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  Death on a Branch line

  ( Jim Stringer - 5 )

  Andrew Martin

  Andrew Martin

  Death on a Branch line

  PART ONE

  Friday, 21 July, 1911

  Chapter One

  ‘Palace Hotel,’ said the voice from Scarborough.

  ‘Have you any rooms for tonight and tomorrow?’ I asked.

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ said the voice, ‘but we’re quite full up.’

  ‘Any good?’ asked Wright, and he propped open the police office door to let in fresh air, or what passed for it in York station.

  I put the receiver back on its cradle and shook my head.

  ‘Pity,’ said Wright. ‘It’s a good one is that. Bang on the front.’

  Old man Wright, the police office clerk, already had his weekend by the sea booked so he’d been pretty cheerful all that Friday — and pretty annoying with it. Just now, we were the only two in the office and he was giving me the benefit of his full attention. He stepped forward to wind the handle again.

  ‘How about trying the Grand?’ he said.

  ‘I can’t run to that,’ I said.

  ‘Eh?’ he said, for he was connected to the station operator again, and had only one ear cocked in my direction.

  The office clock said three twenty-two. I still hadn’t eaten my dinner, and it sat on the desk in front of me: bread and cheese and a bottle of warmish tea — an engineman’s snap.

  By propping open the door, Wright had only changed the quality of the stifling heat, not reduced it. It now came with a smoke smell and a rising roar. On some distant platform, a porter or guard was shouting ‘This is York!’ as if he’d only just discovered the fact.

  ‘Scarborough Grand, please,’ Wright said to the operator and then, turning to me: ‘Whatever price they quote you, just say, “I’ll pay half.”’

  ‘Come off it.’

  ‘It’s what’s expected,’ said Wright, as he handed me the receiver once again, saying, ‘You’re connected.’

  He then stood back with folded arms to watch.

  ‘Is that Scarborough Grand?’ I said into the receiver.

  ‘I’ve just told you it is,’ said a man.

  ‘It’s a different person speaking now,’ I said.

  ‘Must I repeat everything I’ve already said?’ asked the man in a peevish tone.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘since I didn’t hear it.’

  Some muttering from down the line, which I broke in on with: ‘This is Detective Sergeant Stringer of the York Railway Police,’ for that would put some folk on their mettle. But this fellow just gave a sigh.

  I asked him: ‘Do you have any rooms for over the week-end?’

  ‘For how many people?’

  ‘Two.’

  ‘Double bed?’

  ‘Aye.’

  The line went half-dead. It was like suddenly going deaf. Looking through the door I could see clear across Platform Four to where a little saddle-tank engine had rolled into view.

  ‘What’s going off?’ asked Wright, who was forever nosing into other blokes’ business in a way that would have been somehow more tolerable if he’d been a younger man.

  ‘Fellow’s hunting up a double room for me,’ I said.

  I knew very well that the man at the Grand would only be looking in a ledger, but I pictured him (a small, bald man in my mind’s eye) wiping the sweat off his brow as he climbed the mighty staircases of the great hotel in search of an unoccupied room. He’d be a little bloke in a stand-up cellulose collar that chafed at his neck, and all the well-spoken chatter and swanky clothes of the guests would make him furious.

  Cradling the receiver between neck and chin, I took off my suit coat and hung it over the back of the chair. Then I looked again through the door. On the footplate of the tank engine there was no driver but just a pawky-looking kid, going ten-to-the-dozen with his coal shovel. I thought: What’s that daft little bugger about? He’s over-stoking; the engine’ll blow off in a minute if he doesn’t look out. Of course it just would happen that, at the very instant the man at the Scarborough Grand came back to the telephone, the safety valves on the tank engine lifted and the excess steam began screaming through them.

  ‘Hello?’ I bawled down the line to the man at the Scarborough Grand. ‘Could you just hold on a tick?’

  Wright was pacing about the office, shaking his head.

