The Last Train to Scarborough

Chapter One

As I awoke the thought came to me:' Where has Scarborough got to?' and it caused me a good deal of pain. I knew I was near coal – too near. I was on it. Or was it a great black beach, for I heard waves too? There was darkness above as well as below, but not quite complete darkness above, for I could make out thin strips of light. Each thought caused me a blinding pain behind the eyes and I did not want any more to come.

I inched a little way to the left, and the coal smell was stronger. It disagreed with me powerfully, and I saw in my mind things to do with coal and burning as the nausea came on: a locomotive moving coal wagons in an empty station that ought to have been packed with holiday-makers; a man making coal-gas tar at the works on the Marine Parade at Scarborough, and evidently doing it for his own amusement, for he was the only man in the town. A storm approached across the black sea behind him.

I saw the booklet that gave directions for use of an incandescent oil lamp – it gave sunshine at night through a red shade, one hundred and twenty candles – and I saw smoke over Scarborough, and further general scenes of that sea-side town in the hour before the lamps are lit: the funicular railway closed and not working; the locked gate at the entrance to the underground aquarium and holiday palace. I figured an orchestra locked inside there along with a troupe of tumblers, and a magician who was the wonder of the age but nevertheless troubled by a leaking kettle.

I saw the harbour of the town with the boats at all angles, as though they'd been dropped in only moments before, and were still struggling to right themselves.

I saw a public house with a ship's figurehead on the front, a marine stores, the sign reading 'All Kinds of Nets Sold' lashed by waves… and nobody about. I pictured the great hotel – I could not recall its name and knew it would cost me pain to try and do so. I saw the high, windowless wall to the side, streaked with rain – the place was a prison viewed from that angle. I heard a great roaring of water on the other side of that wall. Flags flew from what might have been flagpoles at the top or might have been masts, and in my mind's eye the monstrous building slid away from the Promenade, and began bucking about on the dark sea.

These scenes were mainly without colour, but then some colour came, and it was wrong, too bright, done by hand: a red baby in a sky-blue cot set in a yellow room. That baby was on a post card – that was its trouble, and at the thought my stomach lurched fruitlessly while the head-racking pain redoubled. I moved on the coal and the same convulsion came again, only worse. My stomach was trying to do something it could not do. I thought of a short cigar taken from a cedar-wood box. It was a little dry. But what was dry? Box or cigar? At any rate the room containing the cigar was too hot, yet how could it be, for it was part of heaven? No, not quite heaven. A voice echoed in my head: 'It's turned you a bit bloody mysterious, this Paradise place.' Paradise. Somehow, a secret file was involved, a pasteboard folder containing papers that everybody looked at, and yet it was secret. I saw a jumble of razor blades, a fast-turning dial on what might have been a compass, but surely ought not to have been. My mind could hold ideas and pictures but could not make the connections between them.

I looked up again at the light strips. I raised my arm towards them, and they were a good way above the height of my hand. My arm wavered and fell; it was not long enough, and that was all about it. I was perhaps underneath the floorboards, in some species of giant coal cellar, and this notion came with a new sensation: a fearful sense of eternal falling. Some of my memories were coming back to me, and coming too fast. I closed my eyes on the great coal plain and raced down, down, down.

Chapter Two

And there in place of Scarborough was the city of York, or the outskirts thereof: our new house, 'the very last one in Thorpe- on-Ouse', as our little girl, Sylvia, used to say, the house that put off the beginning of open country. It was evening – early evening, spring coming on; a kind of green glow in the sky, and I sat in my shirt sleeves and waistcoat. They had been ploughing in the fields around the village, but I'd not seen the work carried on, for I'd passed all day in the police office in York station.

I sat on the front gate with Sylvia, and our boy Harry. They both liked to sit up high – well, it was high to them, Sylvia especially, and I had my arm around her to stop her falling, which she didn't like. Not the falling I mean, but the arm. She wanted to sit on the gate unsupported like Harry, who now pointed along the lane, saying, 'Here he comes', and old Phil Shannon, who lit the lamps in Thorpe-on-Ouse and at Acaster Malbis, was approaching on his push bike, with the long lamplighter's pole held at his side. I fancied that it was a lance, and Shannon a sort of arthritic knight on horseback. He leant alternatively left and right as he pedalled, like a moving mechanism, some species of clockwork.

'You could set your watch by him,' I said, as he came to about three hundred yards' distance from us.

'You could not,' said Harry. 'It's twenty past six. Last night he was here at five past.'

'Take your arm away, father,' said Sylvia.

I removed my arm, and we watched Shannon come on.

'He looks all-in,' said Harry.

'Well, we're the last house he does,' I said.

'I know that,' said Harry. (He was a bright boy and it seemed that he knew most things of late.)

'I think it's ever so nice of him to come all this way,' said Sylvia, who then tumbled forward onto the cinder track that ran under the gate. She was quite unhurt, and climbed straight back up, saying, 'Don't worry, my pinny's still clean.' It was clean on, and she knew she'd catch it from her mother if it got muddy.

'It's not nice,' said Harry. 'He's paid to do it.'

'Keep your voice down,' I said.

'Why?' said Harry. 'It's fact.'

As Mr Shannon came up, we all said, 'Good evening, Mr Shannon,' and he growled out a 'Good evening' in return, which tickled me. He wasn't over-friendly, except when he'd a drink taken, but even he couldn't ignore a greeting from three people at once. He was an idle bugger into the bargain, and remained on his bike as he lifted the pole up to the lonely gas lamp on the standard over-opposite.

'Does he bring the flame on the end of the stick?' asked Sylvia.

'You know very well he doesn't,' said Harry.

'There's a hook on the end of the pole,' I said. 'He uses it to push a switch. That sets the gas flowing. Then he pulls a little chain with the hook, and that ignites the gas.'

'Let's watch,' said Sylvia, as though what I'd just said wasn't really true, and needed to be proved.

We watched, and when he'd done, Shannon circled on his bike in the pool of white light that he'd made, and set off back for Thorpe and, if I knew him, the Fortune of War public house.

'I love Mr Shannon,' said Sylvia as he wobbled off between the wide, darkening fields.

'He's quite useful about the village,' I said.

'That's exactly what I mean,' said Sylvia.

'He hasn't changed the water in the horse trough for a while,' said Harry. 'It's all green.'

'How does he take the old water out?' asked Sylvia.

'Harry?' I said, turning to the boy. 'How does he do it?'

Harry watched the gas lamp for a while, keeping silence.

'Not sure,' he said, after a while.

'Perhaps he drinks it,' said Sylvia, and she gave a quick little smile.

'That might not be far off the mark,' I said, thinking of Shannon sinking his nightly five pints of Smith's.

We turned and walked back to the house, across our land, which we called 'the meadow'. It smelt of cut grass just then because I'd gone at some of the taller stuff with a scythe in my work suit only an hour before. The house was a long cottage, half tumbled-down, but it was big, getting on for three times the size of our old place on the main street of Thorpe. You could look at it as a terrace of three with a barn or, with a bit of knocking-through, it would be one good-sized cottage with built-on barn.

We lived in four rooms at one end of it, but the whole thing was ours, and on the day we'd moved in the wife had turned to me in our new parlour and said, 'Well, Jim, we've got on!

She was before the house now, beating a Turkey carpet that hung from the washing line. I had never seen that carpet before, but the house had come furnished, and the wife was turning new things up every day.

'I still can't believe it's our house,' said Sylvia as we came up.

'Well, you can thank Mr Robert Henderson for that,' I said.

'He must really like us,' said Sylvia.

'He really likes mother,' said Harry, and I eyed him as we stopped to watch the beating of the rug.

It was true enough.

