Death on a Branch Line (18 page)

Mrs Handley had gone back to apple-peeling, and Mervyn was walking away up the dusty road with his dog and his gun.
Watch
out, rabbits
, I thought. The wife rose from her seat to call out after him: ‘Bye, Mervyn!’

She missed our lad Harry, and she’d taken to Mervyn in his place.

She said, ‘I’m off up for a bath,’ and she went inside the inn.

She was in a strange mood – torn: half-friendly, half not; half wanting me to be investigating the Adenwold mysteries, half not.
Above all, she was annoyed at the arrival of the Chief, for it reminded her that I was not the top man even in the York railway police.

Had the heat got to her? Not a bit of it. She was always agitated – feverish, so to say, even at the best of times. It was just womanliness and you couldn’t cure that with a cold bath.

A single breath of breeze shifted the wisteria growing on the inn front, like a summer sigh. The shadow of a branch waved over the table and became strange when it struck the aerated water. Mr Handley, standing in the pub doorway, boomed out something that might have been ‘You’ve had a long chat out here,’ followed by the question: ‘Don’t appeal?’ or ‘No appeal?’ and I somehow had the idea he was talking about the water. I was never a great one for water, aerated or otherwise, and I took this to be an invitation to take a pint, at which I said, ‘I’d quite fancy a glass of Smith’s, thanks,’ but no sooner had I said it than it occurred to me that he had meant Master Hugh had not appealed against the verdict of guilty and sentence of death.

I stepped through into the public bar after Mr Handley, and the place was empty except for the bloody bicyclist, reading a book. I nodded to him, and said, ‘I see your bike’s gone. Still jiggered, is it?’

‘Took it up to the blacksmith,’ he said, only half looking up from his book. ‘Chap called Ainsty, but he wasn’t about. He’s off fixing some motor, apparently.’

Well, here was more data for the wife, fascinated as she was by the movements of the bicyclist.

The bar smelt of wood and wisteria. All the windows were propped open. On one side they gave onto the golden cornfields and The Angel garden; to the other, they looked onto the trestle table, the dusty lane and the woods.

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?’