The Last Train to Scarborough

Chapter Nineteen

'Do you suppose she means to get on that bike?' I said, handing back the card.

Vaughan took his pipe out of his mouth and gave a grin.

'I think the saddle's set a little too high, Jim,' he said. 'But she looks a game sort, doesn't she? Matter of fact, I know she is.'

'You know her?' I said.

'Home grown, she is,' he said, and I didn't quite take his meaning.

He now returned the package to the cape pocket, and I was relieved at that. I wasn't well enough acquainted with Vaughan to talk sex with him.

He said, 'Drink up, Jim, or we'll be late for supper,' and we walked out of the pub, and reversed our steps, with no sound in the Scarborough Old Town but the breathing of the German Sea.

For a while, nothing was said between us. Vaughan seemed to have attained his object in showing me that particular card, and it had done its work – I'd been made to feel rather hot by it, which brought Amanda Rickerby more and more to mind. Not that I hadn't seen plenty of similar ones before. They would do the rounds of any engine shed, and there was an envelope in the police office that was full of them, and marked 'Improper'. Any stuff of that nature discovered on a train (down the back of a seat or folded into a newspaper on the luggage rack) and taken into the lost luggage office would not be collected or enquired after, and would come to us. But the rum thing was that when it was placed in the left luggage it wouldn't be called for either. So we had our ever-growing file in the police office containing pictures and little home-made- looking books, and one day the Chief said to me, bold as you like, 'Every man in this office looks at that file when left alone,' a remark that put me on the spot rather, and was no doubt meant to do so. I just coloured up and changed the subject, for I had leafed through it from time to time.

No one ever suggested throwing it out, anyhow.

As we walked along Newborough, I noticed a little alleyway going off to the left directly before Bright's Cliff, and this one ran steeply but smoothly down to the Prom, almost like a slipway for ships, rather than ending in a steep drop. A woman stood shivering halfway down it, and she eyed us directly and took a step towards us as we went past.

'You might form your own opinion as to how she gets her living, Jim,' said Vaughan.

'That would be the quickest way down to the beach, wouldn't it?' I said.

'Eh?' he said.

'Where she stood?'

'It would, Jim,' he said, 'but the beach is for summer.'

The woman had retreated into her doorway, and so my gaze shifted to the black, writhing sea beyond. The wind was getting up. As we gained the cobbles of Bright's Cliff, I said, 'What happened to Fielding's post card company?'

'Lost the North Eastern contract,' said Vaughan.'… Back end of 1912, hardly a year after we started. Went bust as a consequence.'

'Why?'

'The cards weren't liked. I mean, cross-eyed station masters on lonely platforms, busted signals, details of dock working, "Sunderland Station Illuminated and Photographed by Kitson Light". Fielding found all that interesting but you see he's an intellect, is old Howard… or so he tells me. He lacks the common touch.'

'Is he in with you as regards the…?'

'The continental specialities? He is not. Well, he wouldn't be, now would he?'

'You keep it a secret from him, do you?'

Vaughan stopped walking, as if to make a declaration.

'I see nothing shameful in it, Jim,' he said, 'and so it's not kept secret – not from men, anyhow.'

'Does Fielding approve?'

'Not exactly, Jim,' said Vaughan. 'Not exactly.'

'How does he get his living?' I enquired.

'He has private means, Jim. We're both lucky in that way. His old man did well for himself in the law, you know.'

'Barrister?'

'Solicitor,' he said, and he was eyeing me. The word made me turn white as paper at the thought of all that lay ahead.

'Is his old man still alive?'

'Hardly, Jim. Howard's pushing sixty, you know. My old man is living.'

'Where?'

'Streatham,' he said, taking his key from his pocket as we approached the door of Paradise. 'A very dismal place in London that suits his character to perfection, Jim. But I shouldn't complain really. The old boy puts five pounds in the post every month, which is not riches but better than a poke in the eye with a blunt stick.'

'Miss Rickerby doesn't usually run to a hot tea on Sundays, does she?' I enquired, as Vaughan pushed at the door.

'She does not. Of course, you know why she's laying it on tonight?'

'I've no notion,' I said.

'I'd say it was all on your account, Jim,' he said, and we stepped into the hot hallway and a smell of cooking.

Vaughan darted straight upstairs. I removed my hat and great-coat, then turned and tidied my hair in the hall mirror. I tried to tell myself this was normal behaviour before supper taken in company, but in fact I was only doing it for Miss Rickerby's sake. It must be true, if Vaughan had noticed it, that the lady had taken a shine to me, but that didn't mean she wasn't out to kill me.

This time I did hang my coat in the hall, first checking that my warrant card was stowed safely in my suit-coat. I followed the food smell along the hallway, coming first to what I imagined to be the dining room. It was on the front side of the house: a faded room with a table that could have sat six but had cutlery laid for five, which must mean that Amanda Rickerby and her brother would eat with we three paying guests. The white cloth was a little askew and nearly, but not quite, completely clean. Also, the wallpaper – decorated with a design of roses the colour of dried blood – had come away a little around the two gas lamps that roared softly on the end walls, and there was a black soot smudge above the fireplace, like a permanent shadow.

Two paintings hung from the picture rail that ran round the room. The first was above the fireplace smudge, and rocked a little in the updraught of a moderate, spluttering blaze. It was a painting of a sailing ship, with a rather dusty name plate at the bottom: 'Her Majesty's Wood Framed Iron Frigate "Inconstant", 16 Tons.' Was it any good? It wasn't signed – not that I could see. Perhaps it was signed on the back. As I looked at it, the fire fluttered and the flute note came. Again, the fireplace was small and imperfectly swept. Crouching down, I saw that a fancy pattern was set into the black iron over-mantel, like the badge of a king. It was a museum piece really.

The second painting was on the wall over-opposite, and showed a high, thin, brightly lit house with smaller ones massed below as though combined in a great effort to raise it up. Scarborough from the sea. The harbour stood in the foreground and that gave the clue: it was Paradise of course, and I made out my own room – the top one, and the brightest of the lot.

The kitchen was next to the dining room, and the food cooked in it would have to be carried the half a dozen yards between the two doors. The kitchen door stood open. The gas gave a yellow light, and the walls were of white brick. The place was stifling. There was a great table, bigger than the one in the dining room, and Amanda Rickerby stood at one end of it, her brother at the other. She was singing lightly. I caught the words, 'Why are you lonely, why do you roam?' and I knew the song but couldn't lay name to it. She broke off (not on my account, for she still hadn't seen me) and, pointing at a pot bubbling on the range, said, 'Egg yolk.'

Her brother went to the larder to fetch an egg, and Miss Rickerby carried on singing – 'Have you no sweetheart, have you no home…' – and she could sing so very well that I was almost sorry when she saw me and stopped, and smiled, at the same time pushing something behind the knife polisher, which was one of a great mix-up of things on the big table. She knew I'd seen her do it, but this only made her smile the wider, as though it was all part of the game that seemed to be going on between us.

'We're trying a little bit of French cooking, Mr Stringer,' she said, indicating her slow-witted brother at the range.

'Oh,' I said, 'what?'

'Scotch broth,' she said.

I heard a sniff from behind me, and Theo Vaughan was there.

'There's nothing particularly French about Scotch broth,' he said, nodding at me. There was no sign of shame at his late behaviour in the Two Mariners. He had a glass in his hand, and was making for one of the objects on the table – the beer barrel laid in for the guests. The kitchen seemed to be open house for everyone, and Vaughan was now filling his glass from the barrel tap.

'The Scotch broth is just the starter,' Miss Rickerby said, then: 'I thought you didn't care for this beer, Mr Vaughan.'

'Oh, a pint of the Two is fine after a couple of the Four,' he said. 'Ask any beer man.'

'I suppose that, being that bit more drunk, you just stop caring,' said Amanda Rickerby, grinning at me.

The fact was that our trip to the pub had been nothing to do with the beer. Vaughan had wanted to take me out to show me the cards But why?

The range was set before a recess that might once have been the fireplace. It was too big to fit in, and perhaps accounted for the heat of the house. All the other fireplaces were small, after all. Adam Rickerby stood at the range next to a stew pot. He was holding a knife over an egg, and eyeing his sister with a look of panic.

'Gently now,' she said, with half a glance in his direction.

The knife clattered down on the egg, and all its innards dropped into the broth.

' That weren't right,' he said, as though it had all been his sister's fault, at which Amanda Rickerby for once turned away from me, and gave her full attention to her brother.

'It won't hurt to have the whole egg in, Adam,' she said. 'It won't hurt at all.'

'I've to put salt? Pepper?'

'That's right. But go easy, love.'

Vaughan was eyeing the lad with a look of dislike.

'I'm off through,' he said, and he went into the dining room, or so I supposed.

'It's the second course that's the French dish,' said Amanda Rickerby, turning back towards me. 'I can't pronounce it. Mr Fielding found the recipe in one of his books some weeks ago, and we thought we'd try it tonight.'

She slid a bit of paper across the table to me. At the top somebody had written 'Croquette de Boeuf'.

'That's French all right,' I said.

'Can you go through Sunday without a treat of some kind, Mr Stringer?' she enquired. 'Don't tell me: you go to a Morning Service every Sabbath without fail?'

'That's not what I call a treat,' I said.

'Nor me,' she said, and took from behind the knife polisher the object she had hidden: a glass of red wine, and she boldly took a sip, as if to say, 'There's nothing to be ashamed of in a glass of wine.'

Her brother was removing a tin tray from the oven, making the room even hotter. The stuff inside it was red and lumpy – smelled all right though.

'Is it done, our lass?' he said, holding it in the hot cloth and offering it towards his sister.

'It's beautiful, Adam,' she said. 'Mr Stringer,' she ran on, turning back to me, 'supper is about to be served.'

'I'll go into the dining room then,' I said.

'Good thinking,' she said. 'And do take a glass of beer with you.'

She indicated a line of glasses on a shelf near the door. I took one and helped myself from the barrel.

'Shall I take one for Mr Fielding?' I enquired.

'No,' said the brother, looking up at me sharply as he put the meat into a serving dish, and then he added, in a somewhat calmer tone, "E 'as wine.'

I thought how the house was that fellow's life. He was master of all its little details.

Returning to the door of the dining room I clashed with Howard Fielding, who held a wine glass and a bottle of white wine, half full with a cork in it.

'Good evening again, Mr Stringer,' he said, and he made his way towards the head of the table with his twinkling sort of walk. He indicated that I should take the place to his right side. Vaughan was already sitting to his left, looking sadly at his beer glass, already empty in front of him. Miss Amanda Rickerby then entered holding her wine glass and a black album, saying, 'We're all here then – no need to ring the bell,' and sat down at the end of the table opposite to Mr Fielding. Finally, Adam Rickerby came in with a big tray, and began distributing the soup bowls. As he did so, Miss Rickerby eyed me in the most thrilling way. I must be just her sort, I decided.

'Cedar-wood box after supper, Howard?' Vaughan asked Fielding, without looking up from his empty glass.

'Perhaps Mr Stringer would care to join us at the box?' said Fielding, pouring himself a glass of wine, and he turning and looking his mysterious question at me, with head tilted, so I said, 'I'm sure I would, thanks,' and took a drink of my beer.

