Murder At Deviation Junction (7 page)

    'Aye,'
he said. (He seemed very happy to admit the fact.) 'I worked out that he
wouldn't get there in time to see the Club Train. It would have left
Middlesbrough before he arrived.'

    'Can
you recall the date?'

    He shrugged.
'Run-up to Christmas time.'

    'Why
was he so dead set on seeing the Club Train?'

    'It's
a swanky thing, en't it? Luxury carriage set aside for the toffs. All modern
conveniences carried. Newspapers, hot drinks, ice refrigerator - that's for the
champagne, you know.'

    The
train was beside us now, adding its steam to the whiteness of the air, but the
lad didn't stir himself.

    'Why
don't you drink that milk?' I said.

    'I
like to watch it,' he said, still gazing down at the bowl of the ladle. 'I like
to see the cream rising to the top.'

    He
pitched the milk on top of the platform, and made ready to load the train.

    'That's
what's going to happen to me,' he said, as the train guard jumped down from the
brake van, ready to give a hand. 'I'll rise to the top.'

    'I
started under Crystal myself,' I said. 'I was his lad porter for a while at
Grosmont.'

    The
milk train was in now. Thirty tons of engine stood alongside the kid - a B16
class 4-6-0, very nice motor, and he paid it no mind. Instead, he was thinking
over my remark.

    'And
what are you now?' he asked, giving me a level look.

    'Detective,'
I said. 'Detective . . . sergeant,' and of course it was a lie. 'You'll be
hearing from me again,' I said, re-pocketing my notebook.

    I had
in that moment determined to investigate the matter of Paul Peters, and not
leave it to others. I was bored in my work and in need of distraction. I found
myself thinking: if this is suicide, there will be nothing to plunge into, and
I will be straight back to hunting up ticket frauds and petty hooligans. But as
my thoughts ran on, I found that I was trying to picture whoever had done for
the boy and made it
look
like suicide.

    Why
would a man come all the way to Stone Farm to make away with himself? Peters
was a young fellow doing work that he enjoyed and with everything before him.
He had not committed suicide. He had been killed - I was on the instant certain
of it - and Stephen Bowman was mixed up in it somehow, or knew more than he let
on. He was standing by the milk train now, having stepped across from the
station building, camera once again over his shoulder. Why had he come to this
station on this day? But no - he hadn't made the choice to come. We had all
been turfed off the train against expectations. And as for the reason for his
being on the
line . .
. well, he
was
staying at Whitby. But there
was more to it than that.

    Crystal,
ready to depart for his bed, stood in the booking office doorway. I would show
him what I was made of - him and Shillito both. I would search for the truth
about Peters, and if I made enough headway before Christmas Eve, I might be DS
by New Year.

    I
climbed into the one passenger carriage with Bowman. We were railway rovers,
him and me both. Any man who wanted to make his way in the modern world had to
be. We stowed our cameras on the luggage racks. Bowman, not looking at me,
said, 'Your wife said you were detective grade. But you gave out to the boy
that you were detective sergeant.'

    I
coloured up while removing my topcoat. He didn't miss much, for all the booze
he put away. He must have a head like cast iron.

    'I
have the grade "detective sergeant" on the brain,' I said, 'what with
forever thinking about this interview I have coming up.'

    Bowman
gave a short nod.

    'Christmas
Eve's the big day,' I said, 'at the headquarters in Middlesbrough.'

    Bowman,
taking his seat, said, 'I can hardly think for tiredness just now, but when I
get back to London I'll fish out last year's diary. It's in the office
somewhere, and I have a note in there of Peters's wanderings. Come down, and
I'll stand you dinner. Make a day of it.'

    'Up,'
I said.

    'What's
that?'

    'It's
"up" to London as far as the railways are concerned.'

    I
wondered at his not knowing, being a railway journalist.

    He
nodded wearily, saying, 'But what if you're going across country: Stafford to
Birmingham, for instance? What's that? It's neither up nor down.'

    'The
kid says that Peters carried two cameras. That right?'

    Bowman
nodded and yawned at the same time.

    'He
would generally take two on a job, yes.'

    'Why?'

    'In
case one broke - even though the model he used, the Mentor Reflex, is about the
sturdiest portable available. He was over-keen, you see.'

    Bowman
made do with one Mentor Reflex. The job did not justify the precaution of
taking two - was not important enough. He had arranged his topcoat over his
legs, making a blanket of it. As we pulled away from Stone Farm, he looked
through the window at the snow-covered fields. It was all like so much spilt
milk.

    'Beautiful
railway ride!' he said, in his sarcastic way.

    A
moment later, he was asleep, and the stop at the small town of Loftus - where
more milk was taken up - didn't interrupt his slumbers. As we rolled on
parallel with the high street, the sea came into view once more, and I looked
down to the left, towards the ironstone mine that stood on the low cliff there.
This was Flat Scar mine, one of the biggest, and it squatted at the seaward end
of a great valley that had been cut by a tiny beck.

    The
wheelhouse of the mine was at the centre of a web of wires. Iron buckets were
being sent out along these, running to and from the mine's own railway station.
The mine was its own little black town, with its own gasworks and its own black
beach behind the main building, on which rusty lumps of machinery and slag were
dumped as required. A wooden jetty stuck out to sea, but this was disused now.
No stone went north by boat.

