Andrew Martin: Murder At Deviation Junction

My interview was to be with the chief of the force himself, Captain Fairclough, and it was fixed for twelve noon in the spot we were now leaving behind: Middlesbrough, to which the headquarters of the North Eastern Railway Police had lately removed, having been first at Newcastle.

We rolled through Redcar station, for we were semi-fast to Whitby, where we would change for York. I caught a glimpse of the beach as we rocked through Redcar station. It was snow- covered. A torn white flag planted in the sand flew the word 'TEAS'.

The ladies in the compartment were developing a conversation.

'Do you wash at home?'

'Some,' the wife said, very cautiously. 'Only handkerchiefs and the like.'

That was a fib (we washed everything at home), and I flashed the wife a sideways glance, which she avoided.

The woman started in with another question: 'Do you wash the - ?' But she broke off at the sight of three rough-looking blokes whisking along the corridor, shouting at each other as they went. Iron- getters most likely, I thought, and half-canned at the end of a turn. Harry was kicking his feet, looking out of the window at more furnaces - set high on a hill in the weird light.

'Everything's on fire, dad,' said Harry, and it was evidently fine by him, for he spoke the words calmly.

'Wimbledon's home to us,' the woman was saying. 'Lumley Road.'

She would keep on mentioning it.

'It's well away from the railway,' she said.

Was that good or bad? She found the railway noisy, I supposed. But there'd be no Wimbledon without it. I remembered the place from my days on the London and South Western company - a medium class of houses, and seemingly more of them every week you rode by them.

I looked again through the window. A little light left in the day; lonely cottages here and there; snow landing slantwise on the sea beyond.

'Do you know London?' the woman was saying.

'I'm from there myself,' said the wife.

'Oh, where?'

She was cornered now.

'Waterloo,' she said, and that was the end of the conversation for the moment. You could not say the lodging house the wife had kept there had been well away from the station; it had been almost in it. Lydia frowned at the gas lamp over Harry's seat. He suddenly smiled and waved at her with the full length of his arm, as though she sat half a mile away, but she did not respond. She was fighting for the sisterhood, but that didn't mean she had to like all individual women, or even very many of them, and it was ridiculous of me to think so, as I had often been told upon raising the point.

Harry was keeping rhythm with the train, repeating over and over; 'Rattly ride, rattly ride, rattly ride,' until Lydia, ever so gently, kicked him on the knee, after which he fell to whispering the words.

I turned to the boy, saying, 'Those hills are full of miners, Harry - getting the ironstone from which the iron and steel is made. There's a whole world underground: miles of tunnels, workshops, storerooms, even horses and stables.'

'Have you been doing your marketing in Middlesbrough?' Lydia asked the woman.

'I did a little shopping ,' said the woman. She was not the sort for marketing.

The village of Marske was to our left - a big house on a hill stood guard over it, but snow fell on village and mansion alike.

'We had tea at Hinton's,' the woman was saying. 'The main dining room, you know.'

We crashed over some points and there was a winding gear suddenly hard by us, all lit up.

'We had lovely macaroons,' the woman was saying, 'and then Stephen smoked a cigar in what they call the More-ish Room. It's rather select.'

At this, the man was finally provoked into speaking.

'The Moorish room,' he said. 'After the Moors, who come from North Africa or wherever it might be .. .'

'Or the Yorkshire Moors,' said the wife, grinning, and the Wimbledon pair both laughed at this: the man quite briefly, the woman for longer. It surprised me that she should have laughed, and made me better disposed towards her.

I turned to Harry. 'Have you seen that we've been passing wagons full of the stuff? They're taking it to Middlesbrough, but must wait for the passenger trains to go by.'

'Why?' said Harry.

'Because,' I said, 'people come before lumps of stone.'

'You reckon ,' he said, and Lydia touched his knee with her elastic-sided boot again. This was another of his regular expressions she considered coarse. I looked at the wife, and she grinned. I liked those boots of hers. I wanted to see what she looked like standing in them with nothing else on, but had not quite had the brass neck to ask. I would do, though - I would do it come Christmas Eve if everything had gone all right in Middlesbrough, and we had more money in view.

We were now winding our way towards the new seaside town of Saltburn. The black sea was to our left; a slag breakwater stretched out like the black hand of a clock. More shouts came from along the corridor, and the Wimbledon man had stopped work to listen. Harry was coughing again.

We began rolling past tall houses. The cornerstones of some did duty as telegraph poles, and the wires between were thick with snow. Too heavy a coating and they'd come down. Was the blackness I could make out beyond them the sea or the sky? We stopped against the station name: 'Saltburn'. It hung on chains, restless in the sea wind, and I imagined the sea as vertical beyond the houses, like a great wall.

'Want a turn along the platform, son?' I said to Harry.

'Don't be daft,' said the wife. 'He'll catch his death.'

So I went out alone.

As I stepped down, a gang of big, raggedy, snow-covered blokes climbed up. They carried long articles in sacks, and they were not Saltburn types at all. It was rum. There were more like them already aboard.

Saltburn was a terminus - you left by the same direction you arrived. Beyond the buffer bars towered the Zetland Hotel, facing out to sea, which meant views in summer and a terrible battering from the wind come winter. I looked up. A bit of the fancy wooden edging of the platform canopy was coming away in the wind. I stared as it rocked back and forth, thinking: this might come down on the carriage roof at any moment.

I heard the bell before I expected, and was back up in an instant. As I returned to the compartment, Stephen the clerk-on-the-move was coming the other way along the corridor. There was something in his hand, which he put behind his back somewhat as I looked on.

He stepped into the compartment after me, and whatever had been in his hand was now gone. We rumbled backwards, then forwards again; more shouting from along the corridor. Skelton came; Brotton; Huntcliffe - a tiny spot, with no station, but we stopped there anyway. I looked to the left and saw only blackness. But I knew it to be the sea.

Harry was asleep, and the ladies were nodding off too.

The train went on its slow, jerky way for another minute, then came to rest again. At once the gleaming whiteness of snow began to build up against the window frames to the left. There was a sound far off like a war, but it was only the rumbling and booming of the sea. And still the shouts came from along the corridor.

'Irregular, is it?' the man said after a space. 'To come to a stand here?'

'Just a little,' I said, and I couldn't resist adding in an under- breath, 'We're not more than six foot off the cliff edge.'

The clerk moved his boots in a way that made me think he didn't like that idea, so I added, 'Should be away shortly.'

I ought to have introduced myself to the fellow, but something told me he didn't want that. The sharp scream of the train whistle came, and we rolled slowly on. Stephen the clerk said, 'There's some strange working on this line, I'll say that much.'