Death on a Branch Line (26 page)

The wife passed a couple of the letters across to Mrs Handley, who looked them over for a while. Then she handed the bundle back to Lydia, lifted the bar flap and moved towards the front door of the pub, saying, ‘I’ve something to show you.’

She came back a minute later, pushing her way through the cricketers, and holding a paper – another letter by the looks of it. She passed it first to Lydia, who read it over quickly before handing it to me. Well, after all the Mayfair hotels the address did come as a shock, for this dated from the time after his arrest for murder:
‘His Majesty’s Prison Wandsworth, Heathfield Road, London S.’ The letter was addressed to Mrs Handley. It began with thanks for a letter of hers, and ‘all the news of The Angel’. Hugh Lambert then fell to talking about the prison:

There is a warder here called Parkhurst, which causes me to
wonder whether there is a warder in Parkhurst Prison called
Wandsworth. The man seems doubly displaced because he also
bears a remarkably close resemblance to Dawlish, the chaplain
at my old college. But he is much nicer than Dawlish.

As you can already tell, this place is doing peculiar things to
my mind, but I am otherwise perfectly content. Everything is
wonderfully concentrated, and you have the whole world here
in its distilled essence. The sparrows in the yard do duty for the
Adenwold country-side; a cigarette after supper (or ‘tea’) is an
evening in the bar of the Ritz, and as for ‘prisoners’ association’
– well, that’s a chapter from a Dickens novel. Please send
my best regards to your husband, and tell Mervyn to look for a
robin’s nest in the old plum tree in the graveyard. There are
two holes in the trunk at the start of the branches. When I saw
it last, the north-facing one was occupied by the family of
robins; the other (west facing) was occupied by a family of flycatchers,
and the robin parents fed the flycatchers and vice
versa, which I found charming. Enclosed are two sketches for
Mervyn. The first is a robin and a flycatcher side by side, the
second (as I do hope you can tell) is of a mole. I don’t know
why. Perhaps, in my present situation, I should turn mole. Do
tell Mervyn, by the way, that if a mole were the size of a man
he would create a tunnel his own width and thirty-seven miles
long after a typical night’s work.
 

I handed the letter back to Mrs Handley, and she was on the edge of tears.

‘The drawings are at the framers in Malton,’ she said. ‘I’m going to put them up in place of the fish pictures.’

(You’d have thought wall space came at a premium in The
Angel, whereas in fact the fish pictures were the only ones in the place.)

‘We saw Mervyn in the woods just now,’ I said. ‘He was burning bird bones: a kestrel and a moorhen.’

The wife was frowning at me, but I’d checked Mrs Handley’s tears at any rate.

‘The kestrel attacked the moorhen, and they came down together,’ she said. ‘It happened out at the back here. Our Mervyn came racing in to tell me while I was talking to Master Hugh. We all went out to see, and Hugh looked down at these two birds and he said something like “That’s father and I”. Mervyn heard it quite distinctly, and when the police were first here asking all their questions I was daft enough to let on. Well, they had Mervyn in – took me and him by train to York, and asked us that many questions. The boy was in tears from the moment we left to the moment we came back – I’ve never seen him in such a state.’

‘He told us he’d never travelled by train,’ I said.

‘He never has
since
,’ said Mrs Handley. ‘Put him off for life, that trip did.’

‘That’s why you never went to Scarborough,’ said the wife, and Mrs Handley said, ‘Yes. It was a consideration.’

‘Was his statement put in?’ I said. ‘Was he called as a witness?’

Mrs Handley shook her head. ‘It never came to that,’ she said.

I noticed there was a small glass of wine on the bar in front of her. I had never seen her drink before.

‘Mrs Handley,’ I asked her, ‘do you really think that Master Hugh is a murderer?’

She just drained her glass, and said, ‘Do you want some dinner?’

