The Necropolis Railway

Chapter Nineteen

Thursday 17 December continued

I came back from the rag room with a blackish ribbon – or rag, if you were going to be particular – on my arm. The Governor took me up onto the footplate of Twenty-Nine, and there was no trouble as we picked up just two from the funeral set: a passenger carriage and a hearse. As we came into the Necropolis, Rose was half driving, half reading the paper, and every so often exclaiming, 'Oh, my eye,' at some new sporting sensation. Vincent was swanking at his regulator and fire, keeping the pressure at dead on 180 per square inch, which was the right mark for Twenty-Nine. I was staring at them both without minding if they knew it.

We backed into the Necropolis station, where a small crowd waited on the platform, all in fine black coats and toppers. They were all men and looked like a lot of ravens, but one of the ravens had the lined and worried head of Erskine Long, the Necropolis chairman. I watched the coffin come along after the last of the mourners had climbed up. Smith's coffin was as exquisite as his coats. It had panelling, fancy handles and a mass of hothouse flowers on top, and I could tell the Necropolis bearers – not Saturday Night Mack's gang, but a smarter-looking lot – were struggling with the weight of it, even though I guessed there would be little of the man himself left inside. The door marked 'first' was opened to receive the casket.

When I went back onto the footplate, Vincent was at his fire again, and Rose was putting something back in the box under his seat. I had seen him do that before.

Vincent put coal on as I hosed down the cab. After being given the off, Rose settled down to smoking his pipe and driving, both of which he did very badly, knocking ash everywhere and repeatedly relighting his pipe, and jabbing on the vacuum brake instead of brushing it on in the approved way. So we made jerky progress as we passed through the signals and speed limits of the Southern Division.

As we came to the edge of the city, I ran out of jobs to do on the footplate and looked at the passing scenery while a million questions raced through my head. It was a queer business, travelling south of London. The countryside, when it came, was of a very pretty sort, although more comfortable than I was used to, with bright green fields, churches covered in ivy and winding, dusty lanes with tempting inns dotted along the way. But there was no end of building taking place, and you'd get whole streets going up in the middle of fields. You could never quite say that London had finished, and it was vexing because you thought it ought to.

Towards Brookwood, I thought London had really given up the ghost, but then we suddenly rose out of a cutting and I looked down into a wood and saw men with axes and machines steaming away. London, according to the Necropolis idea, could not hold all of its dead, but it could not hold all of its living either, so it had to be ever restless, ever growing.

After a lot of fussing about from Rose, we were into the Necropolis running, bunker-end first, along the single track between the lines of mighty trees. We passed by North Station, which seemed closed up and forgotten like a cricket pavilion in winter. As we approached South Station, however, there was a parson in strange togs waiting on a bench with a pipe in his mouth. Smith must have been church.

The parson stood up as we came closer but did not knock out his pipe until after Rose had struck the buffer bars with his usual bang. I stepped off the footplate and saw the four bearers put the wondrous casket onto their shoulders. They aimed themselves towards the little church that went along with South Station. A moment later the procession was off, with the parson in the lead and the Necropolis board in a semi-march – all save the man at the back, the youngest of the lot, who swished at the tops of the grass with his stick. As they went on, though, they did begin to fall in step in a ramshackle sort of a way, like loose-coupled waggons, and presently they disappeared from view.

It now struck me that I was alone with Barney Rose and Vincent, and at their mercy if they decided to try something. And no sooner had this thought come to me than I heard a crack, like a gunshot, in the bushes, and turned about to see a bony fox racing through the graves. I called up to the pair on the footplate: 'Did you see that?' Looking up, I saw Rose with a bottle of some spirit at his lips. I looked away so as to give this horrible vision a chance to disappear, and when I looked back the bottle had gone.

Vincent was working next to him, putting a bit of oil on the fire-door runners, and for the first time I felt sorry for the fifty-face kid, having to do his best to learn from a semi-drunk. 'He only takes a nip,' he said, looking at me, then added, 'You'd better not split.' I just stood there dumbfounded.

'Smith's gone,' said Vincent, 'But there's still a lot you can blab to if you're daft enough to try.'

Rose leant forwards and threw the bottle, and cork after it, into the fire, slamming the door immediately after. 'Cat's out of the bag,' Barney Rose said, pushing past Vincent and coming down onto the platform of South Station. As he stood next to me there was a wrong smell about him, and I now realised it had always been there, that it was the reason he'd been looking away from me after the death of Mike.

'You're risking it a bit, aren't you,' Vincent called down to Rose, 'with top brass riding on the train?'

'That's the whole reason for it,' said Rose. 'We've got a carriage-load of swells with us today… fellow's got to get his screw somehow.' He turned to me and smiled his usual smile – which now looked different. 'We nearly had White-Chester up,' he went on, 'but he's sent his excuses, or so I've heard. I would've needed a whole other bottle if that gent had shown his face.'

'You'd have been stood down straight away if he'd seen you, though,' I said. 'Leave off,' said Vincent. 'I don't know,' said Rose. 'The Necropolis lot are one thing, but White-Chester likes a drop himself, or so I believe.' 'But he's not driving a train,' I said.

