Andrew Martin: Death on a Branch line

‘Is the connection made?’ he said, and he began to advance.

‘It is,’ I said, ‘and I trust that your brother has been saved.’

Cambridge man, first-class degree and brilliant intellect, yet he looked baffled; and when Cooper’s shot hit him in the chest, the look of bafflement increased, and kept on increasing as he slowly collapsed. I looked towards Cooper, and he had the gun trained on me, weighing up the wisdom of a second shot.

We walked along Whitehall in the rain. The black cabs came on and on like one long funeral. Tiny trees along the pavements; the buildings were grey cliffs and every man held an umbrella except for the Chief and me, and the two policemen in capes who happened at that moment to be lumbering along beside us like carthorses. We passed the entrance to Downing Street — one tradesman’s van was parked a little way along it with a white horse in the shafts.

‘Do you suppose Mr Asquith’s at home?’ I said.

The Chief made no answer, but looked at his watch.

‘We’ve an hour to kill,’ he said.

The letters on the side of the van read: ‘Williams of Pimlico’.

I said to the Chief, ‘You’d think they’d put “Williams of Pimlico: Suppliers of Bread to the Prime Minister”.’

‘Full of good ideas, you are,’ said the Chief.

He stopped and eyed me for a moment before adding, by way of making amends, ‘The Tories wouldn’t buy the bread if it was a Liberal prime minister and the Liberals wouldn’t buy if it was a Tory.’

‘Expect not,’ I said.

‘Shall we take a pint?’ said the Chief.

The pub was like a tiny baronial hall, with shields on the wall, and criss-crossed with high beams; and it reeked of past-food. As the rain streamed down the windows, and the Chief bought two pints on expenses, the man at the next table was talking about India. ‘Do you see yourself going out there?’ he kept asking the woman he was with. It was pretty bloody obvious enough that he wanted her to go out there, so why didn’t he just say so? Another fellow, steaming on the same bench as me, said to a man standing before him in a coat with a fur collar: ‘For the first time in years I’ve been able to do a bit of shooting,’ and as he spoke, the pub was filled with the sound of the Westminster bells, which were so deep-toned they might have been inside your head.

‘Care for another?’ the man at the table asked the woman.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Do you?’

‘Well, I know I don’t fancy going out in that,’ the man said, contemplating the streaming windows.

Why must he go round the houses so? He put me in mind of the Adenwold bicyclist. The lengths that fellow had gone to just to get a fuck! He’d even made a show of taking the bloody machine to the blacksmith’s to get the wheel fixed. As if anybody had been interested! Well, I had been, and the wife, too; she’d always suspected him, just as though one bicyclist might prove as important in the whole business as the combined forces of the state.

The Chief was saying something about the fellow we were going to see — Major somebody or other. His name came in two parts: Henderson-Richards or some such hedging of bets. I imagined him as a man who couldn’t decide between Henderson and Richards, who considered them both good names and had determined to have the best of both worlds.

He was in the Special Police, or army intelligence, or both. It was the office for muffling-up, anyhow, and our meeting with him would mark the end of the business that had begun with the transfer of Hugh Lambert at York. It would all be laid to rest, and with no undue ceremony beyond my own name being put to a paper.

My name evidently counted for something in this — otherwise, why would they have called me down to London for the signing (even if it had taken them three months to get round to it), and that with a special first class travel warrant and with the Chief as chaperone?

‘Take another?’ asked the Chief, draining his glass and watching me over the top of it.

He was altered in his approach towards me since the Adenwold events — more watchful. I’d brought off something big, after all: Hugh Lambert had been released and pardoned, if that was the term. Usher had fixed it all after talking to Hardy and Mervyn — this in spite of his strongly held opinions against men of Hugh Lambert’s type. Lambert had evidently had a handshake from the governor of Durham gaol, a letter from the governor of Armley and an armful of money and a rail pass into the bargain.

This last he’d used to come up to York station in the middle of August.

As before, old man Wright and I had been the only ones in the office. Wright had a scar on his forehead — nothing to the Chief’s scars but very noticeable all the same. He’d slipped and fallen on his July week-end in Scarborough — taken a tumble down the steps from the Marine Parade to the beach. I couldn’t help thinking it was his own fault for having talked it up so much in advance.

Also as before, it was a day of unbreathable heat on Platform Four, and the sparrow had been outside the door, for I’d had my snap in front of me as on that earlier occasion. But this time Hugh Lambert had practically trodden on the poor thing — didn’t give it a glance. He’d marched up to me and put out his hand, and I was that shocked to see him that I forgot to stand. Old Wright did so, however, and sharpish, as if he’d seen a ghost, for he’d heard all about Hugh Lambert.

‘I owe you my life, Detective Stringer,’ Lambert said, and he sounded none too happy about it.

‘I’m sorry for what happened to your brother,’ I said. ‘I called to him at the wrong time. They thought the machine was being used to communicate on his behalf. It was just a… bit of a mix-up.’

‘A mix-up,’ he repeated, and he evidently didn’t think much of that way of putting it.

He then stood and eyed me for a while, looking down on me — I couldn’t help thinking — in more ways than one. He wore a boxy suit that didn’t suit him and he looked more out-of-sorts than he had before, but in a new way. After an interval of silence, he turned on his heel and quit the office.

Even Wright was put out on my behalf.

‘That was a bit rich,’ he said, coming up to me quickly as though I’d just been struck a blow. ‘… After what you did for him.’

Well, what had I done? I’d killed his brother, or as good as. Hugh Lambert’s own life was somehow of no account to him and this, according to the wife in our many hours’ conversation on the point, was a consequence of his father’s treatment of him. Because of the way he was, his father had undermined him (it was the wife’s word), and undermined he’d stayed.

This was the wife’s big theory: this business of the undermining. As for his brother’s death, this — according to Lydia — was none of my doing. It was Cooper who’d pulled the trigger. It was all out of my hands. I’d done my level best and should be proud.

I’d had this from the Chief as well, but with something added: I could tell the Chief was pleased by what I’d brought about. It had solved the problem of John Lambert, a man with all the mobilisation plans in his head, and a man who’d proved himself not to be trusted.

But what kept me awake at night was this: Hugh Lambert had told me in the police office that his brother would be in danger from people who would be in Adenwold ‘over the week-end’, and because of what he’d told me, I had become one of the people. I was one of the ‘they’; in fact, I was the very man.

The strangeness, the ghostliness of it…