I watched the wife beating away. With each stroke, a wisp of her brown hair flew forwards, and she pushed it back behind her left ear. But her left ear was too small to keep it in place. You'd think she'd have worked that out after thirty years. As she went at it, the colour rose in her face – not to redness, but a dark brown. I had often wondered whether there might have been a touch of the tar brush in the wife's family, to account for the blackness of her eyes, and the brownness that went all the way down. I thought of Harry's paper, The Captain, which he had on subscription every week, and how one of the stories was 'Tales of the Far West'. There were Sioux Indians in these tales and at odd times a Sioux squaw would appear, supposedly a different one every time. But all of them looked like Lydia.

'Feel free to just stand there gawping,' she said. 'Harry, you'll take the water up for your sister's wash.'

Harry went off to the copper in the scullery. He was good about helping around the house. His main job was to look out for his sister. Their bedrooms were both at the end of a long corridor, over the top of the in-built barn, and this made Sylvia nervous, even though it was these two rooms that had decided us – or decided the wife – to rent the house from Henderson at the knockdown rate of seven shillings a week. It was the view over the fields that had done it. There was a gas mantle in the corridor between the two rooms, and Sylvia believed that it was kept on all night. But this was because she had never yet been awake beyond eight o'clock. In fact, Harry was under orders to come out of his room and switch it off at nine, after his hour of reading, which was often more than an hour.

The children went off through the opened front door, and I said to the wife, 'I'm not sure you should be beating that carpet with washing still on the line.'

I said that just to see the look she would give me, but she didn't take the bait. Instead, still beating, she said, 'Mr Buckingham has been riding the railway again.'

'Oh Christ,' I said.

'On his departure from the station -'

'Which station?'

'Any station… He found that the carriage door had been left unfastened by the company's servants…'

'Which company?'

'You won't put me off… Mr Buckingham endeavoured to fasten the door himself, and…'

Mr Buckingham didn't exist but I could picture him quite easily. He had pop eyes, a red face, and a thin moustache; he looked permanently put-out and was always ready to fly into rage. He was smartly dressed, in clothes often dirtied by the negligence of whatever railway company had the ill-luck to carry him, according to terms and conditions that might or might not have been correctly set out or somehow indicated on the backs of their tickets. He carried a portmanteau (containing valuable items) which was regularly mislaid or damaged by the company's servants. Everything he did was reasonable, or reasonably foreseeable, or so he said, and everything the company did was unreasonable, or so he also said.

'In endeavouring to fasten the door,' said the wife, who had now left off beating the carpet and was enveloping herself in linen as she took down the laundry, 'Mr Buckingham injured himself -'

'Seriously, I hope.'

'And he is contemplating suing. What are his prospects of success?'

The wife said that last part with two clothes pegs in her mouth, and she now walked to the laundry basket, which was over by the chicken run.

'This is something to do with Adams versus the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Company, isn't it?' I said.

'It might be,' the wife said, as she dropped the white sheets into the basket. Some of them went in, and some went onto the bit of cinder track that skirted the chicken run.

'Oh heck,' said the wife.

She was no great hand at housework, but she knew more about An Introduction to Railway Law by Harold Andrews – in which the adventures of Mr Buckingham featured – than I did myself, which was a bad look-out, since I was the one about to be tested. She picked up a tea towel that had missed its mark, and tried to brush off the muck.

'I'd say that was reasonably foreseeable,' I said.

'I forgot to mention', said the wife, standing upright again, and turning to me, 'that Mr Buckingham attempted to close the door while the train was in motion, and that there was a sign fixed to the door expressly forbidding opening or closing it while the train is moving.'

'Right,' I said.

'… which Mr Buckingham didn't see.'

'Had he been drinking, by any chance?' The wife glanced anxiously down again at the basket, looked up at me, and brushed her hair behind her ear.

'Come on, Jim,' she said. 'You're supposed to know this.' And her hair fell forward.

Chapter Three

Now York retreated at a great rate, and I was back in the coal cellar, which was now rising bodily at speed. I was not rising in it, for the floorboards remained the same distance from my face. I would be sick at the peak of the rise, I knew; but when the peak was reached and the next fall began, I changed my idea: I will be sick at the lowest point of the fall, I decided, but instead I turned my head, finding once again a kind of coolness on the coals, and an easing of the pain in my head as York came back.

There came first scenes of the kind I'd once seen at the Electric Theatre with the wife: the great cathedral, the gates of the city wall, only the pictures were not moving, just as they had not moved at the Electric Theatre, except for scenes of the river Ouse – or some such moderately wide and dirty river – meant to suggest the passing of time. That had not been enough for the wife, who had leant across to me, and said, 'Two shillings for this, it's a swiz.' But the scenes showed that York was an important place. Important and beautiful, and I ought not to have left it for Scarborough.

I saw in my mind's eye the mighty station waiting as the trains waited within it, the notable churches of the city, and some of the very old buildings of the centre. I saw a display of the new electric trams, and then I was with the newest of them all, following the newest route of all. The side of it said 'Singer's

Sewing Machines' and the board fixed to the front said where it was going: the terminus of Line Nine, the Beeswing Hotel.

That had been the start of it all, but before that there'd been an earlier start. Of course, this too had to be in York, for that was where I started. But the outskirts… and again I was back in Thorpe-on-Ouse.

When? Some time before or after my journey to the Beeswing. No, it must have been before. We were in the front parlour of our new house, which had several parlours, depending on how you looked at it, but only one so far cosy. Again, it was spring time: primroses in prospect – in the very air – but not yet appeared.

And the fire blazing in our new front parlour, rows of tins of paint lined up ready near the door.

Thursday 12 March, 1914: in the National Gallery, London, the Rokeby Venus had been attacked. The event was reported in the Yorkshire Evening Press and the account lay on the table between us. Mary Richardson, feminist and suffragette, had gone at the painting so named with an axe. Earlier in the day, Robert Henderson, who was the son of Colonel Robert Henderson, whose smooth looks and smooth name I did not like, had stopped the wife in the high street of Thorpe – stopped the wife, I stress. I, walking alongside her, he had quite ignored.

'I do not know the female equivalent of the word "confederate", Mrs Stringer,' he had said.

'Nor do I,' Lydia had said.

'But your confederate, Miss Mary Richardson, has destroyed one of our greatest paintings.'

'Has she?' the wife had said, not yet having seen the Press.

'The report was in The Times this morning,' said Henderson.

'Which painting was it?' enquired the wife. 'Just out of interest.'

'You seem pretty sanguine about the whole business,' he'd replied. 'But then you are part of the women's Co-operative Movement and you agitate on behalf of the suffragettes.'

'Agitate!' said the wife. 'I wouldn't know how to agitate if you paid me.'

'Oh, I think you would,' he said, at which I had to cut in.

'We're just off actually, Mr Henderson,' I said.

He tipped his derby hat at me, but continued to address the wife: 'I do believe you are a symptom of the malaise afflicting the country, Mrs Stringer.'

And then of course he'd given a grin.

'You are a symptom of the malaise afflicting the country,' I said to Lydia as we walked on down the dusty road, in the light rain, making for the boot maker and mender's with the lamps overdue for lighting but old man Shannon nowhere in sight. 'What do you make of that?'

'I'm rather flattered,' she said, as we turned in at the gate of the boot maker's long front yard.

'Yes,' I said, 'I could see. You coloured up.'

'I certainly did not,' she said.

But she had done, and the colour was up in her face still as she lay on the sofa in our new front parlour, in the new (and also very old) house a little way outside the village, the house that had been practically given us by that same Robert Henderson: seven shillings a week for a place three times the size of our earlier one, and with a contract giving us the option to buy at some equally favourable rate.

It was nine o'clock, as I knew by my watch rather than by the clock of St Andrew's church, which did not now reach us, we being so far out.

'I mentioned the business about the Venus to Peter in the Fortune earlier on,' I said.

'Oh yes?' said the wife, who was not in the least interested in the sayings and doings of Peter Backhouse, who was the verger of St Andrew's, even though she counted his wife, Lillian, amongst her best friends.

'He said, "Somebody did what, you say? To the Rokeby what?"'

The wife sighed.

'And to think it was done for publicity,' she said.

She sat back down. The law books were on the tab rug between us.

