Andrew Martin - Death on a Branch line

So that was one less to worry about.

The engine gave a whistle, and I watched the train move away, the reflected sun burning in the blank carriage windows. When it had gone, the lad porter turned and faced me — giving me a stare that had in it a sort of steady defiance. Maybe he’d been given a rating by the station master after my complaint, but I doubted that.

I doubled back over the barrow boards just in time to see the lately alighted fellow in the bowler skirt the triangular green. From the station yard, I watched him take the dusty uphill road. He must be heading for The Angel. After all, it was that or a ten-mile tramp to the next village.

The man appeared to be having bother with the catch on his Gladstone bag, and kept pausing to secure it. A female form was advancing on him from the part of the road that was bounded by the hedges. It was the wife in her high-waisted holiday dress. As the two crossed, the clasp on the man’s bag gave way, and the goods inside spilled out onto the road. Four heavy-looking items in green cloth bags tumbled down, and a quantity of papers floated up and a little way away in the hot evening air. The wife closed on the man, and I was a little jealous of him for the speed with which she came to his aid. She almost knelt in the road to help collect up the papers. By the time I was level with them, everything was back in the bag.

‘You for The Angel?’ I asked, lifting my sporting cap.

‘I’m for the inn, anyhow,’ said the man.

His accent was London.

‘It’s called The Angel,’ I said.

The man removed his bowler to mop his brow. His hair was divided perfectly into two halves from neck to forehead as though he was just up from a swim.

‘It’s a lovely evening,’ said the wife.

‘Well, it is extremely oppressive,’ said the man, before remembering himself and adding, ‘but yes, it is lovely.’

There was something artificial about his speech, as though he wanted to be better than he was.

I said, ‘You’ve come up from…?’

‘Oh you know,’ he said, ‘London way… Norwood area,’ and then, in a kind of panic, he looked up at the sky, saying, ‘Not a cloud!’

He had us down as people who could be fobbed off with talk of the weather. He nodded to us, turned on his heel, and marched on, but after a second he stopped again, and called to me: ‘I say, you ain’t Franklin, by any chance, are you?’

‘Name’s Stringer,’ I called up to him, ‘Jim Stringer.’

He nodded and turned on his heel. He had not given out his own name. I ought not to have given him mine. Lydia stood next to me, and close enough for me to know that our late argument was at an end.

‘Why did you not say you were a policeman?’ she asked, when the man was out of earshot.

‘I don’t want him to bolt,’ I said.

‘You think he’s here to make mischief for this John Lambert?’

‘Well, he’s not here for a ramble in the woods, is he?’

‘I don’t suppose you’ve found out where this man Lambert is?’

‘He’s at the Hall.’

‘Which way is that?’

‘Don’t know just yet.’

‘Why not ask someone?’

I looked at my silver watch: quarter to nine.

‘I don’t know who to trust. You don’t know who might be in with the bad blokes.’

Lydia was grinning at me. I might almost have thought she’d taken a drink at The Angel, only she never touched a drop.

‘Fairly drowning in mysteries, aren’t we?’ she said.

‘What’s up?’ I said.

‘ Him,’ she said, taking hold of my sleeve, and pointing up the road after the clerk.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘what about him?’

‘The papers he’s just dropped,’ she said. ‘Half were quite blank, and half were written in German.’

‘ German? ’

‘Your face, Jim Stringer,’ she said, grinning.

We were taking a turn through the woods, the wife occasionally giving a glance at my cap, and frowning. I had half an eye out for the Hall, but I was above all trying to develop a plan.

The low sun seemed to track us through the trees, always keeping a wary distance. I revolved in my mind the events of the evening, while the wife talked fast. She was in good spirits in spite of my cap, and she picked wildflowers as she walked. She’d fallen into conversation with Mrs Handley, the landlady at The Angel, and taken a liking to her. ‘She’s a feminist, if she but knew it,’ Lydia said. ‘She’s perfectly well aware that she ought not to do as much work as she does, but she says that her mind runs on so if she doesn’t, and she’d rather have the work than the worry.’

‘Why was she crying in the garden?’

‘I’m sure that was on account of the work,’ said the wife.

‘Not the worry, you don’t suppose?’

She gave me a quick glance, but made no answer.

The wife had also been galvanised by a quick cold bath, and a glass of Mrs Handley’s lemonade. ‘It’s nectar, Jim,’ she said. ‘Do you suppose that man from Norwood is connected to the Moroccan business?’ she went on.

‘Well…’ I said, for the question knocked me.

‘He’s up to devil knows what,’ said the wife. ‘Do you suppose it’s too late for violets?’ she said, as we came out into a clearing.

We looked about, and I said, ‘That fellow’s made you sit up, hasn’t he? Do I take it you believe something’s going on?’

‘No,’ said the wife, ‘I don’t for one minute.’

I put my hands in my trouser pockets, and eyed her coolly.

I said, ‘But it’s true about the German papers?’

She nodded once, briefly.

‘There are fixed agents,’ the wife said cheerfully, ‘and there are travelling agents. The Germans have a brigade of spies in Britain… I’m just thinking of all the lies I’ve read in the newspapers… Honestly, it’s all such rubbish. Why shouldn’t a man have German documents about him? He might be half-German for all we know.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but given what I told you at the inn…’

She was shaking her head, wouldn’t have it. She had chosen her side in Britain’s battles. The folk who talked up the German menace were the ones who talked down the women’s movement, and you couldn’t believe in both.

I saw by the presence of telegraph poles that we were hard by the railway line. Swallows flew fast through the evening air, making a high, singing noise as they swooped over the wires. I might once have taken this for the sound of the wires themselves, for I had been told in my early days on the railways that it was possible to hear the electrical signals as they flew from pole to pole. But this was not true. You could not hear the signals however close you stood.

Just then, two sharp cracks came from the wood; a cloud of birds rose up from it, and moved away to the left like smoke.

‘It’s fucking happened,’ I said.

‘You will not…’ said the wife, but I was straight back into the woods and crashing through the branches as a third shot came.

‘You there!’ I called out. ‘Police! Stop firing!’

I felt panic as I clashed through the trees, but my curiosity was stronger than my fear.

‘Give over, mister!’ came a high voice through the trees — a boy’s voice. ‘It’s only t’ rabbits I’m after.’

It was Mervyn Handley, the kid from the inn, but I had to march on for a good half-minute more until I clapped eyes on him. He stood amid fallen trees in the woodsman’s clearing I’d seen from the train, and he held a double-barrelled shotgun pointed down. His powder flasks and shot pouches were too near the fire that bent the warm air behind him. His ferret — which was tied to the skeleton frame of a steam saw — was too near the terrier that was tied to the thickest branch of a fallen log, the result being that the dog was barking fit to bust, and the ferret was giving a constant thin scream. In the clearing, patches of ferns grew, and there were two dead-straight rows of sunflowers. Some of the timbers had been used to make a low shelter with a tarpaulin slung over the top. At the entrance, I saw a dead rabbit, a woodsman’s bill-hook, a funny paper for boys and a sack.