The Last Train to Scarborough

Chapter Thirty

On the lower level of the Promenade, a man at a road works was making hot gas, seemingly for his own amusement. No- one was about. The beach was like black glass. I could make out a couple of dog walkers on the sand, a few hundred yards in the direction of the Spa. They minded the sleeting rain; the dogs didn't. It was nine-thirty, and I had half an hour to kill before I met Tommy Nugent at the station. Facing the sea on the lower Prom was the iron gate leading into the Underground Palace and Aquarium. It was padlocked, and there was a poster half slumped in a frame alongside it. 'Great Attractions of the Season', I could just make out: 'Voorzanger's Cosmopolitan Ladies & Gentlemen's Orchestra, 21 in number including Eminent Soloists, will give a Grand Concert Every Sunday at 8'.

But not in winter, they wouldn't.

'Swimming Exhibitions', I read lower down: 'In Large Swimming Bath by Miss Ada Webb and Troupe of Lady Swimmers, and High Divers at Intervals'.

I walked on towards the harbour: the sea water baths were closed, and never likely to re-open by the looks of it. I climbed the wet stone steps to the higher Prom. The ships in the harbour were huddled tight at all angles. A fishing boat approached, bucking about like mad, and I was surprised the blokes walking the harbour walls weren't looking on anxiously. But I soon saw the value of those walls, for the boat steadied the instant it came between them.

I wound my way up towards the shopping streets. The Scarborough citizens had the sea, the cliffs, the great sky and the Castle to themselves, but all was black. I saw a broken bathing machine in a back yard. Because Scarborough was a happier place than most in summer, it was a more miserable one come winter. I walked up Newborough, heading the opposite way to most of the trams, which thundered down the road from the railway station as though they meant to hurl themselves into the sea when they reached the bottom.

According to the station clock tower it was dead on ten when I walked through the booking office and onto Platform One. The station was still guarded by the moody coal trains. It was biding its time until summer, and there was hardly a soul about. The station bookstall stood like a little paper encampment, and the magazines hanging by clothes pegs from it fluttered in the wind that blew along Platform One. Tommy Nugent was buying a paper – The Scarborough Mercury. He hadn't seen me yet. The two kit bags were at his feet, and he was having a laugh with the bloke who ran the stall.

'Bloody hell,' he said, when I walked up to him, 'I'm surprised to see you. I thought you'd be dead.'

'Well, you didn't seem too upset about it,' I said, as we walked away from the bookstall. 'Where did you put up?'

'Place called the Rookery or the Nookery, or something.'

'Did you have a sea view?'

'Did I fuck. Anyhow, I was hardly in the room. I came by your place twice in the night, you know. First at midnight, then at five.'

'Five o'clock? Not with the guns?'

'Of course.'

'I appreciate that, Tommy. But there was no need.'

'The house was all right then, was it?'

He seemed quite disappointed.

'It was very interesting,' I said. 'Now I'd better see if the Chief's sent the case papers.'

'I have 'em here,' said Tommy.

He'd evidently collected the envelope from the station master just before I'd arrived. It had come up in the guard's van on the first train of the day from York, and the Chief had marked it, 'For the Attention of Nugent and Stringer, York Engine Men'. It was better than seeing 'Detective Stringer' written there, but then again the Chief hadn't troubled to seal the envelope, and it turned out that it held no case report but just witness statements from the residents of Paradise. This was the Chief all over: rough and ready, not letting a fellow relax.

Til have a read of these later,' I said.

'Aye,' said Tommy, 'we've to collect our engine. It's all ready according to the SM.'

'It might be,' I said, 'but I'm staying on.'

'But you said the house was all right.'

'Well, it is and it isn't.'

'I'm coming back with you, then.'

'No, Tommy.'

'Why not?'

'They've no more rooms going today than they had yesterday,' I said, and he began protesting and questioning me over the sound of a train that was materialising out of the rain beyond Platform One. Behind Tommy, pasted onto the station building that housed the ladies' and gents' lavatories, was a poster showing what had been on at the Floral Hall six months before. Alongside it was a post card machine. I must've seen it

dozens of times before but I'd never remarked it until now. Was it one of the ones filled by the firm of Fielding and Vaughan? The words 'Post Cards' went diagonally up the front of it; underneath was written '2d, including Vid postage'. You put the coins in a slot and I said, 'pulled out a little drawer indicated by a picture of a pointing finger. You couldn't select your card but had to take pot luck. I fished in my pocket for a couple of pennies.

'You can get yourself a relief fireman and run the engine back,' I told Tommy. 'But I'm not coming.'

'You were meant to be a relief, if you remember, Jim,' he replied. 'They'll think I'm poisoning my bloody firemen… Who are you sending a post card to?'

'Nobody,' I said, dropping in the coins and telling myself that whatever was on the card would be a clue to the goings-on at Paradise. I pulled the drawer and the card showed a country station scene, hand coloured. All that was written on it was 'Complicated Shunting'. A tank engine, running bunker-first, was pulling a rake of coaches away from one side of an island platform; another two carriages waited on the other side. This activity was being watched by a schoolboy. A few feet beyond the rear end of the engine, a man who carried his hat in one hand and a bunch of bright red flowers in the other, and whose hair had been coloured a greenish shade, was crossing the line by barrow boards. Nobody looked out from the engine, so the bloke appeared to be in mortal peril.

The picture made me think of Mr Buckingham: 'While crossing the tracks at a country station, Mr Buckingham was run over by a reversing tank engine. He survived the accident, but it was necessary to amputate his legs…'

A flicker of an idea about the Paradise mysteries came to me but it was lost beyond recall when Tommy said, 'You're buying a card for no reason? It's turned you a bit bloody nuts, this bloody business.'

The train had come in, and stopped with the sound of a great sneeze from the engine. I looked to my right, and saw the guard stepping down. It was Les White, with his leather bag over his shoulder and his glasses in his hand. He was polishing the lenses with his handkerchief, and he looked lost without them on, but when he set them back on his nose and swivelled in our direction… well, it was like the beam of the bloody Scarborough lighthouse. He nodded at Tommy, who said a few words about the state of our engine. White then set off along Platform One. I was glad he hadn't been the guard who'd brought in the witness statements; glad that a fellow could only come in from York to Scarborough once in a morning. As I watched him go through the ticket gate, another idea about the case broke in on me, and it made me very keen to get to the engine shed.

'Come on, Tommy,' I said, and a couple of passengers who'd stepped down from the York train looked on amazed as we went beyond the end of the guard's van, and jumped onto the tracks. You could do that if you were a Company man and to ordinary folk watching, it was as though you'd stepped off a harbour wall into the sea.

Chapter Thirty One

The engine simmered outside the Scarborough shed like a prize exhibit, freshly cleaned and with not a whiff of steam coming from the injector overflow. The tall fitter, who stood by it with the Shed Super alongside him, explained that he'd left the steam pressure from yesterday's run to decline overnight and then, first thing in the morning, he'd replaced the valve, having by a miracle had exactly the right part lying about in the shed. Steam had then been raised again; the Super had telephoned through to Control, who'd told the signalmen along the line to expect to see the engine running back light to York very shortly, and meanwhile some lad had gone at the engine with rape oil so that the boiler fairly gleamed.

'But we can't take it back today,' I said.

The Super had a white flower in his top pocket; the fitter had a mucky rag in his. The fitter was twice the size of the Shed Super and half the thickness, but they both now folded their arms and looked knives at me. Tommy was up on the footplate. On the way over to the engine shed, I'd told him all about the goings-on at Paradise and he'd accepted that he couldn't come into the house himself but he still held out against finding a relief fireman and running back to York on the J Class. He wanted to stay in Scarborough for as long as I did.

Suddenly, I'd had enough of the pantomime; I decided to

get down to cases with the two blokes.

'Look here,' I said, 'the fact is, I'm a copper.'

'You sure?' asked the Super, and I produced my warrant card from my suit-coat pocket.

He inspected it closely, and the fitter had a good look as well.

'You're not a fireman then?' the Shed Super enquired presently.

'I'm on a bit of secret police work,' I said, returning the card to my pocket, 'or at any rate, I was. If you want the chapter and verse, you can telephone through to Chief Inspector Saul Weatherill at the York railway police office – and your opposite number at York North Shed's in on it as well. Best thing is if you ask them to send a new crew.'

'Here,' shouted Tommy, who'd now climbed up onto the footplate, 'you've sorted out this fire hole door!'

'Cylinder oil!' the fitter called up, then he went back to eyeing me.

'Can I have a read of your ledgers?' I asked the Shed Super.

He looked dazed as I explained: 'I want to know how many times a Leeds bloke called Ray Blackburn fired engines into Scarborough.'

'Name rings a bell,' said the Shed Super.

But it did more than that with the fitter.

'Blackburn?' he said. 'He's dead.'

'He is,' I said, 'but how do you know?'

'Scarborough Mercury,' he said, as we turned and entered the shed.

Scarborough being a terminus, every engine that came in had to go on the turntable before heading out, and the turntable was in the shed. The number, make and point of origin of all the engines that came through would be recorded in a ledger, together with the names of the crew, and those ledgers were kept in the Super's office, which was in the back of the shed. We exchanged the falling rain for the shouts, clanging and smoke smell as we made towards those ledgers. But it turned out that the big fitter had all the vital entries in his head.

As we stood in the Super's office, supping tea from metal cups, the fitter explained that the name of any crew man who came into the shed more than half a dozen times would get about, and Blackburn had been through on just about that many occasions. He then related the fact I already knew: at the time of his last turn, Blackburn had been running Leeds-York, and had volunteered to fire his train on the extra leg to Scarborough, the York fireman booked for the job having been ill. I'd assumed this Scarborough trip to be a one-off until the sight of Les White had reminded me that very few railway men go into any station just once.

In fact, according to the fitter, Blackburn had done half a dozen Leeds-Scarborough turns before his final run. These were always on a Saturday, and they'd been Saturdays in the season when extra Scarborough trains were laid on from all the main towns of Yorkshire. The ledgers – when the Super handed them to me – confirmed the fitter's recollections, much to his own quiet satisfaction: Blackburn had fired into Scarborough on the final two Saturdays of August, and on all four in September. He hadn't worked into the town again until Sunday, 19 October, which had proved his final trip. The other coppers who'd investigated his disappearance must have known about these earlier trips, but had evidently thought them of no account. Had the Chief known of them? If so, why had he not told me? To my way of thinking, these earlier trips changed the whole picture.

In that little office, which was like something between an office and a coal bunker, the fitter and the Shed Super had gone back to eyeing me with arms folded, as if to say, 'Now what do you mean to do with this data?'

I put them off, for I didn't quite know, as I told Tommy when we came out of the shed. I would just keep it in mind when I went back to Paradise that someone in the house might have had dealings with Blackburn before he pitched up on that final Sunday.

It was raining hard now and sea, town and sky seemed in the process of merging. We came off the Scarborough railway lands by a new route that took us through a black yard full of wagon bogies and out onto a street of biggish villas, getting on for half of which were guest houses. The window sign 'Vacancies' came up over and again, and I imagined dozens of lonely landladies watching Tommy and me from behind their net curtains and hoping we'd turn in at the gate. How did they last from back-end of one year to May of the next?

There came the long scream of an engine whistle as we walked down the street, and it sounded like a cry of alarm on behalf of the whole town. I'd meant to get shot of Tommy as soon as possible and head directly back to the house, but it was still only eleven, and the sight of him limping in the rain while carrying the two kit bags made me think I ought to find a gentler way to put him off.

We came out onto a wide road that curved down towards the Prom between two great walls. It was as though the real purpose of this road was to channel tons of water into the sea. Huge, rusted iron plates were set into the bricks, and they too seemed part of a secret drainage system. We followed it down, and when we hit the Prom the wind hit us. The sea was black and white and crazed, with the waves all smashing into each other, and exploding against the sea wall. A tram came up, and passed by with clanging bell, and it seemed to be floating along, such was the quantity of water swirling over the lines.

There was a refuge close to hand, however, in the shape of a very pretty little ale house. The name 'Mallinson's' was written in a curve on the window, going over lace curtains that blocked out the lower part of the glass. How thick was the glass of that window? Quarter of an inch, but once Tommy and I were inside, we found that it held off the German Sea very nicely.

