Andrew Martin - Death on a Branch line

Trying to make out the words had brought on a headache. I put down the paper. What was this other life? I had half an idea.

I looked up to see Will Hamer’s wagon rumbling over the sun-hardened mud. Another man was sitting up with him: Lawson, the doctor from East Adenwold.

He turned out to be a very crabby little man in a salt and pepper suit, who wouldn’t take no for an answer. I felt like offering to lie down myself on the canvas stretcher he was waving about, just to save him a wasted journey. Hamer smiled through the whole palaver. It took more than an unexplained disappearance to jolt him out of his groove.

‘Do you think the man had been drinking?’ Lawson demanded.

‘More likely shot,’ I said. ‘There was something very like a bul let wound on the side of his head.’

‘Have you been drinking?’ asked Lawson.

He seemed to have a very limited imagination: everything started and finished with alcohol. I stood shaking my head as Will Hamer turned the rulley about and drove the doctor back down the track. I ought to have given him a couple of bob for his trouble, I decided, as I set off back to The Angel. He’d proved himself not such a dope after all, for he’d delivered my wire without any hitch, and he’d fetched the doctor.

At The Angel, the bar was quite deserted. I climbed the stairs and the wife was sitting cross-legged reading her paper, The Freewoman, which she immediately tossed to one side. I knew right away that I was properly forgiven, and that there was some important business at hand; or business she thought important, at any rate. It didn’t matter what it was, though. Gifford had very likely been shot at because of what he knew, and I would not put the wife in the way of a bullet. I had to get her out of Adenwold.

There was a pleasant scent of soap in the room, and I saw that the wife had placed cut lavender inside a glass on the dresser. She was looking at me bright-eyed. She started saying, ‘You’ll never guess…’

But I cut in on her, telling her that I’d found Gifford in the woods; that I’d fetched a doctor; that Gifford had disappeared meantime. I did not mention the possibility of a shooting. She kept silence for a moment when I’d finished, before saying:

‘Well, whatever he was about, it’s connected to the man at the Hall, and to his brother. The centre of everything is the Hall, and we’re invited there this evening.’

She would not be going; she would be on the ‘down’ train at 8.35 p.m. But I asked, ‘Invited? Who by?’

‘Why, the tenant of course. Who else would presume to do it? Mr Robert Chandler — he came by the front of the inn just now.’

‘How? On foot?’

‘In a very smart little trap.’

‘We can’t be invited to a place like the Hall. We’re not their type.’

‘It is a little irregular,’ said the wife. ‘But it’s not a dinner invitation. It’s for rather late on — nineish — and Mr Chandler said we were not to dress.’

‘Just as well,’ I said, ‘since we’ve nothing to dress in.’ And, seeing my way to a grievance, I added: ‘He fancied you, I suppose?’

The wife went quite blank at that. She never admitted that any man fancied her. It was as though her womanly spell might be broken if she once did so.

‘He was with his wife,’ she said at length, ‘and she seemed just as keen. They were very friendly. You see, I was sitting outside at the long table and Mr Chandler drove up and said something about it being a lovely day. Then he asked me, “What brings you to Adenwold?”’

‘The train,’ I put in. ‘The train brought you to Adenwold.’

The wife ignored this, saying:

‘I told him that you’d brought me here but that I’d been hoping to go to Scarborough, not that this wasn’t a very pretty spot, and he said, “I know, but Scarborough’s my favourite summer place.”’

‘Why didn’t he go on the outing, then?’

‘I don’t see him in one of your horrible rattling excursion trains,’ said the wife.

Everything bad about the railways was my personal responsibility. ‘I then said that I’d been particularly looking forward to the Chinese lanterns strung all along the garden walks, and he said, “Well, we’ve Chinese lanterns at the Hall, why don’t you come up and see?”’

‘Did you tell him I was a policeman?’

‘I did not.’

‘Did he mention the Chief?’

‘No.’

‘And will Usher be there?’ I asked. ‘And John Lambert, who’s under threat of death because of what he knows about his father’s murder? Where do they come in? Are they invited to this little jolly?’

‘I don’t know,’ replied the wife, ‘but that’s what makes it all so exciting.’

It was one of the things that made it exciting to the wife.

Presently, she went back to The Freewoman, and I looked at Hugh Lambert’s papers again, but I kept striking bits of bad handwriting, or bits I’d already read.

The wife said she’d like a look, so I passed the bundle over. ‘I never went well on a horse,’ she read out loud. ‘Ponder did, but he simply refused…’

‘Who’s Ponder?’ asked the wife.

‘The brother, John,’ I said, ‘on account of his studious ways, I suppose.’

‘… Ponder did, but he simply refused,’ she repeated. ‘However, he would ride out with father and I if father had been especially bold with the brandy, which would make him liable to violence. He saved me from countless thrashings, just by riding in-between us, playing the part of a mounted policeman…’

And she read on from there in silence.

‘What we have here,’ she said, when she eventually put the bundle aside, ‘is impressions.’

‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘It’s literature, worst luck, written only for his own satisfaction.’

‘But then why do you suppose he gave it you?’

‘Well, it’s all in there, I suppose, in a roundabout way.’

‘What do you make of him?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t understand him at all.’

‘Do you know why, Jim Stringer?’ she said, and after giving me a strange look for a while, she went back to looking over the sheets of paper.

‘Who’d want the verdict to stand?’ I asked her a little while later (my silver watch gave ten to four). ‘… Or, to put it another way, who’d have wanted Sir George dead in the first place?’

‘The pheasants of Adenwold, I should think,’ said the wife, still reading Hugh Lambert’s papers.

Come eight twenty-five by my silver watch, Lydia was standing by the door of our room in her best blue cotton dress. It was set off to a T by the high black belt, and the white fancy blouse that showed through at her neck and shoulders. She carried her little leathern bag that was half-bag, half-purse.

‘Look alive,’ she said, as I did up my bootlaces. ‘And remember that it is not fashionable to be intoxicated.’

‘We’ll see about that,’ I muttered, following her through the door.

I had her railway ticket in my inside pocket, but I knew I’d have a job to get her on the train, especially since I meant to go to the party myself. This would strike her as unfair. No self-respecting woman Co-Operator would stand for it.

We’d both slept a little in the early evening; then I’d lain on the bed making notes in my pocket book of the week-end’s events so far. Later, I’d kept station outside the pub with a pint in my hand watching for any sign of the Chief, but he’d not pitched up. Did he mean to stay at the Hall? And would he be at the beano? Would Usher be there?

I could have done with more than just one pint to set me up, but I supposed that a glass of wine would be put in my hand directly I stepped under the Chinese lanterns. You got wine directly on arrival at the Christmas party given by the Archbishop of York for the whole village of Thorpe-on-Ouse. There was no messing about there — the Archbishop was certainly going to be drinking, and he didn’t want to stand out.