Murder At Deviation Junction Read Free Page B

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