Murder At Deviation Junction (36 page)

    Shillito
sat at his own desk, which was directly opposite mine, and he began to eye me.
Was he going to ask for my notebook? As he continued to stare, Wright sharpened
a pencil without looking at it. His eyes were on me. A great train was leaving
from Platform Four, and the noise made my heartbeat begin to gallop.

    Just
then, the Chief came out of his own room and quit the office without a look
back. It was all no good; I was for it.

    Now
Shillito was speaking.

    'As a
body of men we must stand together, would you not agree, Detective Stringer?'

    'I
would, sir.' (I found I didn't object to calling him 'sir' as long as I fixed
my eyes on that mark that I'd made.)

    'We're
up against it on all fronts,' he said.

    I
nodded. The train had gone, leaving only the steady, slow scrape of Wright's
pencil-sharpening blade.

    'We
do not have the privileges of the ordinary public detectives,' Shillito ran on,
'and the travellers are frequently against us.'

    I
nodded again.

    'They
chaff us, will not give up their tickets when asked.'

    I was
tired of nodding.

    'And
do you know what the other classes of railwaymen call us?'

    'The
pantomime police.' 'Just so.'

    (He
hadn't reckoned on me knowing that.)

    'We
must stand together, then.'

    'I
have already agreed to that.'

    I was
pushing it with Shillito, but I seemed to have decided that it was all up for
me in any case.

    
'Very
well then, try this:
we must not deal each other blows'

    Whatever
reply I made to that, he wasn't listening, but was standing up, removing some
papers from the notecase.

    'You
want to get your promotion - there it is.'

    He
dashed the papers down on my desk.

    'Now
I'm overdue at home,' he said, and he strode out of the office without another
word.

    There
were half a dozen pages, torn from a magazine, a railway journal - not
The
Railway Rover
or the
Railway Magazine
or anything I'd heard of, but
some little journal out of the common. I caught them up, and looked across at
Wright, who was still scraping away at the pencil.

    'What
the hell's going off?' I said.

    'You
did yourself a good turn when you clouted him,' said Wright.

    He
put down the pencil, sat back and folded his arms.

    'It's
Christmas,' he said. 'Do you want an orange?'

    There
was no sign of any orange, so this might have been a sort of bluff. I thanked
him and said that if he was after doing me a good turn, he might record in the
log book that I'd gone out on the search for Davitt, the fare evader. I then
quit the office and walked under a sky that threatened more snow, to the Punch
Bowl in Stonegate, which was known for its twopenny pints of ale. It was a
secret-looking pub with many small, half-underground rooms that got smaller the
further back you went from the street, so that it was like drinking in a coal
mine. In the very furthest snug from the street, I began to read the bundle of
papers that Shillito had given me. It was a very strange return for having hit
him; in fact, the papers were strange all ends up.

    On
Christmas Eve morning, Harry was up at half past five, setting a marker, I
supposed, for the next day. I came downstairs at six in Peter Backhouse's
funeral suit; the wife passed me a cup of cocoa and said, 'It fits to a tee.'

    The
suit was in fact blue. I had mentioned this to Backhouse over a pint in the
Fortune of War, and he'd said, 'Don't say that. It's meant to be mourning
black. I'll lose confidence at the funerals if I think it's blue.' But I wasn't
over-concerned, since Peter Backhouse didn't have any confidence to begin with.

    After
breakfast, I opened the front door, and was fairly blinded by the whiteness.
The sight of all the new-fallen snow made Harry break out into a kind of
hopscotch in the warmth of the kitchen. On the doorstep, the wife passed me my
topcoat, which she'd given a good brushing. She then gave me a special kiss of
the sort normally reserved for late evening and handed me my bicycle clips.

    'Buy
a paper at the station bookstall, our Jim,' she said. 'One of the cleverer
sort, you know. Then go into the interview with it under your arm.'

    'To
create the illusion of intelligence, you mean.'

    'No,
Jim, you
are
intelligent.'

    I put
on the bike clips.

    'Please
try to remember that, Jim,' said the wife.

    I
went down the side alley, where the Humber was covered by a tarpaulin against
the shocking weather. As I walked it along the front path, the wife called,
'And if you get the promotion . . . I'll think on about the boots.' Harry stood
behind her, grinning fit to bust, just as though he knew exactly what she
meant.

    The
six wide fields were all piled with a smooth whiteness like well-made beds. I
made the bicycle stand at York station after twenty minutes; I then stood there
for a further three, blowing on my hands to make them work again. As I blew, I
thought of Captain W. R. Fairclough, formerly of the 5th Lancers. Under this
gentleman, whose acquaintance I would be making very shortly, the North Eastern
Railway Police had grown from sixty-seven men of all ranks to three hundred and
forty-two. He was all plans, and I'd been made privy to what was surely the
strangest of them by Shillito; or at least, that seemed to be the case, but I
could not quite dismiss the thought that it was all a great jape designed to
pay me out for hitting him.

    I had
brought the papers along with me. They were in the side pocket of my topcoat as
I approached the bookstall, where I bought both the
Manchester Guardian
and
The Times.
Brainpower in journalism did not come cheap, I decided as
I handed over the coin, but having learnt that I would be keeping my job, and
that there would be another payday after all, I'd been a little freer with the
loose change I had remaining. I stuffed the papers into my pocket, and walked
over to the police office, where Wright and Constable Baker were the only men
about.

