The Last Train to Scarborough

Chapter Nine

The North End shed, a quarter mile beyond the station mouth, was where the Scarborough engines were stabled. I felt a proper fool, approaching the Shed Superintendent's office with my kit bag, just as I had in the days when I'd been working with a company rule book in my inside pocket, and not as some species of actor.

It had turned into a nothing sort of a day -1 would have had it hotter or colder, darker or sunnier. The church bells of the city would not leave off, and their racket drifted over the complicated railway lands that lay at the very heart of York. I was tired out. I'd hardly slept on Friday or Saturday night. There were many new noises in our new house: Sylvia reckoned that the branch of the big sycamore tree tapped on her window – 'but only at nights'.

'It taps when there's a wind,' Harry had corrected her.

The thought of taking articles and becoming a railway solicitor made me hot and cold. It was like a fever. One minute, I could imagine the whole enterprise going smoothly on and myself going to the Dean Court Hotel alongside the Minster – which was the refuge of the top clerks in the North Eastern offices – wearing a grey, well-brushed fedora hat. But it would keep coming back to me that the profession I was entering was unmanly. It came down to this: the lawyers only talked about the railway, instead of doing anything to make the trains go.

I wore my great-coat on top of my second best suit. I had on a white shirt and white necker, and I carried in my kit bag a change of shirt and a tie in case the boarding house should turn out to be a more than averagely respectable one. I carried no rule book, but on my suit-coat lapel I'd pinned the company badge, this being the North Eastern Railway crest about one inch across. All company employees were given one on joining, and the keener sorts would wear it every day. You'd be more likely to see a driver or a fireman wearing his badge than a booking office clerk because the footplate lads took more pride in their work.

I had taken off my wedding ring, partly because it didn't do to fire while wearing a ring – there were plenty of things to snag it on – and partly because Ray Blackburn had been a single man, and I wanted to place myself as far as possible in his shoes. (He'd been engaged, evidently, but surely no engine man would ever wear an engagement ring.) My railway police warrant card I carried in my pocket book, which was in the inside pocket of my suit-coat. I'd need it if it came to an arrest, but I did not envisage having to produce it, and it must be kept out of sight for as long as I was passing myself off as an engine man.

The Super guarded the shed from his little office, which was stuck onto the front of it like a bunion, spoiling what would otherwise have been a perfectly circular brick wall, for the North Shed was a roundhouse. He was expecting me, and seemed to have been thoroughly briefed by the Chief. He had me sign the ledger which was kept underneath a clock in a little booth of its own, the whole arrangement putting me in mind of a side altar in a church. The ledger was really a big diary. The left hand page for Sunday, 15 March 1914 was the booking-on side, and that was clean. But the booking-off side was dirty because those blokes had spent the past ten hours at close quarters with coal, oil ash and soot. It came to me that this was just how it had been at Sowerby Bridge shed when I'd been firing for the Lancashire and Yorkshire railway eight years since.

As the Super looked on, smoking a little cigar, I signed my name.

'What shall I put under "Duty"?' I asked

'Well,' said the Super, inspecting the end of his cigar, 'you're working the last York train of the day to Scarborough, then running back light engine… Only you're not, are you?'

And he practically winked at me.

'I've no notion what I'm doing,' I said. 'All I know is I'm stopping in Scarborough.'

'Your engine'll break down there, lad,' said another voice, and it was the Chief, who had now entered the booth, and was lighting his own cigar from the Shed Super's. 'That way you'll have a good excuse for staying.'

'What's going to be up with the engine?' I said.

'Injector steam valve's shot,' said the Chief.

'Leaking pretty badly,' said another voice, and there was a fourth man in the tiny booking-on place. 'Just come and have a look!' he said.

In the confusion of us all getting out of there, and walking into the shed proper, the new man was introduced to me by the Chief, and he was Tom, or Tommy, Nugent. He didn't look like an engine man – too small and curly-haired, and too talkative by half – but he would drive the locomotive to Scarborough. He'd then come on with me to the boarding house called Paradise and obligingly make himself available as a second mark for any murderers that might be living there. He would also be a kind of guard for me, and it did bother me that the Chief thought this should be necessary, especially since he hadn't seemed over-protective of me in the past.

We entered the great shed, and the galvanising coal smell hit me. I thought: How can blokes keep away from a place like this? But there were not many in there and not many engines. Half of the berths, which were arranged like the spokes of a wheel, stood empty. Tommy Nugent led the way, talking thirteen to the dozen. I couldn't quite catch his words, which were directed to the Shed Super and the Chief, but I saw that he walked lame, and I liked the combination of his excited patter and his crocked right leg. He was half crippled but didn't appear to gloom over it.

The air in the shed was grey, and every noise echoed. A shunting engine was being cleaned by a lad I'd often seen about the station, and as he went at the boiler with Brasso, an older bloke, who sat on the boiler top near the chimney, was saying, 'It's a half day and double time, so what are you moaning about?'

They both nodded at Nugent, who seemed a general favourite in the shed. We then passed one of the Class Zs; a bloke lounging by the boiler frame nodded as we went by.

'Aye aye,' he said, and gave a grin, as if to say, 'Look what I've got to lean on.' ('An engine of exceptional grace and power', the Railway Magazine had called the Z Class.)

But now our party had come to a stop before a little tuppenny ha'penny J Class. It was in steam, and too much of the stuff was trailing away from the injector overflow pipe beneath the footplate on the right hand side.

'And the fire door's jiggered into the bargain,' Nugent was saying. 'It jams on the runners and it's a right bugger to shift it.'

'Seems a bit hard on the passengers,' I said. 'I mean, we are going to take passengers, aren't we?'

'You're the 5.52 express,' said the Chief. 'I'll say you're taking bloody passengers!'

'She's been in this state for ages,' said Tommy Nugent. 'She'd get us back home tonight with no bother, but we don't want to come back, do we?'

'We want to come back eventually,' I said.

'Paradise,' he said, climbing onto the footplate with some difficulty. 'They've got a nerve calling it that, when they're killing off the fucking guests. Here, what shall I call you when we get there? Not Detective Sergeant Stringer, I suppose?'

The Chief looked at me, and gave a grin. He seemed more easy-going today, perhaps pleased that his plans on my behalf were running smoothly.

'No flies on Tommy,' he said.

'Just call me Jim,' I called up to Tommy.

'But that's your real name.'

'I don't see any harm in using it,' I said.

I didn't see the need of all this palaver either. The aim was to kid any spies the Paradise guest house might have in Scarborough station or engine shed, but it seemed highly unlikely there'd be any.

'Either there's something going on in that house,' I said, 'in which case the offenders will be brought to book, or there isn't, in which case we have a pleasant Sunday night in Scarborough.'

'Or they kill you,' said the Chief, blowing smoke.

The Chief knew I was inclined to nerves, and so would rib me in this way, and I preferred this open style of joshing to the strange smiles he'd given in the Beeswing Hotel.

'Just let 'em try,' said Tommy Nugent. 'I hope they bloody do!’

Having collected an oil can from the footplate, he was now touring the lubrication points of the engine. He carried on talking as he did it, but sometimes he'd go out of sight and in one of those moments I said to the Chief:

'Seems a pleasant enough bloke, but he talks a lot… might be a bit of a handful in the house.'

'He's plucky though.'

'How'd he come by the leg?'

'Shot wound. Tom was in the York Territorials… wandered onto the target range at Strensall barracks.'

No wonder he was in with the Chief then. The Chief was not in the Territorials himself, but as an old soldier he had many connections with them. And he liked any man who shot. He was forever trying to get me at it – and he'd described the missing man, Blackburn, as a good shot.

Nugent's voice had gone muffled as he oiled underneath the engine, but it came clear again as he climbed up out of the inspection pit:

'The good thing is, Jim, that I really am a driver, and you really were a fireman or so I've heard.'

'I was a passed cleaner, but I did plenty of firing. Then I turned copper… and now I'm very likely off to be a solicitor.'

'Blimey,' said Tommy Nugent. 'Restless sort, en't you?'

'He has a restless wife,' said the Chief, 'which comes to the same thing', and so saying he shook both our hands and went off. I watched him hunch up as he retreated between two engines. He was lighting a new cigar. What did it say on the firework tins? Light the blue touch paper and retire. The question biting me was this: did he know more about the situation in Paradise than he was letting on?

The Shed Super had gone off too, and I was left alone with Tommy Nugent and the busted engine. Tommy took his watch from his waistcoat pocket.

'All set?' he said.

'Aye,' I said,

'Be a lark, this, won't it?' he said.

'Aye,' I said. 'Hope so.'

Chapter Ten

'I want this rolling to stop,' I said.

It helped not to look at things – to keep my eyes closed. But there was no help for it; I had to look. On the table beside the chart was the coffee pot, a tin of Abernethy biscuits, a box of wax matches (the label showed a cat with glowing eyes and the words 'See in the Dark') and the Captain's pocket revolver. It had a beautiful walnut stock, worn from use by the looks of it. The chart itself I had given up on. It showed only sea: there was a fold where there might have been the beginnings of land. A north point was drawn at the top of it: a sort of glorious exploding star with a capital N riding above, and I felt we must be moving in that direction for the chart room was growing colder by the second. If I had thought on, I might have come to a different conclusion about our direction of travel, but all I knew was that the sun was rising somewhere and making the sky violet, which was more or less the colour, I also knew, of one of the last rooms on land that I had been in.

As the light rose, the rain had eased a little and the figure on the bridge stood a little more clearly revealed as a man in a great-coat and a woollen hat. He hardly touched the wheel, but just stood by it with arms folded, looking always forward (I had not seen his face) where the prow of the ship plunged and rose with great determination. I could see it all through the windows of the chart room: the fore-deck rising one second, half under swirling waves the next.

Until I'd fallen to staring at the objects on the table I had been talking, but I could not now quite remember what I had been saying or for how long. I could not lay hands on my pocket watch, and I could not see any clock in the chart room. I'd started by demanding – in-between the head racking electric pains – to know how I had come to be aboard, and where we were going. I'd told them that I was a copper, and the Captain had said, 'I am the authority on this ship.'

I'd wanted to know whether my face was as red as my hands, whether or how the Captain and the Mate were connected to the Paradise guest house, and how long I had spent on the coal heap. But I'd given up with the questions after a while: the two would not answer, and the Captain barely spoke at all. I'd always known it would be like this on a ship: the man in charge would be the man who said least. It was a little that way on the railways.

Instead, and in return for a borrowed shirt, guernsey and oilskin, and coffee in a metal cup (they had offered me bread but I was not up to food), I had begun to tell them what had happened. I resolved to lay it all out, in hopes that the more I spoke the more I would know. There was much more to it than I said, but I began to give the Captain and the Dutchman the main points of the tale. I did not know what to leave out, so I left out nothing that seemed material and I was encouraged in my speech by the way the pair of them listened closely, and by the way they were not put off even when my own tales began to include the stories of others, as a ship carries lifeboats.

But the Captain was now looking at his pocket watch. I had not got to the meat of the story; I had not got to Paradise, but the Captain was nodding to the Mate, who turned to me and said, 'We are going, my friend.'

He motioned me to stand.

'Where?' I asked.

'For'ard,' said the Captain.

I rose with difficulty to my feet, and contemplated, through the windows of the chart room, the waves washing over the bows.

'You're too deep laden,' I told the Captain.

He nearly smiled, but it was the Dutchman who replied. 'We have a sea running,' he said, as if it was something the two of them had arranged between them.

The Captain remained in the chart room, but gave his revolver to the Mate, who followed me down the steps we'd come up, and back alongside the fore-hold. It was now full morning, although not much of one: grey light and wild, grey waves, and the white moon still hanging in the sky, waiting to see if it was really day, but its turn of duty done. The grimy fore-sail shook, like something troubled – it wanted to take wing and fly.

'You don't let any man come for'ard,' I said to the Mate. 'You keep the whole ship's company aft.'

All save the man at the wheel. But I left him out of it.

'You save your breath, I think.'

'For what?' I said.

'Sleeping,' he replied, and I heard myself asking, 'Was there something in the coffee? The second pot? Something for sleep?'

Or was it the return of the thing that had done for me the first time?