We went over to a table and ate some cheese and cold meats while crowded in by the cricketers. At one point, they were so arranged that I saw a clear channel through them, and station master Hardy was at the end of it, sitting at a table in the ‘public’. He looked red-faced, perhaps on account of his suit, which looked very constricting. Every so often, one of the strapping cricketers would go over and place an empty pint glass on his table, and each time I glimpsed Hardy there were more and more glasses containing
sticky dregs under his nose. It wasn’t so much that the cricketers were not mannerly, or that they were drunk, it was just that they didn’t seem to notice him at all.

When Mrs Handley came to collect the plates, I asked whether Mr Gifford had pitched up.

‘Now, where he’s gone I don’t know,’ she said, with a distracted look.

Well, I would not tell her what little I knew on that score. But I did let on that John Lambert had gone missing from the Hall. (It couldn’t hurt to mention it; the fact would soon be common knowledge with all those coppers in the district looking for him.)

Then the wife said, ‘Where’s our bicyclist, Mrs Handley?’

‘I’ve no idea, I’m sure,’ she said.

‘Has he booked out?’ asked the wife.

‘He has not.’

‘When was he
due
to book out?’

‘No date’s been given. He’s paid for yesterday and he’s paid for today, and he can keep doing that as long as he likes as far as I’m concerned. His bicycle’s gone, though, you might have noticed.’

‘But it’s punctured,’ said the wife.

‘Well,’ said Mrs Handley, ‘I saw him pushing it off into Clover Wood not one hour since.’

Chapter Twenty-Eight

We stood outside the front of The Angel looking at the soft greyness of the sky, the great trees bright green against it. The rainbow was half there and half not, like the memory of a dream, and seeming to carry the message: this is not what you’d call the perfect summer’s day but it’s beautiful in its way, you know.

Two chimes floated up from the village.

‘Hugh Lambert has eighteen hours left alive,’ I said.

‘And what about your investigation?’ asked the wife.

‘In the first place …’ I said.

‘I think time’s too short for “in the first place”,’ said the wife.

‘… You don’t think Hugh Lambert murdered his father,’ I said, ‘and nor do I.’

‘Mervyn’s the key to it, wouldn’t you say?’ asked the wife – and it wasn’t quite like her to be asking questions in this way. As a rule she didn’t give tuppence what I thought. Instead, she was giving me a chance to say what she herself couldn’t.

Just then, the blurred voice of Mr Handley came from behind us.

‘Where
is
that boy?’ he said. ‘He’s late for his bloody dinner.’

He held a pewter of ale in his hand, and because of this and the natural impairment of his speech, it was impossible to know how worried he might be. I turned to him and said, ‘We’ll keep our eyes skinned.’

He turned and went back inside his pub. We watched him do it, and the wife said, ‘I do wonder about that bicyclist, you know.’

He’d always been a special study of the wife’s, and this was down to the shocking business of seeing him stab his own tyre. All
bicyclists were martyrs to rough roads: their machines were too flimsy and were forever getting crocked, and the bicyclists were forever moaning about it. To see the damage self-inflicted put the whole thing on its head.

‘Clover Wood is that way,’ I said, pointing directly over-opposite.

This time, I found a track rather than crashing on through the undergrowth, and I led the wife along it. Wherever the path divided, we took the wider route, but these would become narrow after a while, and we’d end in a jam of trees and thorn bushes. We pressed on through narrow gaps until we did at last strike another good-sized track. It was lined with tall everlastings of a very dark green, and by rights ought to have led to a blank-faced tomb or cemetery. In fact it led to a perfectly round clearing: a Piccadilly Circus of the woods with a fallen log in its centre, two people sitting on the log and two bicycles on the ground hard by. I knew that one bicycle would be punctured, the other not. We were about fifty yards short of the couple, who were the bicyclist from The Angel and a young woman I’d never set eyes on before. Their voices carried along the track, and I motioned the wife into a gap between two of the everlastings. I stepped in after her, and watched the couple.

The fellow’s arm was around the waist of the young woman. It rested there rather guiltily – that arm knew it was taking a liberty – and the conversation went stiffly.

‘It is a very happy chance that you came along, Dora,’ the fellow said.

‘But I don’t have a puncture repair outfit,’ said the woman.

‘Even so,’ said the bicyclist.