It was a cosy little place – dainty for a pub, with lace curtains, upholstered chairs, tables covered with white cloths, and knick-knacks on the mantel-shelves of the two fireplaces. It was the sort of sea-side place that ought not to be open in winter, and ghostly somehow as a result, but there were a fair few in. The drill was that you were served ale from jugs by good- looking serving girls who toured the room carrying trays. I bought glasses of beer for Tommy and myself, and then left him to warm himself by the fire as I stood steaming in my great-coat while reading the Paradise witness statements, stopping only to look at the water falling against the windows, which was now coming more like silent waves than rain.

On the top-most piece of paper, someone had written the word 'Blackburn' and underlined it twice. The other papers, attached by a pin, were the statements. Everyone in Paradise sounded different – higher class – in their statements. All save Fielding.

Amanda Rickerby's was first. She said: I make it my business to see that my guests are not only well catered for in their ordinary wants, but also that they should be happy and really enjoy their time in Paradise. However, I can only go so far as regards the latter. Mr Blackburn seemed to me shy and reserved. He was perhaps rather low about something. He was what I call 'deep'.

He had apparently knocked on the door of the house at eight o'clock, and enquired about a room, having seen the advertisement for the house at what Amanda Rickerby called 'the engine hall' at Scarborough station. Miss Rickerby herself had answered the door to him. He had by her account 'preferred' the small room at the very top of the house: I think on account of the sea view from there, which is a particularly charming one, and you have the benefit even at night, the harbour being so prettily lit up. He had remained in the room until Adam Rickerby had rung the hand bell for supper at 'about eight- twenty or so'.

She said that he'd sat quietly at supper, gone for a walk with 'one of our residents, Mr Vaughan -1 think to a public house.' While sitting in the kitchen, she'd heard them return: They were admitted to the house by Mr Fielding, I believe, but I only heard them coming in. I did not see them. To the best of her knowledge, Vaughan and Fielding had then sat talking in the sitting room, and Ray Blackburn had gone up to his room at the top, which was now mine. She understood that he'd later brought his boots down to the kitchen, but she'd left the kitchen by then, and had gone to bed. She had not seen him again; she had nothing further to add.

Howard Fielding 'had found Mr Blackburn a very thoughtful and pleasant gentleman, but no conversationalist'. He went on: Having lately had a business connection with the North Eastern Railway, and having some knowledge of the Company, I tried to draw him out over supper on railway topics. We touched, as I remember, on locomotive boiler capacities, the role of the fireman as compared to that of the driver, and the railway speed records. But Mr Blackburn only responded to the degree compatible with ordinary politeness. After supper, at about nine-thirty, my friend and fellow resident, Mr Vaughan, then invited Mr Blackburn to take a stroll with him. I believe they walked to a public house. They returned to the boarding house perhaps forty- five minutes later -1 admitted them myself – and Mr Blackburn, looking perhaps rather out-of-sorts, went directly upstairs. Mr Vaughan and I then took a nightcap in the sitting room.

I thought: That's quaint – 'nightcap'.

Fielding's statement continued: At eleven-thirty, I took my boots downstairs to the kitchen for cleaning. Adam Rickerby is generally on hand to clean boots between eleven and midnight. After giving my boots to the boy, I returned to my room, passing Mr Blackburn on the stairs. He was taking his boots down. I said, 'Good night', and he merely grunted by way of reply. I never saw Mr Blackburn again.

I turned over the leaf, and came to the words: 'Adam Rickerby, co-proprietor of Paradise Guest House, saith…' and saw that the lad had been magically given the powers of speech by the Leeds coppers: Mr Blackburn was at all times a quiet gentleman. I noticed he was quiet when he first came into the house, and he continued in that way. Quiet, I mean. I cooked the supper on the evening in question, as I generally do in the winter time. It was a hot supper. Mr Blackburn ate all his food. He went for a drink with Mr Vaughan. These gentlemen came back at I don't know what time. At half past eleven or so I was cleaning the boots in the kitchen, and sitting with my sister. She was reading to me from the papers. I am not educated up to reading. Mr Fielding came in, late on, with his boots. Mr Blackburn came after with his. I cleaned the boots and went to bed. I sleep on the ground floor, in the room that used to be the wash room next to the scullery. I heard nothing in the night. On waking, at half past five, I did my early chores until six-thirty. No-one else was about. I then took Mr Fielding up his boots and early cup of tea. I returned to the kitchen, and collected Mr Blackburn's boots and tea. I took these up to his room with hot water. He was not there.

I turned over the page, and read, 'Theodore Vaughan, resident of Paradise Guest House, saith…And there were two pages for him as against one for everyone else: I found him a pleasant enough chap, rather thoughtful. Over supper, I formed the distinct idea that he was happy with his own company. But it is my custom of a Sunday evening to take a walk; I was putting my cape on in the hall when Mr Blackburn happened to come by. I asked whether he would like to come along with me, and he agreed. In the course of our strolling we passed the Two Mariners, a pleasant public house. I suggested that we take a glass of beer. Again, Mr Blackburn agreed. I can't recall our conversation in detail – something of Scarborough history, something of railways. We were back at the house soon after ten o'clock, less than an hour after our departure. Mr Fielding let us in, since I'd forgotten my key. Mr Blackburn then went up to his room, and I went into the sitting room, where I smoked a cigar and drank some sherry with Mr Fielding. I went up to bed not long after eleven. I believe that Mr Fielding went up later. I occupy the room directly beneath the one used by Mr Blackburn. At first I was busy about my own preparations for sleep and going between my room and the bathroom on the landing opposite, and so was not paying attention to the noises from overhead. I am led to believe that Mr Blackburn carried his boots downstairs before midnight, and there were perhaps some noises that indicated that activity, but I could not say for certain. I was very tired, and fell asleep shortly after.

That statement carried the date '7 November, 1913'

The second sheet was a second statement by Vaughan, dated 9 November: I would like to add to my earlier statement as follows: Having repaired to the public house called the Two Mariners with Mr Blackburn I presented for his inspection certain post cards of a nature rather 'saucy', as some might say. Not to mince words they showed young female persons in various states of what is known as déshabillé…

This was all meant in fun, the statement ran on. Post cards of this sort are commonly seen in the sea-side towns and are by no means – as I understand it – outside the law. I happen to have come by a few cards of this sort having once been in the post card business. They are really just the 'old masters' brought up to date and I will quite often produce them in male company for a bit of a 'laugh' with the boys. However, Mr Blackburn made it clear to me that they were not his 'cup of tea', and so our conversation resumed its earlier course.

This was Vaughan in a corner. The coppers had put the screws on him, having discovered the cards and confronted him over them. I passed the papers over to Nugent, saying, 'Complicated shunting.'

'Eh?'

'Have a read,' I said, handing him the papers.

Who was lying? Was anyone? Vaughan's evidence had been the most interesting. You were limited about what you could say in a police statement; you were only supposed to speak about what you knew, and what might have a bearing on the crime. But Vaughan had tried to throw a bit of doubt on Fielding's evidence… And had he heard any noise from overhead when he was in his room, or not? Also, it was not quite clear whether Amanda Rickerby had been in the kitchen when

Blackburn came down with his boots… But what significance could that have either way?

I drank my beer and looked about the pub. The more booze that went down, the more I was looking forward to going back to Paradise and seeing Amanda Rickerby. I wanted to take her on, one way or another.

'What about those cards?' I asked Tommy after a while. 'Why do you suppose Vaughan showed them to me when he'd already got into bother for showing them to Blackburn?'

'I've an idea about that,' said Tommy.

'Same here,' I said, and as Tommy stopped one of the serving girls and bought us another couple of glasses of ale, I gave him the benefit of my idea:

'I reckon Vaughan showed me the cards for a reason, and it was nothing to do with selling them on to me and making money. He knew he was on the spot. He knew there was suspicion about what had happened as a result of him showing them to Blackburn, who was a very straight bit of goods, remember. Vaughan wanted to make out that he was free and easy with the cards; that he might show them to anyone and nothing would come of it – that it really was all a bit of a laugh.'

(I suddenly recalled Mr Ellis, the old boy who'd sold galoshes, and had just quit the guest house. Vaughan had perhaps held off from showing him the cards on account of his age, and the fact that he was never likely to be interested.)

Tommy Nugent was nodding his head.

'That's it,' he said. 'If the coppers came at him again, he'd be able to say, "I showed this other bloke the cards as well. Why would I do that if it had caused any trouble with the first one?'"

'Right,' I said, stepping aside to let a bloke come by. 'That's exactly…'

Theo Vaughan was standing immediately to my right. He had his cape over his arm, and held a glass of ale half drunk and a cigar half smoked, which meant he'd been in for a while. Cramming the witness statements into my suit-coat pocket, I turned towards him. He gave a start when he saw me, then he grinned and I thought: Either he's a bloody good actor or he's only just this minute clocked me, in which case he would not have heard what I'd said.

He said, 'How do, Jim!'

I introduced Tommy Nugent as my driver and Vaughan shook his hand warmly.

'Where've you been?' I asked him, and he looked at me as if, just for once, I'd been over-familiar instead of him.

'Around and about,' he said. 'Errands,' he added, swaying slightly on his boot heels. 'Meant to tell you about this place, Jim… Pub run entirely by women, and you don't see that often. Decent looking fillies into the bargain,' and he practically winked at us both. 'What about your engine?'

'It isn't quite right,' I said, 'so it looks like I'll be staying another night.'

'Good-o,' he said.

Tommy Nugent didn't know where to look, for of course he'd only just been reading about Vaughan and his very particular line of business. I think it was to cover up his embarrassment that he muttered something about fetching some more beers and wandered off in search of a waitress. I too was feeling rather knocked, so I said, 'I'm just off to the gents, Theo.'

But he said, 'I'll come with you, Jim.'

He set down his glass and followed me, cigar in hand, out into a white-washed back yard – where the rain flew, and the roaring sea echoed – and into a tiny gentlemen's lavatories with two stalls for pissing. Vaughan stood close enough for me to hear his breathing, which he did loudly, through both his nose and his moustache. I wondered what he'd been doing all morning. Evidently, he'd been drinking for a good part of it. Well, his money had arrived by the post from Streatham; he was in funds. As he started to piss, he had the cigar in his mouth; he then lowered the cigar and when he turned away from the stall I saw that it was extinguished. He was stowing the remnant of it in his waistcoat pocket as I asked, 'How d'you put that cigar out?'

'Private method, Jim,' he said.

'All right then,' I said. 'Why did you put it out?'

'Can't smoke in the rain, and I'm off back to the house, Jim,' he said. 'Shall I tell them you're expected for luncheon?'

I did not answer immediately. My life, I knew, would be a good deal simpler if I did not go back, and it might be a good deal longer.

'All right,' I said. 'What time?'

'It's generally about one-ish, Jim.'

'Right you are,' I said, in as light a tone as I could. 'Yes,' I said, 'tell Miss Rickerby I'll be in for one.'

I looked at my watch: midday. I did not care for the constant march of the second hand. It wouldn't take Vaughan an hour to reach Paradise, but he went off directly, and when I regained the bar I found out from Tommy that he'd done it in double quick time as well – hadn't even finished his drink. None of this was at all like him, and his behaviour had increased my state of nerves, so that I was fairly short with Tommy as he quizzed me about Vaughan: short to the point that he gave up talking, and just fell to watching the rain and the serving girls with a hopeless sort of expression that made me feel guilty.

It was Amanda Rickerby – she brought out the worst in me. Half the reason I wanted rid of Tommy was so that I could have her glances to myself. I couldn't help thinking that I had a clear run at Paradise, what with Vaughan being such an off- putting sort of bloke, and Fielding being… well, was he queer? What was my intention? I did not mean to try and ride the lady exactly, but I certainly meant to do something with her: to arrest her, for instance; have it out with her about Blackburn. I would tangle with her somehow, and I wondered whether my real intention was to get revenge for the way Lydia had tried to push me about. But I knew that I ought not to think this way. If my wife pushed me about, it was because I let her.

I said to Tommy, 'When I go off, will you send a wire to my wife? You might go back to the station, or do it anywhere. The address is the post office, Thorpe-on-Ouse.'

'Saying what?' he asked, and I thought: Saying kind things in general.

'Tell her I'll see her tomorrow,' I said.

He nodded.

'I'm off, Tommy,' I said, and it was surprisingly easy to get away from him, and without even making an arrangement for the next day. Or perhaps not exactly surprising, I thought, as I walked along the Prom, with head down and coat collar up, trying hard to keep a straight course against the battering of the wind. After all, he'd seen that the situation at Paradise was pretty involved, and he was back there, warm and dry in the women's pub with a glass of beer in his hand and the guns at his feet should any trouble arise. But it didn't seem likely to – not where Tommy was, anyhow.