    Wright
turned towards me and gave me my wages: three pounds and seven for the past
week, and a pound Christmas bonus. I was so relieved to be in funds that I
almost tipped him - almost went back to the bookstall for another clever paper
as well. Wright also handed me a telegram along with the wage packet. It came
folded, so I didn't read it just then, but walked over the footbridge to take
the train for Whitby, where I would, as usual, change for Middlesbrough. Wright
had been civil enough, but he'd barely looked at me as he'd given over the
wages and telegram. He'd lost interest in me now that I was no longer in bother
with my superiors.

    As I
crossed the footbridge, the telegraph lad came bounding along.

    'Morning,
squire!' he shouted.

    'What
are you doing here?' I said. 'It's Christmas, en't it?'

    'It
is for some,' he said. 'You had a wire from London, you know. Come in just
now.'

    'I've
got it, thanks,' I said.

    The
message had evidently come first into the main telegraph office rather than the
police office - but that was often the way.

    There
were many distractions on the Whitby train, and they took my mind off the wire
in my pocket. There were more kids about than usual and the adults were a sight
livelier than on any normal day. It was Friday and it was Christmas Eve - as a
combination it was nigh-on unbeatable.

    All
the corridors were blocked by giant trunks and going-away portmanteaus and
brown paper parcels, and it took me a good ten minutes to find a seat. When I
sat down I took the newspapers out of my pocket: 'To-Day's Speeches,' I read on
the front page of
The Times.
I then put my hand in my pocket to get out
the telegram, but it wasn't there. I hunted through all my pockets, under the
wondering eyes of every person in the compartment, but it was nowhere to be
found. I had somehow mislaid it.

    It
could only have been from Steve Bowman, for he was about the only man I knew in
London. I didn't want him waking up the whole case of the Travelling Club now
that I'd seen my way clear to dropping it, but it was not in his interests to
do that. I then remembered that he still didn't
know
I'd dropped it. As
far as he was concerned, he had a gaol term in prospect, and no doubt the
telegram had been expressing anxiety on that score, and looking out for my
answer.

    I
would try to reach him by telephone before the day's end. There was no sense
leaving him stewing all over Christmas.

    I
couldn't quite get on with the clever newspapers, and so passed the rest of the
journey looking at the white landscape beyond the window, and reading again over
the papers given me by Shillito, which seemed no less weird now than they had
at first sight in the Punch Bowl tavern.

    Stepping
off the train, I walked past the Middlesbrough police office, hoping not to run
into the two-faced Detective Sergeant Williams who'd dished me to Shillito; or
attempted to. It seemed that Shillito, having been soundly belted, had come
round to me and removed the bar he'd placed on my way to promotion. There was
no great mystery involved. He was a double-fisted man himself, and I'd spoken
to him in the language he understood.

    The
police office was separate from the police headquarters, which lay on Spring
Street, the very place in which Paul Peters's camera had been lifted. It was
not a
long
street, and so the camera must have been taken practically on
the doorstep of railway police headquarters - a fact it might be better, all
considered, not to mention to the head of the force. (I also made a mental note
not to bring up the matter of the shooting of Small David, for I was sure it
had not been a planned event, and that the force would count it an
embarrassment.)

    The
Spring Street offices had only been taken temporarily for just as long as it
took to do up the ones at Newcastle, and the desk that had been placed in the
hallway of the building at the foot of a staircase had a lonely look of not
belonging. The same went for the bloke sitting at it - he wore a police uniform
with a topcoat over, and pointed up the staircase when I told him I had an
appointment with Captain Fairclough.

    'Third
floor,' he said, and his voice echoed against the cold stone, which made me
more nervous than I was already.

    I
climbed the stairs and a black door with the words 'Capt. Fairclough' painted
on it in scruffy white letters stood before me. I knocked, a voice called out
and there he was.

    He
was a handsome man; looked the part of a leader, with grey- black hair and a
grey-black beard. He sat at a sizeable desk in a room otherwise more or less
empty, and it held the wide-awake smells of coffee and paint. It was freezing
too, for behind the wide desk was a wide window, with the sash propped open.

    But
it was all on account of the view, for Captain Fairclough's window looked clean
across the Company rows to Ironopolis. Standing before the desk, I took it all
in: the great red clouds coming out of the blast-furnace tops, like slowly
blossoming flowers; the trains of all shapes and sizes rolling through the
snow; the wagons being hauled and lowered; and the tiny, lonely-looking men by
the rails, or on the gantries of the blast furnaces or crossing the wastes in
between, where, for the present, the snow had killed the ash.

    'Sit
down, Detective Stringer,' said Captain Fairclough.

    I did
it - and too quickly. I still wore my topcoat, and the clever papers, folded in
my side pocket were sticking into me. They could not be seen by Captain
Fairclough, and so had proved a waste of money.

    'Do
you know Middlesbrough?' he asked by way of preliminary.

    It
was good that he'd asked, for it meant he'd not heard of my troublesome
investigations into the Travelling Club. But then again: what was the correct
answer?

    'I am
not very closely acquainted with it, sir,' I said.