Murder At Deviation Junction

    Harry was now looking out of the window.

    'The boy's quite right though, isn't he?' the woman was saying. 'Where would we be if everyone put their boots on the seats?'

    She looked at the man.

    'Where would we be, Stephen?'

    'I'm sure I don't know, Violet,' he said, hardly looking up from his scribbling.

    (She did not look like a Violet - too pale.)

    'I think it comes from his being a policeman's son,' said Lydia, at which the clerk looked up over his glasses at me.

    'The man two doors down from us in Wimbledon is on the force,' said the woman. 'He's quite high up - an inspector, I think.'

    She was pretty but, like her husband, small in scale - like a child playing at being an adult. Whenever she spoke, she caused a commotion, or so she seemed to think, for she rearranged herself afterwards, refolding the gloves that rested on top of her basket and patting down her skirts.

    'He's only been in the street for a year,' she went on. 'Well, we all have. But the milkman for the area, who was known to give short measure ... he doesn't try it in Lumley Road.'

    She looked at us all.

    '...that's because of the Inspector.'

    'James is on the North Eastern Railway force,' said the wife, after a moment. 'Detective grade. He's going for his promotion on Christmas Eve.'

    And because we were in company, she left off the words: 'He'd better get it as well.'

    Lydia had spent the past two years fretting about our futures - mine and hers both. Would she end up at the kitchen sink? That was her leading anxiety. She was a New Woman, forward thinking. There was to be a sex revolution, and you knew it was coming by the speed at which Lydia went at her typewriting. Whenever Harry slept, or was at school, she would be at the machine in the parlour by which she got her living, writing letters for the Co- operative Movement or the women's cause in general or the Co-operative Women's movement, which was a frightening combination of the two. She got a little money by this, and now she'd been offered a position in the Northern Division of the Co-operative Movement: half-time secretary to Mrs Somebody-or-other. Three days a week, ten bob a day. Very fair wages, all considered. Lydia was to give her answer by the first week of the New Year, and she would only be able to say yes if I achieved promotion to detective sergeant. That would be a big leap, for it would all but double my pay, letting us take on a girl who could do the weekly wash and mind Harry for the three days.

    My interview was to be with the chief of the force himself, Captain Fairclough, and it was fixed for twelve noon in the spot we were now leaving behind: Middlesbrough, to which the headquarters of the North Eastern Railway Police had lately removed, having been first at Newcastle.

    We rolled through Redcar station, for we were semi-fast to Whitby, where we would change for York. I caught a glimpse of the beach as we rocked through Redcar station. It was snow- covered. A torn white flag planted in the sand flew the word 'TEAS'.

    The ladies in the compartment were developing a conversation.

    'Do you wash at home?'

    'Some,' the wife said, very cautiously. 'Only handkerchiefs and the like.'

    That was a fib (we washed everything at home), and I flashed the wife a sideways glance, which she avoided.

    The woman started in with another question: 'Do you wash the - ?' But she broke off at the sight of three rough-looking blokes whisking along the corridor, shouting at each other as they went. Iron- getters most likely, I thought, and half-canned at the end of a turn. Harry was kicking his feet, looking out of the window at more furnaces - set high on a hill in the weird light.

    'Everything's on fire, dad,' said Harry, and it was evidently fine by him, for he spoke the words calmly.

    'Wimbledon's home to us,' the woman was saying. 'Lumley Road.'

    She would keep on mentioning it.

    'It's well away from the railway,' she said.

    Was that good or bad? She found the railway noisy, I supposed. But there'd be no Wimbledon without it. I remembered the place from my days on the London and South Western company - a medium class of houses, and seemingly more of them every week you rode by them.

    I looked again through the window. A little light left in the day; lonely cottages here and there; snow landing slantwise on the sea beyond.

    'Do you know London?' the woman was saying.

    'I'm from there myself,' said the wife.

    'Oh, where?'

    She was cornered now.

    'Waterloo,' she said, and that was the end of the conversation for the moment. You could not say the lodging house the wife had kept there had been well away from the station; it had been almost in it. Lydia frowned at the gas lamp over Harry's seat. He suddenly smiled and waved at her with the full length of his arm, as though she sat half a mile away, but she did not respond. She was fighting for the sisterhood, but that didn't mean she had to like all individual women, or even very many of them, and it was ridiculous of me to think so, as I had often been told upon raising the point.

    Harry was keeping rhythm with the train, repeating over and over; 'Rattly ride, rattly ride, rattly ride,' until Lydia, ever so gently, kicked him on the knee, after which he fell to whispering the words.

    I turned to the boy, saying, 'Those hills are full of miners, Harry - getting the ironstone from which the iron and steel is made. There's a whole world underground: miles of tunnels, workshops, storerooms, even horses and stables.'

    'Have you been doing your marketing in Middlesbrough?' Lydia asked the woman.

    'I did a little shopping,' said the woman. She was not the sort for marketing.

    The village of Marske was to our left - a big house on a hill stood guard over it, but snow fell on village and mansion alike.

    'We had tea at Hinton's,' the woman was saying. 'The main dining room, you know.'

    We crashed over some points and there was a winding gear suddenly hard by us, all lit up.

    'We had lovely macaroons,' the woman was saying, 'and then Stephen smoked a cigar in what they call the More-ish Room. It's rather select.'

    At this, the man was finally provoked into speaking.

    'The Moorish room,' he said. 'After the Moors, who come from North Africa or wherever it might be .. .'

    'Or the Yorkshire Moors,' said the wife, grinning, and the Wimbledon pair both laughed at this: the man quite briefly, the woman for longer. It surprised me that she should have laughed, and made me better disposed towards her.

    I turned to Harry. 'Have you seen that we've been passing wagons full of the stuff? They're taking it to Middlesbrough, but must wait for the passenger trains to go by.'

    'Why?' said Harry.

    'Because,' I said, 'people come before lumps of stone.'

    'You reckon,' he said, and Lydia touched his knee with her elastic-sided boot again. This was another of his regular expressions she considered coarse. I looked at the wife, and she grinned. I liked those boots of hers. I wanted to see what she looked like standing in them with nothing else on, but had not quite had the brass neck to ask. I would do, though - I would do it come Christmas Eve if everything had gone all right in Middlesbrough, and we had more money in view.

    We were now winding our way towards the new seaside town of Saltburn. The black sea was to our left; a slag breakwater stretched out like the black hand of a clock. More shouts came from along the corridor, and the Wimbledon man had stopped work to listen. Harry was coughing again.