Murder At Deviation Junction

Mr Bowman. Urgent.' The number given was 2196 London EC.

    Detective Sergeant Williams was putting his coat on. I'd rattled him with my discoveries, no question. Billy moved away, and returned with a second file, this marked simply 'Theodore Falconer'.

    'How about the other three in the picture?' I asked Williams, and he shook his head.

    'This one,' he said, pointing to the clean-shaven, handsome man in black. 'The face seems -'

    But he shook his head again. He'd seemed to have the name on his tongue, as had the blokes in the Exchange. Williams, smiling again, said, 'You're at liberty to take those papers away for a little while. I'm booking off just now - I have the job of collecting the family Christmas tree on the way home. Do you have children yourself, Detective Stringer?'

    'One boy,' I said.

    'I've three girls.'

    Well, a fellow could run to three on a detective sergeant's wages.

    'They're each after a doll's house,' he said, reaching for his bowler, 'so we'll land up with a whole street in miniature.'

    'My boy wants a toy aeroplane,' I said. 'One that really flies.'

    And it seemed to be quite typical of Williams that he should have responded:

    'Now I know just where you can get one of those. Brown's,' said Detective Sergeant Williams, backing through the door. 'On Corporation Road here, but there's a York branch, I believe.'

    'But how does it fly?'

    'Why, elastic,' he said, with a parting nod.

    Billy wound the magneto for me at his end of the office, and handed me the instrument. Half the telephone talkers in London seemed to come and go in echoing waves, and then I was put in connection with a very sad- sounding man who might have sighed very loudly when I asked, 'Am I through to The Railway Rover}' or that might just have been the noise of the line. Anyhow, it was The Railway Rover, and Stephen Bowman had evidently just left the office in a tearing hurry.

Chapter Eleven

    I nodded thanks to Billy, who said, 'Would you care to read those papers here? It's cold out.'

    'Much obliged,' I said.

    I sat down and he brought me a cup of tea, which I never touched because on turning to the prosecution file marked 'Crown vs Sanderson', it straightaway came to me that here was the business that had been known to York newspaper readers as 'The Lame Horse Murders'. The case had been tried in Durham nine months previously; I had forgotten that the defendant was called Sanderson, and the two victims were called Lee.

    George Lee's wife was of superior rank to him. Lee himself had had no schooling to speak of and had started work in the iron mines at fifteen. He was a joiner at various places, rising swiftly to foreman joiner. He was good at his job; couldn't be beaten for energy and push. Aged thirty-one he was injured in a cage accident at New Mine, which was somewhere on the cliffs near Saltburn, for which he was handsomely compensated. He'd used the money to undertake a degree in mining engineering at Leeds University, obtaining a first-class certificate.

    He then worked at a certain Marine Mine, and here he invented a whole new contraption for the mines: the Lee Picking Belt, which had put him in funds for life. His next move was to become a consulting engineer, employed at umpteen mines, and he'd also become an investor: shareholder here, seat on the board there.

    In 1904, Lee had bought The Grange: a tidy-sized place a mile or so inland of Staithes, and so about a dozen miles south of Saltburn. Here, he'd set up as a country gentleman in a small way.

    It was mentioned in the report that he 'travelled every working day to the office he kept in Middlesbrough', but it seemed to be nowhere stated that he had done so as a member of a travelling club. That had been my own discovery, and all of a sudden it didn't seem of much account.

    I looked up just then to see the door of the police office opening.

    A constable came in holding another man by the elbow. This second fellow was smartly turned out. He held a well-brushed bowler lightly decorated with snow, and had a pleasant lemony smell to him: good-class hair oil. He was being led off to the holding cell nonetheless. A couple of minutes later, the constable came by my desk again. Introducing myself, I asked whether he might be Robinson, the man who'd interviewed Peters about the theft of the camera, but he was not. At this, I wanted to get back to 'Crown vs Sanderson', but the constable, nodding towards the holding cell, said, 'Notorious fare-avoider, that bloke.'

    'Caught him at it, have you?'

    The constable nodded. He was holding a cup of tea, provided by Billy.

    'Making for Scotland on a doctored ticket, he was.'

    'Looks like he came along pretty quietly.'

    'Like a lamb,' the constable said, draining his tea. 'He's wanted by the town police here on a number of other points besides.'

    He just would be, I thought, as the constable returned his teacup to Billy, gave me good evening and quitted the room.

    In that perfect police office, I turned back to the file.

    Gilbert Sanderson, George Lee's murderer, had followed evil courses from an early age, and had practically grown up in the reformatory at Durham. It was believed he'd got his living mainly by burglary from then on, although he'd held some subordinate positions in some of the Cleveland iron mines, and had described himself on his marriage certificate of 1897 as a 'tinker'. Sanderson kept quarters at Loftus, in the heart of the iron-mining district, but he was of a roaming disposition, and travelled throughout the North Riding buying and selling, which is where the horse had come in. It was a white mare, an ex-Middlesbrough cab horse that had suffered a collision with a motor in Middlesbrough city centre and been ripped open along the flank. But the mare - name of Juliette - had been stitched and survived.

    A year ago, the paths of Sanderson and Lee had crossed.

    Sanderson broke into The Grange on 11 December 1908, and was stowing candlesticks in a haversack when the owner came upon him. Lee was stabbed through the heart. The wife came next into the room, and got the same treatment. Both died instantly; the manservant was blinded in one eye, and he was lucky at that, for the knife point had stopped just short of causing injury to the brain. The boy, who was seven years old at the time, survived the attack and now lodged with the late Mrs Lee's sister in London, with all the property held in trust for him.

    It was the manservant's description that had done for Sanderson; that and the discovery of the horse in the garden. It had been found lame, with a crack in the right foreleg, and this was taken to be the reason for Sanderson having made his escape on foot. He was well known to the local police (having twice before got hard labour for burglary), and he was arrested the next day at his lodgings in Loftus.

    Sanderson was hanged at Durham Gaol on 4 March 1909, and a newspaper account of the hanging was contained in the file. At the head of it was a woodcut of Gilbert Sanderson: he was a big, pug-looking man with a bald head and long side whiskers.

    I bundled up the papers, together with the camera and the photographs. I walked out on to the platform. It was crowded, although the Whitby train that everyone was after wasn't due for a quarter of an hour. A lad walked the platform shouting, 'Papers, cigarettes, chocolates,' and I wondered which of the three offered the best defence against cold. I let the lad go by, even though the Middlesbrough Gazette was offering its seasonal 'Complimentary Calendar'. I ducked into the refreshment room, where there were even more black-suited businessmen than on the platform. A fire blazed at each end of the room, and the bar was in the middle, under a gas ring that was kept rocking by the opening and closing of the door, to the annoyance of the steward, who kept reaching up to steady it. All the Complimentary Calendars had been chucked anyhow across the floor, and were being trodden to bits beneath the boots of the drinkers.

    Hot milk and rum was on the go, so I bought a glass (in spite of the long cost) and turned to the second set of papers: the 'missing' file on Falconer.