The Railway Viaduct by Edward Marston Page B

that she could be no more than sixteen or seventeen. It was clear from her manner and her elegance that she was no servant. Since he had been informed that Chabal was unmarried, he assumed that she might be a relative of his. Breaking the sad news to her would be painful but it had to be done. Lifting his hat in a gesture of courtesy, Colbeck gave a smile.
    ‘ Bonjour, Mademoiselle ,’ he said.
    ‘ Madame ,’ she corrected.
    ‘ Ah .’ He looked down and saw her wedding ring.
    ‘ Vous êtes un ami de Gaston ?’ she asked.
    It was an awkward question and Colbeck did not wish to answer it on a doorstep when people were walking past all the time. Since he had bad tidings to impart, he needed to do so in privacy. He reached for a polite euphemism.
    ‘ J’ai fait sa connaissance. ’
    ‘ C’est mon marie .’
    Colbeck was shaken. He was talking to Gaston Chabal’s wife.
     
    Victor Leeming had been startled when first given the assignment, but he had adapted to the notion very quickly. He was very pleased to be directly involved in the business of detection again. Strong enough to do the work, he also had the facial characteristics to pass as a navvy. For once, his ugliness was a positive advantage. Wearing moleskin trousers, double-canvas shirt, velveteen square-tailed coat, hobnail boots and a mud-spattered felt hat with the brim turned up, he lookedalmost indistinguishable from the rest of the men. Like them, he even wore a gaudy handkerchief at his neck to add some colour.
    Railway work covered a wide variety of skills, each trade commanding a different wage. Leeming met carpenters, blacksmiths, miners, quarrymen, masons, bricklayers, horse keepers and sawyers. Taken on as a navvy, he was responsible to a ganger, a huge man with the rasping tongue and bulging muscularity needed to keep such an unruly group of workers in order. Digging, loading, cutting and tipping were the navvies’ traditional tasks. Unskilled work was left to the labourers. Leeming was a cut above them.
    When they were building a railway in England, navvies had an allowance of two pounds of beef and a gallon of beer a day. Since they had been in France, however, they had discovered that brandy was cheaper than beer and more potent. It had become the drink of choice for many of them. The fact that they spent their money so freely in the local inns made them more acceptable to the indigenous population. Given a shovel, Leeming was ordered to load spoil into wagons. It was hard, tiring, repetitive work but he did it without complaint. Those alongside him were largely Irish and they tended to work in silence. A group of Welsh navvies further down the line, however, insisted on singing hymns as they used pick and shovel on the rocky ground.
    ‘Will you listen to those bastards?’ said Liam Kilfoyle, during a brief rest. ‘They never stop.’
    ‘I’m surprised they’ve got the breath to sing,’ observed Leeming.
    ‘They’ll work all day, fuck all night and sing their heads off while they’re doing both. It’s unnatural, that’s what it is.’
    ‘They sound happy enough.’
    ‘Little things please little bloody minds.’
    Kilfoyle was a tall, stringy individual in his twenties with a pair of small, darting eyes in a face that reminded Leeming of a weasel. The sergeant had gone out of his way to befriend the young Irishman, feeding him the story that Brassey had prepared for his new recruit. The problem was that Leeming could only understand half of what Kilfoyle said because the latter kept using colloquialisms that were peculiar to the Irish. He knew the rhyming slang of the London underworld by heart but this was quite different. When in doubt as to his companion’s meaning, he simply nodded. Kilfoyle seemed amiable enough. Putting his shovel aside, he undid his trousers and urinated against the wheel of a wagon, breaking wind loudly in the process. He did up his moleskin trousers again.
    ‘Have you worked for Mr Brassey before?’