  The kid on the footplate had finally left off shovelling and was climbing carefully down from the engine looking guiltily to left and right as he did so. I thought for a minute he was going to run away from it, for it was bad practice to make an engine blow off, what with all the wastage of water and steam and the horrible racket.

  ‘Hello there?’ I yelled again into the receiver.

  I motioned to Wright to shut the police office door, but before he could do so, the stream of din ended, at which precise moment I heard the click of the line to Scarborough going dead.

  ‘What happened?’ said Wright as I replaced the receiver.

  ‘Bloke hung up,’ I said.

  ‘Pity is that,’ said Wright, who was pulling at his collar to ventilate his scrawny self.

  I glanced down at the black steel box that supported the receiver and its cradle — it always put me in mind of a little tomb, somehow.

  ‘You should try again,’ said Wright, from behind the pages of the Yorkshire Evening Press, for he was now back at his desk and looking over the pages of that paper. ‘Every room at the Grand boasts a sea view, you know. Why have you left it so late, any road?’

  ‘Just… forgot,’ I said.

  ‘You’ll be in lumber with your missus over that,’ he said from behind the paper. ‘Likes flower gardens, doesn’t she, your missus?’

  The heading on the back page of Wright’s paper was ‘The Crisis At Hand’.

  Wright put down the paper.

  ‘The blooms in the Valley Gardens’ll be absolutely glorious at this time of year — absolutely bloody glorious.’

  Wright stood up, pitched the Press across his desk and quit the office, leaving the door open behind him, having no doubt thought of another way of avoiding doing any work. I read the heading now uppermost on the Press: ‘The German Move in Morocco’.

  It was holiday time, but all the papers were full of war talk.

  I was now alone in the police office, and I watched through the door as the saddle-tank engine moved away. I then looked around the green walls — at the Chief’s half-a-dozen shields won for shooting that rested on the mantel-shelf. (There was no railway police team as such, so the Chief shot for the Wagon Works.) I glanced at the photograph of Constables Whittaker and Ward competing in the tug-of-war at the North Eastern Railway Police Southern Division Athletics, which had been held at Doncaster racecourse in pelting rain two years since. The picture showed them in the process of losing at tug-of-war, but nobody was to know that since the other team was cut out of the picture.

  Then there was the photograph by the armoury cupboard, which showed some big men in shorts making a pyramid by standing on each other’s shoulders and supporting, at the very pinnacle, a slightly smaller man. These men were soldiers, and this pyramid was an achievement of the Chief’s days in the York and Lancashire Regiment, which was not named after York, the city in whose railway station I presently sat, but after the Duke of York, whose lands were somewhere else altogether — although still within Yorkshire, of course. The Chief had been a sergeant major, and mad keen on fitness.

  I looked at the dead dust of the fireplace: a poker lay in it, left over from the last time the fire had been stirred. That was three months since. It was said that the temperature had lately touched 99 degrees in the sh
ade in London, and an artist at the Press had taken to drawing a fat, sweating face in the middle of the flaming sun that appeared above the weather bulletin.

  I sat down at the chair of the desk that Constables Whittaker, Ward and Flower spent most of the day arguing over. The noises of the station beyond gave way to the ticking of the office clock, and I looked at the time: 3.30 p.m. The clock chimed — you never thought it was going to, but it always did — and the significance of that chime to me just then was that I had two hours forty-five minutes left in which to book accommodation for the week-end away I’d promised the wife (for I would be meeting her at our usual spot in the middle of the footbridge at 6.15 p.m.).

  Looking back later on, though, it seemed to me that the three-thirty chime marked the start of one of the most sensational periods ever to pass in York station.

  It all began at three thirty-one, when the telephone rang in the police office, the sound clashing with that of running feet from beyond the office door and the cry: ‘The gun… There’s a gun in his hand!’

  Chapter Two

  It wasn’t logical, but I arrested my dash towards the door to answer the phone.

