The Body on the Train

by Frances Brody

  Gertrude cut her off. “I’ll look into it.”

  Another woman joined in. “Millworkers miss going in there. It was handy for their packets of fags. And Mrs. Farrar, God rest her soul, made decent sandwiches.”

  Gertrude nodded graciously. “As you say, we don’t want to be disrespectful to Mrs. Farrar. It’s rather soon.”

  We rode on, side by side. “Gertrude, that was a dreadful murder. I hope I haven’t made it difficult for you, joining in that procession yesterday?”

  “You’re investigating again, aren’t you?”

  I dodged the question. “I’m tempted to investigate, but no one has asked me to.” Given that we were talking about Mrs. Farrar’s death, I was telling no lie.

  “You must believe Stephen Walmsley is innocent or you wouldn’t have joined the march.”

  “He has a huge amount of support from people who believe he didn’t do it.”

  “It was utterly sickening, Kate, what he did to that poor woman. It was him all right. The police have the killer. Walmsley had blood on his hands.”

  Just for a moment, I let myself imagine that Stephen was guilty, that she was right and I was wrong.

  Gertrude had no doubts. “We don’t know what sort of wicked strain Stephen inherited. No one knows who his father was.”

  “What about his mother?”

  “Her husband threw her out, and then took her back. They moved away, to avoid the shame. As soon as Stephen was old enough, Benjie gave him a job at the pit. He’s very generous like that. And this is how we’re repaid. Murder on our own doorstep.”

  “I hope he’ll get a fair trial, Gertrude.”

  “Of course he will. Everyone does. This is England. We bend over backwards to be fair to rascals. I know that you thought I was being picky, not wanting a child whose history is unknown. There is such a thing as bad blood.”

  We rode on.

  The Miners’ Welfare Institute stood at a little distance from the school. I dismounted and took photographs of both buildings. It was one of those standard-built schools, put up to meet the requirements of the 1870 Education Act.

  “I expect you want to see the mill, too.”

  I had not thought of that, having seen enough mills to know what they are like, but I said yes.

  From the way Gertrude said, “Oh come on then. I suppose you might as well,” I realised I had given the wrong answer.

  “What’s up, Gertrude?”

  “I had a telephone call just before we left. It was for Benjie but of course he’s off on one of his jaunts. We had to cut the workers’ hours and halve pay.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “We have no choice. The over-lookers have accepted the inevitable, but the women are objecting. With their impeccable logic, they have walked out. I didn’t want to burden you with our troubles.”

  “Do you need to talk to them?”

  She sighed. “I should. The foreman seems to think I might be able to persuade the women to listen.”

  The upshot was that we left the horses by the mill gates and went into the yard.

  The group of women turned to look. Surprised by the sight of Gertrude, they became silent. I recognised just one: Joan Arkwright.

  Gertrude took a deep breath and wished them good morning.

  A few replied.

  Joan spoke first. “Mrs. Brockman, we know it’s your mill but it’s our wages you’re snatching from us. Half time means half pay and no one can live on that.”

  “What have you been told?” Gertrude asked.

  “That we’re to be on short time until further notice, well we won’t have it.”

  “We are in this business together,” Gertrude said. “You are all good workers. We make excellent cloth, the best.”

  Joan’s short speech emboldened others.

  “If we’re good workers, be a good boss. Pay us properly.”

  “We can’t pay half rent, we can’t pay half the price of a loaf.”

  Gertrude waited. “It’s not your fault and it’s not mine. The trouble is, fashions have changed. There isn’t the same call for our good cloth as there once was, and we have competition from overseas.”

  “They don’t produce what we do.”

  Gertrude ignored this. “You must have heard about the jobs lost in Bradford. We are trying to find another way. By the end of the month, we’ll have new machinery—suitable for artificial silk, crepe-de-chine and georgette. Bear with us. You are the best workforce. I know you will adapt.”

  By now a man in a white smock had appeared, and two men in brown smocks. They came to stand beside Gertrude.

  “Talk among yourselves,” she said. “Don’t be hasty. But I do hope you will go back to work.” She turned to the men. “Your foreman and over-lookers will be on reduced hours too. I’m sorry to say that short time is what may keep us afloat, until the new machinery comes. We’ll start to produce the material people want these days. But if we don’t fulfil the present order, we’ll have nothing.”

  The women had already begun talking to each other.

  Joan called, “What if the machines don’t come? What if there isn’t enough work for all?”

  Gertrude turned to the man in the white coat. “Mr. Monty, please give our staff your best reassurances.”

  “Right, Mrs. Brockman.”

  “Good day, ladies and gentlemen.” With that, Gertrude and I left the yard.

  “That was very good, Gertrude.”

  “One tries.”

  “Will there be new machinery?”

  “Eliot is onto it now. He’s a shareholder, and so is old Mrs. Dell.”

  That was not the answer Gertrude’s workers would have wanted to hear. “You said it to get them back to work?”

  “They have no idea what we are up against. If you saw the balance sheet for this mill, you’d wonder how we keep going. And it truly is out of our hands. Some of the best mills in Bradford felt the pinch even before we did.”

  “Why is Eliot looking into things, and not Benjie?”