At any rate, the foc'sle took an eternity to arrive. With the movement of the ship, our way was all up and down and not enough along, and the sight of the sea exhausted me. It stretched away on all sides, with no vestige of land to be seen. At the end of our walk the Mate held open an iron door which gave on to a short ladder, and this I was meant to climb down. 'I'm all-in,' I said, more or less to myself, and I would have slept at the bottom, in the metal corridor, the companion way as I believed it was called. But another door was held open for me, and I stepped into an iron room about the size of an ordinary scullery.

'What's this?' I asked.

'Let us say… sick bay,' said the Mate.

The Captain would not have tried a crack like that, I thought, but the Mate was a livelier sort, for all the greyness of his face. He closed the door with a clang and seemed to have trouble locking it, for the grating noise carried on for minutes on end, but it hardly mattered since there was no handle on the inside. On the floor, I could just make out a tarpaulin and a great, roughly piled chain with links about a foot long; one end of the thing rose up and disappeared through a hole in the roof, and that was about it as far as entertainment in the iron room went. So I put the tarpaulin about me, lay down in the space between the chain and the wall, and fell instantly to sleep.

Chapter Eleven

I was curious to discover whether I still had the knack of firing but did not get away to a good start: as we stood waiting to run onto the turntable, I couldn't open the firehole door, so Tommy showed me the trick of the lever.

'It wants a light touch,' he said. 'The harder you try, the harder it is.'

That went for the business in general, of course. It was all in the relaxed swing of the shovel. Tommy was now stowing two biggish-sized kit bags in the locker, ready for the off. (My own bag was already up.)

'What've you got in there?' I asked him.

'Toothbrush,' he said, 'and all that sort of doings.'

'Who usually fires on this run?' I asked.

'Oh, we have various,' he said, and he explained how that complication came about, which was something to do with the mysteries of Sunday rostering in the North Shed – and a bloody nuisance too, since he had to run out with some right blockheads. 'Here, do you think it'll be safe to drink the water in Paradise?' he ran on. 'What's the programme?'

'My immediate aim', I said, 'is to find the blower.'

I was searching for it in all the mix-up of levers and little wheels, and without a murmur of complaint Tommy dragged his bad leg over to my side again.

'That's always the question when you're new to an engine,' he said, putting his hand on a certain little wheel.

I put a bit of blower on to wake up the fire, then put coal in the four corners, where it was too thin. Being out of practice, I had trouble reaching the back of the box, but Tommy wasn't watching.

'We're booked to leave at five fifty-two,' he said, 'and we'll be in by three minutes past seven, or a little later depending on whatever slow freights are moving through Malton, and who's in the signal box at Seamer. There's one bloke there who…'

'What about this injector?' I cut in.

'Have a go,' he said. 'See for yourself.'

I turned the wheel of the injector that was on the blink (all engines have two and both have to be working tolerably well since their job is to put water in the boiler, and boiler water is what stands between any engine crew and an explosion). The wheel was stiff, but the injector made the right sort of singing noise, and the water level in the gauges rose without any bother. There was now more steam coming out of the overflow, however.

'Looks worse than it is,' said Tommy, going back to his side. 'You'll have to put a little more rock on, what with the falling pressure. But it's nowt to worry about really.'

'Good thing there's no hills on the way,' I said.

'No hills, no tunnels, nowt. It's that bloody boring.'

'I could never find engine driving boring,' I said.

'I could,' he said.

'When I was on the footplate, it was absolute life to me.'

'Just try doing it for twenty years,' he said, 'then see.'

A clang on the boiler plate from a shed attendant told Tommy he could roll forward onto the turntable. He drove while sitting on the sandbox, to spare his bad leg – and while talking.

'Why d'you pack it in if you were that keen on it?' he asked, before he remembered what the Chief had said. 'Oh aye – your missus. She's the pushing sort, is she? Well, that's all right. You want a lass with a bit of go.'

'You married?' I enquired, leaving off shovelling as we came to rest on the turntable.

'Engaged just last week, Jim,' he said, as we began to revolve. 'Costly business that was: nine carat ring with garnet.'

But he wore no ring himself, of course. Tommy was saying something about how he was pushing fifty now, but it was better late than never and she was a lovely lass. The eyes of every man in the shed were on us as we revolved. It made me feel quite embarrassed.

Then we stopped with a jerk, and were arse-about-face to the shed exit. That was the first surprise, since I'd been banking on us going out forwards. I put the'gear to reverse, and Tommy gave a gentle pull on the regulator while talking about his intended, who was called Joan, who was twenty years younger than him and pretty well placed, being the daughter of the fellow who owned the shop called the Overcoat Depot on Coney Street. I kept up my end of the conversation by asking who made the giant grey coat, about fifteen foot long and covered in bird shit, that hung from the flagpole near the roof of the Depot, and Tommy not only knew the answer, but had a tale to tell about it as well.

However, I left off listening as we came out of the shed into the heart of the railway lands, where the church bells were still ringing, but in colder and darker air. Over the tracks all around us hung red and green lamps, like rows of low stars, and each one meant something. I'd got my living in the middle of this mysterious web for years, but forgotten how it worked, and even Tommy Nugent had to keep silence for a while as he began to pick his way in the J Class.

We first raced backwards towards a pegged signal and a red lamp that I was sure would check us. But we ran on past them, because it turned out they belonged to another track after all. We carried on going through the railway lands just as though aiming for the main 'up' and a run backwards all the way to London. But after clattering over a diagonal mass of tracks we came to a stop, and Tommy indicated for me to put us into forward gear. We were still some way off from the station, and I was interested to see how we'd get into it.

We again clattered over the diagonal mass, this time heading forwards, and Tommy stopped us under the eye of the waterworks signal box, which was five hundred yards in advance of the station on the 'down' side. We then reversed into the echoing, bluish gloom of the great station, and buffered up to the little rake of Scarborough coaches that waited for us on a short platform, Number Ten, with Tommy talking again about what might or might not be waiting for us in the Paradise guest house, just as though what he'd done with the engine was of no account at all.

I wound down the hand brake, leant out, and looked backwards. The coaches we'd backed onto had been brought up from Leeds, for we were about to make the second part of the Leeds-Scarborough run that Blackburn had done in its entirety, owing to the sickness of the York man. Our service, in fact, would be exactly the same as the one he'd worked into Scarborough.

They were a miserable looking lot, the half dozen or so boarding at York for Scarborough – didn't seem to want to drag themselves away from the gaslights of Platform Ten. In summer, Scarborough was a better place to be than York but in winter the scales tipped, and York was better. As the passengers boarded, our train guard climbed down from his van, and came walking up. Had he been briefed by the Chief? Had he buggery. He was a big bloke, with a blank white face behind blank glasses. I half turned away from him, and began shovelling coal as he handed a docket to Tommy. I could tell he was eyeing me, but if Tommy never had the same fireman twice it ought not to signify.

In fact, Tommy didn't even bring up the subject.

'Injector exhaust's playing up worse than usual,' he said to the guard, who might have worked that out for himself, since he was standing in the hot cloud the leak was making. He said nothing as Tommy talked but stood motionless on the platform until his glasses had completely steamed over from the leak. He then turned and walked back to his guard's van.

I left off shovelling when he'd gone, and said to Tommy, 'He's not a York bloke, is he?'

'Les? He lives in Scarborough.'

'Not at the Paradise guest house, I hope?'

'No – he has a flat near the goods station.'

'Quiet sort, en't he?'

'He's half blind is Les White,' said Tommy, as though that was somehow an answer.

He left it to me to look for the 'right away' from the platform guard. Tommy was nattering away as I looked out, and was still nattering when the whistle blew. He did hear it though, because he gave a tug on the regulator, and we started rolling.

'… Half blind,' Tommy repeated in a thoughtful sort of way.

'That's why the traffic office took him off the footplate.'

'He'd been a driver, had he?' I said, and we were making a new noise, owning to being on the iron bridge over the river Ouse, which rolled black under the riverside lamps.

'Passed fireman, Les was, but failed his eye test for driving. So now he's a guard. Just counts the carriages, makes up his dockets… then sits in his van playing chess.'

'Who against?'

'Himself. Seems rum to me – I mean to say, how can you ever win? There again, though, how can you ever lose? Funny thing about those cheaters of his…'

I was counting off the dark landmarks of retreating York: railway laundry, cocoa works, gas works.

'Cheaters?' I said.

'His blinkers.'

'You what?'

'Less glims. Those bloody bins of his…'

'You mean his spectacles?'

Tommy frowned.

'Aye,' he said after a moment, as though the word would just about do at a pinch. 'He got 'em about a year since, and they somehow made him silent. I don't know how but they sort of choked him off. Trainload of crocks we are – him with his eyes, me with me leg.'

That's right, I thought, and the engine's jiggered into the bargain.

The junction for Hull was to the right, and we clattered over the complication of tracks. Next thing we were flashing through the little halt for Strensall barracks, and I said, 'This is where you did your leg, the Chief told me. At the barracks.'

Tommy nodded and half smiled.

'Didn't hurt too much, I hope?'

'I didn't know a deal about it,' said Tommy. 'I went unconscious, you see. Funny thing is, when I came around, I was chattering away like billy-o.'

'Really?' I said. 'About what?'

'About all sorts.'

And while Tommy Nugent talked about what he'd been talking about when he was accidentally shot, I tried my best to balance fire and water, periodically breaking off to look out of the side of the J Class.

It felt fine to be swinging the shovel again, and just after the village of Flaxton, Tommy, who'd been going on about what a white bloke my governor was, interrupted himself (so to speak) to come over to my side, clap me on the back, and say, 'I wish I had you firing every Sunday'.

I was quite choked by this, almost felt the tears springing to my eyes, and I said, 'You think I'm up to the mark then?' which of course I shouldn't have done but I wanted to hear it again.

'She's steaming like a fucking witch,' Tommy said, making his way with difficulty back to his sand box, and that was even better. No praise that might come my way as an articled clerk could ever mean so much, of that I was sure.

The ruins of Kirkham Abbey came up on the right – a standing shadow in the gloom – and I said, 'Tell me about Blackburn.'

'Hasn't your governor put you in the picture?' said Tommy. ' Well then…'

Between Kirkham Abbey and Malton – which was our only booked stop – Tommy told me all he knew about the fellow.

Leeds and York were both in District One of the company's Rifleman's League, which was where Tommy did his shooting after having been invalided out of the Territorial Army. He and Ray Blackburn had first met two years ago at a shooting match in the York range at Queen Street, behind the station, and since there were only three other clubs in District One, they'd shot against each other a few times since. Nugent said that Blackburn was 'quiet – a slow and steady sort of bloke'. Being slow and steady, he was 'better at the deliberate targets… not a great hand at the quick-firing'. But a good shot all the same. 'He had a good eye,' as Tommy said.

After that first meeting, the Leeds and York teams had gone for a drink in the York Railway Institute.

'They'd bested us,' said Tommy, 'and the losers generally buy the winners the first drinks. But Ray came straight up to me, put out his hand, and said, "Good shooting. Now what will you have?'"

That had impressed Tommy no end, especially since his firing had been 'all over the shop' that evening. What had impressed him still more though was that Ray Blackburn had turned out to be a tee-totaller, so Tommy hadn't had to buy him a drink back. 'Refused outright – wouldn't even have a lemonade.'

'He never drank?'

'Never,' said Tommy. 'He would smoke the odd small cigar, and that was it.'

When the two had met for a second time, after a shooting match in Hartlepool, it had been the same story over again. Blackburn had shot well, Tommy not so well, but still Blackburn had bought the round, expecting nothing in return. This combination of superb shooting and not requiring a drink had quite floored Tommy – 'I mean, talk about gentlemanly' – and I had a suspicion that it was on this account,

rather than because of any deep acquaintance, that he'd come to Scarborough.

'If Ray Blackburn's been done in,' said Tommy, 'then I want to know who's done him, and I want to be up and at 'em.'

'Did the Chief ask you to come on this job, or did you ask the Chief?'

'I wanted to know if I could help at all,' said Tommy, drawing back the regulator.

'It does you credit to risk your neck for a stranger,' I said, and Tommy coloured up at that.

'I en't risking me neck,' he said, but whether because he doubted his own words or because he was embarrassed at being praised we went on in near silence for the next little while, with Tommy just occasionally adjusting his position on the sandbox, as though his bad leg was giving him jip.

'Of course, he was religious,' I put in, as we flew through the little station of Huttons Ambo. (It was too dark to see, but I knew the long platform signs there from memory: 'Huttons Ambo: serves also High and Low Hutton'.)

