Andrew Martin - The Somme Stations

I eyed him for a while, then shifted my gaze to Oliver Butler sitting beyond. He seemed half asleep. Tinsley and I sat on the right hand of the carriage; there was nobody on the seats immediately to our left.

‘I thought you knew,’ he said, ‘… when you asked me about the magazine.’

I gave a single shake of the head.

‘I got up at about one in the morning – ’

‘To be sick?’

Tinsley frowned, as though offended by the notion.

‘I got up to go to the jakes,’ he said, looking again at the slow unwinding of shadows beyond the window. ‘I’d shipped a lot of beer of course, but it was… more than a piss that I needed. I went over to my kit bag to get some paper, Jim. All the bags were up on the little stage, you recall, up with the rifles… and when I opened the bag up, I was looking for my Railway Magazine .’

‘Hold on,’ I said, ‘you were never going to use that for – ’

‘Not on your life, Jim. I was hunting for some newspaper that I kept specially, but I knew the magazine – it was the November 1915 number – had been on the top of the bag, because that’s where I’d put it – on the top so’s not to get crushed. Only it wasn’t there. So I was half looking for the newspaper, and half fretting about the magazine, thinking perhaps I’d put it by my bed after all, or left it at the farm…’

I nodded. ‘Go on.’

‘Just then, Harvey walked in, and he’d been about for a while, because he had a glass of ale in his hand that he’d taken from one of the barrels. He wasn’t the same with anyone his own age as he was with the older blokes, you know. He’d put on swank about his dad who’d got a medal in Africa. He hated the railways, Jim. They’d made a slave of his old man. His dad was nothing, you see, just a casual somewhere in the Company…’

(At this I wondered whether he too had mixed up the two ‘fathers’ of Harvey, not that it made any difference.)

‘Harvey was only on the railways for the uniform – for the blooming gold braid, shouldn’t be surprised. He’d always meant to enlist as soon as he was of age, and then the formation of the battalion was announced, and he came in. Only of course, he wasn’t up to it, and that made him angry. At least, he was angry with me, Jim.’

The kid was white, but he seemed to have mastered himself pretty well.

‘Harvey was giving me a bit of a slanging, saying I didn’t have the looks of a soldier, calling me a railway nut, but I paid him no mind. He’d turned up the lamp on the table, and he was looking at the notice Oamer had left there, so he could see we had our marching orders, that we were going out, and I think it knocked him, Jim, because he knew he wasn’t up to it. Anyhow, he took another pint, and downed it fast.’

‘In a different glass?’

Tinsley shrugged. ‘Think so.’

The two glasses on the table.

Tinsley blew smoke as though he wanted to get the stuff away from himself as fast as possible.

‘I admit, Jim, I might have said something along those lines…’

‘Along what lines?’

‘Something like, “Well, now we’ll see who’s up to snuff, and who gets the horrors at the sight of a bayonet”.’

‘It was exactly that, wasn’t it?’ I said.

‘It was, Jim. Those words exactly, and of course I’d take them back if I could, but there’s no help for it, is there?’

I kept silence, because there wasn’t. However, I still could not credit the idea of Alfred Tinsley as a killer.

‘He said, “Well, you can forget about your railway hobby now.” Then he walked out, collecting up his rifle.’

‘Out into the storm?’

‘Just so. I called after him, “What do you mean by that, you pill?” But he was having none of it. Just marched out, slanging me. Well, I went after him. I mean, who wouldn’t, Jim? And since he’d taken his rifle, I took mine, just to put the frighteners on him. I didn’t know what it would come to – bit of shouting, I suppose. Well, I came out into the rain and I could hardly see a thing, but I finally made him out walking on the sea wall, the abutment – ’

‘Revetment,’ I cut in.

‘I walked towards him, and he had his rifle pointing at me. I said, “We’ll have this out, but drop the bloody gun, will you?” He said, “I’ve a mind to shoot you down.” I said “You wouldn’t bloody dare”, and he said, “I’ve burnt your fucking magazine. It’s in the fucking stove.” So he’d taken it from my kit bag, and he’d put it in the stove – the November number. I could have shot him just then, but I didn’t. I was holding my rifle by the muzzle. I swung it, Jim, and crowned him with the butt. I hit him in the region of his left eye, and he would have had a shiner in the morning, but it was nothing worse than that, only…’

‘Go on.’

‘He fell onto the bloody…’

‘The mooring post… the bollard.’

‘… The upright for tying the ships, that’s it. Cracked the other side of his head against that, then just… rolled into the water. Just went in… haversack, rifle ’n’ all.’

Tinsley sniffed and crushed out the stub of the cigarette with his boot, saying, ‘Thanks, Jim, for that. I’m obliged to you… Once he’d gone, he’d really gone, I mean completely. I stood on that sea wall; I looked down, and there was no trace of him, and the sea was still going wild – hungry for more, sort of thing. Well, I can’t swim. I admit it, Jim, I turned away.’

He sat back, then immediately came forwards again.

‘I didn’t murder him did I?’

I shook my head. It was manslaughter, more like, and Tinsley would be able to claim self-defence. He certainly hadn’t shot at Oamer, either, because why would he do that, and then spill the beans to me?

‘I’m not liable?’ said Tinsley.

I gave no reaction. My thoughts were racing in a circus.

‘There were no witnesses,’ said Tinsley.

That was true enough.

‘Why tell me?’ I said, but I knew really. After our adventures in the Baldwin, and our times in Albert and Amiens, I’d graduated to being a person he could confide in.

‘I didn’t tell you at first,’ he said. ‘Well, you’re a copper.’ He sat back, adding, ‘I told Dawson.’

My thoughts whirled faster. In that case, Oliver Butler had not been lying about Dawson’s confession. Dawson had done it to get Tinsley off the hook. It had been amazingly white of him – might have earned him a place in heaven. If so, I hoped they had a good supply of John Smith’s laid on.

The train was beginning to slow.

‘Anyone else but Thackeray,’ Tinsley was saying, ‘and I’d have let on about it all, but he gives me the willies. I know I should have spoken up when I saw what he was putting Scholes through, but… I am in queer aren’t I, Jim?’

I said, ‘Do you want me to speak to Quinn, get it all straightened out?’

‘I do,’ he said, ‘but just not yet. I mean to set it all to rights, but I want to do it myself… Did I say that his cap had come off? He’d fallen in with his rifle and his haversack, and they were washed away. But his cap was still there, sitting on the sea wall near where he went in. By some miracle the wind hadn’t taken it, and no wave had reached it. I picked it up.’

‘Did Scholes see you? He said he saw something.’

‘He may have done. There might have been somebody moving about near the jakes when I was at the sea wall.’

‘What about the bike?’

‘Tripped over it, Jim. I was coming back from the sea wall, in an awful state, as you can imagine, and I went clattering into the blamed thing, which he’d left lying about between the wall and the hut. I cut my head in the fall, Jim, and it bled a little under the hair. I took my own cap off to check the damage; I set it down, and the wind had it away. Well, of course, I had another cap – I still had Harvey’s. I put it on; it fitted perfectly, and just for that reason, I decided to pass it off as my own. I wasn’t thinking straight, as you can see.