Everybody had the soup now, and I was just about to fall to, when I saw Fielding close his eyes and sit forwards. I thought for a fraction of time that he'd actually pegged out there and then, but he was saying grace, and the final word of it was hardly out of his mouth when I heard a terrible racket such as is made in a bath when the last of the water goes down the plug. This was Theo Vaughan taking his first mouthful of soup.

'What's in the cedar-wood box?' I enquired, after Theo Vaughan's second mouthful, which was quite as loud as the first had been.

'Cigars,' said Vaughan, and I felt an ass, for what else could have been in it?

I flashed a look at Amanda Rickerby. She was still eyeing me, an amused expression on her face. She was turning the pages of the black album while sipping her soup. Every so often she would exchange a muttered word with her brother, but she hardly left off staring at me throughout the meal, and I felt that she was a temptress in league with the naked bicyclist.

'Mainly Shorts, I'm afraid, Mr Stringer,' said Fielding. 'We've smoked the last of the Coronas from Christmas.'

'Well, even a short cigar is longer than a cigarette,' I said.

'Diplomatically spoken,' said Fielding, which made me feel rather a fool.

Fielding and Vaughan both being cigar smokers, the stub in the top room might have belonged to either of them just as easily as to Blackburn. It was plain that Fielding thought himself superior to Vaughan, but the two seemed to jog along together pretty well in spite of the failure of the business they'd worked in, and in spite of Vaughan's dealing in improper post cards. Fielding's private means must be greater than Vaughan's, for his clothes were not only cleaner but of better quality. His linen cuffs were a bit out at the edge, but it was only decent cloth that would fray like that, and the cuff links looked to me to be made of good gold.

I glanced over at Amanda Rickerby. She met my gaze, I looked away quickly; looked back again more slowly to see her smiling.

'This is the guest book for last year, Mr Stringer,' she said, indicating the black album before her.

Was the name of Blackburn in there, and was she teasing me by keeping it from me?

'I put ticks next to the ones I want back, crosses against the ones I don't,' she said.

And she suddenly turned to Fielding.

'Do you remember Mr Armstrong, Mr Fielding?'

Fielding smiled and nodded.

'He was a very strange… well, I was about to say gentleman,' Amanda Rickerby continued. 'He collected seaweed, Mr Stringer. It was his hobby. It was left all over the room to dry. He needed pails of fresh water to clean it – and then he had the nerve to complain about Mrs Dawson's cooking. But Mr Fielding took him in hand.'

Fielding nodded graciously again, saying, 'I merely pointed out that sole a la Normande was supposed to contain fish. He collected seaweed but did not eat fish – slightly paradoxical, I thought.'

'Howard didn't care for him at all,' Vaughan put in, addressing me. 'He drank beer from the neck of the bottle.'

'He was rather a vulgar young fellow,' Fielding explained. 'He was from Macclesfield. The North Bay of this town would have been more to his liking… You'd have thought that a man interested in marine biology would have had more decorum.'

7 wouldn't,' said Amanda Rickerby. 'I'm putting a cross by his name.'

And she did so, before turning the page.

'Mr and Mrs Bailey,' she said, looking towards Fielding again,'… from Hertfordshire.'

'Rather a pleasant couple, I seem to remember,' said Fielding.

Miss Rickerby made no answer to that but looked down at the book and came over very sad, it seemed to me. I wanted to help her, bring her back to smiling, but after a couple of minutes I was aware of Adam Rickerby standing over me and saying, 'Yer've done, 'ave yer?'

I hadn't quite but I gave him my bowl and he took it away along with all the others. Only after he'd left the room did I think: Ought I to have eaten that? Perhaps Blackburn had been poisoned? The soup had seemed quite tasty anyhow, if nothing to write home about. The meat, when it came in, was the cause for a little more in the way of excitement.

'Croquette de boeuf cooked to a turn, Miss R,' said Fielding, when he'd taken his first mouthful, and she seemed to come round from a stupor or a dream.

'I only superintended,' she said. 'It was Adam who cooked it really.'

But there seemed no question of complimenting Adam Rickerby.

'Beef patty, I call it,' said Vaughan, who'd already eaten half of his.

'Oh come now, Vaughan,' said Fielding. 'What about the delicious dressing?'

'Beef patty,' repeated Vaughan, 'with tomato sauce. Perfectly good though,' he added.

'Certainly is,' I said, trying to direct my remark to both Amanda Rickerby and her brother.'… Goes down very nicely.'

But there was something in it I didn't care for, some spice, and the taste of it somehow made me think the dining room fire too hot. Had I been poisoned? No. It took hours to notice if you had been, and what could possibly be the reason? About half a minute after, Vaughan pushed his empty plate away and fell to sucking bits of the meat out of his moustache while eyeing me. The meal ended for all shortly after, when Adam Rickerby stood up and reclaimed all the plates. There would be no dessert, evidently. Pudding was for summer only, together with all other good things.

'Will you be joining us for a smoke, Adam?' I enquired, as he approached the door with the pile of plates.

Fact was, I felt a bit sorry for the bloke. His sister was kindly towards him in her speech and expressions, but never lifted a finger to help him in his duties.

'I've t'plates to clear,' he said, the words coming with a fine spray of spittle.

'After that, then?'

'Then, I've t'plates to wash!

I gave it up, and he left the room. Fielding was good enough to wait until he was through the door before leaning towards me and saying, 'The boy is weak in the head, Mr Stringer. An injury to the brain sustained when he was fourteen.'

'He does very well considering,' I said. 'I knew there must have been something of the kind. What happened?'

Silence for an interval; and they all gave me the tale together, as though they'd rehearsed the telling of it.

'My brother was straight down the mine from school,' began Miss Rickerby.

'One of those timbers in a mine…' said Vaughan, 'that holds up the whatsname.'

'A pit prop,' Fielding put in, 'that holds up the shaft.'

'One of 'em broke,' continued Vaughan, 'and a quantity of coal came down on him.'

'Two and a half tons, Mr Stringer,' said Fielding.

'It rather put him off coal mining,' said Vaughan, who was now staring at the ceiling and stroking his moustache. 'Well… as you can imagine.'

'So you see,' Amanda Rickerby said to me, 'this house really is Paradise to my brother.'

Chapter Twenty

At length, the way became clear for my return to the chart room. The youth led me up in silence; he would not meet my eye. The Captain and Mate waited with chairs pushed back from the table, as though they'd just put away a good supper. The Mate indicated one of the chairs, and the two made no objection when I moved it closer to the stove. This burned too low as before. I asked them to put more coal on from the scuttle that stood alongside, and the Mate did this readily enough as the Captain eyed me. It wasn't as though they lacked fuel on that bloody ship. The pocket revolver was on the table at the Captain's place as before, together with coffee, bread, cold meat of some description and a round cheese. It was all I could do to look at the stuff, let alone eat it.

'Well?' asked the Captain when I'd settled down.

'I'm not at all well,' I said. 'I've a terrible headache.'

'Not what I meant,' said the Captain.

'You were not asking after my health?' I said.

'He means carry on with the talking,' said the Mate.

I eyed him. It did not seem likely to me that the common run of collier – of the sort that carried coal from the North of England to the great gas works of London – would have a foreigner as First Mate. But these two were confederates of long standing – had to be, since they were together weighing the idea of doing murder.

Most likely it was an ordinary collier, and an English one at that. Sometimes, they had funnels that were hinged, like ships in bottles, so that they could go all the way upriver – up the Thames – but the usual trip was to the mighty gas works at Beckton, which came just before the start of the London docks. The colliers were in competition with the coal trains. The North Eastern company carried coal to London over its own metals and those of the Great Northern, but most of the stuff made the long journey by sea. Had I been put on with coal? None was loaded at Scarborough, I knew that for a fact. But this ship would have passed Scarborough on its way south.

The chart room swayed like a tree house in a high wind, and for a moment I was in that tree house, for my mind still wasn't right. I looked down at my hands: the redness was fading somewhat from them, and my memory returning by degrees. 1 started talking. I did not let the Captain and the Mate see my mind entire as I spoke, and tried to make myself seem cooler towards Amanda Rickerby than I had been in reality. I talked to them about her much as I might have talked to the wife about her. I was rehearsing, so to say, the way I might tell the tale of Paradise to Lydia. It was only when, after an hour or so, the Captain once again consulted his watch and nodded towards the Mate – who rose to take me from the chart room – that I wondered whether I would ever have the chance to put the story right, and to make amends.

But make amends for what, exactly?

The Mate was descending the outer bridge-house ladder behind me, and the over-grown kid I'd seen before waited on the deck below. They had entrusted him with a gun, and he continued to look at me as though I was a dead man. It broke in on me that I was a prisoner under escort. It was as though I was the criminal; as though the Captain and the Mate were sitting in judgement on me, the hearings of the trial being conducted in instalments fitted around the performance of their duties in the ship. I supposed they could only hide themselves from the crew for short intervals.

But how long was the run to London from the northern places where the coal was dug? It was roughly four hundred miles' distance, and a ship making about six knots would do the journey in three days and nights at the maximum. By that reckoning there would be only the one more hearing to come.

I descended to the gunwale on the starboard side, facing the land, which ran along with us, rising and falling. The night sky was darker that way; the light rose from behind me. The land, then, lay to the west. I thought I made out bays, hills, perhaps a thin wood on a low stretch of cliff. And now there was a new sound rising on the air, a beating, on-rushing sound, the source of which disturbed the waves of our wake. At the foot of the ladder, a conference was taking place between the Mate and the lad.

I looked back towards the land, and now saw a beautiful, flowing ribbon of lights being drawn over the cliff top. I do not believe that I had ever been happier to see a train, even though I had no hope of catching this one. I then turned my head to the right and saw the source of the new noise: another ship, blazing light on our starboard side, the landward side. It was bigger than us and gaining on us at a great rate. I knew that I had seen this all before, and of course I was now inhabiting the scene shown on the painting in the ship room at Paradise. The very sky was the same colour: a dark blue with a rising pearly light on the horizon.

The Mate had gone aft; the over-grown kid remained. The mass of the mid-ships blocked my view in that direction, but I hoped that a row was brewing, that the crew had mustered on the after deck, pressing to know why they must keep to one half of the ship, and threatening mutiny.

The kid had evidently had his orders, for he motioned me to come down the ladder, and to move for'ard with him. I did so, with the gun on me. It was a revolver that he held, a biggish one. I could see by the mid-ships lamps that it was clarted in grease, which might mean it had only lately been taken out of storage, which might in turn mean it would be stiff to operate. But if that trigger, with the kid's finger presently upon it, travelled one quarter of an inch I was a goner.

'I hope you know what you're about, son,' I said, as we walked halfway for'ard. 'This is a serious doing: kidnap of a police officer, assault. Twenty-five-year touch if you're run in.'

The boy kept silence.

'And what about that gun?' I said. 'Are you sure you're up to firing it?'

He re-pointed the thing at me, but he was watching the oncoming ship. We both were. It wasn't a collier – too clean, sat too high in the water. It was a superior ship altogether to our own, with two funnels amidships and a high foc's'le, proudly carried. It lagged back not more than a couple of hundred yards now – not close enough to hail, but close enough perhaps to strike out and swim to.

'That gun,' I said. 'Fire it, and the fucking flash'll blind you.'

