Death on a Branch Line(65)

I heard an approaching voice outdoors, at which my eyes flicked to the bottom of the letter, and the words: Your disgraceful brother, Hugh. I dropped the letter back into the Bradshaw, and moved to the front door, ignoring the lantern. I’d made the garden gate by the time I heard the clatter of boots on the flagstones that lay between the out-buildings and the cottage. Usher loomed into view a second later, a blue-eyed shadow. He carried a shotgun by a strap over his shoulder, and it looked about right – this was the fulfilment of the man.

He tilted the gun slightly, and pumped it once. A cartridge was ejected, twirled in air and clattered somewhere in the darkness about his boots. I knew that by this action he had also chambered a new cartridge, ready for firing. He said nothing, but levelled the barrel at me as the Chief appeared from around the same corner. He looked glad to be back in his tweeds and his dinty old trilby hat. He also carried a shotgun – the two of them had perhaps plundered the armoury of the Hall – and he too levelled it and took aim at me.

‘Thought you’d have a bit of a poke about, did you?’ he said.

With a jerk of his head, he indicated the cottage to Usher. It was permissible, I supposed, for a sergeant major to make a suggestion to a captain in the heat of an engagement.

I walked, under their guns, back into the cottage, and was directed to the main room where the timetables were stacked and my lantern glowed. I was driven by the gun muzzles towards the back of the room, where the two desks stood, and in so directing me I perceived that the gunmen had made rather a bloomer.

A beautiful bone-handled revolver lay in the tangle of martial-looking goods on the desk, and it looked very questing and forward-pointing and eager to be up and at. I watched the shadows of the two shotguns as I contemplated it, and I made my goodbyes to the world and the mysteries of Adenwold, as I picked it up and turned about.





Chapter Twenty-Five

There were now three pointing guns in the room. My own was aimed at the Chief. Two days ago, I might have asked the man’s permission before going to the jakes and now I proposed putting a bullet in him.

‘You’ll put that fucking gun down at once,’ he said, but he seemed to be only trying the words out for size, hardly believing they’d be heeded.

‘I’ll fucking not.’

‘I’ll fucking not, sir!’ roared the Chief.

He took a step forward.

He might threaten to lag me for decades now, or offer me a glass of beer by way of alternative. I stood in exactly the same relation to him as the bank’s man had on Platform Five of York station, only not quite, for as I met the Chief’s gaze I drew back the hammer of the revolver.

‘Now you’re threatening to put me into a baddish temper,’ said the Chief.

‘Between the two of you,’ I said, ‘you put a bullet in John Lambert.’

Usher flashed a sidelong look at the Chief.

‘… And I can’t think of any reason why that might have been a lawful and right thing to do,’ I said.

A long beat of silence.

‘I’ve told Captain Usher a good deal about you this past day or two,’ said the Chief. ‘Your ears must have been buzzing.’

‘It’s more than his ears that’ll be buzzing in a minute,’ said Usher, whose pale-blue right eye looked along the level of his gun barrel.



‘What did you tell him about me?’ I asked the Chief, indicating Usher.

‘That you were determined,’ said the Chief, ‘hard to put off.’

‘… Hard to put off, with an intact cranium,’ said Usher.

‘You were seen by the manservant coming back to the house with guns in your hands,’ I said. ‘Ten minutes before, two shots had been fired.’

Another beat of silence.

The Chief said, ‘You’ll only fire that thing once, you know – and there are two of us.’

I said to the Chief: ‘I don’t think I’ve been properly introduced to your confederate, sir.’

The Chief flashed a glance at Usher, who made a movement of his head that I could not interpret. Anyhow, Usher spoke next.

‘Why have you taken such a liking to the brothers Lambert?’ he asked, looking along the length of his gun. ‘Can you not see that one is a traitor to his country, and that the other is a member of the cult of –’

‘Of what, for Christ’s sake?’

‘Of Uranus,’ said Usher, at which the Chief gave a great roar of something like fury and something like amusement, and walked three fast paces towards me with his gun still raised and ready to fire. I dashed down the revolver and he swung at me with his right fist; I swung back with my right and my left, and then he was bouncing strangely – hard bald head kept low. He was by repute a heavyweight of the rushing type, but before he could live up to that billing, I rushed at him and crowned him again, and his nose was changed by this. He came at me with his left fist raised, but it was the right that struck home, and the Chief had a very good right. A strongman might have picked me up by my boot-heels and swung my head through a full circle into an iron pole.