Death on a Branch Line(5)

When I returned to the station and to Platform Five, with my shirt sweat-soaked and the whole place re-awakening, the man who’d held the gun was only just righting himself.

The chief was holding the man’s valise – which was locked.

‘What’s in here, then?’ the Chief asked the bloke.

‘Specie,’ he muttered, as he sadly collected up the wreckage of his spectacles.





Chapter Three


Four twenty-two by my silver watch.

The Chief sat at his desk, and I sat on the chair opposite with my suit coat on my knee. The gas hissed like a jungle snake, for the Chief’s office – which was an enclosed part of the police office – was windowless. On the green wall behind him was a plan of the whole of the territories of the North Eastern Railway. The station beyond was still quieter than normal.

‘It’ll be like this when the strike comes, sir,’ I said.

Everyone knew the railwaymen would be the next lot to be out. They wanted recognition for their union    . Could I count myself a railwayman? I had certainly been one once, in my days firing on the footplate, and I could still find myself checked by the beauty of a locomotive, but I was a copper now, a passenger not a pilot on the iron road, and I would not be coming out even if the true railwaymen did. The Chief did not normally speak about politics but he had once said of the strikers that it was ‘our job to keep those fellows down’. I’d kept silence at that.

The Chief was side-on to me, hardly listening but smoking a cigar and fretting about the gunman. He’d taken him into the holding cell and given him a bit of a braying, while I’d stood outside the cell door feeling spare – and guilty with it. I’d put a stop to the rough-house by rapping on the door, and asking the Chief if he wanted a cup of tea. I’d brought one for the prisoner as well, and taken a good look at his face. He’d come off lightly compared to some, and I handed him a bottle of carbolic and a cloth as the Chief stepped back into the office.

‘You’ll stand witness to this,’ the bloke had said, pointing to his cuts and bruises.

‘Pipe down, mate,’ I’d said, ‘and you’ll be out of here directly.’

After coming out of the cell, the Chief had consulted his filing system, and had for once turned up the right paper. There was the bloke, set down in cold print as an employee of the Yorkshire Penny Bank, certificated to carry arms when transporting specie – and there’d been over five hundred pounds’ worth of sovereigns in the valise: the week’s wages for Backhouse’s nurseries, the York General Draperies and half a dozen other places.

‘I half-recognised the fellow,’ said the Chief, putting his boots on his desk. ‘But why did he not come out and say he was running cash for the bank?’

The Chief’s neck was red where his collar rubbed, but that collar could rub his head right off before he’d notice anything amiss.

‘Because he thought you were out to rob him, sir.’

Train smoke floating in from outside, cigar smoke inside; the strikes; the scrap that was brewing with the Kaiser … A fellow wanted to get away and breathe. But I knew I’d lost my chance to make a late booking in Scarborough.

‘He was in a funk, sir, not thinking straight.’

I liked the Chief and didn’t like to see him worried – not that he was ever really worried about anything. If you read the Police Manual, it was all very careful: ‘In exercising the power of arrest, officers must use the greatest caution and discretion …’ But the Chief never had read the Police Manual, and it was too late for him to do so now that he was just a few months short of his retirement. I would have said that getting on for half the things he did were unlawful, but it seemed to me that he always had the right end in view. I thought of him as being at once modern and old-fashioned: modern in that he fostered ‘initiative’ in his men, old-fashioned in that he didn’t hold with paperwork and would clout a ruffian as soon as look at him. I supposed that I covered up for him too often in this. I knew I’d got a name in the office for being the Chief’s favourite, and despite being less than half his age (twenty-seven to his sixty-four), I was the only one he’d take a pint with.

‘You might have shown him your warrant card,’ I said, and the moment I let fall the words, I regretted them. The Chief could be set off at a touch, so I put in a belated ‘… sir’.

The Chief turned towards me and blew smoke. He’d tramped for hundreds of miles across the boiling deserts of Africa; he had a slash mark from a dervish spear across his chest. A newspaper report existed of an army boxing match of about ’79 in which the Chief had been described as a useful heavyweight of the ‘rushing’ type, which was a polite way of saying that he went nuts in a scrap.