up a report for the line superintendent.'
I thought: I'm going to have to arrest the bugger. He'll lose his position.
'This falls under the head of 'accident occurring on railway premises',' Crystal was saying, as I spied another man advancing through the snow at the platform end. He carried some object I couldn't make out.
I watched him for a while and then bent over the body, pulling the flap of the man's topcoat and making a search of his pockets. They were all quite empty. The last of the snow gangers was level with us now and, looking up, I saw that he held two objects. The first was a length of rope.
'Cut it down from the roof beam just above him,' he said. 'Bloke hanged himself,' he ran on, and he was looking at all of us as he spoke, making a kind of appeal.
The second object he held was a camera case of similar design to the one slung about the neck of Stephen Bowman. No - although weathered, it was the very
'Found this half-frozen into the stream,' he said. 'Just on the edge, like. It was only a little way below the cabin -'
The man was shaking with cold. Everybody was eyeing him, and he didn't like it.
'I was making to step on it . . . use it as a stepping stone for crossing the brook . . . Then I thought it might be his -'
He pointed at the bones.
'What is this?' said Crystal, looking from the dead man's camera case to the one hung about Stephen Bowman's neck. 'A flaming camera club?'
Taking the case from the man, I turned about to look at Bowman, and the silver flask was in his gloved hand. I opened the carrying case and took out the camera, which was a black cube in fair condition, given where it had been. There were round switches more or less at the corners, so that it looked as though it was meant to move on wheels - a miniature wagon. Attached to the back of the thing were rusted clips that ought to have held another part of it. I moved a catch and a rubber pyramid rose up. You looked through that to take a picture.
I had my eyes on Bowman as I held the camera.
His words came slowly through the snow.
'The changing box is missing - the box that holds the slides.'
'That holds the . . . exposures?' I said.
The colour was all gone from Bowman's face.
Crystal stood stock still, his moustache collecting snowflakes at a great rate. Most of the snow gang had had enough, and were moving away towards the station house. It was that or become like the man in the blanket. This was not bad weather but something more - this stuff falling from the sky was out to bury us. I looked back at Bowman, and he was all wrong, could not hold my eye. I made a lurch towards the station buildings. I then heard a sound which was not snow falling, but a coloured spray flying from the mouth of Bowman. His hand wiped at his mouth as though he'd just eaten rather than done the opposite, and looking down at the pinkish stuff now lying on the whitened platform, I realised how beautiful the snow had been until that moment.
Chapter Four
Nine hours after the discovery, I looked out of the window of the station building, and the night air was suddenly clear, like a stopped clock. The train was long gone. The engine had detached from it, and taken a run at the drift that lay around the bend. It had just gone bang at the snow and had cut through it directly. The train had then carried on towards Whitby, taking the wife and Harry with it. They were in for a weary drag, but Lydia had made Harry a pillow with her wrap, and they would be in time to connect with the last York train. Duty required me to stay at Stone Farm, and Lydia had quite understood:
'No sense in shirking with your interview coming up.'
She was pushing the pace all right.
I'd then waded through the snow on the bank with two of the blokes from the snow gang, and they'd showed me the cabin where the main discovery had been made. It had been used as a shelter by the platelayers when the direction of the line had been slightly altered years before. The line now went the seaward side of the bank rather than the landward side. A short stretch of the old line remained as part of stationmaster Crystal's empire: Deviation Junction.
The cabin was soundly built, and there were three roof beams at a good height for hanging. Toppled over on the floor of the shelter was an old wooden chair. Had the man stepped on to it while fixing the rope, and then kicked it away? There was a mix-up of rusted tools, railway line catches and clips and baulks of timber on the floor. The body had lain amid this stuff, having fallen away from the noose when the rot set in. It was a queer kind of comfort to know that a man could not remain hanged for ever.
On my return to the station, a loco had run up light engine from Saltburn to take away the snow gang. Every man had stood on the footplate, most with beer bottles in hand.
It was now three-thirty a.m. I closed the doors that gave on to the platform, and poked the fire in the little room that made shift as the Stone Farm booking hall. Through the ticket window, I could see Crystal counting coppers in the ticket office, attending to the business he'd been kept from by the arrival of our train. The body was in there with him, stretched on a table top, and muffled in the blanket. Those bones were Crystal's property, and he growled like a dog if anyone came near. This didn't bother me overmuch: I'd sent two telegrams from the signal box - one to the Middlesbrough office of the railway police, one to the local force, whose nearest office was at Loftus, five miles down the line. And I'd kept my hands on the length of rope and the camera. Nothing would happen until morning, and I had no desire to be at close quarters with Paul Peters in the meantime.
That was the fellow's name. I'd had it from Steve Bowman, who'd also decided to stay at Stone Farm. After seeing the body, and chucking up on the platform, he'd seemed in a great state of nervous tension, wandering about in a daze. He'd said it was the shock of realising that he'd known the dead man; and it was certainly a strange turn-up - far too strange to be explained by coincidence, in my view.
Bowman had got sensible at about midnight, though - which was about when he'd been able to lay his hands on some strong waters. He'd then found his tongue, and told his story to Crystal and myself.
Peters was a photographer. He'd been sent north with Bowman this time last year to tour interesting spots on the North Eastern Railway and get articles from it. They'd put up at the Zetland Hotel in Saltburn for a week in order to look at the easterly parts of the Company's territory. It had been snowing heavily then as now. Peters had kept going off on his own, taking the train at all hours over the Middlesbrough—Whitby stretch. Night photography, weird railway scenes in the half-light or strange weather—it was the coming thing, and he was a demon at it. Peters was a young lad, barely seventeen, and Bowman had known he ought to accompany him. It had troubled his conscience at the time, and was doing so with compound interest just now.
'There'll be an investigation of some sort, I take it?' Bowman said, from the booking-hall bench. He would keep asking that.
'It'll go to the coroner,' I said, for the umpteenth time. 'But what I want to know is: why wasn't more of a fuss made when he went missing?'
Bowman kept silence, taking another go on a beer bottle. He'd been doing excellent justice to a crate of John Smith's - a consignment without a label - that Crystal had given over in exchange for the pair of us staying out of his way. I could see Crystal now through the ticket window. Having got the gist of Bowman's story - which seemed to have fairly bored him - he'd retreated to his desk and begun counting coppers.
'It wouldn't do for the magazine to give the impression it didn't know where its own men were,' Bowman said at length. 'Not that he was on the staff. He had an arrangement with the editor; that's all.'
Silence for a space.
'Peters was a free agent,' Bowman continued. 'Not married - parents dead, if I remember rightly.'
His camera was in its box at his feet. He stared at a poster of Whitby and sighed. Everything he said seemed to come with a sigh.
'Was he the sort likely to make away with himself?'
