Lost baggage porter

Chapter Thirty-two

Walking back towards the Humber, I caught sight of Lund walking between the booking offices, carrying a tiger-skin trunk. Was I looking at a killer? It was very hard to credit, but I believed so. Ought I to risk a word? I wore my bad suit, but not the glasses. I said his name in an under-breath while walking a little way to the right-hand side of him. He looked towards me, sad as before. 'You spoken to your governor yet?' he said. 'Aye,' I said. 'He'll call you in for an interview.' He stopped dead. Behind him was another new Company poster: 'North Eastern Railway to the Yorkshire Coast: Breezy, Bracing.' There was a picture of a ship, half sunk, as it seemed, in rough seas. 'But what proof is there that you did it?' I said. 'I have the gun,' said Lund, although he did not have the valise with him, 'and the bullets will be shown to match.' 'You might need the bloody thing again if Mike comes after you.' 'I'll never lay hands on it again, though I have it stowed away safely.' 'Does Mike know where you live?' He shrugged. 'Reckon not. 1 en't bothered either way.' I read the label on the tiger-skin trunk: 'Dawkins, NewMaiden'. What earthly fucking use was that? Some folk deserved to lose things.

Lund said: 'The Chief Inspector means to come over to the office, does he?'

'Aye,' I said.

'When?'

'Today,' I said. 'Today or tomorrow.'

He frowned, as well he might've.

I said: 'It's a queer going-on, you know…?'

'I must seek my peace,' said Lund, walking on with the trunk, and leaving me behind. I drifted over towards the Humber, revolving the now familiar questions: did I believe Lund's confession to be true? Yes. Did I think he ought to swing for the murder of the Camerons? No. Would I be in the shit if it came out that I had kept from the Chief knowledge of Lund and his doings? Yes. Was Lund determined to carry on with his confession, taking it out of my hands if necessary? Yes. Was not Sampson, rather than God, the true cause of all Lund's affliction and the true cause, besides, of the Cameron killings? He was.

I biked about York in aimless fashion, passing the Big Coach in Nessgate, passing along Clifford Street with the Tower Street copper shop to the right, slowly skirting the twenty-foot black wall that bounded Clifford's Tower, the Castle, Court House and Prison. It seemed a cheek to ride such a comical machine as a bicycle in the shadow of that wall, although the Yorkies rattled back and forth quite happily in their traps and wagonettes. The sky was white, and the brown river was up. It wasn't raining at that moment but it would do soon. I had every confidence that it would do soon. I biked over Skeldergate Bridge watching the smoke coming out of the glass-works chimneys and falling away to the right. Then I doubled back over the bridge, hitting Clemen- thorpe, and the smell of Terry's, the second confectionery works after Rowntree's: they might make sweets in there, but it was a factory all right, with its due allowance of red brick and smoke.

I pedalled into Thorpe-on-Ouse keeping my eyes skinned, but I could tell that this was how the village looked when all was well: empty. I was at the Backhouses' place in time for dinner – not that there was any dinner. Two coppers sat in the scullery, and they'd finished the lot. They were playing cards; looked decent sorts. Peter wasn't at home, so I had Lillian to contend with. She said the wife was asleep with the baby upstairs, and I looked in on them even though Lillian had said I mustn't.

Returning to the scullery, I asked the general company, 'No one's seen any strange men about, I take it?' and Lillian Backhouse said, 'Not 'til you pitched up.'

I was not sure whether she believed I stood in any danger at all, and I wondered whether the coppers did either. What did they know of my adventures? They took pride in not letting on.

I walked out of the house, and climbed back on the Hum- ber. I dawdled about near the gateway to the Archbishop's Palace, turning the bike in ever tighter circles, thinking, until I locked the front wheel, and came off. I picked myself up – no harm done – and pedalled off to the Fortune of War.

Peter Backhouse was in there, and he stood me a pint. Beyond the window, one of the masters at the village school was leading a class out towards a river ramble; they were meant to be walking sober-sided crocodile fashion, but it was a little cavalcade going past. I chatted to Backhouse for a while, and as I did so, I worked out that Dixon was exchanging a few words from behind the bar with a bloke drinking in the parlour. I stood up, pushed through the door of the smoking room, and looked hard at the stranger in the parlour. He had a spirit glass in his hand; he was nobody I knew.

