Murder At Deviation Junction (5 page)

    'Quick
judgment,' Crystal was saying. 'That's the leading requirement of a man in my
place ...'

    The
first two had gained the 'up' end of the platform now, and here they started to
run. Behind and above them, four more men came out of the woods, though at a
slower pace than the first four; and these four slow men were carrying a
cricket bag between them (that was my first thought, at any event) which they
kept level as they came down the bank, boots first, in a controlled slide.

    Crystal
was saying, 'And of course, the rule book only gets you so far . . .'

    The
first of the running blokes was level with us now.

    'Mr
Crystal,' he panted, 'you've to send . . . You've to get . . . You've to get a
wire ...'

    The
bloke was out of puff, couldn't get the words out. Crystal, about ready to blow
up at this impertinence, was turning slowly towards him. The cricket bag was no
cricket bag, but a horse blanket, and it was coming up fast behind Crystal like
a dark wave.

    The
four men spread it before the stationmaster's boots, under the rushing snow:
cricket stumps threaded through black broadcloth. That's what the body looked
like. The suit coat was open, and beneath it was a yellowish stuff like
pasteboard - the flesh of the man himself. There was no head, but then I saw
the skull, resting by the waist. One of the blokes picked it up, set it down on
the blanket at the top of the suit coat, and then stepped back to look, as if
he'd just finished a jigsaw. The skull seemed too small: just a topknot, a
tiny, dinted stone - something to be going on with until a more impressive
object was found.

    We
all kept silence.

    Mr
Crystal's arms were tightly folded. I could not recall him standing like that
before, but I knew what he was thinking:
paperwork.
He stared down at
the body as the snow fell.

    Paperwork
by the armful.

    Presently,
one of the blokes said, 'Seen better days, that lad has.'

    Crystal
turned towards the nearest bloke:

    'Why
d'you bring it to me?'

    'You're
the governor, en't you?' said another of the blokes.

    'Was it
discovered inside station bounds?'

    One
of the four who'd carried the blanket jerked his thumb in the direction of
'up':

    'Wayside
cabin over yonder. Stowed under a load of stuff, he was.'

    'What
stuff?'

    'Fire
irons, coal, sacking - general railway articles.'

    Crystal
flashed into rage.

    'That
cabin's disused. It's for the old line that was taken up. What were you doing
in there?'

    'Tommy
Granger -' said the spokesman, pointing to one of his fellows. 'He was hunting
up a shovel.'

    'Why
did he not have his own shovel?'

    'That
doesn't matter,' I put in.

    'Every
man was specifically instructed to fetch his own shovel,' Crystal was saying,
as I held up my warrant card in the view of everyone.

    'Very
likely a felony's been committed,' I said. 'I'll take charge.'

    'A
felony?' said Crystal. Then: 'You'll bloody not take charge' - and he'd cursed.
He coloured up immediately, but carried on speaking. 'As stationmaster it falls
to me to investigate all the circumstances, and make up a report for the line
superintendent.'

    I
thought: I'm going to have to arrest the bugger. He'll lose his position.

    'This
falls under the head of "accident occurring on railway premises",'
Crystal was saying, as I spied another man advancing through the snow at the
platform end. He carried some object I couldn't make out.

    I
watched him for a while and then bent over the body, pulling the flap of the
man's topcoat and making a search of his pockets. They were all quite empty.
The last of the snow gangers was level with us now and, looking up, I saw that
he held two objects. The first was a length of rope.

    'Cut
it down from the roof beam just above him,' he said. 'Bloke hanged himself,' he
ran on, and he was looking at all of us as he spoke, making a kind of appeal.

    The
second object he held was a camera case of similar design to the one slung
about the neck of Stephen Bowman. No - although weathered, it was the very
spit.

    'Found
this half-frozen into the stream,' he said. 'Just on the edge, like. It was
only a little way below the cabin -'

    The
man was shaking with cold. Everybody was eyeing him, and he didn't like it.

    'I
was making to step on it . . . use it as a stepping stone for crossing the
brook . . . Then I thought it might be his -'

    He
pointed at the bones.

    'What
is this?' said Crystal, looking from the dead man's camera case to the one hung
about Stephen Bowman's neck. 'A flaming camera club?'

    Taking
the case from the man, I turned about to look at Bowman, and the silver flask
was in his gloved hand. I opened the carrying case and took out the camera,
which was a black cube in fair condition, given where it had been. There were
round switches more or less at the corners, so that it looked as though it was
meant to move on wheels - a miniature wagon. Attached to the back of the thing
were rusted clips that ought to have held another part of it. I moved a catch
and a rubber pyramid rose up. You looked through that to take a picture.

    I had
my eyes on Bowman as I held the camera.

    His
words came slowly through the snow.

    'The
changing box is missing - the box that holds the slides.'

    'That
holds the . . . exposures?' I said.

    The
colour was all gone from Bowman's face.

    Crystal
stood stock still, his moustache collecting snowflakes at a great rate. Most of
the snow gang had had enough, and were moving away towards the station house. It
was that or become like the man in the blanket. This was not bad weather but
something more - this stuff falling from the sky was out to bury us. I looked
back at Bowman, and he was all wrong, could not hold my eye. I made a lurch
towards the station buildings. I then heard a sound which was not snow falling,
but a coloured spray flying from the mouth of Bowman. His hand wiped at his
mouth as though he'd just eaten rather than done the opposite, and looking down
at the pinkish stuff now lying on the whitened platform, I realised how
beautiful the snow had been until that moment.

