Death on a Branch Line(72)

The wife passed a couple of the letters across to Mrs Handley, who looked them over for a while. Then she handed the bundle back to Lydia, lifted the bar flap and moved towards the front door of the pub, saying, ‘I’ve something to show you.’

She came back a minute later, pushing her way through the cricketers, and holding a paper – another letter by the looks of it. She passed it first to Lydia, who read it over quickly before handing it to me. Well, after all the Mayfair hotels the address did come as a shock, for this dated from the time after his arrest for murder: ‘His Majesty’s Prison Wandsworth, Heathfield Road, London S.’ The letter was addressed to Mrs Handley. It began with thanks for a letter of hers, and ‘all the news of The Angel’. Hugh Lambert then fell to talking about the prison:

There is a warder here called Parkhurst, which causes me to wonder whether there is a warder in Parkhurst Prison called Wandsworth. The man seems doubly displaced because he also bears a remarkably close resemblance to Dawlish, the chaplain at my old college. But he is much nicer than Dawlish.

As you can already tell, this place is doing peculiar things to my mind, but I am otherwise perfectly content. Everything is wonderfully concentrated, and you have the whole world here in its distilled essence. The sparrows in the yard do duty for the Adenwold country-side; a cigarette after supper (or ‘tea’) is an evening in the bar of the Ritz, and as for ‘prisoners’ association’ – well, that’s a chapter from a Dickens novel. Please send my best regards to your husband, and tell Mervyn to look for a robin’s nest in the old plum tree in the graveyard. There are two holes in the trunk at the start of the branches. When I saw it last, the north-facing one was occupied by the family of robins; the other (west facing) was occupied by a family of flycatchers, and the robin parents fed the flycatchers and vice versa, which I found charming. Enclosed are two sketches for Mervyn. The first is a robin and a flycatcher side by side, the second (as I do hope you can tell) is of a mole. I don’t know why. Perhaps, in my present situation, I should turn mole. Do tell Mervyn, by the way, that if a mole were the size of a man he would create a tunnel his own width and thirty-seven miles long after a typical night’s work.

I handed the letter back to Mrs Handley, and she was on the edge of tears.

‘The drawings are at the framers in Malton,’ she said. ‘I’m going to put them up in place of the fish pictures.’

(You’d have thought wall space came at a premium in The Angel, whereas in fact the fish pictures were the only ones in the place.)

‘We saw Mervyn in the woods just now,’ I said. ‘He was burning bird bones: a kestrel and a moorhen.’

The wife was frowning at me, but I’d checked Mrs Handley’s tears at any rate.

‘The kestrel attacked the moorhen, and they came down together,’ she said. ‘It happened out at the back here. Our Mervyn came racing in to tell me while I was talking to Master Hugh. We all went out to see, and Hugh looked down at these two birds and he said something like “That’s father and I”. Mervyn heard it quite distinctly, and when the police were first here asking all their questions I was daft enough to let on. Well, they had Mervyn in – took me and him by train to York, and asked us that many questions. The boy was in tears from the moment we left to the moment we came back – I’ve never seen him in such a state.’

‘He told us he’d never travelled by train,’ I said.

‘He never has since,’ said Mrs Handley. ‘Put him off for life, that trip did.’

‘That’s why you never went to Scarborough,’ said the wife, and Mrs Handley said, ‘Yes. It was a consideration.’

‘Was his statement put in?’ I said. ‘Was he called as a witness?’

Mrs Handley shook her head. ‘It never came to that,’ she said.

I noticed there was a small glass of wine on the bar in front of her. I had never seen her drink before.

‘Mrs Handley,’ I asked her, ‘do you really think that Master Hugh is a murderer?’

She just drained her glass, and said, ‘Do you want some dinner?’

We went over to a table and ate some cheese and cold meats while crowded in by the cricketers. At one point, they were so arranged that I saw a clear channel through them, and station master Hardy was at the end of it, sitting at a table in the ‘public’. He looked red-faced, perhaps on account of his suit, which looked very constricting. Every so often, one of the strapping cricketers would go over and place an empty pint glass on his table, and each time I glimpsed Hardy there were more and more glasses containing sticky dregs under his nose. It wasn’t so much that the cricketers were not mannerly, or that they were drunk, it was just that they didn’t seem to notice him at all.