The Somme Stations

by Andrew Martin

  In Ilkley, all the lights showing in the window of a mill went off in an instant. More snow was coming down.

  ‘Somebody struck a match just after Tinsley said that. It was Roy, and he was lighting up because he was worried. It was the first time you or him had heard of the connection between Tinsley and Shaw. It had just always fallen out that you were elsewhere when Tinsley mentioned him. It might have struck you, when you were getting off the train, that we’d been keeping the connection secret from you, having found out about the killing of Matthew Waddington. I mean to say, you knew I’d been curious about Naburn Lock. You probably knew I’d looked into what had gone on there, having seen the way you and your brothers reacted to seeing one of the little Somme stops named after it. And in Albert you’d seen me in conference with the Chief.’

  Oliver Butler gave a kind of snort, and moved position on the bench. ‘So you didn’t know?’

  ‘Tinsley didn’t know what Shaw had done, and nor did I – not then: not on the train back from Amiens. I wasn’t sure that Shaw existed, and I didn’t know for certain until I wrote to the Chief from here asking him to look up him.’

  Butler was removing an item from his greatcoat pocket.

  ‘You wanted to silence Tinsley and me,’ I said, seeing that it was a revolver he held, ‘because you thought we knew Tom Shaw had killed Matthew Waddington, about which you were wrong. But why would the matter be of any concern to you in the first place? Why would you fight Shaw’s battles? It could only be that you were involved … I don’t believe you personally had a hand in killing Waddington.’

  ‘Good of you to say so, Jim.’

  ‘Killing’s not really your way of going on.’

  ‘Well, we’ll see about that.’

  ‘You’ve got too much to lose.’

  ‘That’s debatable.’

  ‘I’m thinking of your wife.’

  ‘So am I, Jim.’

  ‘So it must have been your brothers.’

  Butler inspected the gun – a revolver; he set it on his lap.

  ‘They’ll be questioned in due course,’ I said. ‘The Chief said he might get Thackeray on the job, only it’s a crime committed in civvy street. Shaw’s already let on to the Chief that he knew Andy and Roy. Pair of head cases, he calls them – makes out they had it in for Shaw for some reason. He’s starting to cough, no question. When the Chief puts the blocks on a fellow, that’s generally the result. They’ll swing at the end … all three.’

  Some of this was true; some of it wasn’t, as I believed Butler knew. I couldn’t really claim the credit for what he came out with next …

  ‘Matthew Waddington owed Shaw money,’ said Butler, seeming to address one particular illuminated street corner in the town below. ‘Waddington was a tough customer. Shaw’s a little bloke, and he wanted back-up when he confronted him at the lock. He paid the boys a pound apiece … Well, it’s a lot of money to them.’

  ‘You pay those boys to do a job, they do it well. The Army found that out.’

  ‘Saved your life on July 1st,’ Butler put in.

  ‘True enough,’ I said. I’d forgotten about that – how the twins had saved my life by their digging.

  ‘Waddington’, Butler continued, ‘said Shaw would have to wait a little while for his money. Shaw said he wouldn’t wait. Waddington came at him, so Andy and Roy stepped in, just as I stepped in for you when Dawson came at you on Spurn.’

  I’d forgotten about that as well.

  ‘Anyhow,’ I said. ‘It ended in a killing. And you were involved because you knew of it.’

  That, I was sure, was why he and his brothers had enlisted: put distance between themselves and Shaw. But the mystery was … why all the panic among the three Butlers over Naburn Lock? They could just have denied everything.

  I asked Butler, ‘Will you say all you’ve just told me in court?’

  ‘Say all what, Jim? I’ve said nothing.’

  Silence for a space. Ilkley, I decided, was just the right size of town. It had trams, but I did not believe they were necessary.

  ‘You didn’t shoot Scholes on July 1st, did you?’

  He held the revolver in his right hand now, weighing it.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Jim.’

  The bloke was emerging with a sight more credit than I’d have thought possible.

  ‘Dawson told you he’d done it,’ I said, ‘… took the blame. Why didn’t you tell Thackeray?’