  ‘You are not, repeat not…’ I heard the voice on the line saying before I replaced the receiver with a crash. It had been Dewhurst, governor of the York station exchange. Evidently he’d got wind that I’d been using a company telephone for private business.

  I was through the office door in the next instant — out into the muffled sunlight, and the black sharpness of the station atmosphere, the smell that makes you want to travel. Everywhere people were running and screaming. The very trains seemed to have scattered, for I couldn’t see a single one.

  Only three people were not moving and they stood on the main ‘down’ platform — number five — amid abandoned portmanteaus and baggage trolleys. I stood on the main ‘up’ — number four. One of the three held a gun out before him and the other two faced him; it was plain that not one of them knew what the gun would do next.

  The new footbridge stretched between the main ‘up’ and the main ‘down’, and a steeplechase was being run over it, what with everyone fleeing the gun. But one bowler-hatted man was running the opposite way, and battling through the on-rushing crowd: the Chief. I knew he’d been knocking about the station somewhere.

  I bolted for the footbridge, and began fighting my way through the crowds in the wake of the Chief. A succession of ladies in summer muslin seemed to be pitched at me, and some wide-brimmed hats were scattered as I fought my way to the main ‘down’ where the Chief was closing on the three blokes.

  As soon as we made the platform, the Chief slowed to a walk, gesturing me to stay well behind him. The gunman swung his revolver towards the Chief, saying, ‘Are you another of them?’

  ‘Another of what?’ asked the Chief.

  ‘Another of these bastards,’ he said, indicating the two roughs facing him.

  This was not the common run of shootist. For a start, he wore spectacles. He was also decently spoken and smartly turned out — and alongside his polished boots rested a good-quality leather valise. The two standing before him — blokes of a lower class — neither moved nor spoke, but watched the gun, which was a revolver of the American type.

  ‘We’re all staying right here until the police come,’ said the man with the gun.

  ‘I am a policeman, you fucking idiot,’ said the Chief, and that was him all over — rough and ready.

  ‘Well, you don’t look like one,’ said the man with the gun.

  ‘I happen to be in a plain suit,’ said the Chief, and I wondered why he did not hold up his warrant card. I would have come forward and shown my own, but it was in the pocket of my suit coat in the police office.

  ‘Plain suit?’ said the gunman, eyeing the Chief. ‘ Dirty suit, more like.’

  The Chief, as usual, looked like nothing on earth. His trousers did not match his top-coat, and they were both of a winter weight — it almost made you faint with heat sickness to look at them. In York, people were jumping into the river off Lendal Bridge to get cool, but the Chief didn’t give tuppence about the weather. He’d been in the Sudan, where 95 degrees was counted a rather chilly spell, and he’d worn a thick red coat throughout that show, which was perhaps why he wore his winter coat now. His bowler was greasy and dinted, and stray lengths of orange hair came out from underneath it so that a stranger might have been fascinated to lift the hat off his head and see the way things stood with the rest of the Chief’s hair. A man who’d served in the colours ought to have been smarter, I always thought.

  But you knew the Chief had been a soldier by other signs.

  In the greenhouse heat of the station, he was moving towards the man with the gun. I watched the Chief make his advance — and then a noise made me turn around. The great mix-up of lines and signals beyond the south end wavered in the heat, and a train was there in the hot, shimmering air. Here’s trouble, I thought.

  The train bent like a flame or a fever vision as it came on and, as I watched, it slid to the right with a high whine, so that it was heading for our platform.

  The Chief, still advancing on the gunman, was making great windmilling movements with his right arm. He meant to wave the train through, as if it was a horse and trap approaching a partial blockage in a country lane (and the Chief did walk with a farmer’s plod).