    From
the mine station, ironstone was taken up a zigzag railway towards the furnaces
at Rectory Works. I looked up to the right, and saw the Rectory (as the works
was generally known) with its line of fiery towers - only they were not blast
furnaces but kilns, and they did not make iron but burned the lumps of
ironstone down so that there was more iron and less stone. It was then cheaper
to carry to the blast furnaces of Ironopolis.

    The
iron cloud over the kilns was slowly changing from one shape to another^ moving
like a person in agony.

    As we
rumbled on towards the Kilton Viaduct, which would carry us across the valley,
I looked down at the mine, and up at the kilns. Here was a pretty situation: a
train was setting off from the mine station. It was making ready to climb the
zigzag. I stood up in the compartment to watch the exchange. The zigzag line,
running east to west, would take the iron train between the hundred-
and-fifty-foot-high brick legs of the Kilton Viaduct while we crossed over the
top, heading from north to south.

    A
wind gauge fluttered beyond the compartment window - a strange-looking
contraption. It was like a small windmill, and it operated a 'stop' signal in
high winds. It was not safe for a train to be on the viaduct in those conditions,
but we were rolling across it now, going at the precautionary slow speed over
the great ravine. The walls on either side of the single track were low, and I
looked over the one on the left to see the iron train still climbing. At any
moment, it would be passing underneath. The falling snow, the rising iron
cloud, the crisscrossing of the trains, the rise and fall of the tide and the
slow approach of Christmas - all were part of the larger machine. The
transition I'd taken a fancy to happened out of sight, with black smoke rising
from below. The little ironstone engine had been on the left; now, having
passed underneath the viaduct, it was rising to the right, taking its dozen
wagons to the waiting kilns of the Rectory Works, where more fun lay in store -
for the wagons would be picked up bodily by a mighty winch, and carried to the
top of the kilns, there to be upended. I had seen that business carried on, and
it was like watching a hungry giant feed itself. An account of it might have
been interesting for readers of Bowman's magazine, and what could match it for
photographic opportunities?

    But
he slept on.

    He
had no enthusiasm for his work. He was like me: fixed in a rut. I gazed at his
fiery little face, which was suddenly blotted out as we shot into the Grinkle
Tunnel. Three quarters of a mile of blackness . . . and we came out into the
beginnings of day. Bowman had rolled forwards somewhat. He was the same
sleeping man as before, only now shaking with the train.

    He
was not shamming.

    He
had wanted to know my line of questioning - that was why he'd stayed on at
Stone Farm. But I must lose him in Whitby, for I intended to make straight for
the siding where, the lad porter had told me, the Club Train had been kept; and
was kept still. It no longer ran, and nor did Peters, who had been closely
interested in it, and I thought those facts might very well be connected.

    We
were now gliding across the viaduct over Staithes. That village was packed
tight in the mighty ravine below. During the short stop at the station, I
watched fishermen walking between boats on the snowy beach, wondering whether
to put out. 'All weather is a warning.' Where had I heard that? A man led a
pony with a sack slung on either side across a white field. Kettleness station
came next; then the viaduct of Sandsend, which was like the legs of a giant
iron man walking, and the houses below looked as though they'd been pitched off
the cliff by that same giant.

    I was
not tired, despite having been up all night, and I knew the reason: in the
months and even years beforehand, I'd done too little. I had been biding my
time in the York Railway Police office, avoiding the chilly stares of Shillito,
listening enviously to the sounds of the engines and enginemen coming and going
in the station beyond. An office in a station was a ridiculous thing: a ship
forever docked.

    We
were now rolling across the snow-covered cliff-tops - and our train was the
only moving thing on those tops as we made for the terminus, Whitby West Cliff.
As we came in, I woke Bowman with a touch on the shoulder.

    'Copy's
come up short,' he said, quite distinctly, at the moment of waking, and then he
looked at me for a moment as though he didn't know me. But he quickly
apologised, and collected up his things.

    Whitby
West Cliff station was a little way out of the town, which was silenced by
snow. Bowman walked beside me through the drifting whiteness, the camera slung
over his shoulder. We stopped outside a bakery that was responsible for all the
activity in one particular narrow street just above the harbour.

    'Which
is your hotel, old man?' I said.

    'Oh,'
he said. 'The Metropole.'

    'I
know it,' I said, and I pointed seawards. 'The alley past the chapel will see
you directly to the door.'

    'Right-o,'
he said, but he made no move.

    A low
tugboat was rocking across the water from the west to the east harbour wall -
nothing more to look at than a floating chimney. A church clock counted sadly
to five.

    'To
think that it's twelve hours until I can take a drink,' said

    Bowman.
'That's if I stick to my fixed rule .. . which I never do.'

    'Well,
I'm for the town station, and home,' I said.

    He
nodded and we shook hands.

    'You'll
keep me posted as to your investigation?'

    I nodded.
'I'll be in touch,' I said.

    But
he still didn't move off, and it struck me that he'd been clinging to me like a
barnacle right from the start. He now muttered something while looking down at
the snowy pavement.

    'What's
that?' I said.

    'Peters,'
he said, looking up. 'It comes to me now . . . He'd had one of his two cameras
stolen.'

    'Where?'

    'Middlesbrough
- in the vicinity of the station, I think.'

    'Did
he report it?'