'I don't know about all this business,' I said, indicating them. 'All I wanted was to be an engine man, and when that came to nothing, I settled for being a railway copper.'

'Don't fib, Jim,' said the wife, and we listened to the ticking of the clock, the ticking of the fire, and then the mooing of a cow, of which we heard a good deal in our new house, along with wood pigeons.

We were more thrown together, living so far out, and that was good and bad. The wife's aim was to set us up with our own little empire, and her work for the women's cause was starting to take second place to that, although she would never have admitted it. She'd gone all out for the country life, stealing a march on me, for I was the Yorkshireman. I was the one who'd taken her north, having struck that bad business while apprenticed for the footplate with the London and South Western Railway. For me, life in the North Eastern Railway police was next best thing to life on the footplate. I'd been promoted detective sergeant in double quick time, and I now made fair wages. But the wife wanted to make me a sort of gentleman farmer-cum-solicitor, and her pushing had earned its reward. I was on the point of giving in my notice, with a view to starting as articled clerk in the offices of Parker and Wilkinson, an arrangement subject to my performing satisfactorily during what was billed as a 'conversation' with Mr Parker himself about railway law. His outfit was one of several firms that did work for the North Eastern, and their particular speciality was cases of personal injury: the paying off – or, better yet, fending off – of passengers' claims for damages.

I knew very well that this conversation was to be a test, albeit of a gentlemanly sort, and it was now less than twelve hours off. Going into the office of Parker and Wilkinson would entail at first a cut in my earnings, but the wife had told me to see this as taking a step back in order to make a great leap, and she was prepared to dip into the inheritance she'd had from her father in order to help fund my training for the law.

'Shall we have another look at Buckingham?' she enquired.

'Go on then,' I said, and she picked up the book.

'The train he's waiting for is running late,' said the wife, after an interval of reading lying down with her head propped in her hand. 'He takes a carriage instead, and then sends the bill to the railway company. Will they settle?'

'They'd be better off just paying him not to use the railway,' I said. 'They should pay him to leave the bloody country.'

The wife eyed me.

'It depends on the lateness of the train,' I said. 'If it's only running half an hour late, that would be a reasonable delay. A day late would be unreasonable. Anything in-between, you argue about.'

The wife yawned as she said, 'That's about right, Jim. I'm sure you'll do brilliantly tomorrow.'

'Are you?'

'It's really nothing to worry about. Mr Parker said it would be a formality.'

'That's just what bothers me.'

She came across and sat on my sofa, lifting her skirts as she stepped up, like a tomboy climbing a hill.

'You'll have a lovely day of it tomorrow,' she said. 'Your meeting with Mr Parker will be over in no time, and when it's done, you'll be on the road to being a solicitor… I know you've the whole day off, but you might call into the police office to let them know how you get on.'

'To put on swank, you mean?'

'… You'll perhaps take a turn in the Museum Gardens, then perhaps go to Brown's to see how your new suit's coming on.'

Owing to the slowness of Brown the tailor my new suit would not be ready in time for the interview, and I would be making do with my best suit.

'I think I'll sit by the river and watch the trains going over the Scarborough railway bridge. They've the new Z Class on the Scarborough branch. They're just running her in, you know.'

'What are you, Jim? Ten years old?'

'I'm pushing thirty, which is too late to be starting a new job.'

'It's not a job, it's a profession. You might come back here for a nap, then you've your office "do" at the Beeswing.'

'The Chief says he has an important bit of business he wants to mention to me at the Beeswing,' I said, and the wife frowned.

'But you've practically left.'

Silence for a space. I had deliberately stirred the wife up, and felt rather bad about it.

'It's not a dangerous bit of business, is it?' she enquired. Would she be so concerned if she knew that Robert Henderson might be put in the way of violence? I liked to think not.

Chapter Four

A needle hung before me. It was the common run of needle – it had an eye in it – only much bigger, and it did not go away until I started to count the seconds of its persistence, whereupon it vanished immediately. I saw next a line of paint tins against a wall in a room. They were not opened, and I knew that I did not want to see them opened, for I did not like the smell of paint. Close by, I strongly suspected, was a rattling window and beyond that the sea, which was black with something… something starting with the letter B, and ending in S. The sea was black with butlers: dark-coated men bathing. No, couldn't be. That wasn't the word.

Now bells rang about me on the dark coal plain, and the floorboards over my head were being lifted one by one. It appeared that they were not nailed down, for they came away very easily. Two men worked at the job. Both wore rough guernseys and some species of gumboots, and as they worked they rose and fell with the coal plain, and with me. Above them, a night sky was gradually being revealed: a mighty and expanding acreage of stars and racing wisps of cloud. I fixed on one very bright star, and that was a mistake, for the act of watching it brought back the sickness, and the French word came to me: mal de mer. I had heard that somewhere of late.

As I watched in wonder, I counted the bells. Had there been eight strokes in all? One of the two men wore a hat that might have been a captain's peaked cap, but there was no braid and no badge, as though he wanted to keep back his identity. His face was brownish and square. The other's face, beard and hair were all grey, and he was now down on the coal with me, fastening up a tunic with two rows of brass buttons. The man who remained above, standing on the edge of the ragged skylight that he'd had a hand in making, shouted a question to the one standing over me, and I could not make it out, but I knew from the tone that he must be the governor, and I heard the reply: 'They're all aft, skipper.' He was foreign in some way, this second man. He put a bit of a'd' sound at the beginning of 'they're', in a way that made the word seem babyish. But he looked a hard case, as did the other.

Another bell was rung – a bell that existed in an altogether different world – and it brought me to wakefulness sitting alone in my best suit on the top deck of the Number Nine tram. Friday evening and the tram running along, and my memory doing so once again as well. We ran along under the York lamps and only a scattering of stars, making for the place where easternmost York came to a stop: the Beeswing Hotel. The conductor was hanging off the platform, and joshing with various street loungers that we passed, like a performer on a moving stage. His high, cracked voice floated up the staircase but hadn't kept me from sleep. I had not slept in the afternoon as the wife had suggested, and I was dead tired, for I'd been awake all night fretting about my meeting with Parker.

In fact, our 'conversation' had been just that, and we had not touched on the doings of Mr Buckingham, reasonable or otherwise. 'I have satisfied myself that you are not a fool, Mr Stringer,' Parker had said, but he'd taken two and a half hours about it, in the course of which he'd introduced me to every man in the office. He'd asked me a good deal about Lydia, and I wondered at first whether he was one of her not-so-secret admirers like Robert Henderson, but I decided he was more nervous of her than anything. 'She is a rather forward party,' he had said, which I thought rather forward of him. Then again, in the summer of i9i3 she had intercepted him on his bicycle in the middle of York, and put it to him that I might have a start in his office.

'How did she know it was me?' Parker had asked, towards the end of our interview. My answer was pretty well-greased. I told him he was a famous York character, often mentioned in the Yorkshire Evening Press as chairing the police court or speaking at society events, or addressing the Historical Society on the Merchant Adventurers of York, on which he was an expert.

'Yes, but there's never a photograph, is there?'

That was true enough. The Press only ran to photographs for convicted murderers.

'… So how did she know?'

The truth was that Mr Parker had made the mistake – if that's what it was – of bicycling out to Thorpe-on-Ouse one summer's evening. As he went on his stately way along the high street, Harry had called out, 'That's an Ai bike!' It was one of the best made: a Beeston Humber. As Harry went on about the bike – he was excited over the expanding sprocket on the rear, which gave half a dozen different gearings -1 explained to the wife about the rider: about how he was the star of the police court, the top man in the office to which I often took our witness statements should a prosecution be under consideration. The wife had taken note of the man, or perhaps most particularly the bike, and flagged it down in central York not a week later, just as people stop the knife grinder on his bike when they want something sharpened.

