Murder At Deviation Junction Read online

  'What's Langton's place?' I said.

  Wood looked at me for a space.

  'I'm saying nowt about it.'

  'You've one question left,' one of the football blokes called out to me.

  'Mr Wood,' I said, 'have you heard of any operator in this town - any man who might at some time last year have had away a good- quality camera?'

  'Camera? What for?'

  'How do you mean, "What for?" The camera was taken from a professional photographer in a street robbery this time last year. It happened in Spring Street near the railway station.'

  'Camera?' Wood said, making a question of the word again. 'Never heard of any such article being taken.'

  'Then do you have any idea where a good camera might fetch up having been taken?'

  I was nearer the mark with this, for one of the footballers said, 'You give him the tip, Woody, and he'll do all right by us over the little bit of bother we had in York.'

  He didn't have this quite right, but I kept silence.

  'Let's be right,' Wood said to me. 'I'll take you to a likely spot, but the bloke there - he doesn't want any bother from you lot.'

  'I'm after the camera,' I said, 'and that's all.'

  Wood nodded, and fixed his cap back on his head.

  'We'll take a walk then.'

  I picked up my hat and notebook. Turning to Clegg and his mates, I said, 'I'll show these statements to Detective Sergeant Shillito, but I'm going to recommend the matter goes no further.'

  Clegg nodded at me.

  'Obliged to you, mate,' he said. I then turned and followed the little bloke, Woody, into the street.

  Woody pushed on ahead, red-faced from anger or shame at helping out a copper; or just from the bitter cold. It was washday in Middlesbrough, and we moved under great glowing white banners of towelling and sheets suspended across the streets. Turning a corner in the half-light, I fancied that I saw two great snowflakes swooping down towards us, but they were seagulls. We were on the edge of the town centre, and rows of shops began to appear amid the red houses, but the place that Woody found was something between a shop and a house. The door was ajar; there were words painted on it that I did not have time to read, because Woody pushed it open directly and then, saying something in an under- breath, he was off down the street like greased bloody lightning.

  A man in a dusty topcoat stood by a small fire looking thoughtfully at a great mix-up of goods, as though he'd lately bought it as a job lot and was wondering whether it had been a good investment. There were bits of bicycles, gramophones, sticks of furniture, a tangle of overmantels, with the ornamental items that might once have stood on them - and that might, but probably wouldn't, do so again - tumbled into wooden boxes hard by. There were a lot of clocks, some of which turned out to be barometers, and a whole corner was given over to musical instruments, including half a dozen fiddles, one of these being labelled 'violin' as though it was a cut above the others. I nodded at the man, holding up my warrant card.

  'Detective Stringer,' I said. 'Railway force.'

  The man stood up straight.

  'You wouldn't have taken delivery of a camera, I suppose, some time over the past year?'

  The man looked at his boots for a while, then up.

  'Hold on,' he said, and turned on his heel. He disappeared into a back room, and after a couple of minutes of scuffling and cursing, came back carrying a camera.

  'That was quick,' I said.

  'Don't hang about when you lads come calling,' he said.

  He wanted me off his premises, just like most of the folks I met in the course of my work.

  He handed it over to me. It was the same as the one that had dangled from Bowman's shoulder, and the one that had been found in the brook near Peters's body: the Mentor Reflex. But this time the changing box that held the exposures - or might do - was fixed in place at the side. If the doings was all inside there . . . that could only mean that this camera had not been stolen by people interested in what Peters had photographed. It must, in that case, have been taken by the common run of street thief, a man interested only in the value of the camera. Why else would the camera have been brought to the man standing before me?

  If the exposures proved to be in place, the villains concerned in the Middlesbrough theft must have been a different lot from the ones who did for Peters at Stone Farm - that was my first thought, at any rate.

  'Have you had this off, mate?' I asked the man, pointing to the changing box.

  He shook his head.

  'And I don't believe the bloke who brought it in had done either.'

  'Why not?'

  'He didn't look my idea of a whatsname - photographic artist.'

  'Who was he?' 'Reckon I'd let on if I knew?'

  'Er, no,' I said.

  'That's just where you're wrong,' he said. 'I'm not bent, though you might think it from the looks of this place. A bloke came in, sold me a stack of stuff for a tanner. I took it sight unseen, granted. But that en't a crime now, is it?'

  'Would you recognise the bloke again?'

  'Big cap ... thick muffler ...' said the shopkeeper.

  'That's narrowed it down to about thirty million.'

  'I can't help that, mister,' he said.

  I believed him, just as I'd believed Clegg and the men of Vulcan Athletic. They seemed to be part of an honest network - or had they been guying me from start to finish?

  'Mind if I take it?' I said. 'It's evidence.'

  'You're the boss,' he said.

  Anything to get shot of me.

