Death on a Branch Line(2)

‘What happened?’ said Wright as I replaced the receiver.

‘Bloke hung up,’ I said.

‘Pity is that,’ said Wright, who was pulling at his collar to ventilate his scrawny self.

I glanced down at the black steel box that supported the receiver and its cradle – it always put me in mind of a little tomb, somehow.

‘You should try again,’ said Wright, from behind the pages of the Yorkshire Evening Press, for he was now back at his desk and looking over the pages of that paper. ‘Every room at the Grand boasts a sea view, you know. Why have you left it so late, any road?’

‘Just … forgot,’ I said.

‘You’ll be in lumber with your missus over that,’ he said from behind the paper. ‘Likes flower gardens, doesn’t she, your missus?’

The heading on the back page of Wright’s paper was ‘The Crisis At Hand’.

Wright put down the paper.

‘The blooms in the Valley Gardens’ll be absolutely glorious at this time of year – absolutely bloody glorious.’

Wright stood up, pitched the Press across his desk and quit the office, leaving the door open behind him, having no doubt thought of another way of avoiding doing any work. I read the heading now uppermost on the Press: ‘The German Move in Morocco’.

It was holiday time, but all the papers were full of war talk.

I was now alone in the police office, and I watched through the door as the saddle-tank engine moved away. I then looked around the green walls – at the Chief’s half-a-dozen shields won for shooting that rested on the mantel-shelf. (There was no railway police team as such, so the Chief shot for the Wagon Works.) I glanced at the photograph of Constables Whittaker and Ward competing in the tug-of-war at the North Eastern Railway Police Southern Division Athletics, which had been held at Doncaster racecourse in pelting rain two years since. The picture showed them in the process of losing at tug-of-war, but nobody was to know that since the other team was cut out of the picture.

Then there was the photograph by the armoury cupboard, which showed some big men in shorts making a pyramid by standing on each other’s shoulders and supporting, at the very pinnacle, a slightly smaller man. These men were soldiers, and this pyramid was an achievement of the Chief’s days in the York and Lancashire Regiment, which was not named after York, the city in whose railway station I presently sat, but after the Duke of York, whose lands were somewhere else altogether – although still within Yorkshire, of course. The Chief had been a sergeant major, and mad keen on fitness.

I looked at the dead dust of the fireplace: a poker lay in it, left over from the last time the fire had been stirred. That was three months since. It was said that the temperature had lately touched 99 degrees in the shade in London, and an artist at the Press had taken to drawing a fat, sweating face in the middle of the flaming sun that appeared above the weather bulletin.

I sat down at the chair of the desk that Constables Whittaker, Ward and Flower spent most of the day arguing over. The noises of the station beyond gave way to the ticking of the office clock, and I looked at the time: 3.30 p.m. The clock chimed – you never thought it was going to, but it always did – and the significance of that chime to me just then was that I had two hours forty-five minutes left in which to book accommodation for the week-end away I’d promised the wife (for I would be meeting her at our usual spot in the middle of the footbridge at 6.15 p.m.).

Looking back later on, though, it seemed to me that the three-thirty chime marked the start of one of the most sensational periods ever to pass in York station.

It all began at three thirty-one, when the telephone rang in the police office, the sound clashing with that of running feet from beyond the office door and the cry: ‘The gun … There’s a gun in his hand!’





Chapter Two


It wasn’t logical, but I arrested my dash towards the door to answer the phone.

‘You are not, repeat not …’ I heard the voice on the line saying before I replaced the receiver with a crash. It had been Dewhurst, governor of the York station exchange. Evidently he’d got wind that I’d been using a company telephone for private business.

I was through the office door in the next instant – out into the muffled sunlight, and the black sharpness of the station atmosphere, the smell that makes you want to travel. Everywhere people were running and screaming. The very trains seemed to have scattered, for I couldn’t see a single one.

Only three people were not moving and they stood on the main ‘down’ platform – number five – amid abandoned portmanteaus and baggage trolleys. I stood on the main ‘up’ – number four. One of the three held a gun out before him and the other two faced him; it was plain that not one of them knew what the gun would do next.