Death on a Branch Line (2 page)

The new footbridge stretched between the main ‘up’ and the main ‘down’, and a steeplechase was being run over it, what with everyone fleeing the gun. But one bowler-hatted man was running the opposite way, and battling through the on-rushing crowd: the Chief. I knew he’d been knocking about the station somewhere.

I bolted for the footbridge, and began fighting my way through the crowds in the wake of the Chief. A succession of ladies in summer muslin seemed to be pitched at me, and some wide-brimmed hats were scattered as I fought my way to the main ‘down’ where the Chief was closing on the three blokes.

As soon as we made the platform, the Chief slowed to a walk, gesturing me to stay well behind him. The gunman swung his revolver towards the Chief, saying, ‘Are you another of them?’

‘Another of what?’ asked the Chief.

‘Another of these bastards,’ he said, indicating the two roughs facing him.

This was not the common run of shootist. For a start, he wore spectacles. He was also decently spoken and smartly turned out – and alongside his polished boots rested a good-quality leather valise. The two standing before him – blokes of a lower class – neither moved nor spoke, but watched the gun, which was a revolver of the American type.

‘We’re all staying right here until the police come,’ said the man with the gun.

‘I
am
a policeman, you fucking idiot,’ said the Chief, and that was him all over – rough and ready.

‘Well, you don’t look like one,’ said the man with the gun.

‘I happen to be in a plain suit,’ said the Chief, and I wondered why he did not hold up his warrant card. I would have come forward and shown my own, but it was in the pocket of my suit coat in the police office.

‘Plain suit?’ said the gunman, eyeing the Chief. ‘
Dirty
suit, more like.’

The Chief, as usual, looked like nothing on earth. His trousers did not match his top-coat, and they were both of a winter weight – it almost made you faint with heat sickness to look at them. In York, people were jumping into the river off Lendal Bridge to get cool, but the Chief didn’t give tuppence about the weather. He’d been in the Sudan, where 95 degrees was counted a rather chilly spell, and he’d worn a thick red coat throughout that show, which was perhaps why he wore his winter coat now. His bowler was greasy and dinted, and stray lengths of orange hair came out from underneath it so that a stranger might have been fascinated to lift the hat off his head and see the way things stood with the
rest
of the Chief’s hair. A man who’d served in the colours ought to have been smarter, I always thought.

But you knew the Chief had been a soldier by other signs.

In the greenhouse heat of the station, he was moving towards the man with the gun. I watched the Chief make his advance – and then a noise made me turn around. The great mix-up of lines and signals beyond the south end wavered in the heat, and a train was there in the hot, shimmering air.
Here’s trouble
, I thought.

The train bent like a flame or a fever vision as it came on and, as I watched, it slid to the right with a high whine, so that it was heading for our platform.

The Chief, still advancing on the gunman, was making great windmilling movements with his right arm. He meant to wave the train through, as if it was a horse and trap approaching a partial blockage in a country lane (and the Chief
did
walk with a farmer’s plod).

The engine driver could see that something was up, and he hung off the side of his cab to get a better look – one tiny scrap of humanity clinging onto thirty tons of roaring machine. The train seemed to frighten the gunman, for he yelled, ‘I’ll shoot, I’ll shoot!’ The Chief was roaring too, and waving as the train came rolling alongside us. I imagined the riot among the passengers on board. Their train was giving the go-by to York, principal junction of the north!

As the train rolled away, I heard the Chief say to the gunman:

‘Now give it over.’

No reply from the gunman, and no movement from him either.

The five of us stood amid the abandoned bags and the posters for ‘Sailor Suits – Young Boys Will Appreciate Them This Weather’ and ‘Ebor Lemonade – The Drink That Refreshes’.

A half-minute passed.

‘I said give it over,’ repeated the Chief, and his voice echoed about the brick arches, the fourteen platforms and the like number of lines. I heard a distant clunk, and, looking towards the great signal gantry beyond the north end, I saw that all the levers had been set at stop. To my knowledge, they had never all said the same thing before, and it meant word had reached the mighty signal box that controlled the station and hung suspended over the main ‘up’.
The signallers would all be in there, but moving about on their knees, below the line of the windows.