  I carried the Mentor Reflex into the middle of town. The wide, new streets were all in straight lines, and the trick was to avoid the ones along which the sea wind raced. The streets were prettily lit, for all the cold, and the shops crowded with Christmas tomfoolery. There was a clear-cut line between the sexes: the men were moving fast, thinking of business, the women moving slow, thinking of Christmas. I was turning a corner in the locality of the railway station when I was checked by the sight of a small fir tree from which dangled little medicine bottles of coloured glass. 'Milner,' read the sign above the window. 'Druggist.' The important notice was in the corner of the window: 'Photographs Developed'.

  I pushed open the door, entering a sort of warm, chemical Christmas. Approaching the counter, I removed my gloves and loosened the catch that held the plates on to the camera. A man waited at the counter: white-coated and clean - struck me as a doctor who'd missed his mark, like all druggists.

  'Can you do these for me express?'

  'Two hours,' he said, and whether that was express or no, I couldn't have said from his tone.

  'How many exposures in here?' asked the man, taking the tin from me.

  'Well, there'd be two at most, wouldn't there?' I replied. 'Or there might not be any.'

  He looked at me narrowly, saying, 'If there aren't any, it won't take two hours.'

  I requested the largest print size, and then went off for a bite and a warm, eventually walking into Hintons, although not the select parts used by Steve Bowman and his wife, but a smoke-filled, publike part of it, where I ate fried eggs and drank a cup of cocoa.

  It was five o'clock when I returned to Milner, the druggist.

  'Anything doing?' I asked, and by way of reply he handed over an envelope, saying, 'Two and fourpence.'

  * * *

  Chapter Ten

  I paid the money over without a thought for the cost, and pulled first from the envelope the two negatives. Five men stood on a platform before a special carriage. It was the one I'd viewed at Bog Hall Sidings, Whitby. Above it was visible a part of the platform canopy, and I knew that right away for the broken one at Saltburn. The men's eyes seemed to be burning, and all about their boots was a mass of rough blackness - snow in reverse.

  I then pulled out the prints. Going from left to right, the first man was clean-shaven and wore a silk hat (which he held in his left hand, along with his gloves) and a topcoat buttoned right up; there would be a smart blac
k morning coat underneath, no doubt. He was handsome, and his hair went backwards in waves. His dashing looks put me in mind of fine copperplate handwriting.

  He looked slightly sidelong at the photographer, as if to say, 'Photograph me, would you?' and his left arm somehow did not belong about the shoulder of the next man, number two, but that's where it was. Number two was perhaps half the age of number one. He had a friendly face and smiled straight at the photographer. He carried a folded copy of a newspaper, the name of which I could make out: it was the Whitby Morning Post, which served the whole of the coast of North Yorkshire. He wore a derby hat, and had a fine winter flower in his buttonhole, as did the next man, who was about of an age with the first; his rough, grey hair and beard were all of a piece with his tweed suit. He might have been an explorer, freshly returned from the Arctic Circle. The fourth had a round face (he was bareheaded and bald) and round glasses. He gave a cautious smile. The flower in his buttonhole did not suit him. It was too flowery. Number five was older than the rest. He wore a stovepipe hat, and had blind-looking eyes; he looked dirty and confused, but also rich. He might be Moody - the man who'd gone under a train, father of another Moody now living in Pickering. I looked them over again, thinking of them in turn as handsome fellow, young fellow, wild-looking fellow, bald fellow and old fellow.

  The second print was more or less the same, save for the fact that the young man was looking down, and I saw immediately that this was the difference between a photograph that could be used in a picture paper, and one that could not. The prints themselves made an impression not very different from that of the negatives - and this, I believed, was on account of the strangeness of the snow light; I could not tell whether the picture had been taken in the morning or afternoon.

  What had become of these men?

  I had already been told that one was dead, and I knew this much: that there was only one way your fortunes could go once you'd attained the distinction of your own railway carriage, and that was down the hill. I found myself turning one of the prints over, half expecting the druggist to have written their names on the reverse. I looked at the man, now serving a cold cure to another customer. Smart shopkeeper like himself - he might know one of the Club gents; he might know all six. So might any man in Middlesbrough, come to that. . .

  I had meant to take my trophy straight to Detective Sergeant Williams, but a new notion came to me as I exited the druggist's, and I struck out for the largest building in my line of sight: the Middlesbrough Exchange. I crossed a wide square that was filled with trams come to the rescue of the freezing citizens. In the cold darkness, the iron-making smell had descended on the middle of the town: the strange, out-of-the-way smell of burning sand.

  One of the mighty double doors of the Exchange was being swung to as I approached, and the place was evidently closing up. A fossil in a gold-braided uniform watched me go in, as if to say, 'I won't trouble to ask your business; you'll be ejected before long in any case.' In the great hall of the Exchange, the remaining groups of buyers and sellers talked under clouds of cigar smoke. Wooden stands were placed at intervals, each one an island under its own electric light. Notices were pinned to the stands: the day's prices of coal, ironstone, iron, steel and ships, as I supposed - all the goods that had raised Middlesbrough from nothing to a city of a hundred thousand souls in less than a lifetime.

