The Necropolis Railway

Chapter Eleven

Monday 30 November

For the following week I had the worst turn of the lot: the five o'clock in the morning go-on. On my first day of early turns, which was Monday 30 November, there was more coming and going in the shed than I had seen at any later hour, with 200 locomotives under the roof, and the fires were being started on all sides. The men were stoking up the whole of London, setting the world turning for another day, and by their looks they seemed to say they could manage the job quite well without me.

I went in to see the Governor first thing. As Nolan scribbled away, the Governor said he was giving me a rest from Twenty-Nine and Thirty-One for a while, for there weren't enough funerals. This was no great shock: those two only went out three or four times a week in any case. He put me on to general tidying and making straight, and as I was leaving he called out, 'Watch yourself off-shed today. It's thick as a bag out there.'

I walked back to the mouth of the shed, and saw that the dawn had come but it had been one of those frauds, where too much blackness makes way for too much whiteness. I couldn't even make out the turntables. A bell was being rung behind me, echoing in the shed. A couple of engines were coming off-shed, rolling out on the tracks to either side of me, big as black clanking houses on the move and giving me a sheer blank fright as they swept strangely past, proving the power of the fog, which swallowed them in an instant. A minute after, I heard an explosion.

A man to my left threw off his cap and began to run. On Filey Beach when I was twelve, my dad offered me a sporting challenge: first to touch the spars of Lighthouse Pier from a hundred yards off. For the first time my father did not let me win, and I saw what a man could do, even a little, sometimes-silly butcher in a brown billycock. This fellow was faster than my dad. He was leaping the rails, flying across the front of the fog, then disappearing diagonally into it. A crowd was coming up behind me to watch, and I turned around and saw Crook. It was a shock to see him away from his clock. 'Detonation,' he said to me, and his eyebrows did their little jump.

Detonators were put on the tracks as a back-up for signals on foggy days, and an explosion meant an engine had struck one. I didn't breathe as I awaited the sound of a smash, which was like waiting for death itself, because there was curiosity and horror too. I believed smashes came as the sound of a great bell being rung, and now I was about to find out for myself. But thirty seconds went by and we heard nothing, and I felt I ought to be doing more than standing there and waiting, so I stepped away from the shed.

I knew, once in the middle of the fog, that the bad business wasn't over. There were shouts, lamps swinging, the sound of people scrambling forward, then stopping. I was hard by the locomotive now, and I saw it was an engine commonly called a Jubilee, one of the two that had rolled out of the shed beside me. There were men all around it, with more crammed onto the footplate. A man was being moved around in there, propped up, turned about, and I could see the little ambulance box being passed across from one fellow to another. Then I saw the head of the man being moved: it was Mike's, and it was all wrong; blue, like a bad potato.

The body that was connected to the head flopped – the legs were for a second forgotten, and dangled from the cab – and it seemed too small, although in fact it was the head that was too big. But it scarcely mattered either way: the two could not remain connected for very much longer, since the one would henceforward want nothing to do with the other.

Now there was a fellow coming up from behind who said, 'Did you hear the barker?' Somebody else I didn't know said, 'That's what we all heard.' 'No,' said a voice that could have been the first one, 'we heard the shooter and the fog bomb blowing off together.' Another said, 'There was no shooter. He just came off the bloody engine.'

I looked up. Arthur Hunt was leaning against the Jubilee's tender and staring at me as if he'd never left off doing it from that time I'd first seen him in the half-link's mess. The dirty business done, the fog was clearing all the time, racing away. Barney Rose was at the other end, next to the cylinder casing. He had his pipe going, but looked rattled all the same, and I knew I should have left him alone, but I couldn't. I had come to a place that was full of hatred. One man had disappeared and another had died, and this last was a good deal more popular than myself. It wasn't bravery that made me walk towards Rose; it was something like what they call the life force itself.

The fog may have been lifting but the Jubilee was giving out whiffs of steam, and there was Rose's pipe smoke to add to the morning ghostliness. When he spoke he looked away from me. 'I was under orders from the Governor to let Mike take her off-shed,' he said, 'just while I walked along her and took a good look at the motion… something a bit queer about the noise it was making…' He left a long pause, then he started again, still looking away: 'He was like Taylor and like you: a very ardent lad.'

He gave a funny little sideways smile that made me feel ill, and I said, 'What do you mean?' I suppose I was shouting, but the fog seemed to require it.