'Eh?' he said.

'Are you sure you can work it? I mean, is it double or single action?'

'You'll find out soon if you don't shut up,' he said.

The other ship was starting to make us roll in a different way. I might swim into its path and wait in the water, but would the cold kill me? Would I be spotted, and if so would I be rescued? The ship gave a long, low horn-blow, like the mooing of a giant cow, and the sound threatened to deafen me and I think the kid also, for the look in his eyes was one of shock and fear. He looked down at the gun, then up at me, and something had made him talkative.

'Don't come it about being a copper,' he said. 'You're a bloody stowaway.'

'You're talking through your fucking braces,' I said.

The kid was again eyeing the other ship.

'Stowaway…' I said. 'That's what you've been told, is it?'

'And you can't kidnap a dirty stowaway,' said the kid, turning back towards me. 'You're no copper,' he said again. 'You'll be given to the coppers at the turnaround.'

'Turnaround?' I said. 'Where?'

We were close to the gunwale, practically leaning on it. I put my left hand on the cold iron, and the kid made no move to stop me. A deck ring bolt was between us, and a pile of rope. The rope might prevent him from making a grab at me, should I attempt the leap. I edged still closer to the gunwale. The sea was – what? – twenty feet below and quite black. It looked like oil; smelt like oil for the matter of that. But then again it seemed to roll almost playfully, with only the occasional wave uncurling itself to make a leap and hitting high against the hull with a slap that set the iron ringing. Now the oncoming ship was blowing its horn again, as if in encouragement, just as if to say: 'What are you waiting for, man? Make the leap!'

Chapter Twenty-One

I stayed behind alone in the dining room after the meal. I was studying the painting opposite to the fireplace because something about it troubled me.

I hung back there about five minutes, and when I came out, I saw Adam Rickerby moving rapidly towards the foot of the stairs with a giant tin of paint or white-wash in each hand. The wife had laid in a couple of similar-sized cans at our new place, all ready for me to start decorating, and it was all I could do to lift one of them. Adam Rickerby carried two with ease and was now fairly bounding up the stairs with them. Well, he had evidently washed the pots in double-quick time.

I followed him up to the first landing, where the door of the ship room was closed. Were Fielding and Vaughan already in there? But Rickerby was climbing at the top of his speed to the next landing, and again I followed him up. Coming to the floor that was being decorated I could not see him: the corridor stretched away darkly. But there came a noise from the second door down on the left. That door stood ajar, and I walked in directly to see Rickerby standing by an open window with a shrimp net – very likely the one I'd seen in the cupboard upstairs – in his hand. The low gas showed bare, flaking walls, white-wash brushes and rolls of wallpaper on every hand – and it was the green stripe again. Why did the landlady persist with that? Her colour was grey-violet, the colour of her coat and hat. The sea wind surged fiercely against the frame of the open window like a roll of drums, and I saw that behind Adam Rickerby a hole had been knocked in the wall, showing another, darker room beyond.

'Can I help you?' he said.

Of all the questions I might have asked, the one that came out was: 'Why is the window open?'

'Carry off the smoke,' said Rickerby.

'There is no smoke,' I shot back.

'It's been carried off.'

With his wild hair, the smock-like apron and the long-handled shrimp net he held, the lad was halfway to being bloody King Neptune.

'Smoke from what?' I said.

The room had one of the small iron fireplaces but it was not lit. Rickerby's gaze drifted down to an object on the floorboards by his boots, half hidden in scraps of torn wallpaper: a paraffin torch of the sort used for burning off paint. It might have smoked at one time; there might have been something in his tale.

'Why are you holding that shrimp net?'

'I mean to use t'pole.'

'For what?'

'Reaching up.'

'To what?'

'Ceiling.'

'Why do you want to reach up to the ceiling with the pole?'

'I don't.'

And I nearly crowned him just then, which might not have been so clever, given the size of him.

'I mean to reach up wi' t'brush,' he said.

'So you'll tie the brush – the white-wash or distemper brush – onto the pole, is that it?'

He kept silence, watching me. Presently he said, 'Aye,' and I wondered whether there might not have been a note of sarcasm there, and – once again – whether he was brighter than I took him for.

'What's the work going on here?'

'… Making an apartment.'

'Why?'

He looked sidelong, looked back.

'Bring in a different sort.'

'A different sort of guest? What sort?'

'The sort that likes apartments.'

Holiday apartments were more expensive than holiday rooms, and I supposed that the difference would repay knocking down walls to create them.

I believed that I had got as much as I would get from Adam Rickerby.

'I'm off downstairs just now,' I said. 'I'm off to smoke a cigar.'

Under the steady gaze of the over-grown schoolboy, and with mind racing, I turned and quit the apartment-to-be.

Approaching the ship room, I fancied for the second time that I heard muttering from behind the door, which stopped directly upon my opening the door and entering. I saw the black sea tracking endlessly past the tall, delicate windows. If Fielding and Vaughan had been speaking, they'd been doing so without looking at each other. Vaughan lay flat on the couch and again smoked towards the ceiling. Fielding sat in his armchair facing the tall windows. In that warped, wide room the fire was too small, the fireplace smaller still, and yet the room was too hot.

The gas was noisy here, as in the rest of the house. It sounded like somebody's last breath, going on for ever. Was it the gas that made the room hot or thoughts of the landlady that made me hot in it? Something had changed about the few sticks of furniture in the room. None of these quite belonged. It was as if they'd been meant for a different room, and I fancied that if somebody struck up on the piano, it might crash through the ancient floorboards. I noticed for the first time an alcove set into the wall beside the piano, with two bookshelves fitted into it. Each held half a dozen books, all – at first glance – about ships or the sea, or paintings of same, and I took them all to be Fielding's.

Set between his armchair, and Vaughan's couch, was the second armchair. The small bamboo table had been pushed towards it, and a cigar, already cut, rested on a little saucer that made shift as an ash tray. Beside it was a box of long matches: wind vestas. As I sat down at my chair and took up the cigar, Vaughan rolled a little my way, blowing smoke. His reddish, down-pointed moustache looked odder still when set on its side. Fielding also altered position somewhat, so that his gaze was now midway between me and the sea.

'I'm obliged to you,' I said to Fielding after lighting the cigar and shaking out the match. I was glad to have got my smoke going first time, for there'd only been one match left in the box – which seemed to sum up the whole house. Fielding nodded courteously in my direction, and crossed his legs, which he did tightly, in a fashion rather womanly. Vaughan watched me for a while, then rolled back to his former position.

'It makes a cracking cigar divan does this,' he said.

'And it will be fit for nothing else once you've smothered it in ash,' said Fielding. 'The Lady will not like it.'

No, I thought, but she won't be the one who cleans it.

'You have lots of books on ships,' I said to Fielding.

'About ships, I think you mean,' he replied. 'I assure you that none of them are on ships. I have many about railways as well, and quite a fair number of novels.'

'He's got enough books to start a bookshop,' said Vaughan, 'and that's just what he means to do.'

An interval of silence, and then Fielding leant a little my way, like a man about to pass on a confidence. 'There's a good lock-up shop on Newborough, Mr Stringer,' he said. 'If it falls into my hands, it will be re-fitted throughout and will indeed become a bookshop as Vaughan says…'

'Second-hand books,' said Vaughan, nodding at the ceiling, as though he thoroughly approved of the idea.

'Antiquarian,' corrected Fielding.

He seemed to have the ability to start and finish businesses just like that; seemed to have the capital to do it as well – and to buy new books.

'Theo… Mr Vaughan here… was showing me some of your cards for the platform machines,' I said. 'Just my sort of thing, they were.'

'But you take a close interest in the railways, Mr Stringer,' said Fielding, cocking his head and smiling at me. 'The average passenger does not, or so Mr Robinson of the North Eastern company assured me.'

'Robinson's a pill,' said Vaughan.

'He told me', Fielding ran on, still smiling, 'that as a supplier of images I lacked the common touch.'

'Bloody nerve,' said Vaughan, who'd already mentioned to me this famous saying of Robinson's.

'Told me to my face,' continued Fielding, 'and do you know… he was putting on a silk top hat at the time.'

It was impossible to tell from his expression how angry he was, if at all.

'You must be pretty mad at the Company,' I said.

'I should just think he is,' Vaughan said.

He would keep putting his two bob's worth in. Again, it was hard to work out if Fielding minded very much.

'Pretty mad?' Fielding repeated coolly. 'From their point of view they acted logically. I admit that I rode my own hobby horses a little too hard.'

'The straw that broke the camel's back', Vaughan put in, 'was Sunderland station.'

'I produced a card showing Sunderland station at night,' said Fielding, blowing smoke in the direction of the sea,'… illuminated by the new system of oil lighting supplied by the Kitson Company. On the rear of the card was given the number of lamps, also the cost of oil and mantles, installation and maintenance. It came out at three farthings per lamp per hour.'

'Cheap,' I said.

'Decidedly,' said Vaughan, who was trying to blow smoke rings.

'But Robinson didn't care for it,' Fielding continued. 'He told me, "It's meant to be a post card not a company report," and suggested instead a card showing holiday makers at Sunderland. I then made the mistake – as I now see in retrospect – of venturing to suggest that only a certified lunatic would take a holiday in Sunderland, which does not have any beach to speak of.'

'Factories,' said Vaughan, 'that's what Sunderland has.'

'Where were the pair of you living when you had the card business?' I enquired.

'Leeds,' said Fielding. 'I was rather shaken after the collapse of the business. I moved here last summer – a sort of convalescence, I suppose.'

'Then he wrote to me saying I might like it,' Vaughan added.

'Where were you in Leeds? If you don't mind my asking?'

'Central,' said Fielding, uncrossing his legs, and I wondered: Is he being short with me?

'Both in the same digs?'

'Howard was at the better part of town,' said Vaughan, blowing smoke.

. Blackburn had lived at Roundhay; I wanted to work it in.

'I know a spot called Roundhay,' I said. 'You weren't there by any chance?'

'We were not,' said Fielding, and he cocked his head at me, as if to say: 'Now why ever did you ask that?'

Vaughan was eyeing me too.

'You two must like having this place to yourself in the winter,' I said presently.

No reply from either of them.

'Do you ever come here in summer, Jim?' Vaughan suddenly enquired. 'I mean, do you fire the excursions?'

'I'm usually rostered another way,' I said. 'Half the time I'm running into…' And I revolved the towns of Yorkshire for a while:'…Hull.'

'Ah, now Hull is the plum,' said Fielding, rising from his chair and carrying his cigar stub towards the fire, where he dropped it carefully into the flames; he then brushed the ash from his fingers and briefly inspected his fingernails. 'One of our cards showed the electric coaling belts on the Riverside Quay,' he added, returning to his seat.

'Shown on a day of heavy rain, they were,' said Vaughan.

'Good job old Robinson never saw that one or he'd have put the mockers on sooner than he did.'

He was examining his own cigar, which, like mine, had a little way to run. 'Sound smoke, wouldn't you say, Howard?'

'A little dry,' said Fielding, speaking as though his mind was elsewhere.

'I wonder why that is?'

'We should keep a little pot of water in the cedar-wood box.'

I was about to try and get the conversation back to the winter visitors, as a way of returning to the subject of Ray Blackburn, when Fielding unexpectedly saved me the bother.

