Death on a Branch Line(63)

I awoke at the chime of three, however, and knew that I could not put off finding an answer.

I stood up, dressed and caught up the lantern we’d been given at the Hall. The wife changed position twice as I did so, but she slept on. Outside the front door of the inn, I lit the lantern, and set off back for the Hall.

The lantern showed swinging, grey-coloured pictures of Adenwold: closed doors, shuttered windows, high blank hedges. I took the early track through the woods, and followed it to the rear gate of the Hall, which now stood unattended. I moved fast across the grass, approaching the lines of cone-shaped trees.

The Chinese lanterns on the terrace were now only so much dangling litter, objects of no significance, long since burnt out. The table had been removed, but a line of empty bottles remained on the bottom step of one of the two staircases.

Light glowed from two of the house windows. I turned the lamp off and went up the steps into the mathematical garden. I was not sticking to the complicated paths: I went as the crow flies, and I could feel ornamental plants falling under my boots.

The light in the sky was ash-coloured, a sort of emergency light. There was just enough to see what was important. I had now reached the low windows of the rear of the house, and a voice in my head put the question: Where are you going? A sash window standing open gave the answer. I ducked down and I was in, coming bang up against a piano. I took out my matches, and relit the lantern. The room grew as the light flared – a long yellow room with multiple sofas, as if the contents of many ordinary drawing rooms had been taken into it.

It held no fewer than three wide, peaceful billiard tables. The lantern showed me a dark painting of a boy and a greyhound over the fireplace, and I pictured Sir George Lambert and his sons in this room, each playing his own game on his own table.

I moved now into the hallway, which offered the front door and the main stairs as ways of escape. But I could not have said whether I was aiming to find or avoid the occupants of the house. I began a circuit of the hall, and the first room that I came to contained a harpsichord and many photographs, both on the walls and on the mantel-pieces. They were all of men shooting or hunting, and one showed a cricket game. It ought to have been possible to work out which man was Sir George – his would be the face that cropped up the most often – but I had no time to examine the pictures.

My lantern was like a magic lantern, showing me dream-like pictures. The next room along was done out in a Chinese style with tall vases and delicate black cabinets holding pottery that was Oriental in looks but otherwise mysterious to me. The main object in the room was not in the least Chinese, however. It was an old soap crate, and it held more photographs – some framed, some not – and a stack of handwritten papers.

I picked up the first framed photograph. The young man pictured was Master Hugh. He was standing before a tree, and looking as though taken by surprise, but quite happy about it. He was grinning, perhaps on account of his hat, which was completely shapeless in a countrified way. I picked up the first of the papers that was to hand. It was a short note, and the address was Park Place, London S., which I took to be a good address.

‘My dear Hugh,’ it began. ‘This is up to the mark. It has the music of the place. You pretend not to know it, but if you heard a note wrong in the happy speech of the public bar in that pretty village of yours … this you would instantly detect. Have you tried Heinemann’s? If they bite, you would perhaps be five pounds to the richer, for one book of poetry equals one very good dinner in Mayfair, or one good lunch and a haircut.’

It was signed ‘Paul’.

I picked up another paper, which carried the heading ‘Station Hotel, York’ and was evidently from John Lambert:

Greetings and thank you for the verses, which I find beautiful, although whether that means anything coming from a railway drudge, I doubt. You asked how my work is going here and you can damn well endure the answer. Many of my supposed talents go to waste in this business, but it might be regarded as useful. Are you bored by railway timetables? You might not be if you knew how they were put together. (How’s that, by the way, for the beginning of a chapter in The Wonder Book of Railways for Boys and Girls?) …

A voice came … a woman’s voice from the top of the stairs. She was calling out a name I couldn’t catch. Bundling some of the letters into my pocket, I reviewed my options. I could retreat into one of the rooms I had so far visited or sprint for the front door. I sprinted, as the voice called again from lower on the staircase. I was quickly at the door, where I set about trying to work the latch.

‘You there!’ called the voice just at the moment I got the trick of it.