Chapter Thirty-Two

The iron wall of the chain locker cracked and the grey Mate stood in the gloom of the companionway holding the pocket revolver.

'How are you, my friend?'

'We've anchored,' I said.

'Come along with me,' he said, and he was holding the outer door open.

'What became of the kid?' I asked. 'Did he jump?'

'Nothing,' said the Mate'… He got wet,' he added, at length.

'Why did he jump?'

'Yes,' said the Mate. 'Why? I would like to know too.'

Stumbling onto the deck, I saw that our ship had arrived at its rightful home, for it was now one of hundreds or so it appeared. Under the dark blue, roaring night sky, I had the impression of ships in lines stretching fore and aft; some were on the wide channel in which we were anchored – the Thames Estuary, of course – while others appeared to have been picked up and set down amid the streets. I saw a ship that had interrupted a line of street lamps; a ship at close quarters with a church. I had the impression of many smaller vessels patrolling the lines of the big ones like prison guards, and I had the idea that this was also a city of one-armed men, a city of cranes that were all lit by small white lights like Christmas trees. Most were still but every so often one would stir, as though it wanted to confer with its neighbour, or couldn't stand the sight of its neighbour, and so must turn aside. The fore-deck of our collier seemed to command the whole of the great docks but I knew I saw only a fraction of the mass; that Beckton stood only on the fringes of the London docks proper and that I had imagined beyond the limits of my vision.

'Where's the gas works?' I asked the Mate, who was eyeing me with his chin sunk into the up-turned collar of his brass- buttoned coat. He shifted his grey-bearded chin so that it came clear of the collar, and indicated an expanse that shone moonlike a little way for'ard on our starboard side – it was perhaps a quarter of a mile off. I saw a jetty crowded with cranes, and two colliers docked there. All was silent and still on the jetties, but you could see the way things would go on come first light. High-level railway lines ran back from the jetties and these penetrated the factory buildings set down amid the great fields of pale blue dust; the lines smashed through the front walls, came out through the backs and ran on to the next, like lions jumping through hoops in the circus, only these were not factories but retort houses, where the coal was taken to be burnt and the gas made. The York gas works, at Layerthorpe, ran to one retort house but here were dozens, all tied together by the railway lines and set in the wide expanse together with their companions the gas holders, which were perfectly round, like great iron pies.

'Have we made the turnaround?' I asked the Mate, and he didn't answer but indicated with the revolver that we were to walk along to the bridge house once more. As we made our way, there came one repeated clanging noise, echoing through the night, the beating heart of the London docks, as I imagined.

Once again, there was nobody about on the fore-deck, and I saw nobody but the Mate prior to being sat down before the Captain in the chart room. The chart lay on the table as before, the oil lamp and the coffee pot on top of the chart. I doubted that the Captain had given it as much as a single glance on our way from the north. He and the Mate evidently navigated by second nature or force of habit. Running the ship was something they did casually, while attending to other business.

The Mate gave the revolver to the Captain. Behind the Captain's chair, the door leading to the bridge was closed and there was no man out there. For the first time since waking, I noticed the silence of the ship.

The Captain sat with arms folded, and his eyes never left me. I would have said he was a handsome man, although he looked a little like a marionette. There was something neat, cat-like about him.

'Coffee?' he said, and he leant forward and poured me a cup.

'Do you want some carbolic?'

He knew his man had crowned me. I shook my head.

'Food?'

'Later,' I said, and the Captain flashed a look at the Mate that I didn't much care for.

'Do you want to go to the heads?' enquired the Captain.

'Come again?' I said.

'For a piss,' the Mate put in,'… or the other.'

He wouldn't say the word. They were quite gentlemanly, this pair, after their own fashion. I thought about the Captain's question: going by the state of my trousers I must have pissed myself at some earlier stage in the proceedings, but I was not going to boast about the fact if the stink coming off me hadn't made it evident. As for the other business – that had all somehow gone by the board. I shook my head.

'Then carry on with your story,' said the Captain.

'I'll start it if you tell me what happened to the kid.'

No answer.

'I reckon he was scared half to death,' I ran on.'… Now have we unloaded the coal? No, don't reckon so, because we're still sitting low in the water, and the ship'd be even filthier if we had done. When's the turnaround?'

'For you,' said the Captain, 'it could be quicker than you think.'

We eyed each other for a good while.

'Well,' I said,'… where was I?'

'Paradise guest house,' said the Captain.

'I know, but where had I got up to?'

It was the Mate who answered.

'Your engine was all fixed, but you did not take it home with you.'

He made me sound like a schoolboy with a broken toy. Still, it was no fault of his own that he was bloody foreign.

'You should have taken it, you know,' said the Captain, suddenly leaning forwards over his sea chart. 'You should have done it.'

Chapter Thirty-Three

Adam Rickerby let me into Paradise without a word. It was midday. I could hear laughter from the kitchen, but made directly for my own room at the top of the house. Climbing the stairs, I realised that Rickerby was following me, and when we came to the floor being decorated I turned and said, 'I'm staying another night.'

'I know,' he said, in his blank-faced way.

I turned and climbed the final staircase, and he climbed it two steps behind. On the attic landing, I turned again and he suddenly seemed enormous, the roof being lower there. I asked his habitual question back at him:

'Can I help you?'

'Aye,' he said, and he was lighting the gas on the little landing.

When the jet was roaring, he turned and held out his hand, saying, 'Two shilling.'

'Don't worry,' I said, 'I'm not going to make off.'

'Who said you were?'

Again, the flash of intelligence.

I paid the money over, and once again he dropped it in his apron pocket. I took my great-coat off, walked into the little room, and put it on the bed. Rickerby looked on from the doorway.

'You've ter put that in t'closet,' he said.

I turned and eyed him. I was minded to tell him to clear off.

'Why? I said.

'It's damp.'

'What of it?'

'Wants airing… You might take a chill.'

'That's my look-out, isn't it? Why are you so interested in trains, Adam?'

'Why are you ' he said, and he stepped into the room. He was bigger than he ought to've been. Something had gone wrong in the making of him. He took another step towards me. I said, 'Go steady now,' but he still came on, and I damn near told him I was a copper, and that he'd better quit the room. But he went right by me, picked up my coat and put it into the closet, threatening to have the whole thing over and setting all the hangers jangling.

'Why do you like train smashes, Adam?' I called after him, as he left the room.

'Because I don't care for trains,' he replied, and I'd broken through at last…

'How do you mean, you'd broken through?' enquired the Captain, as the rattling of the swinging coat hangers was replaced by the sound of the Mate running his hand over his grey beard, the coldness of the chart room, and the gas smell put out day and night by the Gas, Light and Coke Company.

The Captain had brought me up short. I'd barely started again with my recollections. I'd been pleased to have them returning so clear and complete, and I was forgetting that I might have to answer for them; forgetting about the gun that lay on the table, which was not two feet away from me, but it was only six inches from the Captain's right hand. It was a tiny piece, but it would do the job. What was it that Tommy Nugent had said? 'How big a hole do you want to make in their heads, Jim?'

'I don't know,' I said to the Captain.

The Mate smoked a cigar from the tin with the picture of the church on it. He also had before him a plain glass bottle containing a brown spirit of some sort – whisky or rum, not Spanish sherry – and a small glass, which he filled from the bottle pretty regularly. It seemed to be his reward for the ship having reached its destination. But the Captain did not take a drink.

'It was the first obvious connection,' I said. 'The two follow on, do you not see? Why and then because. It proved he wasn't such a blockhead as all that.'

'You thought that he had been making a show?' the Dutchman put in, but it was the Captain who came up with the right word:

'Shamming?' he said.

'I'm not sure.'

'What happened next?'

'I went to down to the kitchen.'

'And?'

Chapter Thirty-Four

In the kitchen, Amanda Rickerby had her hair down (which made her a different kind of beauty) and was brushing it while she sat at the kitchen table, which was crowded with new- bought groceries. Instead of 'hello', she said, 'Mr Fielding is very chivalrously peeling the potatoes,' and he was most unexpectedly working at the sink with his suit-coat off and shirt sleeves very carefully rolled.

'It is extremely unhygienic of me to brush my hair in the kitchen,' Miss Rickerby added, and I saw there was pen and paper in front of her.

'Don't worry on my account,' I said.

'I'm most awfully sorry. I'll stop just as soon as I've finished.'

Vaughan was not present. Adam Rickerby stood by the range, and paid me no mind. He was gazing at his boots, as he was being quizzed by a round, jolly looking woman – evidently Mrs Dawson the daily help.

'How are we off for tinned rhubarb?' she was asking him.

'We've none in,' said Rickerby.

'Prunes?'

'None in.'

'Vanilla essence.'

'Eh?'

'Never mind. Rice?'

'We've none in… I reckon.'

'Ah now, I detected a flicker of hope there, Mrs Dawson,' Howard Fielding said from the sink, moving a quantity of peeled potatoes onto the draining board.

'There,' said Amanda Rickerby, who'd finished brushing her hair, and was putting it up. 'What do you think, Mr Stringer?'

Being so curly, it didn't look much different; but it did look beautiful.

'Good,' I said, thinking: As you know very well.

'Good,' she repeated. 'But I wish there was a looking glass in here.'

'It's not your boudoir, love,' said Mrs Dawson, who was now in the larder. 'And I wish you wouldn't move everything about from one week to the next. I know it's you and not Adam. He's perfectly neat-handed.'

'We should put up a notice,' said Fielding from the sink. '"A place for everything, and everything in its place.'"

He'd turned around now, and was smiling at me, drying his hands on a tea towel and giving me that questioning look of his.

'Yes,' said Amanda Rickerby, 'but where would we put it?'

It was then that I saw the glass of wine – white this time – at her elbow, and not only the glass but the bottle. 'But where would we put it?' she repeated, in a dreamy sort of way. Looking at me, she picked up her pen, and said, 'How about "excellent in quality"?'

But it seemed that she was speaking to Fielding, even though she had her back to him, for he replied,' Superior in quality,' and Amanda Rickerby wrote that down. 'No tinned meat,' he added. 'You have that down?'

Miss Rickerby nodded, more or less to herself. She then said, 'Tariff furnished on application,' and she gave me a lovely, mysterious smile at that. She'd seen that I'd noticed the bottle. It said 'Chablis' on the label, and I could not have pronounced that word but I knew it signified good wine.

'Now I need fresh cheese,' said Mrs Dawson.

'Can you have fresh cheese?' asked Amanda Rickerby. 'Mr Fielding's special reserve,' she said to me, indicating the bottle.

'Help yourself to a glass of wine, Mr Stringer,' Fielding called out from the sink. 'It's a rare event to find the Burgundy whites in Scarborough.'

'And he should know,' put in Miss Rickerby.

She found a glass, and poured me some wine.

'It's been standing in cold water since breakfast time,' she said, regaining her seat, 'and what do you think? Mr Fielding sent Adam with a sovereign to buy some lovely fish from the harbour.'

Vaughan now entered in his cape, looking flushed and damp but in good spirits. I wondered where he'd been since the women's pub. Seeing the fish lying in white paper on the kitchen table, he said: 'Good-o, I like a bit of cod.'

'It's haddock,' Fielding called out. He had now acquired his own glass of the Chablis, and it appeared that a regular party was in the making.

'We're going to have it with cheese sauce,' said Amanda Rickerby,'… and creamed potatoes.'

But of course she was not lifting a finger to help her brother, who was doing all the work with some assistance from Mrs Dawson.

'Is this normal?' I said. 'For a Monday in Paradise?'

'It is not, Jim,' said Vaughan. 'Potted shrimps and stewed fruit would be near the mark for normal. What are we having for pudding, Mrs Dawson? I fancy treacle tart.'

'All right, Mr Vaughan,' she said, 'I'll just immediately make that for you.'

'Hang about,' he said, 'I'll give you a hand.'

And he walked into the larder and came out with a tin of Golden Syrup, which he passed to Mrs Dawson before sitting back down again and taking a copy of Sporting Life from the pocket of his cape. Mrs Dawson took the lid off the tin, saying, 'That's no earthly use,' and passed it to Amanda Rickerby, who peered in before handing it in turn back to Vaughan.

'It's more like olden syrup,' she said, but the crack was for my benefit. She seemed most anxious for my approval of all her remarks, and so I grinned back at her – but were the smiles of a woman who was half cut worth the same as those from a sober one? And whenever I see someone drinking heavily in the daytime I wonder why they're about it, whereas evening drinking is only to be expected and quite above board.