'No holds barred,' said Rose, shaking his head and seeming nearly to laugh. Another bloke came up to us, and Rose carried on talking, still with that hateful half smile. 'Well, Mike being new to the regulator, and a little heavy-handed with it, I got left behind. I never saw him hit the fog bomb, only heard it, and when I got nearer he was flat out by the track, with the engine heading away for bloody Bournemouth at ten miles to the hour. He'd come off the footplate and hit the next rail.' He looked up at the two of us, then down again. 'Talk about beginner's luck,' he said.

Beyond and above us, on the footplate of the engine, I could make out that they were still holding Mike, still turning him this way and that as if he might somehow come back to life if they got him at the right angle. 'How did he come off?' said a voice. 'Tripped on coal, if you ask me' said Rose.

I remembered that I had seen Mike's messy ways with the shovel for myself.

A lantern was coming towards us; behind it was a man coughing – the Governor. 'It's Florence fucking Nightingale' said a sharp voice – the voice of Arthur Hunt. Mike was being brought down off the footplate, and somebody was shouting, roaring angrily. The Governor yelled something to Rose, then leapt onto the footplate of the Jubilee. Rose followed him up more slowly, looking completely all in. Two minutes later the engine began rolling backwards towards the shed. Rose was at the regulator, and the Governor was looking out at all the blokes. "The impedimentia of illusion are being removed from the stage!' he roared, by which he meant get back to our duties.

A shout went up – many intemperate words, and all against the Governor. I wasn't one of the shouters but it made me feel good to be part of the crowd. For the first time I was a Nine Elms man. Well, I mean… it was for once not myself but another who was the object of hatred. 'Get that fucking slave driver off there' said a voice from the crowd of men, which could have been Hunt again, but I could not be sure. Then I saw the swinging bulls' eyes of the constables coming up, and I thought: it is very like the end of the shows in the music halls with the chuckers-out coming in, and I remembered Mike's legs hanging off the side of the cab, and how they were like Mr Punch's little broken legs that would sometimes flop over the front of the small stages in the seaside booths, making you sorry for him in spite of all. But Mike was a good fellow to begin with, in my eyes at least; Taylor had been another by all accounts, and maybe that was part of the killer's programme, to get the nice ones, in which case I had better stop playing the milksop.

The coppers took the numbers of the blokes around the loco, and asked everybody what they'd seen. Two hours later a detective with a white beard who looked like a sea captain, accompanied by the Governor, came to see me while I was ripping rags on my own in the rag store, and I told them everything I knew and nothing of what I thought – because I could have given them quite a bit to chew on.

The Governor called me a good lad, and started coming on strong about the half-link blokes right in front of the detective. He said that Rose was not up to the mark, that there would be an inquiry, and it would be the finish of him. He also said that Rose had overrun in the yard at the start of August, which I'd already heard from Vincent, who'd said somebody had split over it, and now the Governor, working up to boiling point in the rag store, came out with the name. 'It was that poor sod Henry Taylor who spilled the beans to me – it was his job to do it, but look what happened to him. He was a good lad too – would have been up on the footplate in double-quick time.'

By now his colour had reached the danger level, and he started coughing, as the detective, who seemed to know of all this anyway, smiled, and told him to calm himself.

I had one question burning to be asked: 'Where's Vincent today?' 'On leave,' said the Governor.

'So he's not about?' I said, and the Governor said nothing, but looked across at the detective.

As I went back to tearing rags, I fell to thinking – because I had to think about everything – how Mike was careless with coal. On the footplate, he was one of those clumsy fellows whose boots always seemed too big. But it did look as if he'd been jacked in, and with him went the best hope of finding out what had really happened to Henry Taylor. Why would Barney Rose not look at me? And why had Arthur Hunt been off-shed with no engine underneath him? And then Vincent, who was certainly no friend of Mike's… that mysterious little fellow had five days holiday a year, and had taken one of them on this foggy November day… And then why had Arthur been off-shed with no engine underneath him?

One thing seemed certain: with Mike gone, the half-link was left with nothing but relief firemen. Vincent would have to go up. At the same time, though, there were 500 men at Nine Elms Loco Shed, and any one of them could have been the killer. Come to that, there were thousands of fellows in London who were off their boxes, and the wall around Nine Elms was low enough to let in any of them. Bob Crook, after all, was no sentry – you did not need to see him unless you were booking on.

When I'd finished thinking all these things – all destined for the back of the diary, to be mulled over for hours – my mind emptied for a while, except for the small part of it needed to keep me tearing rags. I did not quit the work but in due course a feeling of stark terror came over me, and with it thoughts of the shadows in the courtyard, moving and growing.

I had seen the devil of violence and yet I knew it was only the start.