  “You must have noticed a change in Benjie, he seems so detached from everything. He works up a little enthusiasm about the new mine, but not much. He pretends to be working when he goes into his study, but if you barged in, you’d see his stamp collection on the table, or his coins.”

  We rode in silence for a while, in single file along the lane, coming to the closed Corner Shop by the back way. It looked different when approached from the rear. The building appeared more solitary, set back from the row of houses.

  It still seemed difficult to imagine this innocuous setting as the scene of a brutal crime. I put that thought from my mind and attempted to sound matter-of-fact.

  “I can see why the shop is convenient for people on this side of the village.”

  “Yes. It was always a shop, the last house in a row that was demolished forty years ago. That’s how it came to be called the Corner Shop. The then-owners wanted to keep on renting because they did good trade.”

  “It looks odd, standing all alone, cut off from Silver Street.”

  Gertrude’s horse whinnied, anxious to move on.

  She stroked his neck. “I don’t know whether anyone will want to take it on after what has happened.”

  “Would you consider doing what that woman suggested earlier, and having a Co-operative Store?”

  “Well it’s our shop, you see. Once you let the cooperatives in, they sell for less and share dividend with their members. They swallow up all the trade. They’re an anathema to owners of small shops.”

  The garden behind the shop was beautifully tended. Some crops had been sown, overseen by a scarecrow. Scraps of newspaper had been threaded on string to keep away the birds

  “Mrs. Farrar took pride in her garden.”

  “I feel terrible about it, Kate. I didn’t like Mrs. Farrar, not that I had much to do with her. She was a busybody. Raynor acts as estate manager. He said she never paid the rent without moaning about how difficult it wa
s to make ends meet, but I wouldn’t have wished that death on anyone.”

  “It was a robbery?”

  “Yes, though for such a pittance. Thank God they have him behind bars.”

  I thought of him, in that cold whitewashed room, and saw him in my mind’s eye. Defeated. Dejected. As if he had given up on himself.

  “What do you know about him?” I asked.

  “He had the best of care and attention in the home. And a good job at the Finney pit. There’s gratitude for you.”

  “If he was in work, he couldn’t have been so hard up that he would kill for a paltry sum, could he?”

  “Some people never have enough, Kate.”

  If at that moment I had said what was in my mind, I would have had to pack my bags and go. Gertrude was a person who never had enough. I had forgotten what she can be like. I thought back over our friendship, and for the first time wondered how it had lasted this long.

  My explanation was that we had met for lunch, in department store restaurants or select cafés. She had invited me to her version of country house weekends. Alongside her snobbish, self-satisfied guests, Gertrude seemed a saint.

  She continued. “Mrs. Farrar had more money than she let on. Who knows what he stole and where he stashed it before the police picked him up?”

  A tall woman from the end house opened her door, stepped outside, noticed us and retreated.

  Unless I was mistaken, that was the grace and favour house, and she was the woman who lived rent-free.

  “Who is she?”

  “I don’t know all the tenants by name.” Gertrude steadied her horse that had become restless. “It won’t be easy to find someone to take on the shop. There’s a lot of superstition. People began to see Mrs. Farrar’s ghost hours after her body was taken away.” She turned and gave me a smile. “Are you ghoulish enough that you want a picture of the shop?”

  “Yes, but just for my own information.”

  “Not that I’m asking to be a censor or anything but this is a rather sensitive time.”

  I took the photograph without dismounting. “It will be an aide memoire to where we’ve been today.”

  “I’ve told the estate agent to be sensitive about advertising—at least until things have quietened down.”

  I would make sure that Mrs. Sugden was the first person to come and look around. She would find out about the mysterious neighbour in the end house.

  “Let’s get away from here.” Gertrude urged her horse into a gallop, calling, “I’ll show you a sight worth photographing!”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  After a mile or so, Gertrude slowed her horse. “Have you ever seen a pit being sunk?”

  “No.”

  “Neither have I. But you’ll see it now. I told you Royds wasn’t re-opened after the strike. Benjie had tests done, bore holes and such like. He’s opening new seams at Overton. There’s a company getting on with the work now.”

  “That sounds like a huge undertaking.”

  “A messy one! You’ll need a bath when we get back!” She trotted ahead. The breeze carried her words to me. “You have to speculate to accumulate. Our future is pinned on this. Fortunately, we have a lot of potential investors. Eliot and I have been drumming up support. It will be so up to date. Even Raynor—and I don’t quote him lightly—says it will be a gold mine of a coalmine.”

  We were on a hill. Now I had the lie of the land. Looking down at the wood gave me my bearings. We were at the other side of the wood. Overton Wood was its name, but it was always the Bluebell Wood, even when bluebells faded and died. Beyond it had stood the children’s home.

  The ground dipped, creating a miniature valley. My horse hesitated on the steep incline. A little way ahead, a cloud of dust rose. Sparse grass gave way to dirt ground. We rode on. Seen from this distance, the group of men clustered at the bottom of the valley made me think of busy ants in a basin. There was something very much like an encampment. Makeshift huts had been erected. Smoke rose from a brazier. On the hill to the left were horses and carts. As we paused to watch, one of the carts set off.