(‘That’s very magnanimous of him,’ whispered the wife, as a silence fell between the two on the tree trunk.)

‘There’s practically everything
but
a puncture repair outfit in my saddle-bag,’ the young woman eventually said.

‘I’ll take it into the blacksmith’s again tomorrow,’ said the man. ‘I tried him yesterday but he wasn’t about.’

‘Do blacksmiths fix punctures?’ asked his companion. ‘After all,
I’d have thought it was a rather delicate operation and
they’re
all fires and hammers.’

‘He might be able to fettle up a couple of tyre levers,’ the fellow said.

‘Why do you need a tyre lever?’

‘For levering off the tyre. It’s very hard to get the modern Dunlops over the wheel rim without one.’

‘Oh.’

And they sat silent once again.

(‘He’ll lose all feeling in that arm of his,’ I whispered to the wife.)

‘I don’t suppose that you find bicycles very interesting as a topic of conversation,’ the bicyclist said, after a further minute.

‘Well,’ said the young woman, ‘I’d rather ride them than talk about them.’

‘That goes for so many things, don’t you find?’ asked the bicyclist, who immediately coloured up. He was getting nowhere fast with his spooning.

‘You see, my original plan,’ he went on, ‘as I think you knew, was to make for Helmsley after spending just Friday night at The Angel. It was only the condition of the machine that made me hang on here.’

‘I come along this track most Sundays about this time,’ Dora said with a sort of sigh.

You don’t want them sighing at this stage
, I thought. But the fellow answered her sigh with a sigh of his own, followed by the remark: ‘Well, no fear of an interruption here.’

And somehow that did the trick, for after an interval of staring forward in silence they both turned towards each other and began kissing, which they continued to do as the wife crept off the way we’d come with me following, and as the Adenwold church bells began striking three.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Come five o’clock, we were watching the cricket game.

I stood on the boundary by the three poplars; the wife, being restless, was making a circuit of the ground. I was thinking about how, coming out of the woods, we’d struck two of the coppers in the search party. I’d asked them whether they’d come upon any scent of ‘their quarry’, and one of the two had said, ‘The quarry? That’s over yonder, en’t it?’ which had made me think John Lambert might yet escape them.

We’d just given up a hunt of our own: for young Mervyn. Our best hope seemed to be to find him and hustle him into saying what he knew, but Mervyn was not at his set-up and had evidently not returned to The Angel, for we’d come across Mrs Handley who’d told us that she was also searching for him. She had not been over-anxious, though: the boy was allowed the run of the woods and fields, and would often tramp off to East or West Adenwold and stay out all day.

The cricket game was being played against a great wall of grey sky that was darkening by the minute, and which made the players’ whites seem to glow. A woman I’d never seen before stood by the pavilion twirling a lacy parasol, and I thought:
That’ll have to
do duty as an umbrella before long
. A second charabanc had brought the second team (the two motors were now drawn up alongside the pavilion), and she must have come in with them.

The first innings had ended after a shockingly short period of time, and the Reverend Ridley was giving directions to his team, who – having batted and scored thirty-six – were now about to go out and field.

The pep talk concluded, some of the players performed physical jerks as they strode out, for all the world as if they were about to do something strenuous. There might have been raindrops already flying, or it might just have been the colour of the sky that made me think so.

The players were now all arranged.

A fast bowler ran up and, reaching the wicket, leapt and pedalled his legs as though cycling – seeming, as he rose, to make the shape of a sea-horse in the air. He landed running; the ball flew past the batsman, who turned and watched it rise into the hands of the wicket keeper, who, having caught it, chucked it to another fielder and gave the batsman the evil eye for a while.

Then it all started again.

The wife was now at my shoulder on the boundary.

I asked her: ‘Did you hear what the vicar was saying?’

‘Something to someone about not sending a lot down on the leg side to Pepper. He said they’d be absolutely slaughtered if Pepper got a lot to leg. He’d only have to start glancing at their legs, and they’d all be finished.’

‘I expect Pepper’s the man in bat just now,’ I said. ‘What are the teams called, do you know?’