Death on a Branch line js-5

by Andrew Martin

  Mr Handley was at the barrel of Smith’s pouring me a pint, and one for himself. He boomed out a remark in his habitual blurred manner, and I could not understand. I asked him, as politely as I could, to repeat it, and it was hard to keep in countenance as he made the same baffling noise again. I looked over to the bicyclist for help, and sure enough he looked up from his book and reported with a sigh:

  ‘He says, “There are as many crimes committed high as low.”’

  I nodded at Mr Handley, and said, ‘You’re right over that,’ although I was thinking of the constant succession of working men I’d given evidence against in the York police court. You hardly ever saw a toff before the magistrates.

  ‘Mr Handley,’ I said, ‘did Sir George Lambert have any military connection?’

  Mr Handley shook his head as he raised his glass to his lips. He then touched the glass to his lips, and half the beer went down in an instant. I raised my own glass and tried the same, but I didn’t have the trick of it, and my glass went down by just two inches and I nearly choked. To cover up the embarrassment, I said, ‘Does the pub pay?’

  Well, I had to listen very carefully, and say ‘Pardon’ a lot, but I got the gist. The pub did not pay. The village was in decline. The limestone quarry had been worked out, and farming had been in a bad way for years. His talk became a constant low moan on a theme of everything going to pot: the timber in the woods round about was not of the sort wanted by the modern house-builders, and the holiday trade was nothing to what it had been at the height of the cycling craze. Whole fleets of cyclists, it appeared, had once passed through the Adenwolds every week-end.

  At this news, I looked across towards our own bicyclist, but he’d quit the room. Mr Handley talked on, and I pictured Lydia in the tin bath upstairs. I always liked to hang about when she took a bath, and if she didn’t tell me to clear off, that meant we would have a ride. Mr Handley was running on about how he was thinking of removing with his family to York. I asked him, ‘Where in York?’ and — not being very interested in the reply — revolved my own thoughts as he gave it.

  What was the Chief up to at the Hall? Had John Lambert killed the Major, and did he mean to make a confession to it in order to save his brother? No. Couldn’t have, because he’d been in London at the time, and the court must have heard evidence to that effect.

  What — if any — was the connection between the timetables for the military and the murder?

  And the man Usher… If he meant to murder Lambert, why hadn’t he just gone ahead and done it directly? How did things stand between Usher and the new owner of the Hall?

  Who had been the man in the dust-coat running away from the station?

  And what was the bloody bicyclist up to?

  I thought of Gifford, the man from Norwood. I took out my silver watch. It was ten after one; I was supposed to have seen him at the inn at one.

  ‘Gifford,’ I said, interrupting Mr Handley, ‘the commercial traveller… Have you seen him about?’

  Mr Handley shrugged, muttered something like, ‘Not lately.’

  I drained off my glass and — telling Handley that I was off to take a turn in the woods — I quit The Angel.

  I didn’t mean to go into the woods, though. I meant to bang on the vicar’s door to ask questions as follows. One: why had he been staring at us in the graveyard? Two: why had he called Gifford back? Three: where did he suppose the man might be just at present? Bugger the Chief. He was an old man, shortly to be super-annuated. I would pursue that matter independently of him.

  But I wasn’t long out of the front door of The Angel when, looking to my left as I walked towards the first green of Adenwold, I saw something wrong-coloured lodged in the greenery of the woods. I went in after it.

  The road was lost to my sight within ten seconds as the barriers of green fell between it and me. I might just as well have jumped into a green sea. I twisted my way between the trees and holly bushes, brambles and ferns, all connected by spider webs of ivy and bindweed, and after half a minute of battling I came to the hat: a brown, high-crowned bowler. It hung on a brier bush in company with thousands of red berries glowing in the green darkness. No name was written in the crown, but it was Gifford’s, I was sure. I caught it up, and fought my way through to the wide clearing that lay beyond the brier bush.

  This I took at first to be an expanse of flat moss, but a slip of my boot proved it to be a green and black pond over which a hundred insects swooped, the lot of them looking like man-made flying machines going through their paces. Why had Gifford, the man from the London suburbs who hated nature, entered this abandoned world?