'Seems all right to me,' said Vaughan, inspecting the treacle and receiving a glass of wine from Fielding. He dipped his finger into the tin, and started licking the stuff.

'It's just because we're all always so blue on Monday,' said Amanda Rickerby, 'and today we're going to be different, and you and I are going to have a lovely long talk, Mr Stringer.'

I thought: At this rate, we're going to have a fuck, and that's all there is to it. All I had to do was let on I was married and that'd put an end to it, and I knew I should do it because if you fucked one woman who wasn't your wife, then where would it end? You might as well fuck hundreds, or at least try, and your whole life would be taken up with it.

I saw that Fielding was eyeing me from his post at the sink.

'Just at present, Miss Rickerby is composing an advertisement for the Yorkshire Evening Press! he said.

'You mean you're composing it,' Vaughan interrupted. 'Old Howard's a great hand at writing adverts,' he added, turning to me. 'He advertised in the Leeds paper for a promising young man interested in post cards, and I thought: That's me on both counts! You see, I'd worked for a while on one of the travelling post offices, Jim.'

'Which ones?' I enquired.

'The Night Mail "Down".'

I was impressed, for the Night Mail 'Down', with carriages supplied by the Great Northern and staff by the General Post Office, was the TPO.

'You must have lived in London at that time,' I said, 'since you'd have worked out of Euston?'

'Born in London, Jim,' said Vaughan, and I wondered whether that alone accounted for his appearing to be of a slightly superior class. I tried to picture him walking every morning through the great arch in front of Euston station.

'Did three years on that,' he said, 'clerking in the sorting carriages and… well, I saw the quantity of cards being sent.'

'As a misprint in The Times once had it, Mr Stringer,' Fielding put in, 'the down postal leaves London every evening with two unsorted letters and five thousand engines.'

I grinned at him.

'Did you quit?' I enquired, turning back to Vaughan.

'Chucked it up, yes. Didn't care for the motion of the train, Jim; gave me a sort of sea sickness.'

'Mai de mer,' said Fielding, and everything stopped, as though we were all listening for the sound of the sea coming from just yards beyond the wall of the kitchen. Everything stopped, that is, save for Adam Rickerby, who had been put to chopping parsley with a very small knife, and was evidently making a poor fist of it. Mrs Dawson was eyeing him. I knew she was going to step in, and I wondered whether he'd really fly into rage this time – and with knife in hand. But there was something very kindly about the way she took the knife from the lad, saying, 'Let's do the job properly. You're worse than me, love.'

With Mrs Dawson looking on, and the parsley chopped, Adam Rickerby then lowered the haddock into a big pot, poured in some milk, and set it on the range. At length, the room began to be filled with a sort of fishy fog. Theo Vaughan had finished his wine, and was now helping himself from the beer barrel on the table, saying 'You sticking with the wine, Jim?'

In-between doing bits of cooking in consultation with Mrs Dawson, Adam Rickerby was trying to make things orderly in the kitchen. He was forever shifting the knife polisher about on the table, and presently took it away to the sideboard. Amanda Rickerby, disregarding her pen and paper, was now sipping wine at a great rate and saying things such as, 'I do like it when we're all in, and it's raining outside.' She then turned to me, enquiring, 'Tell us all about trains, Mr Stringer. Have you ever eaten a meal on one?'

Adam Rickerby eyed me as I revolved the question. As a copper, I'd quite often taken dinner or luncheon in a restaurant car, usually with the Chief and at his expense. Would an ordinary fireman do it? Had I ever done it when I'd been an ordinary fireman, leaving aside sandwiches and bottled tea on the footplate? No.

'Do you count light refreshments in a tea car?' I said.

'Yes!' Amanda Rickerby said, very excited. 'Is there one running into Scarborough?'

'In summer there is,' I said.

'And might they do a little more than a tea? Not a joint but a chop or a steak?'

'I think so.'

'And a nice glass of wine? When does the first one run?'

'May sort of time,' I said, and she shut her eyes for a space, contemplating the idea.

'Cedar-wood box after luncheon, Mr Stringer?' Fielding called over to me.

I nodded back. 'Obliged to you,' I said.

Miss Rickerby was standing, leaning forward to pour me more wine, and she threatened to over-topple onto me, which I wished she would do.

'Care for another glass?' she enquired, sitting back down.

Vaughan gave a mighty sniff, and said, 'You ought to have asked that before you filled it, Miss R… strictly speaking.'

But she ignored him in favour of eyeing me.

'Well, it goes down a treat,' I said.

'Just so!' said Fielding, and Aijianda Rickerby turned sharply about and looked at him.

'Are you married, Mr Stringer?' she said, facing me again – and I knew I'd failed to keep the look of panic from my face.

'Well…' I said again.

'Three wells make a river and you in the river make it bigger,' said Mrs Dawson from the pantry, where she was making a list. It was an old Yorkshire saying, but what did it mean, and what did she mean by it?

'You either are or you aren't,' said Amanda Rickerby. 'I mean, it ought not to require thought.'

I was fairly burning up with embarrassment. But Mrs Dawson had hardly looked up from her pencil and note pad while making her remark; Fielding was taking the corkscrew to another bottle; Adam Rickerby was stirring a pot; Theo Vaughan was biting his long thumbnail while reading, and the one little pointer on the gas meter that moved around fast was moving around just as fast as ever.

'No,' I said, 'I'm not,' and the cork came out as Fielding said, 'Oh dear.'

'What's up?' said Vaughan, looking up.

'It's corked,' said Fielding.

'It was,' said Vaughan, 'but now you've taken the cork out.'

'No, I mean the cork has crumbled,' said Fielding.

'What's the harm?' said Vaughan, turning the page of the paper. 'You weren't thinking of putting it back in, were you?'

'You don't seem to understand,' said Fielding.

I had betrayed Lydia my wife: our eleven years together, our children… I told myself I'd done it in order to keep in with Miss Amanda Rickerby. I had done it for the sake of the investigation, and no other reason. She was on the marry and it was important for me to keep her interest in me alive in order to acquire more data. Amanda Rickerby was grinning at me, and I believed she knew. Yes, she knew all right.

I drained my glass, sat back and said, 'You say that Blackburn jumped into the sea, but would that really have killed him? Just to jump in off the harbour wall?'

'I'll tell you what it wouldn't have done, Jim,' said Vaughan, still looking over Sporting Life. 'It wouldn't have warmed him up:

'Lucifer matches, Mr Stringer,' said Amanda Rickerby. 'You can suck the ends and then you'll die. Perhaps he did that.'

'While he was bobbing about in the sea, you mean?' asked Vaughan. 'And you have to suck every match in the box, you know.' 'My dad', said Miss Rickerby, 'did it by drinking a bottle of spirits every day for forty years.'

'Yes, and you think on about that, Amanda dear,' said Mrs Dawson. 'I don't like to see wine on the table so early in the day.'

'It's a special occasion, Mrs Dawson,' said Amanda Rickerby, and she rose to her feet. With a special smile in my direction, she said, 'Won't be a minute,' and quit the room.

Theo Vaughan was still sticking his finger into the tin of Golden Syrup.

'I like treacle,' he said.

'Evidently,' Fielding put in.

'I like it on porridge,' said Vaughan.

'That would be sacrilege to the Scots,' said Fielding.

'If you put it into porridge,' said Vaughan, 'it allows you to see into the porridge.'

'Very useful I'm sure,' said Fielding.

'It goes like the muslin dresses of the ladies on the beach when the sun is low. They're sort of.'…'

'They are transparent, Vaughan,' said Fielding.

'Noticed it yourself, have you?'

'I have not!

'Mr Vaughan, please remember there are ladies present,' said Mrs Dawson. But in fact she herself was the only one in the room at that moment, and she was putting on her coat and gloves, at which I saw my opportunity.

'I'll show you to the door, Mrs Dawson,' I said. Once out in the hallway, I said, 'Very good house, this. It's a credit to you – and to the boy.'

'He's a bit mental, the poor lamb,' Mrs Rickerby said, fixing her wrap, 'but he does his best.' 'I'm thinking of trying to help him in some way. I know he has a strong interest in railways…

She eyed me. The clock ticked. I couldn't keep her long, since she was evidently over-heating in her coat and wrap.

'I know he likes to read about them,' I said, 'or to be read to about them.'

'I've read to him on occasion,' said Mrs Dawson, 'when we've done our chores of a morning.'

'About what exactly?'

She kept silence for a moment, reaching for the latch of the door. I opened the door for her.

'Youth cut to death by express train,' she said. 'Collision in station, engine on platform. Driver killed, fireman scalded. Car dashes onto level crossing as train approaches… He knows his letters well enough to spot a railway item in the newspaper, and then everything has to stop while you read it out.'

'Why?'

'Why? It's just how he is. It's how his condition takes him. He's a very simple lad, is Adam. He has this house, which he tries to keep up. He did have Peter…'

'Peter?'

'His cat that died.'

The rain made a cold wind as it fell onto Bright's Cliff.

'… And he has his little boat,' Mrs Dawson added.

'Oh? Where's that?'

'Sometimes in the stables over the road, sometimes on the beach, sometimes in the harbour.'

'How does he move it about?'

'On a cart.'

'He goes in for a bit of sailing, does he?'

'It's a rowing boat.'

In the kitchen I'd thought Mrs Dawson a kindly woman, which perhaps she was, but she didn't seem to have taken to me and I wondered whether she was the first person in Paradise to have guessed that I was a spy. Or was it just that – being married herself and a woman experienced in the ways of men – she'd somehow known I was lying about not having a wife?

As Mrs Dawson stepped out into the rain, I heard a footfall on the dark stairs. Amanda Rickerby was coming down, and I returned with her in silence to the kitchen, which was a less homely place without Mrs Dawson. It was too hot and everyone looked red. Vaughan was moving some pots and pans aside so that he could get at the beer barrel again; Fielding remained with his back to the sink with arms folded and head down, evidently lost in a dream, but he looked up as we walked in, and Adam Rickerby approached his sister, carrying the fish in its baking pan.

She said, 'Oh dear, Adam love, it's over-cooked.'

She drew towards her another dish.

'The only thing for it,' she said, 'is to break it up, put it in this, and make a pie.'

'A pie?' he fairly gasped, and he looked all about in desperation. As he did so, it was Fielding's turn to quit the room. In the interval of his absence, Amanda Rickerby played with a salt cellar, completely self-absorbed, as it seemed to me; Vaughan pulled at his 'tache and read his paper, and Adam Rickerby fell to tidying the kitchen with a great clattering of crockery and ironmongery. When Fielding returned a few minutes later, the lad was arranging the objects on the table: he wanted the knife polisher in a line with the vegetable boiler, the toast rack, the big tea pot, and so on.

'Adam, love,' said his sister, 'don't take on. I'm just going to ask Mr Stringer about summer trains, I'll see to the cooking in a moment.'

'It's too late,' he said. 'It'll be tea time any minute.'

'Well, stop moving things about, anyhow.'

'I en't movin' things about,' said Adam Rickerby. 'I'm movin' 'em back!

So saying, he walked directly through the door that gave onto the scullery, and I heard the opening and closing of a further door, indicating that he had gone into his own quarters at the back of the house.

'If luncheon is off then so am I,' said Vaughan, rising to his feet.

'Mr Stringer,' Fielding enquired from his post at the sink, 'will you come upstairs now for that cigar?'

And I somehow couldn't refuse him.

Chapter Thirty-Five

In the ship room the gas had not been lit, and the fire was low. Fielding, who entered in advance of me, was stirring it as I walked up to the left hand window and watched the storm. The wine and the earlier beer had made my head bad, and I had a half a mind to lift the sash and let in the wind and flying rain. I was in no mood for smoking a dry cigar but it would be a way of getting at Fielding. Or did he want to get at me?

He set down the poker and brought the cedar-wood box over. There were just two short cigars rolling about inside. The Spanish sherry, I noticed, was waiting on the small bamboo table. He poured two glasses, and we both drank. I saw for the first time that he wore a signet ring on his right little finger.

'Quite a panorama,' he said, indicating the window, 'as the post card people say.'

Has he brought me up to show me the view? I didn't want the sherry, but I drank the stuff anyway, as if doing so would bring the truth closer. But Fielding was only smiling politely. He seemed to have no topic for conversation in his mind.

'What ships do you see from here?' I asked, presently.

'Only this morning,' he said, 'one of Mr Churchill's destroyers.'