I looked again beyond the station end. The signals resembled so many soldiers with shouldered arms. Out there in the great unroofed world, passing trains were setting cornfields ablaze, signal boxes were catching fire for no good reason and all kind of trouble was brewing: the miners were out, the dockers were out and the great heat had been given as the cause of many suicides. The ancient city of York itself had become a kind of Turkish bath.

The gunman was in fits now, pointing and repointing the revolver at the Chief. He looked the part of an ink-spiller – it ought to have been a fountain pen and not a revolver that rested there in his hand. The Chief stood three feet before him, one ruffian to either side of him.

The Chief repeated his request:

‘Hand it over.’

The gunman shook his head, and sweat flew. The stuff was rolling down from underneath his hat all the time.

One of the ruffians spoke up:

‘He reckons you’re after his bag.’

The Chief turned around and looked at the fellow for a while.

The Chief’s face … well, it was a bit of a jumble: little brown eyes that lurked behind slanting cracks in his head like those sea creatures that live inside stones; big, no-shape nose. The only orderly feature was the well-balanced brown moustache, which looked twenty years younger than the rest of him.

The Chief turned back to the gunman.

‘I don’t want your bag, only the gun.’

The gunman kept silence.

‘Can I tempt you to a glass of ale?’ the Chief suddenly asked him.

No reply from the gunman.

‘Strikes me you might
prefer
a glass of ale to twenty years’ hard labour,’ said the Chief.

The gunman said, ‘If I give you the gun, there’ll be nothing to stop you taking the bag.’

‘Look, I keep forgetting about this fucking bag,’ said the Chief. ‘That’s on account of the fact I’ve no interest in it and do not bloody want it.’

‘You’re one of them,’ the gunman said, addressing the Chief, but nodding towards the two roughs. ‘They know you. When you came up, they said, “It’s Weatherill.”’

‘And did they look pleased about it?’ asked the Chief.

The Chief took two steps towards the gunman, and there was now not more than a yard’s distance between him and the revolver.

‘So now then,’ the Chief said, and he advanced again.

The gunman looked down at his bag, then up at the Chief.

‘One more step and I’ll fire,’ he said.

The Chief took one more step; he removed the revolver from the hand of the gunman, who stared at the Chief amazed.

‘That was painless, wasn’t it?’ said the Chief, smiling, and I winced at that for I knew what was coming: the fast blow that sent the man to the ground.

It was then that the two roughs made their breakaway. I turned and scarpered over the bridge after them. In the middle of the bridge, I was ten feet behind the slower of the pair; then seven feet, five, closing … But the five became seven again, and he had ten yards on me by the time he reached the ticket barrier, where he went out through the ‘in’ gate, clattering against the pole that supported the sign: ‘Please show your own ticket’.

I nearly gave up the pursuit just then, but I saw that the second one had crocked himself on that pole, and that I was gaining on him again as we pounded through the cab shelter.

We came out from under the glass roof of the shelter and ran on hard under the great heat of the blaring sun, but we were both slowed by it, as was the man in the lead, who was also back in my sights now.

I was separated from the first bloke by seventy yards’ distance, from the second by thirty. As we went along by the dying gardens of the Royal Station Hotel, pink-cheeked, bewildered women in white dresses came and went; black-suited, sweltering railway clerks were presented to us in a steady stream, and were pushed
aside or dodged if lucky. To my left, I saw Leeman Road, and the central post office of York, with a dozen vans queuing up before it to deliver the letters that people would insist on writing in spite of the suffocating heat.

Under the arch of the Bar Walls, and the headquarters of the North Eastern Railway came up. Beyond the offices was the Cocoa Factory, hard by the river, and I was now running under the raying sun and the smell of burning chocolate combined. At the river’s edge, the first man ran right, heading along the road that ran between the two towering buildings of the cocoa works, while the second man ran straight – gaining Lendal Bridge ten seconds before me. I was keeping on the tail of this second man, since I knew that he was in the same state as me: half-dead. Under the bridge, the river was low and dirty, over-crowded with pleasure cruisers that puffed out bad-tempered black smoke. In Museum Street, the man dodged right. Was he in the doorway of the Conservative Club? Half-fainting, I stopped and verified that he was not … and I gave up the chase.