'Well,' said Rose, giving me a queer look, 'in a way he's driving hundreds of them, wouldn't you say?'

He's a socialist like Hunt, I thought, although not so urgent.

Half an hour went by, during which, to my relief, a bloke appeared and started doing odd jobs about the platform, Vincent played with the injector and Rose read his paper, remarking on how the 'men from Marylebone had not persevered with Knight' in Australia but had persevered with somebody else against all odds. I just sat on the platform bench flunking how it was not important that Rose was not the right sort. What was important was that I had struck more sadness in a month in London than in all my time in Bay, and there was nothing left for me but to play out my part of the little detective and find out the cause of it all.

The clock on the chapel over in the trees gave ten dings and Rose said, 'Here they all come, minus one' – the one being Smith.

The parson was leading the way once more. He was very cheery, as were they all, really. There was even a smile on the face of Erskine Long, who was directly behind. The same man was at the rear as before, swiping the grass with his stick. Even when they had been walking away from me it had been pretty obvious that he was the youngest, but I now saw that he was the youngest by at least twenty years. He was also the only one who did not look mild as milk: you could picture him in olden times, with a sword in his hand.

The four bearers walking behind looked lost without their coffin. The crowd did not trouble the bar – there was to be some grand event later at the American Hotel near Waterloo – and boarded the train directly.

'You'll find the ride up a deal smoother than the down run' said Rose, 'now that I've had my pick-up.'

It was faster and that's for certain. I could not make out the names of any of the stations this time, and we fairly crashed across the points as we aimed for the Necropolis branch. Vincent was putting too much on – the pressure was above 200 – and I couldn't stop myself thinking of him as the friend of the fire, or saying out loud over the crashing of the engine, 'It's my opinion someone put the kybosh on him.' But Vincent just kept putting coal on, and Rose opened the regulator ever wider.

I leant out of Twenty-Nine, and saw the Necropolis station with all the lamps lit, for even though it was only shortly after eleven the light had gone out of the day.

I leapt down as soon as we pulled up because all of a sudden I could not stand to be close to half-link men. As I walked along the platform, I struck the Necropolis toffs climbing from their carriage and talking of some private business. First down was the young one, who I heard saying, 'He was not of our kidney.' He then gave a hand to Erskine Long, who, from his looks, was back to his old fretful self, and was saying, 'But what would you have brought it to, Mr Argent?'

1 should like to have brought it to a vote' the younger man replied.

Erskine Long put his top hat on his head and said, 'But it has all been carried on with the agreement of the board, has it not?'

'Not precisely, no. I should have said main force was nearer the mark.'

A third gent, who had come out of the carriage and was putting on black gloves, said to the young man: 'But your objection is not to the sales but rather to the -'

Argent nodded once, sharply, at this new fellow. 'Primarily it is to the terms on which the ground has been sold' he said.

In spite of using my slowest saunter, I had moved some way out of earshot by then, and they were quitting the station in double-quick time, heading for their beano at the American Hotel. Alone on the platform, I thought of how quickly the darkness came down these days, and how quickly the Necropolis packed up. Every day, I thought, is a half day here.

When we got back, Nine Elms was freezing. I went in to see the Governor. His two fires were roaring and there were a couple of Christmas cards on the wall behind him. I wondered who could have sent them, for he was out with every man in the shed.

He was looking at one of the big ledgers he kept on the shelves behind him. For the first time he had his black frock-coat off: there was a red waistcoat underneath, and this, with his white hair and red face, made him look like Father Christmas himself. With Nolan sending sour looks my way, the Governor told me that, provided I kept him informed of any news or events touching mortalities past or present, I could carry on cleaning for the half-link until Christmas, although having given long consideration to the matter, he had decided I was not to go off-shed again. He then asked whether I wanted to take any days for Christmas aside from Christmas Day, on which Nine Elms was closed. This all came out of the blue, and I suddenly had an idea of how I could use the time. I had five days annual allowance of holiday. I asked for Tuesday 22nd to Christmas Eve, and Boxing Day and the 28th too. The 27th was a Sunday so this gave me a good long run for action. The Governor looked surprised -he must have thought I was really going to make a Christmas of it – but he put me down for all these in another one of his books.

As he did so, I asked whether he'd made a note in any of those volumes as to Henry Taylor's last appearance at the shed. 'It wouldn't be in there,' he said, 'and I can't recall it.'

'Would you be able to tell me the last time he went off-shed?'

The Governor frowned a little at this, but after a few seconds he pulled down one of the volumes, searched for a page, ran his finger down a column, and said, 'Wednesday 12 August – to Brookwood.' 'And who was he riding out with on that day?'

The Governor looked down at the page again. 'Arthur Hunt,' he said, 'with Vincent doing a firing turn.' He shut his book with a bang, and said, 'Watch yourself.' He looked at me for a long time and smiled.

In the Governor, at least, I had struck a good man at Nine Elms.