'Yes,' he said with a sigh, 'it was my suggestion that the Lady advertise for railway men. Well, she was in rather low water then as now. But then, you see, the first one we had in went missing.'

'I know,' I said, somewhat alarmed in case I had revealed my true identity, and perhaps too fast, for Vaughan propped himself up on his couch while Fielding rose once more from his seat, and stood before me with arms folded and one little foot tapping away.

'Of course,' I said, 'Ray Blackburn was Leeds and I'm York, so I didn't know the fellow personally. But I know what happened.'

'You know!' exclaimed Fielding with half a smile.

'Disappeared in the night,' said Vaughan. 'Spirited away in the dead of bloody night, Jim.'

'To obtrude a fact or two, Mr Stringer,' said Fielding, 'Mr Blackburn went to bed at about eleven-thirty, and was nowhere to be seen when the boy went up to him with a cup of tea at seven the next morning.'

I didn't much care for that, since the boy had promised to bring me tea at seven as well. I was certain that I'd been installed in the room Blackburn had occupied, and it was beginning to seem as though I'd stepped into his very boots.

'Were you both in the house when it happened?' I enquired.

'Oh dear,' said Fielding, 'you sound like the gentlemen in blue.'

He was down on the coppers then, and that was unusual for a respectable sort like him.

'Same people in the house then as now,' said Vaughan, 'which is why we've all been on the spot these past weeks. How many police teams would you say we'd had, Howard? Past counting isn't it?'

'Not quite,' said Fielding. 'We've had three visits from the Scarborough men, two from the Leeds. A little potation?' he enquired of me, nodding towards the sideboard.

'But we're right out!' exclaimed Vaughan.

'I took the liberty of replenishing the supply,'

'Spanish sherry?' said Vaughan, rising to his feet.

'It's in the usual place,' said Fielding, and he nodded significantly at Vaughan.

Well, that place was evidently outside the room, for Vaughan went quickly out of the door and returned after a few moments – in which Fielding kept silence while smiling at me – carrying a tray on which stood a bottle and some small glasses. He set this down on the top of the piano and began to pour, slopping the stuff about rather as he did so, perhaps because the piano top was too high for the operation.

'Really, Vaughan,' said Fielding, looking on, 'it will not do; it will not do at all… I'm sorry it's not decanted,' he said, turning my way.

'Don't worry on my account,' I said, chalking up another idiotic remark. Was Fielding taking the rise out of me?

'Did nobody hear anything?' I said, extinguishing my cigar on the saucer.

'We didn't,' said Vaughan, passing out the drinks. 'We'd been at this stuff all night, one way or another. Absolutely mashed we were, come midnight.'

'I don't care for this "we", Vaughan,' said Fielding.

'Begin at the beginning,' said Vaughan, regaining his couch. 'Blackburn turned up at about the same time you did, Jim. Supper was served directly, and it was a hot supper, then as today. One of Howard's recipes. The Lady happened to have some peculiar sort of chops and some old cheese lying about…'

'Veal Parmesan,' Fielding cut in.

'Well, it was the Lady's first railway man,' said Vaughan, 'so I suppose she wanted to pull out all the stops.'

'Who cooked the meal?' I asked.

'The boy of course, Jim,' said Vaughan, draining his glass. 'When supper was over, I asked the fellow if he'd care for a pint, and so we walked over to the Two Mariners, just as you and I did, Jim. Well, it was a bit of a washout in the pub. The fellow hardly said a word, and I came back with him at about ten past ten, barely half an hour after we'd set off. I'd forgotten my key so had to ring the bell. Howard here answered the door and let us in.'

Fielding nodded at me, confirming this.

'Blackburn then went straight up to his room,' said Vaughan, 'and Fielding joined me in here, and we had a bit of a chat about the lad: Adam, I mean. I'd seen him earlier in the day, a little before Blackburn turned up, acting in a rather queer fashion in this room, Jim. It was just as darkness was falling, and he was standing by the window there with no gas lit, and waving…'

'A shrimp net?' I put in, and Vaughan frowned.

'No, Jim, not a shrimp net. Why would he be waving a shrimp net? He was waving an oil lamp about.'

'Waving it out to sea?' I said. 'Signalling?'

Vaughan nodded.

'I thought so, Jim.'

'Perhaps the gas had run out, and he'd needed the lamp to see by.'

No answer from Vaughan; he was staring up at the ceiling. Behind Fielding, the wind was getting up, becoming unruly by degrees, and you just knew it would end badly. If that sea had been a bloke in a public bar you'd have moved into the saloon. With head cocked, Fielding watched me watching it, as if to say, 'Why are you surprised? Any man worth his salt ought to know the ways of the sea.'

Chapter Twenty-Two

'Hand over the gun,' I said to the kid.

With the revolver in my hand I would take my chances with the Captain and the Mate, wherever they'd got to. If I couldn't get it off the kid, I'd go over the side. This was the programme. I didn't believe the kid would shoot, and he might not have the chance. The other ship would overhaul us in a couple of minutes' time, which gave me about thirty seconds' leeway – thirty seconds to leap while in full view of their bridge. 'If you hand it over,' I said to the kid, 'I'll see the judge lets you off with a talking-to – got that?'

He shook his head very decidedly, but he was shivering.

'Hold on to it, and you'll be lagged for most of your life. Fire it, and you'll fucking swing.'

'Come off it,' said the kid. 'Nobody on land knows you're here.'

That couldn't be right. Somebody knew – somebody in the Paradise guest house knew. The kid was facing me, but watching the other ship with the tail of his eye. He was in a funk all right; the gun hand was shaking, but he now cocked the hammer with his thumb. It cost him quite an effort, and he had to steady the thing with his other hand, but now I had the answer to my question: it was a single action revolver, and I was halfway to being dead.

'What are you, son?' I asked him. 'Ship's cook? Captain's boy?'

'You fuck off,' he said, and from somewhere aft I heard, floating over the waves and the wind and the engine beat, the voice of the Captain. He was speaking more loudly than he ever had done to me, and with more anger, although this anger was directed more at himself, as I believed, than at any other party. 'I don't see it,' I heard him say. 'I just don't see it.'

The kid heard it too, and perhaps he wanted to talk to drown it out.

'You needn't worry about me,' he said. 'You ought to be looking out for yourself.'

'You think I'm a stowaway,' I said to the kid. 'It's customary at sea to shoot stowaways, is it?'

The kid nodded slowly.

'Stowaway,' I repeated. 'What do you think I am? Hell bent on a free ride to the bloody gas works? That's it, isn't it, son? We're on a run to Beckton with a load of gas coal. You'll come back empty, will you? Or with a load of coke? Where've we come from, eh, son? The Tyne? Dunston Staithes?'

'You're nuts, you are,' he said, but there wasn't much force behind the words. He was hatless, and his hair blew left and right. In the weak light of the dawn, I could see clear through to his scalp. He'd be quite bald in five years' time; he was wasting his best years at sea.

I pictured the great wooden piers at Dunston where the coal was pitched from railway wagons into the colliers day and night under a black cloud that rolled eternally upwards. That was the main starting point for the coal-carrying vessels. But the ship gaining on us carried a clean cargo; it had a smart red hull. I saw now that two blokes stood on the foc's'le, facing each other and still as statues. Was there a hand signal for 'Come alongside'? I ought to have paid more attention to the super-annuated skipper who had given talks on seamanship to the Baytown Boys' Club.

The kid had one eye in that direction too.

'How do I know you're a copper?' he said.

How was I to prove it without my card? My mind raced in a circus.

'Do you know York station?' I said.

'No. And what's that got to do with it?'

I could hear the throbbing engines of the other ship now, quite distinct from the roar of the sea.

'… Because I'm a railway copper,' I said, 'and that's where I work. The police office on Platform Four.'

'Come off it,' said the kid.

I tried to recollect the words on my warrant card but could not, perhaps because of whatever had happened to me. There was some stuff on it about the directors of the railway company. It was more about them than it was me, and very wordy and over-blown.

'Just you take my bloody word for it,' I said, and the kid almost laughed. Well, I couldn't blame him for that.

I put my hand out for the gun, saying, 'Give it over,' but he made no move. I'd seen the Chief take a gun off a man. He did it by force of character – and by shouting abuse. You could scare a man by shouting even if he was armed and you were not.

I glanced down at the restless waves; a wind blew up from them. The sea was waiting for me to come in – then there'd be some fun. Only you were liable to be killed outright if you jumped straight into freezing water. Your heart would attack you in revenge for the shock. I looked over again to the other ship, where the faces of the blokes on the foc's'le showed white.

They were looking our way. They contemplated us calmly, and their vessel was swinging closer.

The kid watched them too.

'Witnesses,' I said. 'I can read the name of that ship. I can hunt up those blokes later on, and they'll testify to what they saw… Hand over the shooter.'

But I couldn't read the name. It was something foreign. However, it appeared that one of the two mannequins on the foc's'le was fitted with a moving arm, for he saluted us just then.

'They see us,' I said. 'I reckon they're coming alongside.'

I put my hand out again for the gun.

'You won't like it in gaol, son.'

'It'll be just like here,' he said, and the gun was in my hand.

I tried to look as though I had expected this development. I held the gun; I commanded the ship – the whole of the seas.

Chapter Twenty-Three

I held up my glass of Spanish sherry as though trying to decide whether it agreed with me or not. It looked like cold tea, and tasted like cold, very sweet tea.

'Vaughan left me at quarter after eleven, Mr Stringer,' said Fielding, with the black sea boiling behind him. 'I then remained here, reading, until half past, when I decided I'd better take my boots down to the boy. He's generally in the kitchen at that time, and one of his last duties is to clean the boots.'

'And as you were coming back up, you saw Blackburn going down with his boots,' Vaughan put in.

'That is correct,' said Fielding slowly, as though not over- keen on the fact having been mentioned. 'We crossed on the bottom stairs.'

'How did he seem?' I asked.

'How did he seem?' Fielding repeated, cocking his head. 'Rather morose. He barely gave me good night.'

'So the last person to see him would have been the boy?'

'Or our landlady,' said Vaughan. 'She'd been in the kitchen when you'd taken your boots down, hadn't she, Howard?'

'I believe that she had been,' said Fielding, 'but she'd gone up to her room by the time I got there.' He turned to me, explaining: 'It is the Lady's habit, Mr Stringer, to read articles from the newspapers to her brother, last thing.'

'And to drink wine,' added Vaughan.

I felt the urge to defend Amanda Rickerby against this slur, and immediately felt guilty on that account. A man ought to have feelings like that only for his wife. But then again my wife smiled at Robert Henderson, and yet every time I met him while walking, the bastard cut me dead.

A strange kind of flat boat was putting out from the harbour. It looked like a brightly lit, floating station platform with three men waiting for trains on it, and it was bucking about pretty wildly. Fielding saw me eyeing it.

'It works in combination with the Scarborough dredger,' he explained. 'They scour out the harbour approach every few weeks.'

'We think we know what happened to Blackburn, Jim,' Vaughan said. 'We think he jumped into the sea.'

'Why would he do that?'

'Well, he was pretty cheesed off about something,' said Vaughan, 'and that's fact. I often worry whether it was something I said to him after supper. You see, he'd been quite bright at supper.'

