way. Low, sharp branches kept whisking off my own hat as if to say, ‘ Keep it off: show us some respect, won’t you?’ At every turn, my boots broke the twigs beneath my feet, and I began to feel unsure about what lay beneath, like a man walking over the rotten rafters of an ancient attic.
I called out ‘Gifford!’ a few times, but there came no answer.
Of course, he might have gone the other way around the pond. My route led in the direction of a golden light coming through the trees, and as I came to the limit of the woods — and re-entered the heat of the day — I saw that the golden-ness was made by the sun and a cornfield combined. The edge of the woods was marked by clouds of cow parsley, just as the border of a fancy handkerchief is marked by lace.
I walked along a little way, and then I saw another wrong colour, this time on the ground. I picked up the red model engine: the single-driver. It was made of stout soldered tinplate, and beautifully finished. The maker’s name was stamped in German underneath. It might have been something like ‘Gastin’, with two little dots over the ‘a’, but the letters were too tiny to be made out.
Turning the model over in my hands, I thought of the German railways. It was said that you had to show your ticket to the guard on all trains with no exceptions, and that the guard saluted you like a military man when you did so. The station masters saluted passing trains all along the line, whether those trains stopped at their stations or not. As a people, they were lacking in humour, and they carried method too far.
But Gifford, surely, was neither German nor a travelling agent of that country. As he had said himself, he was a traveller in small locomotives. Yet he had possessed some secret, some knowledge touching on the Adenwold mysteries, and he had meant to tell me it.
Had he been observed in the course of observing someone? Had the vicar brought him into the woods to put his lights out, only to drop in on the railway station and collect the cricket team?
The locomotive had spilled from its bag, which was hard by in the grass. I looked up and there, lying under cow parsley, was Gifford’s Gladstone bag… not six feet from the man himself.
He was half in a ditch, his head pointing down into its depths, his boots higher than his head. Directly above was the stout branch of a giant oak. Had he come down from it?
Or had he been pursued through the woods, only to come a cropper as soon as he escaped the trees?
He seemed to have attained a kind of peacefulness in his position. His eyes were closed, and he looked to be having a pleasant sort of dream, but his head was cut by brambles, his face was bluish and a quantity of dark- coloured blood had flowed from the corner of his mouth.
I held my hand over his mouth, and felt nothing. I knelt down and put my face directly in front of his, at which I detected faint breaths. If he had come down from a height, and suffered a smash, I ought not to touch him.
Had he tried to make away with himself by leaping from the tree? Perhaps he was in low water financially. He’d sounded desperate enough, and the vicar had evidently not purchased the red engine.
It seemed wrong that I should be able to view his head so closely. I touched my hand to his hair, and my fingers came up rust-coloured. Blood (and a good deal of it) was working with the Brilliantine to keep Gifford’s hair fixed in place, and shining. I touched again, and there was a groove under the hair. I pulled my hand away fast. Had he taken a bullet?
I sat up on the edge of the ditch; ten yards to my left, a wooden bridge ran across it, half-hidden by brambles. Two white butterflies danced in the air before my face, as if to say, ‘Isn’t this all a lark? You may have your troubles, but we’re on holiday just at present.’
I set the little engine down next to the Gladstone bag, and looked at my silver watch: one thirty-five.
Chapter Twenty-One
Flying along the margins of the cornfield, I kept a look-out for the telegraph poles that ought to be somewhere ahead. They would indicate the territory of the railway line.
I rounded a bend and came upon the silent poles, and their confederates, the silent tracks. I slowed somewhat as I went past the downed stretch of cable. It struck me that railway policemen ought to be issued with portable telegraph instruments. With these, and a length of cable looped over the right wire, it was possible to send your own messages.
Running now along the railway sleepers, I looked up. The poles carried six wires: telegraph and telephone either way — that accounted for four. The other two would be the wires linking the signal boxes of the branch, for the sending of the signalmen’s bell codes. To send a message, you’d have to know which was which; you’d need the portable doings, and you’d need to go beyond the point of the cut. Then you’d be within reach of the normal world, and sanity.
I kicked up my boot-heels and I flew on. The station, waiting on the far side of a tree-made arch, seemed to swing and shake as I pounded down the track.
I found it quite deserted, like a ship becalmed. But Will Hamer and his horse and donkey stood dreaming in the station yard, with the rulley hitched up behind.
I ran at the fellow, gulping at air and unable at first to speak.
Instead, Hamer spoke.
‘It’s you again,’ he said, smiling.
‘There’s a man badly injured in the woods,’ I said. ‘I’ve just come from him. He’s near the bridge over the ditch.’
‘I know that spot,’ said Hamer, who was now not quite smiling but still looking amiable, ‘On the edge of Clover Wood.’
So there were separately named woods within the woods.
‘He may have fallen out of a tree,’ I said.
‘Aye,’ Will Hamer said, ‘I expect so.’
‘Will you fetch a doctor?’
‘Aye,’ Hamer said again, making no move, ‘I will do.’
‘Where is a doctor?’
‘Well now, East Adenwold,’ Hamer said. ‘Doctor Lawson — deliver to him regular like. Very good man for an emergency if you can catch him in.’
‘You’d better look sharp,’ I said. ‘I reckon the fellow’s dying. Might you un-harness the donkey? I mean, wouldn’t the horse be quicker on its own?’
Hamer looked at his horse for a while. Presently, he said, ‘Wouldn’t move at all on his own, wouldn’t that bloke. Pair of ’em might go a bit faster, though, and don’t think I en’t tried a few tricks. I’ve had ’em this way and that: him to the left, him to the left. You name it, I’ve tried it.’
I stood silent. Was there any other way of getting help to Gifford apart from employing this blockhead?
‘… Mangel wurzels I’ve tried,’ he was saying. ‘Short rein, long rein…’
He turned and fixed on me a sort of questioning smile.
‘You look down-hearted, mister,’ he said.
‘There’s blood coming out of the bloke’s mouth,’ I said, ‘and that’s always a bad look-out.’
‘Might be his… tooth fallen out?’
‘Will you go off just now?’ I said. ‘I’ll go back to guard the bloke, and I’ll see you at the place.’
I indicated the rulley.
‘You’ll get that along the edge of the field — there’s a track of sorts.’
‘Oh, no bother,’ he said, and he fell to smiling at me.
I felt in want of a whistle to blow and a green flag to wave.
‘Come on, men!’ Hamer shouted at last, and the horse and donkey first awoke, and then moved.
I took off my jacket, and watched them cross the station yard, but as before they rolled to a stop after twenty yards.
‘While I think on…’ Hamer called out, and I thought: Christ, he wants to be paid. But that wasn’t it. He was passing a paper to me.
‘Your wire was delivered,’ he said, ‘earlier on, like.’
It was an acknowledgement of sending, written on a chit stamped: ‘The Booking Office, West Adenwold
