Murder At Deviation Junction (12 page)

    'Mind
if I take it?' I said. 'It's evidence.'

    'You're
the boss,' he said.

    Anything
to get shot of me.

    I
carried the Mentor Reflex into the middle of town. The wide, new streets were
all in straight lines, and the trick was to avoid the ones along which the sea
wind raced. The streets were prettily lit, for all the cold, and the shops
crowded with Christmas tomfoolery. There was a clear-cut line between the
sexes: the men were moving fast, thinking of business, the women moving slow,
thinking of Christmas. I was turning a corner in the locality of the railway
station when I was checked by the sight of a small fir tree from which dangled
little medicine bottles of coloured glass. 'Milner,' read the sign above the
window. 'Druggist.' The important notice was in the corner of the window:
'Photographs Developed'.

    I
pushed open the door, entering a sort of warm, chemical Christmas. Approaching
the counter, I removed my gloves and loosened the catch that held the plates on
to the camera. A man waited at the counter: white-coated and clean - struck me as
a doctor who'd missed his mark, like all druggists.

    'Can
you do these for me express?'

    'Two
hours,' he said, and whether that was express or no, I couldn't have said from
his tone.

    'How many
exposures in here?' asked the man, taking the tin from me.

    'Well,
there'd be two at most, wouldn't there?' I replied. 'Or there might not be
any.'

    He
looked at me narrowly, saying, 'If there aren't
any
, it won't take two
hours.'

    I
requested the largest print size, and then went off for a bite and a warm,
eventually walking into Hintons, although not the select parts used by Steve
Bowman and his wife, but a smoke-filled, publike part of it, where I ate fried
eggs and drank a cup of cocoa.

    It
was five o'clock when I returned to Milner, the druggist.

    'Anything
doing?' I asked, and by way of reply he handed over an envelope, saying, 'Two
and fourpence.'

    I
paid the money over without a thought for the cost, and pulled first from the
envelope the two negatives. Five men stood on a platform before a special
carriage. It was the one I'd viewed at Bog Hall Sidings, Whitby. Above it was
visible a part of the platform canopy, and I knew that right away for the
broken one at Saltburn. The men's eyes seemed to be burning, and all about
their boots was a mass of rough blackness - snow in reverse.

    I
then pulled out the prints. Going from left to right, the first man was
clean-shaven and wore a silk hat (which he held in his left hand, along with his
gloves) and a topcoat buttoned right up; there would be a smart black morning
coat underneath, no doubt. He was handsome, and his hair went backwards in
waves. His dashing looks put me in mind of fine copperplate handwriting.

    He
looked slightly sidelong at the photographer, as if to say, 'Photograph
me,
would you?' and his left arm somehow did not belong about the shoulder of the
next man, number two, but that's where it was. Number two was perhaps half the
age of number one. He had a friendly face and smiled straight at the
photographer. He carried a folded copy of a newspaper, the name of which I
could make out: it was the
Whitby Morning Post,
which served the whole
of the coast of North Yorkshire. He wore a derby hat, and had a fine winter
flower in his buttonhole, as did the next man, who was about of an age with the
first; his rough, grey hair and beard were all of a piece with his tweed suit.
He might have been an explorer, freshly returned from the Arctic Circle. The
fourth had a round face (he was bareheaded and bald) and round glasses. He gave
a cautious smile. The flower in his buttonhole did not suit him. It was too
flowery.
Number five was older than the rest. He wore a stovepipe hat, and
had blind-looking eyes; he looked dirty and confused, but also
rich.
He
might be Moody - the man who'd gone under a train, father of another Moody now
living in Pickering. I looked them over again, thinking of them in turn as
handsome fellow, young fellow, wild-looking fellow, bald fellow and old fellow.

    The
second print was more or less the same, save for the fact that the young man
was looking down, and I saw immediately that this was the difference between a
photograph that could be used in a picture paper, and one that could not. The
prints themselves made an impression not very different from that of the
negatives - and this, I believed, was on account of the strangeness of the snow
light; I could not tell whether the picture had been taken in the morning or
afternoon.

    What
had become of these men?

    I had
already been told that one was dead, and I knew this much: that there was only
one way your fortunes could go once you'd attained the distinction of your own
railway carriage, and that was down the hill. I found myself turning one of the
prints over, half expecting the druggist to have written their names on the
reverse. I looked at the man, now serving a cold cure to another customer.
Smart shopkeeper like himself - he might know one of the Club gents; he might
know all six. So might any man in Middlesbrough, come to that. . .

    I had
meant to take my trophy straight to Detective Sergeant Williams, but a new
notion came to me as I exited the druggist's, and I struck out for the largest
building in my line of sight: the Middlesbrough Exchange. I crossed a wide
square that was filled with trams come to the rescue of the freezing citizens.
In the cold darkness, the iron-making smell had descended on the middle of the
town: the strange, out-of-the-way smell of burning sand.

    One
of the mighty double doors of the Exchange was being swung to as I approached,
and the place was evidently closing up. A fossil in a gold-braided uniform
watched me go in, as if to say, 'I won't trouble to ask your business; you'll
be ejected before long in any case.' In the great hall of the Exchange, the
remaining groups of buyers and sellers talked under clouds of cigar smoke.
Wooden stands were placed at intervals, each one an island under its own
electric light. Notices were pinned to the stands: the day's prices of coal,
ironstone, iron, steel and ships, as I supposed - all the goods that had raised
Middlesbrough from nothing to a city of a hundred thousand souls in less than a
lifetime.

