Death on a Branch Line (10 page)

We walked on in silence through the dark woods. Every so often, there came a crashing as a bird tried to fly through the trees, and I did wish they would
stop
trying, for they put me in a great state of nerves.

When we gained the top of the road that rose from the centre of the village, we saw a greenish light through the windows of The Angel. I opened the front door, and we stepped into the little hallway where we had the options ‘Saloon’ or ‘Public’, or the stairs that led up to our room. There was no question but that Lydia would take the stairs. She didn’t drink, and had never set foot inside a public house, but when I asked, ‘You off up, then?’ she said ‘Not just yet’, and stepped into the public bar with me.

Was it fear or curiosity that had made her do it?

We pushed through the door, and half a dozen – no, eight – faces looked back at us.

It turned out that, whichever door you walked through, you got the saloon
and
the public, and that the bar – on which stood six green-shaded oil lamps – was a sort of wooden island in-between the two. The ‘public’ side was wooden walls and wooden benches. The ‘saloon’ side was a little smarter. It had the red rose wallpaper and a fish picture over the fireplace similar to the one in our room. This one showed a pike, but with no instructions and no display of hooks. (If you wanted to catch a pike, you could work out how to do it yourself.) All the windows were open, and a warm breeze
occasionally wandered through from the ‘public’ to the ‘saloon’ side. Mr Hardy, the fat station master, stood alone at the bar on the ‘public’ side, and there were a couple of agricultural fellows talking and smoking at a table behind him. The two arrivals-by-train – the bicyclist and the man from Norwood – sat in the saloon side, and each had a small round table to himself. The man from Norwood had a pipe on the go, and was reading documents. The bicyclist was eating a pie – the Yorkshire pie, I guessed. Every now and again, he would lay down his knife and fork and give a loud sigh. After a while, it came to me that this might be connected to the fact that Mr Handley the landlord, sitting on a high stool on the saloon side, was addressing him. He did so again now, in a very deep, drunken voice, an underwater sort of voice like a deaf man’s, and I couldn’t make it out, but the bicyclist sighed again and said, ‘It certainly cannot be ridden in its present condition – not with the inner tube holed. The wheel would zig-zag intolerably.’

His machine was evidently punctured. Like most who take to biking he was middle class – might have been a university product. As I watched, Mr Handley was served a pint in a pewter by his wife. It must have gone hard with her that he wasn’t paying.

Mrs Handley smiled – still cautious, but I had a persuasion that she was warming to us. I ordered a pint of bitter for myself and the lemonade for the wife, and Mrs Handley seemed quite chuffed at this. Her husband being a man for strong waters only, and her boy not liking lemons, I supposed that she was glad to find a taker for her home-made brew. She poured the lemonade and then said to me: ‘We have John Smith’s bitter, and Thompson’s ale. The Thompson’s is a little stronger.’

‘Oh, my husband knows all about that,’ the wife cut in, and I thought with excitement:
Now she’s definitely nervous
. Unpredictable things happened when the wife became stirred-up.

Mr Handley made some further remark to the bicyclist. I couldn’t understand a word he said, yet the bicyclist seemed to have no trouble in doing so.

‘Cycling is certainly beneficial in that way,’ he said, in reply to Mr Handley. ‘It is said to promote a general activity in the liver,’
he added, at which he gave a pitying look to Handley, as if to say, ‘But
your
liver has enough on as it is.’

He then stood up and quit the bar.

I asked for John Smith’s, and plunged in haphazard as Mrs Handley passed me the pint.

‘Almost everyone hereabouts has … well, gone.’

She folded her arms and eyed me for a while.

‘Moffat’s here,’ she said, ‘down on the East Green. He’s the baker.’

‘Why hasn’t he gone?’

‘He doesn’t like Scarborough, I suppose.’

‘Can’t credit
that
,’ said the wife, and she grinned, whereas Mrs Handley did not. Or not
quite
, anyhow.

‘Caroline and Augusta are here,’ said Mrs Handley.

‘Who are they?’

‘They’re the old ladies in the almshouses.’