A noise came from the doorway, and Vaughan stood there in his Inverness cape, grinning with eyes half closed. He was thoroughly drunk by now and breathing noisily through his drooping moustache. He had not been invited, and I fancied that Fielding did not look too pleased to see him, although of course he kept up a show of politeness.

Vaughan closed on me with a post card held out. It might have been the woman earlier shown on the trapeze, only she now lounged under a tree, wearing no clothes as usual but holding a parasol, which would not have made her decent even if she'd chosen to use it for the purpose of keeping decent, which she had not done. Vaughan showed it only to me. There was evidently no question either of showing it to Fielding or of hiding it from him, but he could see it from where he stood, anyhow.

'Class A,' breathed Vaughan. 'Quite a naturalist, this one.'

'Naturist,' said Fielding, 'and be so good as to take her away'

Vaughan grinned, turned on his heel, and quit the room. Where was he going? Off to waste more of his allowance?

'I'm used to Vaughan's bohemian ways,' said Fielding, now pouring us out another glass each of the sherry. 'But it does you credit, Mr Stringer, the way that you take him in your stride.'

He sat down in his favourite chair, and I took the couch.

'I suppose they're only the Old Masters brought up to date,' I said, thinking of Vaughan's witness statement.

'It's not the highest sort of indecency,' said Fielding.

'The railway cards I liked though,' I said. 'It's not often you see a crossed signal or an out-of-gauge load on a card.'

'Something that might have appealed to a footplate man such as yourself, said Fielding, 'was our series of pictures of double headed trains.'

He was going round the houses; this surely was not meant to be the subject of our talk, but I said:

'You know there are triple-headed trains working in some places… Up the bank to Ravenscar.'

'I shouldn't wonder,' said Fielding. 'What is it there? Six hundred feet above sea level?'

'Getting on for,' I said. 'They're very short trains too.'

'So you've a train with almost as many engines as carriages?' said Fielding, blowing smoke, and tipping his head to one side. He was full of little cracks like that. He moved his little glass from one hand to another, as though practising receiving a glass daintily with both hands. I wondered whether he'd worn that ring of his in York gaol. He'd have been asking for trouble if he had done. I was bursting to ask him whether he really had been lagged, because I could scarcely believe it.

'Vaughan's money came today, of course,' I said, after an interval of silence.

'Yes,' said Fielding. 'It's just enough to keep him idle. Some people might say that a modest allowance has promoted lethargy in my case as well, but I think I'm a little more industrious than friend Vaughan.'

'You've carried on various businesses,' I said.

'Yes,' said Fielding, exhaling smoke, 'but who was it said that the key to success is consistency to purpose?'

And he tipped his head, as though really expecting me to supply the answer.

'I don't know,' I said.

'Disraeli?' he said, and he smiled, adding, 'I should have stuck at my original plan.'

'Oh. What was that?'

'In my youth, I trained as a lawyer.'

'A solicitor?

He nodded again.

'I have it in mind to take articles myself,' I said, and he tipped his head. He did not believe me for a minute, or did not credit that it was possible.

'It's a hard road,' he said, and he left too long a silence before adding,'… but the work ought to be well within the capacities of a man like yourself.'

Fielding set out to be mannerly at all times, but occasionally he did not come up to the mark. I glanced over to see Amanda Rickerby in the doorway. She stood swaying somewhat, and said, 'There's a person to see you downstairs, Mr Fielding.'

He rose, half bowed at her, and went off through the open door of the ship room.

'Who was it?' I enquired of the landlady. But she walked to one of the two windows without replying.

'What a day,' she said, after a space. And then, remembering my question, 'It was someone from the gramophone society.'

She continued to stare out at the German Sea. Here was another of her silent goes; there'd been one during breakfast, and one in the kitchen not half an hour since. Was it the same thought every time that kept her silent? A ship putting out black smoke was stationary on the horizon. It might as well have been a factory at sea. Miss Rickerby turned and saw the decanter of Spanish sherry.

'Do you want a glass?' she said, moving fast towards it. 'Not that it's mine to offer.'

'Better not,' I said. 'I've just had two.'

She returned to the window with her glass, looking out to sea again. I stood by the next window, so that we were about three feet apart. I did not know what would happen, or what I would do. I was in fact paralysed by indecision, and so it was strange to see, down on the Prom, a tall, thin man moving with great purpose. He wore a Macintosh and a bowler, and was running at the top of his speed through the rain. He skidded up to the beach steps, half stumbled down them in his haste, and continued running over the black beach, going full pelt, heading straight for the waves, where he came to a sudden halt. Amanda Rickerby turned to me and smiled sadly.

'Well, I thought he was going to do… something,' she said.

We faced each other now, and she took a step towards me, with face downturned. She was a head smaller than me, and I could see the top of her curls, and then, when she tilted her face upwards, the powder on her cheekbones, the blueness and greyness that made the overall greenness of her wide-set eyes.

'I am quite drunk, Mr Stringer,' she said.

She appeared to be looking at my North Eastern Railway badge again, really concentrating on it. She took my right hand in hers. Her hand was dry, and she moved it about over mine in a way that was somehow not restless but very calming – the right thing. I could hear footsteps on the stairs.

'You had better lock your room tonight,' she said, quickly.

'Why?'

'Probably no reason,' she said, withdrawing her hand, and giving me a smile that was natural, quick, charming, and just about the most mysterious thing I've ever seen.

Adam Rickerby stood in the doorway.

'Gas 'as run out,' he said. 'Meter wants feeding.'

Amanda Rickerby smiled brightly and much more straightforwardly at me. 'Do you have sixpence, Mr Stringer? I'll pay you back later.'

Chapter Thirty-Six

Amanda Rickerby went downstairs in the company of her brother.

Events were now rushing on faster than my thoughts and faster also than my morals. What had she meant by advising me to lock my room? Did she mean that otherwise she would come to visit me in the night, and that she needed to be saved from herself? What was Vaughan up to? Mysterious and glooming in the seafront pub… in better spirits during luncheon… but now making off again. And for what purpose had Fielding taken me up to the ship room? But as I stepped out of that room, one thing was certain: I was alone on the first floor of the house, and both Fielding's and Miss Rickerby's bedroom doors stood open.

I walked into Fielding's first; I hardly cared if I was discovered. In fact being discovered might save me from myself. It was a big room, papered in plain green with a red border, better kept than the rest of the house, and very calm and neat, and made more so by the sight of the lashing rain and wild dark sea beyond the two windows. There were red rugs on wide black boards of the kind seen in inns, bookshelves in alcoves. You had to look hard to see the blisters in the wallpaper and the fraying in the carpet, for the gas was not lit, nor was the fire. There were two closets, a tall chest of drawers, a folded table and a smaller table by the bed head with a little drawer set into it. Over the fancy ironwork of the fireplace was a painting of a ship foundering. I fixed my eye on the chest of drawers, and I marched over the carpet towards it, feeling sure they must have heard the drumming of my boot heels on the floor below.

On the top of the chest of drawers lay an ebony tray with hair brushes and a shoe horn. I reached out with two hands, and pulled open the top drawer to its fullest extent. A smell of coal tar soap came up. The drawer contained a quantity of Howard Fielding's under-clothes neatly folded, and many little boxes. With Fielding, it seemed that almost everything came in boxes. There were several round collar boxes, and I quickly lifted the lids of two. They contained collars. I then lifted the lid of a green velvet-lined one. The inside of the lid was white silk, and the words 'Best Quality' were written there. It held solitaires and cuff links. A tortoiseshell one held more cuff links and Fielding's collection of stick pins and tie clips.

I shut the drawer and opened the next one down: comforters, socks, under-shirts, ties… and more boxes. I opened the biggest box, made of wood. It held candles and matches. Another wooden one held a tangle of alberts. Next to this was a felt bag with a drawstring. I pulled at the string with two hands, and looked down on half a dozen straight razors with pearl handles. The biggest box was leather covered. I opened it and saw a vanity set, with scissors, nail-shaper, toothbrush all held in place on red velvet – and two twenty pound notes folded in half on top. I shut the drawer, and stood still, listening to the house. Did I hear a door slam downstairs?

I marched up to the sea picture: 'Wreck of a Brig off Whitby', it was called. It showed a ship being rolled over in high seas; two men looked at the brig from the beach, and they were evidently a gormless pair. Why didn't they do something about it?

But I felt the same. I had discovered nothing. Well, nothing except the money, and what did that signify? It was a good amount, but a fellow was entitled to keep forty pounds cash in his bedroom after all. I was still half drunk, and my head was pounding as I inspected the rest of the room. I threw open the first of the closets, releasing a smell of mothballs. Fielding hung his coats up all right – Adam Rickerby would have approved. The two had neatness in common, although they'd hardly exchanged a word since I'd been in the house. I moved over to the bookshelves. Novels, collected numbers of Notes and Queries, a digest of The Railway Magazine, Famous Sea Tales, Marine Painters of Britain, A Catalogue for the Collectors of Post Cards, The Literary Antiquary; some volumes on book collecting, some guides to Scarborough. I walked to the little bedside table, opened the drawer set into it, and here was not a box but an envelope. On the front was written: 'Railway Selection – Line-side Curiosities & C'. The flap of the envelope was tucked into place but not sealed. I lifted it up, and there were two post cards: the first showed a woman in a riding hat sitting side saddle on a white horse; the second showed her sitting astride the horse. She was quite naked in both.

I froze, listened to the house; watched the door. There came faint voices from below, nothing besides.

The overall picture was now composing, but the light of day was also fading, and Fielding's room was half enclosed in darkness as I replaced the cards – for there'd been half a dozen in the envelope, all of the same sort – and walked smartly out of his room and into the corridor. Here, I listened again before I approached the opened door of Miss Rickerby's bedroom.

It was not exactly blue but lavender – her colour. The paraffin heater roared faintly as before. In combination with the low burning fire, this made the room too hot, also as before. I made first for the dressing table and opening the top-most drawer I did not care for the look of my face in the triple mirror (which seemed to give all the angles of the photographs in a criminal record card). The drawer held a great mix-up of buttons, buckles, beads, chains, lockets. I pricked my finger on the pin of a butterfly brooch. The stones on the brooch and on the chains and pendants were not precious as far as I could judge, and it made me feel sorry for the owner.

There was some silver there however – just pitched in anyhow with everything else. I saw a decorated paper fan. I caught it up, and opened it out, bringing to life a sea-side scene: a long promenade with happy bicyclists, and strollers with parasols and sun hats. I could not make out the words at the top, so I held it towards the seething blue flame of the paraffin heater and read: 'Eastbourne, Sussex'. She liked Eastbourne. I knew that already.

I tried the second drawer. It held some mysterious bundles of cotton and muslin that I knew I ought not to look at, two folded corsets; also a pair of small binoculars, another jumble of jewellery and some documents pinned together. I removed the pin. The first paper was a clipping from a magazine: 'Are You Troubled by Poor Eyesight?' An optician's advertisement – and I felt a surge of love for Miss Rickerby. The next paper was a handwritten letter, and I could hardly read a word of it; there were a couple more in the same shocking hand. I stared at the final page of the final one, and swung it in the direction of the blue light. At length, I made out 'a compass – only a trinket but it works'. The document that came after was type-written, perfectly clear… and all the breath stopped on my lips as I read the heading that had been underlined at the top: Re: Your Claim Against The North Eastern Railway Company. The letter began:

Dear Mr Rickerby, please find enclosed a letter we received on the 5th inst. from Parker and Wilkinson of York, the solicitors acting for the North Eastern Railway Company in this matter.

The letter offers compensation in the sum of one hundred and twenty pounds and payment of your costs in full and final settlement of your claim. We believe this offer to be reasonable in view of the danger of a finding of contributory negligence against you should the case be pursued and taken into court.

As you will see from the letter, this offer stands for the next sixty days…

I returned to the top of the letter. The address was that of Messrs Robinson, Farmery and Farmery of Middlesbrough, and carried the date 11 March, 1910.1 supposed they would have known that Adam Rickerby was unable to read, and that the business would be dealt with on his behalf by his sister. She, at any rate, had been the one who'd kept the letter, and it proved that Adam Rickerby had not been made strange by the collapse of a pit prop. He'd tangled with a train, and it was odds-on that the money paid over as a consequence – and paid through the agency of the firm that I would shortly be working for – had bought the Paradise guest house.

