Murder At Deviation Junction by Andrew Martin Read Free Book Online Page A

sergeant" on the brain,' I said, 'what with
forever thinking about this interview I have coming up.'
        Bowman
gave a short nod.
        'Christmas
Eve's the big day,' I said, 'at the headquarters in Middlesbrough.'
        Bowman,
taking his seat, said, 'I can hardly think for tiredness just now, but when I
get back to London I'll fish out last year's diary. It's in the office
somewhere, and I have a note in there of Peters's wanderings. Come down, and
I'll stand you dinner. Make a day of it.'
        'Up,'
I said.
        'What's
that?'
        'It's
"up" to London as far as the railways are concerned.'
        I
wondered at his not knowing, being a railway journalist.
        He
nodded wearily, saying, 'But what if you're going across country: Stafford to
Birmingham, for instance? What's that? It's neither up nor down.'
        'The
kid says that Peters carried two cameras. That right?'
        Bowman
nodded and yawned at the same time.
        'He
would generally take two on a job, yes.'
        'Why?'
        'In
case one broke - even though the model he used, the Mentor Reflex, is about the
sturdiest portable available. He was over-keen, you see.'
        Bowman
made do with one Mentor Reflex. The job did not justify the precaution of
taking two - was not important enough. He had arranged his topcoat over his
legs, making a blanket of it. As we pulled away from Stone Farm, he looked
through the window at the snow-covered fields. It was all like so much spilt
milk.
        'Beautiful
railway ride!' he said, in his sarcastic way.
        A
moment later, he was asleep, and the stop at the small town of Loftus - where
more milk was taken up - didn't interrupt his slumbers. As we rolled on
parallel with the high street, the sea came into view once more, and I looked
down to the left, towards the ironstone mine that stood on the low cliff there.
This was Flat Scar mine, one of the biggest, and it squatted at the seaward end
of a great valley that had been cut by a tiny beck.
        The
wheelhouse of the mine was at the centre of a web of wires. Iron buckets were
being sent out along these, running to and from the mine's own railway station.
The mine was its own little black town, with its own gasworks and its own black
beach behind the main building, on which rusty lumps of machinery and slag were
dumped as required. A wooden jetty stuck out to sea, but this was disused now.
No stone went north by boat.
        From
the mine station, ironstone was taken up a zigzag railway towards the furnaces
at Rectory Works. I looked up to the right, and saw the Rectory (as the works
was generally known) with its line of fiery towers - only they were not blast
furnaces but kilns, and they did not make iron but burned the lumps of
ironstone down so that there was more iron and less stone. It was then cheaper
to carry to the blast furnaces of Ironopolis.
        The
iron cloud over the kilns was slowly changing from one shape to another^ moving
like a person in agony.
        As we
rumbled on towards the Kilton Viaduct, which would carry us across the valley,
I looked down at the mine, and up at the kilns. Here was a pretty situation: a
train was setting off from the mine station. It was making ready to climb the
zigzag. I stood up in the compartment to watch the exchange. The zigzag line,
running east to west, would take the iron train between the hundred-
and-fifty-foot-high brick legs of the Kilton Viaduct while we crossed over the
top, heading from north to south.
        A
wind gauge fluttered beyond the compartment window - a strange-looking
contraption. It was like a small windmill, and it operated a 'stop' signal in
high winds. It was not safe for a train to be on the viaduct in those conditions,
but we were rolling across it now, going at the precautionary slow speed over
the great ravine. The walls on either side of the single track were low, and I
looked over the one on the left to see the iron train