Murder At Deviation Junction Read online

  I had in that moment determined to investigate the matter of Paul Peters, and not leave it to others. I was bored in my work and in need of distraction. I found myself thinking: if this is suicide, there will be nothing to plunge into, and I will be straight back to hunting up ticket frauds and petty hooligans. But as my thoughts ran on, I found that I was trying to picture whoever had done for the boy and made it look like suicide.

  Why would a man come all the way to Stone Farm to make away with himself? Peters was a young fellow doing work that he enjoyed and with everything before him. He had not committed suicide. He had been killed - I was on the instant certain of it - and Stephen Bowman was mixed up in it somehow, or knew more than he let on. He was standing by the milk train now, having stepped across from the station building, camera once again over his shoulder. Why had he come to this station on this day? But no - he hadn't made the choice to come. We had all been turfed off the train against expectations. And as for the reason for his being on the line . . . well, he was staying at Whitby. But there was more to it than that.

  Crystal, ready to depart for his bed, stood in the booking office doorway. I would show him what I was made of - him and Shillito both. I would search for the truth about Peters, and if I made enough headway before Christmas Eve, I might be DS by New Year.

  I climbed into the one passenger carriage with Bowman. We were railway rovers, him and me both. Any man who wanted to make his way in the modern world had to be. We stowed our cameras on the luggage racks. Bowman, not looking at me, said, 'Your wife said you were detective grade. But you gave out to the boy that you were detective sergeant.'

  I coloured up while removing my topcoat. He didn't miss much, for all the booze he put away. He must have a head like cast iron.

  'I have the grade "detective sergeant" on the brain,' I said, 'what with forever thinking about this interview I have coming up.'

  Bowman gave a short nod.

  'Christmas Eve's the big day,' I said, 'at the headquarters in Middlesbrough.'

  Bowman, taking his seat, said, 'I can hardly think for tiredness just now, but when I get back to London I'll fish out last year's diary. It's in the office somewhere, and I have a note in there of Peters's wanderings. Come down, and I'll stand you dinner. Make a day of it.'

  'Up,' I said.

  'What's that?'

  'It's "up" to London as far as the railways are concerned.'

  I wondered at his not knowing, being a railway journalist.

  He nodded wearily, saying, 'But what if you're going across country: Stafford to Birmingham, for instance? What's that? It's neither up nor down.'

  'The kid says that Peters carried two cameras. That right?'

  Bowman nodded and yawned at the same time.

  'He would generally take two on a job, yes.'

  'Why?'

  'In case one broke - even though the model he used, the Mentor Reflex, is about the sturdiest portable available. He was over-keen, you see.'

  Bowman made do with one Mentor Reflex. The job did not justify the precaution of taking two - was not important enough. He had arranged his topcoat over his legs, making a blanket of it. As we pulled away from Stone Farm, he looked through the window at the snow-covered fields. It was all like so much spilt milk.

  'Beautiful railway ride!' he said, in his sarcastic way.

  A moment later, he was asleep, and the stop at the small town of Loftus - where more milk was taken up - didn't interrupt his slumbers. As we rolled on parallel with the high street, the sea came into view once more, and I looked down to the left, towards the ironstone mine that stood on the low cliff there. This was Flat Scar mine, one of the biggest, and it squatted at the seaward end of a great valley that had been cut by a tiny beck.

  The wheelhouse of the mine was at the centre of a web of wires. Iron buckets were being sent out along these, running to and from the mine's own railway station. The mine was its own little black town, with its own gasworks and its own black beach behind the main building, on which rusty lumps of machinery and slag were dumped as required. A wooden jetty stuck out to sea, but this was disused now. No stone went north by boat.

  From the mine station, ironstone was taken up a zigzag railway towards the furnaces at Rectory Works. I looked up to the right, and saw the Rectory (as the works was generally known) with its line of fiery towers - only they were not blast furnaces but kilns, and they did not make iron but burned the lumps of ironstone down so that there was more iron and less stone. It was then cheaper to carry to the blast furnaces of Ironopolis.

  The iron cloud over the kilns was slowly changing from one shape to another^ moving like a person in agony.

  As we rumbled on towards the Kilton Viaduct, which would carry us across the valley, I looked down at the mine, and up at the kilns. Here was a pretty situation: a train was setting off from the mine station. It was making ready to climb the zigzag. I stood up in the compartment to watch the exchange. The zigzag line, running east to west, would take the iron train between the hundred- and-fifty-foot-high brick legs of the Kilton Viaduct while we crossed over the top, heading from north to south.