I could make nothing of the other papers. I replaced the pin, and my eye fell on the one box in the drawer. It was about three inches square, the lid decorated with sea shells. I lifted the lid, and saw a small silver compass set into a miniature replica of a ship's wheel. But it was the object lying alongside it that I picked up. In the half light I saw the crest of the City of York, the Leeds crest, the sheep, the ears of corn. Here was the badge of the North Eastern Railway, and I was quite certain that it had once belonged to Ray Blackburn.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

I stepped out of Amanda Rickerby's room and walked along the dark corridor to the top of the staircase, where I heard the sound of rainfall. The front door was open, but it closed as I looked down. Fielding appeared at the foot of the stairs. His gramophone club business evidently concluded, he was putting on his coat in the hall, under the gas chandelier. I had not seen his coat before. It had a velvet collar.

'You look tired,' I called down, for he did, and I wanted to appear mannerly, not like a burglar. He looked up the stairs and nodded his head a few times.

'I believe we all are,' he said.

I called down, 'A lot of drinking goes on in this house,' and he tipped his head to see if I was joking, looking for a clue as to how to take this.

He gave a half smile, and said, 'What else can you do on a day like today in Scarborough?' and he put on a wide- brimmed hat.

'Where are you going?' I enquired, and he might easily have told me to mind my own business, but he said: 'Take the air. A saunter… Can one saunter in a storm?'

'Where's Miss Rickerby?' I called down.

This was forward of me again, but he said, 'She left a moment ago to do the same, I think. The boy went with her… There's some of the wine left chilling in the larder, Mr

Stringer,' he added with great weariness as he opened the door and contemplated the wind and the rain. Then he stepped through it and was gone.

I cannot say for certain why, but in the next moment I dashed down the stairs and entered the dining room, kitchen and scullery in turn. Only in the scullery, where the walls were of white-glazed brick, did a gas light burn. The rough wooden door beside the mangle must be the entry to Adam Rickerby's room. I knocked – no answer. I lifted the latch, pushed the door, and the light from the scullery fell on another scullery, or so it appeared, but this with a truckle bed in it. A good-sized barrel stood in the room, an old washing dolly, a quantity of carefully folded sacks, and a bicycle with the front wheel smaller than the back so as to make way for a great basket. There was no carpet on the stone floor, and no fireplace but many thick blankets on the bed, which was neatly made up with hardly a crease in the pillow. A trunk stood by the side of the bed. I lifted the lid, and saw rough clothes, neatly folded. Many objects hung from nails on the wall: a bike tyre, an oilcloth, a sou'wester, an apron, and a cork lifejacket. Well, Adam Rickerby lived by the sea, so it was not surprising that he owned a boat. Most who owned boats owned lifejackets. None of this was out of the common, except that I couldn't quite imagine him in charge of a boat, at large on the seas without his sister to encourage him and set him right when he went wrong.

I stepped out of the room, closed the door behind me, and returned to the gloomy kitchen, where something drew me over towards the knife polisher. It looked like a round wooden wheel, the rim of which had been repeatedly stabbed by knives, although in fact they rested in slots. One of the holes accommodated several long, thin items: three skewers of some sort, and a nine inch needle with an eye, which was perhaps for trussing up meat prior to roasting. In the centre of the polisher was a handle connected to a circular brush: you wound it and the blades inside were cleaned.

I climbed the steps, which were all in darkness; had a piss in the gloomy bathroom on the half decorated floor and wandered along towards the door of the apartment-in-the-making. I turned the handle, and stepped through to see amid the shadows the rags of half stripped paper hanging from the walls, the bare boards and the parade of paint tins. The window stood open as before, and I watched for a while the waves hitting the harbour wall a quarter of a mile off. I knew what I was doing: I was putting off looking through the hole in the wall. I watched the sea make three attempts to send spray to the top of the lighthouse, and then I approached the hole, which was about man-sized.

The shreds of faded green-stripe wallpaper made a kind of curtain over it. I pushed them aside, stepped through, and my boots came down silently -1 was on carpet, which was a turnup. I could feel the carpet but not see it, for this second room was darker than the first. But this room too had a window over-looking the front, and objects began to appear by the phosphorous light of the sea beyond: a small sofa, an armchair, a clock on the wall, a high bed with mattress and covers still on and neatly made. There had been some attempt to clear the room: the dwarf bookcase held only one volume, and there were no ornaments to be seen, save for a clock that rested on a tasselled cloth spread over the mantel-shelf. A sheet of paper rested on the counterpane of the bed. I meant to read it, but as I took a step forwards, the flute note came from the fireplace, and I nearly bolted from the room as the paper jumped off the bed, and floated, swinging gently, to the ground. It was the wind coming through the chimney. I walked over, and was relieved to read only the words 'Trips by Steamer' and a list of timings. My hand was shaking as I held it though; I'd had a bad turn, and did not care to stay in the room. I stepped back through the hole, and in a moment I was climbing the topmost staircase under the eyes of old man Rickerby who gave me the evil eye from each of the three photographs in turn.

In the half landing outside my own quarters I fumbled for some matches, pushed open the door, and lit the oil lamp in my little room. It glowed red and the redness made the little room seem the most welcoming of all, and it made me immediately sleepy into the bargain. But I would not sleep. I sat at the end of the bed and removed the piece of paste-board that kept the small window from rattling. I lifted the sash and leant forward, looking down at the Prom below, letting the sea wind move my hair about and breathing deep, cold breaths. I then filled my water glass from the jug by the wash stand and took a drink. I lay down on the bed, and pulled aside the tab rug that lay half underneath the bedstead. The little copper stubs marking the tops of the gas pipes remained tightly sealed. I put the rug back, and listened to the little window shaking. Every small gust caused a fearful din, and the bigger ones seemed set fair to break the glass. I leant forward and lowered the window. It rattled less when closed. I ought really to put back the pasteboard, but I could hardly be bothered. I lay still, listened to the waves, and revolved a hundred bad thoughts: Amanda Rickerby had lied about her brother's accident because it might be seen to have given him a grievance against railway men; Fielding was not queer – or he was a strange sort of queer if he went to bed with pictures of naked ladies. I called to mind the pictures. Lucky horse! But I hadn't the energy to make use of the memory – I was tired out, having hardly slept for three nights. I thought of the wife, and how she'd say, 'You're overstrung, Stringer', and brush my hair right back, for she thought it should go that way rather than the parting at the side, and I was sure that it therefore would do in time.

… But how I liked it when she brushed it back. You'd have thought she'd have better things to do, just because she generally had so much on, what with the Co-operative ladies and the women's cause and the new house and all the rest of it.

I closed my eyes, and I don't believe that I slept, but when I opened them again I saw that there was an intruder in the room, in the shape of a twist of black smoke rising up from the red lamp. As I looked on the redness flared, causing everything in the room to lean away from the window, and then it died away to nothing. The oil had run out. I had the manual for the lamp but no more oil, and I must have light, so I dragged myself to my feet, found my matches in my pocket, and walked out onto the little landing. Reaching up to the gas bracket I turned the tap, breathed the hot coal breath, and lit it, whereupon I was instantly joined on the landing by my own shadow. I had not had sixpence about me, but Miss Rickerby, or her brother, must have fed the meter before going out.

I moved back into the little room, kicked the door shut, and fell onto the bed, where I turned on my side and contemplated the line of white light under the door. The bad thoughts came back: Robert Henderson's hair was brushed directly back. In order to have a fraction of his money I must work all the hours God gave at a job I didn't want to do. Five years of articled clerkship, and for what? So that I might offer a kid a hundred and twenty pounds in exchange for half his brain. My thoughts flew to Tommy Nugent, and I hoped he was back in York, courting his girl from the Overcoat Depot on Parliament Street. I pictured the wife again, wearing my third best suit- coat as she showed her friend Lillian Backhouse about the new garden. That was all right: Lillian Backhouse was another feminist, and the suit-coat looked better on Lydia than on me, in spite of it being twice her size.

Amanda Rickerby came to mind once more… How had she come by the badge and why had she kept it? My head was fairly spinning. Had she asked me to lock my door in order to protect me from the boy? From Fielding? From Vaughan? (Surely not from Vaughan?) Or did she mean to come up and sit astride me as the woman on the post card had sat astride the horse? I did not believe she would do, but I decided that the moment we'd shared in the ship room ought to mark the end of our relations. I was a married man after all. I stood up, locked the door, fell back onto the bed, and even though it was hardly more than late afternoon, I was asleep in an instant, my boots still on my feet.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

'You were dead wrong about Adam Rickerby,' said the Captain, pushing back his chair and rising to his feet with the pocket revolver in his hand.

If he didn't mean to shoot me, then he might be on the point of quitting the chart room, and I wanted him to stay, firstly because I knew he had secrets of his own touching this matter and secondly because I wanted to talk on. I wanted to get behind the mist, and I now knew I could do it. The recollection of my exchange with Miss Rickerby in the ship room came with many complications, and the best thing was to talk on because my speech brought back my memory of what came next and remembering, at least, was something I could be proud of.

The Mate was eyeing the Captain, and so was I – had been for some little while. It was the difference that made the similarity so plain: the Captain's face never smiling, hers almost always; his hair short, curls not given time to begin, hers abundant. But there was a strength to the Captain's close-cut hair, a sort of possibility in it. How could I not have noticed before that they had only the one face between them: wide, symmetrical, cat-like? The boy had the same face again, but the accident or some earlier event had made mockery of it, stretching it too wide and piling on the curls. He had been over-done. Anyhow, I knew that this was Captain Rickerby sitting before me, and that he had once sent a silver compass set in a miniature ship's wheel to his sister.

'I'll tell you what happened,' I said to him, just as though he was Peter Backhouse, sitting over-opposite me in the public bar of the Fortune of War in Thorpe-on-Ouse with more than a few pints taken; and I did feel a kind of drunken happiness, for I could now see the whole thing clear.

'It was the light under the door,' I said to the Captain, who'd now sat back down. 'It was not there – the line of white light – and I was half glad of it, because I knew it would have hurt my eyes if it had been. That was part of my affliction… You see, I believe that what happened to me – what was done to me – impaired my memory, but I have now recovered my memory. I can go on from here and tell you the whole thing. I have the solution to the mystery.'

I made my play:

'The woman in the post cards,' I said,'… not the one on the horse, but the one that Vaughan had liked particularly… You see, she was Blackburn's fiancée, and when Blackburn was shown the cards in the Two Mariners he attacked Vaughan, really laid into him…'

'They came to blows over this?' enquired the Mate, blowing smoke.

'Very likely,' I said. 'At any rate they were set at odds. Perhaps Blackburn had threatened to go to the police. In the night, Vaughan must have gone up to him, perhaps to try and settle the matter. They must have fought again. Vaughan killed Blackburn, perhaps not intentionally. He hauled the body downstairs, put it on the cart over the road, took it to the Promenade or the harbour wall, and pitched it into the sea. Vaughan knew I was onto him. He'd over-heard me talking to

Tommy Nugent in Mallinson's, and so he tried to do me in by the method of…'

'It is nonsense,' said the Mate, lighting a new cigar.

'If you don't tell the truth,' said the Captain, 'you'll never leave this ship.'

I had made an attempt to disentangle myself from the Rickerby family, and failed utterly. Even the bloody foreigner could see the lie for what it was. To cover my embarrassment, I asked the Mate for a cigar, which he passed over together with matches.

Blowing smoke, I began again. 'The light', I said, 'was not there…

I had known straight away the meaning. The pain in my head made movement nigh impossible, but I had to find different air. Each inhalation carried the taste of coal into me, and these breaths could not be released. My breathing was all one way, which was no sort of breathing at all. I rolled off the bed, but was now in a worse position than before with more work to do in order to stand upright. I believe the hardest thing I ever did was to rise from that floor, and unlock that door, whereupon I saw the gas bracket on the little landing, which seemed to be saying: Don't mind me; I'm nothing in this; I'm not even burning. But it was on at the tap, and invisible death poured from it. I tried to close the tap, but my hands were not up to the job. I half fell down the first stairs, where I saw in the darkness the first gas lamp of the half-decorated landing. I saw it in the darkness, and proper breathing was not permitted here either. I would shortly burst; I was a human bomb. I crashed against Vaughan's door; it flew open, and his room was empty, the bed still made up.

In falling, I rolled underneath another gas bracket that played its part in the relay of death-dealing. I regained my feet, but my feet were treacherous, might have belonged to another man altogether. I did not know my hands either, which were stained red by all the coal gas in me. I pushed at Amanda Rickerby's door and she rose instantly from her pillow – instantly and yet drowsily. A bottle and a glass stood on the floor by her bed, but she looked beautiful in her night-dress as she made her strange, dazed enquiry: 'How are you?'

