Lost baggage porter

Chapter Three

I lugged the magazines with me through Micklegate Bar – the grandest of the city-wall gates – and on into the city At the Little Coach in Micklegate, I took another drink, putting the peg in after a couple of glasses, and when I stepped out the rain had eased off, though the streets were still empty.

I knew York a little, having grown up nearby at Baytown. (I'd also had an earlier spell of working for the North Eastern Company, my railway start having been a lad porter out at Grosmont.) But I couldn't think of where to go, so I pursued an aimless way about the centre of the city, where the streets were narrow and ancient, the houses all overhanging, falling slowly towards the pavements. I turned into Stonegate, where a solitary horse was turning on the cobbles, too big for the street.

I walked on through those ancient streets: cobbles, shadows, funny little smoke-blowing chimneys on powdery- faced, sagging houses; old buildings put to new uses: bakeries, drug stores, tea rooms – newly established or selling off, the shopkeepers came and went at a great rate but the old houses carried on, even though some of them looked as though they could barely support the gas brackets that sprouted from them. I turned and turned, and presently I struck the Minster, the great black Cathedral; the Minotaur of the labyrinth, as I thought of it, with its two mighty West towers, sharp-pointed and horn-like.

I doubled back across Lendal Bridge, looking along the river at the coal merchants, sand merchants, gravel merchants. They all became one at night: so many shouting men, so many cranes, so many dark barges, which were like the goods trains – meaning that they seemed to shift only when you turned your back.

In Railway Street, on the approach to the station, I passed by two dark, dripping trees with Evening Press posters pasted on to the trunks. The first read 'York Brothers Slain'; the second made do with 'Yorkshire Evening Press – The People's Paper'. A constable was coming towards me. I'd seen him before about the station, but he was not with the railway police. Of all the lot from Tower Street – which was the main copper shop of the York Constabulary – he was the one whose patrol took him nearest to the railway station. He was a smooth, dark, good-looking fellow with a waxed moustache; he looked like a toff who'd dressed up as a policeman for a lark, and he passed me by without a glance or any hint that we were in a way confederates.

A two-horse van nearly knocked me over as I wandered under the arches into the station forecourt, and another came charging close behind. I walked past the booking halls, and struck the bookstall, and here were Evening Press posters by the dozen, loosely attached to placards and pillars, and this time every one of them reading, 'York Brothers Slain'. The posters moved in the cold breeze that blew through the station, and I thought of each one as soaked in blood, so to speak, like pieces of newspaper stuck on to shaving cuts. The whole bookstall was blood-soaked, now that I came to think of it: the shilling novels full of murders; the periodicals with their own mystery killings, moving towards their solutions in their weekly parts, and each tale with its own detective hero – a sleuth hound with peculiar habits but a mighty brain. The man who stood in the centre of all this sensation – the stout party who kept the bookstall, who was nearly but not quite to be counted a railwayman… he stared out at me with no flicker of recognition in his piggy eyes. Did he not see in me the invincible detective type?

I moved in on to Platform Four. The station was alive even if the city was not, and it was ablaze with gaslight. 'Down side,' the lost-luggage porter had said. That meant crossing the footbridge, and, as I put my boot on the first step, the telegraph lad came skipping down towards me with telegraph forms in his hands.

'You found it then, chief?'

He was looking at the portmanteau.

'Aye,' I said, grinning at him, 'office and bag both.'

'Champion,' he said, before haring along Platform Four to the telegraph office, where he would doubtless have a couple of minutes' rest before being shot out again like a bagatelle ball.

'Down' side…

Well, half the platforms were on the 'down'.

With the portmanteau seeming to grow heavier by the minute I walked over the bridge to Platform Five, where a train was about due. A dozen folk stood waiting, and there was a big fellow lying on a luggage trolley smoking: a station lounger, waiting for a 'carry'. I walked west of the platform, through an arch in the station wall to Platform Fourteen. It was a wooden platform – a new addition – but this was where the Scotch expresses called, and there must have been one due, for thirty or so people waited, including the platform guard with his silver whistle strung about his neck, and his little army of porters, all talking in short bursts, as if nervous.

The clock on Platform Fourteen showed 6.40 when I saw the engine come swerving through Holgate Junction, steam flowing from the chimney like a witch's hair, the line of lights behind bulging to the left, then to the right. I heard a cough behind me, and it was the lost-luggage porter, sopping wet and with a small valise over his shoulder. He said nothing but just gave me a half-nod as the engine came up, the handles on its smoke box making the shape of half-past four.

The engine pulled up alongside us, and it was another thing again close to, with the leaking steam, and the rain on the boiler like sweat. Hard to credit that it needed the permission of signals or the help of men to get to its destination.

'What's going off then?' I asked, just as the engine came to a stand alongside us.

'Summat is,' said the porter. 'The Blocker's pitched up, so the Brains'll be here presently.' He was looking vexed, staring along the length of the platform, observing all the give- and-take of train arrival.

'What's your name?' I said.

'Edwin Lund.'

He said it fast, without putting out his hand; he didn't seem over-keen to learn mine but I gave it him:

'Stringer,' I said. 'Detective James Stringer.'

No; still didn't sound right.

A man came up, half running half walking through the arch that led to Platform Five.

'The Brains, I call him' said Lund in an under-breath nodding in the direction of the man. As he spoke, Lund was shifting along towards the north end of the platform, looking away from the man he'd just identified.

The man was too tall for his coat, and his long hands were held out to the side, so that he settled like a bird onto the platform. He began looking about. Then the really big fellow, the lounger from Platform Five, was with him.

