Station.’
‘Obliged to you,’ I said, ‘but I knew it had gone off, because the fellow I sent for arrived.’
‘What fellow?’ said Hamer, and instead of answering, I gave his horse’s arse a good slap, which set the three on their way again. I watched them out of sight, then raced back through the station and around the woods.
I came to the bridge just as two rabbits went flying across it. I looked about. Birdsong twisted through the drowsy air. I walked a little way along the margin of the wood. I looked about once again. The sun beat down on the brambles and the cow parsley.
Neither Gifford, nor his bag, nor the little red locomotive, were anywhere to be seen.
I stood still for a space, thinking of everything and nothing. Finally I sat down by the bridge, exhausted.
This place Adenwold, I thought… It’ll be the bloody finish of me. I made no further attempt to scout about. There was no sound but the steady, heavy drone of insects. I looked at my silver watch: five to two. I felt honour- bound to wait for the doctor. It was important that somebody kept up sensible behaviour. When the chimes of two o’clock floated over from the village, I moved under the big oak for shade, and took the papers of Hugh Lambert from my pocket.
‘Mr Richardson, the station master at Adenwold during our childhood,’ I read… and that pulled me up short, for starters. It was hard to imagine the station without Hardy: he seemed such a fixture of Adenwold, his own strangeness matching that of the village. I read on:
… Mr Richardson would bring Ponder on in his railway interests, and father would undoubtedly have written to the Company demanding his removal had the man been anything less than a model official. His top hat was lustrous, and the staff were most punctilious under his eye, as even father admitted. Richardson personally sent telegrams by the dozen for father, using the station machine, and always with a smile and always without charging. But he would talk trains with the boy! And how could father state that the railways were neither sporting nor aristocratic? That they had paid grandfather too little for right of way over his land, a fact serving to remind father that the estate was small, the family not as well-off as commonly imagined, and he only a Baronet? Father expressed himself delighted at Richardson’s retirement, but the new man wore a bowler instead of a topper and did not keep the place so well. How many times did father cancel Ponder’s subscription to the Railway Magazine? And how often did he wearily reinstate it during a fit of guilt? It wasn’t so much my brother’s reading and collection of the Railway Magazines that antagonised father, as the sending-off for the special binders with the railway crests. (I should say that Ponder, an incredibly untidy person for all his orderly mind, liked the idea of binders more than the act of binding.) The writing-in of letters by Ponder was still more to be deprecated, and the publication of articles under his own name doubly so. I remember Ponder showing the first of his letters to appear in cold print. It appeared under the heading: ‘A correspondent asks for information concerning the vacuum brake now installed’. He pointed to the word ‘correspondent’ and then to himself, and he grinned. He then promptly won a carriage clock for one of his railway essays. I asked him whether it had been an essay on carriages but nothing so modest: ‘How to Improve the Summer Services’ was his theme. Not some of them, but all. And Ponder ought to know, for he’d spent almost the whole summer lying on the croquet lawn and reading timetables, relayed to him in batches free of charge, I believe, by Mr Richardson. Ponder would seek out the innovations: a new restaurant car between St Pancras and Leeds; a train from York to Hull booked one minute later than the previous month. It was the drag of interrelatedness that fascinated him, the way that one train couldn’t be moved until another had been. He was quite lost to it all; and he was lost to father, too. Ponder did not retreat so much as fade from the battleground, with the result that father and I concentrated our fire on each other, and in this connection too the railway figured, for it was the railway that took me to London, and my other life.
Trying to make out the words had brought on a headache. I put down the paper. What was this other life? I had half an idea.
I looked up to see Will Hamer’s wagon rumbling over the sun-hardened mud. Another man was sitting up with him: Lawson, the doctor from East Adenwold.
He turned out to be a very crabby little man in a salt and pepper suit, who wouldn’t take no for an answer. I felt like offering to lie down myself on the canvas stretcher he was waving about, just to save him a wasted journey. Hamer smiled through the whole palaver. It took more than an unexplained disappearance to jolt him out of his groove.
‘Do you think the man had been drinking?’ Lawson demanded.
‘More likely shot,’ I said. ‘There was something very like a bul let wound on the side of his head.’
‘Have you been drinking?’ asked Lawson.
He seemed to have a very limited imagination: everything started and finished with alcohol. I stood shaking my head as Will Hamer turned the rulley about and drove the doctor back down the track. I ought to have given him a couple of bob for his trouble, I decided, as I set off back to The Angel. He’d proved himself not such a dope after all, for he’d delivered my wire without any hitch, and he’d fetched the doctor.
At The Angel, the bar was quite deserted. I climbed the stairs and the wife was sitting cross-legged reading her paper, The Freewoman, which she immediately tossed to one side. I knew right away that I was properly forgiven, and that there was some important business at hand; or business she thought important, at any rate. It didn’t matter what it was, though. Gifford had very likely been shot at because of what he knew, and I would not put the wife in the way of a bullet. I had to get her out of Adenwold.
There was a pleasant scent of soap in the room, and I saw that the wife had placed cut lavender inside a glass on the dresser. She was looking at me bright-eyed. She started saying, ‘You’ll never guess…’
But I cut in on her, telling her that I’d found Gifford in the woods; that I’d fetched a doctor; that Gifford had disappeared meantime. I did not mention the possibility of a shooting. She kept silence for a moment when I’d finished, before saying:
‘Well, whatever he was about, it’s connected to the man at the Hall, and to his brother. The centre of everything is the Hall, and we’re invited there this evening.’
She would not be going; she would be on the ‘down’ train at 8.35 p.m. But I asked, ‘Invited? Who by?’
‘Why, the tenant of course. Who else would presume to do it? Mr Robert Chandler — he came by the front of the inn just now.’
‘How? On foot?’
‘In a very smart little trap.’
‘We can’t be invited to a place like the Hall. We’re not their type.’
‘It is a little irregular,’ said the wife. ‘But it’s not a dinner invitation. It’s for rather late on — nineish — and Mr Chandler said we were not to dress.’
‘Just as well,’ I said, ‘since we’ve nothing to dress in.’ And, seeing my way to a grievance, I added: ‘He fancied you, I suppose?’
The wife went quite blank at that. She never admitted that any man fancied her. It was as though her womanly spell might be broken if she once did so.
‘He was with his wife,’ she said at length, ‘and she seemed just as keen. They were very friendly. You see, I was sitting outside at the long table and Mr Chandler drove up and said something about it being a lovely day. Then he asked me, “What brings you to Adenwold?”’
‘The train,’ I put in. ‘The train brought you to Adenwold.’
The wife ignored this, saying:
‘I told him that you’d brought me here but that I’d been hoping to go to Scarborough, not that this wasn’t a very pretty spot, and he said, “I know, but Scarborough’s my favourite summer place.”’
‘Why didn’t he go on the outing, then?’
‘I don’t see him in one of your horrible rattling excursion trains,’ said the wife.
Everything bad about the railways was my personal responsibility. ‘I then said that I’d been particularly looking forward to the Chinese lanterns strung all along the garden walks, and he said, “Well, we’ve Chinese lanterns at the Hall, why don’t you come up and see?”’
‘Did you tell him I was a policeman?’
‘I did not.’
‘Did he mention the Chief?’
‘No.’
‘And will Usher be there?’ I asked. ‘And John Lambert, who’s under threat of death because of what he knows about his father’s murder? Where do they come in? Are they invited to this little jolly?’
