The Body on the Train Read online

  He smiled. It was our childhood nickname for him. Everyone else who was part of our merry band has gone from the street. I am the only one who sometimes calls him by that name.

  It was oddly comforting to have him with me.

  He frowned. “You will come out, Kate?”

  “Yes. I will come out.”

  “And you will come out of this same gate?”

  “If they send me out of another gate, I will come round to this one.”

  He was satisfied.

  Under the watchful eye of the guard, Philip drove away.

  As I took the first step towards the prison, a sense of dread swept through me. Perhaps it was to do with the size of the building, the iron gates, or some memory in the air of the thousands of people brought here, heavy with fear and despair.

  An earlier version of me might have heard gates clang behind me. When young and marching for the vote, I was with the suffragists. We took part in peaceful demonstrations but not everyone avoided arrest. I knew the experience of imprisonment through the stories of suffragette friends, the brutality and attempts to strip away the self. I had no wish to be a martyr; played my part, but was secretly relieved not to be incarcerated.

  I took a deep breath and gave myself a little shake. I walked towards the man on the gate, permit in hand. One more deep breath and I became someone else, a person who will not be cowed by men in uniform, no matter what their rank or station. Nursing experience always stands me in good stead. And I have excellent models among my old suffrage friends, and my family. Women from my mother’s and aunt’s rank in life quite naturally carry an air of authority and entitlement. There is a way of shifting the shoulders and straightening the back.

  The gateman had one of those faces that will always look youthful, plump cheeks, pale blue eyes, and strands of fair hair showing beneath his cap.

  After a few moments I was taken across a yard towards to what appeared to be a little house. Another uniformed man pointed to a battered chair and asked me to wait. Polite and courteous, but what lies beneath?

  After what seemed a day and a half but could not have been more than ten minutes, another officer entered. This man was tall and so cheerful he might have just come up trumps in a sweepstake. The sound of his boots clattered us to the main building. After that, everything merged into an opening and shutting of doors, the turning of keys and endless brightly lit corridors.

  One prison officer gave way to another.

  At last, I found myself ushered into a cold, whitewashed room with a high barred window. Two wooden chairs, placed with mathematical precision, stood on either side of a wide table. The prisoner sat with his head bowed. It occurred to me that this is the kind of place where one should bring cigarettes or chocolate. I had neither.

  “Stephen?”

  The prison officer cleared his throat. “Kindly address the prisoner by his surname, madam.”

  Stephen Walmsley raised his head and looked at me. Puzzled. His dark eyes were red-rimmed. He appeared confused, and why should he not be, at the sight of a stranger? The newspaper account had given his age as twenty, but he appeared younger. There was a yellowing bruise on his cheek and a cut near his lip.

  “Officer, I need to speak to Mr. Walmsley alone, and will you please remove the handcuffs?”

  “Can’t do that for security reasons.”

  “I will take responsibility.”

  He hesitated, pursing his lips. Whatever edict had come from on high, the importance of my visit must have been made clear. I doubted it was Commander Woodhead I had to thank. More likely, DC Yeats had found a way to send a message that carried the commander’s authority.

  After a hesitation, he unlocked the handcuffs. “I’ll be by the door, madam.” He left the door open.

  I closed it, imagining his ear against the other side.

  Stephen rubbed his wrists, first one and then the other. There was a painful looking mark on each wrist where the handcuffs had been too tightly fastened.

  “Mr. Walmsley, Stephen, I’m Mrs. Shackleton. Kate Shackleton. How are you?”

  He did not answer. Neither would I in his situation. What an idiotic question. I sounded like some patronising do-gooder who might make things worse for him.

  Still he did not speak.

  “How are they treating you?”

  He did not look at me, nor did he answer.

  The sketch of the unknown man was in my pocket. I had formed an idea of showing it to him, saying that if he helped me, perhaps I could help him. That plan no longer held water.