‘Oh,’ I said, ‘the elderly parties. We saw them. Why haven’t they gone?’

‘Well, they’re too old. They have those houses at a peppercorn rent. They’re supposed to be infirm. They can hardly go off … enjoying themselves.’

And here she did give a quick smile. She was continuing to eye me carefully, however.

‘Who runs the Scarborough outing?’ asked the wife.

‘Christmas Club,’ said Mrs Handley. ‘You see, the Christmas Club here has nothing really to do with Christmas. You put in your money, and you have three days in Scarborough.’

‘Don’t you get a turkey at Christmas?’ I said.

‘You get a chicken,’ Mrs Handley said after a while. ‘But people like the Scarborough jaunt. It’s a village tradition.’

‘I suppose nobody from the Hall’s gone, have they?’ I asked Mrs Handley.

‘Most of the servants have, I believe.’

‘But not the man who cuts the grass?’

‘That’s Ross’s boy,’ she said, and she nodded to one of the two agriculturals, explaining that they were brothers from West
Adenwold, to which they would be returning on foot very shortly, together with the grass-cutter, who was son to one of them. I decided to put them out of consideration, along with the two old maids in the almshouses.

‘I believe there’s a new squire in place of the murdered man,’ I said. ‘But that it’s not John Lambert.’

Mrs Handley folded her arms, and smiled at me as if to say, ‘Well now, you’re quite the dark horse, aren’t you?’

‘That’s Robert Chandler,’ she said, slowly, as though feeling her way. ‘He’s Major Lambert’s late wife’s brother. He’s the new tenant.’

‘Why doesn’t John Lambert have the place?’

‘Oh, he
owns
it. It’s come to him – only he doesn’t want to live there.’

‘Why not?’

‘Bad memories, I expect.’

‘Does he ever come in here?’ asked the wife.

‘No fear,’ said Mrs Handley.

‘What does he do for a living?’ I asked.

Mrs Handley shrugged.

‘I can’t say. I hardly know him. He’s in London a good deal of the time, and in York most of the rest. They say he keeps heaps of books in the gardener’s cottage, a little way off from the main house.’

‘Sir George Lambert,’ I said, ‘– what was he like?’

Did Mrs Handley colour up at the question?

‘He was a sportsman,’ she said presently, ‘always bucking about on his horse. He had the hunt, which came through on Wednesdays and Saturdays like a great whirlwind; he had his shoots, and he had his cricket games …’

‘This inn is his, isn’t it?’ I said, with the wife eyeing me.

‘’Course it is,’ said Mrs Handley, as if to say, ‘Don’t you know how a village works?’

‘What about his wife?’ asked Lydia, no doubt thinking this would be a subject more to Mrs Handley’s taste.

‘Dead long since,’ said Mrs Handley.

Well, I had read something of the account of her death in Hugh
Lambert’s papers – the business of the fire seeming always too cold.

‘And so there was no-one to come between him and the boys,’ Mrs Handley was saying. ‘He was very hard on the two boys – on Hugh especially.’

Mrs Handley had fallen to gazing at Mr Hardy the station master, but I was sure there was nothing in this. He was just a convenient object to look at. Mrs Handley’s earlier sadness had returned, and I could see that it was not on account of the murdered father, but on account of the son who was about to swing for the crime.

‘Would
Hugh
come in here?’ asked the wife, who, having finally entered licensed premises herself, had evidently become fascinated by the question of who else might or might not do so.

‘Master Hugh?’ said Mrs Handley, and she gave a cautious sort of nod. ‘He’d take a glass, and he’d sit in the public. The
public
, mark you, not the saloon. He was one of the two young masters, and yet he’d sit in the
public
bar.’ She smiled, saying, ‘Always wore the same suit – dark blue worsted. Lovely cloth, and yet the trouser bottoms clarted with muck, and all up his black boots. He told me one day: “I always wear a city suit in the country and a country suit in the city.”’

As she spoke, she was preparing a supper for us – two plates of cold ham and salad. She handed them over the bar, saying, ‘What do you reckon to that saying of his? Was I supposed to laugh?’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’

‘I’ll tell you what – he’d look at me until I
did
laugh.’