'You're advertising for railway men again,' I said, 'or at any rate, Miss Rickerby is.'

'Is she?' said Fielding, and he frowned. It wasn't like him not to know something.

'That's why I'm here,' I said.

'Of course,' said Fielding, with a single rapid nod of the head.

'The house is still on the North Eastern list,' I said. 'Any lodge within five minutes of the station is eligible, although strictly speaking, I don't think this is within five minutes.'

'It is if you run like mad,' said Vaughan. 'I'm off to the toilet,' he went on, rising from the couch.'… Toilet then bed.'

'Won't do, won't do,' said Fielding, shaking his head. 'You are not "off to the toilet". You are going to the lavatory, and we do not wish to know.'

'Please yourself,' said Vaughan, who gave us both good night before quitting the room.

Fielding said, 'I have tried my best to bring that young man on, Mr Stringer, believe me.'

I wondered whether this was how he saw Vaughan, as somebody to be brought on, much as the wife regarded me.

'I'm pleased that the fate of poor Blackburn didn't put you off coming here,' he said.

'I have his same room as well,' I said.

'As well as what?' he said, smiling. 'Won't you have another sherry?'

'All right then,' I said. 'I'm obliged to you.'

He twinkled his way over to the piano and brought the tray to the occasional table, where he filled my glass, passing it to me very daintily. I took it from him in the same way.

'In so far as I've known them,' he said, 'I've found engine drivers and firemen rather a rough class, but you conduct yourself in a very gentlemanly way, if I may say so.'

I nodded, thinking: Is he onto me? I touched my pocket book, through the wool of my suit-coat. It was there all right, the warrant card within it. Fielding couldn't possibly have had sight of it. Anyhow, he was smiling at me in a sad sort of way that made me think the compliment genuine.

'Did you find that Blackburn was like that?' I asked him.

'He was rather tongue-tied,' said Fielding, sitting back down in his accustomed seat. 'A big fellow but carried his size well. A dignified man… handsome…' 'Do you know what he and Vaughan talked about on their walk after supper?'

'Well,' Fielding said, 'I can make a hazard.'

'Rare one for the fair sex, isn't he?' I said. 'Mr Vaughan, I mean.'

'He's a rare one for pictures of the fair sex,' said Fielding. 'He showed you some of his samples, I suppose.'

'Yes,' I said. 'One.'

'Was it the naked lady on the trapeze?'

I shook my head.

'It was the naked lady holding the bicycle.'

'It is the same… artiste,' said Fielding with a sigh.

He was evidently pretty well acquainted with the cards himself, even if he didn't approve of them.

'Made out he knew her,' I said.

'He'd like to know her,' said Fielding, 'I don't doubt that. He's minded to set himself up as a photographer in that line, you know.' He shook his head for a while. 'It's my fault in a way. I mean, I brought him into the post card world.'

There came a noise from the doorway, and Miss Rickerby was in the corridor with her brother.

'Tell me, Mr Stringer,' Fielding was saying quite loudly, 'how do you manage to spot all the signals while rushing along the line? I believe the North Eastern is the most densely signalled railway in the country. Sixty-seven on one gantry at Newcastle alone.'

He was trying to cover up the subject of our conversation.

'Well,' I said, 'each man has his own pet way of remembering where the signals are. Speaking for myself, I…'

'They're like gladioli,' said Amanda Rickerby, coming into the room looking rather pink about the face but none the less fetching for that.

'How are they?' I said.

'That's what they look like,' she said. 'When there's more than one, I mean. I find them quite pretty but it frightens me when they change because nobody's near by and suddenly they move!

Her brother came into the room behind her, and I thought: You could say the same for him. He brought the paint smell with him, and there were specks of white-wash on the backs of his hands.

'Boots,' he said.

'Come again?' I said, because he was looking my way.

'Do yer boots,' he said, almost panting.

'We have our boots on,' said Fielding, not to the boy but to Miss Rickerby, who was of course eyeing me. 'You can't very well clean them now.'

For the first time I looked back boldly at Amanda Rickerby, and even though both of us were smiling it was obvious in that moment of honesty that neither one of us was exactly what you might call happy.

'It's just gone eleven,' her brother said. 'I clean t'boots from eleven on.'

'But the hot supper has thrown us all late,' said Fielding, and again he was appealing to our landlady rather than addressing the boy.

'The gentlemen will take them down to the kitchen in the next little while if they want them doing, Adam,' said Miss Rickerby. 'And you have something for Mr Fielding, don't you?'

The lad took a note from the front pocket of his apron, marched up to Fielding, and handed it to him.

'What's this?' said Fielding.

'If you read it,' said the lad, 'then yer'll know!

'Put through the letter box, just now,' said Miss Rickerby. 'I hope you don't mind, but I had to look at it to see who it was for. It's from your recorded music people.'

'Yes,' said Fielding, now glancing at the note. 'It's just a reminder about the meeting.'

'Mr Fielding is the chairman of the Scarborough Recorded Music Circle,' Miss Rickerby said to me, 'which is pretty good going considering he doesn't have a gramophone.'

'It is a little irregular,' said Fielding, colouring up, 'but…'

'He won't tell you that they pleaded with him,' said Miss Rickerby. 'Modesty forbids. He is also in the Rotary, Townsmen's Guild etc., sidesman at St Mary's church, and I half expect him to come in for tea and say he's been made Mayor – only he'd never let on. I'd just find this funny hat and big golden chain while straightening his room.'

Fielding was making a sort of waving away gesture with his right hand, as if to say, 'All this is nonsense', but he'd been fairly dancing about with pleasure at the landlady's compliments. She now leant in the doorway with folded arms, smiling and giving Fielding a sad but very affectionate look which made me a little jealous that for once her eyes were not on me.

'Miss Rickerby,' said Fielding, 'my dear Miss Rickerby, won't you…' For a moment I thought he was stuck for words, but he finished:'… give us something on the piano.'

'No, Mr Fielding,' she said, smiling, but privately now and looking down at her shoes. 'No, I most certainly will not.'

Chapter Twenty-Four

Fielding said good night, walked along to his bedroom, and closed the door. Standing just outside the sitting room I watched him do it, which was easy enough as his bedroom was on the same floor (and faced the right way to have the sea view). There were two other doors on that floor. One stood open, giving onto a fair-sized bathroom, all white with gas light burning. The other was closed. I walked over to it and knocked, and there was no answer. I was alone on the silent landing. I turned the handle and opened the door a fraction, gaining a view of a large, pale blue room that smelt of talcum powder. I saw a dressing table with triple mirror, and a nightdress was thrown over the bed like a dead body. A low fire burned in the grate, and there was a paraffin heater hard by that was turned up to the maximum judging by the stifling heat. This was Miss Rickerby's room.

She's like a cat, I thought – luxuriates in the heat. I closed the door as gently as possible, and I heard a rattle from behind me. It was Fielding's door opening. He wore a night-shirt, dressing gown, and his hair was all neatly combed; but he was only tripping his way across to the bathroom.

I turned and walked up the stairs towards the floor being decorated. My own bathroom was on this landing somewhere. Most of the wallpaper had been stripped from the landing walls but some remained in patches, showing the green stripes that still survived upstairs. The gas jets roared, giving a shaking white light, and I wondered whether they kept going all night. I stopped next to a dangling strand of the green wallpaper and felt minded to pull it away. I was reaching out towards it when the roaring of the gas gave way to the roaring of water – a whole waterfall seemed to have been set in motion somewhere out of sight beyond the walls. A door flew open along the corridor, and Vaughan appeared in shirt sleeves, with braces dangling and the seething din of the flushing lavatory behind him.

'Is that the bathroom?' I said.

'It is, Jim,' he said, 'but I haven't had a bath. When you've had a heavy supper, I always think it's best to…'

'I know,' I said, cutting him off.

'I've been twice in the past ten minutes,' he said, which made me worried again about the food we'd eaten, even though I felt all right.

'This is me,' Vaughan said, indicating a closed door. 'Care for a peek?'

He proudly occupied the worst room I'd seen so far in the house. It had the green and less-green wallpaper on three walls, and the dried-blood roses on the fourth. The effect was of two rooms that had crashed into each other. The roses were singed and discoloured behind two copper gas pipes that rose up either side of the fireplace. These ran up to little pale green shades that made the whole room look sickly. On the mantelshelf a pipe stand had spaces for a dozen pipes but held just one. The small fireplace was dead, but Vaughan too had a paraffin heater going. It was directed at the wall, like a child being punished for naughtiness in a school form room.

'A few damp spots there,' he said as I looked at it.

Vaughan had evidently been lying on his bed, and right next to the pillow end was a portmanteau stuffed with clothes, and a pile of copies of Sporting Life. The only furniture besides the bed and washstand was a wicker chair and a cabinet with the door open. A black trunk marked, for some reason, 'WELLINBROUGH' in white painted letters stood alongside the cabinet. There were no pictures at all on the walls. The flimsy curtains were drawn, but Vaughan too would have overlooked the sea. He was sitting on the wicker chair and removing his boots. I thought: I've got to get out of here before he takes off his trousers.

'You an early riser, Jim?' he said.

'Do you call seven o'clock early?' I said.

'I call it bloody ridiculous,' he said. 'Have a care tomorrow, will you, old man? I can hear most of what goes on up there.'

I looked up.

'But you heard nothing the night that Blackburn disappeared.'

'I was half cut then, Jim… And you know, there might have been something… something about two, something again about four. A sort of rumbling.'

'Did you mention it to the coppers?'

He shook his head.

'Not certain of it, Jim… not certain. You don't go in for physical jerks, I hope?' he added as I looked at the gas pipes, noting that they continued rising beyond the two shades, disappearing into the ceiling… and yet there was no gas plumbed into my room.

Vaughan, having thrown one boot towards the cabinet, now threw the second in a roughly similar direction.

'I should take these downstairs for the lad to clean,' he said.

'And will you?'

'Doubt it,' he said. 'I give that youth a wide berth.'

'Does he ever fly off about anything?' I enquired. 'He always seems liable to.'

Vaughan frowned.

'Shouldn't wonder,' he said. 'He's cracked.'

'But you've never seen him do it?'

'I've seen him on the point of blowing up – then I've made myself scarce.'

'When did you find out about his accident?'

'Oh, that all came out when the police started asking questions. They could see he was nuts, and wanted to know why. Miss Rickerby told them, and then she told us all.'

'You don't suppose he did for Blackburn, do you?'

'Blackburn jumped into the sea, Jim,' said Vaughan, who was now kneeling down and fishing about inside the trunk. '… Or that's what we all tell ourselves in this house. I mean, none of us likes to think we're sharing lodgings with a murderer.'

He lifted a book out of the trunk, and rifled through the pages, as if to make sure they were all properly bound in.

'Well,' I said, 'no-one can say what happened.'

Vaughan stowed the book back in the trunk.

'The lad's got a hell of a job on with that decorating,' I said.

'Well, he's making an apartment, Jim. It's Fielding's idea, and he's persuaded the lady of it. Eliminate the rough element.'

I looked upwards again, following the pipes with my eye.

'Where do they go?' I said, indicating them.

'Up into the floorboards. Up into your room, I expect.'

'But there's only an oil lamp in my room.'

'Well,' he said, 'perhaps there was gas once.'

