Death on a Branch Line(42)

He stood smoking a cigarette, in a living room that had been put to use as a study in the place that he preferred to the Hall. There were two desks, one either side of the dead, dusty fireplace, and these two desks seemed to signify great effort, like a double-headed train. Lines of bright light leaked through the closed curtains, and they showed up twirling clouds of dust. There were papers everywhere, covering all the means of ordinary living: papers on top of the sofa, on the carpet, all about the hearth and the hearth rug. They were scrawled with both letters and numbers, and some of them were maps, and some were maps of the sea; and where there weren’t papers there were railway timetables.

John Lambert looked disappointed to see us, but only moderately so.

‘You’re still living, then?’ I blurted, all my rehearsed speech going by the board.

‘I can’t deny it,’ he said, breathing smoke, ‘… in the face of all the evidence.’

He looked over-strained, as he had the day before – but no worse. His beard, growing in the shadow of his hollow cheeks, still looked as though it had not been intended. Instead, it was a mark of decline. His white suit was of a good cloth, but did not stand close scrutiny.

‘A man has arrived to see you,’ I said. ‘A Captain Usher.’

He nodded once, touched his spectacles and looked at me shrewdly.

He said, ‘How do you know?’ But he seemed only moderately curious on that point, and as to the reason for my interest in the matter.

‘He came by train,’ I said. ‘Not many people do, so it’s easy to keep cases on the arrivals.’

John Lambert nodded again.

‘Usher has been here once today already,’ he said. ‘And is about to return. I wouldn’t be here when he does if I were you.’

‘Is he the one you’re in fear of?’ the wife put in.

(I would allow her that one question.)

‘I’m not in fear of anyone,’ Lambert replied. And he kept silence for a moment, before adding: ‘That said, I do not much expect to see out the day.’

‘And you won’t say why?’ I enquired, in horror.

‘I will not. It is all a secret – a profound secret.’

‘And do you know the identity of your father’s murderer?’

He kept silence.

Why would a man about to die have any interest in keeping a secret?



‘You make … timetables,’ said the wife, from over near the sofa.

‘My wife will step outside now,’ I said.

Lydia – giving me not so much as a glance – was leaning over the sofa, fanning her brown face with her straw boater, which I knew was meant as a deliberate provocation.

‘Would you please move away from there?’ Lambert rather coolly requested.

Lydia stood back, saying, ‘You needn’t worry. I do not understand railway timetables.’

A beat of silence.

‘Actually you will find that many perfectly intelligent people do not,’ said the wife. ‘They are very badly designed. Your brother was not married, I believe,’ she ran on, ‘but is there a fiancée perhaps, or some special woman who will be thinking of him this week-end?’

I looked white at her. Here was a man who did not expect to outlive the day, and she was making tittle-tattle.

‘My wife will leave the room now,’ I repeated.

Lydia eyed me for a full five seconds before turning on her heel, and walking out, which left a strange silence between me and Lambert, during which he smoked out his cigarette.

‘Well, congratulations,’ he said, ‘you worked your will in the end.’

So saying, he turned and pitched the cigarette stub into the fireplace, where it joined dozens – if not hundreds – of its fellows.

‘Is it difficult to be married?’ he asked, turning back to face me.

‘She’s rather strong-minded,’ I replied.

Lambert looked as though he might have said a hundred things in answer to that, but settled on none. He glanced at his watch.

‘Will you join me in a friendly glass?’ he enquired. ‘Just before the return of friend Usher?’

He caught up a tumbler from the mantel-piece, and poured into it from a whisky bottle that stood by the sofa. But this glass was evidently his own, so another was needed, and as Lambert hunted about for it I let my eye run over his papers.

There seemed an eastern bias to it all. Two timetables of the Great Eastern; a town plan of the port of Harwich; sea charts for the Channel and the North Sea; a book on the railways of East Anglia. The written documents gave little away, but were just dense masses of handwriting. I made out a few phrases – ‘Principal entraining stations’, ‘provision of hospital trains’ – and one sentence I read in its entirety. It stood out almost luminous: ‘There must be kept, throughout the emergency, open lines for out-going, so that trains can be kept running, as it were in a circle.’