  ‘Thought of it, Jim, but I didn’t think I’d be believed. It’d only throw more suspicion my way.’

  Silence for a space.

  ‘I never knew which way Thackeray would jump. He was – is – bloody loony. He might be thinking of bringing the charge against you, for all you know.’

  I eyed Butler. He wasn’t putting on side. He didn’t know.

  ‘Thackeray’s been here,’ I said. ‘I’ve been charged with the murders … Harvey and Tinsley.’

  ‘What?’

  Butler saw me as a man trying to charge a killer, not as a man being charged with killing.

  ‘I’m on a sort of special bail,’ I said. They’ll cart me off to Armley nick in a few days.’

  ‘How many days?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘I knew they’d found you near a German rifle,’ said Butler, ‘but … Why would you kill Tinsley? How do they make it out?’

  I gave him the theory. ‘I suppose I’ll tell the court martial what really happened on Spurn, but I’ve no evidence, and Tinsley’s not around to back me up, thanks to you and your fucking green light …’

  ‘Don’t talk rot, Jim.’

  ‘And I don’t suppose you’re going to pitch in and help.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘By saying your brother overheard Tinsley’s confession, of course, and told you of it directly.’

  ‘Jim,’ he lied, ‘I know nothing of what was said on that bloody train. Anyhow,’ he continued (which choice of word proved he was lying), ‘you’ve put me right in it by going after Shaw. I don’t owe you any favours. Quite the opposite, in fact.’

  He stood up, turned and faced me, revolver in hand.

  ‘I can see the difficulty you were in right from the start,’ I said. ‘You were involved in one bit of business – at Naburn – where a bloke’s knocked about the head and put into water. You knew that investigation might be re-started at any minute. Then another comes up along the same lines … Somebody might see that the twins made a connection between them.’

  Butler was eyeing me, and it was a direct look, not sidelong, as when Tinsley and I had rolled past him onto the dangerous stretch of line. He continued to hold the revolver in his right hand. The hand was gloved. His left hand, also gloved, he brought up to the revolver. He set back the hammer. As he did so, the finger of his glove became caught, nipped in the mechanism. With a look of irritation on his face that I was not meant to see, he pulled, and quite suddenly the left hand and glove came away from the gun, which he had continued to point at me all along. We were now back to square one. Well, not quite, because the hammer was now cocked. It was a single action gun, and we both awaited the single action – the pulling of the trigger, with Ilkley puffing away peacefully below us. I did not feel the cold in that moment, and nor I believe did Butler. Presently, he stepped forward and set the gun on the bench beside me.

  As he walked away, I called after him, ‘You’ve told the man Shaw where I’m to be found, I suppose?’

  No reply.

  I called louder, ‘He’s been here already, creeping about in the garden!’ Again no reply. I reached for the gun, and carefully uncocked the hammer.

  The gun – a service revolver – proved to be fully loaded. On returning to ‘Ardenlea’, I put it into the trunk in my room. The fact that Butler had left it for me meant he’d told Tom Shaw it was on my say-so that he was being questioned over the murder of Matthew Waddington; that I had found him out. It also meant that Butler had then regretted having told Shaw this and was charitably equipping
me for what was to come … or that he wanted me to do the job of dealing with Shaw … or that, having meant to do for me himself, and having funked it, he couldn’t stand the sight of the thing, or … I gave it up.

  The end result anyhow was that he was leaving things in the balance, as he had at Flers. He would assist a man’s fate, but he wouldn’t become it.

  The next day, I received a parcel, forwarded from Old Man Wright, the clerk in the police office at York station. Inside it was a letter from Mrs Tinsley, of Albemarle Road, York, and five years’ worth of Railway Magazines. The numbers for 1911 to 1914 were bound in red cloth with gold lettering. The ones for 1915 came loose. November 1915 was in the envelope in which Mrs Tinsley had received it from the back numbers department of the Railway Magazine offices in London, and she explained that she’d sent off for it to make good the missing number. There was a good deal in the letter about what a tremendous chap I was, according to the letters Tinsley had sent home.

