The Last Train to Scarborough

Chapter Forty-Two

Forty minutes south of York, I looked through the compartment window at the town of Retford: red bricks in the morning sunshine, and a smoking chimney that I believed to be the brickworks, and which I always thought of as a sort of factory for making Retford.

I'd run through the place on the main line many times, and had passed through it going the other way only a little under a month before, on my return from London and my imprisonment aboard the steam collier Lambent Lady, owned and operated by the firm of Hawthorn and Bruce of West Hartlepool, and contracted to the Gas, Light and Coke Company for the Beckton run. The Captain was a Rickerby: John, brother of Adam and Amanda; and the First Mate was Gus Klaason. The great-coated fellow I'd alerted by firing Tommy's pistol was Wharf Master of the Gas, Light and Coke Company who'd quickly alerted the Port of London Authority, an outfit that ran its own police force, and it was those boys who'd taken in Klaason and Rickerby (whose shoulder my bullet had broken). The two had been left unguarded for a minute before a remand hearing at Greenwich Magistrates Court; they'd done a push and were no doubt steaming fast to the far side of the world very soon after. An enquiry was to be held into the matter and a Chief Inspector Baxter of the Port of London Authority Police had written me a letter of apology. But I hardly cared about the escape. Yes, Captain Rickerby had meant to kill me at the last, but his intention had been to save his family from disaster, and he'd certainly put off the moment as long as he could. He had also saved that petrified lad – name of Edward Crozier – from drowning by going about to collect him after he'd tried to swim to the foreign ship that came alongside. (Crozier had by chance seen me brought aboard, and then been roped into the job of guarding me.)

The PLA coppers had been decent sorts, and they'd made me a present of the blue serge suit they'd given me after my rescue. I'd had my choice of any number of suits or sports coats and flannels, since they'd seemed to have an entire tailoring department on the strength. They also had a first class police doctor, who'd told me that carbon monoxide (as from coal gas) combines with haemoglobin in the blood to make carboxyhaemoglobin.

He wrote the name down in my pocket book as a kind of souvenir, saying that this was a very stable compound – and this stability was not a good thing. The poison prevented the lungs sending oxygen to the bodily cells that need it, and it might stop heart, lungs or brain. When it took over half your blood, then you were done for one way or another. I might have been saved, the doctor said, by not having jammed the paste-board into the window frame of my room on my second night – that small amount of ventilation might have been all- important. The doctor did not believe I had taken any permanent injury from my experience, but he did fret about my loss of memory. He asked me questions to test the membranes of my brain, and seemed quite satisfied with the results of this quiz, which ran to enquiries such as 'What is the name of the Prime Minister?' But I had been testing myself ever since. I would run through all the railway companies that ran into York station, or try to put a name and rank to every man in the police office, and do it fast. I would hit a sticking point every so often. For instance, the name of the painting that had been attacked could not have been the Rickerby Venus, could it? I asked myself the name of the oldest pub in York and could not recall whether it was the Three Cranes on St Sampson's Square, the Three Crowns on Coney Street or, for the matter of that, the Three Cups on Coney Street. I had certainly known the answer once, and I wondered whether the forgetting might not be down to the gas.

Beyond the window, Retford had been replaced by flying fields. I stretched out my legs, loosened my tie, and thought about doing a spot of reading. Beside me on the seat was a copy of the previous day's Yorkshire Evening Press, which struck a happy, holiday note in some of its articles, the Easter week-end being in prospect: 'Great Rush to the Sea-side Predicted'; 'Everybody on Pleasure Bent'. All the regiments of the York garrison would be marching through the streets in aid of a recruitment drive, and there would be the showing of a film, The British Army Film, at the Victoria Hall in Goodramgate. It promised 'some very wonderful pictures of bursting shrapnel, of quick-firing guns springing out shells at the rate of thirty a minute'. Also, Constable Flower had arrested a 'drunk and incapable' on one of the far platforms of the station. He'd taken him into the cells in the police office by means of a luggage trolley, and this news had caused laughter when, later on in the day, it was announced in the police court.

Beside the Press was the latest number of the Railway

Magazine opened towards the back of the paper with the page headed 'What the Railways Are Doing' uppermost. This was the classified section of the magazine, and always carried the notices announcing meetings of the Railway Club, who were really a London lot, but whose meetings were open to anyone taking the trouble to write to the secretary for a ticket. At seven o'clock that day – the announcement was circled in my copy of the magazine – Mr A. K. Chambers would be reading a paper entitled 'The New Atlantics with Special Mention of the North Eastern Class Z', and I had the ticket for it in my pocket.