  “Have you seen a solicitor?” I should have known that. I should have found out.

  It took several moments before I realised he was refusing to talk.

  “I’m sorry you are in here.”

  At that, he looked across at me. So was he, of course. More sorry than I.

  I pressed on. “Do you understand why you are here?”

  He placed his hands on the table and looked down at them as if seeing them for the first time. They were workman’s hands, clean, tiny cuts, the nails cut straight. “Who are you?”

  “Someone who wants to find out what happened on Friday night.”

  “Are you here to see if I’m daft? If I’m to be sent to the loony bin?”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “I would have to have been more nuts than crackers to do what they say I did. Mrs. Farrar was good to me.”

  “Did you kill her?”

  He sighed. The question was an old one now. It had been thrown at him a hundred times, along with fists. “I would never have hurt Mrs. Farrar. Everyone knows that.”

  “Who knows it?”

  “Everyone. They came to the prison the night after I was taken. I heard them.”

  “Who?”

  “My workmates, pals from the band, Milly and Joan.”

  “Milly and Joan?”

  “I heard Eric playing the trumpet. I didn’t hear the tambourine but I know Joan would have been bashing it. Milly would be there.”

  “What did they play?”

  He shrugged. “Eric stopped in the middle of a note. He must’ve been moved on.”

  “Will you tell me what happened on Friday?”

  “I’ve telled it overmuch.”

  “To the police?”

  “Aye.”

  “And a solicitor?”

  He gave a snort. “He were in a hurry, had better things to do.”

  “If you didn’t kill Mrs. Farrar, tell me what you can. Perhaps I can help.”

  “No one can. They’ve made up their minds to blame me.”

  “At least let’s try. Were you at work on Friday?”

  Slowly, the story slid from him and filled the small room.

  He finished his shift at the pit where he worked on the winding machinery. He went back to where he lodged, above Mrs. Farrar’s shop, bringing fish and chips for them as he did on a Friday night. While they ate, the water was heating for his bath. It was band practice night. He filled the tin bath. He always did. It was too heavy for Mrs. Farrar. He took the bath into the house. She was moving about in the scullery.

  While he took his bath, he noticed that everything that would polish was polished. The house smelled of lavender. She had brought in daffodils from the garden, arranged in a painted jam jar. Everything shone, as though she was expecting someone. The brasses gleamed. She had starched the antimacassar. It had been like that for a few days, no dust allowed, but she hadn’t said what brought it on, and he hadn’t asked.

  He was glad she was cheerful because a while before she had seemed miserable. But of course, they all had.

  Apart from that, all was usual. He called to her when he was ready for his back washing. She washed his back, and then left him to it.

  He emptied the bath where they’d planted potatoes. He hung it back on the nail outside.

  The suit he wore to band practice had been Mr. Farrar’s. It fitted him right well. Mrs. Farrar was glad that there was use for it.
He took his trumpet and set off for practice. He played with the Temperance Band.

  After band practice, he walked Joan home. She lived on Silver Street. He wouldn’t say she lodged there because Mr. and Mrs. Arkwright were more like mam and dad to her, just as Mrs. Farrar was like a gran to him. They were both lucky, him and Joan. They had been lucky up until last Friday.

  “Is that where I’d find Joan, on Silver Street?”

  “Number 42. She works though, at mill.”

  “What happened next?”

  He seemed reluctant to continue. I urged him to pick up the story, wanting him to keep talking, remember the details of that evening, and that night.

  They went inside, he said, him and Joan. Mrs. Arkwright had baked, she always did. As he was walking back towards Mrs. Farrar’s, with buns wrapped in a tea towel, he saw two of his pals. They were going into the Miners’ Institute. He didn’t go with them because he knew they’d be drinking. He’d signed the pledge when he joined the Temperance Band, although he’d really only joined for the trumpet playing.