As we clattered on over the new-laid tram rails, I saw from the windows that a light rain was falling, and the wind getting up. After the stop at the Spotted Cow, I caught the whiff of the gas works at Layerthorpe, and heard drunken chatter coming up the stairs. I turned about and saw Constables Flower and Whittaker from the York police office, the conductor shouting some jest up after them. I'd known that Whittaker lived somewhere hereabouts. They were on their way to the 'do' but half canned already. They nodded along the gangway when they saw me, but took care to sit well short of where I was.

Everyone likes having the top deck to themselves, and the arrival of Flower and Whittaker annoyed me. I knew they thought me a queer fish, and they could never quite hide the fact. I tried to imagine myself as they saw me: a railway copper genuinely keen on railways – that marked me down as a nut, for a start. Neither Flower nor Whittaker would have cared a rap for the Class Z.

I was in addition a plain suit man – the only one in the office just then – and they were uniformed. I was their superior, and Chief Inspector Weatherill's favourite into the bargain. But being the Chief's favourite… well, it came with complications. He had a great liking for danger and excitement but, since he was nearly seventy, his days of experiencing bother directly were about done. So he put all the trouble my way, perhaps suspecting I enjoyed it as much as he had. Or was it just that he thought I had the makings? That I might be trained up to enjoyment of tangling with the really bad lads if only I was given enough experience in that line? I didn't know, and it certainly wouldn't do to ask. The Chief was a force of nature: you took what came from him.

I'd had the solving, after a fashion, of three murders, while the constables' quarry was of the order of fare evaders, card sharpers and makers of graffito on carriage windows. I had a wife who went out to work, and who thought herself superior. She was one of those suffragettes, very likely a bomb thrower in the making, and on top of all that I was practically a solicitor already, and the lawyers were the enemy. They decided on who we could or could not go after, and in the serious cases they took the prosecution – and the victory, if it came – all for themselves.

I thought again of Parker and his office. It commanded a view of the old station, which was now used as an overflow siding for coal wagons, but it was a world away from those wagons, with the oil paintings on the wall, the thick carpets, the law books as heavy and handsomely bound as bibles. There were rows of silent ledger clerks, who recorded the decisions of the office brains, and everything flowed smoothly and silently on a river of black ink.

Behind me, Whittaker and Flower, who'd fallen silent on first seeing me, had regained their pep and were bickering after their usual fashion.

'How many drinks have I stood you over the years?' Flower was saying (or maybe Whittaker, but it hardly mattered).

'I've no idea,' came the reply,'… Not many.'

'No, no, think about it. Tot it up.'

'I should say it comes to about exactly half the amount I've bought you.'

'I should say it does not.'

There hadn't been a single cross-grained individual in that law office; every face had smiled at me at every turn. But when I got out of there I was relieved… in which case how would I stand a lifetime of it? The money I'd be earning after five years would smooth the way, of course: I would eat luncheon at dinner time, and ride in cabs. Or I saw myself atop my own Beeston Humber, with a gearing to meet every condition of road.

And I would be James, not Jim.

I looked up at the window, and thought: Lightning! but it was the conductor flashing the electric lights and bellowing up, 'Terminus!' I looked back: Flower and Whittaker had bolted. They would already be inside the hotel, the name of which filled the top deck windows on the left side: BEESWING. Just the one word. The letters were green, and seemed to glow in the blustery night even though they were not illuminated. For some reason, I knew they meant trouble.

As I stepped off the tram, I gave the conductor a cheery enough 'Good night!', but I was thinking that we ought not to have been dragged out all this way for the 'do'. It ought to have been held at the Railway Institute, which was hard by the station and our office, but the Chief had had a falling out with Dave Chapman, who ran the bar and booked out the social rooms there. Chapman had found the baize scraped and a little torn after a billiards session involving some of the men from the Rifle League. He had sent the bill for repair directly to the Chief, who was one of the high-ups of the League. Well, there'd been a hell of a row. The Chief wouldn't pay the bill. He made out that Chapman was down on all shootists because his flat was right next to the shooting range, and he was kept up at all hours by the firing. The Chief had turned on Chapman even though the two had been great mates, which was how the Chief had come to know the whereabouts of Chapman's flat and so on. He had a habit of turning on people, especially lately, and I marvelled at the way I managed to keep in his good books, and wondered how long it would last.

The Chief had set about trying to get Chapman stood down, and meanwhile started looking out for another venue for the 'do'. Favourite was the Grapes in Toft Green next to the railway offices, which was really called Ye Grapes, but not by the railway police blokes, who preferred it to all the nearby Railway Taverns and Railway Inns, and pubs named after locomotives, perhaps because the new landlord of it had been in the railway police himself before my time. But he hadn't had a licence for functions, or was short-handed or something. So that was out, and the Beeswing was in.

The place was brand new but meant to look old; handsome enough, but more of a pub than a hotel… and where the wings of bees came in, I couldn't guess. Fastening up my Macintosh, I decided to take a turn down the road rather than going straight in. This was the edge of York, and my way led me first past a muddy building site. A sign read: 'Construction by Walden and Sons', and I wondered why anyone would want to lay claim to what presently looked like a battleground. Further, I came to a children's park. One loutish-looking kid went back and forth in the gloom on a brand-new swing that creaked even so. He had an unpleasant look of not being content with the swing but waiting for something else to happen. I walked on beyond the limit of the York lights, and walked past cows standing stock still in fields, as though for them too time had stopped.

I turned and went back towards the hotel. The tram that had brought me up was rocking away into the distance, and another Number Nine was drawing up, about as thinly patronised as the previous one. I watched as one man climbed down: the Chief. I tipped my bowler at him (saluting had somehow long since gone by the board between the two of us), and he lifted his squash hat clean off his head, at which the wind made his few strands of orange hair rise up as well, in a kind of double salute.

'Evening, sir,' I said.

'Don't stand out here nattering, lad,' he said. 'The beer's gratis until nine o'clock.'

As we entered the hotel by a side door, I unbuttoned my topcoat, and the Chief saw my smart rig-out. He looked taken aback for a second. He hadn't been in the police office himself that day – he was in it less and less often – but he knew I'd been away from it too, and he knew why. He didn't mention my interview with Parker, however. He'd never either encouraged me or discouraged me in the plan to turn solicitor. But I knew he didn't like it, and this because he couldn't stop it. The Chief liked to control people – he was like the wife in that way – and now he was losing control of me. The Chief said, 'I've a spot of business to mention to you, lad.'

'I know,' I said.

I followed him over to the bar, where, instead of talking to me, he fell in with Langbourne, the charge sergeant, so I was left dangling.

We railway coppers had been kept apart from the Beeswing regulars (if such a class existed) by being put in what might have been the function room. It smelt of new wood varnish, and I half expected to see pots of the stuff lying around. There was a stage, and a new piano, but there would be no turns. There would just be free beer, followed by cut-price beer, and that would be quite sufficient. There were about a dozen from the police office, and a few station officials and hangers-on besides. The fellow at the bar gave me a glass of ale without needing to be asked, and old man Wright, the Chief Clerk, came up. He looked rather canned already.

'You're off, then?' he said, wavering slightly.

'Very likely,' I said, 'but not yet a while.'

He took a belt on his drink, and cocked his eye at me.

'When’ he enquired, quite sharply.

Old Man Wright was inquisitive to a fault, which was indecent somehow in a man of his age.

'It's not settled yet,' I said.

'How's your missus?' he said.

'All right,' I said. 'Yours?'

Our wives both worked part-time for the Co-operative Women's Union, and were both strong in their feminism.

'They're opening a new store, Acomb way,' he said.

'I know,' I said.

Silence for a space.

'And that little lass of yours,' said Wright, 'what's she called again?'

'She's called Sylvia,' I said, taking a belt on my beer and grinning at Wright. 'I don't suppose I need explain why.'

Wright frowned down at his pint.

'Why?' he said, looking up.

'Sylvia Pankhurst, I said. 'It was the wife's doing. But it's a pretty name.'

Another silence, in which I drained my glass. Wright drifted off, and I asked the barman the time of the last tram.

'Ten thirty,' he said.