In the office, old man Wright, who distributed the post, had handed me the letter in which it came and I had made a point of satisfying his curiosity by opening the envelope in his presence and letting him see the ticket for himself. The meeting was to be held at the Railway Club's premises: 92 Victoria Street, London SW, and Wright had said, 'You've booked a day of leave for that?' Then, later, when he'd thought about it a bit more, 'Seems a long way to go just to hear about trains,' at which I'd reminded him that he was in fact in the railway police and so ought not be taking that tone.

It was quite in order to josh with Wright. His wife, Jane, would not be coming back to him as she had made plain both to Wright and to my own wife during a meeting of the Cooperative ladies. But he had developed a plan in response: firstly, he would no longer buy his groceries from any of the Co-operative stores, his wife and her new man, Terry Dawson, being employees of the Movement. This went hard with Wright because the Co-operative stores were much the cheapest, and he was a right old skinflint, but it was the principle of the thing. (The Co-operative slogan, 'The Friendly Store', now rang very hollow in his ears, he told me.) Second of all, he would leave work early twice a week to attend the dancing classes given in the room over the Big Coach public house on Nessgate. Once up to snuff with the two-step and the waltz and whatnot, he would go along to the Saturday afternoon tea dances that were held in many of the hotels of central York, and were known to attract the widows of the City.

'The best one's at the Danby Lodge on Minster Walk,' Wright told me one day in the police office. 'I'm going to try my luck there first.' 'You'll need a lot of luck,' Constable Flower had said, in an under-breath, and whether Wright heard it or not, he certainly wasn't put off. He seemed very confident about his plan, and I wondered whether the end of his marriage might not be the making of him.

Of course Wright, being so nosey, had had a field day on my delayed return from Scarborough. Lydia had been into the office twice to ask where I'd got to, the second time in tears. His fixed opinion, he told me later, was that I'd been done in. 'Of course, I didn't say that to her,' he told me, 'or not in so many words', and I dreaded to think what he had said for he was not the sort to play down any drama.

On the Thursday morning, three days after Adam Rickerby put me onto the Lambent Lady, the Chief himself had gone to Scarborough, making straight to Bright's Cliff to see what had become of me. There he'd found a bloke from the council sent to board over the window I'd smashed when I'd pitched the chair through it. That had been quick work. Someone else in the street had gone into the council offices to complain that the house, having evidently been abandoned, was now a magnet for vagrants and burglars. The Chief told me that the bloke from the council had posted a bill for the work through the letter box before leaving.

It seemed very unlikely to me that the bill would ever be paid.

The Chief had broken into Paradise in company with some of the Scarborough coppers. There were signs of people having left in a great hurry, although the gas had been turned off. It was the Chief himself who'd come upon the body of Fielding, which was just as well since he was well equipped to stand that kind of shock.

I'd returned to Bright's Cliff a few days after with the Chief, some coppers from Scarborough and Leeds, and the Scarborough coroner, a Mr Clegg. By then Theo Vaughan had turned up, having walked into the Scarborough copper shop to make a clean breast of… well, not much. He'd staggered back to the house at three in the morning on Tuesday, 17 March, and found it empty. The smashed window and the gas reek had terrified him, and – knowing that he was still under suspicion over the last bit of bad business in the house – he'd taken a few of his belongings (including, I didn't doubt, the remainder of his Continental Specialities) and fled the scene.

I'd talked to Vaughan in the coroner's court and had given him the whole tale over a cup of tea during an adjournment in the inquiry. I asked him whether he'd known that Fielding was sweet on the lady of the house.

'Not in that way, Jim,' he said, 'not in that way.'

He was every bit as familiar as he had been before, despite the fact that he now knew me for a policeman. When I told him how I'd come upon the special post cards in Fielding's bedside drawer, he said, 'He must have had 'em away from my room, Jim. I tell you… no man can resist.'

He then leant towards me, with droplets of cold tea dangling from his 'tache, and might have been on the point of again offering to sell me some at a knockdown price. I believe he was only put off by the clerk of the court coming up to me at that moment and addressing me as 'Detective Sergeant Stringer'.

