Death on a Branch Line(16)

After the platform, the ‘down’ line divided, one track running into a three-road siding with a stack of general railway rubbish piled between the tracks – baulks of timber, rusted track shoes and the like. There was a small goods warehouse, not much larger than the station house, with a weighbridge outside it.

The ‘down’ platform over-opposite contained nothing but a single bench, with more cornfields beyond.

The bicyclist, wheeling his machine, advanced upon us and gave not so much as a nod as he passed on his way. Was he off to silence John Lambert? His machine made the whirring sound of a dragonfly. I was wondering whether I ought to pursue and question him when a sudden bark of laughter came from the woods ahead of us.

At first, I thought this came from the signal box, which was half in the woods, and raised one storey off the ground on stone arches. (This, I supposed, so as to give the signalman a clear view of the trains arriving and departing through the trees.) The signalman stood at the top of the wooden staircase that led to the high door of the box. He did not look like one of the usual solid sorts employed in signalling: he was thin with a straggly beard, no cap and a uniform worn anyhow.

But when the laughter came again, I knew it had not come from his lips, but from those of another lounger on a level with him but on the other side of the tracks. This scrawny youth I took to be the lad porter at Adenwold. He sat like a crow on the little iron platform built onto the top of the pole that held the signals controlling the station. He was on a level with the treetops, yet slightly in advance of the trees, giving him a view of the whole station and the village hard by. And he was smoking.

He called across to his partner the signalman: ‘Reckon this pair are thinking, “Crikey, where’ve we pitched up?”’

‘Reckon so,’ the signalman called back.

‘Who’s that?’ asked the wife, screening her eyes and looking up towards the signal gantry.

‘He ought to be down here giving a hand with our bags,’ I said, ‘not cackling in the bloody trees.’

There was a movement from the direction of the booking office, and I saw a fat man turning in the doorway. I made towards him, passing the open doorway of the waiting room where stood one giant black bench with horsehair bursting through holes in the seat cover.

The complications of light (too much of it outside, too little of it inside) meant I could make out little more than a silhouette in the booking office, but I knew the man for the station master by the glint of brass buttons on his tunic.

‘Your porter’s not up to much,’ I called across to him, but there was no answer, only a sort of rumble and whistle from within the dark room. I set down my bag and walked over.

‘I say, mate,’ I began, ‘I’ve never seen the like of …’

The words died on my lips as I looked inside the booking office.

It was a sort of wood-smelling hovel. There was a counter with an ABC telegraph machine on it. But there was so much clutter on the floor in front of the counter that I supposed most passengers had their tickets served out through the doorway. There was a wide cabinet fixed to the wall, and a clock beside it. A tall sloping desk held many papers and tattered books, but a good many more books lay on the floor: Wagon Book, Transfer Order Book, Delivery Book, Goods Not Reserved Book – all of these were on the dusty floorboards, and it was all wrong. It was like seeing a Bible on the floor of a church.

The fat man stood guiltily in amongst this wreckage, as well he might do. One visit from a company auditor and he’d be stood down on the spot. He was no smarter in appearance than his two juniors in the trees, but in manner he was the opposite. The sweat rolled off him, and he looked scared. He was standing beside a small table, and here was the queerest thing of all, for on the table top (which was covered over with a green cloth) were perhaps sixty or seventy tiny leaden soldiers set out in a battle scene. I looked at the man, and his eyes flickered towards me, then away. We were both struck dumb, save for the fact that a kind of regular, desperate whistle escaped from the man’s throat as he laboured to breathe in the heat.

I said, ‘Your lad porter, Mister …’ at which he gave a start and a small cry of ‘Oh yes?’

He looked at me with great anxiety, practically trembling.

‘You ought to know that he’s sitting at the top of the signal pole and cheeking the passengers,’ I said.

‘Leave off, Jim,’ came the voice of the wife from the platform. ‘Could you just ask the gentleman where we might get a bed for the night?’

‘I sent the boy up to oil the lamps,’ said the station master. ‘He’s … he’s still up there, is he?’