I sat on with Backhouse, drinking Smith's, and the beer did its work of lessening my nervousness by degrees. Backhouse then returned to his graft in the churchyard, and I to his home – where the coppers were now roaming about the garden, each in a world of his own – and the wife let me pick up the baby. Little Harry cried as soon as I did so, and I wondered whether I would be out with him for ever, having missed his first hours. He was small, as Dad had feared, and this was on account of him coming early, but that didn't bother me. To my mind the trouble with most babies was that they were a sight too big. I watched his hands; you'd think that somebody had paired and polished his nails, they were so dainty.

I slept a little in the afternoon, patrolled the village come nightfall in the soft rain with my cap pulled low, keeping on the kee-vee, and feeling a confounded twit, before returning to the Fortune with Backhouse. That night, I hardly slept again, what with the worry of all, the night-time movements of the many Backhouse children, the baby refusing to settle, and the coming and going of the police guards, who changed shifts in the small hours.

At four in the morning I dressed and walked back to 16A. Opening the front door, I whispered 'Sampson? Hopkins?' For I was now of a mind that they might have reached an accommodation, and remained together. If so, would they bother travelling hundreds of miles to settle my hash? And as for their confederate, Mike… I was not quite so vexed about him. I had him down as a man for a nasty assault, but killing was not his line.

The thing was the left-luggage ticket though. They would come for the ticket, which I would not be able to hand over.

Feeling like a burglar in my own home, I put on my good suit, collected up the Swan pen that Dad had given me, some of the blank papers I'd had from the Chief, and the book I'd lifted in Calais: Paris and its Environs. In the low gaslight, I opened a page haphazardly: 'The stranger visiting Paris for the first time, and anxious that his first impression of the city should be as striking as possible, cannot do better than a walk from the Louvre to the Place de la Concorde.' I closed the book and looked at the gold lettering on the cover. It was like a souvenir from a dream.

I stepped out of the house, locking the door behind me, and rode the Humber through the blue darkness to the station. There was nobody at the barrier. A long black coal train was rolling through, and when it had passed, I saw the Night Station Manager across the way on Platform Five, holding his black top hat in his hands like a mourner at a funeral. He turned away as I made for the Police Office.

Inside, I turned up the gas, lit the stove, put the kettle on to boil. I fished out some carbons from the drawer of Shillito's desk, took up the Swan pen and, beginning 'Special Report' and 'Persons Wanted', set about my account of the roundhouse robbery and the flight to Paris.

I had brought along Paris and its Environs so as to get the spellings of some of the French words right, but after the best part of an hour I was still describing events in the roundhouse. Knowing the young Company man who'd come along with us only as 'Tim', I did my best to describe his looks, with a funny feeling of digging the man's grave as I went about it. Did I want them to see him run-in? Yes and no. I'd liked him in a way, and he hadn't seemed a violent sort.

I had a second hesitation as I came to recall just what Sampson had said in the roundhouse about the killing of the Camerons. The Chief wanted Sampson charged with their murder, should he ever be found. This was because Sampson had shot at the Chief and made him lie down between the tracks. It was one thing to keep back Lund's confession, but it would be another again to lie in writing about what I'd heard, with the words repeated on the carbon beneath… And then stand to it all in court.