  He shouted goodnight and went on his way, going round to the back of the house, the shop door being bolted. The back door was wide open. Mrs. Farrar lay on the floor by the fender. He knelt down beside her, at first thinking she’d had a fall. He went to pick her up and that was when he knew. She was dead. He didn’t know what to do. He thought someone had broken in. He looked around to see if anyone was still there. No one was, but in the shop everything was chucked about, cash drawers pulled open, cash tin gone. He covered Mrs. Farrar with the counterpane from her bed. He was shaking, and lit a cigarette to calm his nerves. He knew she would hate for the place to be a mess. She kept everything just so. He began to clear up. He mopped the blood. Then he knew from the mess that it would take too long to put everything as it was. So he went for help.

  Police and ambulance came. He had blood on him. They took him to the station and kept on at him all night, trying to make him say that he’d killed Mrs. Farrar.

  I believed him when he said that he had not.

  “Stephen, you said that Mrs. Farrar had seemed miserable, but on that day she was cheerful. Do you know what made her unhappy, and then what might have accounted for her change of mood?”

  “People have their ups and downs.”

  “But that night was different. She’d brought flowers in the house. Did she do that often?”

  He thought for a moment and then seemed suddenly interested. “No, she never did. She said they belonged outside, growing as God intended.”

  “Was there anything else about how she was that evening?”

  “When I came in with fish and chips, she was singing. She was singing, I don’t know, daft stuff. “The Grand Old Duke of York.” I thought it was a bit funny for her to be singing a nursery rhyme.”

  “Do you think she was expecting someone?”

  “She never said.”

  “Did she get many visitors?”

  “Not really.”

  “Any?”

  “Only neighbours coming in the shop.”

  I took out the sketch of the unknown man. “Have you ever seen this person?”

  The question took Stephen by surprise. He looked carefully at the image.

  “No.” He looked at me with the same care. “Do you think he did for Mrs. Farrar?”

  Without warning, the officer opened the door. “Time’s up, madam.”

  I looked at my watch. “My time isn’t up, officer. Please leave us.”

  Surprisingly, he did.

  “Has anything unusual happened lately?”

  He sighed. “I don’t know. I don’t know nothing since I been in here.”

  “Try and think. Have there been strangers about?”

  “Not right round by us but the home was closed, and there’s been work going on nearby.” He leaned forward, suddenly eager to tell me something else. “Mebbe that’s why Mrs. Farrar were upset that time. She didn’t want the Bluebell Children’s Home to close. None of us did. She allus visited, went to see the kids.”

  “The children’s home?”

  “Where I was fetched up. A lot of us was.”

  “What happened in your family?”

  “Dad died. Mam went off. Mrs. Farrar allus said, ‘Don’t blame yer mam too much. She’ll be sorry. She’ll blame herself well enough one day.’”

  “Mrs. Farrar sounds a good person.”

  He gulped, fighting back tears. “I woulda been lost without her. She took me in when I was thirteen.”

  The officer opened the door again, this time looking at his fob watch. “Time’s up.”

  The officer produced handcuffs.

  Stephen held out his hands. He spoke without prompting. “Tell mi friends not to fret.”

  The officer stood back, so that I could leave before them.

  I stood in the corridor.

  As he came out, Stephen said, “It musta been that made her sad, made us all sad, the home closing.”

  “Thank you, Stephen.” I needed to come again. I should have specified that I needed more time with him. “Chin up.”

  It was a ridiculous thing to say to a man who must go to sleep with a noose at the back of his eyes. Words are easy to say when you are going in one direction along a corridor and a prisoner is going in the other.

  Another escort appeared. I stood aside while Stephen was led away.

  I turned back to look. So did he. He cast a glance of hope, and pleading, and then unaccountably began to sing, and though the prison officer barked at him, he kept on singing.

  “The Grand Old Duke of York, he had ten thousand men. He marched them up to the top of the hill and he marched them down again. And when they were up they were up, and when they were down they were down, and when they were only halfway up they were neither up nor down.”

