Death on a Branch Line(37)

‘Let’s leave it that you are only to send the message if you can,’ I said.

‘Oh, all right,’ he replied, as if this was a very interesting new idea. ‘Only if I can.’

A thought struck me, and I said, ‘Mr Hamer, you wouldn’t have brought anybody into this village today, would you?’

‘Me?’ he said, and he looked at me for a while. ‘I should say not!’

And then he winked very slowly, which I wished he hadn’t done.

He re-started his beasts, and I took out my silver watch. It showed 9.45. Hamer ought to be at West Adenwold station by ten thirty, and the wire ought to reach York within five minutes of that. I guessed that the 12.27 arrival at Adenwold would leave Pilmoor at about midday, which meant that, if the Chief received the wire as soon as it arrived at York station (which was odds-on), he’d have an hour and half to get to Pilmoor. That would be simplicity itself. Being on the main line, Pilmoor was served by a good many fast trains from York, and it was only sixteen miles to the north. The only weak link in the chain was Hamer, who had now disappeared from sight in the hedge-tunnel.

I pocketed my watch and looked up.

Lydia was dawdling along the hedge-tunnel, moving slowly, which was out of the common for her. I called out to her and she quite ignored me. I wondered at this until I saw that the clerk from Norwood, the one who’d spilled the German documents, was coming along behind her. He walked briskly, and carried once again the Gladstone bag. I called again to Lydia, and once more she ignored me, but cut across the green making straight for the shut-up confectioner’s shop. The Norwood clerk had stopped and was looking about. I had a persuasion that it wouldn’t do to be seen by him, so I pulled down my cap, and turned a little aside as I watched him walk through the churchyard wicket. Lydia was watching the man from the shop doorway.

‘What’s the game?’ I asked, walking up to her.

‘I’m following him,’ she said, pointing to the clerk as he tramped across the graveyard in his cheap suit and high-crowned brown bowler.

‘But you were in front of him,’ I said.

‘I was following him from the front,’ said the wife.

The Norwood man had now cleared the graveyard and was leaving it by the opposite wicket.

‘He’s off to the parsonage,’ said the wife, as the man opened the gate of the big house behind the church, and walked up to the door.

‘Come on,’ said the wife. ‘I want to know what he’s about.’

So we too entered the graveyard, moving in the great, delaying heat between the compartments of the dead bounded by the thick dark hedges. As we walked, I told Lydia about how I’d sent for the Chief and how I expected him by the 12.27 train. I told her about how I’d met the earlier train in and collared the man in the field boots, and she in turn said that she’d had breakfast at the long table outside the inn, where entertainment had been provided by the sight of the bicyclist making a show of mending his puncture.

‘He was making such a palaver that I challenged him directly about it,’ she said.

‘Oh Christ,’ I said. ‘What did you say?’

‘I just said, “Surely this hole is of your own making. I saw you attack the tyre last night.”’

‘Pitch right in, I would … And what did he say to that?’

‘He said, “I had a fancy that it was punctured, but I thought I’d make quite sure.”’

‘He never did,’ I said.

‘That’s what he said.’

‘Did he seem put-out?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll bet. I’ll bet he was creaking in his shoes.’

‘I couldn’t imagine how anybody could behave more suspiciously,’ the wife ran on, ‘until about two minutes later when that man came down to breakfast, and started looking over his German papers while drinking coffee.’

And she pointed towards the vicarage, where we glimpsed through low graveyard trees the Norwood clerk, still waiting to be admitted. We’d come to a stop before one of the newer graves, which stood outside the green enclosures and lay exposed to the bright sun. ‘In Memoriam,’ I read, ‘Sir George Arthur Horton Lambert, Baronet. 1855–1909. Deus Fortitudo Mea.’ That meant something like ‘God give me strength’. No, couldn’t be. It was a very simple inscription anyhow, but then I supposed there were many things you couldn’t very well put on a murdered man’s gravestone. ‘Died peacefully’ was out for starters; so was ‘Loved by all’. There were no flowers on the grave but just a single bush growing up from the grass mound.