Andrew Martin - The Somme Stations

‘Waddington’, Butler continued, ‘said Shaw would have to wait a little while for his money. Shaw said he wouldn’t wait. Waddington came at him, so Andy and Roy stepped in, just as I stepped in for you when Dawson came at you on Spurn.’

I’d forgotten about that as well.

‘Anyhow,’ I said. ‘It ended in a killing. And you were involved because you knew of it.’

That, I was sure, was why he and his brothers had enlisted: put distance between themselves and Shaw. But the mystery was… why all the panic among the three Butlers over Naburn Lock? They could just have denied everything.

I asked Butler, ‘Will you say all you’ve just told me in court?’

‘Say all what, Jim? I’ve said nothing.’

Silence for a space. Ilkley, I decided, was just the right size of town. It had trams, but I did not believe they were necessary.

‘You didn’t shoot Scholes on July 1st, did you?’

He held the revolver in his right hand now, weighing it.

‘Don’t be silly, Jim.’

The bloke was emerging with a sight more credit than I’d have thought possible.

‘Dawson told you he’d done it,’ I said, ‘… took the blame. Why didn’t you tell Thackeray?’

‘Thought of it, Jim, but I didn’t think I’d be believed. It’d only throw more suspicion my way.’

Silence for a space.

‘I never knew which way Thackeray would jump. He was – is – bloody loony. He might be thinking of bringing the charge against you , for all you know.’

I eyed Butler. He wasn’t putting on side. He didn’t know.

‘Thackeray’s been here,’ I said. ‘I’ve been charged with the murders… Harvey and Tinsley.’

‘ What? ’

Butler saw me as a man trying to charge a killer, not as a man being charged with killing.

‘I’m on a sort of special bail,’ I said. They’ll cart me off to Armley nick in a few days.’

‘How many days?’

I shrugged.

‘I knew they’d found you near a German rifle,’ said Butler, ‘but… Why would you kill Tinsley? How do they make it out?’

I gave him the theory. ‘I suppose I’ll tell the court martial what really happened on Spurn, but I’ve no evidence, and Tinsley’s not around to back me up, thanks to you and your fucking green light…’

‘Don’t talk rot, Jim.’

‘And I don’t suppose you’re going to pitch in and help.’

‘How?’

‘By saying your brother overheard Tinsley’s confession, of course, and told you of it directly.’

‘Jim,’ he lied, ‘I know nothing of what was said on that bloody train. Anyhow,’ he continued (which choice of word proved he was lying), ‘you’ve put me right in it by going after Shaw. I don’t owe you any favours. Quite the opposite, in fact.’

He stood up, turned and faced me, revolver in hand.

‘I can see the difficulty you were in right from the start,’ I said. ‘You were involved in one bit of business – at Naburn – where a bloke’s knocked about the head and put into water. You knew that investigation might be re-started at any minute. Then another comes up along the same lines… Somebody might see that the twins made a connection between them.’

Butler was eyeing me, and it was a direct look, not sidelong, as when Tinsley and I had rolled past him onto the dangerous stretch of line. He continued to hold the revolver in his right hand. The hand was gloved. His left hand, also gloved, he brought up to the revolver. He set back the hammer. As he did so, the finger of his glove became caught, nipped in the mechanism. With a look of irritation on his face that I was not meant to see, he pulled, and quite suddenly the left hand and glove came away from the gun, which he had continued to point at me all along. We were now back to square one. Well, not quite, because the hammer was now cocked. It was a single action gun, and we both awaited the single action – the pulling of the trigger, with Ilkley puffing away peacefully below us. I did not feel the cold in that moment, and nor I believe did Butler. Presently, he stepped forward and set the gun on the bench beside me.

As he walked away, I called after him, ‘You’ve told the man Shaw where I’m to be found, I suppose?’

No reply.

I called louder, ‘He’s been here already, creeping about in the garden!’ Again no reply. I reached for the gun, and carefully uncocked the hammer.

The gun – a service revolver – proved to be fully loaded. On returning to ‘Ardenlea’, I put it into the trunk in my room. The fact that Butler had left it for me meant he’d told Tom Shaw it was on my say-so that he was being questioned over the murder of Matthew Waddington; that I had found him out. It also meant that Butler had then regretted having told Shaw this and was charitably equipping me for what was to come… or that he wanted me to do the job of dealing with Shaw… or that, having meant to do for me himself, and having funked it, he couldn’t stand the sight of the thing, or… I gave it up.

The end result anyhow was that he was leaving things in the balance, as he had at Flers. He would assist a man’s fate, but he wouldn’t become it.

The next day, I received a parcel, forwarded from Old Man Wright, the clerk in the police office at York station. Inside it was a letter from Mrs Tinsley, of Albemarle Road, York, and five years’ worth of Railway Magazines . The numbers for 1911 to 1914 were bound in red cloth with gold lettering. The ones for 1915 came loose. November 1915 was in the envelope in which Mrs Tinsley had received it from the back numbers department of the Railway Magazine offices in London, and she explained that she’d sent off for it to make good the missing number. There was a good deal in the letter about what a tremendous chap I was, according to the letters Tinsley had sent home.

Tinsley had been only a kid but he’d had a philosophy of life, which said that you ought not to try and avoid trouble, but should put yourself in its way – only then did you deserve whatever good things might occur in your life. It was a philosophy I admired, and it was for this reason that I left the revolver in the bottom of the trunk while continuing with my programme of walking the Moor.

Or it might be that I was suffering ‘a depression’ – a condition much talked of among the soldiers of ‘Ardenlea’.

‘Ardenlea’,

Ilkley,

Yorkshire.

November 4th, 1916

Dearest Lillian,

I’m sorry not to have been back for the children last night. There has been another drama here, in the place where ‘life passes in a pleasant dream’ (you will remember).

I arrived at mid-afternoon yesterday, to be told by the Matron that Jim was out on the Moor – and this in the falling snow. I went straight out there myself. It was becoming rapidly dark, but I saw Jim progressing slowly on his crutches. He was halfway up towards the bathing place that sits on the lower Moor here. I then… I then saw what appeared to be a scene from a play or a film – a scene from one of the ‘Westerns’ that Jim takes me to at the Electric Palace, and the world of this drama was black and white, with small black figures against the snow, just as the world of the films or bioscopes is black and white.

I watched a small man I did not know (he was just a shadow to me, but I could see he was small, and very fit) making quickly towards a small man that I did know, namely Jim. The first man had his arm held out, as though pointing at Jim and accusing him… only it was a gun that he held, and I thought: this man means to shoot my husband, and I found myself thinking that this was extremely bad manners, and that I would on no account stand for it. I made a move in the direction of the man, and then I saw the flame as he fired the gun. With the stage melodramas, and in the Westerns, you hear the bang but you do not see this great leap of orange flame, and it shocked me so that I called out some wild words I cannot now recollect.