'Because I don't want to be stranded here.'

'You do not,' he said, 'take it from me.'

'Are there any sandwiches laid on?' I asked him.

'Laid on what?’ he said, and I knew he was not a York lad.

I decided that I would be on that last tram, and that I might as well put away a fair few pints beforehand. I sank a couple more in the company of Shillito, the uniformed sergeant, and Fred Thomas, who was not a copper at all but the deputy night station manager. The talk wasn't up to much. Trams came periodically crashing up beyond the windows. They made more noise and vibration than was needful, and each time I thought some disaster was in the offing.

The Chief was now talking to a fellow called Greenfield, who'd come up specially from the Newcastle railway police office. I watched the Chief's face as he spoke. It had been scorched by the sun in the Sudan, pounded by heavyweights in his army boxing days, and set about by whisky and baccy smugglers in the docks of Hull, where he'd had his start on the force. Consequently the Chief's face was irregular: no two photographs of it looked the same, and it would have been hard to draw.

Presently, Wright came wobbling back over, and he was not only drinking but munching at something. I saw the carton in his hand: liver capsules.

'You ought not to be drinking if you've liver trouble,' I said.

No reply from Wright, who just eyed me for a while.

'Here,' I said, 'any idea what the Chief's got in hand for me?'

He looked sidelong, and I knew he knew; but to old man Wright, information was valuable, which is why he was forever asking questions and why he hardly ever answered them.

'Why do you want to know?' he said presently. 'Do you have the wind up?'

Behind him, the Chief was approaching with papers in his hand.

Chapter Five

The Chief handed me one of his small, bitter cigars, which meant 'down to business'. He never gave a cigar to any other man in the office. He lit his, and lit mine. As he did so, I eyed the documents he'd put on the bar top. The top-most ones were cuttings from newspapers.

'Why are you mentioning this to me now, sir?' I said. 'Nothing else for it,' he said, and gave a quick grin – a very quick one. 'I want you on to it day after tomorrow.'

That meant Sunday. The wife would just love that, what with all the work we had to do about the house. But this was the Chief all over. He liked to keep his men on their mettle. He had many times taken me for a drink-up in the middle of the working day, so I ought not to have been surprised that he should talk shop in the middle of a 'do'. But there was a look on his face I didn't much care for: a kind of excitement. How much beer was he shipping? He passed over the first cutting. It came from the 'Public Notices' page of a Leeds paper.

MISSING, Mr Raymond Blackburn of Roundhay, Leeds. Aged 30, 5ft Win high, medium-large build, brown eyes, dark hair. Last seen at the Paradise Guest House, Scarborough, on 19 October last, and has not since been heard of. Any information to be addressed to the Inspector of Police, Roundhay, and the informant will be suitably rewarded.

'Know the name?' said the Chief.

'No. Why do you ask?'

Old man Wright was lying down on the stage. It looked pretty final.

'The same notice has been posted in the Police Gazette the last few months… Have you not seen it?' The Chief was rocking a little back and forth, eyeing me quite nastily. 'Blackburn was a fireman,' he said.

'On the North Eastern?' I asked, because other companies ran into Leeds besides ours.

The Chief nodded.

'On 19 October last year, he fired a passenger train into York from Leeds New Station. It was meant to be taken on to Scarborough by another crew, but the fireman booked to take over from Blackburn was off sick, so Blackburn stayed with the engine and took it all the way through with the second driver. It was a Sunday, and Blackburn's train was about the last one into Scarborough station. The engine was needed next day in York, so the driver ran it back that night with another York bloke who was waiting in Scarborough after an earlier turn.'

'Why didn't Blackburn go back with them?'

'Because he knew he wouldn't get into York in time for the last Leeds connection.'

'Well then… he could overnight in York.'

'But he chose to do it in Scarborough.'

The Chief was eyeing me; I glanced down at the newspaper clipping.

'Paradise,' I said at length. 'It's a good name for a rooming house.'

'It might be,' said the Chief, blowing smoke and grinning at the same time, 'and it might not be. It just depends what it's like.'

'And you want me to find out?'

The Chief looked away, saw Wright on the stage, looked back.

'Of course it's odds-on he made away with himself,' he said. 'All his belongings were left in his room except the suit he wore. He was a gloomy sort, by all accounts. He probably just went off in the night and jumped in the sea.'

'But then the body would have been washed up?'

'Not everything that falls in the sea off Scarborough is washed up,' said the Chief,'… thank Christ. Now our lot in Leeds have been looking into the matter with the Scarborough Constabulary.'

'And what have they found out?'

'Fuck all,' said the Chief, who then removed a bit of tobacco from his front teeth and said again, 'Now…'

But this was followed by silence, as the Chief again eyed old man Wright, who was sitting up on the stage now, looking somehow like a little boy. The Chief was looking daggers at Wright; he then fixed me with the same evil stare, as though Wright's behaviour was somehow my responsibility.

'It struck the Leeds blokes', the Chief continued, 'that they ought to send a man to stay over at this house, and see how things stand, and to do it on Sunday so as to get the Sunday lot of guests.'

'Why have they not done it then?'

'Well, they've been a bit short-handed.'

The Chief had softened his tone now. He was so variable in his speech that you did wonder whether fifty years of hard drinking and blows to the head might not be catching up with him.

'I see,' I said. 'And that's why they've taken five months to get round to the idea?'

'What brought it on was that the house has started advertising for railway men again.'

'Where?'

'In the engine shed at Scarborough. Other places beside.'

'If they're posting adverts in the engine shed they must be on the List.'

There was a list of private boarding houses close to stations that had been approved by the Company for taking in railway men on late turns. Sometimes the Company paid the boarding houses directly; sometimes the railway blokes paid out of their own pockets and claimed the money back later.

'They were on it all right,' said the Chief, 'and they've never been taken off it.'

'How many engine men had gone there before Blackburn?'

'None. He was the first.'

'So you might say that, so far, no railway man has gone to the Paradise guest house and survived to tell the tale?'

'Well,' said the Chief as once again the smoke spilled from the sides of his grinning mouth, 'I'm hoping you'll be the first. You see, the Leeds blokes thought it'd be quite a clever stroke to send a copper who could make on he was a North Eastern fireman – just to see if there was anyone in the house who might have a grudge against the Company, or against railway blokes as a breed. Only they don't have any men who can fire an engine.'

Silence between the Chief and me; he dropped his cigar and stood on it.

'You're a passed fireman, aren't you?' he said at length. 'You fired engines until you ran that loco into the shed wall.'

I was not having that.

'It was my mate who ran it into the wall. He'd jiggered the brake. I just happened to be standing up there when the consequences of his error became manifest.'

'I like your way of putting that,' said the Chief. 'You'll turn up at the house with just the right amount of coal dust and muck on you, just the right engine smell.'

'It's customary for engine men to have a wash when they've finished a turn, sir.'

'Yes, well don't be too thorough about it. I've a driver all fixed up for you,' said the Chief. 'He's just the man for the job.'

'Why? Is he the man who drove the engine that Blackburn fired?'

'No, that bloke's out of the picture – taken super-annuation, retired last month. I have in mind a bloke called Tommy Nugent.'

But he would say no more about this Nugent apart from the fact that he knew him through the North Eastern Railway Rifleman's League, which the Chief practically ran. Blackburn had also been in the League, and both the Chief and Nugent, it seemed, had said the odd word to him at inter-regional shooting matches.

'Will Nugent be staying at the house too?'

'Could do,' said the Chief. 'You might be glad of a mate… Some pretty queer types in this house, apparently.'

'They've all been questioned, I assume. Statements have been taken.'

'They have, lad.'

'Answers not satisfactory?'

'They en't,' said the Chief.

The Chief was grinning at me. I was growing anxious, and he liked that.

'Do you have the case papers to hand, sir?'

But I somehow knew he wouldn't have. Clerking was no part of real police work, at least not to the Chief's mind.

