Murder At Deviation Junction js-4 Read online

  Harry was coughing again, so I whisked him back along the platform to where the wife waited, and we climbed up. The steam heat was working in the carriage, but Harry still coughed. He was on the mend from his latest bad go, but he had a weak chest: at age two he'd had pneumonia. Three months in the York Infirmary, pulse at a fever rate for days on end. Our sick club didn't cover the cost, and most of our savings were gone.

  We settled ourselves in an empty compartment, and I took out from my pocket the Middlesbrough Gazette for Monday 13 December 1909. A succession of polar lows were moving south in an Arctic airstream. There had been much freezing of water taps and gas mains, and now widespread snow was forecast for the district.

  The train was being quickly boarded: it was the main service of the evening down the coast to Whitby. You could go by the country way, but I wanted to see the sea. People clattered along the corridor, carrying snow on their shoulders, shouting about the weather: 'Bad weather for thin boots, this is!'

  Harry settled eventually, and the wife took out her library book - something on the women's movement, probably with a dash of religion. She always had something like that on the go.

  The whistle blew and we were fast away. A moment later, a man and a woman walked into the compartment, and Harry immediately fell to staring at them, which I couldn't stop without drawing attention to the fact that he was doing it.

  They were both small. The woman carried a big basket stuffed with parcels. As she pulled the white fur mantle off her shoulders, I caught sight of Lydia's flashing eye. It meant this was the fashionable kind of mantle, worthy of notice. The woman sat down quickly, but took a long time settling herself. The man wore wire- rimmed spectacles, a flat, snow-topped sporting cap, black suit and a green topcoat of decent quality. The cap didn't belong, for he did not look the sporting type.

  He carried a valise and a canvas case about a foot and a half square. He looked twice at the notice on the string rack over the seats: 'Light articles only'. He took off his specs and blew on them, as though thinking about that sign. Then he stowed the case on the rack anyway. He put his topcoat up there, and whipped off the cap; he was bald, except for a line of hair that ran round the perimeter of his scalp. It was just a memory of hair, marking the boundary of where the stuff had been. His nose was queer as well. It was an arrow, coming out sharply and going in again quite as fast. It was just right for supporting his specs, though.

  Sitting down, he gave me a quick nod, which made his red face turn redder still.

  As we rocked away from Middlesbrough station he took some papers from the valise and began leafing through them at a great rate, while occasionally making jottings in a notebook. I looked out of the window. The iron district was to my left, the mighty furnaces burning under the snow. The woman was reading a picture paper - Household Words or some such. I caught sight of the question: 'A lemon cake for Christmas?'

  The man lifted his feet and rested them on the seat over opposite, at which Harry's mouth opened wide. I knew what was coming, but could see no way of stopping it.

  'It's not allowed!' said Harry, pointing at the boots.

  Lydia shook her head, though she was almost laughing at the same time. The man coloured up and - continuing with his note- making - took his feet off the seat.

  'Don't bother on our account,' I said to this clerk-on-the-move, who acknowledged me once again with a nod.

  Harry was now looking out of the window.

  'The boy's quite right though, isn't he?' the woman was saying. 'Where would we be if everyone put their boots on the seats?'

  She looked at the man.

  'Where would we be, Stephen?'

  'I'm sure I don't know, Violet,' he said, hardly looking up from his scribbling.

  (She did not look like a Violet - too pale.)

  'I think it comes from his being a policeman's son,' said Lydia, at which the clerk looked up over his glasses at me.

  'The man two doors down from us in Wimbledon is on the force,' said the woman. 'He's quite high up - an inspector, I think.'

  She was pretty but, like her husband, small in scale - like a child playing at being an adult. Whenever she spoke, she caused a commotion, or so she seemed to think, for she rearranged herself afterwards, refolding the gloves that rested on top of her basket and patting down her skirts.

  'He's only been in the street for a year,' she went on. 'Well, we all have. But the milkman for the area, who was known to give short measure ... he doesn't try it in Lumley Road.'

  She looked at us all.

  '...that's because of the Inspector.'

  'James is on the North Eastern Railway force,' said the wife, after a moment. 'Detective grade. He's going for his promotion on Christmas Eve.'

  And because we were in company, she left off the words: 'He'd better get it as well.'