    Nine
hours after the discovery, I looked out of the window of the station building,
and the night air was suddenly clear, like a stopped clock. The train was long gone.
The engine had detached from it, and taken a run at the drift that lay around
the bend. It had just gone bang at the snow and had cut through it directly.
The train had then carried on towards Whitby, taking the wife and Harry with
it. They were in for a weary drag, but Lydia had made Harry a pillow with her
wrap, and they would be in time to connect with the last York train. Duty
required me to stay at Stone Farm, and Lydia had quite understood:

    'No
sense in shirking with your interview coming up.'

    She
was pushing the pace all right.

    I'd
then waded through the snow on the bank with two of the blokes from the snow
gang, and they'd showed me the cabin where the main discovery had been made. It
had been used as a shelter by the platelayers when the direction of the line
had been slightly altered years before. The line now went the seaward side of
the bank rather than the landward side. A short stretch of the old line
remained as part of stationmaster Crystal's empire: Deviation Junction.

    The
cabin was soundly built, and there were three roof beams at a good height for
hanging. Toppled over on the floor of the shelter was an old wooden chair. Had
the man stepped on to it while fixing the rope, and then kicked it away? There
was a mix-up of rusted tools, railway line catches and clips and baulks of
timber on the floor. The body had lain amid this stuff, having fallen away from
the noose when the rot set in. It was a queer kind of comfort to know that a
man could not remain hanged for ever.

    On my
return to the station, a loco had run up light engine from Saltburn to take
away the snow gang. Every man had stood on the footplate, most with beer
bottles in hand.

    It
was now three-thirty a.m. I closed the doors that gave on to the platform, and
poked the fire in the little room that made shift as the Stone Farm booking
hall. Through the ticket window, I could see Crystal counting coppers in the
ticket office, attending to the business he'd been kept from by the arrival of
our train. The body was in there with him, stretched on a table top, and
muffled in the blanket. Those bones were Crystal's property, and he growled
like a dog if anyone came near. This didn't bother me overmuch: I'd sent two
telegrams from the signal box - one to the Middlesbrough office of the railway
police, one to the local force, whose nearest office was at Loftus, five miles
down the line. And I'd kept my hands on the length of rope and the camera.
Nothing would happen until morning, and I had no desire to be at close quarters
with Paul Peters in the meantime.

    That
was the fellow's name. I'd had it from Steve Bowman, who'd also decided to stay
at Stone Farm. After seeing the body, and chucking up on the platform, he'd
seemed in a great state of nervous tension, wandering about in a daze. He'd
said it was the shock of realising that he'd known the dead man; and it was
certainly a strange turn-up - far too strange to be explained by coincidence,
in my view.

    Bowman
had got sensible at about midnight, though - which was about when he'd been
able to lay his hands on some strong waters. He'd then found his tongue, and
told his story to Crystal and myself.

    Peters
was a photographer. He'd been sent north with Bowman this time last year to
tour interesting spots on the North Eastern Railway and get articles from it.
They'd put up at the Zetland Hotel in Saltburn for a week in order to look at
the easterly parts of the Company's territory. It had been snowing heavily then
as now. Peters had kept going off on his own, taking the train at all hours
over the Middlesbrough—Whitby stretch. Night photography, weird railway scenes
in the half-light or strange weather—it was the coming thing, and he was a
demon at it. Peters was a young lad, barely seventeen, and Bowman had known he
ought to accompany him. It had troubled his conscience at the time, and was
doing so with compound interest just now.

    'There'll
be an investigation of some sort, I take it?' Bowman said, from the
booking-hall bench. He would keep asking that.

    'It'll
go to the coroner,' I said, for the umpteenth time. 'But what I want to know
is: why wasn't more of a fuss made when he went missing?'

    Bowman
kept silence, taking another go on a beer bottle. He'd been doing excellent
justice to a crate of John Smith's - a consignment without a label - that
Crystal had given over in exchange for the pair of us staying out of his way. I
could see Crystal now through the ticket window. Having got the gist of
Bowman's story - which seemed to have fairly bored him - he'd retreated to his
desk and begun counting coppers.

    'It
wouldn't do for the magazine to give the impression it didn't know where its
own men were,' Bowman said at length. 'Not that he was on the staff. He had an
arrangement with the editor; that's all.'

    Silence
for a space.

    'Peters
was a free agent,' Bowman continued. 'Not married - parents dead, if I remember
rightly.'

    His
camera was in its box at his feet. He stared at a poster of Whitby and sighed.
Everything he said seemed to come with a sigh.

    'Was
he the sort likely to make away with himself?'

    Bowman
nudged his spectacles again.

    'Well,
he wasn't very amiable,' he said. 'Not much conversation. Taking photographs
was everything to him.'

    'But
was he the sort to kill himself? The nervous sort, I mean?'

    Bowman
looked down at the floor, looked back up again.

    'He
didn't like it if you said, "Take a pot - go on, take a pot of that
engine." That would annoy him.'