Mr Clegg had praised me before his court, and the Leeds and Scarborough coppers also seemed to think I'd done a good job. It came down to this: I'd made myself the mark, and I'd cracked the mystery – and it was cracked all right, papers amounting to a confession to the killing of Blackburn having been discovered amongst Fielding's belongings. He'd known Blackburn as soon as he turned up at the house; had seen him about in Scarborough on earlier occasions with the Lady. He had observed them buying oysters on the harbour wall, later walking in Clarence Gardens. It was perhaps there that Blackburn had made her a present of the North Eastern badge that she so much admired.

In exposing Fielding I had left two dead bodies in my wake, but this seemed to be taken quite lightly by everyone in authority: one of the dead was a man who would have swung anyway, and that went down as quick and violent justice of the sort the Chief and many another favoured. But as regards the death of Tommy Nugent, I blamed the Chief. He'd been too reckless from start to finish, and I meant to have it out with him.

During the visit to the house in company with the Leeds and Scarborough men, I saw a different side to the man. He knew he'd made a bloomer over sending Tommy Nugent with me, and he acted accordingly. I believe that 'chastened' is the word. He'd liked Tommy Nugent, was saddened by his death, and seemed to take the responsibility for it, but that wasn't enough for me.

We'd all (the Leeds and Scarborough coppers, the Chief and me) gone off to the Two Mariners after inspecting the house, and I'd given the story, which was fast becoming a party piece, over a few pints. As when addressing Captain Rickerby, I'd played down my infatuation with the Lady of the House, although I think one of the Scarborough coppers guessed at it; he'd questioned her over the disappearance of Blackburn and had evidently half fallen in love with her himself. When we coincided in the gentlemen's halfway through our session in the Mariners, he congratulated me on saving her life by the smashing of the window, for that was the supposition – theirs and mine: that she had survived the gas, and made off with her brother to avoid being taken in charge over the killing of Tommy.

'She was a peach, wasn't she, that one?' the Scarborough copper said. 'I wouldn't have minded tomming her myself.'

He told me that he was circulating her and Adam's descriptions in the Police Gazette as being wanted for questioning over the death of Tommy Nugent. 'But I'll tell you this,' he added, buttoning up his flies, 'I half hope we never find her.'

'I don't suppose you ever will,' I said, which might have been taken as rather rude, but I was the star turn that day and could have got away with anything. As I told my tale, one of the Leeds blokes kept saying, 'Well, who'd have thought it?' and 'What a turn-up'. He might have been a stooge, paid to boost me.

The Chief had kept silence as I gave my account, even when, towards the end – and made brave by my three pints – I'd eyed him and said in front of everyone, 'Tommy Nugent ought not to have been sent. He was gun crazy – out for any opportunity to loose off a bullet.'

Later, on the train back to York, as I sat with the Chief in a smoking compartment we hardly spoke a word, and I knew that for the first time in our acquaintance this was my silence rather than one of his. I'd been stirred up by my success in the pub, and I now felt I had the measure of the Chief. I would let him stew before I said my piece.

He smoked and I sat over-opposite, looking sidelong.

'Will you have a cigar?' he enquired, just after we'd come out of Seamer.

'I reckon not,' I said.

'It is a smoking compartment, you know.'

'Yes,' I said, 'but that doesn't mean it's obligatory, does it… sir?'

'Obligatory,' he muttered under his breath.

A silence of twenty minutes followed that exchange.

'I want to say something about this case,' I said, as we flew through Rillington.

'Fire away,' he said.

'You sent me into that house unprepared.'

'Correct.'

I was a bit knocked by that but I ploughed on: 'Unprepared in the following ways: number one…'

'No,' said the Chief, who had now turned and was looking through the window.

'Eh?'

'Don't put numbers to it. I'm liable to get a bit cross if you do that. Put it shortly.'

'I had no sight of the case papers,' I said. 'Well, I had the witness statements, but none of the reports. I had no account of the personalities in the house.'

The Chief was still looking through the window.

'Firstly,' he said,'… Christ, you've got me at it now… you had all the papers that were to hand. The others were missing and have never turned up since.'

'That's a bit funny, isn't it?'

'Well, you don't seem to be laughing about it. And even if more papers had been to hand, do you think those Leeds and Scarborough blokes are up to writing an account of anyone's personality⁷.' He fairly spat that word out. 'What do you think they are? A bunch of fucking novelists?'

'… And you gave me no advance warning of the job,' I said. 'Well, one day – not enough.'

