Lost baggage porter

Chapter Eighteen

The breakfast had fairly dazed me, and I walked back into the station wondering who I ought to be: myself or Allan Appleby. I worked it out by degrees as I strolled along Platform Four, and I saw the Lad, the telegraph boy, watching me from the footbridge, as if he was trying to puzzle it out at the same time. I stopped before the Left Luggage Office, where I collected my bad suit. I changed into it in the gentlemen's, and took my good one back, receiving the ticket in lieu, which I placed in my trouser pocket.

In the Police Office, I picked the 'Occurrences – Large Theft' file out of the cabinet near the door. I read again the first one: 'Attempted (possible actual) burglary at office of goods superintendent, York Yard South… Mr Cambridge (Goods Super) will endeavour to ascertain losses.' The writer of that was a great one for brackets. When would Mr Cambridge make that endeavour? Or was the setting down of the intention the end of the matter? I wondered which of the absent sportsmen had written this: Shillito? Langborne? Wright? If I hung on, I'd be able to ask Shillito directly, but no, that was not permitted; I must be kept from him, and all the other railway coppers of York.

I turned over the leaf, and read again of the assault on the wagons – also in the South Yard. I knew all about that, and had a fair idea who'd replaced the broken seals – Valentine Sampson's tame little goods clerk. They'd tried the Acetylene company van on the same night but given up because they couldn't put their hands on the right cylinder, as I supposed. Well, they had it now. I turned over again, and read of the robbery at the Station Hotel on 16 December, only this time the list of missing items went on to another sheet, and seemed to run on too long. I was reading of 'silver cigarette cases (two), silver snuff boxes (two), gold Alberts (three), good jewelled bracelets (two), cash (estimated?200)', and more besides until the penny dropped. This latest sheet did not belong to the account of the hotel robbery. I went backwards through the pages, and saw that there was another stray mixed in with the papers to do with the burglary at the office of the Goods Super. The two went together and the second one I'd found was meant to be read as the first of the two. I looked to the top of this page: the date was 21 December 1905, the occurrence detailed as follows: 'Theft from Lost Luggage Office'.

I stared at the words while an engine pulled out of the station, somewhere on the down side. The rising bark from its cylinders ought by rights to have ended in some mighty explosion, but instead the engine simply left the station. Silence returned, and I had the great perplexity of this new occurrence before me. There were no more details – only the list of items stolen. Had no statements been taken for this or any of the thefts?

If this matter was part of the series then it was an inside job, and there were only two blokes on the inside of the Lost Luggage Office: Parkinson and Lund. I bundled up the file again, and returned it to its cabinet. Why had I not seen those papers before? Had I simply missed them? It was not out of the question. I'd first looked at them on my first day in the job, and I'd been in a tearing hurry. It was very important to find out how Lund was connected to Valentine Sampson and his band – and that before I met Sampson at the Grapes. I could do with knowing about Parkinson too but I had no address for him whereas I had a street name at least for Lund: Ward Street, Layerthorpe. The sun was doing its work, even in Layerthorpe. The shadow of a cloud moved faster than me along Fossgate and, running on ahead, it rolled easily up and over the silos of Leetham's Mill. The same breeze made cigar and cigarette stumps tumble along the cobbles at my feet. Although I wore the Appleby suit, I did not sport the fake spectacles. Some of the pubs had their windows open; they were getting an airing, and the voices that floated out of them were still at this time of the day normal voices, kept low. In between the pubs were the tiny alleyways and side-streets where the constables walked in twos. Ward Street was one of them, or connected to one.

I turned into one of the entries, and saw two men standing in the doorway of a little broken-down hotel called Hem- ming's. One was peeling an orange, and throwing the peel at the other as he did so. It might have been a lark, but neither one was laughing. I turned again, and was facing the curved wall with the posters on it – the one I'd seen after quitting the Garden Gate on my first meeting with Miles Hopkins and Mike. The gas lamp was there but, not being lit, looked different. The advertisements for the pantomime remained, and if they'd survived this far, I reckoned, they'd probably see out the year.