  Tinsley had been only a kid but he’d had a philosophy of life, which said that you ought not to try and avoid trouble, but should put yourself in its way – only then did you deserve whatever good things might occur in your life. It was a philosophy I admired, and it was for this reason that I left the revolver in the bottom of the trunk while continuing with my programme of walking the Moor.

  Or it might be that I was suffering ‘a depression’ – a condition much talked of among the soldiers of ‘Ardenlea’.

  ‘Ardenlea’,

  Ilkley,

  Yorkshire.

  November 4th, 1916

  Dearest Lillian,

  I’m sorry not to have been back for the children last night. There has been another drama here, in the place where ‘life passes in a pleasant dream’ (you will remember).

  I arrived at mid-afternoon yesterday, to be told by the Matron that Jim was out on the Moor – and this in the falling snow. I went straight out there myself. It was becoming rapidly dark, but I saw Jim progressing slowly on his crutches. He was halfway up towards the bathing place that sits on the lower Moor here. I then … I then saw what appeared to be a scene from a play or a film – a scene from one of the ‘Westerns’ that Jim takes me to at the Electric Palace, and the world of this drama was black and white, with small black figures against the snow, just as the world of the films or bioscopes is black and white.

  I watched a small man I did not know (he was just a shadow to me, but I could see he was small, and very fit) making quickly towards a small man that I did know, namely Jim. The first man had his arm held out, as though pointing at Jim and accusing him … only it was a gun that he held, and I thought: this man means to shoot my husband, and I found myself thinking that this was extremely bad manners, and that I would on no account stand for it. I made a move in the direction of the man, and then I saw the flame as he fired the gun. With the stage melodramas, and in the Westerns, you hear the bang but you do not see this great leap of orange flame, and it shocked me so that I called out some wild words I cannot now recollect.

  And yet it was as though my Jim did not know his part in the play or the film, for he remained upright, and it was the man with the gun who had fallen at the very moment of firing. It was then that I saw a third man on the Moor: Weatherill, the Chief Inspector. He had shot the man who had fired at Jim.

  He – Jim’s Chief – was making slowly towards Jim with his own gun carried loosely, while I ran pell-mell in the same direction, and some of the fitter men from the house came streaming up the hill after me, having heard the shot. The faster I moved, the slower the man Weatherill did, and I saw him come to a stop in the falling snow, and light a cigar.

  The first small man – the stranger – had completely missed Jim, but had been terribly wounded by Weatherill’s shot. He was carried into the house, and when I saw him in the light I realised that his coat was quite soaked in blood, so that when they took it off him, and lay it down on the floor of the hall, the blood continued to flow from it, just as it was flowing from the man himself.

  Oldfield, the Matron, telephoned through to the hospital for an ambulance as Weatherill screamed questions at the man, who was obviously in agony. I saw on the floor a paper that had dropped from his coat. It was half covered in blood, but I could make out that it was a certificate from the railway company addressed to ‘Thomas Shaw, Engine Driver’. In spite of the blood, I caught it up, and did not know whether to give it to the shot man, or to Weatherill, or to Jim. In the event, I gave it to Jim. It began, ‘You are hereby informed that your services are required in connection with the working of the railway. You will not, therefore, at present be required to join the army …’

  Jim and Weatherill then left with the man in the ambulance. Jim’s guard here, Brewster (I have told you of him before), was quite happy to let Jim go, and it is clear that what this man Shaw has to say – if anything, for he seemed hardly capable of speech – could have an important bearing on Jim’s case.

  Not much else is clear, I’m afraid.

  I will write to you again tomorrow, dear.

  You will of course not mention a word of this to the children.

  With love,

  Lydia.