When I returned to the station and to Platform Five, with my shirt sweat-soaked and the whole place re-awakening, the man who’d held the gun was only just righting himself.

The chief was holding the man’s valise – which was locked.

‘What’s in here, then?’ the Chief asked the bloke.

‘Specie,’ he muttered, as he sadly collected up the wreckage of his spectacles.

Chapter Three

Four twenty-two by my silver watch.

The Chief sat at his desk, and I sat on the chair opposite with my suit coat on my knee. The gas hissed like a jungle snake, for the Chief’s office – which was an enclosed part of the police office – was windowless. On the green wall behind him was a plan of the whole of the territories of the North Eastern Railway. The station beyond was still quieter than normal.

‘It’ll be like this when the strike comes, sir,’ I said.

Everyone knew the railwaymen would be the next lot to be out. They wanted recognition for their union. Could I count myself a railwayman? I had certainly been one once, in my days firing on the footplate, and I could still find myself checked by the beauty of a locomotive, but I was a copper now, a passenger not a pilot on the iron road, and I would not be coming out even if the true railwaymen did. The Chief did not normally speak about politics but he had once said of the strikers that it was ‘our job to keep those fellows down’. I’d kept silence at that.

The Chief was side-on to me, hardly listening but smoking a cigar and fretting about the gunman. He’d taken him into the holding cell and given him a bit of a braying, while I’d stood outside the cell door feeling spare – and guilty with it. I’d put a stop to the rough-house by rapping on the door, and asking the Chief if he wanted a cup of tea. I’d brought one for the prisoner as well, and taken a good look at his face. He’d come off lightly compared to some, and I handed him a bottle of carbolic and a cloth as the Chief stepped back into the office.

‘You’ll stand witness to this,’ the bloke had said, pointing to his cuts and bruises.

‘Pipe down, mate,’ I’d said, ‘and you’ll be out of here directly.’

After coming out of the cell, the Chief had consulted his filing system, and had for once turned up the right paper. There was the bloke, set down in cold print as an employee of the Yorkshire Penny Bank, certificated to carry arms when transporting specie – and there’d been over five hundred pounds’ worth of sovereigns in the valise: the week’s wages for Backhouse’s nurseries, the York General Draperies and half a dozen other places.

‘I half-recognised the fellow,’ said the Chief, putting his boots on his desk. ‘But why did he not come out and say he was running cash for the bank?’

The Chief’s neck was red where his collar rubbed, but that collar could rub his head right off before he’d notice anything amiss.

‘Because he thought you were out to rob him, sir.’

Train smoke floating in from outside, cigar smoke inside; the strikes; the scrap that was brewing with the Kaiser … A fellow wanted to get away and
breathe
. But I knew I’d lost my chance to make a late booking in Scarborough.

‘He was in a funk, sir, not thinking straight.’

I liked the Chief and didn’t like to see him worried – not that he was ever really worried about anything. If you read the Police Manual, it was all very careful: ‘In exercising the power of arrest, officers must use the greatest caution and discretion …’ But the Chief never
had
read the Police Manual, and it was too late for him to do so now that he was just a few months short of his retirement. I would have said that getting on for half the things he did were unlawful, but it seemed to me that he always had the right
end
in view. I thought of him as being at once modern and old-fashioned: modern in that he fostered ‘initiative’ in his men, old-fashioned in that he didn’t hold with paperwork and would clout a ruffian as soon as look at him. I supposed that I covered up for him too often in this. I knew I’d got a name in the office for being the Chief’s favourite, and despite being less than half his age (twenty-seven to his sixty-four), I was the only one he’d take a pint with.

‘You might have shown him your warrant card,’ I said, and the moment I let fall the words, I regretted them. The Chief could be
set off at a touch, so I put in a belated ‘… sir’.

The Chief turned towards me and blew smoke. He’d tramped for hundreds of miles across the boiling deserts of Africa; he had a slash mark from a dervish spear across his chest. A newspaper report existed of an army boxing match of about ’79 in which the Chief had been described as a useful heavyweight of the ‘rushing’ type, which was a polite way of saying that he went nuts in a scrap.