Andrew Martin: Death on a Branch line

‘I wish I’d been there to see it myself,’ said the Chief.

Usher was looking at his watch.

‘We ought to be pressing on, Chief Inspector,’ he said.

‘Could I ask one last question, sir?’ I asked Usher, and we eyed each other levelly. ‘Is it known for an absolute fact that Hugh Lambert is… that way?’

‘We’ve no hard evidence… thank God,’ said Usher.

I nodded to the pair of them, and carried on up to The Angel as the chimes came for nine-thirty.

I heard no stir from The Angel as I came up to it, and I saw no light at our window. I went through the front door, climbed the stairs and knocked with a light knuckle on the door. No answer. I pushed the door open. The half-closed curtains dusked the room, which smelt of lamp oil and lavender. The wife lay under the covers in her night-dress, and I took her at first to be fast asleep, but I knew she could not be in the circumstances and, as I entered the room, she rose and propped her head on her arm.

‘The boy?’ I said.

‘Nothing doing,’ she said.

‘I’m just off down for a pint,’ I said, and I went downstairs, and pushed through the door that gave onto the two bars.

Mr Handley was there alone, surrounded by the green-shaded oil lamps and looking at the fireless grate with his usual pewter of ale in his hand. He nodded at me before returning his gaze to the grate, saying something that was most likely, ‘I’m wondering whether to light it.’

The air was still close, and the windows all open. It was light that was wanted more than heat, but Mr Handley next said (I think), ‘I’m minded to do it.’

I asked him if he’d pour me a pint first, and as he did so I asked him the whereabouts of his wife. ‘Turned in,’ he replied, in his blurred voice.

‘Mervyn?’ I said.

‘Aye, him an’ all,’ said Mr Handley.

‘Any sign of the dog?’ I asked — just to see what he’d say.

Mr Handley shook his head, saying something like: ‘That bugger stops out all hours… law unto his bloody self.’

‘What about the bicyclist?’ I said. ‘Is he in bed too?’

‘Reckon so,’ said Mr Handley, and I felt like asking whether he was quite sure he hadn’t drugged the lot of them for the sake of a quiet life.

‘Still hot, en’t it?’ I said, presently.

‘It is that, aye,’ said Mr Handley, who, having drawn us a couple of pints, was kneeling at the grate and making paper faggots with back editions of The Yorkshire Post.

‘Always like this of a Sunday evening, is it?’ I asked him.

‘Aye, dead loss,’ he said.

‘You’d rather be farming, I expect,’ I said.

‘I liked that line of work,’ he said. ‘I liked a… when I worked.’

I couldn’t make out the middle word. It was short, sounded like ‘ewe’.

‘A what?’ I said. ‘A few?’

‘A view,’ he answered, rising from the grate.

Behind him, blue smoke rolled fast over the coals of the fire.

‘You lost the farm on account of Sir George,’ I said.

‘That’s it,’ said Mr Handley with a sigh; but then he stirred himself to a joke, which I heard quite distinctly: ‘God giveth and God taketh away.’

‘The pub must be a kind of prison for you,’ I said, ‘after life on a farm, I mean.’

‘Aye,’ said Mr Handley, but I didn’t believe he meant it, for he then said something very like: ‘I’m looking to take in hand a York house.’

‘Did I have that right, Mr Handley?’ I said. ‘You want to take on a York pub?’

He nodded.

‘Any particular one?’

‘Grapes,’ he boomed, ‘- on Toft Green.’

‘I know it,’ I said. ‘Hard by the new railway offices. Very popular spot and a regular gold mine, I should think, what with…’

But I did not want to speak further of the Grapes, which was a success — I now recalled — mainly on account of its landlord, a little, bright-eyed bloke who talked ten-to-the-dozen with the railway clerks, who used the place as a home from home. Chattered like a bloody monkey, the fellow did, and it was impossible to imagine Mr Handley in his place.

‘I’ve had a tip the present fellow’s moving on, and the tenancy’s coming up,’ Mr Handley said, ‘and I do fancy it.’

He took a long go on his pint, put down the pewter and grinned at me.

‘The living’s high in York, en’t it?’ he said.

I considered the question. The place had its gentry, of course, and it had its workhouse and its people for ever on the verge of the workhouse, but it was mainly full of respectable sorts like me. In my days in London I’d been something else: not quite respectable, a junior railwayman clarted in engine grease, living in a world of my own, believing that the be-all-and-end-all of life was high-speed trips on the main line. My ambitions had started and finished with the footplate of a locomotive. It had been a sort of dream existence, and ever since then I had been trying to make my way in the real world, and not making it fast enough. I was only the Chief’s lapdog, and the Chief was only Usher’s. We were both too small to influence events of any importance, and that is what the week-end had proved

But Mr Handley was talking hopefully of York.

As he spoke, I noticed that the six green oil lamps that lit the inter-connected bars of The Angel were surrounded by moths and that there were also many daddy-long-legs bouncing up and down the walls. The kindling in the fire was seething as the flames took hold, and it dawned on me that there was another sound coming from beyond the opened windows, a sort of sizzling. Mr Handley was watching me and smiling as he saw me noticing the rain, but there was also a questioning look to his face, and it seemed that he had just asked me something about my own life — touching on some wide and philosophical matter requiring speech stretching late into the night.

Putting Hugh Lambert from my mind, I began telling Handley of my days firing, taking him on several journeys, fairly closely described: winding under the fearfully over-crowded signal gantries of the south London suburbs on the way to the great Necropolis of Surrey; racing across the Lancashire Fylde in another hot season with the windmills to left and right turning their arms over like bowlers at cricket. Next minute, the poor bloke was being shunted under the grey February skies of Dover onto the stone pier with the steamer for France rocking and waiting… And each time with trouble in prospect.

He told a few things of his own, and it was just the landlord and me sailing on the brown sea of pints of Smith’s towards midnight. At Mr Handley’s request, I’d long since stopped offering money for my pints; he had taken to me like a brother.

It was quite wrong to take the man for a lunatic, as most of his customers probably did. His voice rose and fell in all the right places; it was melodic in its low, rumbling way, and I had no doubt that he made perfect sense for all that he put away between six and eight pints of Smith’s in the two and a half hours that I sat up with him.

I was back in the bedroom as the clock struck midnight, undressing by the light of a candle stub. I fell straightaway asleep, but woke at the chime of three, and walked along the corridor to the jakes where I pissed for what seemed like about half an hour. Returning to bed, I dreamed of a train formed of a locomotive pulling a line of carriages that somehow became brake vans that were all finally revealed as cricket pavilions. The train wound its way through pretty country-side, slipping the pavilions here and there as required by teams of cricketers who stood waiting at line-side locations. The slipping of the pavilions went off perfectly, and the cricketers were delighted to have them, but somebody somewhere raised a voice of objection, and it was a woman speaking out even though there’d been no women involved in the giving and receiving of the pavilions.