On this occasion I obeyed the order: 'Turn right for Capstan's Cigarettes', and I was now into a new part of Layerthorpe, walking along a terrace where there was not enough window, so that the people in the houses had not been accommodated so much as bricked up. From somewhere, one voice was screaming out 'Dad!' over and over, and a dog barked after every cry. Eventually the voice gave up, but the barking continued, the loneliness of the sound driving the dog itself crackers. I didn't know the number of Lund's place and, as I walked, I realised that the matter was complicated by the fact that the dull, brown doors came irregularly. Some in the terrace were shuttered so that two houses were turned into one, and there were intervals of wall in between the houses, as though the builder's meagre supplies of glass had run out completely while his abundance of bricks had continued or increased. But the real surprise came at the end of the terrace where the last two houses had collapsed, or been demolished, with the rubble remaining, so that the terrace was like a cigar which had been smoked up to a certain point. On the facing terrace, the opposite numbers of the fallen houses remained and one carried a sign, not proudly but against its will as it seemed to me: 'Ward Street.'

But which was Lund's place? I turned around, and there was a man approaching one of the doors. I walked towards the man.

'How do?' I said, and he smiled.

He'd looked all right until he did that, but the inside of his mouth was a calamity: too-many-teeth and no-teeth all at once.

'How do?' I said again, for the sight of the mouth had knocked me. 'I'm looking for a fellow called Lund.'

The man pushed at the door, and walked in, motioning me to follow, which I did with no time to prepare for the second shock: the reek of the room. The man did not explain himself, but just sat down on a broken-down sofa next to a broken- down woman. Half a single curtain at the window, no fire; poker in the middle of the bare wooden floor, tab rug hard up against the wall. It was as though a wind had lately blown through. The pair in the room were canned, and I was somehow sure they were drinking at that moment, too but I could see no bottles. The man leant forwards, slowly revealing a worn spot on the top of his cap, like a bald patch.

Silence until the woman spoke up:

'You must take us for what we are,' she said.

Was this Lund's mother? The person in want of a linoleum?

'I'm after a word with Lund,' I said, 'Edwin Lund.'

It was as if the man had forgotten what I was about but, now remembering, he rose to his feet, and caught up the poker that lay in the middle of the floor.

'Cold is cruel, en't it?' said the woman as he did so.

The man continued forwards, holding out the poker, making towards the fireplace, where something smoked in the blackness of the grate. He pushed the poker up the chimney, and rattled it against the flue. As he leant over to perform the action, a ripped part of his coat slipped, taking with it a portion of ripped shirt, so that I could see clear through to his white, washboard ribs, and what might have been the beginnings of a scar. Soot came down into the grate as the poker rattled, and then, behind me, something else that was coloured black settled quietly into the room: Lund. He wore a black suit, old and not pressed. His kerchief was something special, but not elegant; he held two black books in his hand. He nodded slowly at me; he didn't seem put-out, as I'd hoped, and he suddenly looked to me like a crafty, secretive fellow. He might have been about to say something – it was impossible to guess what – when the man holding the poker righted himself with a loud groan. The woman on the sofa was looking towards him; she then nodded at me, saying, 'Weakened insides, Mister.' 'I went under an operation,' said the man, sitting back down on the sofa. 'He has a want of strength on the insides,' said the woman, as if that added anything to the general understanding. All the Lunds had this in common: riddled with illness, and very vague about it. The man was smiling at me again, as though he knew I was looking without success for the spirit bottle that lay somewhere to hand. Lund, at the foot of the stairs, was holding his hand in an unfamiliar way: moving it across his mouth, as though feeling the flesh after a narrow shave. He wanted to be out of the house, I could tell. He offered no greeting, but said, while moving across the room: 'I'm off to chapel – want to walk along with me?' I nodded to the pair on the sofa and stepped out of the door after Lund, closing it behind me. It was a relief to be back in the open air, although the street looked worse, now that I'd seen the inside of one of the houses. 'No one comes to visit our house,' said Lund, walking along in the direction from which I'd come. 'You must have had all on to find the place.' 'You told me the street once, if you remember' I said, 'and then I saw your dad.' He shook his head as he walked on. 'That's not your dad?' 'That's Mr Pickering. He's Mother's friend.' 'Do they work?' 'Not over much.' 'Then yours is the only wage coming in?' 'We have a little from the Chapel Poor Fund besides…' We were back in Fossgate now, and there was a little life both inside and outside the pubs. A kid on the opposite side of the road who was wearing boots that were far too big for him (or just had outsize feet) was waving his cap at me. I tipped my own back at him, and he did a little dance with an evil expression on his face, as if saying: 'I've just bagged another idiot.' Looking away from him, I saw a man barring our way while nodding his head, thoughtful-like, as if to say: 'Now what do we have here?' There were tattoos on the backs of his hands, the leftovers of long-lost high spirits. We skirted around him easily enough, but Lund said: 'You're a little out of the tourist track here, you know. You should keep your eyes open.'