    Some
clerks remained at the counters that were set into the walls beneath a great
gallery, but most were already shuttered. I walked towards one group of
businessmen with my warrant card and the photograph held aloft. 'Detective
Stringer of the railway police,' I said, and they turned to me as one. It cost
them quite an effort to look civil, but the warrant card made them do it. What
did they see? A thin, youngish bloke with a camera over his shoulder; topcoat a
little out at the elbows. It was my work coat. A new one, in a better grade of
cloth, would be served out to me if I gained my promotion. As they eyed me, I
felt very strongly the want of that word 'Sergeant' - 'Detective Sergeant'
would have testified to at least one promotion successfully secured. One of the
men took the photograph and passed it among his fellows. The second one to clap
eyes on it spoke immediately.

    'It's
Falconer,' he said, and he pointed to the rather wild-looking one, the explorer
type.

    The
next man to take the photograph nodded, and he too said, 'Falconer.'

    'How
would I find the man?' I asked.

    'How
would you
find
him?' asked one of the men, in a wondering tone. 'Well,
that's the
question,
isn't it?'

    Another
of the group was speaking:

    'And
that one's - why, that's Lee.'

    'Which
one?' I said, craning to see, and I was aware of not appearing to be a fellow
of quite the right sort.

    'This
one,' said one of the men, indicating the bald-headed and spectacle-wearing
gent, while another at the same time asked, 'Is some connection discovered between
the two?' But in fact they were all speaking at once now, and their
black-gloved hands were all over the photograph as they each sought a better
look.

    'It's
a travelling club,' I said, but the remark was lost in the scramble.

    One
of the men was asking, 'You're on the Middlesbrough force and you've not heard
of poor George Lee?' The first one to have spoken gave me a narrow look,
saying, 'You seem to stand in need of some enlightenment.'

    'I'm
from the railway force,' I said, 'stationed at York.'

    'You're
operating independently of the Middlesbrough constabulary?' one of the men
asked. He seemed to quite credit that I might be, and that this might be a
rather clever notion. He looked a little more amiable than the rest, but the
situation was too humiliating for words. I must break away.

    'Does
this represent some new line in the investigation?' asked one of the men as I
reclaimed the picture.

    'Yes,'
I said.

    'But
isn't it a little late for that?'

    Christ
knew whether it was or no, but Detective Sergeant Ralph Williams would be the
man to tell me. Reclaiming the photograph, I fairly sprinted towards the double
doors but one of the group - the amiable chap - was keeping pace, and as we
crossed the exchange floor, he held his gloved hand out before him as though
grasping an imaginary cricket ball.

    'George
Lee,' he said, waving his cane enthusiastically. 'If I had in my hand a
quantity of ironstone, he could tell me the percentage of iron in a trice. Not
just a rough indication of quality. I mean, he'd shoot a verdict straight at
you. "Thirty-five per cent," he'd say, which is a good deal, and in
which case, of course, you were on velvet. Twenty-five per cent? Oh Lord,
then
you had a headache - do you sink your shaft or no for that grade of
stone?'

    He'd
stopped in the lobby or vestibule of the Exchange before the great double
doors, and he was pressing the question on me:

    'For
twenty-five per cent stone?'

    'If
you could mine the stuff cheaply . . .' I said, groping in the darkness, and
the amiable man gave me a sort of wink at that. We were pushing on towards the
tram-packed square, the man's cane ticking like a clock on the new-laid
pavement.

    'What
were George Lee's origins?' I asked, reasoning that no disgrace ought to attach
to ignorance on that point.

    But
the amiable man had his arm out, and was saying, 'This is me.'

    A
hansom had stopped for him, and it had whisked him away as I looked on.

    Not
three minutes later, I was in the warm police office, where Ralph Williams -
who was also amiable, but steady and quietly spoken with it - was inviting me
to sit down at his desk chair. He himself perched on the desk.

    'Now
you have some further questions as regards the dead photographer?' he said,
once I'd explained the absence of my quarry Clegg.

    'I've
discovered his camera,' I said, indicating the Mentor Reflex, 'and I've found
the pictures in it. Now it all comes down to the identity of these fellows -'

    I
took the photograph from its pasteboard sleeve. 'They're the
Whitby-Middlesbrough Travelling Club - went every day from country stops along
the line into this station.'

    Williams
seemed a good fellow, but I'd been hoping to stifle that grin of his, and in
this I had succeeded.

    'The
shot was taken at Saltburn,' I said, 'by Paul Peters.'

    'Well,
this
is
a turn-up,' said Williams, eyeing the photograph.

    I
told him how I'd come by it.

    'Now
this man,' I said, pointing to the bald, spectacle-wearing one, 'is George Lee,
mining engineer. Some blokes at the Exchange just told me.'

    Williams
nodded.

    'I
believe it is.'

    'What's
become of him?'

    'Lee?'
said Williams, still looking at the photograph. 'Why, murdered.'

    'Like
Peters,' I said, 'and this picture makes a connection between them.'

    Williams
might have frowned at that, but his pleasant face didn't suit frowning. I asked
him, 'Was it known that Lee was in this Club?' 'The connection was certainly
not made in court,' said Williams. 'I do not believe that the matter of this
... Travelling Club ... I do not believe it was brought in.'