  Lydia had spent the past two years fretting about our futures - mine and hers both. Would she end up at the kitchen sink? That was her leading anxiety. She was a New Woman, forward thinking. There was to be a sex revolution, and you knew it was coming by the speed at which Lydia went at her typewriting. Whenever Harry slept, or was at school, she would be at the machine in the parlour by which she got her living, writing letters for the Co-operative Movement or the women's cause in general or the Co-operative Women's movement, which was a frightening combination of the two. She got a little money by this, and now she'd been offered a position in the Northern Division of the Co-operative Movement: half-time secretary to Mrs Somebody-or-other. Three days a week, ten bob a day. Very fair wages, all considered. Lydia was to give her answer by the first week of the New Year, and she would only be able to say yes if I achieved promotion to detective sergeant. That would be a big leap, for it would all but double my pay, letting us take on a girl who could do the weekly wash and mind Harry for the three days.

  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.'

  The train motion sent the ladies' heads rocking, and Household Words slipped to the floor between them, but we hadn't made more than another half-mile before we stopped again. The banks of a cutting enclosed us on either side, and I was ready for the jerk of the applied brake, for something was certainly amiss. We creaked on past a lineside cottage that looked tumbledown, and with a badly smoking fire. Then came a high signal box followed by brighter lights rising to meet us, and we were into a station. There came more shouts, the sound of running boots along the platform.

  The Wimbledon woman was awake.

  'Where is this?' she said, just as we came to rest with the station sign conveniently filling our compartment window: Stone Farm.

  The snow was flying at the words as Harry said, 'It's like Christmas here.'

  He always woke up just as though he'd never been asleep.

  'Are we booked to stop here?' asked Lydia.

  'No,' I said, 'and not much ever is.'

  I'd suddenly had enough of the compartment, and all the uncertainty brought on by the weather.

  'I'm off for a scout about,' I said. 'See what's going on.'

  The rough-looking blokes were moving along the corridor.

  'We mustn't be stuck here for all hours,' said the wife. 'Harry wants his bed.'

  'Do not,' he said, but he said it quietly, which proved he did. The mysterious Stephen watched me go as I pulled the door closed behind me. The fellow hadn't put pen to paper since Saltburn.

  Chapter Three

  I stepped down on to the platform into a blizzard - no other word for it. The rough blokes were streaming away along the platform towards the 'up' end - the direction of Whitby - and their sacks held shovels and lanterns. Snow gang, that's what they were. I saw the train guard come running towards me. He was heading the opposite way to the blokes.

  'Bad blockage is it?' I shouted to him.

  He was making for the signal box - he would telegraph from there.

  'Reckon not,' he said, still running. 'If it is, we'll work back to Saltburn.'

  In that case, the Company would have to put us up - perhaps at the Zetland Hotel. Lydia would like that.

  I turned to face the engine again, which was harder to do, since the snow blew from that direction. The engine driver and his fireman were holding a low conversation on the platform while a few feet beyond them stood a bloke in a waterproof cape. He would be the stationmaster. He was directing the snow gang to the site of the blockage, and they looked like a foreign ar
my, trooping off in their long coats and no-shape hats. But I now saw that they were just ordinary railway blokes: men from every corner of the sheds at Middlesbrough and Saltburn who'd fancied a bit of overtime. I looked again towards the stationmaster. The cape threw me off a little, but there was something familiar about the man's brown bowleg snow-covered as it was.

  'Fighting King Snow,' said a voice at my ear. It was Stephen from the compartment. He stood there in his topcoat, blinking in the snow and holding out a travel flask. The canvas case dangled from his shoulder, and I knew it now for a camera case.

  I took a belt of the stuff in the flask.

  'Much obliged,' I said, handing it back.

  He poked his glasses to the top of his beak of a nose, and took another go on the flask. His hot little head looked stranger still when tipped back. I gave him my hand.

  'Stringer,' I said. 'Jim Stringer.'

  'Stephen Bowman,' he said. 'Call me Steve.'

  He was holding out a business card; I read it by the train light.

  'S. J. Bowman. Correspondent, The Railway Rover. Also author: Railways Queer and Quaint; Notes by Rocket: A Compendium; Holidays in the Homeland; &c.' The address given was not Wimbledon but 'Bouverie Street, Fleet Street, E.C.', which I took to be the address of the magazine.

  'We're running a special feature on the North Eastern company,' he said.

  I could think of no real answer, so I said, 'Why?'

  'We started one last year but it had to be called off.'

  It was no answer, of course.

  'I'm a detective on the Company force,' I said.

  We were making for a little open-fronted shelter that lay just beyond the 'down' end of the platform.

  'Your wife said you were a policeman,' he said, as we stepped under the wooden roof. 'How's the line, by the way?'

  'Be cleared soon, by all accounts.'

  The snow was finding its way through my boot soles, and I kept moving my toes, trying to recall them to life. Bowman was at his flask again. With head tipped back, he resembled a spectacle-wearing bird. Having despatched the snow gang, the stationmaster was staring along the platform at me.