And she was almost laughing
now
.

‘He
meant
you to laugh,’ I said.

‘’Course he did. He was always coming out with things like that.’

‘Contradictory,’ I said.

‘And he was just ever such … fun.’

‘Unlike John.’

‘John’s clever,’ she said. ‘Clever people aren’t usually much fun, are they?’

And it was clear from this that she didn’t include me in that category.

I looked over at the clerk-type from Norwood – I was pretty sure he couldn’t hear our conversation, nor was he straining to do so. I somehow didn’t feel I ought to ask Mrs Handley about him and the bicyclist, whereas it was all right to ask about the locals. That was the sort of thing an ordinary tripper might do.

The wife said, ‘Mervyn told us that Master Hugh had given him a dormouse.’

Mrs Handley’s smile disappeared for an instant, but it came back as she said:

‘… Came up here, parked himself down on the bench outside, just next to where Mervyn was sitting. He turns to little Mervyn and he says, “I’ve rather a bad head cold today,” and lifts his handkerchief out of his pocket. Well, the face he pulled when he saw that dormouse curled up in the middle of this most beautiful red silk handkerchief …’

‘Master Hugh didn’t know it was there?’ I asked.

‘He knew very well it was there. He was play-acting for the boy, don’t you see? It was all for Mervyn’s benefit. Well, it fairly slayed me, that did. I laughed fit to bust.’

‘Was the dormouse dead?’

Mrs Handley stopped laughing, and looked at me in amazement.

‘Of course it wasn’t
dead
. Where would have been the fun if it had been dead? It was a dormouse. It was
asleep
.’

Well, this was all apiece with the feeding of the sparrow outside the police office.

‘He doesn’t sound much like a murderer,’ said the wife.

‘Driven to it by the father, I expect,’ said Mrs Handley, in a very business-like way. ‘There’d been aggravation between them for years, and Lambert kept a house full of guns … There’ll be an end to the business on Monday morning, anyhow.’

She gazed at vacancy for a moment, before adding:

‘He’s to be hung on Monday – eight o’clock.’

‘I know,’ I said.

And she eyed me again, perhaps struggling to withhold the question: ‘And
how
do you know?’

The wife was staring towards the window, picking at her food. Mrs Handley moved off to serve one of the agriculturals, and as she did so the man from Norwood also left the bar. The wife said, ‘I’m going up.’

‘Hold on,’ I said, lifting my pint, ‘I’ll just finish up.’

But she just said, ‘Don’t be long’, and was gone.

I told myself she’d been emboldened to leave my side by the meek-seeming behaviour of our chief suspects: the man from Norwood and the bicyclist. But that might not have been it at all.

Station master Hardy, I noticed, was looking at me along the bar. The moment I returned his gaze he looked away, but not before I could get in the word ‘Evenin”.

‘The soldiers you have at the station,’ I said, moving towards him. ‘What lot are they?’

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘that’s the York and Lancasters.’

It was the Chief’s regiment.

‘Are they set out just anyhow, or is it a model of some particular scrap?’

‘Battle of Tamai,’ he said, for the first time eyeing me directly. ‘Thirteenth of March, 1884.’

Hardy’s tunic was askew, but perhaps it had to be arranged peculiarly to fit round his big belly. He was not drunk, but on the way.

‘I know a fellow was in that very show,’ I said, for the Chief had fought at Tamai.

‘You do?’ said Hardy, and he was different now – sharper. ‘Who’s that, then?’

I couldn’t answer directly without giving away that I was a copper, so I said, ‘… Sergeant major, he was.’

Hardy was now holding my gaze for once. He was almost smiling as he said, ‘Tough as bulldogs, the non-commissioned blokes.’

‘This particular fellow once marched for fifty miles in hundred-degree heat,’ I said, at which station master Hardy eyed me for a while, perhaps idling the thought of that long march.

‘I’d like to shake that man by the hand,’ he said presently, and he nodded rapidly to himself for a while, each nod signifying a further retreat from the conversation.