  A wind gauge fluttered beyond the compartment window - a strange-looking contraption. It was like a small windmill, and it operated a 'stop' signal in high winds. It was not safe for a train to be on the viaduct in those conditions, but we were rolling across it now, going at the precautionary slow speed over the great ravine. The walls on either side of the single track were low, and I looked over the one on the left to see the iron train still climbing. At any moment, it would be passing underneath. The falling snow, the rising iron cloud, the crisscrossing of the trains, the rise and fall of the tide and the slow approach of Christmas - all were part of the larger machine. The transition I'd taken a fancy to happened out of sight, with black smoke rising from below. The little ironstone engine had been on the left; now, having passed underneath the viaduct, it was rising to the right, taking its dozen wagons to the waiting kilns of the Rectory Works, where more fun lay in store - for the wagons would be picked up bodily by a mighty winch, and carried to the top of the kilns, there to be upended. I had seen that business carried on, and it was like watching a hungry giant feed itself. An account of it might have been interesting for readers of Bowman's magazine, and what could match it for photographic opportunities?

  But he slept on.

  He had no enthusiasm for his work. He was like me: fixed in a rut. I gazed at his fiery little face, which was suddenly blotted out as we shot into the Grinkle Tunnel. Three quarters of a mile of blackness . . . and we came out into the beginnings of day. Bowman had rolled forwards somewhat. He was the same sleeping man as before, only now shaking with the train.

  He was not shamming.

  He had wanted to know my line of questioning - that was why he'd stayed on at Stone Farm. But I must lose him in Whitby, for I intended to make straight for the siding where, the lad porter had told me, the Club Train had been kept; and was kept still. It no longer ran, and nor did Peters, who had been closely interested in it, and I thought those facts might very well be connected.

  We were now gliding across the viaduct over Staithes. That village was packed tight in the mighty ravine below. During the short stop at the station, I watched fishermen walking between boats on the snowy beach, wondering whether to put out. 'All weather is a warning.' Where had I heard that? A man led a pony with a sack slung on either side across a white field. Kettleness station came next; then the viaduct of Sandsend, which was like the legs of a giant iron man walking, and the houses below looked as though they'd been pitched off the cliff by that same giant.

  I was not tired, despite having been up all night, and I knew the reason: in the months and even years beforehand, I'd done too little. I had been biding my time in the York Railway Police office, avoiding the chilly stares of Shillito, listening enviously to the sounds of the engines and enginemen coming and going in the station beyond. An office in a station was a ridiculous thing: a ship
forever docked.

  We were now rolling across the snow-covered cliff-tops - and our train was the only moving thing on those tops as we made for the terminus, Whitby West Cliff. As we came in, I woke Bowman with a touch on the shoulder.

  'Copy's come up short,' he said, quite distinctly, at the moment of waking, and then he looked at me for a moment as though he didn't know me. But he quickly apologised, and collected up his things.

  Whitby West Cliff station was a little way out of the town, which was silenced by snow. Bowman walked beside me through the drifting whiteness, the camera slung over his shoulder. We stopped outside a bakery that was responsible for all the activity in one particular narrow street just above the harbour.

  'Which is your hotel, old man?' I said.

  'Oh,' he said. 'The Metropole.'

  'I know it,' I said, and I pointed seawards. 'The alley past the chapel will see you directly to the door.'

  'Right-o,' he said, but he made no move.

  A low tugboat was rocking across the water from the west to the east harbour wall - nothing more to look at than a floating chimney. A church clock counted sadly to five.

  'To think that it's twelve hours until I can take a drink,' said

  Bowman. 'That's if I stick to my fixed rule .. . which I never do.'

  'Well, I'm for the town station, and home,' I said.

  He nodded and we shook hands.

  'You'll keep me posted as to your investigation?'

  I nodded. 'I'll be in touch,' I said.

  But he still didn't move off, and it struck me that he'd been clinging to me like a barnacle right from the start. He now muttered something while looking down at the snowy pavement.

  'What's that?' I said.

  'Peters,' he said, looking up. 'It comes to me now . . . He'd had one of his two cameras stolen.'

  'Where?'

  'Middlesbrough - in the vicinity of the station, I think.'

  'Did he report it?'

  'Not sure.'

  'When did this happen?'

  'Couple of days before I saw him for the last time. I must look at my diary, as I say.'

  And he nodded again and moved off in the direction of the sea.

  * * *

  Chapter Six

  Down to the sea, up again a little way, and I came to the other Whitby station: the Town Station. It overlooked the harbour. Two trains were in steam, but there were no takers for them. A line of footprints in the snow ran along the platform, and I followed them to a porter who was sitting on a barrow reading the Whitby Morning Post instead of scraping up the snow. I held up my warrant card to him, saying, 'How do? I'm cutting through to Bog Hall, all right?'

  I wasn't really asking but telling him.

  I stepped down off the platform and walked into a wide railway territory across which snow flew right to left, seawards. Here was the main line to York, running away through a mass of sidings and marshalling yards. Beyond lay the estuary of the river, where signals gave way to the masts of schooners. I was making for a mass of carriages by the river's edge when a tiny pilot engine moving under a great tower of steam checked my progress. The driver kept his face set forwards but the fireman turned and smiled down at me.