'I didn't want you shitting yourself for a whole week, did I? It might have been bad for your health.'

'I wouldn't have been shitting myself… sir. I would have been developing a plan of action.'

'I didn't want you to develop a plan of action.'

'Why not?'

'Because it would have been crap.'

'Thanks,' I said, and the Chief stood up. He suddenly looked big – too big for Malton station, which we were just then pulling into.

'Where are you off to?' I said.

'The next carriage,' said the Chief, blowing smoke.

The chief said 'carriage' when he meant 'compartment'. He was old-fashioned in that way.

'I don't care for the smell in this one,' he continued, as he pulled open the door.

'And what smell is that?'

'Lawyer,' he said, and he disappeared along the corridor.

I sat alone until Kirkham Abbey came up – a good twenty minutes. Then I too stood up and walked along to the next compartment. From the corridor, I looked through the window at the Chief, who was sitting there with the gas lamps turned up full. He hardly ever read on a train, but would always sit under bright light. The lamp immediately above him illuminated his head in such a way that I could count the hairs. There were not more than a dozen. I shoved open the door, and entered the compartment. I sat down facing the Chief. He met my gaze while exhaling smoke, at which my gaze shifted somewhat to the left – to the 'No Smoking' sign pasted on the window.

'I'm not complaining on my own account,' I said. 'It's my job to go into dangerous places.'

'Congratulations,' said the Chief. 'It's only taken you ten fucking years to work that one out.'

'But you shouldn't have sent Tommy Nugent. Why did you send him?'

'He wanted to go,' said the Chief. 'He was bored. There's a lot of it about, you know. I'm bored listening to you.'

I watched the dark fields roll by the window. There was absolutely nothing at all between bloody Barton Hill and Strensall.

'Who was the man you were speaking to in the station when we came back from the Beeswing?' I said. 'It seems an age since, but it was only Friday. You weren't over-keen that I saw you.'

'None of your fucking business,' said the Chief, and just at that moment I knew.

'Do you want me to stay on the force?' I said.

'It's not obligatory,' replied the Chief, and now we were in his silence, and we remained in it all the way back to York.

On arrival at the station, I walked through the arch in the Bar Walls to Toft Green, where the Grapes public house was dwarfed by the new railway offices. It was a perfect little jewel box of a pub, with the name spelled out in the stained glass of the window. The name of the landlord – the new landlord – appeared over the door: John Mitchell, licensed to sell beers, wines and all the rest of it. He was holding a cheerful conversation at the bar, and I broke in on it directly by asking whether Chief Inspector Saul Weatherill of the railway police had wanted to hold a 'do' in the pub.

'Aye,' said Mitchell, a bit dazed.

'You spoke to him about it at the station on Friday, didn't you?'

Mitchell nodded.

'What was it in aid of?' I enquired.

'Leaving 'do' for a fellow call Stringer. Why?'

The Chief, then, had not bargained on me dying in Scarborough, and not only had he come to terms with my leaving the force, but he was willing to make a party of it. It was this that decided me.

'You may as well forget about it,' I said. 'I'm Stringer, and I en't leaving.'

Chapter Forty-Three

At King's Cross station, a succession of pointing-finger signs directed me to: 'King's Cross for St Pancras', which was the Underground station; the booking office of same, where I bought a penny ticket; and the southbound platform of the Hampstead Tube.

Charing Cross Underground station was being rebuilt, I discovered on arrival, but the pointing fingers were there as well, directing me past the men hammering, sawing, mixing cement – and onto the platforms of the District Railway, where I waited for a westbound train while figuring in my mind a particular bench in the Museum Gardens at York, the one set just before the ruins of St Mary's Abbey. It was there – on the day of my return from the London docks – that I had told the tale of Paradise to the wife, taking care to put a quantity of rouge and kohl onto Amanda Rickerby's face and a good ten years onto her age.

'She was a scarlet woman,' the wife had said, in an amused sort of voice, as though to save me the trouble of going to any further lengths.

Naturally, I also left out my own blushes and faltering speech, my own keenness to be in the company of the lady. But I did admit that she had taken my hand in the ship room on the second, fatal evening.

'And what did you do then?' the wife asked.

'Nothing,' I said, and the wife had kept silence.

'Don't you believe me?' I said.