There had been. The painting in the dining room showed my room the brightest.

'Why would it be stopped?'

'Economy,' said Vaughan with a shrug, and he was now at my side.

'Here's our little friend again,' he said, and he passed me a post card showing a woman – the bicycling woman. Only now she was painting a picture. You couldn't see it because the easel faced away from the camera but you could see everything else. The card came from a new envelope, lately fished from the trunk.

'Who is this bloody woman, Theo?' I said.

'Yorkshire lass,' he said, and he passed me another card.

'Told you she was game,' he said, and she was now sitting on a gate before a meadow and dangerously close -1 would have thought – to a country road. Vaughan said, 'You can tell it's a windy day, can't you?'

'Why put these sorts of picture on post cards?' I said. 'I mean, it's not as if you can post 'em, is it?'

'For collectors,' he said. 'And you can post 'em in envelopes, Jim.'

I glanced over towards his bed. There was a tin of something there. At first I'd taken it for a tin of lozenges, but I now read 'Oglesby's Pilules', and, underneath, 'Oglesby's Pilules are a Certain Cure for Blind and Bleeding Piles'.

'Do you have piles, Jim?' he enquired, seeing where I was looking and holding out another post card. 'Sometimes I can't walk around town. Rather fancy studio shot. I presume that swan is stuffed,' he added, passing me the card.

'Look here,' I said, 'why are you showing me these?'

He stepped back, offended.

'What's the matter, Jim?' he said. 'Has old Fielding warned you off?'

'Warned me off what?'

'Business connection,' he said.

'Eh?'

'You can have the choicest selection from the choicest range. A hundred cards for a quid, Jim.'

'Why would I want a hundred?'

'You can have two hundred if you want. To be perfectly honest, I'm keen to sell the whole stock, hence the special rate. Of course, you're a chum as well – that's the other reason.'

He moved over to the fire, leant on the mantel-shelf, and looked shrewdly at me, or at least I supposed that was the idea.

'But maybe you think rather narrowly of me for bringing them out.'

'You mean me to buy them and sell them on?' I said.

He nodded quickly.

'They go like hot cakes in any engine shed,' he said. 'Sixpence a piece. I've blokes on the Great Northern and the Hull and Barnsley, and they're getting rich at this game, Jim. When the samples are first shown there's a bit of a frost, I'll not deny it. Blokes are shy, as I can see you are, Jim; they're married men, and it's on their conscience a little, but I promise you that after a couple of weeks, when they think back to what they've seen, and turned it over a little in their minds, why… there's a regular rush, Jim.'

'The cards are not legal though, are they?'

'Where?' he demanded, still with the shrewd look.' Where are they not legal? They're jolly well legal in France.'

But then he relented a little.

'The coppers can be a nuisance,' he said. 'But it's small apples to them, Jim. I know that from experience. Would you care for a bottle of beer?'

'Well,' I said, 'what time is it?'

'Quarter to midnight,' he said.

I grinned, for it was a crazy situation. It seemed about a week since I'd come into Scarborough station with Tommy Nugent.

'It's nearly midnight, Jim!' said Theo Vaughan, laying the card package down on the bed. 'I'm not going to mince words! I believe in plain speaking!'

I was curious to see where he'd go for the beer, and in the end – after a bit of head scratching on his part – it was the portmanteau. The bottle opener he found at last in the bottom of the closet.

'I don't run to glasses,' he said, handing over the bottle. 'But you're not the sort to bother. Try giving old Fielding a bottle and no glass and just see what happens!'

'What does happen?' I said.

'Nothing,' said Vaughan. 'But it's the look he gives you.'

'He'll drink it then?'

'He'll drink it all right.'

Vaughan took a pull on his beer, and fell to eyeing me for a while.

'I should just think he will,' he ran on. 'What's the old devil been saying about me? But go on, Jim, I can see you want to question me. Get straight to it. Honesty and trust and plain- dealing – that's the start of any business connection.'

'Did you show your cards to Blackburn?' I said.

That knocked Vaughan, I could tell, for he asked, "What cards?' and went back to his shrewd look.

'Well,' I said, taking a pull of beer, 'the ones presently under discussion. The ones you've just asked me to question you about.'

At this, Vaughan might have nodded, but it was done too fast for me to be certain.

'The coppers want to know every detail of my dealings with the man, which amount to this: sitting next to him at one supper, during which he was more or less silent; going with him to the Two Mariners, beginning in hopes of conversation and ending in complete silence.'

'But on the walk – in the pub – you did show him the cards?'

'I suppose so.'

Vaughan was pacing now, beer bottle in hand.

'And he didn't take to the cards?'

'You should have seen him when I took 'em out, Jim. Face like bloody yesterday and he said, "I shall be mentioning this to Miss Rickerby.'"

'Oh,' I said.

'Next development, Jim,' said Vaughan. 'The coppers – the Scarborough lot – made a search of the house – well, they've made several – and they turned up a few of my choicest cards in one of them. I had them stowed away in two places in this room, and they evidently found both. No action was taken. They just gave me a bit of a rating, you know. They were quite decent about it really. I think they knew it was a bit unsporting, the way they came upon them, and to be honest I think they rather enjoyed the experience. Bit of light relief. Now I knew that Blackburn had threatened to split on me to the Lady, and I didn't know whether he had done, or whether she'd told the coppers. So I thought it best to come right out with it, and let on that I'd shown Blackburn a couple of samples.'

He took a long pull on his beer before continuing:

'But if I thought that would bring an end to the matter I thought wrong, Jim. Three times in the past five months I've been called in to the copper shop on Castle Road.'

'I can't imagine the Lady splitting,' I said. 'She seems pretty free and easy – she'd just think those cards were a bit of a laugh.'

Vaughan seemed quite bucked by the thought. He nodded and said, 'I can just see her in a series of her own, Jim. She'd be shown all day about her normal activities only without a stitch on. You're getting pretty hot at the thought, I can see it, Jim.'

'No, no, I'm just, you know… rather hot.'

'Mind you,' he continued, 'what you'd end up with would be a lot of photographs of the Lady drinking glasses of wine.'

'If the cards drew the interest of the coppers,' I said, 'and they've been all over this house, how come you've still got all the cards?'

'I haven't nearly as many as I once had,' said Vaughan. 'They've had some of the best ones off me, and I generally keep the few I do have in a little hidey hole outside this house.'

'Where's that then?' I asked, taking a pull on my beer.

'Just now, Jim,' he said, 'it's the left luggage office at Scarborough station.'

I finished my beer, and put the bottle on the mantel-shelf.

'I'm off to get my boots cleaned,' I said, 'if the lad's still about.'

'You back at work tomorrow, then?' asked Vaughan.

'If they've fettled the engine,' I said, opening the door, 'then yes. But I've got a feeling I'll be stuck here another night.'

No railway man was ever required to wait two nights for an engine. It made no kind of operating sense, but I had decided that I was on the track of something. Besides, Vaughan showed no sign of thinking anything amiss. I turned in the doorway, and took a last look at the room.

This was the real meaning of the term 'bachelor's lodgings'. The phrase was meant to mean something different but this was it in practice.

'We'll talk about a business connection tomorrow, shall we?' said Vaughan, and I nodded in a vague sort of way.

'You look about ready to move out of here,' I said.

'I've always got an eye out. After all that's gone on here I'm a bit sick, but then everyone's under the gun because of this bloody never-ending investigation.'

'Even Fielding?' I said.

'Him most of all,' said Vaughan.

'How come?'

'I shan't say, Jim. I'm sworn to silence.'

But I didn't doubt that he'd let on eventually, and here was another reason for staying on at Paradise.

"Night then,' I said.

On quitting Vaughan's room I needed a piss, and so stepped into the bathroom he'd earlier come out of.

The cabinet by the side of the toilet stood open. Inside was a mass of razor blades in paper wrappings, a length of elasticated bandage, a big bottle of Batty's Stomach Pills, something called Clarke's Blood Mixture, Owbridge's Lung Tonic, some ointment for puffed-up feet, Eczema Balm ('the worst complaint will disappear before our wonderful skin cure'), and a red paste-board packet with a picture of a dead rat on it. Rat poison in the bathroom cabinet: 'Fletcher's Quick-Acting Rat Poison', to be exact. The ingredients were printed on the back: 'Lampblack, Wheat Flour, Suet, Oil of Aniseed, Arsenious Acid'. This last came from arsenic, and it struck me that there was a whole murder kit in this cabinet. But the investigating officers had obviously not thought so – otherwise they'd have taken the stuff away. I wondered whether it was Vaughan's stuff, or whether it belonged to the household in general. I unbuttoned my fly, and I was just slacking off, playing the yellow jet spiral-wise in the toilet bowl and thinking on when the door opened behind me. It was Vaughan again. It was less than a minute since I'd seen him last.

'I know you won't mind me interrupting, Jim,' he said.

'It could have been worse,' I said, craning about.

'Old Fielding,' he said, as I left off pissing and pulled the chain.'… Guess where he was in the three months before he came here?'

The flushing of the toilet was so loud (it was as if the thing was throwing down half the German Sea) that I couldn't hear what came next, and had to ask Vaughan to speak up.

'York gaol!' he repeated, over the dinning of the waters.

Chapter Twenty-Five

With gun in hand, I began to turn about, but stopped to watch the kid. He had backed away from me, and his right hand rested on the gunwale. Behind him, on the other ship, the man who had raised his arm had lowered it, and he had turned a different way, looking for another bit of good to do; his vessel was also bouncing and swinging away from us, taking him on to the next business.

The kid, leaning against the gunwale, turned from me to the departing ship. But I ought not to be bothering about him. I had a decision to make. I could go for'ard with the gun or I could go aft. At present, I was looking aft. I could see clear past the bridge house to the wake our ship was making. I ought first to make for the engine room, stop the blokes who were creating that wake. They were party to a crime as long as they continued their work. I pictured them as small, half deafened and blinded, blackened blokes who never questioned the ringing bells that brought their commands. I would go to the bridge, and work the lever that told them to change direction. Suddenly a great wind came, and the fore-deck behind me went low and the bridge house tilted towards me, as though its illuminated windows were eyes, inspecting me. The ship righted itself, and there came the sound of hammering – a hammering on iron. I turned fully about, facing away from the kid, and I was instantly felled by a giant, flying sailor.

The gun flew from my hand as I collapsed to the deck. The ship made another slow rise as our struggle began. There were not at first any blows; at least, I did not think so at the time. It was more like a kind of wrestling, in which I was ever closer smothered by the sailor's great weight and his wide oilskin. I was under him, and his stinking breath, and then for an instant I was up, seeing the sea from the wrong angle as the ship pitched again – and catching a glimpse of the gunwale, where the kid had been standing, and was no longer. In that moment of distraction, the sailor had caught hold of my ears, one in each hand. They made convenient handles for him as he contemplated me. His great face was in two halves: black beard and the rest – and the rest was mainly nose. You are ugly, I thought, and perhaps he meant to say the same to me. He got as far as 'You' before rage over-took his speech, and he dashed my head down onto the iron deck.

The next time I lifted my head, I lay in the iron parlour again, my only companion the mighty slumbering anchor chain. The ship rose and fell, and I slipped in and out of dim dreams. Presently I looked down at my right hand, which lay like a thing defeated. No gun there.

