Andrew Martin - Murder At Deviation Junction

'Briggs.'

He dropped his cigar stub to the floor, and lowered one boot from his desk on to the cigar.

'Seems he was dead set on coming to York - you've gone white, lad,' he said, eyeing me more closely.

A beat of silence.

'Any road,' the Chief went on, 'they've just sent word to say they've got him.'

'They've run him in?'

The Chief raised his boot back on to the desk.

'Now you've gone red,' he said. 'Aye - they've shot the bugger dead.'

The Chief scratched his head, setting his few strands of hairs wriggling. On his face was a complicated expression. He looked at me for a while from behind his boots - watched me as I thought on.

Small David. He'd returned from Scotland on Monday morning, had his set-to with the troublesome brother and then he'd tried to come after me. I took a breath, for I meant to start in on my account of events at Fairy Hillocks. But then I held the breath.

The Chief suddenly pulled a pasteboard envelope from a desk drawer, and swept all the papers on top of his desk into it.

'You've been away from the office for two working days,' he said, 'Friday and Monday. Do you have anything in your notebook to show for it?'

'Not in my notebook, no.'

'Why not?'

'Because I didn't set anything down in my notebook.'

'Why not? No pen to hand?'

'That's not why.'

'You had a pen to hand?'

'I carry two at all times.'

'Indelible?'

'One indelible; one - whatever is the opposite of indelible.'

'Can you give me one good reason why a young detective should carry any pencil other than an indelible one?'

'Trust, sir,' I said,'. . . that's what it all comes down to. If I was trusted more, then I could write in normal pencils, but I am not trusted.'

'"If I were trusted more" I believe is the correct English.'

'That proves my point exactly, sir.'

'To return to the notebook,' he said, lighting another cigar. 'You didn't make a note ... because nothing happened?'

'Because too much happened.'

'Do you want to have been on leave?'

I couldn't make him out.

'It is not a good idea to frown at me in that way,' said the Chief. 'Do you find the question unclear?'

'You're saying I don't have to tell you what happened.'

'That's it.'

I thought it better to leave a moment of silence before giving my reply.

'I accept.'

My difficulties were falling away at a rate of knots, but the fact that I had been let off the need to explain what I'd been about in Scotland did not mean that I would be allowed to keep my position.

'Am I to be stood down?' I asked.

'Shillito means to speak to you about your future,' said the Chief, rising to his feet.

It was not the answer I had hoped for.

Chapter Thirty-four

I walked into the main office and Shillito was waiting there, holding a leathern notecase under his arm. There was a mark on his forehead that I'd made. He watched me come out of the Chief's door, and motioned me towards my own desk. Wright was looking on from his corner - the best ringside seat.

Shillito sat at his own desk, which was directly opposite mine, and he began to eye me. Was he going to ask for my notebook? As he continued to stare, Wright sharpened a pencil without looking at it. His eyes were on me. A great train was leaving from Platform Four, and the noise made my heartbeat begin to gallop.

Just then, the Chief came out of his own room and quit the office without a look back. It was all no good; I was for it.

Now Shillito was speaking.

'As a body of men we must stand together, would you not agree, Detective Stringer?'

'I would, sir.' (I found I didn't object to calling him 'sir' as long as I fixed my eyes on that mark that I'd made.)

'We're up against it on all fronts,' he said.

I nodded. The train had gone, leaving only the steady, slow scrape of Wright's pencil-sharpening blade.

'We do not have the privileges of the ordinary public detectives,' Shillito ran on, 'and the travellers are frequently against us.'

I nodded again.

'They chaff us, will not give up their tickets when asked.'

I was tired of nodding.

'And do you know what the other classes of railwaymen call us?'

'The pantomime police.' 'Just so.'

(He hadn't reckoned on me knowing that.)

'We must stand together, then.'

'I have already agreed to that.'

I was pushing it with Shillito, but I seemed to have decided that it was all up for me in any case.

'Very well then, try this: we must not deal each other blows'

Whatever reply I made to that, he wasn't listening, but was standing up, removing some papers from the notecase.

'You want to get your promotion - there it is.'

He dashed the papers down on my desk.

'Now I'm overdue at home,' he said, and he strode out of the office without another word.

There were half a dozen pages, torn from a magazine, a railway journal - not The Railway Rover or the Railway Magazine or anything I'd heard of, but some little journal out of the common. I caught them up, and looked across at Wright, who was still scraping away at the pencil.

'What the hell's going off?' I said.

'You did yourself a good turn when you clouted him,' said Wright.

He put down the pencil, sat back and folded his arms.

'It's Christmas,' he said. 'Do you want an orange?'

There was no sign of any orange, so this might have been a sort of bluff. I thanked him and said that if he was after doing me a good turn, he might record in the log book that I'd gone out on the search for Davitt, the fare evader. I then quit the office and walked under a sky that threatened more snow, to the Punch Bowl in Stonegate, which was known for its twopenny pints of ale. It was a secret-looking pub with many small, half-underground rooms that got smaller the further back you went from the street, so that it was like drinking in a coal mine. In the very furthest snug from the street, I began to read the bundle of papers that Shillito had given me. It was a very strange return for having hit him; in fact, the papers were strange all ends up.

Chapter Thirty-five

On Christmas Eve morning, Harry was up at half past five, setting a marker, I supposed, for the next day. I came downstairs at six in Peter Backhouse's funeral suit; the wife passed me a cup of cocoa and said, 'It fits to a tee.'

The suit was in fact blue. I had mentioned this to Backhouse over a pint in the Fortune of War, and he'd said, 'Don't say that. It's meant to be mourning black. I'll lose confidence at the funerals if I think it's blue.' But I wasn't over-concerned, since Peter Backhouse didn't have any confidence to begin with.

After breakfast, I opened the front door, and was fairly blinded by the whiteness. The sight of all the new-fallen snow made Harry break out into a kind of hopscotch in the warmth of the kitchen. On the doorstep, the wife passed me my topcoat, which she'd given a good brushing. She then gave me a special kiss of the sort normally reserved for late evening and handed me my bicycle clips.

'Buy a paper at the station bookstall, our Jim,' she said. 'One of the cleverer sort, you know. Then go into the interview with it under your arm.'

'To create the illusion of intelligence, you mean.'

'No, Jim, you are intelligent.'

I put on the bike clips.

'Please try to remember that, Jim,' said the wife.

I went down the side alley, where the Humber was covered by a tarpaulin against the shocking weather. As I walked it along the front path, the wife called, 'And if you get the promotion . . . I'll think on about the boots.' Harry stood behind her, grinning fit to bust, just as though he knew exactly what she meant.

The six wide fields were all piled with a smooth whiteness like well-made beds. I made the bicycle stand at York station after twenty minutes; I then stood there for a further three, blowing on my hands to make them work again. As I blew, I thought of Captain W. R. Fairclough, formerly of the 5th Lancers. Under this gentleman, whose acquaintance I would be making very shortly, the North Eastern Railway Police had grown from sixty-seven men of all ranks to three hundred and forty-two. He was all plans, and I'd been made privy to what was surely the strangest of them by Shillito; or at least, that seemed to be the case, but I could not quite dismiss the thought that it was all a great jape designed to pay me out for hitting him.