'Who comes up here in winter?' I asked him.
'Juggins like us,' he muttered.
Huddled in his coat, he did not meet my eye; he had hardly the will to speak. He hadn't taken on alcoholic fuel for a long while, and he had now reached the point of being made tired by the cold - which was a dangerous point. He belonged in an office, not a Highland train; an office or a pub, of course.
I looked out at two winter diehards in the fields, following a hay wagon as we moved on.
I was almost asleep myself when a jolt of the train brought me up sharply. Bowman was eyeing me again.
'The wild sea disclosed,' he murmured, and he nodded to the right. Great grey waves were rising and coming at us. The line was practically on the beach.
'When will he bloody get off?' I said, nodding along towards our friend; but Bowman had gone back into his own world.
I had hoped the man might step down at Helmsdale. This was a seaport with a slightly larger station. For once, grey houses blocked the view of fields and sea. But while everyone bar the two ministers got off there, our bastard sat tight.
After Helmsdale we were rocking along in a valley by a fast black river - one-sided trees and tumbledown cottages, all snow- covered. It seemed a great impertinence for the engine, which was green, and its carriages, which were greener still, to intrude upon this white world, which was a kind of fairyland, not real, not Britain. I could not believe they had the Royal Mail here; or even newspapers. There were telegraph poles and wires, but they were all askew and snow-loaded.
We stopped at a place called Kildonan, and hastened down on to the platform. I needed a piss, and there was no WC on the train.
A man in railway uniform stood before the station house.
'Good day,' I said.
(That was a laugh, with the wet snow flying at us.)
'Could I use the jakes in the station house?' I continued.
'The whit?' he said, making the sound of a cane going swish through the air.
'The station lavatory,' I said.
'Aye, aye,' he said, and jerked his thumb at the open door behind him. It was half booking hall, half living room with a good fire going and three pot dogs on the mantelpiece. The lavatory was in a door leading off. I pissed and came out, lingering by the fire. I then turned, nodded at the man and climbed up into the train as he blew his whistle. The ministers had gone, and Bowman was standing up at his seat.
He was talking in low tones to the man we had been pursuing.
The stationmaster slammed the door behind me, and the train jerked into motion as the man we had been pursuing turned towards me, gun in hand. With perhaps the beginnings of a smile, he motioned me towards him, motioned me into my seat. He sat down opposite me, and Bowman sat down beside him.
Bowman would not meet my eye.
He was in on it.
Chapter Twenty-four
'In five minutes, ye'll alight the train,' said the man.
'Will I now?'
'Aye, ye wull,' he said, with a glance down at the revolver in his hand.
Juggins like us, Bowman had said. Juggins like me. The business of the photograph was never meant to come to any good, and I should never have taken it up. Shillito had been right. I knew hardly anything, but it was too much for this Scotsman. Was he Sanderson? Had Sanderson been Scottish? I asked him outright:
'Are you Gilbert Sanderson?'
'Sanderson's deed,' he said. Again, the half-smile came. He had the smooth kind of Scottish accent, making the most of the Rs.
Down below us to the left, the black water seemed to be in a panic as it rushed towards two mighty boulders. We and it were the only things moving in the valley. Looking up at the mountains, I thought for some reason of hymn-singing in church, the search for the Beyond. This was an almost heavenly, life-after-death place where everything was different. I would not see my wife and child again, and all that was left was curiosity.
'Where is this place?' I said, and it was Bowman who answered, looking down and away. It took me a while to make out what he'd said, which was: 'Strath of Kildonan'.
Well, it sounded like a place in a book.
I looked back at Bowman, but he could not meet my eye.
The train began to slow, and a station rolled into view, but there had been no bell, and there were no people.
'Oot,' said the Scotsman, and I stood up. We climbed down,
Bowman slamming the door behind us, and then immediately huddling up into his coat again. The train went on. This was not a station, but a halt. The place was not named. The platform was of wood, like a theatre stage, and there was no station building, but only the two pointing arrows for 'Inverness' or 'Thurso and Wick'. The Scotsman must have requested the stop miles since.
I could not keep my eyes open in the floating snow, but I knew that the clattering river was near by, that mountains rose all around; and that a high-wheeled dog cart stood waiting at twenty yards' distance.
'Tae yer left', said the Scotsman, and I could not make out the words.
I turned in the snow towards Bowman. The lenses of his spectacles might have been painted white. He looked like a red-faced blind man.
'He means you to go to your left,' Bowman said.
The snow-covered heather leant across the path so that, as I came up to the cart, my trouser legs were soaking. It wasn't weather for a forty-shilling lounge suit.
Two men waited in the cart. Their collars were up, and their hats pulled low, but I knew them. They had stepped from the photograph in my pocket and up into the vehicle. They were the barrister known to the Chief and called Marriott, and the youngest man of the five, the one who'd been missed in Filey over the summer. Had I run them to earth, or they me? The young man was speaking to the Scotsman in what seemed like a friendly way, but the barrister, who was in the driving seat, stared straight ahead at the miserable horse. I was placed on one bench; the young man, the Scotsman and Bowman sat facing me. The revolver lay in the Scotsman's hand. He did not wear gloves; the gun would freeze before that hand of his did. He was made for this weather, born to it.
'Ye've the photograph about ye?' he said, and I gave it over.
Marriott the lawyer cracked the whip, and we started to roll as the Scotsman said to the young man, 'Would you no say I was better to look on than yon Gilbert Sanderson, Richie?'
The young man said something I didn't catch.
'Aye, he's the same high foreheed as me,' said the Scotsman, 'I'll grant ye that.'
Again a remark from the young man that I did not hear, to which the Scotsman said, 'Nay, nay, he was bald - I'm towsy-haired compared to the leet Sanderson.'
He pulled off his cap to show his smooth brown skull; there was not a hair on it. He didn't crack a smile, but he was jesting with the younger man, who smiled a little uneasily. The Scot seemed to have a liking for that young man, who looked maybe a couple of years shy of my own age.
Of course, the Scotsman's identity of appearance with Sanderson had been the key to the whole scheme. He had stolen Sanderson's horse and lamed the beast in the garden; he had then entered the house to do the murder, made sure he was seen by a servant and made off on foot. Was the Whitby-Middlesbrough Travelling Club a band of robbers then? I could not believe it.
The young man, evidently called Richard, stood in need of a shave, and there was a deep red cut on his forehead. He had come a long way from garden parties at Filey. The road was rising up above the railway line now. We were passing a broken-down stone house, and a sign reading 'DANGER', warning travellers off the land at certain times when shooting would take place. I glanced up again at the mountains, but could not make out the tops. On the hills were four-pointed shelters, like crossed swords.