Andrew Martin - Murder At Deviation Junction

I closed with a few friendly remarks, and news of the birth of my son. I used police-office paper, but crossed out that address and wrote in my own at Thorpe-on-Ouse. I did not look over the letter on finishing it, because I knew that I might not have the brass neck to send it if I thought too hard about what I'd put. In fact, I was in such a rush to get it off that I swept my arm across my ink pot as I reached for an envelope, sending a tide of blue across the green leathern top of my desk, and towards the photograph of the Travelling Club, which I automatically tried to protect by making a barrier with my arm - with the sleeve of my good suit coat.

'Fuck!' I shouted, and Shillito's head rocked upwards.

I turned to see Wright, who, instead of shaping to help me mop the ink, was tapping the swear box with his pencil. I ran off into the jakes with the idea of soaking my coat sleeve, and when I returned, Wright was now blotting the ink, and Shillito had left. It was as though there could be fellowship in the office, but only with Shillito out of it.

'I'm obliged to you, mate,' I said to Wright.

'No harm done to your precious picture,' he said, handing it over to me.

It was on account of the picture that I had ruined the coat (for it was ruined), and I began to think the damned picture cursed. Perhaps it brought ill luck to every man connected with it.

My letter had escaped the ink flood, and I gave it for posting to Wright, who was pointing at the picture.

'I know this one,' he said.

He was indicating the distinguished-looking cove in black. But he was frowning at the same time.

'Can you put a name to him?'

He closed his eyes for a space, which, Wright being very old, made him look dead.

'No,' he said, opening them again. 'But I have a mental picture of him here in York - somewhere about the town.'

I looked again at the gent in the picture, contemplating the blank wall of mystery.

'Everyone thinks they know this bloke,' I said, at which Wright looked a bit put out, so I said, 'But thanks anyway.'

'I'd drop it if I were you,' he said, and he glanced at Shillito's empty chair, adding, 'Never mind missed promotion - he means to have you stood down.'

A mental picture came into view: the high wall that ran around the York Workhouse.

'That would be a shame, wouldn't it?' I said. 'I know what a lark it is for you to watch our battles.'

Then Wright knocked me by saying, 'It would be more of a lark if you stood up to him.'

I nodded.

'I always mean to,' I said, 'but when it comes to the touch -'

The thought of my own weakness shamed me, so I changed tack, saying to Wright, 'I'd like to telephone London again. Could you put me through?'

Wright took my letter for posting and wound the magneto for me.

A moment later, I was speaking this time to a very cheery bloke who worked on The Railway Rover.

'Editorial,' he said.

'Is Mr Bowman about?' I asked.

'Not presently,' I think he said, which was followed by something that might have been: 'He's been out of the office a good deal lately, and I haven't seen him all day today.'

The sound of what seemed like a gale blowing down the line took all expression out of his voice, so that he might have been delighted by Bowman's absence or greatly worried by it. I said I would call back; but the idea was growing on me that Bowman had bloody well disappeared too.

Chapter Fifteen

'Where's the Chief?' I asked Wright.

'Don't you know?' he said. 'He's at a shooting match.'

I struck out along Platform Four with the photograph in my hand.

A couple of dozen people waited there, huddled into their comforters under the station's sky - the great frosted-glass canopy. Passengers always looked lonely until the train came. A sort of Christmas lean-to, hung with tinsel, had been put up by the side of the Lost Luggage Office for the sale of nuts and sweetmeats. It was an assistant from the bookstall who'd been put to working inside.

I gave him a nod, thinking the while of the letter I'd written to Ellerton, and already wincing at the memory. It was all sob stuff. What did anyone at the Lancashire and Yorkshire care that I was miserable in my new employment; and had I really suggested that they might change their minds?

I saw the telegraph boy walking towards me - the Lad, as he was always known.

'How do, Mr Stringer?' he called out.

'How do?' I said.

'Where're you off to?' he asked, as we closed.

'Platform Thirteen,' I said.

'Good-o,' he said.

He was always cheerful, the Lad.

I jumped down off the edge of Thirteen, which was against regulations, and strode out over the sidings, on to which a few snowflakes that looked like bits of paper were falling. I was making for the old loco-erecting shop, which having been disused for years had lately been converted into a shooting range for the

Company rifle club, of which Chief Inspector Weatherill was the governor.

I pushed through the door of the great shed, which at first seemed empty as well as freezing, and then a shot rang out, quite deafening me for a space. In front of me were booths roughly made out of railway sleepers. Each booth corresponded to a target dangling from a wire stretching the width of the building at the far end, and the bullets flew to these targets through half a dozen columns of light from gas rings high in the roof. There was a balcony above the line of targets, and, set into the wall behind it, a vast clock with no hands, but the central spindle that had once held them remained, and it struck me that it must have made a tempting supplementary target for the riflemen.

I walked along the line of booths, and they were all empty but the last one, in which the Chief sat at a low stool, hunched over with the rifle on the stone floor beside him. Evidently the contest hadn't started yet—that, or it had just finished.

'Sir?' I called. 'Might I have a word?'

The Chief seemed not to have heard; he wore a cravat against the cold, but no topcoat or jacket (to allow free movement to his arms, as I supposed), and he was bareheaded, allowing me sight of his scant strands of dirty yellow hair, which fell across his head at intervals of about half an inch, like the lines drawn on a globe.

I heard a thin squeal of metal, and the targets fifty yards off began to moving to the right. They were being winched towards a hut made of old boiler plates in the right-hand corner of the building. The target marker sat in there, I knew.

I called to the Chief again, and then I spied the ear defenders bundled into his earholes. He was still looking down at the floor, perhaps muttering to himself, but what he was saying I could not make out, just as I could never make out what the Chief was thinking. I couldn't make him out full stop, but I liked him, and I'd always felt he had a liking for me, though he'd given me the hard word on plenty of occasions.

I had taken the photograph out of my coat pocket, and was advancing towards the Chief when an electrical bell sounded from the far end of the shed. This made enough din to rouse the Chief, who looked up in a daze as I passed him the photograph.

'If you have a second, sir, I wanted you to see this.'

'Eh?' he said.

I passed him the photograph, and he looked at it with his ear defenders still in. Behind him, at the far end of the range, the marker had opened the door of his iron shelter, and was approaching us under the line of gaslights.

'It's the Club,' I said.

He knew the story of the Travelling Club in rough outline, but this was the first time he'd had sight of the photograph. He was studying it as the marker leant across the low timber barricade that separated the firing positions from the main part of the range; he passed the Chief a target that had been riddled with the Chief's bullets, and the Chief passed the photograph back to me as he received the target. It was about the size of a newspaper, and the Chief took a while getting to grips with it, which annoyed me, for it was a hard job to keep his mind fixed on a subject even without distraction.