'You'll have your bob's worth now, mister,' said Lund, who'd taken up position on the opposite side of a porter's cabin from the two blokes we were watching.

The Blocker was straight into a party of ladies boarding at a door somewhere about the middle of the train. He seemed set on doing the job of a porter, and was offering to help a lady with her basket, but she was shaking her head, and so he only added to a mix-up of cloaks, bags, and over-sized bonnets. The Brains stood looking on. A porter was coming up the crowd now. The Brains stopped him in his tracks, and started trying to chat with him, but the porter would have none. He was after the tips from that scrimmage of train- boarding women.

At the front end of the train, the north end, the fireman was down on the tracks, wrestling with the coupling and the vacuum pipe. The engine he'd helped bring in belonged to the Great Northern Company. It would now be replaced, and the train taken onward by one of the North Eastern's locomotives. The fireman was right below my boots. The fellow was sodden from the rain that had blown into the cab on the trip; he was clarted with oil and coal dust, and his oilcloth cap had a great burn hole in its middle. I was jealous of him all the same… I was jealous of every engine man that stepped.

I moved to try and make out the number of the engine, which was an Ivatt Atlantic.

'Look out' said Lund.

The confused ladies had been abandoned. The Blocker was walking fast along the platform in our direction, and the other was following behind, but he was the one you noticed, and what you noticed most particularly were his long hands. The Ivatt Atlantic was now pulling away from the front carriage, leaving a great gap in the air. It always looked wrong when an engine uncoupled, like a head being chopped from a body. You half expected blood.

But I should have been looking south, as Lund was.

'Wham!' he cried, and his thin voice cracked at the word, just as the Blocker clattered straight into a man who'd lately climbed down from a carriage, and was fishing in his waistcoat for his watch.

And now the Brains was on the scene, also assisting the gent who'd been knocked down. The Great Northern engine was off and away, leaving the train beheaded. The knocked- over gent was set back on his feet, helped into the train, and Lund was saying quietly, half to me, half to himself: 'They have it now, I'm certain they do.'

Brains now had his back to us; after a second, a small black object twirled away from him and landed under the carriage of the train into which the toff had stepped. Almost before it had landed, he was walking away, his hands held out and down, like something precious, and the Blocker was at his side.

Then they were running, as they went through the arch leading to Platform Five.

'Watch that,' I said to Lund, pointing at my bagful of magazines, and I scarpered after them. 'I am a detective, and I shall arrest you on a charge of theft.' The words ran through my head as I came onto Platform Five, where there was a man leaning against a pillar… and another man leaning against a pillar. They were not the Brains or the Blocker; they had similar weird looks to the fighting Camerons of the Institute. All of a sudden, the station seemed full of loungers – fellows who could not be relied on to come and go with the trains. I dashed onto the footbridge. I was the arresting officer, and I would bring the charge; I would be in the Police Court, and in the Yorkshire Evening Press, too: 'Detective James Stringer, of the North Eastern Railway force, who is stationed at York, took the stand…'The thing was not to fret about the job. Get in deep. Then I again couldn't see the Blocker and the Brains even from the centre of the footbridge, which gave views of the whole station. I looked about for a constable, and gave a glance over in the direction of the Police Office, which was also on Platform Four. My view was blocked by the signal box that overhung the bookstall on that platform, and I couldn't even make out if light burned in the Police Office. I gave it up, walked back to Platform Fourteen. The 'down' express had gone, carried by its new North Eastern engine off to Newcastle, Berwick, Edinburgh. Lund, the lost-luggage porter, stood on the platform coughing. The pocketbook was in his hand, caught up from the tracks. 'Did you tell the gent that his pocketbook had been lifted?' I said. He shook his head. 'Why ever not?' 'Train pulled out in double quick time,' he said, and he began coughing again – a real workhouse cough. 'You all right, mate?' I asked him. He nodded. His uniform gave him a schoolboy look, but it was impossible to make out his age. 'I'd have thought you'd take an umbrella with you on evenings like this.' 'Why?' 'Well you've about three thousand to hand in your place of work.' 'It's against regulations to take 'em out.' 'But your governor, Parkinson, does it.' No answer to that. 'Why did you not tell the police before – about those two, I mean?' I gestured along the empty platform.No reply. 'What'll you do?' he said after a while. I thought hard for a second. 'I'll make a report' I said. He looked at me and then looked away. He'd been galvanised by the activities of two vagabonds, but now he'd gone back to his silent ways. 'You'll be a witness, won't you?' I said. 'You'll stand to all we've just seen?' He might've nodded; hard to tell. I picked up my bag, just as an S class 4-6-0 rumbled up to the place recently left by the Scotch Express. More steam, more rain-sweat. It was a mighty green beast, hard to ignore, but Edwin Lund managed, standing there on Platform Fourteen with his cap in his hand and his long, twisted face turned away from the engine. As I made to walk off, he suddenly called: 'Garden Gate!' 'You what?' I said, stopping in my tracks. 'Garden Gate,' he repeated. 'Public house. You'll be able to put your hands on those chaps in there.' 'How do you know?' I said. He shrugged. 'They're regulars there. Never fail.' 'But how do you know?' 'I live close by, Ward Street, and I've seen 'em in there' he said. 'Well… going in, any road.' 'You didn't follow 'em in?' He shook his head. 'Taken the pledge, like.' 'Well' I said, 'I might get across there tomorrow… That's my starting day on the force.' 'Garden Gate, Carmelite Street' said Lund, before being overtaken once again by his cough.