The sound of church bells, calling from the centre of the city, was being ignored by everyone except Lund. They acted on him like a capstan, winding him in. He was walking with an elastic stride, and not coughing. He seemed surer of himself than before though he still looked like a scarecrow – a stick in a suit, and the blackness of his suit made his thin head look whiter. He was the undertaker and corpse all in one.

'I've read about the robbery at your place,' I said, 'at the Lost Luggage Office, I mean.'

Lund walked on, saying nothing.

'Do you know anything of that?' I asked.

'It might have been done by the lot you're after,' he said.

'Why did you not bring the matter up, though?'

'Because I know nowt about it.'

'You must have known I'd get round to it, though.'

'I thought you'd get to it in time,' he said, and I had the idea that he was baiting me.

'When you gave me the little tour of your office, you never showed me the safe,' I said.

'It's kept out of the way,' he said. 'I'm asked not to show it to strangers. By rights, anybody who's lost valuables must wait on the other side of the counter.' 'Whoever did it knew the combination of the safe' I said. 'I reckon it's a put-up job like all the others, which is a bad look-out for you and your governor Parkinson.' Lund said nothing. 'Were you not questioned over it?' 'There were some questions, aye.' 'And what did they amount to?' 'Nowt.' 'Who asked 'em?' 'Station Police Office bloke.' 'Name of Weatherill?' 'Shillito' said Lund, turning about to face me. We were at the top of Fossgate by now, just by the Blue Boar. 'I may have to run you in' I said, 'you and Parkinson both.' Lund moved his hand to his face in that new way of his. 'But to do that,' he said, 'you must first… come out of hiding, so to speak.' One idea was strong on me: this was a threat. Could it be? Lund had pitched me into this secret work, and by his knowledge of what I was about, he had power not only over my investigations but also – at a stretch – over whether I lived or died. Across the road, a happy crowd was forming before the mighty pillars of the Centenary Chapel: ordinary- looking York folk revealed at that moment as Wesleyan Methodists. All across the crowd, hats were being lifted in greeting like flaps on the tops of organ pipes; and still more came, all on foot – there were no carriages, as you might expect to see outside a church of a Sunday morning. There might have been hundreds in the street, waiting not just for the Centenary Chapel, but the other chapels – and the one church – that stood in St Saviourgate besides. 'Go every Sunday, do you?' 'Every day,' said Lund. He was directly opposite me, but looking away. 'Past ten year… only missed once in all that time.' He hurriedly looked away, just as a gust of wind struck us. Then, with his head still averted, he added: 'Went again next morning, mind you.' 'The prodigal son,' I said, glancing down at the book in his hand, and added, 'What's that?' pointing at it. He looked down at the book. 'Prize for regular attendance.' I read the title on the spine: The Great If, and Its Greater Answer. 'Looks rather dry,' I said. 'It asks for a little thinking,' said Lund, looking up, and meeting my eyes for an instant. Behind him, the doors of the chapel were opening. 'Read it in the services, do you?' I said. 'Get away,' he said, and now there might just have been a small smile. After a short pause, he said: 'I could have had A Historical Geography of the Holy Land but decided against.' 'I en't bloody surprised,' I said. His eyes flickered and closed again and for a longer time, which seemed to seal the whiteness of his face, making him look for an instant like a white pole, a ninepin. He was, perhaps, keeping a cough down. When he opened his eyes again, he said: 'We must be born again, you know.' I made no reply, but wondered whether it was the church bells ringing out all across the city that had brought this on. Lund said, 'Well, I'm off in now,' and moved away, beginning to make his way through all that stack of folks, still coughing, and the cough seemed to take all his attention, requiring him to remain outside, leaning against one of the mighty pillars, as everybody else filed in through the doors. Presently, he mastered his cough, but for all his chapel-going ardour of five minutes before, he just stayed leaning against the pillar and looking down at his boots. I watched until he entered the chapel, which he did just as the first hymn struck up, and with a half-glance in my direction.

'The Great If,' I thought, finally walking away from the top of Fossgate… that was just about right.