'I know you did nothing, Jim,' she said, and it seemed to me that she sounded almost disappointed, as though I'd failed her own sex. She also sounded distracted, and it struck me that I ought to have predicted that she would be. Whenever you have some important matter to relate and you've taken a time working yourself up to doing it, you invariably find that the person you're telling it to is thinking of something else entirely – something much more important, or at least more closely touching upon their own lives, which comes to the same thing.

'Have you seen Robert Henderson lately?' I asked, when I'd come to the end of my tale.

'Yes,' she said, and in that moment everything hung in the balance. The white stones of the ruined abbey were no longer beautiful; instead they were just so many tombstones, a representation of death.

'He came over to see me yesterday,' said Lydia.

'To do what?' I said, eyeing her.

'To make love to me.'

'Hold on a minute,' I said, turning to her on the bench.

'I told him to kindly leave the house immediately,' said the wife, and the abbey and the gardens, with the crocuses and daffodils and speckless blue sky were all beautiful again.

'But there was a difficulty, of course,' said the wife.

'I'll say there is,' I said. 'It's his bloody house.'

The wife nodded and stood up, startling the peacock that had wandered up to our bench.

'You've to come with me, Jim,' she said.

'Where are we off to?' I asked, as she set off at a lick.

'He told me', Lydia said, as we tore past the observatory, through the gates of the gardens and out into Museum Street where a trotting pony with trap behind nearly did for us both, 'that there would be a general rent increase across the estate, and that he would let me know about it shortly.'

'Christ,' I said, trotting myself to keep up with the wife as she turned a corner. 'That's going some. He's a bigger bastard than I thought.'

'Don't use that language, Jim,' said the wife, as we marched diagonally across St Helen's Square with very little regard for the folks in the way.

'I told him', the wife said, addressing me over her shoulder, 'that he had better let me buy this house immediately on the terms mentioned when we rented it.'

'And what were they?' I asked, shouting over the barrel organ played by the bloke who stood every day at the start of Davygate. (Wanting to limit my dealings with Henderson, I'd kept out of the detailed negotiations about the house.)

'He'd said we could have it for a hundred and fifty,' the wife called back.

'Well,' I said, dodging one bicyclist and nearly running into another as a result, 'he'll just go back on that, won't he?'

'Oh no,' said the wife, 'he agreed to it there and then. He was very shamefaced. I think he knew he'd done wrong.'

'Well, he'll know for certain when I go round tomorrow and smash his face in,' I said.

'You won't, Jim.'

'I bloody will.'

'You won't, Jim, because he's off to India. Sailing first thing in the morning – looking after his father's interests out there.'

'It's about time he got a job,' I said. 'I suppose that's why he tried it on.' 'Very likely,' said the wife, and we were now outside the door of the Yorkshire Penny Bank on Feasgate. It was where the wife kept her inheritance from her mysterious, very Victorian father who'd died, extremely ancient, shortly after our marriage and who'd owned more than one London property.

'You've not enough to buy the house,' I said.

'Have you never heard of a mortgage, Jim?' said the wife, pushing open the door; and I saw that she'd brought all sorts of household papers in her basket.

An hour later we were at our other favourite bench – in the little park next to the Minster. The wife had arranged the mortgage in record time but even so we'd missed the start of Evensong in the great cathedral, about which I was secretly quite pleased – and the wife hadn't minded too much. She was happier than I'd seen her in a good while.

'What's the medieval word for what he was proposing, Jim?'

'Same one as today,' I said. 'A fuck.'

The wife frowned at me, for a pair of respectable ladies happened to be passing by our bench at just that point.

'I don't think those blokes with the broad swords and the boiling oil were too particular about polite language,' I said.

'Droit de seigneur;' said the wife, 'that's it,' and she shook her head.'… Incredible in this day and age.'

'We might go in after the first reading, if you like,' I said, nodding towards the Minster.

'All right, let's,' she said, and she took my hand.

'By the way,' I said, rising from the bench, 'I'm not going into that solicitor's office.'

I had been expecting an explosion; instead we kissed.

'I'm so relieved, Jim,' she said. 'I could hardly bear to bring it up after all the work you've put in. But now that we've a mortgage to repay you've got to be earning, and the wages of an articled clerk just wouldn't have been enough.'

We walked over to the east entrance of the Minster, and an usher in a red robe came up to us just inside the door, whispering, 'Are you for Evensong?'

'I am,' said the wife. 'My husband's going to take a pint of beer and meet me afterwards.'

I grinned at her, and we might have kissed again had it not been for that usher.