  In the library of ‘Ardenlea’, a fellow was giving a Gramophone Concert for the benefit of the invalids. The fellow – whose name I do not recollect – had a lot of gramophone records and a lot of very strong opinions about them. First of all, he liked all his gramophone records – there wasn’t a dud amongst them, evidently – and he was particularly keen on the symphonies among them. The symphony was the highest expression of the musical art. He had just given part of ‘something new from Elgar’, with whom he was on terms of the closest friendship, or so you would have thought from his talk. At the end of it, he lifted the needle and said, ‘Well, that’s woken you all up.’ But it hadn’t. The two men nearest the fire – two Marines, late of the Chief Mechanical Engineers’ Office at York, who’d been shelled and badly burned in the same armoured car – were fast asleep, in spite of all the loud parts.

  But then it was a very good and soothing fire that was burning in the library.

  The symphony man was now taking out a record by Brahms. He blew the dust off all his records before playing them, even though there was quite obviously no speck of dust on them.

  ‘Now Brahms, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘was German.’

  ‘Poor show,’ said Major Dickinson, but he did not wheel himself out of the library, which he very easily might have done. In fact, he and the record man nodded at each other, just as though this little exchange had gone perfectly to plan.

  The man put the needle down on the record, and sat in the chair he had placed next to the gramophone. He bent his head as the music started, as he always did, out of respect to the composer, as I supposed. But I did not care for Brahms, who was even keener on the quiet-then-suddenly-loud business than Elgar. The man’s music seemed to go with clattering of one of the nurses as she came in with the cocoa, and it reminded me that a library ought to be silent.

  I lit another cigarette and removed myself mentally from the library …

  … That morning, the wife had come into my room with her portmanteau in her hand, and an opened envelope tucked into the belt of her skirt, and I could see it was an army envelope. ‘Sorry for opening this,’ she said, being not in the least sorry.

  She held the envelope over the counterpane of the bed, upended it, and three little cloth squares fell out directly. The letter floated down a moment later. Well, the pieces of cloth were diamond-shaped rather than square, and I showed the wife how they would fix onto a tunic sleeve.

  ‘Captain Stringer,’ she said, and she stood back, marvelling at me.

  ‘A field commission,’ I said, ‘they’re pretty rare.’

  ‘As an officer,’ said the wife, ‘if you came into the soldiers’ buffet at the station and had cakes with your tea on a Sunday afternoon, you’d have the silver service.’

  ‘That’s a big if,’ I said.
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  Leaning suddenly forward, she said, ‘What on earth did you do to deserve it?’

  ‘Search me,’ I said.

  ‘It’s all very well to be modest,’ she said, ‘but I don’t think you should be saying things like “Search me”. Not as a captain.’

  In fact, I knew. This was the doing of Muir, the officer with the notebook. He had observed – and noted – my rescue of the train and its load of shells from the German bombardment. I’d saved a pretty big bang there. Or rather, Tinsley had, with my assistance.

  The wife said, ‘Today, Harry gives a talk on the book – in front of the whole school.’

  ‘The Count of Monte Cristo? Will he talk about the book or the hole in the book?’

  ‘Both. And about how it saved your life … which he believes it did, at any rate.’

  My tale about the book had never really ‘taken’ with the wife.

  She caught up her portmanteau. She was leaving ‘Ardenlea’ for good, and I would soon be doing likewise …

  In the library, the nurse was continuing with her clattering, in that she was going around the room closing the curtains, and so concealing the total blackness beyond. In fact, it was probably snowing. The stuff had been coming down for days – fast and silent, a mysterious but generous offering. It was also snowing at the Burton Dump, Oamer had written to tell me, in a note that congratulated me on my commission. The push was now on for a spot called Beaumont Hamel, which was a little way to the north, requiring new branches from the existing ‘main line’.

  Brahms was not being very well received. One of the Marines – Howell – had set down his cocoa and gone over to the shelf where the bound volumes of Punch were kept. The record man took the hint, and said that by way of closing his programme of music he would give us a rest from crashing and banging (well, he didn’t quite put it like that), and would play us ‘one of the Nocturnes by Debussy’. This was not a symphony, which suited me, and Debussy was French, which suited Major Dickinson. Nocturne meant ‘of the night’ – my French was up to that much – and the record man explained that this particular piece was called by a word I can’t recall that meant ‘Clouds’.