  Some clerks remained at the counters that were set into the walls beneath a great gallery, but most were already shuttered. I walked towards one group of businessmen with my warrant card and the photograph held aloft. 'Detective Stringer of the railway police,' I said, and they turned to me as one. It cost them quite an effort to look civil, but the warrant card made them do it. What did they see? A thin, youngish bloke with a camera over his shoulder; topcoat a little out at the elbows. It was my work coat. A new one, in a better grade of cloth, would be served out to me if I gained my promotion. As they eyed me, I felt very strongly the want of that word 'Sergeant' - 'Detective Sergeant' would have testified to at least one promotion successfully secured. One of the men took the photograph and passed it among his fellows. The second one to clap eyes on it spoke immediately.

  'It's Falconer,' he said, and he pointed to the rather wild-looking one, the explorer type.

  The next man to take the photograph nodded, and he too said, 'Falconer.'

  'How would I find the man?' I asked.

  'How would you find him?' asked one of the men, in a wondering tone. 'Well, that's the question, isn't it?'

  Another of the group was speaking:

  'And that one's - why, that's Lee.'

  'Which one?' I said, craning to see, and I was aware of not appearing to be a fellow of quite the right sort.

  'This one,' said one of the men, indicating the bald-headed and spectacle-wearing gent, while another at the same time asked, 'Is some connection discovered between the two?' But in fact they were all speaking at once now, and their black-gloved hands were all over the photograph as they each sought a better look.

  'It's a travelling club,' I said, but the remark was lost in the scramble.

  One of the men was asking, 'You're on the Middlesbrough force and you've not heard of poor George Lee?' The first one to have spoken gave me a narrow look, saying, 'You seem to stand in need of some enlightenment.'

  'I'm from the railway force,' I said, 'stationed at York.'

  'You're operating independently of the Middlesbrough constabulary?' one of the men asked. He seemed to quite credit that I might be, and that this might be a rather clever notion. He looked a little more amiable than the rest, but the situation was too humiliating for words. I must break away.

  'Does this represent some new line in the investigation?' asked one of the men as I reclaimed the picture.

  'Yes,' I said.

  'But isn't it a little late for that?'

  Christ knew whether it was or no, but Detective Sergeant Ralph Williams would be the man to tell me. Reclaiming the photograph, I fairly sprinted towards the double doors but one of the group - the amiable chap - was keeping pace, and as we crossed the exchange floor, he held his gloved hand out before him as though grasping an imaginary cricket ball.

  'George Lee,' he said, waving his cane enthusiastically. 'If I had in my hand a quantity of ironstone, he could tell me the percentage of iron in a trice. Not just a rough indication of quality. I mean, he'd shoot a verdict straight at you. "Thirty-five per cent," he'd say, which is a good deal, and in which case, of course, you were on velvet. Twenty-five per cent? Oh Lord, then you had a headache - do you sink your shaft or no for that grade of stone?'

  He'd stopped in the lobby or vestibule of the Exchange before the great double doors, and he was pressing the question on me:

  'For twenty-five per cent stone?'

  'If you could mine the stuff cheaply . . .' I said, groping in the darkness, and the amiable man gave me a sort of wink at that. We were pushing on towards the tram-packed square, the man's cane ticking like a clock on the new-laid pavement.

  'What were George Lee's origins?' I asked, reasoning that no disgrace ought to attach to ignorance on that point.

  But the amiable man had his arm out, and was saying, 'This is me.'

  A hansom had stopped for him, and it had whisked him away as I looked on.

  Not three minutes later, I was in the warm police office, where Ralph Williams - who was also amiable, but steady and quietly spoken with it - was inviting me to sit down at his desk chair. He himself perched on the desk.

  'Now you have some further questions as regards the dead photographer?' he said, once I'd explained the absence of my quarry Clegg.

  'I've discovered his camera,' I said, indicating the Mentor Reflex, 'and I've found the pictures in it. Now it all comes down to the identity of these fellows -'

  I took the photograph from its pasteboard sleeve. 'They're the Whitby-Middlesbrough Travelling Club - went every day from country stops along the line into this station.'

  Williams seem
ed a good fellow, but I'd been hoping to stifle that grin of his, and in this I had succeeded.

  'The shot was taken at Saltburn,' I said, 'by Paul Peters.'

  'Well, this is a turn-up,' said Williams, eyeing the photograph.

  I told him how I'd come by it.

  'Now this man,' I said, pointing to the bald, spectacle-wearing one, 'is George Lee, mining engineer. Some blokes at the Exchange just told me.'

  Williams nodded.

  'I believe it is.'

  'What's become of him?'

  'Lee?' said Williams, still looking at the photograph. 'Why, murdered.'

  'Like Peters,' I said, 'and this picture makes a connection between them.'