'Well now, there's been a mix-up over that,' he said. 'They were meant to've been sent but they've not come. The earliest I can get them now is Monday morning, but it'll do you good to go in there blind. You'll bring a fresh pair of eyes to it all.'

'I think that's what's called a mixed metaphor,' I said, and I left off the 'sir', which I would generally add, as an insurance policy, when talking to the Chief.'… Or maybe not,' I said, seeing the way he was eyeing me.

'When do you start in that fucking solicitor's office?' he said.

'It's not decided yet, if you recall… sir.'

'It's already rubbing off on you.'

The Chief took a pull on his beer. More was coming, I knew.

'Bloody infected, you are.'

Was this Scarborough job his way of penalising me for leaving the force? Of course it was. The Chief was down on all lawyers. In court, they had a habit of asking him, 'And what accounts for the injuries sustained by the accused in your custody, Chief Inspector Weatherill?'

I asked, 'Was Blackburn married?'

'He was not,' said the Chief, 'but he was engaged – had been for ages.'

'Might be an idea to talk to her.'

'I think the Leeds blokes have had a word. She's a bit flighty, moved about a lot, very different from Blackburn.'

'What was he like?'

'Grave bloke,' said the Chief. 'Quiet. Bit of a lone wolf…

Big Catholic, as a matter of fact.'

I tried to figure him in my mind: a big, quiet, dark bloke. But the picture that came was of a big, quiet, dark Catholic church I'd seen hard by a railway line in Leeds. St Anne's, I believed it was called.

'Tell you something else about him,' said the Chief. 'He was a bloody good shot.'

I bought another pint, and the Chief climbed onto the stage and made a speech. Well, it was more a reading of notices. The office was doing creditably well. More crimes solved than last year. A collection would shortly be taken for the North Eastern Railway super-annuation fund. The Riflemen's League was always looking out for new members, ditto the York Territorials. A fellow ought to be able to fire a rifle – he never knew when it might not come in. Vote of thanks to the landlord of the Beeswing, and that was that. The drinking was carried on for another hour, and then we all piled on the last tram back to York.

I sat next to Shillito, the other sergeant, and behind Flower and Whittaker.

'My cousin's six foot seven,' Whittaker was saying.

'You en't half a spinner,' said Flower.

'You reckon⁷.'

'Don't ask rhetorical questions.'

'Are you bloody well accusing me of asking rhetorical questions?' Whittaker asked Flower.

'There, you've just asked another,' said Flower. 'You don't even know what one bloody is.'

Wright was kipping on the front seat.

'Is Wrighty okay?' I asked Shillito.

'He has his troubles just now,' he said, which was a very

Wright-like reply.

My head reeled a little, and I felt it best to avoid looking through the windows, for the street lamps would rush up rather fast. As the tram jolted and jerked its way, I felt the motion to be unnatural. It was a heartless machine – no fire burning in its innards. I closed my eyes, and then we were at the railway station and piling off. The Chief was first down, and straight into the cab shelter. I watched him amid all the rattling of horses' hooves and cab wheels, and the loud, echoing goodbyes of all the blokes. The Chief was walking fast towards a bloke coming out of the station. He looked behind and saw me as he advanced on this bloke. The Chief collared him by calling out, A word…!' and then a name I didn't catch. The two closed, and began talking, the Chief twice more looking around in my direction, which was not characteristic of him, since he didn't usually bother about other people. Was the Chief going down the hill? He was too often juiced; too often out of the office; too careless of his paperwork; too old. I eyed the bloke the Chief was talking to. The bloke glanced my way once, and then looked down, rather shamefully I thought, as though I was the subject under discussion. Who was he? I knew him from somewhere.

I walked away towards the bike rack, which was under the cab shelter. I was taking the front lamp from the saddle bag, prior to fixing it on, when old man Wright walked up.

He said, 'I've a bottle of whisky in the office, if you fancy a nightcap,' and he was trying to steady himself, as though he was on board a ship.

It was such a strange turn-up that I immediately agreed, and re-stowed the lamp in the saddle bag.

'What's brought this on, Wrighty?' I asked, as we stepped through into the station.

He made no reply, but just concentrated on walking straight.

In the station, I saw few people. Instead, the trains were in charge – they had the run of the place. There were not many, it being late, but the night-time trains seem to make more noise and let off more steam than trains of the day. The last Leeds train was making hard work of pulling away from the bay platform, Number Six. We were on the main 'up' platform, where the police office stood, and Wrighty was veering wide, approaching the white line of the platform edge. Then, half running, he climbed the steps of the footbridge and crossed to the main 'down'.

'Wrighty!' I called out. 'What's going off?'

But I was drowned out by the thundering of a great coal train coming up on the 'down' line. The loco was black, the smoke was black, and every wagon thoroughly blackened. It was as if the English night itself had been put on rails and carted north. I crossed the footbridge as the train ran underneath, and I saw Wright on the very edge of the main 'down'.

'What's up, Wrighty?' I shouted at him.

'Nowt,' he said.

'Well then!' I shouted, and Wright kept silence but the train did not. It seemed to come on eternally, like the turning of a wheel, and Wright stood at the platform edge facing the wagons as though expecting them to stop so that he might climb aboard. He stood too close to them for my liking. I pulled at his sleeve to draw him back away, at which he turned about, and I saw that his face was quite different. He didn't look as if he was blubbing, but I knew that was what the alteration signified. He said something, and I couldn't make it out for the thundering of the wagons.

'Come away from here, Wrighty!' I shouted.

But he made no move, and once more addressed the flying coal wagons.

'Jane's left me.'

'Eh?'

'She's left me!'

I could hardly credit it. Wrighty had been married to Jane for forty years. I couldn't think what to say, but after a dozen more wagons or so, I shouted, 'Don't take on, Wrighty!'

'I was always home to her directly!' Wright shouted at the train. 'I was never a stop-out!'

'Your missus is a decent sort!' I shouted back, 'You must be able to…'

But I couldn't think what.

Suddenly a flying, flimsy brake wagon signified the end of the train, and Wright and I stood in silence, the empty tracks before us.

'Let's go into the office and put a brew on,' I said, but Wright shook his head. I tried to pull him back from the platform edge in case he had it in mind to wait for another train, and pitch himself in front of it. I thought: This is more like the kind of drama that happens when you've missed the last tram, and I pictured Jane Wright: a sensible woman with a lot of grey hair. She smoked cigarettes and had a smile that was fetching on account of teeth that went in. I'd never been able to make out what she saw in Wright, who didn't have a nice smile, or any at all come to that. After forty years of marriage, that might become rather wearing.

Wright turned away from the platform, saying, 'Weatherill's told you what's going off in Scarborough, has he?' and he was about back to normal, in that he was asking questions instead of answering them.

'He has that,' I said.

I saw that the offer of whisky had just been a ruse on Wright's part to achieve… well, something or other to do with his own difficulties.

'Walk you home, shall I?' I said, and he gave a half nod.

'When are you off, then?' he said, as I collected my bike.

'To Scarborough,' I said. 'Sunday.'

'You going on your tod?'

'No, the Chief's fixed me up with a mate. A driver. We're going there as a footplate crew. Don't tell anyone, mind you,' I added, grinning at him.

'Weatherill's putting a train driver to police work?' said Wright. 'That's rum.'

So he hadn't heard that part.

'The Chief has it all planned out,' I said.

We'd come out of the station, and turned down Leeman Road. I was pushing my bike, and Wright was occasionally colliding with it as he walked. We came to the beginning of Railway Walk, which was a kind of dark alleyway running along by the main line. Only you couldn't see the railway for the hoardings that were all down that side. From the railway they were bright, cheerful things advertising Heinz Beans, Oxo and whatnot, but on Railway Walk you just saw the shadowy backs of them, and the tall sooty timbers holding them up. Wright lived along one of the terraced streets that ran off the Walk on the other side.

Why had he been glooming at the coal train? Perhaps he was a regular on the main 'down' at eleven o'clock? That train came through every evening at about that time. It wouldn't stop in under half a mile and so presented a nightly opportunity for anyone wanting to make away with themselves.