'That's right is that,' said Tommy. 'Catholic. I can't remember how I know that but he was the sort of bloke… you just couldn't help but know. Not that he was pi. It just came off him.'

'Radiated,' I said.

Tommy nodded.

'… Sort of thing. 'Course, with that particular lot, there's no bar on drinking, quite the opposite in fact. So there again he was just that bit different. Mind you, that lass of his…'

'His fiancée?'

'I only saw her once – easy on the eye but a bit of a tart, if you ask me. Led him a right bloody dance.'

'What did he look like?'

'Nice looking fellow. Dark, biggish – very dark eyes.'

As we closed on the market town of Malton, Tommy gave up on Ray Blackburn for a while, yawned and limped over a couple of paces to glance at my fire. 'Dead spot back centre,' he said. 'Big coal makes a dead spot,' he added, going back to his perch. 'You want it about the size of your fist.'

It wasn't a criticism, I told myself, so much as just a passing remark. He hadn't meant to take back his earlier praise. As I put on coal, I was half aware of Tommy opening the locker door. A little later, as I continued shovelling, he was pulling a night-shirt and under-drawers from one of his kit bags, and when I looked over at him again, he was pointing a fucking rifle at me.

Chapter Twelve

It was a short rifle – barely three feet long – and Tommy stood there grinning with it in his hand, and rocking slightly on the footplate.

'I'll be taking this in, if it's all right with you,' he said.

He reached again into his kit bag, and took out a smaller bag made of cloth. From this he took a cartridge, which he put between his front teeth.

'Hold on a minute,' I said.

'I've another in the kit bag, and you can have that one,' said Tommy, still with the cartridge between his teeth. He pulled a lever behind the trigger; the gun broke, and he put in the cartridge. He snapped the gun shut once again.

'See how it's done?' he said.

He then pulled the lever again and the cartridge flew spinning upwards before landing on the footplate. Tommy caught it up, and frowned. 'Dented, that is,' he said, and he pitched it through the fire-hole door into the rolling white flames.

'Shut the door, man,' I said. 'There's liable to be a bloody explosion.'

But as I spoke there came only a soft, single pop from within the fire. I stared at Tommy, as we rattled into Malton.

'You're a bit of a dark horse, en't you?' I said.

'It's only little,' he said, running his hand along the stock. 'Carbine, point two-two calibre. Handy if you're on horseback or if you're a lad – or both. Yours'll be just the same, but you can have a feel of both, and take whichever one suits.'

'Stow it, Tommy,' I said. 'Police don't go armed in this country… Does the Chief know you've brought all this ironmongery?'

'Why else would he send me?'

That might be right.

And as we rattled on through the night, I saw that in Tommy's eyes this gun – or these guns – made up for his crocked leg; gave him a value in this world that he didn't seem to get from driving an engine. The guns were the reason he'd come, and it was just like the Chief to have packed me off with someone like Tommy; part of his game of keeping me always on the jump. I was his favourite all right, but I paid the bloody price for it.

'Look, this is a fishing trip, Tommy,' I said. 'Do you know what that means? We go in and keep our eyes skinned. I come back and write a report saying whether further questioning is required. There ought to be no bother. We ought to be perfectly all right.'

'Ought to be?' he said. 'With these beauties, it's a surety. You know the firing positions, I suppose? There's standing…'

And he shouldered the weapon, with the dark streets of Malton rolling behind.

'Kneeling…'

At that, he did kneel down and aimed the gun in all the black dust of the footplate. I ought to stop him. Apart from anything else, the Chief had shown me the firing positions more than once, in hopes of getting me to take up shooting as a benefit to myself, the railway company I worked for, and the country I lived in.

'… And prone.'

Tommy baulked at that one, but I could tell he'd been contemplating lying flat to show me the third firing position. He was now stowing the rifle in the kit bag again. It appeared that he kept them wrapped in his clothes, towel, night-shirt; fairly buried they were by the time he'd finished. He then shut the locker door smartly, for Malton was coming up.

Three minutes later we were at a stand in the empty station. It was 6.35 p.m., but you'd have thought it was midnight. Of train guard Leslie White there was no sign. A couple of people had boarded, one had alighted, and we were waiting for our starter signal and the whistle of the platform guard, who stood a little way off with hands clasped and head bowed as though someone had lately died.

The signal gave a jerk, the platform guard looked up, and we were off. Tommy didn't wait for the whistle. For all that he seemed the most amiable of blokes, the business with the gun had set me thinking he was a bit crackers.

With one hand on the regulator, he was talking now about how he hadn't told Joan, his intended, what he would be about in Scarborough; how he'd tell her after the event, on Wednesday, when they were going to the Electric Theatre on Fossgate; how they reserved seats for every Wednesday; how you could get ninepenny seats for sixpence if you reserved but no seats there were very comfortable, which was why for preference they'd go to the City Picture Palace on Fishergate, only it wasn't possible to reserve there so you had to take pot luck, which was no use because Joan always wanted an aisle seat, not on her own account but so that he, Tommy, could stretch out his leg – this even though he always said he didn't care where he sat. 'The leg does not stretch out, and that's all about it,' he told me, before embarking on a further speech about how he was looking for a house over Holgate way to move into with Joan… and presently we were approaching Scarborough.

Only half the lamps were lit, and the wide, dark terminus stood nearly empty. A long coal train was parked at the excursion overload platform, as though to send out a message: Forget about coming here for pleasure this time of year. Other coal wagons were scattered about on the approach roads, and a little pilot engine waited with a bloke leaning out of the cab. He'd no doubt be put to rounding up the wagons; meantime, he was smoking and watching us come in.

Scarborough, being a terminus, had a strange arrangement that made the working complicated. We drew right up to the buffer beams on Platform One. We would then – as I supposed – uncouple our coaches, and the pilot would pull them back, releasing our engine. In the normal course of things we'd then work backwards to the engine shed, which was about a mile off, take on water, turn on the turntable, and head back to York. But our engine was not fit for the run back, or so we would make out.

Tommy Nugent was already on the platform, and making his lop-sided way towards a door under a big lantern: the office of the night station master. He knocked, the door was opened, and in he went to start lying.

I looked back, and the last of our half dozen passengers were stepping down from the carriages. They walked through the leaking steam and away towards the exit. Leslie White, the guard, was coming up through the steam as well. He stopped, and turned his specs in my direction.

'Where's Tom?' he said, and I saw there was a wooden box and a folded board under his arm. I read the label on the box:

The Empire Chess Set.

'In there, mate,' I said, indicating the SM's closed door.

White's spectacles tilted that way, then back to me.

'You're running light back?'

'Reckon not,' I said.

And I indicated the steam whirling all around us.

He gave the shortest of nods, turned on his heel, and went off. There was a crew room somewhere about. He'd book off there. When he'd gone, I was left quite alone on Platform One. I saw the pilot engine simmering away on the approach road, but the driver of it made no move. The door of the night station master's office opened, and Tommy stepped out.

'He's telephoning through to the shed,' he said, and his voice echoed in the empty station. 'They'll look at the engine overnight.'

The bloke in the pilot engine had now stirred himself, and was buffering up to the back of our coaches. Tommy was heading for the platform edge, prior to climbing down and uncoupling. But to spare his leg, I said I'd do it. I jumped down onto the filthy ballast, and began unscrewing the brake pipe. As I worked, I saw Tommy's boots, and he was talking at a great rate once again, as though to keep my spirits up.

It'd only be the work of a moment, he said, to run up to the shed, make out the card describing our engine's defects, and book off. We'd have a bit of a spruce-up, but not too much because we did want to look like engine men after all, then it'd be off to Paradise to sort out that bad lot, perhaps with a stop for a pint on the way. He generally took a pint at the end of a turn did Tommy, if not several, and he didn't see why he should do any different this time. But I didn't know about that. Now that the journey was done I wanted to be off to the house of mystery as soon as possible, get in and out, have the whole business done with.

It would be another half hour, though, before we untangled ourselves from the railway lands of Scarborough…

The pilot pulled back our coaches and took them off to the darkness, making for the tunnel that led to the main Scarborough sidings at Gallows Close, where excursion carriages by the hundred were stored in winter much as a lad's train set is stowed in a cupboard when school term begins. We then worked the J Class back to the engine shed, where Tommy fell into a long, echoing conversation with a very tall fitter, whose long brown dust-coat looked as though it might be hiding the fact that he was really two men, one standing on the shoulders of the other. The shed was dark, and smelt of the dying fires that had been dropped into the pits below the engines. Tommy Nugent's voice came drifting through the floating wisps of smoke.

'… And that's how I know it's not the clack valve, you see. Now the stuff's not coming out full bore, so it's not completely shot, but of course the higher the pressure the faster the leak, and what it could really do with is…'

Why did he have to go on so? The valve needed replacing, and that was all about it. They'd be very unlikely to have the right one in the Scarborough shed so we'd have all the excuse we needed to hang about in the town for ages if we wanted. I wandered into the booking-on vestibule, where there was a little less floating smoke, and a little more light, thanks to two gas lamps sticking out over a wide, green North Eastern Railway notice board. I walked up for a look. I was informed that two new dummy signals were in place on the Scarborough approach, and a certain water tank had been discontinued.

Company employees were to refrain from removing the newspapers from the engine men's mess, otherwise newspapers would no longer be provided. A small quantity of gunpowder had been found under a seat on a train running between Scarborough and Filey and a general warning was accordingly issued to all employees of the railway. A fellow from the shed had won a barometer at cycle racing.

In one corner of the board was a space for notices of a more general nature. A seven-roomed house was for sale in Scarborough: 'In splendid condition – large garden.' My eye ran on to the notice directly beneath: 'PREPARE FOR A RAINY DAY!' I didn't read that, but moved directly to the one below.

Paradise Guest House. All rooms excellent and nicely furnished. Baths, hot and cold water. Sea views. Five minute walk from station. Railway men always welcome, cheap rates for short or long stay. Apply Miss Rickerby at Paradise Guest House, 3 Bright's Cliff, Scarborough.

Miss Rickerby – she sounded a respectable enough party. A picture composed in my mind of a thin, jittery woman who almost outdid her white dress for paleness, but I realised I'd called to mind a Mrs Riccall, who worked in the pharmacy on Nunnery Lane, York, and was known to the wife. Just then Tommy Nugent came limping into the vestibule.

'Well, I'm finally shot of it,' he said, meaning the J Class. 'I've told 'em we'll come back in the morning about ten to see what's what.'

'We'll try to,' I said. 'It all depends on events.' Tommy stood still under the gas with his cap in his hand, and he made his eyes go wide, and blew upwards, which

caused his curly hair to move.

'Quick wash and brush-up, then Paradise it is!' he said.

I didn't show him the notice posted by or on behalf of Miss Rickerby because I'd finally worked out what was making him talk at such a rate: Tommy Nugent was spoiling for a scrap, and I didn't doubt he'd prove a brave man if it came to it. But that didn't mean he didn't have the wind up.

Chapter Thirteen

I might have been sleeping in my metal quarters as I heard the sound of a bell amid the sea roar and the creaking iron. It might have been the bell that woke me. There came another, and I counted five strokes in all. Were we within earshot of a coastal church?

No, the bells were floating along with us; we had made away with them, carried them off. They rang them for the watches, and five strokes did not mean five o'clock. I thought again of the run to Scarborough, and how I ought to have known not to head for the sea. I figured a boat approaching the Scarborough harbour, lurching on the waves like a. drunkard; I called to mind the clock tower above Scarborough railway station, white against the Scarborough night, a foreign look to it somehow. I thought of the porter who was keen to lock the station gate, as though he had secret and illegal business to conduct there; I saw a heap of razors, safetys and cut-throats, and a hot bluish room. I saw again the gigantic needle hanging in the air. I began to count, and the needle faded.

The station clock tower came up once more, and I knew I had a brain injury of some sort – a concussion perhaps – because I could not see why a station would have a clock, leave alone a clock tower? It was asking for trouble, because the clock would only prove the trains wrong. I adjusted my position against the chain. No. It was churches that had clocks in the main, but why did churches have clocks? They did not operate trains. They were not in the business of time, quite the opposite really. But they did have them, and that was fact. It seemed to me that my brain was befuddled as before, but I was no longer subject to the flashes of electricity, and the sea was perhaps a little calmer. The violent rocking had been replaced with a calmer up and down, like a great breathing.

