Death on a Branch Line (23 page)

A voice came … a woman’s voice from the top of the stairs. She was calling out a name I couldn’t catch. Bundling some of the letters into my pocket, I reviewed my options. I could retreat into one of the rooms I had so far visited or sprint for the front door. I sprinted, as the voice called again from lower on the staircase. I was quickly at the door, where I set about trying to work the latch.

‘You there!’ called the voice just at the moment I got the trick of it.

I slid through the door, turned right and dashed across the front of the house, reaching the territory of the dark out-buildings. Some of their doors were open, disclosing a deeper darkness. The dung on the stone walkways combined with the stagnant black air and the smell of engine oil to make a drugged and drowsy atmosphere. I leant against the wall of a workshop, getting my breath and looking towards the gardener’s cottage, which stood fifty yards off.

A voice was at my ear.

‘Have they brought you in, sir?’

It was the footman or manservant, the one who’d been forcing the claret on me. He wore no tie; his clothes looked hastily put on.

‘Into what?’ I said, shocked.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘the search.’

‘I know that a … difficulty has arisen,’ I said, with fast-beating heart.

‘I mean to pray for him, sir,’ said the manservant. ‘I believe his soul’s in danger.’

I eyed the man. It was strange to hear somebody say they meant to pray when they were not in a church.

‘He’s not well in himself,’ the man ran on, ‘and Captain Usher wanted to keep an eye on him. But he burst out of his room about half after one in the morning and he hasn’t been seen since.’

‘Was he not under lock and key?’ I asked.

‘He is the owner of the house, sir,’ said the manservant.

‘It was Usher who gave chase?’

‘Captain Usher and Chief Inspector Weatherill.’

‘Were any shots heard?’ I asked, and I saw by the lantern light that the man had closed his eyes. Was this the prayer in the process of being delivered up? He opened his eyes after a few seconds, and carried on briskly, as though he had just sent a telegram.

‘How do
you
know that, sir?’ said the manservant. ‘I heard two shots at two o’clock, but I’d gone back to bed by then, and was half-asleep. I just looked at the clock, and I suppose I thought:
Well, it’s two for two, like church bells striking
. A few minutes later, I went over to the window again and light was coming across the lawn. It was Captain Usher and Chief Inspector Weatherill. I dashed down to see them, and they said they were looking for Mr Lambert, and I believe they’ve been about it ever since.’

‘Did they carry guns?’ I asked.

‘They both held shotguns.’

‘
Why
, do you suppose?’

‘Well,’ said the manservant, ‘suicide is feared.’

I supposed he meant that Lambert, bent on suicide, might have been assumed to be armed and generally inclined to shoot.

I shook my head.

‘That won’t answer,’ I said.

‘I must go to the housemaid, sir,’ said the servant. ‘She’s very upset.’

And this man – a very dutiful fellow indeed – headed off in the direction of the house.

The Chief and Usher were giving out that John Lambert was missing. But I believed they’d done for him.

I held up my lantern and contemplated the gardener’s cottage.

As before, the door was on the jar. I pushed it, and entered, setting the lantern in the middle of the floor. Aside from a jumble of what looked like belts and webbing bags on one of the two desks, the room had been cleared and tidied: all the timetables and papers had been piled against the left-hand wall. A blanket was partly draped over the stack of documents. I moved towards it, and saw a last year’s Bradshaw. There were thin folded papers inside, acting as bookmarks. One marked a page for ‘London, Barking, Tilbury’ and certain railway stations and times on the ‘down’ line had been circled in ink pen. Here was the easterly drift again. I imagined that John Lambert read timetables in the same way that an art expert looks at a painting, forever spotting curious little details here and there.

I unfolded the paper that had marked the page. It was pale blue, and headed ‘Sartori’s Park View Hotel, Hyde Park Corner, London, S.W.’ The date was 9 October, 1908, and I recognised Hugh Lambert’s writing:

My dear John

Well, the Squire’s chucked me out again, so I’m lodged just
around the corner in the above mentioned pensione – very
modern with all hygienic desideratas. You entrained for York
last week, I think. How do you find the place? I have spent
more time there than you, and feel I ought to be able to supply
a few pointers.

I strongly recommend the peacocks of the Museum Gardens
who look very proud but are not above taking rolled pellets of
bread from your fingers. They can ‘fly’ to the top of the tree,
but it looks to me suspiciously like a jump accompanied by
flapping of wings. I dragged the Squire to the Museum
Gardens once, and could only persuade him to show interest in
the peacocks by telling him they were a species of pheasant,
which gave him the opportunity to imagine killing them.
Peacocks’ tails are beautiful: blue and green and iridescent, but
the poor peahens come in drab browns. The case is the opposite
with the peacocks and peahens here at Sartori’s …

I heard an approaching voice outdoors, at which my eyes flicked to the bottom of the letter, and the words:
Your disgraceful
brother, Hugh
. I dropped the letter back into the Bradshaw, and moved to the front door, ignoring the lantern. I’d made the garden gate by the time I heard the clatter of boots on the flagstones that lay between the out-buildings and the cottage. Usher loomed into view a second later, a blue-eyed shadow. He carried a shotgun by a strap over his shoulder, and it looked about right – this was the fulfilment of the man.

He tilted the gun slightly, and pumped it once. A cartridge was ejected, twirled in air and clattered somewhere in the darkness about his boots. I knew that by this action he had also chambered a new cartridge, ready for firing. He said nothing, but levelled the barrel at me as the Chief appeared from around the same corner. He looked glad to be back in his tweeds and his dinty old trilby hat. He also carried a shotgun – the two of them had perhaps plundered the armoury of the Hall – and he too levelled it and took aim at me.