  'Now then!' he called down.

  'You wouldn't know the whereabouts of the yardmaster?' I said.

  Just then a man stepped around the smokebox end of the engine, which straightaway began a fast retreat, the fireman grinning at me all the while.

  'Who wants me?' asked the man. I explained what I was about and showed him my warrant card, and he gave his name as Mackenzie. He was a big bloke, and seemed to fairly roll over the rails and barrow-boards on our way to the farthest corner of the siding, where the railway land met the half-frozen river.

  'Mothballed,' said Mackenzie, coming to rest, with his fingers in his waistcoat pockets, before a train of oddments. We were looking directly up at a dirty but good-class bogie carriage. It was in Company colours, but 'CTC' was written in gold on the side.

  'Cleveland Travelling Club,' said Mr Mackenzie. 'Ran from Whitby to Middlesbrough and back every day for nigh on twenty years.'

  'When was it decommissioned?'

  'One year since,' he said. 'Fancy a look up? Pride of the line, this was,' said Mackenzie, hauling himself up towards one of the high doors. He was proud of it himself too, as it seemed to me.

  He got the door open after a bit of struggle that cost him his perch on the footboard, pitching him on to the mucky snow beneath. He clambered up again, motioning me to follow.

  The carriage smelt of past cooking, and it contained coldness: a special damp kind.

  'Subscribing Club members only in here,' said Mackenzie. 'That was always the rule. No guests allowed - not even if they paid treble. You after taking pictures?'

  He was pointing at the Mentor Reflex.

  I shook my head. I was looking at a great boiler in a cubby-hole all of its own.

  'Tea-making machine,' said Mackenzie, as he squeezed his way forwards.

  'Galley's next,' he said, sliding back a door that gave on to a little dusty kitchen. Half a dozen dusty wine glasses in a basket; two cups rested on a short draining board. I picked one up.

  'Gold trim,' I said.

  I knew the design. Best Company china. I'd first come across it at the Station Hotel, York.

  'Where's the rest of the service?' I asked Mackenzie, and his cheeks rolled upwards and outwards as he smiled. 'Tom Coleman's back parlour, shouldn't wonder.'

  'Who's he?'

  'Whitby Town stationmaster as was. Took superannuation nine months since. Took himself off to Cornwall 'n all.'

  'That's handy,' I said. 'Who else would know about this show?' 'You might try the traffic department,' said Mackenzie. 'They supplied the Club tickets.'

  'They'd be seasons, I suppose?'

  'Aye,' said Mackenzie. 'Whitby-Middlesbrough annual returns. Specials, like.'

  We were moving along the corridor again.

  Mackenzie said, 'The Club never had a full complement of members, you know.'

  'The club cars I've heard of,' I said, 'on the Lancashire and Yorkshire and the Midland and suchlike - there'd be twenty-five members or so. That amount was needed before the Company would lay out money for the carriage.'

  'Well, this club was different,' said Mackenzie.

  You'd have thought he was the Hon Sec or some such.

  'Richer,' he added, after a space. 'Membership never overtopped five.'

  We were moving along the corridor again, passing two compartments. Inside they were like a rare sort of First Class accommodation: wood panelling with walnut trimmings, fancy electroliers bunched up into railway chandeliers. Photographic views were mounted in glass frames above each of the dozen seats - all the photographs showed country houses instead of the usual waterfalls or whatnot. One of the window panes was cracked, and there was a single bootprint on one of the seats.

  Mackenzie was shaking his head as we pushed along the corridor. 'It was fitted on to the morning Whitby-Middlesbrough train,' he said. 'Came back with the evening Middlesbrough-Whitby.'

  The corridor now brought us into a saloon: a railway sitting room with two settees facing each other under another brace of chandeliers. The seats had their backs to the windows. At either end were more chairs: two rockers facing a third sofa, and this one with a drop-head, for lying back.

  'You'd have your glass of wine on your way home from business,' said Mackenzie, 'and you'd drink it stretched out flat! Bit of all right, wouldn't you say?'

  'But only one of them could do that,' I said.

  'All right if you were that one, then -'

  'I just can't picture the sort of men who might have rode up here waiting on the platform at Whitby Town every morning,' I said.

  'The train ran from Whitby,' he said. 'They didn't. Nobody who rode up here boarded at Whitby as far as I know. They lived at different spots further along the line.'

  'Where?'

  'Wherever a go
od house was to be found. Places around Saltburn.'

  Stone Farm was near Saltburn. Was this a Club of murderers?

  'They lived closer to Middlesbrough than to Whitby, then?'

  He nodded.

  'It's an hour and a half all the way from Whitby to Middlesbrough. You wouldn't want to do that every day.'

  'They all rode every day?'

  He nodded.

  They were not gentry, then; not county people but businessmen. They could run to the smaller sorts of country houses. They'd have carriages and half a dozen servants apiece, but were still obliged to turn up daily at their place of business.