  The engine driver could see that something was up, and he hung off the side of his cab to get a better look — one tiny scrap of humanity clinging onto thirty tons of roaring machine. The train seemed to frighten the gunman, for he yelled, ‘I’ll shoot, I’ll shoot!’ The Chief was roaring too, and waving as the train came rolling alongside us. I imagined the riot among the passengers on board. Their train was giving the go-by to York, principal junction of the north!

  As the train rolled away, I heard the Chief say to the gunman:

  ‘Now give it over.’

  No reply from the gunman, and no movement from him either.

  The five of us stood amid the abandoned bags and the posters for ‘Sailor Suits — Young Boys Will Appreciate Them This Weather’ and ‘Ebor Lemonade — The Drink That Refreshes’.

  A half-minute passed.

  ‘I said give it over,’ repeated the Chief, and his voice echoed about the brick arches, the fourteen platforms and the like number of lines. I heard a distant clunk, and, looking towards the great signal gantry beyond the north end, I saw that all the levers had been set at stop. To my knowledge, they had never all said the same thing before, and it meant word had reached the mighty signal box that controlled the station and hung suspended over the main ‘up’. The signallers would all be in there, but moving about on their knees, below the line of the windows.

  I looked again beyond the station end. The signals resembled so many soldiers with shouldered arms. Out there in the great unroofed world, passing trains were setting cornfields ablaze, signal boxes were catching fire for no good reason and all kind of trouble was brewing: the miners were out, the dockers were out and the great heat had been given as the cause of many suicides. The ancient city of York itself had become a kind of Turkish bath.

  The gunman was in fits now, pointing and repointing the revolver at the Chief. He looked the part of an ink-spiller — it ought to have been a fountain pen and not a revolver that rested there in his hand. The Chief stood three feet before him, one ruffian to either side of him.

  The Chief repeated his request:

  ‘Hand it over.’

  The gunman shook his head, and sweat flew. The stuff was rolling down from underneath his hat all the time.

  One of the ruffians spoke up:

  ‘He reckons you’re after his bag.’

  The Chief turned around and looked at the fellow for a while.

  The Chief’s face… well, it was a bit of a jumble: little brown eyes that lurked behind slanting cracks in his head like those sea creatures that live inside stones; big, no-shape nose. The only orderly feature was the well-balan
ced brown moustache, which looked twenty years younger than the rest of him.

  The Chief turned back to the gunman.

  ‘I don’t want your bag, only the gun.’

  The gunman kept silence.

  ‘Can I tempt you to a glass of ale?’ the Chief suddenly asked him.

  No reply from the gunman.

  ‘Strikes me you might prefer a glass of ale to twenty years’ hard labour,’ said the Chief.

  The gunman said, ‘If I give you the gun, there’ll be nothing to stop you taking the bag.’

  ‘Look, I keep forgetting about this fucking bag,’ said the Chief. ‘That’s on account of the fact I’ve no interest in it and do not bloody want it.’

  ‘You’re one of them,’ the gunman said, addressing the Chief, but nodding towards the two roughs. ‘They know you. When you came up, they said, “It’s Weatherill.”’

  ‘And did they look pleased about it?’ asked the Chief.

  The Chief took two steps towards the gunman, and there was now not more than a yard’s distance between him and the revolver.

  ‘So now then,’ the Chief said, and he advanced again.

  The gunman looked down at his bag, then up at the Chief.

  ‘One more step and I’ll fire,’ he said.

  The Chief took one more step; he removed the revolver from the hand of the gunman, who stared at the Chief amazed.

  ‘That was painless, wasn’t it?’ said the Chief, smiling, and I winced at that for I knew what was coming: the fast blow that sent the man to the ground.

  It was then that the two roughs made their breakaway. I turned and scarpered over the bridge after them. In the middle of the bridge, I was ten feet behind the slower of the pair; then seven feet, five, closing… But the five became seven again, and he had ten yards on me by the time he reached the ticket barrier, where he went out through the ‘in’ gate, clattering against the pole that supported the sign: ‘Please show your own ticket’.