  I skirted the pond as he must have done after losing, or abandoning, his bowler, and pressed on, picking my way. Low, sharp branches kept whisking off my own hat as if to say, ‘ Keep it off: show us some respect, won’t you?’ At every turn, my boots broke the twigs beneath my feet, and I began to feel unsure about what lay beneath, like a man walking over the rotten rafters of an ancient attic.

  I called out ‘Gifford!’ a few times, but there came no answer.

  Of course, he might have gone the other way around the pond. My route led in the direction of a golden light coming through the trees, and as I came to the limit of the woods — and re-entered the heat of the day — I saw that the golden-ness was made by the sun and a cornfield combined. The edge of the woods was marked by clouds of cow parsley, just as the border of a fancy handkerchief is marked by lace.

  I walked along a little way, and then I saw another wrong colour, this time on the ground. I picked up the red model engine: the single-driver. It was made of stout soldered tinplate, and beautifully finished. The maker’s name was stamped in German underneath. It might have been something like ‘Gastin’, with two little dots over the ‘a’, but the letters were too tiny to be made out.

  Turning the model over in my hands, I thought of the German railways. It was said that you had to show your ticket to the guard on all trains with no exceptions, and that the guard saluted you like a military man when you did so. The station masters saluted passing trains all along the line, whether those trains stopped at their stations or not. As a people, they were lacking in humour, and they carried method too far.

  But Gifford, surely, was neither German nor a travelling agent of that country. As he had said himself, he was a traveller in small locomotives. Yet he had possessed some secret, some knowledge touching on the Adenwold mysteries, and he had meant to tell me it.

  Had he been observed in the course of observing someone? Had the vicar brought him into the woods to put his lights out, only to drop in on the railway station and collect the cricket team?

  The locomotive had spilled from its bag, which was hard by in the grass. I looked up and there, lying under cow parsley, was Gifford’s Gladstone bag… not six feet from the man himself.

  He was half in a ditch, his head pointing down into its depths, his boots higher than his head. Directly above was the stout branch of a giant oak. Had he come down from it?

  Or had he been pursued through the woods, only to come a cropper as soon as he escaped the trees?

  He seemed to have attained a kind of peacefulness in his position. His eyes were closed, and he looked to be having a pleasant sort of dream, but his head was cut by brambles, his face was bluish and a quantity of dark-coloured blood had flowed from the corner of his mouth.

  I held my hand over his mouth, and felt nothing. I knelt down and put my face directly in front of his, at which I detected faint breaths. If he had come down from a height, and suffered a smash, I ought not to touch him.

  Had he tried to make away with himself by leaping from the tree? Perhaps he was in low water financially. He’d sounded desperate enough, and the vicar had evidently not purchased the red engine.

  It seemed wrong that I should be able to view his head so closely. I touched my hand to his hair, and my fingers came up rust-coloured. Blood (and a good deal of it) was working with the Brilliantine to keep Gifford�
�s hair fixed in place, and shining. I touched again, and there was a groove under the hair. I pulled my hand away fast. Had he taken a bullet?

  I sat up on the edge of the ditch; ten yards to my left, a wooden bridge ran across it, half-hidden by brambles. Two white butterflies danced in the air before my face, as if to say, ‘Isn’t this all a lark? You may have your troubles, but we’re on holiday just at present.’

  I set the little engine down next to the Gladstone bag, and looked at my silver watch: one thirty-five.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Flying along the margins of the cornfield, I kept a look-out for the telegraph poles that ought to be somewhere ahead. They would indicate the territory of the railway line.

  I rounded a bend and came upon the silent poles, and their confederates, the silent tracks. I slowed somewhat as I went past the downed stretch of cable. It struck me that railway policemen ought to be issued with portable telegraph instruments. With these, and a length of cable looped over the right wire, it was possible to send your own messages.

  Running now along the railway sleepers, I looked up. The poles carried six wires: telegraph and telephone either way — that accounted for four. The other two would be the wires linking the signal boxes of the branch, for the sending of the signalmen’s bell codes. To send a message, you’d have to know which was which; you’d need the portable doings, and you’d need to go beyond the point of the cut. Then you’d be within reach of the normal world, and sanity.