Chapter Forty-Four

I found 92 Victoria Street within ten minutes of quitting Victoria Station. One brass plaque by the door read 'William Watson, Tailor', another 'The Railway Club, est'd 1899'. The door was firmly locked, but then the talk would not begin for another six and a half hours, it being just then only one o'clock. I might return for it, but really I had only walked up to the door in order to establish the exact location – just in case any railway-minded person should ask me about it.

I turned and retraced my steps, entering the station on the west side, under the awning belonging to the London, Brighton and South Coast end of the Victoria operation. The names of the principal destinations were painted on a long board mounted over the awning, and I read: 'Hastings, St Leonard's, Bexhill, Pevensey, Eastbourne…'

I bought my ticket, and found the train waiting on the platform with all doors invitingly open. As the guard began slamming them shut I was not so much reading as gazing down at my copy of the Yorkshire Evening Press. In Scarcroft Road a York councillor had made a miraculous escape from a burning house. I'd been reading the same words for five minutes, and it seemed impertinent for the paper to be telling me about York while I sat in one of the grandest stations in London, so I folded it up and put it aside. Shortly after, the train jolted into life and we were rolling out from under the glass canopy into a beautiful, sky-blue afternoon. We soon began to make good speed, and I wondered a little – but only a little – about the engine. I had not walked up for a look at it, just as I had not looked at the one that had carried me south from York, and I believe that I only really noticed one station on the way from Victoria: Lewes, where the gulls screamed over the goods yard even though we were still twenty miles from the sea.

I continued in my distracted state as I walked south from Eastbourne station along Terminus Road. Why did I walk south? I had no firm idea, but that way led to the front, which was the main attraction of Eastbourne in sunny weather. After ten minutes' walking I came to the sea, and in my mind's eye the paper fan unfolded.

The frontage was called the Grand Parade, and it was just that: motors, carriages, bath chairs and pedestrians – and every face turned towards the glittering waters of the English Channel. I joined the throng for a while, before descending towards the Prom where a narrower parade was going on for walkers and bath chair patients only. Out on the milky sea there was only one vessel to be seen – a sailing boat – and it brought to mind a sign posted in York station for the benefit of engine men: 'Make No Smoke', which made me think in turn of Captain Rickerby. Since his escape, it had come out that one of the constables meant to be guarding him and Klaason at Greenwich had been a seaman who'd sailed under Klaason in deep waters ten years since, and I'd thought it very big of the Port of London Authority police to admit as much.

I came to a bandstand that projected out from the Prom and hung over the beach. The crowds were particularly dense here even though a dozen notices, fixed all around the bandstand, said that the concerts would not begin until the Saturday. The seaward edge of the beach (which was pebbly, as Howard Fielding had said) was crowded with bathing machines and, as I looked on, one of them rolled forwards, which set the people standing about applauding. A little while after, two men emerged from it, waded a little way out, and began to swim. Some of the crowd clapped again, some cheered, and some laughed in derision for the water must still be freezing.

Won't be for long though, I thought: the day was beautiful, and all the predictions were for a fine summer.

I continued my walk, looking for a lavender coat and a mass of curls under a feathered hat, but most of the ladies wore white that day, and perhaps she did too. Or perhaps she was nowhere near Eastbourne.

I walked easterly until I came to a round fortification sitting on a hummock of grass. It had been built to keep Napoleon off but was now part of a pleasure ground. I bought an ice cream from an Italian with a barrow, and turned around and walked back towards the pier. That seemed promising, being so packed, and as I approached I studied the men and women walking up and down, and the thing in general. The highest of the white wooden buildings on it was crowned with a kind of white, round summer house, and this – as I realised when I approached the pier turnstiles and all the signs announcing the attractions available for my penny – was the famous camera obscura of Eastbourne, being some species of magic lantern that captured scenes from all along the front. I might see her inside there, projected two inches high and flickering in whatever the camera obscura made of the glorious sunlight. But the queues leading up to it were too long.

I walked to the end of the pier and back with no luck.

… Or was it just as well?

On the Grand Parade once again, I was practically trampled to the ground as I took out my pocket book where I'd noted the times of the return trains. It was now nearly four o'clock, and there was one at a quarter after: an express too. I would be in plenty of time for A. K. Chambers and his thoughts on the New Atlantics. But I decided to wander inland a bit, and so, with my suit-coat over my shoulder, I walked for nearly an hour amid the comfortable villas, which all had names: The Chase, The Sycamores, The Grove, The Haven. I had half an eye out for a house called Paradise, but the names in Eastbourne were a cut above that.

