Death on a Branch Line(20)

Spilling out through the front door of The Angel, I saw that the long table now stood empty, and that Mervyn Handley’s ferret had been untied and removed. The train gave two screams as it approached through the trees, and I began running along the dusty downhill road, which brought the sweat pricking under my shirt. The floating sharpness of engine smoke mingled with the dizzying country-side scents of hay, cut corn, hedge flowers and meadow flowers – and all for my benefit alone, for there was no-one else about. It was unnatural for an evening to be so close. A man deserved a rest after six, but this bugger of a sun would never let up. Seemed set on proving a point, it did: I can keep this up for ever, you know!

I ran past the triangle of dying grass that marked what seemed to be the centre of Adenwold, and across the station yard, where I had to step aside to let a man in a long white dust-coat come through. He was hatless, and with silver hair, and the coat came out behind him like wings. Behind him, the train was just coming to a stand. Had he come down early from it? He’d have risked a broken ankle if so. I turned about and watched him tear across the station yard, and then away in the opposite direction to The Angel.

He might or might not have arrived by train. My priority was to observe those who certainly had done.

I gained the ‘down’ platform, and stood level with the tail light of the guard’s van, which blazed away needlessly in the golden evening. A man was walking away from a third-class carriage. He was a clerkly sort, sweating in tall collar, black shiny suit and a cheap, high-crowned brown bowler that clashed. He carried a portmanteau and a Gladstone bag. The lad porter was on the platform, watching the man. He’d made no move to assist him.

The clerkly sort kept turning about as he walked, as if to make sure that nobody else had climbed down from the train – which nobody else had. He stopped as I watched him and gave me a steady stare for a second or two before striking out for the barrow boards and Adenwold.

As he crossed the station yard, he passed a man approaching the simmering train: a parson in a light white suit. He carried a small suitcase.

Was this the Reverend Martin Ridley, the vicar who’d been in the woods at the time of the killing? He stepped onto the platform and came past me without a glance. The porter closed on him. They exchanged a word, and the porter took the suitcase. The vicar wore a white straw hat with a red ribbon around the crown that pulled at the brim, making it wavy and flower-like. His face was redder than a vicar’s ought to be. I did not care for his looks, but he was evidently deemed worth money by the porter, who now opened a door marked ‘First’ for him. The vicar climbed up, passed down a coin or two and the porter slammed the door.

So that was one less to worry about.

The engine gave a whistle, and I watched the train move away, the reflected sun burning in the blank carriage windows. When it had gone, the lad porter turned and faced me – giving me a stare that had in it a sort of steady defiance. Maybe he’d been given a rating by the station master after my complaint, but I doubted that.

I doubled back over the barrow boards just in time to see the lately alighted fellow in the bowler skirt the triangular green. From the station yard, I watched him take the dusty uphill road. He must be heading for The Angel. After all, it was that or a ten-mile tramp to the next village.

The man appeared to be having bother with the catch on his Gladstone bag, and kept pausing to secure it. A female form was advancing on him from the part of the road that was bounded by the hedges. It was the wife in her high-waisted holiday dress. As the two crossed, the clasp on the man’s bag gave way, and the goods inside spilled out onto the road. Four heavy-looking items in green cloth bags tumbled down, and a quantity of papers floated up and a little way away in the hot evening air. The wife closed on the man, and I was a little jealous of him for the speed with which she came to his aid. She almost knelt in the road to help collect up the papers. By the time I was level with them, everything was back in the bag.

‘You for The Angel?’ I asked, lifting my sporting cap.

‘I’m for the inn, anyhow,’ said the man.

His accent was London.

‘It’s called The Angel,’ I said.

The man removed his bowler to mop his brow. His hair was divided perfectly into two halves from neck to forehead as though he was just up from a swim.

‘It’s a lovely evening,’ said the wife.

‘Well, it is extremely oppressive,’ said the man, before remembering himself and adding, ‘but yes, it is lovely.’

There was something artificial about his speech, as though he wanted to be better than he was.