Murder At Deviation Junction

    'You wouldn't have taken delivery of a camera, I suppose, some time over the past year?'

    The man looked at his boots for a while, then up.

    'Hold on,' he said, and turned on his heel. He disappeared into a back room, and after a couple of minutes of scuffling and cursing, came back carrying a camera.

    'That was quick,' I said.

    'Don't hang about when you lads come calling,' he said.

    He wanted me off his premises, just like most of the folks I met in the course of my work.

    He handed it over to me. It was the same as the one that had dangled from Bowman's shoulder, and the one that had been found in the brook near Peters's body: the Mentor Reflex. But this time the changing box that held the exposures - or might do - was fixed in place at the side. If the doings was all inside there . . . that could only mean that this camera had not been stolen by people interested in what Peters had photographed. It must, in that case, have been taken by the common run of street thief, a man interested only in the value of the camera. Why else would the camera have been brought to the man standing before me?

    If the exposures proved to be in place, the villains concerned in the Middlesbrough theft must have been a different lot from the ones who did for Peters at Stone Farm - that was my first thought, at any rate.

    'Have you had this off, mate?' I asked the man, pointing to the changing box.

    He shook his head.

    'And I don't believe the bloke who brought it in had done either.'

    'Why not?'

    'He didn't look my idea of a whatsname - photographic artist.'

    'Who was he?' 'Reckon I'd let on if I knew?'

    'Er, no,' I said.

    'That's just where you're wrong,' he said. 'I'm not bent, though you might think it from the looks of this place. A bloke came in, sold me a stack of stuff for a tanner. I took it sight unseen, granted. But that en't a crime now, is it?'

    'Would you recognise the bloke again?'

    'Big cap ... thick muffler ...' said the shopkeeper.

    'That's narrowed it down to about thirty million.'

    'I can't help that, mister,' he said.

    I believed him, just as I'd believed Clegg and the men of Vulcan Athletic. They seemed to be part of an honest network - or had they been guying me from start to finish?

    'Mind if I take it?' I said. 'It's evidence.'

    'You're the boss,' he said.

    Anything to get shot of me.

    I carried the Mentor Reflex into the middle of town. The wide, new streets were all in straight lines, and the trick was to avoid the ones along which the sea wind raced. The streets were prettily lit, for all the cold, and the shops crowded with Christmas tomfoolery. There was a clear-cut line between the sexes: the men were moving fast, thinking of business, the women moving slow, thinking of Christmas. I was turning a corner in the locality of the railway station when I was checked by the sight of a small fir tree from which dangled little medicine bottles of coloured glass. 'Milner,' read the sign above the window. 'Druggist.' The important notice was in the corner of the window: 'Photographs Developed'.

    I pushed open the door, entering a sort of warm, chemical Christmas. Approaching the counter, I removed my gloves and loosened the catch that held the plates on to the camera. A man waited at the counter: white- coated and clean - struck me as a doctor who'd missed his mark, like all druggists.

    'Can you do these for me express?'

    'Two hours,' he said, and whether that was express or no, I couldn't have said from his tone.

    'How many exposures in here?' asked the man, taking the tin from me.

    'Well, there'd be two at most, wouldn't there?' I replied. 'Or there might not be any.'

    He looked at me narrowly, saying, 'If there aren't any, it won't take two hours.'

    I requested the largest print size, and then went off for a bite and a warm, eventually walking into Hintons, although not the select parts used by Steve Bowman and his wife, but a smoke-filled, publike part of it, where I ate fried eggs and drank a cup of cocoa.

    It was five o'clock when I returned to Milner, the druggist.

    'Anything doing?' I asked, and by way of reply he handed over an envelope, saying, 'Two and fourpence.'

Chapter Ten

    I paid the money over without a thought for the cost, and pulled first from the envelope the two negatives. Five men stood on a platform before a special carriage. It was the one I'd viewed at Bog Hall Sidings, Whitby. Above it was visible a part of the platform canopy, and I knew that right away for the broken one at Saltburn. The men's eyes seemed to be burning, and all about their boots was a mass of rough blackness - snow in reverse.

    I then pulled out the prints. Going from left to right, the first man was clean-shaven and wore a silk hat (which he held in his left hand, along with his gloves) and a topcoat buttoned right up; there would be a smart black morning coat underneath, no doubt. He was handsome, and his hair went backwards in waves. His dashing looks put me in mind of fine copperplate handwriting.

    He looked slightly sidelong at the photographer, as if to say, 'Photograph me, would you?' and his left arm somehow did not belong about the shoulder of the next man, number two, but that's where it was. Number two was perhaps half the age of number one. He had a friendly face and smiled straight at the photographer. He carried a folded copy of a newspaper, the name of which I could make out: it was the Whitby Morning Post, which served the whole of the coast of North Yorkshire. He wore a derby hat, and had a fine winter flower in his buttonhole, as did the next man, who was about of an age with the first; his rough, grey hair and beard were all of a piece with his tweed suit. He might have been an explorer, freshly returned from the Arctic Circle. The fourth had a round face (he was bareheaded and bald) and round glasses. He gave a cautious smile. The flower in his buttonhole did not suit him. It was too flowery. Number five was older than the rest. He wore a stovepipe hat, and had blind-looking eyes; he looked dirty and confused, but also rich. He might be Moody - the man who'd gone under a train, father of another Moody now living in Pickering. I looked them over again, thinking of them in turn as handsome fellow, young fellow, wild-looking fellow, bald fellow and old fellow.

    The second print was more or less the same, save for the fact that the young man was looking down, and I saw immediately that this was the difference between a photograph that could be used in a picture paper, and one that could not. The prints themselves made an impression not very different from that of the negatives - and this, I believed, was on account of the strangeness of the snow light; I could not tell whether the picture had been taken in the morning or afternoon.

    What had become of these men?

    I had already been told that one was dead, and I knew this much: that there was only one way your fortunes could go once you'd attained the distinction of your own railway carriage, and that was down the hill. I found myself turning one of the prints over, half expecting the druggist to have written their names on the reverse. I looked at the man, now serving a cold cure to another customer. Smart shopkeeper like himself - he might know one of the Club gents; he might know all six. So might any man in Middlesbrough, come to that. . .

    I had meant to take my trophy straight to Detective Sergeant Williams, but a new notion came to me as I exited the druggist's, and I struck out for the largest building in my line of sight: the Middlesbrough Exchange. I crossed a wide square that was filled with trams come to the rescue of the freezing citizens. In the cold darkness, the iron-making smell had descended on the middle of the town: the strange, out-of-the-way smell of burning sand.