I returned to the front thoroughly over-heated, although the sun was now going down and making a golden road running out to sea. I was a good way further east than I had been before, towards Beachy Head and the cliffs, where Eastbourne becomes country. The sounds of the Grand Parade came to me faintly, and I saw that the Promenade here was ail-but deserted. A zig-zag path winding through ornamental gardens brought me down onto it, and looking right I saw her. She was gazing out to sea in a blue dress, a straw boater in her left hand. Well, it would never have fitted on top of her curls, and I believed that she only carried it for form's sake. Something told me she was about to look my way, so I darted towards a laurel bush that stood between us, and when I stepped out again she'd gone; and I found that I could hardly catch my breath because she was alive and looking just as before; because I had seen her; and because I now could not.

I then noticed the shelter on the Prom, made to look old and quaint with white plaster, black beams and a thatched roof. She must be in there. The thing was open at the front and I knew that, short of walking directly up to it, the best way of getting a look inside would be to drop down from the Prom to the beach, and walk a little way towards the sea.

This I did. In fact, I walked right to the water's edge, where two lads stood throwing stones at some rocks a little way out. I faced out to sea with the shelter now behind me, not quite directly and at a distance of, say, forty yards. I half turned and saw her on the bench inside it with legs crossed, kicking her top-most boot. She might be sheltering from the continuing sun, or from the slight breeze that was picking up, or just lazing after a long day of doing not much. I decided that she was most likely not working. She was supposed to be lying low after all, and I knew she was in funds. On my visit with the Chief to Paradise I'd inspected the vanity case and all the other boxes in Fielding's tall chest of drawers, and the forty pounds was nowhere to be seen.

I looked again towards the Prom, but this time the other way, for I had to ration my glances at the shelter… and there was Adam Rickerby, walking.slowly. He looked thinner, though still not right, and he seemed to list as he walked. What was wrong with his face? Was his hat on backwards? That was the effect somehow; there also seemed less of his curls under it, and I knew from the way his sister rose to greet him in the shelter that he was poorly. I wondered whether the bullet was still in him; I hoped not, for where would he find a doctor to take it out? I looked forward again, watching the stones thrown by the two lads into the little waves.

What had I done wrong in the Paradise guest house? As far as everybody else was concerned, it seemed very little. But then I was the only one who knew that I'd fallen for Amanda Rickerby.

What had been the result of my doing so as far as the investigation was concerned? One consequence was that I'd given too little time and thought to Tommy Nugent. I ought to have taken him in hand on the Monday: packed him off home – flatly insisted that he leave Scarborough. But I'd been too keen to get back to Miss Rickerby.

Would I have stopped in the house for that second night had it not been for my feelings towards her? And the thought that something might happen between us? I believed I would have done… Then again, it was my feeling towards her that had finally made me lock the door against her.

Why had she told me to lock the door? I wanted to ask her that, at least. Had she really known of the danger presented by Fielding? In which case, why had she not done more to protect us all? I believed she had been on the point of telling me to lock my door on the first night. She had begun to say it, late on in the kitchen, but she had pulled up. She wanted to make sure of her suspicions, and by flirting with me she was able to approach certainty.

And then again – the question of questions – why had she held my hand in the ship room, having used me for her own purposes for the entire… What had it been? Only an evening and a day; and I'd only been in her presence a fraction of that time. Had she taken my hand to apologise for what had happened, or for what was to come? Or had there been some other reason for it?

'Mister,' one of the lads was saying (and he'd probably been saying it for a while), 'we're aiming for that rock.'

He pointed out to sea.

'Want to try?' he said, and he walked up with a handful of stones.

'I'll only need one,' I said, taking the biggest. I shied it and scored a direct hit, no doubt because of not trying at all.

I turned about and saw Amanda and Adam Rickerby in the shelter, both looking forwards. She, I believed, was smiling.

The first boy was eyeing me in amazement, but the second was a bit of a harder nut: 'Bet you can't do it again,' he said, but I knew from his face that I could rest on my laurels, that no second throw was required. I glanced down at my watch.

'Where are you off to now?' enquired the first lad, doubtless wanting to know what amazing feat the hero of the hour might perform next.

'I'm off to catch a train,' I said.

He nodded, and it evidently seemed the right course of action to him, as it did to me for a dozen different reasons.