  My escort led me back the way we had come.

  When we had left the corridors behind and were in a high-ceilinged open space, I turned to him. “I need to see the governor.”

  A single crumb of comfort came from the fact that Stephen Walmsley had not yet been charged with murder.

  Chapter Seven

  Ged Adams of Middleton spared Sykes the longest time. He was one of the smaller growers, and grumbled that earning a living from the rhubarb came hard. There were so many in the game and the big boys had the advantage. They sat in the doorway of a little hut that held spades, candles and a couple of long leather aprons. Ged poured strong sweet tea into tin mugs. He looked out across all the land they could see, mist just clearing from the frosted and furrowed earth.

  “Why would I put a body on a train, with acres of land to choose from?”

  When they had finished the tea, and Sykes had learned how the rhubarb was taken to the station, he asked to see where the forced rhubarb grew.

  “Looking for a body?”

  “Just interested.”

  Ged lit a lamp. He opened the door into a shed with such a low ceiling that Sykes had to bend. It was warm inside, heated from a stove at the back and pipes that ran the length of the shed. In the eerie lamplight, he saw row upon row of crimson stalks with large heart-shaped leaves.

  Beginning to feel he would learn nothing at all of value, Sykes next talked to Stanley Ambler of Hope Farm. Stanley tended his raised strawberry beds as he talked. “Don’t believe a word of it, gov. It’s a tale to give government an excuse to send spies in and see how much we’re growing.”

  By noon, Sykes had visited nineteen of the growers whose produce went on the train that fateful Friday night. He learned that the growers started work at dawn, finished at dusk, and that nobody knew a thing, and not a single man among them noticed anything unusual.

  By then, the car was filthy, the windscreen decorated with dead insects. Sykes stopped for petrol, and to have the car washed.

  He drove home for a bite to eat and to warm up. Rosie was out. That’s why she doesn’t want a telephone, he thought as he cleaned his shoes. She thinks it would do nothing but
ring when she goes out and stop the minute she comes back.

  Opening his road map on the table, he checked the route to Moortown Golf Club.

  He drove out of the city towards the suburbs, a pleasant enough journey. Green space, lots of trees, fresh air. This made a change from his insurance jobs. It beat visiting stuffy offices. The drive gave him time to think of how they should best go about this odd business of the man in the sack, but no inspiration came.

  He had never visited a golf course. As far as he was concerned, golf was for people who didn’t understand cricket. Hitting a small ball with a long stick seemed to him the worst kind of pointlessness. If the unidentified man had suffered a head wound, attributable to a blow from the sharp end of a golf club, that would be different. It would be a reason for being here. As things stood, Sykes had no great faith in Mrs. Shackleton’s idea that the unknown man might have been a golfer. Golfers, guns and Russian gold did not make a good fit.

  Mrs. Shackleton was blindly feeling for a starting point in the investigation, he told himself. When he did not bite at her suggestion that he go undercover as a railway security inspector, she came up with this.

  The way in which the man’s body had been dealt with smacked of revenge, and suggested financial shenanigans, wheeling and dealing. Perhaps the man had reneged on a debt and paid with his life. Lawlessness was rife these days, ever since the war. Even so, in all his years on the force, Sykes had never come across a link between crime and rhubarb.

  The minute he drove through the gates of Moortown Golf Club, Sykes had the measure of this place. It was for people with more money than sense. All good chaps together, being jolly, scratching each other’s backs. And now men were crossing the Atlantic to knock small balls around in a different country. Had nobody anything better to do these days?

  For a moment or two, he stayed in the motor looking about him, considering his approach. He combed his hair, put on his hat, and climbed from the car. He told himself not to look at the bigger cars round about. First a person is pleased to be that rare creature who owns a vehicle, and then he sees all the others, newer and bigger, that belong to men who are no better than he is. Still, for all they knew, this was his Friday car.