Free The Railway Detective Collection: The Railway Detective, the Excursion Train, the Railway Viaduct (The Railway Detective Series) by Edward Marston

said, irritably. ‘Now stand out of my way and let me get dressed. I have to go out.’
    Polly Roach had played the submissive lover for too long now. She decided that it was time to assert herself. When she got involved with William Ings, she had seen him as her passport out of the squalor and degradation that she had endured for so many years. He represented a last chance for her to escape from the Devil’s Acre and its attendant miseries. The thought that he might be deceiving her in some way made her simmer with fury. As he tried to do up the buttons on his shirt, she took him by the shoulders.
    ‘Stay here with me,’ she ordered.
    ‘No, Polly. I’m going out.’
    ‘I won’t let you. Your place is beside me.’
    ‘Don’t you want me to make more money, you silly woman?’
    ‘Not that way, Bill. It’s too dangerous.’
    ‘Take your hands off me,’ he warned.

    ‘Only if you promise to stay here tonight.’
    ‘Don’t make me lose my temper.’
    ‘I have a temper as well,’ she snarled, digging her nails into his flesh. ‘I fight for what’s mine. I’m not going to let you sit at a card table and lose money that could be spent on me. I’ve been in this jungle far too long, Bill. I want to live somewhere respectable .’
    ‘Get off me!’ he yelled.
    ‘No!’
    ‘Get off!’
    Stung by the pain and annoyed by her resistance, he pushed her away and lashed out wildly with a fist, catching her on the chin and sending her sprawling on to the floor. Her head hit the bare wood with a dull thud and she lost consciousness. Ings felt a pang of guilt as he realised what he had done but it soon passed. When he looked down at her, he was repelled by her sudden ugliness. Her mouth was wide open, her snaggly teeth were revealed and he could see the deep wrinkles around her scrawny neck for the first time. Her powdered cheeks were hollow. Ings turned away.
    He had never hit a woman before and expected to be horrified at his own behaviour. Yet he felt no remorse. If anything, he felt strangely empowered. He finished dressing as quickly as he could. Polly Roach could do nothing to stop him when he retrieved his belongings from a corner and stuffed them into a leather bag. After taking a farewell look around the tawdry bedroom, he stepped over her body as if it were not there and went out with a swagger.

CHAPTER FIVE
    Madeleine Andrews had refused the kind offer of accommodation in the neighbouring house, preferring instead to spend the night beside her father’s bed. With a blanket around her shoulders and a velvet cushion beneath her, she sat on an upright wooden chair that was not designed to encourage slumber. Every time she fell asleep, she was awake again within minutes, fearful that she might fall off the chair or miss any sign of recovery by the patient. In fact, Caleb Andrews did not stir throughout the night, lying motionless on his back in the single bed, lost to the world and looking in a pitiful condition. It was only his mild but persistent snore that convinced Madeleine that he was still alive.
    She loved her father dearly. In the five years since her mother’s death, she had been running their home, taking on full responsibility and treating her father with the kind of affectionate cajolery that was needed. Madeleine was an attractive, alert, self-possessed young woman in her early twenties with an oval face framed by wavy auburn hair and set off by dimpled cheeks. She was calm and strong-willed. Instead of showing panic when told of the attack on her father, she had simply abandoned what she was doing andmade her way to Leighton Buzzard as soon as she could.
    By the time that she arrived, her father had been moved to the spare bedroom in the stationmaster’s house and a penitent Frank Pike was seated beside him. It took her over an hour to convince the fireman that he needed to go home to his wife in order to reassure her that he had not been injured during the robbery. Still troubled in his mind,