More visions came. I saw in my mind's eye an oil lamp burning red, a gas bracket giving a shaking white light.

I saw a knife polisher on a kitchen table, a packet containing rat poison and again the lamp burning red, as though by thinking of light, I might create light.

The chain room was darker than when I had been put into it. A tiny amount of moonlight came down through the hole that the chain went through, and this only illuminated the remainder of the chain. There was no mystery about where the thing went. It was not the Indian rope trick. This was the anchor chain – it ran up to the windlass on the fore-deck – and I had a suspicion that the anchoring of the boat, the end of the voyage, would be the end of me as well, because there would be policemen where we ended, and law and order generally – and the Captain meant to avoid that. Yes, it would be very dangerous even to sight land, because it would remind the Captain and the Mate that they would have to account to someone for holding me prisoner and I did not think they were over-keen to do that.

I was too bloody cold.

I sat against the chain and pulled the tarpaulin around me. I was supposed to be becoming a solicitor, a notion that seemed more than ever mysterious. I tried to recall having done some lawyering but could not. I had stood up many times in the police court but only as a policeman-witness. I had meant to be going into a quiet office over-looking the sleeping wagons of the old station, but there had evidently been a change of plan, and I would be going to the North Pole instead.

Running my hand over the tarpaulin, it came to me that it was not smooth as a tarpaulin ought to be, and it did not have the tar smell that generally came off a tarp. The smell in the chain locker was paint and oil, and I wondered whether it might serve as a sail locker as well. I swept my hand again over the canvas – for that's what it was – and found the thing I was after before I knew I was looking for it: a stretch of rope. I could not find the end of it and for all I knew it was longer than the anchor chain, but a length of it between my hands made a weapon. I sat back holding the rope and feeling there would be no half measures from now on. When the grey Dutchman came back, I would be on him; I would be on him quicker than thinking.

But after a while I set down the rope. It was too cold to hold. A short interval of time later, I pulled the oilskin more tightly around me, and made also to wrap myself in the great sheet, which might have been a sailor might have been something else again, but as I counted the faint ringing of a further six bells, it didn't seem to matter one way or another, and the only thing to do was to give in to the darkness, the rise and fall and the deep cold, and to sleep.

Chapter Fourteen

We had a scrub-down in the engine shed wash room. Then we walked back to the station along a cinder track, and climbed up onto Platform One. We exited the station through the main gates that a porter stood ready to padlock. It was only just gone seven, but he was shutting up shop. It was depressing, somehow, that a fair-sized station like this should close so early.

I said to the porter, 'Leslie White, our guard… has he come by?'

'Ten minutes since,' he replied.

With the station behind us, we stood at the top of Valley Bridge Road. A few wagons rolled through the streets but there were no trams to be seen, and precious few people.

Turning towards Tommy, I said, 'Paradise is on Bright's Cliff – it's on the south side, off Newborough.'

'Not far, is it?' he enquired, as we began to walk.

He came to Scarborough a lot but evidently did not leave the station very much. I mended my pace to his as we made our way along the dark canyon of the Valley Road. Tall houses stood a little way off on either side, beyond the Valley Gardens. They were beautifully tended, those gardens – and famous for it – but now they were enclosed in darkness. Halfway along, the sea came into view below us, with the white of the wave tops standing out clearly on the black water.

'It's getting up,' said Tommy, when he drew level with me.

He'd expected the sea to be quiet, like the town.

The tide was coming in, and the waves were like an invasion sweeping right up to the empty Promenade. The Grand Hotel was in view high on our left, the four turrets making it look like a great castle – a fortress against the sea. Lights shone at barely a quarter of the windows. The flags on the roof were all stretched out to the utmost by the sea wind.

'Bright's Cliff is on the other side of it,' I said. 'We've come a bit out of our way.'

'Oh, wait a bit,' said Tommy. 'I'm missing a bloody bag.'

It was true enough: he only carried one of his two.

'Reckon I left it at the gate,' he said. 'I put it down when you asked the bloke about Les White. Will you just hold on here?'

'Is it the one with the guns in it?'

'One of 'em,' he said, which I didn't quite understand.

'I'll go,' I said, because I was twice as quick as him and I wanted to get on, but Tommy wouldn't have it. He would fetch the bag himself.

'Look,' I said, pointing to a lonely-looking bench under a lamp on the Promenade. 'I'll wait for you there.'

'Right you are, mate,' he said, and he turned to go.

'Leave your other bag here at any rate!' I called after him, but he didn't seem to hear that, and I stared after him until he was claimed by the darkness of the Valley Gardens.

I sat down on the bench, and watched the waves for a while. Then I looked to my right, where the Prom curved around towards the Spa, which was like a little mansion with a ballroom, restaurant and orchestra. But this Sunday evening the Prom curved away into darkness, and the Spa might as well have been spirited clean away.

Because I was looking the wrong way, I didn't see the woman who approached out of the darkness from the left and sat on the bench alongside me. She wore a blue dress, which came out from underneath a grey-blue double-breasted coat, which she hugged tight about her. Her hair was a mass of dark curls under a fetching hat with a peaked brim and a feather in it. I thought: She looks like a hunter. Who was the Greek female who was the hunter? I couldn't recall.

She looked out to sea, and I watched her face from the side. It was squareish, darkish, a little plump with wide green eyes. She was wrapping the coat tight around herself, and I thought: If she's so cold, why is she sitting here and not walking briskly? But then she left off with the coat, and gave a sort of startled gasp, as though she'd just remembered something. I thought: She'll go off now. But she crossed her legs right over left instead, and began waggling her raised right boot. The wife would do that when she was restless, but this woman was not restless; she was bored, more like – and idle with it. I liked the look of her though, and I thought I'd better stop eyeing her in case it became obvious.

I craned my neck backwards to see whether I could catch sight of Tommy Nugent coming out of the gloom of the Valley Gardens. But there was no sign of him, so I looked forward again, and counted three wide waves as they came in, turning themselves inside out and going from black to white in the process. I knew the woman was eyeing me, so I tried to watch the sea as though I had some special understanding of its moods and movements.

Another night walker came up out of the darkness to the left: a man in a great-coat and a high-crowned bowler. He walked a little white dog with the lead wrapped around his wrist, and he was eating a fried fish from a bit of paper. He stopped just in front of the bench, and leant against the railing, half looking out at the wild sea, half at the woman on the bench. He might have nodded at her and nudged his hat when he'd come up, or he might just have been setting it right after a gust of wind.

The fish didn't half smell good, and the dog thought so too, because it would sit down, begging to be given a scrap, then shuffle about and sit down again, just in case its master hadn't noticed the first time. The man ate the fish with a superior look, as if conveying to the dog: 'Well yes, I suppose you would like a piece, but then who wouldn't? It happens to be excellent grub, otherwise I wouldn't be eating it.' After a few moments, the woman spoke up, and I was glad – encouraged, somehow – to hear that her accent was mild.

'Will you give your dog some of that fish, for heaven's sake?' she said.

'He doesn't like fish,' said the man, and I couldn't tell whether the two knew each other or not.

'You could have fooled me,' said the woman.

'It's cats that like fish,' said the man.

'Try him,' said the woman.

'Oh all right,' said the man, and he dropped a bit of fish that the dog caught and ate in an instant.

'I saw Jepson in town today,' said the woman.

'The magician?' the man asked, rather unexpectedly, as he finished off the fish and crumpled up the paper.’ He’s in town early.'

'Or late,' said the woman. 'He was in Boyes's.'

'Oh aye?'

'Household Goods department… Returning a kettle. He was after a full refund.'

'Why?'

'It was faulty.'

'How?'

'In the only way that a kettle can be faulty, Mr Wilson,' replied the woman (and she gave me a look as she did so). 'It had a hole in it.'

'Well,' said the man (evidently Wilson), 'what about it?'

'He was very angry.'

'He's entitled, isn't he?' said Wilson, who was surprisingly off-hand with the woman, considering how pretty she was. 'If I bought a kettle with a hole in it, I'd do my nut.'

'Yes, but you're not The Magical Marvel of the Age,' said the woman… With all due respect.'

The man pulled a face, which might have meant anything.

'It doesn't do for a man who's supposed to have mysterious powers to get all worked up about a faulty kettle,' said the woman.

'Well, that's his look-out,' said the man, and, giving a half nod to the woman, he went off into the windy darkness as the woman said, partly to herself: 'He put on such a lovely show at the Winter Gardens, as well.'

The woman now stood up and sighed at the sea. She took off her hat, and drove her hand into the mass of curls. Then she turned and headed off into the Valley Gardens. I watched her for the space of three lamps, and at the instant she disappeared there was Tommy Nugent coming the other way, grinning and limping, kit bags in hand.

'You all set?' I said, standing up.

He gave a nod; there was no mention of taking a pint. He seemed minded to get on with it now. We walked towards the funicular railway that led up towards the Grand, and I read the famous sign: 'Two hundred and twenty steps avoided for id.' But it wasn't working. The two carriages were suspended halfway up, like two signal boxes dangling from a cliff. It was a strain for Tommy to climb the steps, but he never moaned. As we toiled up, we had the high north wall of the Grand Hotel towering alongside us. There were no windows in it, and a dark slime ran all the way to the top.

Tommy was saying about he'd had enough of the J Class; he'd try to lay his hands on one of the Class Qs. They had a good height to the cab roof; you weren't all cramped up in there as with the Js. They'd been express engines, but were now coming off the main line, and were ideal for the medium distance, semi-fast trips like the Scarborough runs. He was talking to cover up nerves, I felt sure of it.

At the top of the steps, we were in the square that stood between the Grand and the Royal hotels. No-one was about. A horse whirled a hansom away from the front of the Grand, and I had the idea that every last person was fleeing the town. We turned right, making for Newborough, which was the main shopping street of Scarborough, but dead and abandoned now apart from the shouts of a few unseen loafers.

We went past a furniture store that showed in the window its own idea of the perfect living room, lit by a low night light. Next to it was a marine stores: 'All Kinds of Nets Sold'. After half a dozen shuttered and dark shops I saw the sign: 'Bright's Cliff. It was a short stub of a street at a slight angle off the Newborough – put me in mind of a drain leading to the cliff edge, a sort of cobbled groove over-looked by houses older than the common run of Scarborough buildings. At the end of it stood a single lamp that marked the very edge of Scarborough, and a steep drop down to the Prom. Near by stood an upended hand cart with a couple of old sacks tangled up in the wheel spokes. It might have been connected with some stables that looked half derelict.

The end property was turned somewhat towards the cliff edge, as though disgusted with the rest of the street, and a derrick stuck out from its front, from the forehead of the house's face, so to say. This must be for drawing things up the cliff. I walked directly to the end of Bright's Cliff and looked down. I saw an almost sheer bank, covered in old bramble bushes and nettles; then came a gravel ledge, then the rooftops of some buildings on the Prom: a public house, a public lavatory, and the Sea Bathing Infirmary. A little light leaked out of the pub, and, as I looked down, with Tommy Nugent breathing hard behind me, a man walked out of it – well, he was just a moving hat from where we looked, and the hat revolved on the Prom, and doubled back into the public lavatory, which must still have been open. I doubted that the sea bathing place was open. There'd be very few takers for its waters in March.

Tommy tapped me on the shoulder, and I wheeled about.

'Paradise is that one,' he said, and… Well, I didn't know about paradise but, as far as Bright's Cliff went, the house indicated was the best of a bad lot.

Chapter Fifteen

It was a house of white-painted bricks, and the paint was falling away a little, like the white powder on the face of a pier- rot. It was perhaps a hundred years old, and sagged somewhat. The windows were rather ill-assorted as if they'd been bought in a job lot at knockdown price, no two being the same size. The door was blue; over it was a fanlight of coloured glass with the name of the house set into it, the letters being distributed between the different panes like so: PA-RAD-ISE.

'You knock,' said Tommy, and he held one kit bag in each hand, as though he was ready to march straight in.

I knocked, and there came the sound of a woman's laughter from beyond the door as I did it. The door opened slowly, and there stood a trim, well-dressed man, perhaps in the middle fifties. The laughter had stopped but the man was smiling pleasantly. He was the very last sort of person I'd bargained for, and I was silenced for a moment by the sight of him. He tipped his head, preparatory to asking our business. But Tommy was already speaking.

