Death on a Branch Line(69)

Coming upon us late, the dust-coated special policeman – name of Cooper – had got the false idea that we’d both been eavesdropping on the Chief and Usher. But he hardly relented when the true situation was explained. He had found us to be making light of a grave national danger, and there was more than a hint in his arguments that we would try to come to the traitor’s aid. The Chief had put a word in for me, but it counted for nothing. Cooper was junior to Usher, but Usher agreed with his man, and so we were stowed at the top of the house, and the door locked behind us.

The wife hadn’t seemed to mind too much.

‘At least they’re not trying to be gentlemanly,’ she said.

She sat on the bed, and asked for another look at Hugh Lambert’s papers.

‘Now we’re in a cell just like him,’ she muttered, after leafing through them for a while.

A few minutes later, she passed me one of the sheets, saying, ‘This is interesting.’

I read:

Father and the Reverend Ridley hit it off splendidly. The Reverend never mentioned that father did nothing besides romp around the estate blasting animals, and father returned the favour. Father was unsettled to discover that Ridley kept a model railway in his house but the only other point of antagonism between the two of them was Emma, my former governess, who continued to appear at the Hall long after her efforts had secured my admission into Eton. Her new role, according to father, was to give him ‘French lessons’. He often accused me of being too familiar with gutter slang, but some acquaintanceship with it on his own part might not have come amiss.

I am sure that the Reverend, however, saw nothing amusing in the situation, for he liked Emma. She could stop him in his tracks, even with a cricket game in prospect.

I handed the papers back to the wife, telling her I’d heard something similar from Chandler at the party.

‘Didn’t Mrs Handley tell us that the vicar had a fancy woman at a village near here?’ asked the wife. ‘You don’t suppose it’s this Emma, do you?’

I eyed her for a while as she went back to reading. She was becoming properly interested in new explanations of the murder at the very moment we’d been stopped from investigating them. I fished in my pocket for my silver watch: six o’clock.

Hugh Lambert had twenty-six hours to live.

I looked out of the window. This would be a hot day, but not sunny. In the grey light, the mathematical garden looked just mathematical, and not at all beautiful, and the stone pond from this height appeared over-crowded with great, aimlessly floating goldfish. Each checkmated the other: they were all in a fix because someone had too much money. I looked up, towards the woods. Was John Lambert hiding there? Of course, I wanted him found. He had been black-mailing Britain, but somehow I couldn’t help thinking that Britain was Usher and the Chief more than it was me. By the very fact of knowing the danger the country faced, they became men who had more to lose from that danger. It was wrong-headed of me, I knew, but I felt that I would rather see Hugh Lambert spared the noose than his brother found.

I’d thought that John Lambert was going to lay name to the killer. Instead, he’d proposed to trade the whole country for his brother’s life.

At eight o’clock the manservant came with coffee and bread rolls, and the poor bloke didn’t know where to look. The night before we’d been guests of the house; now we were its prisoners. After breakfast, we swapped over: the wife looked out of the window, and I looked again at the papers of Hugh Lambert. After a few false starts, owing to his bad handwriting, I struck:

It is perfectly possible to catch a rabbit by hand if you approach it downwind, and it is perfectly possible to release it subsequently. I have taught young Mervyn the trick of the first but not the habit of the second. I know that he sells rabbits to the carter, who takes them to the butchers of the other Adenwolds, and I know he sells moleskins to the blacksmith Ainsty, and that he once sold a job lot of them to Hamer, who distributed them amongst the plumbers of Malton in return for considerable profit. Moleskins are ideal for cleaning the joints of freshly soldered pipes, unfortunately for the moles.

I have taught the boy to draw these creatures, in the hope of curing his habit of snaring them, but his addiction to killing rabbits rivals, I fear, that of father. Mervyn practically lives in the woods, but I am aware that he makes a special point of lurking there when father is out after rabbits, knowing very well that the pleasure for father is all in the killing and not in the acquisition of meat, and that Tom, father’s lumbering old spaniel, misses half the corpses in any case.

‘Here’s something,’ I said, calling across to the wife.