Death on a Branch Line(73)

When Mrs Handley came to collect the plates, I asked whether Mr Gifford had pitched up.

‘Now, where he’s gone I don’t know,’ she said, with a distracted look.

Well, I would not tell her what little I knew on that score. But I did let on that John Lambert had gone missing from the Hall. (It couldn’t hurt to mention it; the fact would soon be common knowledge with all those coppers in the district looking for him.)

Then the wife said, ‘Where’s our bicyclist, Mrs Handley?’

‘I’ve no idea, I’m sure,’ she said.

‘Has he booked out?’ asked the wife.

‘He has not.’

‘When was he due to book out?’

‘No date’s been given. He’s paid for yesterday and he’s paid for today, and he can keep doing that as long as he likes as far as I’m concerned. His bicycle’s gone, though, you might have noticed.’

‘But it’s punctured,’ said the wife.

‘Well,’ said Mrs Handley, ‘I saw him pushing it off into Clover Wood not one hour since.’





Chapter Twenty-Eight


We stood outside the front of The Angel looking at the soft greyness of the sky, the great trees bright green against it. The rainbow was half there and half not, like the memory of a dream, and seeming to carry the message: this is not what you’d call the perfect summer’s day but it’s beautiful in its way, you know.

Two chimes floated up from the village.

‘Hugh Lambert has eighteen hours left alive,’ I said.

‘And what about your investigation?’ asked the wife.

‘In the first place …’ I said.

‘I think time’s too short for “in the first place”,’ said the wife.

‘… You don’t think Hugh Lambert murdered his father,’ I said, ‘and nor do I.’

‘Mervyn’s the key to it, wouldn’t you say?’ asked the wife – and it wasn’t quite like her to be asking questions in this way. As a rule she didn’t give tuppence what I thought. Instead, she was giving me a chance to say what she herself couldn’t.

Just then, the blurred voice of Mr Handley came from behind us.

‘Where is that boy?’ he said. ‘He’s late for his bloody dinner.’

He held a pewter of ale in his hand, and because of this and the natural impairment of his speech, it was impossible to know how worried he might be. I turned to him and said, ‘We’ll keep our eyes skinned.’

He turned and went back inside his pub. We watched him do it, and the wife said, ‘I do wonder about that bicyclist, you know.’

He’d always been a special study of the wife’s, and this was down to the shocking business of seeing him stab his own tyre. All bicyclists were martyrs to rough roads: their machines were too flimsy and were forever getting crocked, and the bicyclists were forever moaning about it. To see the damage self-inflicted put the whole thing on its head.

‘Clover Wood is that way,’ I said, pointing directly over-opposite.

This time, I found a track rather than crashing on through the undergrowth, and I led the wife along it. Wherever the path divided, we took the wider route, but these would become narrow after a while, and we’d end in a jam of trees and thorn bushes. We pressed on through narrow gaps until we did at last strike another good-sized track. It was lined with tall everlastings of a very dark green, and by rights ought to have led to a blank-faced tomb or cemetery. In fact it led to a perfectly round clearing: a Piccadilly Circus of the woods with a fallen log in its centre, two people sitting on the log and two bicycles on the ground hard by. I knew that one bicycle would be punctured, the other not. We were about fifty yards short of the couple, who were the bicyclist from The Angel and a young woman I’d never set eyes on before. Their voices carried along the track, and I motioned the wife into a gap between two of the everlastings. I stepped in after her, and watched the couple.

The fellow’s arm was around the waist of the young woman. It rested there rather guiltily – that arm knew it was taking a liberty – and the conversation went stiffly.

‘It is a very happy chance that you came along, Dora,’ the fellow said.

‘But I don’t have a puncture repair outfit,’ said the woman.

‘Even so,’ said the bicyclist.

(‘That’s very magnanimous of him,’ whispered the wife, as a silence fell between the two on the tree trunk.)

‘There’s practically everything but a puncture repair outfit in my saddle-bag,’ the young woman eventually said.

‘I’ll take it into the blacksmith’s again tomorrow,’ said the man. ‘I tried him yesterday but he wasn’t about.’