She was not rightly awake; she had taken in a quantity of the gas, and I was not in my right mind, which is why I replied, 'I'm in great shape,' and I may have vomited there and then onto her bedroom carpet, which was not very gentlemanly of me. I took the stool from before her dressing table and pitched it through her window, marvelling that my red hands were up to the job. I came out of the room revolving, and struck Adam Rickerby, who was there in long johns and no shirt. He looked like the strong man at the fair, or the Creature from the Jungle. But he did not look to have been gassed – or not badly. Had the poison reached downstairs? I would consult the man who had laid it on for my benefit.

I pushed at Fielding's door, and entered his room for the second time. He sat on his bed; it was all I could do to stand. I felt tiredness as a great weight pressing me down to the floor. The room was in darkness, and I could not see the gas brackets, but I knew that here too the coal vapour streamed. He wore a suit, and sat on his bed.

'You locked your door, Mr Stringer,' he said, and I somehow gasped out:

'You sound… put-out.'

'No, that was Blackburn,' said Fielding. 'His eye, I mean,' and he gave a little private smile, indicating an object that lay beside him on the bed: the nine inch needle that had been kept in the knife polisher.

He'd done for Blackburn by stabbing into his eye as he slept, no doubt after observing, or over-hearing, whatever creeping about had gone on earlier in the night. The long needle put swiftly into the closed eye – that way there'd be little blood and no noise. He'd meant to do me the same way. But on finding the door locked he'd fixed on a method that took no account of doors, and would bring an end to everything and everyone.

'The gas', he said, from the bed, 'will spare you a deal of trouble even if you don't quite see it. For one thing, you would have been forever buying the lady wine, and she likes the good stuff you know. You would have had to learn all about the best vintages to keep her happy, and you would be starting as far as I can judge, Mr Stringer, from a position of complete ignorance…'

With every new remark that he made more of the truth – which was not quite as Fielding saw it – came home to me. He too was now breathing wrongly, fighting for it, and rocking on the bed as he did so. His dainty feet were raised from the floor, so that he looked like a child too short for the school form. He had put on a soft-tasselled hat for his own death; a species of indoor hat – a smoking hat, as I believed it was called. He was not smoking but held some long implement – not the needle, which was by his side – but some other long implement, which he passed constantly from left to right hand. If I might lay my own hands on either it or the other… But that was impossible without air, and I found myself dreaming – and it was a kind of floating dreaminess – about a gun. That would be so much faster, and I heard myself wasting air by saying, 'I ought to shoot you down.'

How had he carted Blackburn, a big fellow, down the stairs? The window. The bed in the small room was level with it. Fielding might have fed the body through, and it would then have dropped directly to the Prom; Fielding would have sent the suit down after. He himself, in that different world in which everyone could walk, would have descended by the stairs and the streets, and dragged Blackburn into the water.

… But I couldn't believe I had that quite right. It was odds- on that a body dropped into the harbour would turn up again. I stumbled a little way forward.

'Spooning, you would call it,' Fielding was saying. 'He was the first at it, and then you. She spoons with you in the presence of the man who pays the bills. Well, I am sparing you a good deal of expense…'

And he seemed to concentrate hard on taking a breath, as though he might out-think the gas, then the word burst out of him:

'Distemper… costlier than you might think when bought in bulk… wallpaper at a shilling a roll…'

With great effort he took another breath; he was better at it than me. But I could see that it did not come easily, and he now had to pause and fall silent every few words.

'… And the Lady forever changing her mind about the colour.'

It came to me that I was now nearer to him, to the dangerous implement in his hand, and the other one beside him on the bed.

'No!' I said, and I could not say any more, and it was a wasted word into the bargain. But I had meant to say that the Lady's colour was lavender.

Two paces to go before I was at Fielding and the bed. But why kill a man who was dying anyway? I looked to the windows: the first one – closed. To the second one – closed. I should have smashed the glass. I had wasted my time in not doing it, and accordingly I had wasted my life. The room was whirling at lightning speed; my legs were buckling under me and I wanted to be on the floor, stretched right across it; I could not support the weight of my own head. I tried to take a breath but nothing came. I saw bookshelves, a bed, fireplace, Fielding himself, but there was no air in-between any of these objects. I was drowning on dry land, drowning on the first floor but I was not ignorant. Rather, Fielding was. I recalled those late silences of the Lady, which were the true indication of her feelings towards me, which were no feelings at all.

'You tell me… that you have hopes of becoming a… solicitor,' Fielding seemed to be saying, and his voice had gone very high on that last word; he'd fairly squeaked it out. 'But there is no royal road to the acquisition of knowledge… Mr Stringer, you were born to a world of dirt… dirt and dust and coal… and that…'

I managed another step forwards as he unfolded the jewelled implement in his hand.

'Your presumption,' he said, rocking faster now, his face pink, far, far too pink. 'It scarcely… It takes one's breath… It takes the breath…'

I first thought that the implement might be for the fine adjustment of shirt cuffs, for he held it positioned over his left wrist. He made a smooth, practised movement.

'This gas… too… slow,' he said, and he breathed in, making a fearful dry squeaking, before swiftly transferring the implement to his other hand, and moving it over the other wrist. He raised it to his neck, and for an instant I thought: The contraption adjusts shirt collars too – just the thing for a faddish fellow. But Adam Rickerby, standing behind me, called out: 'He'll 'ave blood all over!'

Fielding moved the thing quite slowly and carefully from right to left across his neck.

And he tilted his head at me.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

'And you believe that he'd killed Blackburn?' enquired the Captain.

I had the idea that the question was asked out of duty, that he was now restless, his mind elsewhere. I believed that I had understood most things in the seconds before Fielding's death, and now that I could recall that understanding, I gave my theory in outline to the Captain. And while speaking I thought the thing through in a different way.

All the trinkets in those drawers of Fielding's, too neatly stored in boxes: they signified a lack of love. Oh, he had the friendship of Vaughan all right, and I pictured the two of them in the ship room, smoking silently: Vaughan lying flat on the couch, Fielding sitting daintily, periodically crossing his legs in a different way. But anyone could have the friendship of Vaughan: he was like a spaniel, and about equally given to cocking his leg in public. The love of Amanda Rickerby was a different matter. Ray Blackburn, a handsome, well set-up man of marriage-able age, had been the beneficiary of her love, and she had kept the company badge as a token of it. He had been to Scarborough several times before the fatal night, although never before to Paradise. I saw the two of them about the town, falling into conversation in the railway station perhaps. She sees him coming along the platform, his dark face further darkened and made more impressive by coal dust, and she chooses to ask him, rather than the funny-looking little platform guard, the time of the train. Where would she want to go to? Hull, Stockton, York, Leeds? It did not matter; the trip would only be a vague plan, anyhow. They would find that they had walked and talked for the entire length of the platform, that they had gone together through the station gates… and then they had the whole of Scarborough in which to walk and talk. I did not put it past her to have been drawn by his sober character, which came out of his strong religion. He might keep her on the straight path.

Later on, Blackburn would have been torn. He could not resist the opportunity to travel to Scarborough and to stay at Paradise when the chance arose in the course of his work. I supposed that he'd passed some of the night in Amanda Rickerby's bed. I saw the two of them there, sweating under the sheets in the hot talcum smell of the lavender room, and Fielding lying in his own bed just across the landing and knowing. Why? Because he had been listening for it. Had he seen them about the town beforehand? •

It would make a married man feel strange to be in that lavender room, at least in the moments before and after the event, the prospect of which had drawn him there. Blackburn had gloomed about the house throughout his stay, which was down to guilt, and his own serious-minded nature.

Earlier on, Vaughan had showed him the special cards, which was just exactly the wrong thing to do to a man of Blackburn's mind. I pictured the two of them walking through the Old Town in the evening: the lobster pots rocking in the wind; the flashing of the lighthouse showing by modern means all the oldness of the Old Town. Blackburn would wonder what he was doing there, with this strange, unmannerly fellow loping along too close-by his side.

Blackburn had no doubt blown up at Vaughan, who had taken stick from the coppers ever since for an act he was only now beginning to think of as shameful. But it might become less shameful every time it was repeated. I believed he half hoped I would walk into the copper shop on Castle Road to say he'd shown me the cards as well, but that it had only been in fun and nothing had come of it.

As to Vaughan's whereabouts on that Monday… Well, he was a man under pressure and he was in funds. It would not have surprised me if, between Mallinson's and the luncheon- that-never-was, he had paid for something different from what the cards brought him to – some advance on that action. He certainly knew where the accommodating ladies were to be found. I pictured him walking down the alleyways – those alleyways in the shadow of the Grand Hotel, the ones that echoed to the sound of rushing rainwater – and looking in at every doorway in turn. Or were those women to be found on the main streets, above the shops selling trinkets for trippers? It was a sea-side town after all, a place of pleasure. As he stood next to me in the gentlemen's he might have been nerving himself up to asking me to accompany him. I supposed that he often resorted to the Scarborough night houses – resorted to them even during the day – for Vaughan was not an attractive fellow and this was his usefulness as far as Fielding was concerned. He was no rival for the affections of Amanda Rickerby. Fielding made no objection to ugly or old men staying in the house – or families, hence the push to make family apartments. He objected to single young men, such as Armstrong, the fellow who'd collected seaweed.

You might think Fielding a nancy but once you knew different it was obvious that he loved Miss Rickerby. I saw him fairly springing about with pleasure when she had complimented him in the ship room, the whole black sea behind him, utterly forgotten. He coloured up when she addressed him; and he never made any of his little cracks at her expense. But he did not stand an earthly with her, being twice her age and nothing to look at, and while he was not a pauper he was a failure in business and a gaol bird into the bargain. But for a while he'd tried. You might say that he'd tried bribery. He was paying for the redecoration of the house; he hung his pictures about the place; laid in cigars and Spanish sherry, and he gave her the benefit of his business advice. The more profit the house turned, the less chance of Miss Rickerby selling up and leaving. But he mustn't have been thinking straight when he recommended that she bring in railway men, for the law of averages said that a marriage-able one would land on the doorstep eventually. Having dealt with one, he had another on his hands directly. But he had read the signs wrongly in my case.

At first, she had given me her smiles and flirtatious glances wholesale, especially in the company of Fielding. But they had been replaced by thoughtful silences when she'd discovered what she needed to know: that he was jealous. I recalled the ways he had tried to take me away from her when she was being over-friendly. At dinner, he had lured me to the ship room with the promise of a cigar; he had done the same at the luncheon that never was, practically ordering me from her presence on that occasion. Late at night in the kitchen he had urged me to go up and look at the waves. The following morning he'd been keen that I should go off to the station to reclaim my engine. And I believed that his hatred of me – and his jealousy – were made plain to Amanda Rickerby when I'd said that the white wine 'went down a treat', and he'd exclaimed, 'Just so!' in a sarcastic way, unable to keep his feelings in check. I saw Amanda Rickerby's face turning quickly, the sight of her face in profile – the sudden sharpness of it. She would have seen him then for the murderer of Blackburn, and known he might try something similar on me.

'I do not say that your sister is a party to murder,' I said to the Captain, 'or complicit in any way. No charge against her would stand. Her behaviour was…' And a convenient phrase came to me from my law studies:'… It was too remote from the crime. She couldn't know for certain that Fielding would try anything. It might have seemed tantamount to slander to have confided her suspicions, you know. In the end she settled for telling me to lock my room.'

The Captain eyed me for a while, perhaps not keen on the sight of a fellow trying to get himself off the hook. At the same time, he was weighing some further plan, I knew.

'And he just dropped the body into the harbour?' he enquired. 'That would be a risk, wouldn't it?'

'I believe your brother, Adam, may have helped him get rid of the body,' I said, and the Captain did not flinch but just glanced sidelong to the Mate, who enquired, 'How, would you say?'

'I don't mean the lad was involved in murder. It would be just tidying up to him. He was neat-handed, and he had a boat. He was also clever enough to know that this business might bring the house down, so to say. Paradise was everything to him, so he perhaps did Fielding's clearing-up for him. Whether he believed that Blackburn had been killed or made away with himself I don't know. Fielding might have told him anything, threatened him with God knows what. They never spoke again, anyhow.'

'You think they brought Blackburn to us?' the Mate cut in.

'No,' I said, 'Adam brought me to you knowing the movements of your ship, and knowing the times it passed Scarborough at no great distance from the shore. But Blackburn… what would be the point? The boy would just pitch him into the sea a good way out.'