Roberts, the Clerk, had it wrong. Sampson had said 'I enjoyed that business', meaning he enjoyed hearing of it or reading of it – at least so I believed, and I would write my account accordingly, letting people make what they would of his words. But in fact I wrote nothing. Instead, I sat back and thought again of all the crimes of Sampson, beginning with the ones I suspected him of (he had somehow caused the hotel man, Mariner, to make away with himself; he had very likely killed the two detectives at Victoria), and then running on to the ones I was witness to, which included railway trespass at the lowest, attempted murder of the Chief Inspector at the highest. But you could not swing for attempt. Why should that concern me either way? Was my goal the execution of Valentine Sampson? It would have been nearer the mark to say that my goal was the saving of Lund, but unfortunately the two could not go together.I stood up and made another pot of tea. I looked at what I now knew to be the armoury cupboard, tried the door – locked, of course. I wandered over to the mantel, looking at the photograph of the Grimsby Dock Police Football team of 1905. Did every man in that team suffer the same vexation as me over police work? You would not have thought it from their faces. I went back to the desk and picked up Paris and its Environs. On the second page, I read 'A Railway Map of France will be found at the end of the book', and I turned to the map, where the English Channel was put down as 'La Manche'. The lines shown extended a good way beyond France, and the sea routes to England from Belgium and Holland were also drawn in. As I looked at the map with an idea dawning, a mighty noise rose within the Police Office, the sound of a wind or a great wave rolling into shore.

I stepped through the outer door as the sound rose to its highest pitch, and there, ten feet away and leaking steam, stood the engine that had brought in the fish special from Hull. Four doors opened along the three carriages, and half a dozen unimportant people walked away to fade into the city of York. After a space, another passenger climbed down in a Homburg hat and Norfolk jacket; he placed a portmanteau on the ground as another man approached him. The gentry in from Hull was Sampson, and he was being met by Mike. Of Hopkins there was no sign, and that was because Sampson had put his lights out.

Mike stood before Sampson; I was looking at Mike's wide back. He was up to his old tricks: blocking… although he didn't know that he was standing between me and his governor. At the very moment that I stepped back towards the Police Office, Mike turned aside, great head dipped low under his low, wide cap, and Sampson was looking directly at me, revolver in hand.

He advanced upon me, gun in one hand, portmanteau in the other. A long article, half muffled in rags rested on top of the portmanteau. Beyond him, at the far end of the train, the fish boxes were down, but not attended to on the platform, which was quite deserted. The engine was now retreating beside the train it had brought in a moment before; it would be coupled at the opposite end presently. An engine going backwards… It was a crazy spectacle, like time itself in reverse.

Sampson, still walking forwards, said: 'You know what I've come looking for, little Allan.' 'The left-luggage ticket?' I said, sounding as if I was trying to be helpful, and so sounding daft. He continued to advance. He had travelled to Hull by steamer, crossing the North Sea, and missing the Channel ports. 'Hopkins said you had it. Whether he put you up to it, I don't know. But he came at me with a fucking cutter in his hand…' His voice went high as he said those final words. Even now, he couldn't credit it. But of course… the knife had been meant only to put the wind up me. I was backing towards the door of the Police Office. 'Where's Miles?' I said, for some reason. Sampson shook his head. 'Gone case, little Allan,' he said. I thought of the tracks running below the window of the hotel room in Paris, the word 'Vins' painted on the wall of that great French hole. Sampson said: 'One hour I sat there looking down, little Allan… Waiting for a train to roll over him… Waited in vain, too.' 'Well, it was late on,' I said. My back was against the door of the Police Office. Sampson was shaking his head once more. 'Long time to wait for nothing to happen,' he said. 'Oh, I don't know,' I said. 'I reckon it's about average.' 'Hopkins told me you were a copper, in which case the ticket may be out of your hands, resting in a box marked "Evidence". Or then again, little Allan, you might just have held on to it, knowing you'd touch for a fortune just by taking a trip to London… And do you know something, little Allan? I'm having difficulty trying to decide which of those two actions would be the most cuntish?'

It was only then the light fell from his eyes.

'I don't have the ticket' I said.

I made my breakaway at that moment, having realised that the article in the portmanteau was an axe. How he had put his hands on such a thing on the way in from Hull, I could not have said. Perhaps Mike had handed it to him as he stepped from the train. At any rate, it meant there might be worse in store than a bullet in the brain.

I was running as I had these thoughts, and I was not my present self as I ran, but a young boy caught in a thunderstorm on the beach at Baytown, fleeing the one lightning bolt that would do me, while the lugger I'd been watching out to sea rocked on the waves and waited. The bullet came into my back, pushing me forward, so that I flew a little way before landing in darkness.