'We're two railway men,' he said. 'He's the fireman, and I'm the driver.' (I thought: Don't say that, it's not convincing.) 'We've just come from the station, and we're having to overnight in Scarborough.' He took a deep breath before continuing: 'Now we've heard…'

But the man cut in, turning a little to one side, and saying, 'Miss R! Two gentlemen in need of a bed – they're railway men,' he added, in a way I didn't much care for.

The trim man was now replaced in the doorway by a woman and it was the one who'd been sitting on the bench. She'd evidently just come in, for she had her grey-blue coat and hunter's hat still on. She looked a bit distracted, flushed and very pretty. I took off my hat, and she whipped hers off at exactly the same time, as though we were playing the looking glass game; and then she shook her curls.

The hall was rather cramped. The landlady stood on a brownish carpet, a little worn, under a swinging gas chandelier, with three of the four lights burning. The wallpaper was green stripes, also a little faded; there was a faint smell of paint. On the wall was a thin case with a glass front. Above it a sign said, 'Today's Menu,' but there was nothing in the case. The stairs were narrow, and rose up into darkness. The thin banister was rather battered… and the hall was too hot. In spite of this, the woman seemed highly amused at something or other and she was beautiful.

I was on the point of speech, but Tommy was under way again.

'Our engine's broke down,' he said. 'It's an injector steam valve that's giving bother.'

'I'm awfully sorry,' said the woman, 'but you see…'

'Steam's pouring out of the overflow, and when that happens…'

The woman was eyeing me, half smiling. Did she remember me from the bench?

'We saw your notice in the engine men's mess,' I interrupted, for fear that if I didn't speak up soon she'd think me dumb.

'Ordinarily,' Tommy was saying, 'we'd have taken the engine back to York tonight but it's not up to the trip, so we've left it at the Scarborough shed, and in all likelihood they'll have it sorted out by morning.'

'Good,' said the woman, by which she no doubt meant: 'Shut up.' Then she said, 'We hate to turn railway men away, but we only have the one room available tonight.'

'Single bed, is it?' I asked.

'If that,' she said, with half a smile.

I turned about and looked at Tommy; then back to the woman, who looked as if she was trying not to laugh. It was fascinating to watch the movement of her lips over her teeth.

'Do you mind if we step away for a moment to talk it over?' I asked her.

'Not a bit,' she replied, and she retreated into the house, leaving the door on the jar.

I walked with Tommy towards the gas lamp at the end of Bright's Cliff.

'I'm going to take the room, Tommy,' I said. 'I'm the investigating officer and… well, do you see?'

He put down his two bags on the cobbles, and, opening one of them, said, 'Fair do's, Jim. But you'll take a rifle, won't you?'

I'd forgotten about the bloody rifles.

'No,' I said, and Tommy looked put-out. 'I mean… they're a bit small,' I said.

'Dangerous to a mile these are, Jim,' he said, 'and I should think the average room in that house is about ten foot across.'

'But they're meant for target shooting. I mean, they're miniature rifles, aren't they?'

'How big a hole do you want to make in their bloody heads, Jim?'

He was unwinding one of the great bandages he'd made of all his under-clothes.

'Well,' I said, 'I don't want to make a hole in their heads at all. I'm not trained up in rifle shooting.'

'No need to be a dead eye,' he said. 'Not inside a house. You're not going to need orthoptic bloody spectacles, Jim: just pull the bloody trigger. And I'll tell you something else: you're well away with this because it's about the only gun you could loose off indoors and not deafen yourself.'

He was obviously a good deal more concerned for the one firing than the one being fired at. I looked down at the kit bag, where one of the rifles was in clear view.

'I just don't fancy it, Tommy,' I said. 'I shan't bother.'

'Jim,' he said, glancing back over towards the door, 'those people are strange.'

The door of Paradise was still half open, spilling coloured gaslight onto the cobbles of Bright's Cliff.

I said, 'They didn't look strange to me.'

Tommy now held a third bloody shooter in his hand: a pistol this time. It was very small and thin – there was nothing to it. It looked like a pop gun of Harry's.

'Two-two pistol,' he said.

'How many more have you got in there?'

'What do you say, Jim? You can carry this beauty in your pocket.'

I shook my head, and he fastened up the kit bag, covering over this final offering.

'Remember this,' he said, 'if Ray Blackburn was killed, and you click to the reason, they'll come after you no matter what.'

'Tommy,' I said, 'I can't hang about or it'll look funny. I'll see you at the station tomorrow, all right?'

And it appeared that I really had offended him, because without another word he marched along the short cobbled road until he came to the junction with Newborough, where he hesitated for a moment, before turning left and disappearing from sight.

I returned to Paradise and knocked on the opened door. The woman came again, and I liked being able to make her appear in this way – like Aladdin with his lamp. She now carried a cup and saucer with a bit of cake on the side. She'd disposed of her hat and coat, and wore a dress, more lavender than blue. I thought: What a pity that, being a married man, I can't fuck you, because you'd certainly make a very nice armful.

'My mate's gone off,' I said. 'I'll take the room if that's all right.'

She opened the door wider to let me in, turned and put her cup down on the bottom stair, and held out her hand. The house was boiling warm. The woman raised her arm over my shoulder and pushed the front door to.

'I'm Miss Rickerby,' she said, as the door closed behind me.

'Pleased to meet you,' I said. 'Stringer.'

And I found that we were exchanging smiles rather than shaking hands. I could tell immediately that she was at odds with the house. The place ought to have belonged to an older person. A clock ticked softly, and I thought of people's holidays ticking away. Would this hallway look any different in the summer months? It seemed all faded, and with a suspicion of dust. Also, it was kept hot as the houses of old people – those that can afford it – generally are. And the paint smell made it seem more, not less, old. Even the fanlight over the door was old, I thought, half craning round towards it, with old colours in it: a mustardy yellow, a green and a red of the sort seen in church stained glass.

'Shall I help you with your coat?' the landlady enquired. She seemed very keen to do it, and I thought: Is she sweet on me?

'No thanks,' I said, 'I'll manage.'

But I made heavy weather of the operation as she looked on.

'I like your badge,' she said, when the lapel of my suit-coat was revealed, and she leant forward and nearly touched it.

'Oh,' I said, with face bright red, 'that's the North Eastern company crest. Really it's three other railway company crests in a circle.'

'Why?' she said.

I tried to peer down at it. I must have looked daft in the attempt.

'It's the companies that were amalgamated to make up the North Eastern,' I said. 'The top one is the York and North Midland Railway. That has the city of York crest on it. The bottom left hand one is the Leeds Northern Railway and that has the Leeds crest and a sheep to show the woollen industry, together with ears of corn to show that side of the business, and a ship to show… well, shipping…'

As I rambled on it struck me that there was a good deal more to this badge than I'd ever thought, so I said, 'Do you really want to hear about the third crest?'

She was looking at me with an expression of wonderment.

'Would you like a cup of tea?' she said, seeming to come out of a trance. 'Or would you rather see the room first?'

At the back of the hallway, to the right of the stairs, I could see the man who'd answered the door. He now wore some species of dressing gown over his suit. It was perhaps a smoking jacket – not that he was smoking, as far as I could make out, but just generally taking it easy. He too held a cup of tea. He nodded as I looked at him.

My coat was over my arm. A coat tree stood in the hallway, beside a small bamboo table on which stood an ornamental tea pot, a dusty circle of sea shells, some framed views of Scarborough, and a black album of some sort, closed. I reached out towards it, thinking it might be a visitors' book, that Blackburn's name might be in it, but something in Miss Rickerby's look checked me. However, after eyeing me for a moment, she said, 'Open it.'

I did so. It held more views of Scarborough.

'The sea from Scarborough,' observed Miss Rickerby of the first one I turned up. 'Scarborough from the sea,' she said of the second.

'I thought it might be a visitors' book,' I said, closing it again. 'I thought I might have to sign it.'

'We do have a visitors' book, but it's in the kitchen. I'm going through it just now.'

I nodded, not really understanding.

'You see,' she explained, 'I write to the visitors asking if they'd like to come back – the ones I want back, that is.'

I should've thought they'd all want to come back, looking at her.

I glanced up, and the man had gone from the side of the stairs.

'It's hardly worth keeping it out this time of year,' the landlady said.

'You've not been busy then?'

She smiled, eyeing me strangely.

'We had a Mr Ellis last week.'

'An engine man, was he?' I enquired, and it seemed my investigation had begun sooner than I'd bargained for.

She shook her head.

'He travelled in galoshes, if you see what I mean. Now… tea or room?'

'I'd rather see the room, I think,' I said.

'Quite right,' she said, 'because you might just hate it. What did I put down about it on the notice at the station?' she asked, turning towards the staircase.

'You said all the rooms were excellent,' I said, and she made a noise like 'Ha!'

I thought of the wife, who'd been a landlady when I first met her – my landlady in fact. She had a good sense of humour, but it would not have done to rib her about the rooms she let out. Being so keen to get on, she never saw the funny side of anything touching business or money.

Miss Rickerby carefully moved her teacup aside with the toe of her boot, and began climbing the stairs. Without looking back, she said, 'Follow me.'

I did so, with my coat over my arm, and of course it was a pleasure to do it, at least as far as the view of Miss Rickerby's swinging hips went. But the stair gas burnt low. The paint smell increased; the stair carpet seemed to deteriorate with every new step, and the green stripe wallpaper became faded, like a sucked humbug. We came to the first landing: black floorboards with a blue runner, none too clean. It led to closed doors.

'The sitting room is on this floor,' Miss Rickerby said, indicating the nearest closed door.

The staircase narrowed still further as we approached the second landing: a dark corridor where one bare gas jet showed tins of white-wash and rolls of wallpaper leaning against the wall.

'These are all the rooms you can't have,' said Miss Rickerby – and this was evidently why Tommy Nugent had been turned away.

'Decorating,' I said.

'You're very quick on the uptake, Mr Stringer.'

I followed her up another, still narrower staircase, and we came to a short corridor, running away ten feet before ending in the slope of the house roof. A gas bracket – unlit – stuck out of the wall to my left. A little further along, also on the left, was a small white-painted door with a sloping top to accommodate the roof – evidently a cupboard or store room. Immediately to my right was a somewhat bigger white-painted door, with a low, reddish light coming out from underneath. The landing being so small, I was rather close to Miss Rickerby who smelt of talcum, perhaps, but also something out-of-the-way. She made just as good an impression close to, anyhow.

She said, 'You haven't asked the price.'

I said, 'No, that's because…'

'… You're stupendously rich.'

She took a small match box from her sleeve, turned the gas tap on the bracket, and lit the mantle, allowing me to see that the wallpaper was a faded green stripe alternating with an even more faded green stripe.

'It's because in your notice,' I said, breathing in Miss Rickerby, 'you put down "economical rates for railway men".'

'And because the North Eastern company will refund you,' said Miss Rickerby… which was what I should have said.

'Two shillings,' she said, and she reached for the handle of the bigger door, pushed it open and retreated.

The room was practically all bed. The head of it was just alongside the door, while the end fitted neatly under the win- dowsill. The window itself was about three feet with a wide ledge and red velvet curtains, which had perhaps once been very good, but now showed bald patches, and were parted, so that the whole window was like a tiny theatre stage. I went in, shuffled along by the edge of the bed, and looked out and down. There was a kind of staircase of dark house roofs to either side, but directly below was the Prom (which was deserted), then the lights of the harbour, with its cluster of cowardly boats, unable to face up to the wild black sea beyond.

'That's a grandstand view all right,' I said.

But Miss Rickerby had most unexpectedly – and disappointingly – gone, so I continued my inspection of the room alone.

Well, it was like a ship's cabin, or some sort of viewing booth: you'd sit on the bed with your feet up, and marvel at the scene beyond your boots. I took off my great-coat, set my kit bag down on the counterpane, and sat on the bed in the manner just described. The room was tolerably well-kept, although I fancied it wouldn't do to look too closely. On the hearth, I could see fire dust that a brush had passed too lightly over.

At my left elbow, as I sat on the bed, was the door, and there was a key in the keyhole. To the left of my left leg was a wardrobe with, as I imagined, just enough clearance between it and the bed to allow for the opening of the doors and barely any between its top and the ceiling. Beyond my boot soles was the window. To the right of my right boot was a small table covered with a tartan cloth. On the table was a box of long matches, a red-shaded oil lamp, with the wick burning low – as though in expectation of a tenant – and instructions for the lighting of the lamp. There was also a black book.