  I kicked up my boot-heels and I flew on. The station, waiting on the far side of a tree-made arch, seemed to swing and shake as I pounded down the track.

  I found it quite deserted, like a ship becalmed. But Will Hamer and his horse and donkey stood dreaming in the station yard, with the rulley hitched up behind.

  I ran at the fellow, gulping at air and unable at first to speak.

  Instead, Hamer spoke.

  ‘It’s you again,’ he said, smiling.

  ‘There’s a man badly injured in the woods,’ I said. ‘I’ve just come from him. He’s near the bridge over the ditch.’

  ‘I know that spot,’ said Hamer, who was now not quite smiling but still looking amiable, ‘On the edge of Clover Wood.’

  So there were separately named woods within the woods.

  ‘He may have fallen out of a tree,’ I said.

  ‘Aye,’ Will Hamer said, ‘I expect so.’

  ‘Will you fetch a doctor?’

  ‘Aye,’ Hamer said again, making no move, ‘I will do.’

  ‘Where is a doctor?’

  ‘Well now, East Adenwold,’ Hamer said. ‘Doctor Lawson — deliver to him regular like. Very good man for an emergency if you can catch him in.’

  ‘You’d better look sharp,’ I said. ‘I reckon the fellow’s dying. Might you un-harness the donkey? I mean, wouldn’t the horse be quicker on its own?’

  Hamer looked at his horse for a while. Presently, he said, ‘Wouldn’t move at all on his own, wouldn’t that bloke. Pair of ’em might go a bit faster, though, and don’t think I en’t tried a few tricks. I’ve had ’em this way and that: him to the left, him to the left. You name it, I’ve tried it.’

  I stood silent. Was there any other way of getting help to Gifford apart from employing this blockhead?

  ‘… Mangel wurzels I’ve tried,’ he was saying. ‘Short rein, long rein…’

  He turned and fixed on me a sort of questioning smile.

  ‘You look down-hearted, mister,’ he said.

  ‘There’s blood coming out of the bloke’s mouth,’ I said, ‘and that’s always a bad look-out.’

  ‘Might be his… tooth fallen out?’

  ‘Will you go off just now?’ I said. ‘I’ll go back to guard the bloke, and I’ll see you at the place.’

  I indicated the rulley.

  ‘You’ll get that along the edge of the field — there’s a track of sorts.’

  ‘Oh, no bother,’ he said, and he fell to smiling at me.

  I felt in want of a whistle to blow and a green flag to wave.

  ‘Come on, men!’ Hamer shouted at last, and the horse and donkey first awoke, and then moved.

  I took off my jacket, and watched them cross the station yard, but as before they rolled to a stop after twenty yards.

  ‘While I think on…’ Hamer called out, and I thought: Christ, he wants to be paid. But that wasn’t it. He was passing a paper to me.

  ‘Your wire was delivered,’ he said, ‘earlier on, like.’

  It was an acknowledgement of sending, written on a chit stamped: ‘The Booking Office, West Adenwold Station.’

  ‘Obliged to you,’ I said, ‘but I knew it had gone off, because the fellow I sent for arrived.’

  ‘What fellow?’ said Hamer, and instead of answering, I gave his horse’s arse a good slap, which set the three on their way again. I watched them out of sight, then raced back through the station and around the woods.

  I came to the bridge just as two rabbits went flying across it. I looked about. Birdsong twisted through the drowsy air. I walked a little way along the margin of the wood. I looked about once again. The sun beat down on the brambles and the cow parsley.

  Neither Gifford, nor his bag, nor the little red locomotive, were anywhere to be seen.

  I stood still for a space, thinking of everything and nothing. Finally I sat down by the bridge, exhausted.

  This place Adenwold, I thought… It’ll be the bloody finish of me. I made no further attempt to scout about. There was no sound but the steady, heavy drone of insects. I looked at my silver watch: five to two. I felt honour-bound to wait for the doctor. It was important that somebody kept up sensible behaviour. When the chimes of two o’clock floated over from the village, I moved under the big oak for shade, and took the papers of Hugh Lambert from my pocket.

