Andrew Martin - Death on a Branch line

‘Then you’re not here to do him in?’

By way of answer to this stab, the blue-eyed man merely changed the angle of his head.

‘I’m going to have to ask for your name,’ I said.

‘That’s confidential,’ he said, and he looked at me levelly. ‘Do you mean to arrest me?’

I had never yet arrested a man of a markedly superior class. Anyhow, I had no reasonable cause to suspect him of any crime.

‘Arrest?’ I said. ‘Not a bit of it’ — and I added, by way of a touch of humour, ‘I’m for easy going.’

‘Good day to you, Detective Stringer,’ he said, and I watched him walk off, my head seething with the word ‘ass’ directed at my low-class self.

I needed more authority. I would summon the Chief from York.

But how?

A girl in a very white pinafore with black-stockinged legs that looked too thin, making her seem somehow spider-like, came out of one of the houses. And I’d thought they all stood empty. She skirted the green and walked over to the baker’s.

I pictured Hugh Lambert in Durham gaol. He had forty-seven hours left to live. Did he wish it was more, or less? A condemned cell was bigger than the common run of cells, and was a kind of open house. There was always a warder looking on; the governor would come and go; the priest, too. Lambert was about to die, but was not yet dying, and this was an odd notion: as though time itself had been meddled with.

I followed the girl into the baker’s. The interior was dark and unbearably hot. There were twelve loaves on the shelves behind the baker, I counted them as I waited for the girl to buy her loaf — only she didn’t buy it but was given it gratis. I bought the smallest one remaining, and said to the baker: ‘You’re about the only person left in this village?’

He grinned. He looked a decent sort, gave his name as Moffat.

‘Only two of us here on the East Green,’ he said. ‘My daughter and myself.’

‘Was she the one in just now?’

‘She was.’

‘Hardly any point baking today, I’d have thought.’

‘I’ve just done a few,’ he said. ‘We generally have a couple of trippers by.’

‘There was a murder here, I believe?’

‘I believe so,’ he said, and that rather threw me. ‘Before my time,’ he ran on. ‘We’ve only been here three months.’

I decided to rule him out of account. He could have no interest in stopping John Lambert from speaking out about the murder of Sir George.

I asked him: ‘Do you know if the village carter’s about?’

‘That’s Will Hamer. He should be coming by here in just a minute.’

I came out of the baker’s, tore off a bite of bread and waited. Moffat was now leaning in his shop doorway whistling, and the tune wove its way steadily through the birdsong: ‘My Grandfather’s Clock’. The sun was raying down, everybody was waiting for everything and I ate my bread with half an ear cocked for the sound of gunshots from the Hall.

I heard instead a rattling of cartwheels, and looked up to see a load of hay creaking along the narrow hedge-tunnel with not an inch to spare on either side. The load was like a barn on the move, and yet only one horse did the dragging, and only one man led the horse.

At the same time, a rulley drawn by the lop-sided combination of a horse and a donkey was coming from the opposite direction — the way that led to the Hall — and I decided that the man driving this must be the carter, Will Hamer. He had two beasts to the farmer’s one, and yet he carried no load. He looked far wiser than a carter needed to be, with a white halo of hair and beard.

Will Hamer and the man leading the load of hay stopped and had a good laugh at how they’d come to be on the same bit of road at the same time. Presently the farmer sauntered on, his great haystack rolling behind. There was a placard on the side of the cart reading ‘Sidebottom: West Adenwold’. I would rule him out of account as well, provided I did not see him around again.

I walked across to Hamer before he could get going again. Standing next to the donkey, I held up my warrant card. He gazed down at me with a bright smile on his face, which by degrees became a frown.

I said, ‘Can you make it out, Mr Hamer?’

‘Bits,’ he said. ‘I can read bits. I can’t read all words, like.’

‘Well,’ I said, pocketing the card, ‘who can? Now I’m on police business, and I’d like a message sent. Could you do that?’

He nodded.

‘I can take you a message anywhere,’ he said. ‘East Adenwold, West Adenwold…’

‘The lines are down here,’ I said, ‘and I need a telegram sent. Can you carry a message to West Adenwold for me? West Adenwold is the nearest of the two, isn’t it?’

‘The nearest to where?’ asked the carter.

‘To here.’

He frowned again.

‘And there is a good-sized railway station there?’

No reply, but I pressed on: ‘And there is a telegraphic instrument in that station?’

‘Aye to both of those,’ Hamer said presently, and with a smile returned. The fellow was as slow as a wet week; there again, it suited me that he couldn’t read. I took out my indelible pencil, and began scrawling in my pocket book as follows: To Chief Inspector Weatherill, York Station Police Office. Come to Adenwold by first train. Matter of the gravest…

I broke off. The gravest what? The gravest gravity? I scratched out the sentence and wrote: ‘Life or death matter at hand.’

I passed it up to Hamer, saying, ‘What’s the cost?’

‘Well now,’ he said, ‘what d’you reckon?’

‘They ought to send it for nowt,’ I said, ‘since it is police business — and how about two bob on top for yourself?’

The carter had such a big grin on him when I passed up the money that I thought a bob might have been nearer the mark. Thanking me, he moved off, which was a matter of waking up the donkey and horse with a shout of ‘Come on, men!’

He went off a little way, and then stopped. He turned about and said, ‘Line might be down at West Adenwold ’n’ all.’

‘Let’s leave it that you are only to send the message if you can,’ I said.

‘Oh, all right,’ he replied, as if this was a very interesting new idea. ‘Only if I can.’

A thought struck me, and I said, ‘Mr Hamer, you wouldn’t have brought anybody into this village today, would you?’

‘Me?’ he said, and he looked at me for a while. ‘I should say not!’

And then he winked very slowly, which I wished he hadn’t done.

He re-started his beasts, and I took out my silver watch. It showed 9.45. Hamer ought to be at West Adenwold station by ten thirty, and the wire ought to reach York within five minutes of that. I guessed that the 12.27 arrival at Adenwold would leave Pilmoor at about midday, which meant that, if the Chief received the wire as soon as it arrived at York station (which was odds-on), he’d have an hour and half to get to Pilmoor. That would be simplicity itself. Being on the main line, Pilmoor was served by a good many fast trains from York, and it was only sixteen miles to the north. The only weak link in the chain was Hamer, who had now disappeared from sight in the hedge-tunnel.

I pocketed my watch and looked up.

Lydia was dawdling along the hedge-tunnel, moving slowly, which was out of the common for her. I called out to her and she quite ignored me. I wondered at this until I saw that the clerk from Norwood, the one who’d spilled the German documents, was coming along behind her. He walked briskly, and carried once again the Gladstone bag. I called again to Lydia, and once more she ignored me, but cut across the green making straight for the shut-up confectioner’s shop. The Norwood clerk had stopped and was looking about. I had a persuasion that it wouldn’t do to be seen by him, so I pulled down my cap, and turned a little aside as I watched him walk through the churchyard wicket. Lydia was watching the man from the shop doorway.