To the right of my right knee was a small fireplace, not laid for a fire but with kindling and paper ready in one scuttle, and coal in another. At my right elbow was a wash stand on a scrap of red and black tab rug, which ran partly under the bed as any rug in that room would have to do. For the rest, the floor was black-painted boards.

I sat and watched the black, brooding sea and listened to the wind rising off it, which periodically set the window clattering in its frame. I then leant forward and picked up the book that lay by the side of the lamp. It was Ocean Steamships by F. E. Chadwick and several others, and the owner had written his name on the inside page: 'H. D. R. Fielding'. Who's he when he's at home? I thought, and I settled down on the bed with it. Turning to the first page, I read: 'It is a wonderful fact in the swift expansion of mechanical knowledge and appliances of the last hundred years that while for unknown ages the wind was the only propelling force used for purposes of navigation…'

At that, I put the book back on the table and picked up the directions for the lamp. 'Sunshine at Night,' I read. 'The "Famos" 120 Candle-Power Incandescent Oil Lamp. The management of the lamp is simplicity itself…' Tucked into the pages of the little booklet was a handwritten note evidently meant for guests at Paradise and left over from the summer: 'Please note that teas can by arrangement be served on the beach. Please place requests with Mr Adam Rickerby.'

So there was more than one Rickerby. I didn't quite like the thought.

I replaced this and the lamp directions, and looked at the wallpaper, which was of a mustardy colour, bubbling here and there, and showing the same small ship – a black galleon – entangled dozens of times over in the same curly wave. I was just thinking that it would have made a good pattern for a lad's room when I heard a stirring to my left and there, looming in the doorway, was the over-grown boy who might have spent his childhood years gazing at it.

'Does it suit?' he enquired.

'Adam Rickerby?' I said, and he nodded.

'Will it do?' he said.

The words fell out of his mouth anyhow, in a sort of breathless rush, and with a quantity of flying spittle. He was a gormless lad of about eighteen and, depending on how he grew, he might be all right or a permanent idiot. For the time being, he was unfinished. He wore a shirt of rough white cloth, a thin white necker tied anyhow, and a dirty green apron, so that he looked like some monstrous sort of footman.

'It's cosy enough, en't it?' I said.

He made no answer.

'But it suits me fine,' I said.

'It's two shilling fer t'night,' he said, and he put his hand out.

'Who sent you?'

'Our lass,' he said, and so he was the brother of Miss Rickerby. I was glad he wasn't her husband.

While her face was made pretty and friendly-seeming by being rather wide, his was pumpkin-like; and while her mass of curls was fetching, his were… well, you didn't often see a man who had too much hair but his allowance was excessive, as though sprouting the stuff was about all he was good for. While his sister was well-spoken (for Scarborough, anyhow) he spoke broad Yorkshire, and his blue eyes were too light, indicating a kind of hollowness inside.

I paid over the coin, and he dropped it directly into the front pocket of his apron.

'Winder rattles,' he said.

'I know,' I said, and he skirted around the bed until he came to the window. There he crouched down and found a bit of paste-board, which he jammed into the frame, afterwards remaining motionless and gazing out to sea for a good few seconds. Rising to his feet again he indicated the paste-board, saying, 'You've to keep that in,' as though it was my fault it had fallen out. I could clearly read the words on the card: 'American Wintergreen Tooth Powder: Unequalled for…' and then came the fold. At any rate, it worked, and the best the wind could do now was to create a small trembling in the frame.

'Seen t'toilet?' enquired the youth, who was standing in the doorway once more.

I gave a quick shake of my head.

'It's on t'floor below… Yer've not seen it?' he repeated.

'Is there something special about it?' I said.

The lad kept silence for a moment, before blurting:

'There en't one in't back yard.'

'But you don't have a back yard, do you?' I asked, thinking of how the rear of the house gave on to what was practically a sheer drop. *

He shook his head.

'So it'd be a bit hard to have a toilet in it, wouldn't it?'

I glanced down under the bed, and Adam Rickerby looked on alarmed as I did so. A fair quantity of dust was down there, but not the object I was looking for.

'There's no chamber pot,' I said.

He eyed me sidelong, looked away, eyed me again.

'This room doesn't have a chamber pot,' he said.

'I know,' I said. 'That's what I'm saying.'

'Want one, do yer?' he said, very fast.

'Yes,' I said, 'that's what I'm also saying.'

A note of music arose: the sea wind in the little iron fireplace – a very pure sound, like a flute.

'Cabinet fer yer clothes,' he said suddenly, indicating the wardrobe.

'Yes,' I said, and the silence that followed was so awkward that I said, 'Thanks for pointing it out.'

Had he taken the point about the chamber pot? It was impossible to tell.

'Coal an' wood in't scuttles,' he said – and just then there came a great bang and a scream from beyond the window.

The lad remained motionless, as I barged the bed aside to get a look. Red lights, like burning embers, drifted peacefully down through the black sky towards the harbour.

'I'd say a maroon's just been let off,' I said, and I looked at the lad, who was frowning down towards the bed.

'Appen,' he said.

'What does it mean?'

'Could mean owt,' he said.

'Well,' I said, 'that can't be right,' at which he looked up at me quite sharply 'If a maroon could mean anything, they wouldn't bother firing one. I'd say a ship's been wrecked.'

And the lad didn't seem to think much of that idea, because he just turned on his heel and quit the room. I went out after him, and caught him up on the floor being decorated.

'There's t'toilet,' he said, indicating a white-painted door. 'Paint's all dry.'

Evidently, then, he did not mean to supply me with a chamber pot. It struck me that he was a very inflexible youth.

'Where's everyone else in the house?' I said. 'I want to see about this shipwreck.'

'Sitting room,' he said. 'Next floor down.'

I followed him down towards the first landing. On the way we passed three framed photographs I hadn't noticed on the way up. I turned towards them expecting to see sea-side scenes. Instead there was an old man giving me the evil eye. He hadn't mustered a smile for any of the three, I noticed, as we descended under his gaze.

'Who's that?' I enquired, although I knew the answer in advance on account of the pile of grey curls atop the old man's head.

The lad stopped on the stairs, but didn't turn about.

'Our dad,' he said.

'Is he in the house?'

'No.'

At the bottom of the staircase, the lad had paused to straighten a crooked stair rod.

'What do you mean?' I said. 'Is he not in the house just at present, or is he never in it?'

The lad straightened up, standing foursquare before me in the narrow space and folding his arms. He looked bullet proof, and big with it. Did he mean to put the frighteners on me? I stood my ground.

'Never,' he said.

'Well, let me see now,' I said. 'Would your old man be dead?'

'He would. How do you take yer tea?'

'What's that got to do with it?'

'I'll be attending yer in t’morning,' he said, taking a step closer towards me. 'I'll be bringin' yer 'ot water in a jug and tea… in a cup.'

'Well, that's just how I like tea,' I said.'… In a cup.'

No flicker of a smile from the lad.

'Two sugars,' I said. 'When did your old man die, if you don't mind my asking?'

'Two year since. Milk?'

I nodded. 'And plenty of it.'

'Seven o'clock suit?'

'Fine.'

The old man hadn't killed Blackburn at any rate… Unless the lad lied, but I somehow didn't think so. He was indicating the nearest closed door, and saying, 'Sitting room. Fire's lit in there.'

He then told me a cold tea was served on Sundays in the dining room, and carried on down the stairs. Remembering about the shipwreck, I approached the door of the sitting room. It faced the right way to give a view of the sea. I could hear muttered voices from within.

Chapter Sixteen

I looked up as the iron wall of the chain room cracked. The door was slowly opening, and it seemed that I was returning to this dark corner of the ship from hundreds of miles away. Blue cigar smoke came in first, like something curious, and I wanted it to go back because it brought the sickness rising up again. The grey Mate stood in the doorway, and he held up an oil lamp, which swung with the ship, and gave his face a bluish tinge.

'The old man wants a word,' he said, the white foam rising at the backs of his teeth.

'What are you talking about?' I said. 'You're the old man.'

But I knew from Baytown days that the captain was always 'the old man' on any ship, regardless of age.

'Wants a word about what, exactly?' I then enquired, just as though there were many other things I ought to be attending to on the ship.

'You are to continue your story,' said the Mate. 'Your recollections.'

And he seemed to be trying out a new English word. The best thing would be to have it out with him straight away. His lamp had illuminated the length of rope, but I could hardly stoop to catch it up and I doubted that my hands would work properly anyway. He opened the first hatchway, and I stumbled into the companionway. He opened the second, and we were out onto the fore-deck under a dark blue sky and a moon that was full. The fore-sail was still rigged; it trembled in the wind, and so did I. The Captain waited a little way ahead, standing by the mid-ships ladder. One of the two of them must have held the revolver, but I could not see it just at that moment.

I looked up. The smoke from the funnel was pale blue and ghostly against the dark blue of the sky. It would come out at odd intervals, not connected to the beat of the engines. Smoke was unburnt carbon; the stuff could kill you if inhaled in a confined space, but that didn't mean that the fellows who made smoke were evil. Any man with an honest job made smoke in quantities, and I wondered about the men in the engine room of this no-name ship. Did they know about me? I doubted it, for the engines and the stoke hold were aft, and no man was allowed for'ard when I was out of my prison.

We walked on red-painted iron. Sea swirled over it, although not so much as before, and now the waves were almost pretty against the full moon. Some were set on following us, others drifted off crosswise, and they made the deck slippery in parts. What's wanted here, I thought, is a mop – and a big one. Mr Buckingham would scarcely have approved of the situation. Was he a real man? I could not decide. He was the fellow who bought a mill that was kept idle through the negligence of the railway company in not delivering a piece of machinery. Would the carrier be liable for profits lost by the mill being kept idle? No. Loss too remote. My ability to think was returning by degrees, but try as I might to recall those final hours in Scarborough, my recollections stopped somewhere about a giant needle, a quantity of razor blades, a wax doll, a paper fan and a paraffin heater in a blue room.

We walked on the starboard side of the ship, and as I looked over the sea, I thought I made out some deepening of night at a mile's distance, but it was more than that.

'Land!' I called ahead to the grey-faced Dutchman.

'Nobody knows you there, my friend,' he said, not turning around.

It looked homely enough all the same. I saw in silhouette two houses and what might have been a church clustered together on a low cliff. We were going at a fair lick, and they seemed to be riding fast the other way, but I kept them in sight as long as I could. Lights burned brightly at the retreating windows, and I was grateful to whoever had lit them.

The Mate had motioned me to stop. I looked beyond him towards the mid-ships, and another man had taken the place of the Captain at the ladder, this one much younger, hardly more than a boy. I saw him clear by the lamp that hung from the rail near where he stood. He wore the regulation galoshes but also a thin, ordinary sort of suit. I was certain that he was not the man who'd been at the wheel during my first visit to the chart room, which meant that there were four at least in on the secret. The kid had made some signal to the Mate, who was now leaning somewhat against the gunwale, and looking aft. Some delay had occurred in taking me into the bridge house, if that was in fact the programme. Perhaps there were some loiterers aft who might catch sight of me unless they were put off.

I looked again towards the land. It was not above a mile away, and the famous Captain Webb had swum twenty-five, or whatever was the width of the Channel. But he had trained for years; he was in peak condition and had covered himself in grease, whereas I was half dead from cold to begin with. A sudden burst of sea came, and the crash of the wave was replaced by the sound of a bell in the darkness, and this one was not aboard the ship. It approached – or we approached it – at a great rate, and it came into view after half a minute, clanging inside a revolving iron cage. Here was a warning buoy of some sort, a tattered black flag flying from the top of it. Perhaps we were too close to land; perhaps this was the best chance I would get to strike out for the shore. But there were no welcoming windows to be seen now, just a low line of cliffs that rose and fell, but always in darkness. I wondered whether such continuous blankness could occur in my own country, or whether some disaster had over-taken the place since I'd left.

I was still held in check by the Mate. I glanced at the face of the kid at the mid-ships. He looked pale in the white light of the moon and the white light of the lantern; his eyes were restless, but I did not care for the expression that came over his face when they landed on me.

'I would not be you, mate,' that look of his said, 'for worlds.