'You're dead wrong,' said the Captain, eyeing me. 'Fielding killed Blackburn, but Adam Rickerby was not involved in any way.'

He continued to use the surname when speaking of his brother, as though the youth was a stranger to him.

'Well,' I said, 'that's as maybe.'

I had to admit that I could not imagine Adam Rickerby lying to the police, or to anyone. It was his sister who'd invented the story of the mining accident. All he had to do was keep quiet on the subject. Amanda Rickerby had done it for the boy's own protection: it would not do to seem to have a grievance against the North Eastern Railway Company in light of what had happened to Blackburn, as Fielding had no doubt discovered for himself when questioned.

'I'd give a lot to know how you brought me up on board without the rest of the crew seeing,' I said.'… Hauled the boat up on the windlass, I suppose, and if anyone asked you'd say your brother was paying a visit, bringing a present of a sack of potatoes perhaps.'

'You think you know everything, don't you?' said the Captain, rising to his feet.

I eyed him levelly. I knew a good deal but I had not fully understood the actions of Amanda Rickerby when we'd stood alone in the ship room. Why had she taken my hand? Where did that fit in with the game she was playing? Had she heard the approaching steps of her brother, and mistaken them for the approach of Fielding, wishing to test him further, to really bring him to the point of murder? Well, she'd been half drunk, and was perhaps more than that later in the evening – knocked out by the stuff – which, I preferred to think, was why she'd let me take my chances against Fielding with the protection only of a locked door. She hadn't even bothered to protect herself- not that she could have known he'd go for the whole bloody house.

As I spoke – giving something of this to the Captain and the Mate – a voice in my head said, 'Leave off, Jim. Face facts, man: she ran rings around you.' And I fell silent.

'We now show you something you don't know,' the grey Mate said. 'Come and follow me.'

Chapter Forty

The Captain came too, with pistol in hand. We descended to the room below the chart room, and then we were out on the mid-ships ladder. Again I could see no crew, and could not get a good view of the rear of the ship.

'What's aft?' I enquired, as we descended.

'A red flag,' said the Mate, setting foot on the deck. 'Some coal. Nothing for you.'

'Where are the crew?'

'Mostly ashore,' said the Captain. 'So think on.'

He meant that he had a free hand with me; might do what he liked. I supposed that an unloading gang of some sort remained on board, since it seemed likely that we were about to put off the coal at the gas works.

It was still dark. I still saw the lights on the cranes before the cranes themselves. But the world was stirring. More cranes turned and talked to their neighbours; a train wound through the streets before the flat, moon-like gas works. Every wagon was covered with white sheeting, and the sheets were numbered at the sides – giant black numbers, but they were not in order, so that it looked as though the train had been put together in a hurry. The gas works still seemed to slumber, and the line of dark, sleeping ships of which we were a part remained as before waiting patiently. Yet the factories that commanded the streets were gamely pumping out smoke, making the black sky blacker, keeping it just the way they liked it; and the air was filled with a constant clanking noise, as though great chains were being dragged in all directions.

'Your sister's in the clear and so is your brother,' I said to the Captain as we descended onto the deck, 'even though he rowed me out to this bloody tub. But I'll tell you this for nothing: you'll be in lumber if you don't put me off directly.'

No answer from the Captain; he had collected a lamp from the railing at the foot of the ladder.

'Young Adam would have been banking on you doing the sensible thing,' I said. 'You've still the chance to come right – just about.'

We had remained in the shadow of the mid-ships, and we now stood before the hatchway of a locker new to me. The Captain held up his lamp for the benefit of the Mate, who was removing a padlock from the catch of the iron door. The door swung open, and the Captain stepped forward, holding the lamp to show me a quantity of brushes of all descriptions: long-handled paint brushes, brooms and mops, buckets made of wood and iron, paint tins, a quantity of ropes, a stack of folded oilskins, a hand pump of some sort, a length of rubber hose, and Tommy Nugent in his shirt sleeves. He sat against the far wall, with legs outstretched before him and crossed in a civilised way, as he might once have crossed his legs while leaning against a tree trunk and eating a picnic.

From boot soles to neck Tommy looked normal, but his face had the dead whiteness of a fungus and the same horrifying lack of shape. It was in at the left cheek, and out at the right temple. All his hair had moved to the right side, as though to cover the great lump that had grown there, and his eyes, which were wide open, were no longer level, no longer a pair, the right one having wandered off to have a look for once around the back of his head. I looked again at his legs, and I was ashamed not to be able to remember which one had been crocked. His right hand rested on one of his kit bags, as though to keep it safe no matter what. The mercy was that Tommy did not breathe – and I did not breathe either. The Captain lowered the lamp, so that Tommy seemed to retreat into the locker, and he kept silence.

It was the Mate who said, 'Your friend Tom.'

'Tommy,' I said. 'His name is Tommy.'

Well, he might have been carrying any number of papers that would have given away his identity, but of course I'd told them all about him. I thought of Tommy's fiancée, Joan, wandering alone in her father's shop, the Overcoat Depot on Parliament Street. I pictured the giant overcoat hanging outside like a man on a gibbet. Joan would no longer need to go to the Electric Theatre on Fossgate; she would no longer need to book an aisle seat on account of Tommy's leg, and so could go to the City Picture Palace on Fishergate, where the seats were more comfortable, but… The Romance of a Jockey, A Sheriff and a Rustler, The Water-Soaked Hero… nobody saw those films alone; it just wouldn't be right.

'He shot at my brother,' said the Captain.

'We have his guns,' the Mate put in. 'We took them from his bag.'

'Adam was bringing you out of the house,' said the Captain. 'He didn't know whether you were dead or alive. He wanted to get you into the fresh air. This…' said the Captain, gesturing at the corpse,'… he loosed off a shot the moment my brother stepped out of the door of the house. He's at least two ribs broken. How he rowed out to me I've no idea…' He indicated the corpse again, saying, 'He was re-loading for a second shot. My brother walked up and hit him.'

'He hit him only once,' the Mate put in.

'And he doesn't know his own strength,' I said. 'Is that it?'

'He knew it,' said the Captain. 'It was this idiot that didn't.'

And he nodded in the direction of Tommy.

'He was alive when my brother brought him. He and… the two of them thought I'd know what to do.'

'And do you?' I said.

No reply.

Had it been Miss Rickerby's idea to send Tommy and me out to the boat? Had she been in any fit state to make that decision, having been poisoned by the gas? And ought I to count it a kindness that she had sent me out? I pictured her waiting on the harbour wall for her brother's return, and I thought of her and her brother as two children, whereas the Captain was definitely grown-up, or so they might think.

'Your brother made you a present of two sacks of potatoes,' I said. 'You must have been chuffed to bits.'

Again, no answer. I wondered whether it had been left to the Captain and the Mate to discover that I was a copper, or whether the two other Rickerbys had made the discovery for themselves. They had evidently put my suit-coat on me before rowing me out, and the warrant card had been in there.

'Your brother might argue self-defence, when taken in charge… i/what you say is true.'

'It's true,' said the Captain,'… and he will argue nothing.'

He raised the lantern again, making Tommy come into full view once more.

'Go in,' said the Mate.

I stepped into the locker, and the door clanged shut behind me.

Chapter Forty-One

As the smell of Tommy Nugent competed with the smell of paint I sat beside Tommy – there was no help for it, the locker being so small – and watched, over the course of perhaps an hour or so, a rectangle of light form around the hatchway, which was evidently imperfectly sealed. When the rising dawn made the outline completely clear I began to pound at the door with my boot heels, and must have carried on doing so for a clear five minutes.

My fury was directed partly at the door and partly at the Chief. I had been a fool in the Paradise guest house, but I blamed the Chief for Tommy's death. I ought to have been free to make an ass of myself alone. I had not wanted Tommy along and had made that perfectly clear, but the Chief had insisted, knowing very well that Tommy would go armed and that he was trigger happy. Why had the Chief done it? Simply to make mischief? He was pushing seventy but that particular flame never burned out in a man, as far as I could see. Had he sent Tommy to lay on a bit of adventure for a fellow shootist? Or had he wanted to make trouble for me because I'd told him I meant to take articles?

After a long interval of my pounding on the door the whole locker about me began to vibrate, and at first I thought this was my doing, but then the ship seemed to lift, Tommy fell softly against me, and my head was filled with the vibration of the engines. I pushed Tommy off, in an apologetic sort of way, marvelling that I might lately have been carted about in a sack with him; then the tree-house motion came back and I knew that we were moving. Beckton gas works had stirred itself for the day, and we were making for the jetty ready for the unloading of our cargo.

My particular fear, ever since the word 'Beckton' had crossed my mind, was that the Captain would put me off with the coal. Once dead I would be taken up by the mighty steel claw of a crane, swung into a wagon, and carried along the high-level line into one of the retort houses where I would be dropped and burned, becoming who knew how many cubic feet of gas, for the benefit of some ungrateful London householder. A better way of disposing of a body could scarcely be imagined.

It was not that the Captain was evil natured, but I believed him to be weak. This was why he had fled from his own father; it was why he'd heard me out, letting me tell the full tale as he tried to make up his mind what to do with me; it was why he'd showed me the body of Tommy Nugent, letting me see his dilemma in hopes of gaining my sympathy; in hopes I would understand better his reason for killing me. Then again his determination to keep his mentally defective brother out of the arms of the law perhaps went to his credit. The lad had suffered enough – Captain Rickerby might be thinking – at the hands of North Eastern Railway Company employees. Anyhow, he was judge and jury in my case, and I was quite sure it was a role he would have given anything to avoid taking on.

What would the weak man do? He would put a bullet in me and toss me in the hold ready for burning. But the accusing finger then began to point in my own direction. Who was I to charge anyone with weakness? I had lingered in the Paradise guest house half in hopes of fucking the landlady. My mind had been only partly on the case as a result; and why had I wanted to ride the lady? Because she was beautiful, yes. But also to get revenge on the wife, who had taken advantage of my own weakness to gain her own ends.

It came to this: I needed some fire in me; I needed to play a man's part; I needed a gun. I turned to Tommy and, in the light that came from the halo around the door, my eye wandered down from his broken head to his right shoulder, along his right arm and up to his right hand which rested on his kit bag. At first Tommy had had two bags, and where the other one had got to I had no notion. But I was sure that Captain Rickerby and the Mate had been through it with a fine toothed comb. They must have been through this one as well – only for some reason they'd left it in the locker. From one or both of the kit bags they'd removed Tommy's guns – that was the word the Mate had used: 'guns' in the plural. Accordingly there was no prospect of finding a gun in the bag. But it just so happened that when I opened it, I laid my hand directly upon the two- two pistol.

In fact, it was partly wrapped in a towel, but I hadn't had to fish for it. The Captain and the Mate must have been in a panic and no doubt a tearing hurry as they went through the bag. I put my hand into the lucky dip again and found nothing but clothes… only something somewhere rattled. I pulled out a cloth bag, and here were the two-two cartridges. The pistol seemed to me – as someone more familiar with revolvers – very primitive: hardly more than a length of pipe with handle, trigger and lever forming three short outgrowths. I pressed the lever; it was very accommodating and the gun broke. I stuffed a cartridge in the general direction of the barrel, and whether

I'd done it right or not I had no idea.

I found out less than a minute later when the door opened and the Captain, holding both his revolver and a coal black sack, appeared before me with the mighty mechanical hand of the Beckton gas works crane descending into the opened hold behind him.

I pulled the trigger; the gun flashed orange; the Captain fell back, and I was quite deafened. In that deafened state I took up the cloth bag, and re-loaded the gun. I stepped out of the locker and over the Captain, who still moved, and who might have been screaming. I saw the Mate, who held no gun and looked at me in a different way; alongside him stood – perhaps – the big man who had floored me. The claw of the crane was rising behind them, and Beckton gas works was far too close on the starboard side. I looked towards the foc's'le and saw two crewmen I did not know, had not seen before, but my surprise was nothing to theirs. I walked over to the port side with the shooter in my hand and there, running fast alongside, was a launch with a rough looking sailor at the wheel and an evident gent in a long, smart, official-looking great-coat standing very upright beside him.

Behind the two was a funnel hardly bigger than either of them, and the top of it was ringed with red paint. They were not quite coppers, I decided, but were somehow in authority. I looked down at them from the gunwale on the port side, and that did no good at all. So I raised my two-two pistol and fired, making not the least effect on the generality of the sailors and crane operators and wharf men. But the two fellows in the launch looked up.