  ‘Mr Richardson, the station master at Adenwold during our childhood,’ I read… and that pulled me up short, for starters. It was hard to imagine the station without Hardy: he seemed such a fixture of Adenwold, his own strangeness matching that of the village. I read on:

  … Mr Richardson would bring Ponder on in his railway interests, and father would undoubtedly have written to the Company demanding his removal had the man been anything less than a model official. His top hat was lustrous, and the staff were most punctilious under his eye, as even father admitted. Richardson personally sent telegrams by the dozen for father, using the station machine, and always with a smile and always without charging. But he would talk trains with the boy! And how could father state that the railways were neither sporting nor aristocratic? That they had paid grandfather too little for right of way over his land, a fact serving to remind father that the estate was small, the family not as well-off as commonly imagined, and he only a Baronet? Father expressed himself delighted at Richardson’s retirement, but the new man wore a bowler instead of a topper and did not keep the place so well. How many times did father cancel Ponder’s subscription to the Railway Magazine? And how often did he wearily reinstate it during a fit of guilt? It wasn’t so much my brother’s reading and collection of the Railway Magazines that antagonised father, as the sending-off for the special binders with the railway crests. (I should say that Ponder, an incredibly untidy person for all his orderly mind, liked the idea of binders more than the act of binding.) The writing-in of letters by Ponder was still more to be deprecated, and the publication of articles under his own name doubly so. I remember Ponder showing the first of his letters to appear in cold print. It appeared under the heading: ‘A correspondent asks for information concerning the vacuum brake now installed’. He pointed to the word ‘correspondent’ and then to himself, and he grinned. He then promptly won a carriage clock for one of his railway essays. I asked him whether it had been an essay on carriages but nothing so modest: ‘How to Improve the Summer Services’ was his theme. Not some of them, but all. And Ponder ought to know, for he’d spent almost the whole summer lying on the croquet lawn and reading timetables, relayed to
him in batches free of charge, I believe, by Mr Richardson. Ponder would seek out the innovations: a new restaurant car between St Pancras and Leeds; a train from York to Hull booked one minute later than the previous month. It was the drag of interrelatedness that fascinated him, the way that one train couldn’t be moved until another had been. He was quite lost to it all; and he was lost to father, too. Ponder did not retreat so much as fade from the battleground, with the result that father and I concentrated our fire on each other, and in this connection too the railway figured, for it was the railway that took me to London, and my other life.

  Trying to make out the words had brought on a headache. I put down the paper. What was this other life? I had half an idea.

  I looked up to see Will Hamer’s wagon rumbling over the sun-hardened mud. Another man was sitting up with him: Lawson, the doctor from East Adenwold.

  He turned out to be a very crabby little man in a salt and pepper suit, who wouldn’t take no for an answer. I felt like offering to lie down myself on the canvas stretcher he was waving about, just to save him a wasted journey. Hamer smiled through the whole palaver. It took more than an unexplained disappearance to jolt him out of his groove.

  ‘Do you think the man had been drinking?’ Lawson demanded.

  ‘More likely shot,’ I said. ‘There was something very like a bul let wound on the side of his head.’

  ‘Have you been drinking?’ asked Lawson.

  He seemed to have a very limited imagination: everything started and finished with alcohol. I stood shaking my head as Will Hamer turned the rulley about and drove the doctor back down the track. I ought to have given him a couple of bob for his trouble, I decided, as I set off back to The Angel. He’d proved himself not such a dope after all, for he’d delivered my wire without any hitch, and he’d fetched the doctor.

  At The Angel, the bar was quite deserted. I climbed the stairs and the wife was sitting cross-legged reading her paper, The Freewoman, which she immediately tossed to one side. I knew right away that I was properly forgiven, and that there was some important business at hand; or business she thought important, at any rate. It didn’t matter what it was, though. Gifford had very likely been shot at because of what he knew, and I would not put the wife in the way of a bullet. I had to get her out of Adenwold.