'

Chapter Seventeen

The sitting room seemed to be filled with the night sky and the black sea. A man with his back to me stood at one of two tall windows, gazing out. Another, younger man lay on a couch. The room was surely the biggest in the house, and it might once have been two rooms – something about the way the floorboards rose to a gentle peak in the middle made me think so; and the way that the two tall windows did not quite match. They seemed to go in for knocking down walls in that house, as I would later discover.

The room was very old. The cornices were crumbling a little, the fireplace was small. Worn blue rugs were scattered over the black boards, but they were too widely spaced. Black and blue: they didn't set each other off right; they were the colours of a bruise. The articles of furniture seemed few and far between. Most notable of these was a very black upright piano, which had a wall to itself and was set somewhat at an angle by the slope of the floor. The man at the window stood some distance from an occasional table that held two books. I could make out the title of one: A History of the British Navy. The man at the window turned about. He was the fellow who'd answered the front door to me, only he looked older now. He stepped aside, as though politely allowing me a view of the sea.

On the harbour wall stood the harbour master's house and the lighthouse, both white. Against the black sky, the two together looked like a glowing white church with a round tower. The man who'd stepped aside was watching me as I noticed the scene on the dark beach, just to the right of the harbour. Two lines of men holding ropes hauled a boat towards the waves, beckoned on by a man at the front, who wore a long oilskin. From this distance the men looked tiny, the whole scene ridiculous.

The guardian of the window put out his hand.

'I'm Fielding,' he said.

'Stringer,' I said.'… I saw a maroon fired.'

He tipped his head to one side, as though questioning what I'd just said, although he was smiling as he did it.

'I saw it from my room,' I said.'… the room on the top floor.'

'Yes,' he said. 'It is the only one presently available.'

The man Fielding was trim, probably in the late fifties or early sixties, with carefully brushed grey hair, a high waistcoat, spotted tie very neatly arranged with a silver pin through it, and a decent, if rather worn, black suit under the smoking jacket. He seemed very proper and mannerly, although he had not yet introduced me to the man lying on the couch, who had not yet troubled to rise. I gave a bolder glance in his direction. He had a droopy moustache, and, as I thought, a lazy eye.

'Are you coming aboard tonight?' Fielding enquired.

'Coming aboard?' I said, shaking his hand. 'Well, I don't see why not!'

It was an idiotic answer, but the man smiled kindly.

'This is the ship room, after all,' he said, and he tilted his head again, as though I should really have known that already.

'That's because you over-look ships, I suppose,' I said with a nod towards the harbour.

'And are over-looked by one,' said Fielding, and with a neat little gesture, he indicated the wall behind me where hung a painting of a ship – two ships in fact, not sailing ships but steam vessels moving with great purpose through moonlit black and blue waters, the one behind looking as though it was trying to catch the one in front. What did you say about a painting if you wanted to come over as intelligent and educated? That it was charming? That it was in the school of… something or other?

'But we are diverted tonight by the one below,' said Fielding, and he faced the window again, spinning on his heel. He wore little boots, with elasticated sides – good leather by the looks of it, but perhaps with the cracks covered over by a good deal of polish, like boots in a museum. They made him look nimble, anyhow.

'But is there a wreck?' I said, for I was determined to crack the mystery of the maroon.

'I should hope not,' said the man on the couch.

He lay completely flat, like a man waiting to be operated on. He looked to my mind… naive. It was a word of the wife's. I was naive too apparently, but surely not as naive as this bloke. His drooping moustache and long hair looked like a sort of experiment. He'd have a different moustache in a month's time, I somehow knew. He wore a greenish suit and a yellow and brown waistcoat, and that was naive too. It was meant to make him look like a swell, but he just looked as though he'd been at the fancy dress basket.

'Rehearsal,' he said, nodding down towards the beach.

'It is a lifeboat practice] Fielding corrected him, in a tone not completely unfriendly, but which suggested he'd held off from introducing the horizontal fellow because he hadn't really thought it worth doing.

'I don't like the look of that sea,' said the man on the couch, who had rolled to face the windows. 'It's sort of coming in sideways.'

He was perhaps five years older than me – middle thirties. Thin, with a high, light voice and long nails, not over-clean, I noticed, as at last he stood up, crossed the room, and put out his hand. He did not exactly have a lazy eye, but a droopy moustache, which pulled his whole face down, as though trying to make a serious person of him. We shook hands, and I saw that there was a black mark where his head had been on the couch.

'Stringer,' I said.

'Vaughan,' he replied.

He then gave a friendly smile that clashed with the downturn of his moustache, nodded towards the man at the window, and said, 'I believe it ought to be first name terms in this house, even if Howard here won't have it.'

'Then it's James,' I said.

'Now is it Jim or is it James?' he said, and he pitched himself back onto the couch in a somehow unconvincing way. I had him down for a clerk and the other, Fielding, for a head clerk, in which case I would outrank them both if and when I became a solicitor. But they both talked to me in the way people do when they want to make themselves pleasant to the lower classes.

'I'm Jim to my friends,' I said, feeling like a prize dope.

'I'm Theodore, which is a bit of bad luck,' said Vaughan. 'You can call me Theo if you like, Jim.'

'Theo, meaning God,' said Fielding from his post near the window, 'and doron, meaning gift. You are a gift from God, Vaughan. What do you say, Miss Rickerby?'

And he tilted his head at the beautiful landlady who was watching us from the somewhat crooked doorway, leaning against the door frame with folded arms, which I did not believe I'd ever seen a respectable woman do before. She said nothing to Fielding but just eyed him, weighing him up.

A gift from God?' Mr Fielding said again. 'What do you say to that, Miss R?'

'His rent is,' she said, and smiled, but only at me, causing me to blurt out 'But…' without the slightest notion of what I was objecting to. I turned to the window, and found a way out of my difficulty in the scene on the beach.

'But… who's the one at the head?' I said, looking down at the men dragging the boat on the beach.

'That's the captain of it,' said Vaughan.

'The coxswain,' said Fielding.

'Cold tea tonight is it, Miss R?' enquired Vaughan, who was still lying down, but now propping his head on his right arm.

'In honour of the new arrival,' she replied, smiling at me, 'we are to have a hot tea.'

'Oh,' I said, 'what time?'

'About nine,' she said, smiling and backing away from the door.

'Of course Mr Stringer is not likely to be keen on that word,' said Fielding, who was still looking through the window, now with a rather dreamy expression.

'Supper?' I said. 'I should say I am keen on it.'

'"About",' said Fielding, still gazing down at the sea. 'You're a railwayman. No train leaves at about nine o'clock.'

'Well,' I said, 'you'd be surprised.'

'Perhaps,' he said, smiling and turning towards me, 'but I do have some experience of railways.'

Nice, I thought. I've an expert to contend with.

'Me too,' said the man on the couch.

But somehow I didn't believe Vaughan.

'It's not tolerated on the railway,' Fielding said, 'but in this house it is the lynchpin: "about"… "roughly"… "there or thereabouts". It's the Lady's way.'

I couldn't tell whether he was cross about it, or just making fun.

'What did you say was wrong with your engine, old man?' enquired Vaughan, who'd evidently had the tale from Miss Rickerby.

'Leaking injector steam valve,' I said.

'Doesn't sound too bad. Couldn't you sort of wind a rag around the blinking thing?'

'There were other things up with it as well,' I said.

'Like what, Jim?' said Vaughan, as Fielding looked on smiling.

I thought: Are these two in league?

'Oh,' I said, 'stiff fire hole door… some clanking in the motions.'

'You know, I think I've had that…' said Vaughan.

Fielding shook his head at me, as if to say: 'Whatever are we to do with him?'

'You worked on the railways, you say?' I asked Vaughan.

'After a fashion. Tell you about it over a pint, if you like?'

This was a bit sudden.

'Where?' I said, feeling rather knocked.

'I know a decent place in the Old Town.'

I was thinking: What is he? Alcoholic? Because we'd barely met.

'I generally take a pint before supper,' he said.

Howard Fielding had turned towards the window and gone dreamy again. There seemed no question of him coming along.

'Hold on then,' I said to Vaughan. 'I'll just get my coat.'

'Meet you in the hallway in two minutes,' he said, and it seemed he meant to remain in the room with Fielding until then.

Besides fetching my coat I would change my shirt and put on my tie in place of my necker. This way, I'd be able to hold my own at supper, which was to be supper after all, and not 'tea'.

As soon as I stepped from the sitting room, the door closed behind me.

Who had closed it?

Odds-on it had been Fielding, except that he had been over by the windows, and furthest off.

I climbed the narrow stairs between the faded green stripes. The stair gas made more noise than light – a constant, rasping exhaling. Bronchitic. It troubled me somehow, and here came the old man, glaring from under his curls. He ought to have been happy with hair like that. I reached the attic storey, pushed open the door of my room, and I was checked by a sharp bang.

By the low, red light of the oil lamp I saw what had happened: the card had once again fallen from the window frame, and a surge of sea wind had hurled itself at the glass. I sat down on the bed, inched along towards the end of it, and jammed in the card once more. Coming away from the window, I swung my legs in such a way that my boots clattered against the first of the two scuttles on the hearth – the one that held the kindling and paper – and knocked it over, spilling the papers.

There were many folded sheets from the Scarborough Post. 'Yesterday the sea was black with bathers,' I read, under the heading 'Shortage of Lifeguards Complained Of. The paper was dated Tuesday, 25 August. There were also handwritten papers headed 'Menu'. The first offered a choice of celery soup or shrimp paste and biscuits; then beef and macaroni stew could be had, or cottage pie. No date was given, but just the word 'Wednesday'.

I looked down again, and saw another piece of paper – this one printed – and it looked familiar. It was a fragment torn from a booklet I'd often seen but never owned: the rule book for North Eastern company engine men. I reached down slowly, and with shaking hand caught it up: 'On Arriving at the Shed', I read. And then, beneath this heading, 'On arriving at the shed, your engine requires to be thoroughly examined.'

Was it Blackburn's? Had this been his room? I thought of his black eyes reading it. Or had they had another engine man in since? If it was Blackburn's property, how did it come to be in the scuttle?

I began to put the papers back, including the torn page from the rule book, but I was checked by a further discovery: a thin item, small, brown and reduced almost to the condition of scrap paper, but still recognisably a cigar stub. According to Tommy Nugent, the limit of Blackburn's vices was the smoking of the odd cigar.

I sat still and heard only the eternal sighing of the gas from the landing beyond; I looked at the wallpaper: the ship in danger over and over again. I thought of Blackburn. Surely he was at the bottom of the sea.

I sat breathing deeply on the bed, telling myself that I could breathe whereas Blackburn could not. That was the main difference between the two of us. I thought of the Chief, who had sent me to this old, faded house and its queer inhabitants. Who, I wondered again, was the man the Chief had been talking to in the station when I'd come down from the tram?

I quickly changed my shirt and fixed the smarter of my two neckers in place without aid of a mirror. I stepped out of my room and was confronted by the cupboard door over-opposite. The man Vaughan would be waiting in the hallway but…

I pulled at the little door. At first, it wouldn't come. I tried again, and it flew open. The gas was saying 'Shuuuuush' as I looked down to see a crumpled paper sack: 'Soda 6d' read the label. There was a bottle of ammonia, a beetle trap. Propped against the wall a shrimp net with a long, uncommonly stout handle, two faded sunshades, two folded wooden chairs. I closed the door feeling daft for having opened it. What had I expected to find? The bleached bones of fireman Blackburn?

In the hallway, Miss Rickerby waited instead of Vaughan. She looked very grave, standing sideways before the front door, under the old glass of the fanlight, with arms folded. She turned and saw me, and slowly and surely she began to smile. She seemed to find great amusement and delight in the way we kept coinciding about the place, like two holiday makers repeatedly clashing in a maze. Vaughan now appeared from the side of the stairs, with coat over his arm, and hat in hand.

'Old Jim and I are just off for a quick pint, Miss R,' he said.

'We keep a barrel of beer in the scullery so that the gentlemen don't have to bother,' Miss Rickerby said, addressing me directly as before.

'But it's the Two X,' said Vaughan, putting on a brown bowler, 'and I generally go for the Four. Besides, I like a smoke with my glass of beer.'

'I don't mind smoking in the least,' said Miss Rickerby, again addressing me even though it was Vaughan who'd spoken. 'I like to watch it.'