  “What are they doing?”

  “This will impress your editor. I don’t suppose many lady photographers will send in photographs of a pit shaft being sunk.”

  As we dismounted, two of the men came from the group and offered to take our horses. They seemed glad to have something to do. From the number of men standing about, this must be a job where everyone is needed, but not all at the same time.

  “Snap away, Kate. I’m going to talk to the engineer. Benjie will be proud of me. I’ll be able to give him an up-to-the-minute report. And then I’ll ask the engineer if he’ll explain it to you.”

  I followed the man who had taken my horse. Neither of us said anything, but I recognised him as one of the people in Sunday’s procession to the prison. “Will you object if I take photographs? I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

  “Nor me, missus.”

  “What is it that you are doing?”

  “I’m a farrier, nothing to do with the job in hand but to keep the horses harnessed and the carts filled.”

  Rubble and soil was being loaded onto a cart.

  I took photographs of the men and the horses and carts, of the brazier and a young fellow with blackened teeth. Grinning, he held up a tin mug as if making a toast.

  My farrier escort seemed pleased to be in a photograph. I made a note of his address and promised to supply copies for him and his workmates.

  “What exactly are the men doing?” I asked him. “How do you sink a pit?”

  “You can’t see it from here but there’s a big timber plate, size of the shaft where the cages will take men to the bottom. There are men below, digging it out and sending up buckets of earth through the hole in the middle of the timber plate.”

  “Won’t the sides be in danger of giving way?”

  “They would, but bricklayers are building a wall around the plate. You’ll see that heap of bricks—that will become the wall. When the plate descends, it takes the wall with it. That provides the surface for the shaft where lifts will take men down into the mine, eventually.”

  “What a hard job. You must be glad to be on the surface.”

  “I am that, missus. I’d hate to be in the bowels of the earth. This pit’s being sunk so deep that we’ll be fighting Australian miners for the coal.”

  “Thanks for the explanation. I’ll take a look.”

  “Aye, you do that, and listen out for the cries of the orphans and waifs and strays.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Bluebell Children’s Home stood nearby for a century and more. It was a lucky place for some. They’d be sorry to see it come to this.”

  “What does this have to do with the home?”

  Gertrude waved for me to join her.

  He turned back to his horses. “Her ladyship summons.”

  He had not answered me. “When was the home demolished?”

  “The minute the young uns left, and just in time for the contractors to gather up the stone blocks and bricks from the house to use again for the shaft wall.”

  “The subsidence didn’t make any difference then, to the sinking of a new pit?”

  “Don’t know nowt about subsidence, not round here.” He turned away, to talk to two men who were tipping buckets of earth and debris onto a cart.

  I noticed a small, blood-red toy, a wooden engine, lying by a rock. It seemed such an incongruous juxtaposition that I took a photograph.

  I wondered where it came from, and whether one of the men might want to take it home. The farrier I had spoken to earlier was now waiting with the horse and cart.

  I went across. “Look, here’s a little engine. Do you have a boy who might like it?”

  He took it from me, holding it this way and that. “Whoever made it did a good job, and painted it too.”

  This might be the engine that Mr. Arkwright had made for Alec Taylor.

  My
guide pointed to a space between two boulders, where a small heap of items had been set aside. There was a child’s shoe, a whip and top, a toy car and a doll with one arm.

  The sight of these items made me feel uneasy. “What did happen to the children?”

  I had heard something from Gertrude, and from Mrs. Arkwright, but this man also seemed in the know.

  He glanced across at Gertrude who was speaking to the engineer. “Perhaps the Pied Piper came and led them into the slag heaps. They were gone before the demolition men came. Before you knew it, the ground was cleared.”

  “But where did they go, and so quickly that their toys were left behind?”

  He shook his head. “Progress moves fast, missus, when there’s money in t’ground.”

  Gertrude was still talking to the engineer. We each had saddlebags, with a bottle of water and some chocolate. I put the little wooden engine into my saddlebag, and then joined Gertrude.

  “There’s a pile of what the children left behind. It looks so sad and pathetic.”

  “Honestly, Kate, those children were given so much. If they chose not to take stuff with them to Stoneville, then it was because they didn’t want it.”

  “Stoneville?”

  “It’s a very good children’s home in Wakefield, on York Street.” She waved to the man who was making his way towards us. “I told the engineer you’d like to talk to him.”

  Someone interrupted the engineer’s progress. He stopped to answer a question.

  Gertrude looked up to where the farrier had tethered the horses. “Do the horses and ponies look well, Kate?”

  “They do.”

  “I’ll go take a look.” She smiled. “Giles is a good farrier. We take the best care of the horses. I make sure the pit ponies have a week a year on the surface. You must come one day when they are brought up. That’s a sight you’d love to photograph. You’d be overjoyed to see them when they have light and air and freedom.”

  A man in his fifties, dressed in tweed suit, twill trousers and wellington boots, came to join us. “Kate, this is Mr. Greenwood, the engineer. Mr. Greenwood, my clever friend Mrs. Shackleton. She’ll understand everything and write it all up for her article.” She walked towards the hill, where the horses were standing.