‘Thought you’d have a bit of a poke about, did you?’ he said.

With a jerk of his head, he indicated the cottage to Usher. It was permissible, I supposed, for a sergeant major to make a suggestion to a captain in the heat of an engagement.

I walked, under their guns, back into the cottage, and was directed to the main room where the timetables were stacked and my lantern glowed. I was driven by the gun muzzles towards the back of the room, where the two desks stood, and in so directing me I perceived that the gunmen had made rather a bloomer.

A beautiful bone-handled revolver lay in the tangle of martial-looking goods on the desk, and it looked very questing and
forward-pointing and eager to be up and at. I watched the shadows of the two shotguns as I contemplated it, and I made my goodbyes to the world and the mysteries of Adenwold, as I picked it up and turned about.

Chapter Twenty-Five

There were now three pointing guns in the room. My own was aimed at the Chief. Two days ago, I might have asked the man’s permission before going to the jakes and now I proposed putting a bullet in him.

‘You’ll put that fucking gun down at once,’ he said, but he seemed to be only trying the words out for size, hardly believing they’d be heeded.

‘I’ll fucking not.’

‘I’ll fucking not,
sir
!’ roared the Chief.

He took a step forward.

He might threaten to lag me for decades now, or offer me a glass of beer by way of alternative. I stood in exactly the same relation to him as the bank’s man had on Platform Five of York station, only not
quite
, for as I met the Chief’s gaze I drew back the hammer of the revolver.

‘Now you’re
threatening
to put me into a baddish temper,’ said the Chief.

‘Between the two of you,’ I said, ‘you put a bullet in John Lambert.’

Usher flashed a sidelong look at the Chief.

‘… And I can’t think of any reason why that might have been a lawful and right thing to do,’ I said.

A long beat of silence.

‘I’ve told Captain Usher a good deal about you this past day or two,’ said the Chief. ‘Your ears must have been buzzing.’

‘It’s more than his ears that’ll be buzzing in a minute,’ said Usher, whose pale-blue right eye looked along the level of his gun barrel.

‘
What
did you tell him about me?’ I asked the Chief, indicating Usher.

‘That you were determined,’ said the Chief, ‘hard to put off.’

‘… Hard to put off,
with an intact cranium
,’ said Usher.

‘You were seen by the manservant coming back to the house with guns in your hands,’ I said. ‘Ten minutes before, two shots had been fired.’

Another beat of silence.

The Chief said, ‘You’ll only fire that thing once, you know – and there are two of us.’

I said to the Chief: ‘I don’t think I’ve been properly introduced to your confederate, sir.’

The Chief flashed a glance at Usher, who made a movement of his head that I could not interpret. Anyhow, Usher spoke next.

‘Why have you taken such a liking to the brothers Lambert?’ he asked, looking along the length of his gun. ‘Can you not see that one is a traitor to his country, and that the other is a member of the cult of –’

‘Of what, for Christ’s sake?’

‘Of Uranus,’ said Usher, at which the Chief gave a great roar of something like fury and something like amusement, and walked three fast paces towards me with his gun still raised and ready to fire. I dashed down the revolver and he swung at me with his right fist; I swung back with my right
and
my left, and then he was bouncing strangely – hard bald head kept low. He was by repute a heavyweight of the rushing type, but before he could live up to that billing, I rushed at
him
and crowned him again, and his nose was changed by this. He came at me with his left fist raised, but it was the right that struck home, and the Chief had a very good right. A strongman might have picked me up by my boot-heels and swung my head through a full circle into an iron pole.

After an unknown interval of time, I came up to a sitting position with a feeling of having been swimming in heavy seas, a headache and blood in my mouth. The chief was on a level with me and grinning. His nose was like a sign indicating ‘left’ to all his features and his grin seemed to be directed that way, too. His
knees were raised and his arms were around his knees. He sat like a happy boy at a camp fire. The Chief liked automatic machine guns and drinking beer under a very hot sun – awkward things – and he had enjoyed our scrap.

I looked at him, and he was all ablaze.

‘Go again?’ he said, like a man forty years younger. How could I have thought that he was ripe for superannuation? Behind him stood Usher, who was beyond speech, but who still had his shotgun trained on my chest. I did not fear him now, though.

The Chief held his hand over his nose. He seemed to be trying to push it back towards the right.

The revolver still lay on the floor, close to the lantern.

‘Why’d you give it up?’ the Chief said, indicating the revolver with his boot.

‘Because I knew the two of you were right,’ I said.

‘About what?’

‘About Hugh Lambert. It was something the wife said.’

She had asked me why I did not understand the man, hinting at missing knowledge.

‘I knew that if you weren’t lying about his …’

But I broke off, for the Chief was still adjusting his nose. It was somewhere about middle now but at the cost of a faster flow of blood. Usher walked forward with a silk handkerchief.

‘If you weren’t lying about
that
,’ I said, ‘then I knew you weren’t lying about not having killed John Lambert.’

‘I’m not sure we ever did deny it, did we, sir?’ the Chief asked Usher, who was lighting a cigarette.

‘I personally never deny anything,’ Usher said, shaking out the match.

‘But you didn’t do it,’ I said.

‘The limit,’ said the Chief, with the handkerchief still held at his nose, ‘the absolute fucking
limit
was when you said we’d taken two shots over it.’

The Chief was shaking his head, still with the handkerchief pressed to his nose.

‘Why were the shots fired?’ I asked.

‘Two warnings,’ said the Chief. ‘… Try and stop him as he raced into the woods.’

‘And how is he a traitor?’