Murder At Deviation Junction (3 page)

    I was
glad he'd fished a locomotive out of the bran tub, even if he ought not to be
getting presents so close to Christmas. I fancied Harry might make an engineman
one day - succeed where I'd failed. But the wife wanted him educated to the
hilt, make an intellect of him. Even at a little under four years old, she
swore he had all the makings.

    Harry
was coughing again, so I whisked him back along the platform to where the wife
waited, and we climbed up. The steam heat was working in the carriage, but
Harry still coughed. He was on the mend from his latest bad go, but he had a
weak chest: at age two he'd had pneumonia. Three months in the York Infirmary,
pulse at a fever rate for days on end. Our sick club didn't cover the cost, and
most of our savings were gone.

    We
settled ourselves in an empty compartment, and I took out from my pocket the
Middlesbrough Gazette
for Monday 13 December
1909.
A succession of
polar lows were moving south in an Arctic airstream. There had been much
freezing of water taps and gas mains, and now widespread snow was forecast for
the district.

    The
train was being quickly boarded: it was the main service of the evening down
the coast to Whitby. You could go by the country way, but I wanted to see the
sea. People clattered along the corridor, carrying snow on their shoulders,
shouting about the weather: 'Bad weather for thin boots, this is!'

    Harry
settled eventually, and the wife took out her library book - something on the
women's movement, probably with a dash of religion. She always had something
like that on the go.

    The
whistle blew and we were fast away. A moment later, a man and a woman walked
into the compartment, and Harry immediately fell to staring at them, which I
couldn't stop without drawing attention to the fact that he was doing it.

    They
were both small. The woman carried a big basket stuffed with parcels. As she
pulled the white fur mantle off her shoulders, I caught sight of Lydia's
flashing eye. It meant this was the fashionable kind of mantle, worthy of notice.
The woman sat down quickly, but took a long time settling herself. The man wore
wire- rimmed spectacles, a flat, snow-topped sporting cap, black suit and a
green topcoat of decent quality. The cap didn't belong, for he did not look the
sporting type.

    He
carried a valise and a canvas case about a foot and a half square. He looked
twice at the notice on the string rack over the seats: 'Light articles only'.
He took off his specs and blew on them, as though thinking about that sign.
Then he stowed the case on the rack anyway. He put his topcoat up there, and
whipped off the cap; he was bald, except for a line of hair that ran round the
perimeter of his scalp. It was just a memory of hair, marking the boundary of
where the stuff had been. His nose was queer as well. It was an arrow, coming
out sharply and going in again quite as fast. It was just right for supporting
his specs, though.

    Sitting
down, he gave me a quick nod, which made his red face turn redder still.

    As we
rocked away from Middlesbrough station he took some papers from the valise and
began leafing through them at a great rate, while occasionally making jottings
in a notebook. I looked out of the window. The iron district was to my left,
the mighty furnaces burning under the snow. The woman was reading a picture
paper -
Household Words
or some such. I caught sight of the question: 'A
lemon cake for Christmas?'

    The
man lifted his feet and rested them on the seat over opposite, at which Harry's
mouth opened wide. I knew what was coming, but could see no way of stopping it.

    'It's
not allowed!' said Harry, pointing at the boots.

    Lydia
shook her head, though she was almost laughing at the same time. The man
coloured up and - continuing with his note- making - took his feet off the
seat.

    'Don't
bother on our account,' I said to this clerk-on-the-move, who acknowledged me
once again with a nod.

    Harry
was now looking out of the window.

    'The
boy's quite right though, isn't he?' the woman was saying. 'Where would we be if
everyone put their boots on the seats?'

    She
looked at the man.

    'Where
would we be, Stephen?'

    'I'm
sure I don't know, Violet,' he said, hardly looking up from his scribbling.

    (She
did not look like a Violet - too pale.)

    'I
think it comes from his being a policeman's son,' said Lydia, at which the
clerk looked up over his glasses at me.

    'The
man two doors down from us in Wimbledon is on the force,' said the woman. 'He's
quite high up - an inspector, I think.'

    She
was pretty but, like her husband, small in scale - like a child playing at
being an adult. Whenever she spoke, she caused a commotion, or so she seemed to
think, for she rearranged herself afterwards, refolding the gloves that rested
on top of her basket and patting down her skirts.

    'He's
only been in the street for a year,' she went on. 'Well, we all have. But the
milkman for the area, who was known to give short measure ... he doesn't try it
in Lumley Road.'

    She
looked at us all.

    '...that's
because of the Inspector.'

    'James
is on the North Eastern Railway force,' said the wife, after a moment.
'Detective grade. He's going for his promotion on Christmas Eve.'

    And
because we were in company, she left off the words: 'He'd better get it as
well.'

    Lydia
had spent the past two years fretting about our futures - mine and hers both.
Would she end up at the kitchen sink? That was her leading anxiety. She was a
New Woman, forward thinking. There was to be a sex revolution, and you knew it
was coming by the speed at which Lydia went at her typewriting. Whenever Harry
slept, or was at school, she would be at the machine in the parlour by which
she got her living, writing letters for the Co-operative Movement or the
women's cause in general or the Co-operative Women's movement, which was a
frightening combination of the two. She got a little money by this, and now
she'd been offered a position in the Northern Division of the Co-operative
Movement: half-time secretary to Mrs Somebody-or-other. Three days a week, ten
bob a day. Very fair wages, all considered. Lydia was to give her answer by the
first week of the New Year, and she would only be able to say yes if I achieved
promotion to detective sergeant. That would be a big leap, for it would all but
double my pay, letting us take on a girl who could do the weekly wash and mind
Harry for the three days.