It wasn't a coat that Vaughan was putting on, but an Inverness cape, and he'd acquired from somewhere a paper package.

'Shall I hold that for you?' said Miss Rickerby, indicating the package. 'That way you'll be able to use your arms.'

Vaughan clean ignored her, but just carried on wrestling with the cape.

'What about the lifeboat?' Miss Rickerby asked him.

'They've got it into the water,' he said, the cape now positioned about his shoulders.

'Well,' said Miss Rickerby, 'I suppose that's a start.'

She was responding to Vaughan, but she addressed the remark, and the accompanying smile, at me. With the cape on, Vaughan looked like a cross between Dr Watson and Sherlock Holmes. Theatrical, anyhow. He was trying his best to stuff the package into the pocket of the cape, but it wouldn't go. Meanwhile Miss Rickerby had taken a step towards me. I thought: There's nothing for it but to reach out and touch her. Begin with the hair. It was a little way in her eyes. Move it aside. That would be only polite…

'Goodbye, you two,' she said, reaching out and opening the door for us. 'Don't be late back.'

And in spite of that word 'two', she'd again looked only at me.

Chapter Eighteen

We turned right at the top of Bright's Cliff, and were soon walking along the narrow cobbled lanes of the Scarborough Old Town. The gas lamps showed lobster pots, upturned boats and other bits of fishing paraphernalia at every turn, as though the sea had lately washed over and left these items behind. The sea wind came and went according to which way we turned in the narrow streets. Vaughan walked leaning forwards with his hands in his pockets and the mysterious paper parcel under his arm. Directly on leaving Paradise, he'd blown his nose on a big blue handkerchief, and this had left a trail of snot hanging from his moustache.

'Are there any other guests in the house apart from you, me and Fielding?' I enquired.

'Just at present? No, Jim. There was a chap in a week ago. Ellis.'

'What was he like?'

'He sold galoshes, Jim, and I don't think there was a great deal more to him than that.'

'How old was he?'

'Old.'

'Did you take him out for a pint?'

Vaughan stopped and looked at me as though I was crackers.

'Well, you're taking me out.' 'Different matter entirely, Jim,' he said, walking on.

'Did he stay in my room, the top one?'

'No, Jim. He was on my floor.'

'But that's all being decorated?'

He explained, under questioning, that there were four guest rooms in total on that floor, including his own, which was not being decorated, and there were no plans in hand to do so. As of last week, Adam Rickerby had only got round to whitewashing two of the other three, so there'd been one spare for Ellis.

'Wouldn't you like your own room done?' I said.

'I like it just as it is, Jim.'

'It's a pretty good house, isn't it?' I said, cautious-like, because it only was pretty good at best. Then again, it might have been a palace to Vaughan.

'It's the best house in Scarborough at the price, Jim,' said Vaughan. 'They don't leave off fires until May; glorious views; and then you have Miss Rickerby into the bargain. What I wouldn't give for a rattle on the beach with her,' he added.

So that was that out of the way.

'How long have you been there?' I enquired, looking sidelong at him and rubbing my own 'tache, in the hope that he'd do the same, and discover the dangling snot.

'Oh, since last summer,' he said, not taking the hint but just striding on.

That would comfortably put him in the house at the time Blackburn disappeared, but I would reserve my questions on that front. Instead, I asked about the house, and he gave his answers without reserve, or so it seemed to me.

The Paradise lodging house was run by Miss Amanda Rickerby and her brother Adam, who was, according to

Vaughan, 'a bit touched'. Their father had bought the place two years since, dying immediately afterwards, his life's aim completed. He'd been a coal miner; he was a drinking man and pretty hard boiled, but evidently a man determined to take his children away from the life of a South Yorkshire pit village. He'd saved all his life, and Paradise was the result. It was now in the hands of his beautiful daughter and her odd brother. There was one other son and another daughter, but they'd 'cleared out entirely', not being able to stand the father.

Vaughan at that moment discovered and swiped away the snot in a way that suggested he was very used to finding the stuff just there, and equally used to dislodging it. Miss Rickerby herself, he went on, 'suffered from lazyitis' and was 'over-fond of port wine'.

'But the house is fairly well kept,' I said.

This, it appeared, was partly on account of the brother, who was a good worker in spite of being a half wit, and had no other interest in life besides cleaning and maintaining the house. He wasn't up to much as a cook and Vaughan believed that the hot supper we had in prospect would be nothing to write home about. But the lad had help every day in the season from a maid called Beth who was quite a peach in her own right apparently. And a Mrs Dawson came in year round. She was a great hand at all housework, and, being an older woman, was practically a mother to the two Rickerbys. In the off-sea- son, Vaughan said, she came in only on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

'So I'll see her tomorrow?' I enquired, and at this Vaughan stopped and looked up at some clouds riding fast and ghostly through the black sky.

'Yes, Jim, you will,' he said, walking on. 'Sorry about that, I was just thinking about something else that's happening tomorrow.'

'I wouldn't have thought you could buy a house like Paradise on a miner's wages,' I said, 'even if you did save all your life.'

'I don't know about that, Jim,' said Vaughan.

'Where was the pit village exactly?' I asked, as we came up to a pub called the Two Mariners.

'Search me,' he said. 'Somewhere near coal! And he fell to thinking hard, and frowning. '… Somewhere up Durham way, I believe it was, Jim.' He pushed open the pub door, saying, 'I like it here of a Sunday. It's quiet and you can talk.'

Talk about what? I wondered, as we stepped into a wooden room with pictures of sea-going men all around the walls, both painted and photographed, but not a single live person of any description to be seen. Somebody must have been in the room lately though, for a good fire was burning in the grate and two oil lamps were doing the same on the bar top. There was a door open behind the bar, which was quite promising, and Vaughan was evidently confident that someone would turn up and serve us a drink because he placed the paper package on a table near the fire, took off his cape, and pitched it over a chair, removing a pipe and a tin of tobacco from one of the pockets in the process. He left his muffler about his neck, and this in combination with the pipe made him look like a university man, which perhaps he had been.

He walked over to the bar, and shouted, 'Rose!'

A woman came through the door behind the bar: she was small, brown and stout.

'How do, Mr Vaughan?' she said.

'Two pints of the Four X please, Rose,' he said, and only as the pints were being pulled did he call over to me, 'Four X all right for you, Jim?'

He turned back to the barmaid. 'Bit quiet… even for a Sunday.'

'All gone to bed,' she said. 'Most of our lot will be at sea come sunrise.'

'We've yet to have our supper,' he said.

'Well, that's Miss Amanda Rickerby for you,' said the barmaid.

Theo Vaughan brought over the pints, and placed the package between us. He then lit his pipe, which went out directly, and placed his feet up on a stool, so that he was quite relaxed, only I had the idea that it cost him more effort to keep his feet up on the stool than otherwise.

'Cheers, Jim,' he said, and we clashed glasses.

He was very forward indeed. From the way he acted you'd have thought he knew me of old, but that was quite all right by me.

'I'm bursting to see inside that package,' I said, and he picked it up with his yellowy fingers and took out a quantity of picture post cards. The top one showed trains unloading at a dockside.

'Old Fielding and I are connected through the railways,' said Vaughan. 'We ran a little business: post card publishing. Well, he did. The Fielding Picture Post Card Company – had a little office in Leeds. Armoury Road, I don't know if you know it, Jim. I had high hopes that it might one day become "The Fielding and Vaughan Picture Post Card Company", but as long as it went on, I was Fielding's employee. Commercial agent, do you know what that means?'

'Not really.'

'It means nothing, Jim. But it was all right. I mean, he is all right, old Fielding. Bit stuck-up, bit of an old maid, and a bit weird in some of his tastes, but decent enough to work for and he struck lucky with the business for a while. We'd done a few runs of cards for some of the big hotels up and down the coast, and to make a long story short some of these caught the eye of a bloke called Robinson, who's the publicity manager of your lot: the North Eastern Railway. I expect you know him pretty well?'

'You're wrong there, Theo,' I said.

'I'm pulling your leg, Jim,' he said, sucking on his dead pipe. 'Robinson gave Fielding the contract -1 should say one of the contracts – for stocking the automatic picture post card machines you see on the station platforms.'

'Oh,' I said.

He looked again at his pipe.

'You know, I think I prefer cigars, Jim. At least a fellow can get them lit!

'You smoke cigars, do you?'

'On occasion, yes.'

'Anyhow, that was me for a year, Jim: third class rail pass in my pocket, and I'd go about re-filling these machines with the cards we'd commissioned.'

I knew the machines. They were in most of the bigger stations. You put in a penny, and pulled out a little drawer that contained a card with ha'penny postage already on it. Some showed North Eastern Railway scenes: interesting spots in the system. Others might show Yorkshire views in general. Vaughan pushed the top-most card across to me.

'Is that Hull?' I said.

'Might be,' he said. 'It was one of the winter series.'

For all his build-up, he didn't seem very interested in it. The card was from a painting, and there was writing across the top of it: The Industrial Supremacy of North East England. The Secret of Success: Cheap Power, Labour Facilities and Raw Materials. Then, in smaller type: For information as to sites and special advantages apply to the commercial agent, North Eastern Railway, York. It was hard to imagine anyone wanting to receive it through the post. I looked at Vaughan. He seemed to want me to say something about it.

'That artist is coming it a bit,' I said.

'How's that?' asked Vaughan.

'Looks like a Class S, does that engine. But you'd never see one of those on dock duties – not in a million years.'

'Why not, Jim?' asked Vaughan, but I could tell he wasn't really bothered either way.

'Too big,' I said. 'They're hundred mile an hour jobs. The company's not going to waste 'em on loading fish.'

Vaughan nodded as though he was satisfied with this. He slid over another card.

'Summer Series,' he said.

This too was from a painting. It showed a sea cliff in twilight. 'The Yorkshire Coast' read the heading. Then: 'Railway stations within easy reach. For particulars write to the Chief Passenger Agent, Department 'A, North Eastern Railway, York.' Vaughan was eyeing me again. I felt minded to ask what he was playing at, but couldn't quite see my way to doing it. Another card was put down: a photograph of a signal gantry on what looked like a foggy day.

'Where's that?' I said.

'Search me,' said Vaughan.

'That one's crossed,' I said, pointing to one of the signals, which had a wooden cross nailed over the arm.'… Means it's out of commission.'

'That right, Jim?' said Vaughan. 'Interesting is that.'

But he wasn't interested in the least.

Out came another card. A station master and a couple of porters stood on a little country platform somewhere.

'That fellow's managed to get his dog into the picture,' said Vaughan, pointing, and then another card came from the packet and was put down. This showed a flat-bed wagon carrying a great boiler or some such outsized article that overhung the wagon by about six feet. A handful of railway officials stood about grinning foolishly.

'Out-of-gauge load,' I said.

'However would they move a thing like that, Jim?' asked Vaughan, who kept looking over my shoulder, as though expecting someone to come up behind me. But the pub was still quite empty.

'They've to keep the next track clear,' I said.

Vaughan nodded.

'They'd run a breakdown wagon along behind it,' I said. 'A crane, I mean, to lift it clear of any obstacles that might come up trackside. Fancy another?' I said, indicating our empty glasses. Vaughan gave a quick nod; I walked up to the bar, shouted 'Rose!' and the trick worked for me too.

When I came back to the table and handed Vaughan his pint he took down his feet from the stool, and ran his hands through his long hair. He then blew his nose on the blue handkerchief, and I saw that there was another card in my place, and this was a comic one, like a picture out of the funny papers. It showed a baby in a cot, and the words above read: 'A Present from Scarborough'.

'One for the holiday makers,' said Vaughan, who was now fiddling with his pipe.

'Enough said,' I replied, giving a grin. But then a thought struck me: 'I don't suppose this one was sold on the stations.'

'Not likely,' said Vaughan. 'This isn't one of the Fielding lot. I'm a sort of free agent now when it comes to the cards.'

He'd got his pipe going properly at last. Rose had gone away from the bar again. Vaughan said, 'I bring a good many over from France, as a matter of fact, Jim.'

'Oh yes?' I said. 'Pictures of French trains, would that be?'

'Not quite, Jim,' and he put down another card, which showed a lady holding a bicycle.

She had no clothes on.

I looked up at Vaughan, who was frowning slightly and sucking on his pipe in a very thoughtful manner.