I had been on the deck, and removed in one dark instant from it. The same had happened to the kid, only I was sure he'd gone overboard in hopes of reaching the second ship. Why had he given over the gun? Because he knew he was in queer, and didn't want any part of what was going on or was about to go on.

I fancied, over the next long while, that I occasionally heard the ringing of a bell but it was nothing more than a faint tinkling through the iron walls, and I could not keep count of the strokes. My pillow was a link of the anchor chain, and it served as well as goose feathers. My trouble was the cold, and I would ward it off by ordering myself to sleep which I seemed able to do at will. They hadn't drugged my coffee on my first trip to the chart room, I had decided. Instead, I had picked up a sleeping sickness as a result of whatever had happened at Paradise.

The house came and went in my dreams along with all the old familiars: the red-shaded oil lamp, the over-heated blue room, the roaring white gas, the magician with his kettle, the long needle. In addition, a man with puffed-up feet scrambled about on the bathroom floor for blood tonic, and the poor fellow was cutting himself to ribbons in the process, being quite desperate. A voice spoke in my head, a smooth character sent to explain my own thoughts to me said, 'You see, Jim, he was the last man left in Scarborough.'

Nobody walked the Prom; the lighthouse was dark; the two carriages of the funicular railway stood dangling out of reach, neither up nor down; each of the three hundred and sixty-five rooms of the Grand Hotel – one for every day of the year – stood empty, and drifting black smoke had possession of the town. The sea had come all the way up to the railway station. It was exploring the excursion platforms and the engine shed beyond. I saw the wax doll in the lavender room, the blue flame of the paraffin heater, and a paper fan that, when folded out, revealed a painting of a sea-side town that was not Scarborough but showed Scarborough up, put it to shame, this one being sunlit, with handsome people walking along a pretty promenade, and a light blue sea beyond.

All at once I was there, with my own wife and my new wife, who chatted away merrily, which I knew to be wrong, and which did cause me anxiety, but I put it from my mind for I was away from Scarborough in an altogether better sea-side spot, at least for a while. Scarborough waited for me, however, and I knew I would have to go back there, to examine the disaster that had befallen the place and to account for it and to answer for it.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Walking down the stairs towards the comfortable landing with my boots in my hand, I revolved the words of Theo Vaughan. Were they true? He must know that I could hardly check by asking Fielding himself.

He had, according to Vaughan, been lagged for raising funds for a publishing company that didn't exist. It went down as fraud. It hadn't been such a great amount of money, and it had all been repaid so he'd only got three months. Vaughan had once had the newspaper clipping that told the whole tale, but he'd lost it (which went a little way to his credit, I thought, since it seemed to mean he didn't have a plan to use the information, but would just blurt it out as the fancy took him).

The prison sentence explained Fielding's presence in Paradise, according to Vaughan. He'd always been keen on the sea, and had come to Scarborough to catch his breath after the shock. He found the house to his liking, if a little low class, and had taken it in hand; set himself to raising the tone with fancy recipes, a few sea paintings here and there, cigars in the ship room, sherry in the evenings. He'd put some money into the house too, and was largely paying the cost of the redecoration of the second floor, for the prosecution had not finished him financially speaking.

I approached the kitchen, and the door was on the jar, letting me see the long table. All the items upon it were a bit better ordered now, and stood in a row: knife polisher, big tea pot, vegetable boiler, corkscrew, toast rack, two dish covers. The kitchen had been cleaned, and the supper things put away. Adam Rickerby had done it, I knew. He liked things orderly. That youth now sat at one end of the table, applying Melton's Cream to a pair of women's boots – his sister's evidently – and she was reading to him from a newspaper with a glass of red wine at her elbow. She was certainly a little gone with drink, but she spoke very properly.

'Interview with foreign secretary,' she read, and took a sip of the wine. 'Sir Edward Grey had an interview with Mr Asquith at 10 Downing Street this morning…'

'Where?' her brother asked, quite sharply, as though the matter was of particular importance to him.

'10 Downing Street,' his sister repeated, before carrying on reading. 'The interview was unusually prolonged. Sir Edward Grey remained at 10 Downing Street for just over an hour and a half.'

She turned the page of the paper, and Adam Rickerby sat back and thought about what he'd heard for a moment. He then took up a brush, and began polishing the boot, saying, 'Any railway smashes?'

'No,' his sister replied very firmly.

'Runaway trams?' he enquired, with spittle flying.

'Nothing of that kind,' said Amanda Rickerby. 'How lovely to see our Mr Stringer,' she ran on, looking up at me. But as I walked over to her brother and handed him my boots, she turned two pages of the paper in silence.

I heard soft footsteps behind me. They belonged to Fielding, who was approaching in dressing gown and slippers with his own boots in his hand.

'Have you been to Eastbourne, Mr Stringer?' Miss Rickerby asked, looking up from her paper as I gave my boots to the boy.

'Eastbourne in Sussex?' I enquired.

'Well, I don't think there's another.'

'Is there something about it in the paper?'

'Are you avoiding my question?' she asked. She smiled, but looked tired.

'I've never been there,' I said. 'I just wondered why you mentioned it.'

Fielding, having given his boots to the boy, was lifting the kettle that sat on the range, pouring boiling water into a cup and stirring.

'Ovaltine,' he said, seeing me looking on. 'Would you care for a cup, Mr Stringer?'

'Oh, no thanks.'

The stuff was meant to bring on sleep, and Fielding must have made it every night, for Miss Rickerby paid him no mind as he went about it. She said, 'Eastbourne is the one place I prefer to Scarborough, Mr Stringer.'

'Well, I wouldn't know,' I said, and then I thought of something clever to add: 'But this is Paradise. How can there be any advance on that?'

'Oh, I should think there could be,' she said. 'Probably quite easily.'

Adam Rickerby was polishing Fielding's boots, going at them like billy-o.

'Don't denigrate the house, Miss R,' said Fielding, with the cup in his hand. 'Eastbourne is fine though.'

'Told you,' Amanda Rickerby said, addressing me.

'Debussy wrote La Mer at the Grand Hotel there,' said Fielding, and since he was addressing me particularly I nodded back, in a vague sort of way. 'Then again it's a shingle beach and you can't sit on it… Good night all, and batten down the hatches. We're in for a storm, I believe. You should take a look at the size of the waves getting up just now, Mr Stringer.'

He quit the room, and I too made towards the door when Amanda Rickerby spoke.

'It's late, Mr Stringer,' she said, looking sadly down at her wine glass. 'I believe that Sunday has already gone.' And then, in a glorious moment, she raised her eyes to mine: 'Have you had your treat yet?'

'I had a bottle of beer in Mr Vaughan's room. Does that count?'

'I'm not at all sure that it does.'

'Have you had yours?'

'No.'

'Well then,' I said, 'that makes two of us.'

I glanced over at Adam Rickerby, who'd finished my first boot. What he made of this exchange between a near-stranger and his sister I could hardly imagine. He was polishing hard.

'I'm obliged to you for doing that,' I called across to him.

'I'll bring 'em up in t'morning,' he said, not looking up.

I walked through the doorway, and Amanda Rickerby rose from her seat and followed. She wasn't done with me yet, and I knew I was red in the face.

'When you go to bed, Mr Stringer…'

'Yes?' I said.

'Oh… nothing.'

She wore an expression that I could not understand.

'Why does your brother want to know about railway smashes?' I whispered, after a space.

'Oh just… morbid interest.'

'I could tell him a few tales,' I said.

'You've caused a few smashes yourself, I dare say,' she said, looking up at me and shaking her hair out of her eyes.

'In a roundabout way,' I said.

'You hardly know whether to claim credit for them or not.'

I was for some reason lifting my hand, which might have gone anywhere and done anything at that moment; might have stroked her amazing hair or pressed down on her bosom. But in the end it landed on my collar, and gave a tug for no good reason apart from the fact that the whole house was overheated.

'Any road…' I began, and I heard the wife's voice, saying, 'Don't say that, Jim, it doesn't mean anything.'

'Will you be staying with us tomorrow night?' asked Amanda Rickerby.

'Depends on the engine,' I said. 'But it might come to that.'

'Good,' she said. 'Good night, I mean,' she added, with a very fetching smile, and I felt both an excitement and a kind of relief that anything that was going to happen between us had been put forward to another day. When I walked into the hallway, I saw Fielding, lingering there apparently adjusting the coats on the stand, and I was glad I'd kept my pocket book and warrant card in my suit pocket. He left off as I approached, and climbed the stairs at a lick.

I dawdled up, thinking of the wife and Amanda Rickerby, weighing the two in the balance. Neither was very big on housework but in the wife's case that was because she was too busy doing other things. I couldn't imagine Amanda Rickerby in the suffragettes, as the wife was. She couldn't be bothered. Was she on the marry? She certainly acted like it, and I felt guilty for not letting on that I already had a wife.

Had she been the same with Blackburn? He'd evidently been a good-looking chap… But surely a woman who owned a house as big as Paradise would want more than a railway fireman.

… And what had she meant to say to me about going to bed?

Had she proposed joining me?

As I came up to the undecorated landing, I thought with anxiety of the wife, calling to mind the Thorpe-on-Ouse fair of the previous summer. It had been held on Henderson's meadow by the river. Robert Henderson and Lydia had coincided more than once there, and he'd as good as forced Jack Silvester, who kept the village grocery, and was a tenant of the Henderson family, to give her a prize at hoop-la even though her hoop had not gone over the wooden base on which the prize – a jar of bath crystals – had stood. Silvester had called out, 'Oh, bad luck!' and then immediately met the hard eye of Henderson. The wife was always going on about the condescension of men to women, and here was a very good example of it, as I had later told her. The crystals were not rightfully hers; she ought not to have taken them. Instead, she would soak for what seemed like hours before the parlour fire in the perfumed baths the crystals made. Lily of the Valley – that was the scent, supposedly. The stopper had come wrapped about with ribbon, and the wife had carefully replaced that ribbon after every use of the crystals.

She'd told me that she couldn't believe she'd gone all these years with un-scented baths, so perhaps it was the crystals themselves and not a matter of who had been responsible for her getting them. Her plan was to get on, and I believed on balance that she was determined to pull me up with her, and not run off with Henderson. She surely wouldn't have made such a great effort into making a trainee lawyer of me if she meant to clear off.

I always knew what the wife wanted, and sometimes our marriage came down to nothing but the question of what she wanted. But what did Amanda Rickerby want? On all available evidence, me in her bed or her in mine, but I could hardly believe that was right. Her approaches were too direct. Women went round the houses when they wanted to fuck someone.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

I lay on my own narrow bed at the top of the house. I'd kept the window open, and the scene beyond was now illuminated by the flashing of the lighthouse, which seemed to light up the whole empty horizon for hundreds of miles, the light then dying away raggedly like a guttering candle. With each successive flash, the sea seemed to boil more violently.

The fire – lit, as I supposed, by Adam Rickerby – burned two feet away from my bed and it made the room too hot like the rest of the house. I turned on my side and watched the line of white light under the closed door – for the gas in the little hallway still burned – and I thought of Fielding. Well, it stood to reason that he was an ex-convict. An apparent gent living permanently in a Scarborough boarding house would have to be in queer somehow even if he wasn't broke, and he certainly didn't seem to be that. He was one of those free-floating businessmen who lived by a series of schemes, and that sort often did pretty well even though the schemes never came to anything.