    My
interview was to be with the chief of the force himself, Captain Fairclough,
and it was fixed for twelve noon in the spot we were now leaving behind:
Middlesbrough, to which the headquarters of the North Eastern Railway Police
had lately removed, having been first at Newcastle.

    We
rolled through Redcar station, for we were semi-fast to Whitby, where we would
change for York. I caught a glimpse of the beach as we rocked through Redcar
station. It was snow- covered. A torn white flag planted in the sand flew the
word 'TEAS'.

    The
ladies in the compartment were developing a conversation.

    'Do
you wash at home?'

    'Some,'
the wife said, very cautiously. 'Only handkerchiefs and the like.'

    That
was a fib (we washed everything at home), and I flashed the wife a sideways
glance, which she avoided.

    The
woman started in with another question: 'Do you wash the - ?' But she broke off
at the sight of three rough-looking blokes whisking along the corridor,
shouting at each other as they went. Iron- getters most likely, I thought, and
half-canned at the end of a turn. Harry was kicking his feet, looking out of
the window at more furnaces - set high on a hill in the weird light.

    'Everything's
on fire, dad,' said Harry, and it was evidently fine by him, for he spoke the
words calmly.

    'Wimbledon's
home to us,' the woman was saying. 'Lumley Road.'

    She
would keep on mentioning it.

    'It's
well away from the railway,' she said.

    Was
that good or bad? She found the railway noisy, I supposed. But there'd be no
Wimbledon without it. I remembered the place from my days on the London and
South Western company - a medium class of houses, and seemingly more of them
every week you rode by them.

    I
looked again through the window. A little light left in the day; lonely
cottages here and there; snow landing slantwise on the sea beyond.

    'Do
you know London?' the woman was saying.

    'I'm
from there myself,' said the wife.

    'Oh,
where?'

    She
was cornered now.

    'Waterloo,'
she said, and that was the end of the conversation for the moment. You could
not say the lodging house the wife had kept there had been well away from the station;
it had been almost
in
it. Lydia frowned at the gas lamp over Harry's
seat. He suddenly smiled and waved at her with the full length of his arm, as
though she sat half a mile away, but she did not respond. She was fighting for
the sisterhood, but that didn't mean she had to like all individual women, or
even very many of them, and it was ridiculous of me to think so, as I had often
been told upon raising the point.

    Harry
was keeping rhythm with the train, repeating over and over; 'Rattly ride, rattly
ride, rattly ride,' until Lydia, ever so gently, kicked him on the knee, after
which he fell to
whispering
the words.

    I
turned to the boy, saying, 'Those hills are full of miners, Harry - getting the
ironstone from which the iron and steel is made. There's a whole world
underground: miles of tunnels, workshops, storerooms, even horses and stables.'

    'Have
you been doing your marketing in Middlesbrough?' Lydia asked the woman.

    'I
did a little
shopping
,' said the woman. She was not the sort for
marketing.

    The
village of Marske was to our left - a big house on a hill stood guard over it,
but snow fell on village and mansion alike.

    'We
had tea at Hinton's,' the woman was saying. 'The main dining room, you know.'

    We crashed
over some points and there was a winding gear suddenly hard by us, all lit up.

    'We
had lovely macaroons,' the woman was saying, 'and then Stephen smoked a cigar
in what they call the
More-ish
Room. It's rather select.'

    At
this, the man was finally provoked into speaking.

    'The
Moorish
room,' he said. 'After the Moors, who come from North Africa or
wherever it might be .. .'

    'Or
the
Yorkshire
Moors,' said the wife, grinning, and the Wimbledon pair
both laughed at this: the man quite briefly, the woman for longer. It surprised
me that she should have laughed, and made me better disposed towards her.

    I
turned to Harry. 'Have you seen that we've been passing wagons full of the
stuff? They're taking it to Middlesbrough, but must wait for the passenger
trains to go by.'

    'Why?'
said Harry.

    'Because,'
I said, 'people come before lumps of stone.'

    'You
reckon
,' he said, and Lydia touched his knee with her elastic-sided boot
again. This was another of his regular expressions she considered coarse. I
looked at the wife, and she grinned. I liked those boots of hers. I wanted to
see what she looked like standing in them with nothing else on, but had not
quite had the brass neck to ask. I would do, though - I would do it come
Christmas Eve if everything had gone all right in Middlesbrough, and we had
more money in view.

    We
were now winding our way towards the new seaside town of Saltburn. The black
sea was to our left; a slag breakwater stretched out like the black hand of a
clock. More shouts came from along the corridor, and the Wimbledon man had
stopped work to listen. Harry was coughing again.

    We
began rolling past tall houses. The cornerstones of some did duty as telegraph
poles, and the wires between were thick with snow. Too heavy a coating and
they'd come down. Was the blackness I could make out beyond them the sea or the
sky? We stopped against the station name: 'Saltburn'. It hung on chains,
restless in the sea wind, and I imagined the sea as vertical beyond the houses,
like a great wall.