'This is you, I think,' I said to Wrighty as we contemplated Railway Walk. But he made no move.

'Has the Chief let on?' he said '… He's dead certain that Leeds bloke was done-in.'

'Well…' I said.

'And that it was somebody in the lodging house that did him.'

'I'll get in there,' I said, 'and I'll run the bugger to earth!'

I eyed Wright, giving him the chance to say, 'Good luck with it,' but he moved off without a word, zig-zagging somewhat.

I climbed onto my bike, and set off for Thorpe. As I rode, it came to me that I ought to have asked Wright whether I might mention his trouble to Lydia, who was quite pally with Jane. I was assuming she'd stick up for marriage in general. But maybe she in turn would leave me for Robert Henderson. She wouldn't have to coach him up to being a big earner. He was that already.

Chapter Six

'They're all aft, skipper.'

The words revolved in my mind, a problem waiting to be solved. I first thought: That grey man talks just as though he's a sailor; wears a sailor's coat too. I did not want him to be a sailor, for sailors were in the habit of travelling further afield than it was normally convenient for me to go. But I took heart from the way that he was lighting a small cigar. Any sort of man anywhere might light a cigar.

'I feel ill,' I said, or anyhow I thought the words, and there was some sort of a connection between my thoughts and my lips, for some sound came out and it must have served well enough because the man replied:

'Just wait until we get some sea,' although it was really more like 'Just wade undil we get shum sea.'

'You'd best look out either way,' I said. 'I'm going to be sick no end.'

I tried to rise from my coal bed, and the two men, one above, one below, watched me do it. I found my feet after a couple of goes but it took an effort to stay up; I wanted to go back to sleep on the coal. I slowly looked down at my boots, feeling myself to be thinner than I was before… and there was stuff all down my suit-coat. I contemplated it while trying to steady myself on coal. I raised my hand to the stuff, and I did not know my own hands. They were red, and I could not shake the notion that they had been stained by beetroot juice. When had I been near beetroot? I looked hard at them in the night sea light, which was partly moonlight, and partly something ghostly made by the waves. It was not beetroot. The redness was under the skin. Poison. I wiped my hand again over my suit-coat. The stuff was vomit… and my North Eastern company badge was missing.

'Where's my top-coat got to?' I said, and then: 'I've a hell of a thirst.' The top man, the skipper, seemed ready for this because he held a bottle of water. He dropped it down to the man below, who passed it to me. I held it with my stained left hand as I drank, and stood with head spinning as the water took effect. It made me feel better in some ways, worse in others. The grey man held out a tin of cigars.

'Do shmoke?' he seemed to say.

I could not read the words on the tin; there seemed to be a picture of a blue church but it was covered in coal dust. I took a cigar.

'What's happened?' I slowly enquired. 'Have I been pressed into the fucking navy?'

No reply.

'Why are my hands red?' I demanded, but there came no answer, only the flare of the match rising up to my face. The cigar was lit, and the grey man threw the match onto the coal. There was just enough light for me to see it go out.

I looked up. The man above, the skipper, had been away – must have been away, for he now returned. He held a ladder, and he too now wore a tunic with brass buttons. He lowered the ladder, and placed the top of it by a wooden beam that helped support the roof of the great coal hole I was in. The grey man indicated the ladder with a turn of his head. Was I supposed to be smoking the cigar, or climbing the ladder? I contemplated the burning cigar, and dropped it. I was not up to smoking just then, and it struck me that I had been far too long on my feet. I wanted to sit down on the coal again, but at the same time it was necessary to rise from it, and escape the black air of this underworld. I climbed the ladder using not so much my feet as the memory of climbing ladders, and when the rungs ran out I was for a moment in a cool breeze at the top of the highest tree in my home village. The name came to me slowly: Thorpe-on-Ouse. But I stepped from it onto iron, where I stood face to face with the one set in authority over the grey man.

He held a small revolver, and behind him was a whole ship with more than a breeze blowing over it. I saw the expanse of the fore-hold running up to the great bulk of the mid-ships, with high-mounted lifeboats either side, tall masts, where derricks with steam winches were fitted, great white-washed ventilators for sucking air into the iron worlds beneath, and the whole thing set upon the roaring, crashing sea under the thousands of stars. I wanted to congratulate the fellow on the effect, to shake his hand, ask him, 'Now how did you manage all this? And how do you ride the thing with only the two of you on board?' For there wasn't another soul to be seen.

Chapter Seven

Before, in our old house, when I reached our front gate I knew I was home, but now the gate was the start of a fairly long walk – across the dark meadow. One light burned in the house, and Lydia was sitting up in bed. I knew my interview with Parker would be uppermost in her mind, and as it turned out, she mentioned it the instant I stepped into the bedroom.

'You've done brilliantly, our Jim,' she said, and she stepped out of bed in her night-gown, and handed me a little envelope. It was a telegram from Parker himself. 'Much enjoyed our meeting of today. Very happy for you to start in April. Particulars follow by post.'

'I'm very proud of you,' she said.

We kissed, and I said, 'You should be very proud of yourself. I mean, it was all your doing.'

She watched to see whether I smiled at this. I did, and the smile was meant. Parker was obviously a decent sort, and I found that I didn't mind too much the idea of being a solicitor, providing I didn't think too much about it.

'Wait until we tell your father, Jim,' she said. 'He'll just die of pleasure.'

My dad was a lovely old fellow, but an out and out snob.

'Actually,' the wife ran on, frowning, 'I think that really is a danger in his case. You're to break the news gently. At first, just tell him you're going into a law office and work up from there.'

She sat back on the bed, and picked up another letter.

'This came as well,' she said. 'It's postmarked London.'

She looked a little worried as I opened it, as if she thought it might contain something that would stop me becoming a solicitor. It was from Railway Titbits magazine, from the editor himself. He was delighted to inform me that I had won the competition in the January number: I had successfully named all ten termini pictured and placed them correctly in order according to date of construction. A one pound postal order would shortly be despatched to me. I showed it to Lydia, who said:

'It really is a red letter day.'

'There must have been hundreds got the answer right,' I said. 'I expect I was just the first name picked out of the hat… I probably shouldn't have entered, being a railway employee.'

The wife rolled her eyes.

'Send the pound back, why don't you?'

'It's the first competition I've ever won,' I said.

'How many have you entered?' the wife asked.

'One.'

'Well then,' she said.

'What did you get up to today?' I asked, as I undressed, for it had not been one of her days in the Co-operative Women's office. I knew that as long as Robert Henderson's name didn't come up, then I'd be happy.

It didn't. She'd worked about the house, dug some of the plot that was intended as the kitchen garden, pulled up two more sycamore saplings that had taken root in the wrong places, and gone for an evening walk into Thorpe with the children. I turned down the lamp, and we tried to sleep.

'I can't get off,' the wife said after a while. 'I'm so excited.' 'Let's read, then,' I said, and I turned up the lamp, and picked up my Railway Magazine, while the wife reached across to the night table, where she found a book that I knew to be called The Practical Poultry Keeper by T. Thornton.

'Now let's see what's what,' she said, and opened the book at the beginning. It was the umpteenth time she'd started it, and after five minutes she tossed it across the counterpane.

'That flipping book,' she said. 'But they're getting on with it now, you know…'

'Who are?'

'The hens. Three eggs today.'

Was that a good rate of production for fifteen hens? The answer to the mystery lay in The Practical Poultry Keeper, but it was a stiffer read even than An Introduction to Railway Law.

Half an hour later, we were still not asleep.

'What are you thinking about?' the wife asked.

It'd been a while since we'd done any lovemaking, what with all our changes of life, and I thought this might be the moment. But then I thought of old man Wright.

I said, 'Did you know that the Wrights have separated?'

'Oh yes, that's very sad. Well, it's sad for him. She's overjoyed about it. She's gone off with Terry Dawson.'

'Who's he when he's at home?'