I ran through some motives for murder – with which the house was fairly bursting. Adam Rickerby was generally nuts, and would defend the house at all costs. Fielding's post card company had been given the chuck by the North Eastern Railway, and he was a man with a past. Had Blackburn known him in Leeds, and been threatening to talk out of turn about him? Fielding wouldn't want the Recorded Music Circle to know he was a convicted fraudster – that'd put a crimp into his social life, all right.

Vaughan was a dirty dog in all respects, and was either honest and open with it, or a splitter who had something to hide. He paid lip service to the idea that Blackburn had made away with himself. But he also seemed to keep trying to drop Fielding in it, and he'd begun pointing the finger at Adam Rickerby into the bargain. The business of the signalling out to sea: why would Rickerby do that? His chief concern as far as I could see was sticking to the bloody meal times. Was Vaughan really trying to put the knock on Adam Rickerby? But he'd as good as put himself on the spot at the same time. By letting on that he'd shown the special range of cards to Blackburn, he was admitting to acting in a way that a sober-sided man like that could easily take against.

Amanda Rickerby? She was mysterious all-round, and she too might well have something to keep from the world at large. She drank, for starters; she was anti-religious where Blackburn had been a bible thumper, and she was funny about the rent. She was, or had been, short of money. She was up to something, anyhow.

I rolled over to the other side and looked at the fire, noticing that it was starting to smoke a little. I climbed out of bed, picked up the water jug that stood by the wash stand, and dashed a pint or so onto the red coals. The sound was tremendous. How a fire protested when you did that! I was replacing the water jug when my toe scraped against something in the floorboards. Looking down, I could make nothing out, so I edged along by the bed until I came to the table where the oil lamp and matches sat. I lit the lamp, carried it back over, and set it down. A short length of lead tube – about a quarter inch worth – stuck up. It was the top of one of the two gas pipes that rose up beyond the lamps in the room of Theo Vaughan: the stub that had remained after the gas pipe (and gas light) in my own room had been removed. Gas would naturally rise to the top of any vertical pipe, but this stub had been nipped tightly shut with a pair of pliers to stop any escape and, leaning closer, I could detect no gas smell from it. Lead, being soft, is easy to nip in that way and I was satisfied that a perfect seal had been made.

I lifted the lamp to the other side of the hearth, and there was the second outcropping of pipe. It too was tightly sealed and gave off no smell. I returned the lamp to the table, blew it out, lay back in my bed, and listened for footsteps on the stairs. I heard the chimney flute note at one o'clock by my watch, and again at four, and I don't believe I slept in all that time but just revolved endlessly the mysteries of Paradise while trying to anticipate the surges of the sea wind against the window. As I lay on the bed I had mostly faced the door but, on hearing the chimes of five rise up from the Old Town, I decided the worst of the night was finished, turned over to face the wall rather than the door, and fell asleep amid the dawn cries of seagulls.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

I awoke and lifted my hand to the back of my head. A delicate sea shell, a fine crab shell perhaps, seemed to hang in my hair. I could not quite trust my hand, for it was made nerveless by cold, but the thing seemed to be at the same time part of me, and not part of me. I tried to tug at the thing, and it both cracked and melted. I brought my hand down, and there was a sticky dampness to it. I could not make out its colour but I knew it to be blood; when dampness comes out of nowhere it is generally safe to assume the worst – to assume that it is blood.

My headache was no worse, anyhow. If anything, I fancied that it was easing, and it had been a while since I'd had one of the electrical flashes. But I wanted badly to get warm. I sat up and put the oilskin more tightly around me. The rise and fall of the ship had become a gentle rocking, a soft swinging, nurserylike. I thought of the wife. Was it true, as I suspected, that she would no longer carry her basket down the main street of Thorpe-on-Ouse in case Robert Henderson should see her about her marketing, and think her low class for not having a servant to do it for her? I could picture Lydia very clearly both with and without basket in the middle of Thorpe, which was proof that my memory was returning. It also seemed to me that there was nothing to choose between the two mental pictures. I had been a fool to fret about Henderson – my anxiety had come from having no graver matter to worry about. I would go back to Thorpe and I would have it all out with Lydia, and if it came to it I would go up to his big house with the stone owl sitting over the door, and I would clout Henderson. Furthermore, I would not be a solicitor, because I did not want to be a solicitor. Even at thirty I was too old and the change of life was too great, and the lawyers were at the shameful end of railway work. It seemed to me, as I sat in that rolling black iron prison, that I had gone to Paradise looking for trouble and hardly wanting to come back because my future, although apparently promising, had been taken out of my own hands. But I would return to York and I would reclaim my future, and if I didn't then I would take a bullet, and there would be nothing between these two outcomes of my present fix.

… Yet while the image of Lydia in Thorpe was clear in my mind, I could still not recall the end of my time in Paradise; and how could my future be contemplated until I had done that? My memory of the final events was lost in a jumble of over-heated rooms propped high above a black sea – a sea that was never still, but that came on in a way somehow un-natural, like a crawling black field.

I lay still; began once more to shiver. I might have slept again in spite of the shivering, and presently, there came a disturbance in the iron room. I could not say what had caused it, but something had changed. All was still again, and I kicked out at the nearest chain link, and it was as though the thing had nerves and had taken umbrage at this, for the part that ran up through the hole shivered for a second, and then the great snake began racing upwards through that hole, making a breakaway with a tremendous, deafening roar that forced me to clap my hands to my ears and move to the furthest corner of my cell.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

When I awoke the lighthouse beam was off, and all was grey along the front. Throwing the bed clothes aside and moving rapidly towards the window I thought some calamity had occurred, but it was just an early winter's morning in Scarborough. There came a knock at the door.

'Yes,' I said.

'Yer tea,' said Adam Rickerby.

'Morning,' I said, opening the door – and he passed me an enamel tray with tea things set out on it. My boots, highly polished, were strung by the laces about his neck. These he set down just inside the door, together with a big jug of hot water for shaving. He'd carried the tray in one hand, and the jug in the other. He was dressed as before, in the long apron, but his hair had grown a little wilder in the night.

'Do you know what time it is?' I enquired.

'I bring t'tea at seven o'clock.'

I had forgotten our arrangement.

'You bring the tea at seven, therefore it is seven o'clock,' I said, putting the tray down on the bed.

'Put it on t'table,' he said, and just for a quiet life I did so.

'Did you sleep well?' I enquired, because I was determined to discover more about this queer bloke.

'I've ter be off down now,' he said. 'I've t'breakfasts to do.'

I had a topping sleep,' I said,'… only the fire smoked a little.' 'I'll tek a broom 'andle ter t'chimney,' he said.

'Do you know why it smoked?'

'Gulls,' he said. 'They nest in chimneys.'

'But it's only March,' I said.

'… Don't follow yer,' he said.

'Gulls don't nest until April or so. I was born in a sea-side town so I know.'

He eyed me for a while.

'Could be last year's,' he said, very rapidly.

'But has no-one else complained of a smoking chimney in this room? Did the fellow Blackburn not complain?'

'Who?'

'Blackburn. You might remember him. He was the one that vanished into thin air while staying here.'

"E did not.'

'Didn't vanish?'

Adam Rickerby took a deep sigh, for all the world as though I was the simpleton and not him.

"E med no complaint!

I took a sip of the tea. It was perfectly good.

'I'm obliged to you,' I said.

'Are yer after a reduction in t'rent?' he enquired anxiously. '… Want yer money back, like?'

'No, why ever do you ask that?'

'I asked yer,' he said, more slowly, and once again giving that flash of unexpected intelligence, 'because I wanted ter know!

So saying he turned about and marched back down to the kitchen. I then moved the jug over to the wash stand, and I had all on to lift it with two hands let alone one. After a shave and sluice-down, I went down to breakfast, which was taken at the kitchen table – apparently this was how it was done in winter.

Amanda Rickerby was there, which surprised me at that early hour. Then again she was reading a novel and sipping tea rather than doing any of the breakfast chores. These had evidently all been left to Adam Rickerby, who was moving plenty of pots and pans about at the range. The landlady glanced up and gave a sly smile by way of saying good morning. She was more beautiful than was needful at breakfast. Over-opposite her – and with his back to me – was Fielding, wearing a fairly smart black suit and very carefully finishing a kipper.

'Morning!' he said, taking a bit of bread to the few remaining specks. 'Sleep well, Mr Stringer?'

'Yes thanks, 'I said. 'You?'

'Very well indeed.'

'I didn't notice the storm, if there was one.'

'Hardly anyone's out from the harbour,' he said, dabbing his mouth with a napkin, 'so I think it's still in prospect.'

'Where's Mr Vaughan?' I asked, and the answer came from Adam Rickerby, who was eyeing me steadily from the range.

"E gets up late,' he said.

'His money came this morning,' Amanda Rickerby put in, 'so I don't think we'll be seeing much of him today.'

She indicated a letter propped up against the knife sharpener. It was addressed to Theodore Vaughan.

'You'll be for the Scarborough engine shed then,' Fielding said, 'and the run back to York.'

'Dare say. If the loco's fixed we'll run it back light engine. That means…'

'I know,' Fielding put in. 'Without carriages.'

I didn't like it that he knew.

'If I know those gentry, they won't want to keep an engine idle for more than a day,' he said.

'Those gentry?'

'The engineers of the North Eastern Railway.'

'No,' I said, 'but there was only one fitter at the shed and… Well, if it comes to it, I might have to stop here another night.'

'Why not?' he said. 'Make a holiday of it!'

Amanda Rickerby read on, but then none of this was news to her.

'If you do come back, you'll have the infinite pleasure of meeting Mrs Dawson,' said Fielding, passing his plate to Adam Rickerby.

I remembered about the daily woman.

'She's due at ten,' said Amanda Rickerby, still with her eyes on her book, 'thank God.'

I thought again of the wife who, being the religious sort of suffragette, never said 'thank God', and who only read books in bed, being always on the go when she was not in bed.

'Porridge,' said Adam Rickerby, and it was by way of being a statement of fact.

As I stared at the porridge that had been put before me, Fielding gave a general 'Morning!' and quit the room.

I began to eat; Amanda Rickerby read, and sipped her tea.

I'd almost finished my porridge when she looked up, and said, 'I hear you've been asking about Mr Blackburn.'

Silence for a space. I watched her brother at the range. Who'd told her of my questions? She was not smiling.

'We believe it was a case of suicide,' she said.

'Yes,' I said.

'Some event seemed to have thrown a great strain on him.'

'Kipper,' said Adam Rickerby, putting it next to my porridge. He retreated to the range, from where he enquired: 'Kipper all right?' 'I haven't started it yet,' I said.

'What a time that was,' said Amanda Rickerby. 'The police all over the house – it does nothing for business, you know.'

There was a hardness in her eyes for the first time, and I thought: This is what you'd see perhaps quite often if you were married to her. She was still beautiful, but in spite of rather than because of her eyes.

'I thought it would be a miracle if we ever got another railway man in,' she said.

'Yes,' I said, contemplating the kipper, 'I can quite see that.'

And when I looked up she was smiling and her eyes were shining again: 'You are that miracle, Mr Stringer.'