The Train by Sarah Bourne (fiction books to read txt) 📕

move back home under their supervision. Only then could they be sure he wouldn’t do anything stupid again. And it would get Deidra off his back having her son at home again. She needed a project. Satisfied he’d worked it all out, he turned his thoughts to the afternoon ahead.

Dyson, the clerk, greeted him as he walked into the chambers.

‘Mr Beauchamp was asking when you’d be in. He wanted your opinion on the Dawson case, I believe.’

Lawrence nodded to him but didn’t stop to talk. He closed the door of his office behind him, put his briefcase next to his desk and took a deep breath. George Beauchamp had become his best friend at school, after which they’d gone to university together and were now in the same chambers. And he’d married his sister. Greenwood, their other school friend, had become an accountant. They still got together regularly for a drink. He sighed and looked around his office. He loved this room with its oak panelling and thick carpet, the mahogany desk polished daily by a cleaner whose name he should remember but didn’t, till it gleamed with a dark sheen. The latticed window looked out over the inner courtyard with its ancient oak tree, stone birdbath in the centre and the neatly-trimmed grass no one ever walked on. Here he was at home. Here he was treated with respect. Here no one told him to wait and muttered under their breath when he spoke.

He’d talk to Beauchamp later, but now he sat and turned on his computer. After staring at the screen for a while he realised he couldn’t concentrate on work. The morning had unsettled him more than he had thought. Not only Liam. The suicide.

He hadn’t told the guard quite the whole story earlier. It was true his grandfather had driven a train and that a man had thrown himself in front of it. What he hadn’t added was that it had been his grandfather’s own brother. The two had been close, brothers who had grown up on an isolated croft on the west coast of Ireland and had left home together in the 1920s to seek a better life in England. Lawrence’s grandfather, Conor, had found himself a job on the trains, and Sean had become a clerk in an insurance company, being better at his letters than his older brother. They’d lived together in a rooming house, looked after by the fearsome Mrs Deakin. All went well until the brothers met Dora Fairweather, and both took a shine to her. When she made it clear she favoured Sean, Conor became so jealous he wouldn’t talk to his brother anymore. He moved to another rooming house and ignored Sean’s overtures. When he heard through a mutual acquaintance that Sean had broken off with Dora in order to make peace with him, Conor went straight round to Dora’s to offer what he could in the way of solace. Four months later Dora died on the table of a backstreet abortionist, and Sean was thrown into despair. He’d given up the girl he loved to make peace with his brother and had been betrayed by both. The only way he could think of getting back at Conor was to make his brother the agent of his death since he had nothing left to live for.

What must it have been like, Lawrence wondered, to have been driving that train? Seeing the man on the tracks and applying the brakes. And as the train began to slow down, recognising his brother. Pulling harder on the brake, the wheels locking and even in the engine room he would have smelled the metal wheels overheating, would have seen the sparks flying. The noise would have been deafening. How would it have felt to look into his brother’s eyes at the final moment before contact? Lawrence shuddered. He couldn’t imagine. Didn’t want to imagine.

Conor never drove a locomotive again but went back to the railway as an apprentice engineer, vowing to find a way to make the brakes more effective. Too late to save Sean. Too late to save himself. A few years later he invented the gadget that started him on the road to fortune. He’d become very wealthy but he’d been driven by his grief and anger. Too many nights he was carried to bed so drunk he couldn’t get there himself, too many days he spent alone, wandering his estate, shouting at the trees, the sky, the universe, shooting wildly at noises in the woods, riding his horses into the ground. Lawrence had been terrified of him as a child, and scornful of him as an adolescent. By the time he died, he hadn’t seen him for over a year.

He shook his head to rid himself of the thoughts. Enough was enough. It was old news, and nothing could be done about it anymore.

He buzzed Dyson.

‘I need to see Paula. Do you know where she is?’

‘Yes, Mr Kelly. She was in court this morning, but she should be back soon. I’ll send her in directly when she returns.’

Lawrence spent the time until Paula arrived looking out the window. A sparrow played in the birdbath, pecking at the water and shaking its head, spreading its feathers and puffing out its chest to ward off the starling that approached. The bigger bird wasn’t intimidated, though, and the sparrow flew off and perched on the branch of the oak tree. Lawrence could almost hear it muttering to itself about the injustice.

A knock at the door brought him back. He never daydreamed. He was concerned about himself. What a waste of time.

‘Ah, Paula,’ he greeted his pupil. ‘Come in.’

Paula was tall, dark-haired, olive-skinned. She had an armful of files which she put on the desk and stood waiting for Lawrence to tell her what he wanted.

Lawrence was struck by her beauty, as he always was when he saw her. By the sheer elegance of her. She’d danced as a child, she’d told him when