'Honestly, don't you pay any attention to Co-operative business?'

'No.'

'He's assistant manager of the Co-operative butchers on South Bank. You go there every week, Jim, just in case you've forgotten. But as from next month he'll be managing the new store in Acomb.'

'So he's the coming man of the York Co-op? Wright's very cut up about it. Do you think you might have a word with her?'

'I could do, but I wouldn't hold out much hope. He's such a misery. A woman's entitled to a bit of fun in her life, you know.'

'I can think of a way of giving you a bit of fun,' I said, and I put down the Railway Magazine. 'It only would be a bit, mind you.'

'Ten termini,' said the wife, as I inched over to her side. 'That's going some.'

'Railway Titbits…' I said. It isn't for the true rail enthusiast, you know. Come to think of it, I don't suppose most of its readers could name one railway termini.'

'You can't have one termini,' said the wife, as we fell to.

Later on, we still weren't asleep.

'What are you thinking about now ' Lydia asked.

'Just thinking on,' I said.'… I've been promised a lot of things lately: ownership one day of this house, perhaps; a start at Parker's office; a pound from Railway Titbits. Only thing is…'

'What?' said the wife.

'I've got to go to Scarborough first.'

The wife eyed me.

'When?'

'Sunday.'

'What? For the whole day?'

'For the night.'

'The night?'

And that, somehow, was what bothered me: the idea of staying the night in Scarborough during the off-season, and the suspicion that the Chief hadn't so much given me a job as set me a trap.

Chapter Eight

The sky was not quite black. Proper blackness rolled upwards from the funnel, and the sky was different to that: a dark, drifting grey. The ship plunged and rose with no land in view as I walked before the Captain's pistol. The ship was about the length of an ordinary train and it moved straight, both over and under the waves like a needle going through cloth. The thread it dragged was a long line of white in the blackness of the water. Parts of the decks were picked out with the white light of oil lamps hung from railings, and here the decks shone with rolling water. The sea flew at the three of us as we walked. We were getting some weather now all right, and it was waking me up by degrees. To my right, a sail was rigged. It was higher than a house and a constant shiver rolled across it diagonally. It was both white and black, covered in coal dust. I knew that a steam ship would sometimes rig a sail if the wind served. We were advancing on the mid-ships, the bridge housing. I couldn't have named all the ship's points, but some of the right words came to me from Baytown, the sea-side place where I'd been born. In going to Scarborough I had returned to the sea and that had been a mistake, but I could not just then have said why or how. I had gone too near the edge of land and somehow fallen off the edge, and the sea had taken me.

I turned about and saw the Captain, with gun held out.

'Where are we going?'

'Aft,' he said.

Another sea came, breaking white over the decks and soaking me through, but that was quite unimportant. The pressing matter was the pain in my temples. Coming fully awake seemed to have brought it on. I did not want to look left or right – that was one result of it; and I wanted to sit down. I wanted badly to sit down and be sick. After that, I wanted breathing time to remember who I was. I had been imagining myself in all the places I knew a certain Detective Stringer to have been and I knew that I had at one time kept a warrant card in my suit-coat pocket that would very likely carry that name, but I did not want to look at it just in case I had confused myself with someone else. We stopped at another ladder, and another wave flew at us. We were like the clowns in the circus who attract buckets of water wherever they go. I was meant to climb this ladder; the Captain held my arm as I did it.

'We must get to the bottom of this business,' I said, and he made no reply. I made two further remarks to him as I climbed the ladder: 'Are you two the whole ship's company?' and then, 'This is a bad affair.' All three remarks went unanswered, and no wonder.

The ladder took us to a low iron door that was on the jar. I pushed at it, and we were into a saloon: here was a lessening of the coal smell. White-painted planks had been fitted to the iron to make wooden walls. I noted an oil lamp on a bracket, two couches, a wooden chair; books on a folding table. Another ladder, or something between a ladder and a staircase, came down into the middle of this room.

'Do go up,' the grey man seemed to say. It sounded as though he was asking politely, but that wasn't it. 'Go,' he repeated, as I eyed him. There was spittle always behind his teeth when he spoke, as though the sea rose and fell inside him as well as all around.

At the top of the stairs was a bare wooden chart room, if that be the right description. It was the room set behind the bridge, anyhow. The for'ard side of it was all window save one slatted wooden door that was half window, and this banged constantly so that the sight of the ship's bows, and the wild seas breaking over them, came and went. The Captain walked directly through this door onto the bridge, and I was left alone with the ghostlike foreigner, who kept silence. The water rolled thickly and slowly over the window like quicksilver; the door clattered, and I glimpsed for an instant the edge of the ship's wheel, the binnacle alongside, and a hand upon the wheel. It was not the Captain's hand – so there was at least a third crewman in the know. I heard a rapid pass of words between the Captain and this new man, but I could make out no word in particular over the crashing waters, the rising wind and the banging door, save perhaps the single faint bell of the telegraph as an order was passed from bridge to engine room. The Captain came back in, removed his cap, and drew his sleeve once over his forehead, which was all that was needed for him to recover from exposure to the storm, just as though he'd been walking fast on a summer's day and worked up a light sweat. The door continued to clatter behind him, and I wished he would shut it permanently, for I was half frozen, and the iron stove in the corner of the room burned too low.

The Captain's hair was practically shaved right off, which made him look foreign. They went in for shaved heads in France, and I fancied there was something about his square face not quite English. The word came to me at length: his face was too symmetrical; but he was English – north of England too, going by the few words he'd spoken. He stood directly opposite to me, with the chart table in-between us. The uppermost chart was quite as big as the table top, and showed a sea full of tiny numbers, but I could not make out what sea. A parallel ruler rested upon it, together with an oil lamp and a black book. To the side of the table stood the grey man – the grey Dutchman, as I had now decided – who indicated a chair at the table, and seemed to say, 'Sit down, I dink you want shum corfee.'

I will set down his words normally from now on. He was always only a little 'off in his English, and of the two he seemed the better disposed towards me. But I did not think he was fit for life beyond this ship. Where the Captain was perhaps in the middle forties, the other was in the middle fifties; his beard and face tried to outdo each other for greyness, and it was the dead greyness of driftwood.

The Dutchman quit the room, perhaps to fetch coffee, and I sat down. This ought to have brought some comfort, but instead the movement brought a worsening of my headache. It was a pain that came as a kind of mysterious brightness, a kind of electricity. But the room we were in was dark, and the Captain's face was dark. He laid the small revolver on top of the chart, took his own seat, and lit an oil lamp that stood on top of the chart. He then took a pen from his pocket, and briefly scrawled something in the book that lay on the chart. I supposed this to be the ship's logbook, but nothing about the book gave away the name of the vessel, and it was impossible to read the Captain's handwriting – which seemed to me illegible in any case – in the brief instant of time before he shut the book.

'Why do you have the gun?' I enquired.

'Because we're minded to shoot you,' he said, blowing out the match.

He sat back in his chair, and picked up a pencil. He looked at it.

'You are the Captain,' I said, after a space.

He nodded once, in a mannerly sort of way, still inspecting the pencil. A further interval of silence passed.

'Being the Captain, you might at least take a glance at that fucking chart occasionally.'

No answer.

'And the other one, the one who's gone for the coffee… he's the First Mate.'

The Captain nodded again, put down the pencil.

'I want a change of clothes, hot water and soap,' I said.

I considered letting this fellow know that I had a family, but it would have been wrong to bring them into it. I had considered them too little of late. In fact I had done them some wrong that I could not quite bring to mind, and this was the penalty: I would be removed from their lives altogether.

'Sea captain,' I said, looking up. 'In the town where I was born every other bloody man was a sea captain.'

'Who are you?' asked the Captain.

I raised my hand to the inside breast pocket of my suit-coat. The pocket had survived whatever had happened to me; the warrant card had not.

'You know,' I said.

'But, you see… we want to hear it from you,' said the Mate, returning with coffee.

I nodded slowly at him, and the thing was: I didn't know the half of it.