The Excursion Train

'How long will we be in Ashford, sir?' asked Leeming, worriedly.

'A couple of days at least, Victor. Maybe more.'

'Then we'd have to stay the night there?'

'Your wife will have to forego the pleasures of matrimony for a short while, I fear,' said Colbeck, 'but she will be reassured by the fact that you're engaged in such an important investigation.'

'Only when you've taken that bath, Sergeant,' stipulated Tallis.

'Yes, sir,' said Leeming.

'I expect my men to be smart and well groomed.' He turned a censorious eye on the elegant Inspector. 'Though there is no need to take my instructions in that regard to extremes.'

'We'll take an early train to Ashford,' said Colbeck, ignoring the barbed comment from his superior. 'I suggest that you bring enough clothing for five days, Victor.'

'Five days!' gulped Leeming. 'What about my wife?'

'She is not included in this excursion,' said Tallis, sourly.

'Estelle will miss me.'

'The sooner we bring this investigation to a conclusion,' observed Colbeck, 'the sooner you'll be back with your family.But we must not expect instant results here. The only way to solve the murder of Jacob Guttridge is to find out what really happened to Joseph Dykes.'

'But we know that,' asserted Tallis. 'he was killed by Hawkshaw.'

'That's open to question, Superintendent. Far be it from me, as a barrister, to question the working of the judicial system, but I have a strange feeling – and it is only a feeling, not a theory – that there was a gross miscarriage of justice on the scaffold at Maidstone.'

CHAPTER SEVEN

Nothing revealed the essential difference between the two men as clearly as the train journey to Ashford that morning. Inspector Robert Colbeck was in his element, enjoying his preferred mode of travel and reading his way through the London newspapers as if sitting in a favourite chair at home. Sergeant Victor Leeming, on the other hand, was in severe discomfort. His dislike of going anywhere by train was intensified by the fact that his body was a mass of aching muscles and tender bruises. As their carriage lurched and bumped its clamorous way over the rails, he felt as if he were being pummelled all over again. Leeming tried to close his eyes against the pain but that only made him feel queasy.

'How can you do it, sir?' he asked, enviously.

'Do what, Victor?'

'Read like that when the train is shaking us about so much.'

'One gets used to it,' said Colbeck, looking over the top of his copy of The Times. 'I find the constant movement very stimulating.'

'Well, I don't – it's agony for me.'

'A stagecoach would bounce you about just as much.'

'Yes,' conceded Leeming, 'but we wouldn't have this terrible noise and all this smoke. I feel safe with horses, Inspector. I hate trains.'

'Then you won't take to Ashford, I'm afraid.'

'Why not?'

'It's a railway town.'

Lying at the intersection of a number of main roads, Ashford had been a centre of communication for generations and the arrival of its railway station in 1842 had confirmed its status. But it was when the railway works was opened seven years later that its geographical significance was fully ratified. Its population increased markedly and a sleepy agricultural community took on a more urban appearance and edge. The high street was wide enough to accommodate animal pens on market day and farmers still came in from a wide area with their produce but the wives of railwaymen, fitters, engineers and gas workers now rubbed shoulders with the more traditional customers.

The first thing that the detectives saw as they alighted at the station was the church tower of St Mary's, a medieval foundation, rising high above the buildings around it with perpendicular authority, and casting a long spiritual shadow across the town. A pervading stink was the next thing that impressed itself upon them and Leeming immediately feared that his bath the previous night had failed to wash away the noxious smell of the cesspit. To his relief, the stench was coming from the River Stour into which all the town's effluent was drained without treatment, a problem exacerbated by the fact that there were now over six thousand inhabitants in the vicinity.

Carrying their bags, they strolled in the bright sunshine to the Saracen's Head to get a first feel of Ashford. Situated in the high street near the corner with North Street, the inn had been the premier hostelry in the town for centuries and it was able to offer them separate rooms – albeit with low beams and undulating floors – at a reasonable price. Colbeck was acutely aware of the effort that it had cost the Sergeant to get up so early when he was still in a battered condition. He advised him to rest while he ventured out to make initial contact with the family. Within minutes, Leeming was asleep on his bed.

Colbeck, meanwhile, stepped out from under the inn's portico and walked across the road to the nearby Middle Row, a narrow, twisting passage, where Nathan Hawkshaw and Son owned only one of a half a dozen butchers' stalls or shambles. The aroma of fresh meat mingled with the reek from the river to produce an even more distinctive smell. It did not seem to worry the people buying their beef, lamb and pork there that morning. Poultry and rabbits dangled from hooks outside the shop where Nathan Hawkshaw had worked and Colbeck had to remove his top hat and duck beneath them to go inside.

A brawny young man in a bloodstained apron was serving a female customer with some sausages. Colbeck noted his muscular forearms and the dark scowl that gave his ugly face an almost sinister look to it. When the woman left, he introduced himself as Adam Hawkshaw, son of the condemned man, a hulking figure who seemed at home among the carcasses of dead animals. Hawkshaw was resentful.

'What do you want?' he asked, bluntly.

'To establish certain facts about your father's case.'

'We got no time for police. They helped to hang him.'

'I've spoken to Sergeant Lugg in Maidstone,' said Colbeck, 'and he's given me some of the details. What I need to do now is to get the other side of the story – from you and your mother.'

Hawkshaw was aggressive. 'Why?'

'Because I wish to review the case.'

'My father's dead. Go back to London.'

'I understand the way that you must feel, Mr Hawkshaw, and I've not come to harass you. It may be that I can help.'

'You going to dig him up and bring him back to life?'

'There's no need for sarcasm.'

'Then leave us alone, Inspector,' warned Hawkshaw.

'Inspector?' said a woman, coming into the shop from a door at the rear. 'Who is this gentleman, Adam?'

Colbeck introduced himself to her and discovered that he was talking to Winifred Hawkshaw, a short, compact, handsome woman in her thirties with a black dress that rustled as she moved. She looked too young and too delicate to be the mother of the uncouth butcher. When she heard the Inspector's request, she invited him into the room at the back of the property that served as both kitchen and parlour, leaving Adam Hawkshaw to cope with the two customers who had just come in. Colbeck was offered a seat but Winifred remained standing.

'I must apologise for Adam,' she said, hands gripped tightly together. 'He's taken it hard.'

'I can understand that, Mrs Hawkshaw.'

'After what happened, he's got no faith in the law.'

'And what about you?'

'I feel let down as well, Inspector. We were betrayed.'

'You still believe in your husband's innocence then?'

'Of course,' she said, tartly. 'Nathan had his faults but he was no killer. Yet they made him look like one in court. By the time they finished with him, my husband had been turned into a monster.'

'It must have affected your trade.'

'It has. Loyal customers have stayed with us, so have our friends who knew that Nathan could never have done such a thing. But a lot of people just buy meat elsewhere. This is a murderer's shop, they say, and won't have anything to do with us.'