Death on a Branch Line(66)

After an unknown interval of time, I came up to a sitting position with a feeling of having been swimming in heavy seas, a headache and blood in my mouth. The chief was on a level with me and grinning. His nose was like a sign indicating ‘left’ to all his features and his grin seemed to be directed that way, too. His knees were raised and his arms were around his knees. He sat like a happy boy at a camp fire. The Chief liked automatic machine guns and drinking beer under a very hot sun – awkward things – and he had enjoyed our scrap.

I looked at him, and he was all ablaze.

‘Go again?’ he said, like a man forty years younger. How could I have thought that he was ripe for superannuation? Behind him stood Usher, who was beyond speech, but who still had his shotgun trained on my chest. I did not fear him now, though.

The Chief held his hand over his nose. He seemed to be trying to push it back towards the right.

The revolver still lay on the floor, close to the lantern.

‘Why’d you give it up?’ the Chief said, indicating the revolver with his boot.

‘Because I knew the two of you were right,’ I said.

‘About what?’

‘About Hugh Lambert. It was something the wife said.’

She had asked me why I did not understand the man, hinting at missing knowledge.

‘I knew that if you weren’t lying about his …’

But I broke off, for the Chief was still adjusting his nose. It was somewhere about middle now but at the cost of a faster flow of blood. Usher walked forward with a silk handkerchief.

‘If you weren’t lying about that,’ I said, ‘then I knew you weren’t lying about not having killed John Lambert.’

‘I’m not sure we ever did deny it, did we, sir?’ the Chief asked Usher, who was lighting a cigarette.

‘I personally never deny anything,’ Usher said, shaking out the match.

‘But you didn’t do it,’ I said.

‘The limit,’ said the Chief, with the handkerchief still held at his nose, ‘the absolute fucking limit was when you said we’d taken two shots over it.’

The Chief was shaking his head, still with the handkerchief pressed to his nose.

‘Why were the shots fired?’ I asked.



‘Two warnings,’ said the Chief. ‘… Try and stop him as he raced into the woods.’

‘And how is he a traitor?’

The Chief flashed a look to Usher, who sighed and said, ‘It’s highly inconvenient that he was invited here tonight. I suppose he can sign the paper, but it’s up to you – he’s your man, and you know his qualities. By the way, do you think a whisky and soda might help that difficulty of yours, Chief Inspector?’

The Chief rose to his feet, gathering up the revolver; he looked at me, then down at it. He raised the revolver, grinning and levelling it at me, and then with the flourish of a conjuror he made the cylinder swing out and I saw the bullet chambers – saw clean through them, in fact.

It was not loaded.





Chapter Twenty-Six

We were in the very long yellow room. After an interval in one of the sculleries involving the ruin of many clean towels and the emptying of most of a bottle of carbolic (both supplied by a parlourmaid), the Chief and I had stanched our wounds, and were kitted out with new, pressed white shirts, which we wore without collars, so that they looked like military tunics. I somehow hoped that they belonged to the manservant rather than any of the Lamberts. Beyond the windows, dawn was breaking, and the heat rising.

The Chief paced with a whisky glass in his hand, but otherwise looked like a barrister in a courtroom as he indicated Usher, his chief witness or exhibit, and the hero and leader of all men not of the Hugh Lambert kind.

His full name, not very surprisingly, was Captain Joscelin Usher – a girl’s name, in fact. And while he was known as ‘Captain’ in memory of his glorious exploits in the Royal Marines in Africa and elsewhere, he was currently employed as a detective inspector of the Special Police on commission from the Secret Service Bureau, of which accreditations he was evidently happy to carry no proofs whatever. He operated always in secrecy, but I wondered – as the Chief spoke on – whether it wouldn’t have been better for him to have carried some form of identification, instead of just looking put out whenever anyone asked who he was and what he was about. It seemed that the Chief had some connection with the intelligence division of the Army, and in turn with the Secret Service Bureau, and it had been arranged in advance that he, a trusted man, would come to Adenwold to assist Usher in his mission, which amounted to this: put the frighteners on John Lambert.

That was not quite how the Chief put it, of course, but not far off. The two of them had certainly been willing to go as far as threatening to put John Lambert’s lights out and the matter might very well have (and might still) come to a killing, for the highest interests of the state were involved.