The Necropolis Railway Read online

  The Necropolis Railway

  Jim Stringer [1]

  Andrew Martin

  Faber and Faber (2007)

  Tags: mystery

  mysteryttt

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  SUMMARY:

  Bright and ambitious, young Jim Stringer moves from the English countryside to London deter- mined to become a railway man. It is 1903, the dawn of the Edwardian age, when steam runs the nation and the railways drive progress. Jim can’t believe his luck to have gotten his foot in the door at South East Railway, run out of Waterloo Station. He finds, however, that his duties involve a graveyard shift, literally—a railway line that takes coffins from London morgues to the gigantic new cemeteries being dug in the city’s outskirts. He also learns that his predecessor had disappeared and that his coworkers seem to have formed an instant loathing for him. Forced to live by his wits and to arrive at his own deductions—assisted by his landlady, for whom he falls— he tries to figure out what is going on before he is issued a one-way ticket on the Necropolis Railway.

  THE NECROPOLIS RAILWAY

  Andrew Martin grew up in Yorkshire. After qualifying as a barrister he became a freelance journalist, in which capacity he has tended to write about the north, class, trains, seaside towns and eccentric individuals rather than the doings of the famous, although he did once loop the loop in a biplane with Gary Numan. He has also learned to drive steam locomotives, albeit under very close supervision.

  He has written for the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, the Independent on Sunday and Granta, among many other publications. His highly acclaimed first novel, Bilton, described by Jon Ronson as 'enormously funny, genuinely moving and even a little scary', was followed by The Bobby Dazzlers, which Tim Lott hailed as 'truly unusual - a comic novel that actually makes you laugh'.

  The Blackpool Highflyer, the second Jim Stringer adventure, was praised in the Independent on Sunday as 'a steamy whodunnit ... This may well be the best fiction about the railways since Dickens', while for the Daily Mail it was 'a stunning achievement'.

  Further praise for The Necropolis Railway:

  'Beautifully constructed . . . Sometimes, the train really does get you there.' Alex Clark, Guardian (Book of the Week)

  'Reader and hero are swept off their feet into a noisy, steamy, antiquated world of great danger.' Andrew Barrow, Spectator

  'Martin skilfully evokes turn-of-the-century London as a mixture of enmity and camaraderie, despondency and boundless opportunity. In the background is a subtly drawn sense of changing times, of the rise of socialism, and the move towards women's rights.' Times Literary Supplement

  'The author's research, that included participating in footplate experience courses, has paid off, for the book is very readable and the railway descriptions run smoothly.' Ffestiniog Railway Magazine

  'A wonderful read... Martin has a superb control of voice and atmosphere, and can turn the minutiae of the railwayman's labour to both comic and dramatic effect. If you enjoy Peter Ackroyd's (or indeed Wilkie Collins's) Victorian melodramas, this is just the ticket.' Conde Nast Traveller

  'Martin weaves the dark menace of London expertly into this tale: the narrow streets and constant noise provide a perfect backdrop for murderous and sinister happenings.'

  New Statesman

  'An unsentimental yet touching chiaroscuro evocation of London in the age of steam.' David Kynaston

  'Hurrah for an Ealing comedy. Martin's back-bitten romance reads in black and white and is very endearing.' Philippa Stockley, Evening Standard (Books of the Year)

  'A classy potboiler ... in the best formal traditions of Dickens and Collins (let alone Christie and Chandler).' The Times

  'This ingenious and atmospheric thriller .. . crackles with the idiom and slang of the period. An eccentric delight.' Daily Express

  The Necropolis Railway

  A Novel of Murder, Mystery and Steam

  ANDREW MARTIN

  Faber and faber

  First published in 2002 by Faber and Faber Limited 3 Queen Square London WC1N 3AU This paperback edition published in 2006 First published in this format in 2005

  Typeset by Faber and Faber Ltd Printed in England by Mackays of Chatham pic, Chatham, Kent

  All rights reserved © Andrew Martin, 2002

  The right of Andrew Martin to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN -57I-23393-7 ISBN 978--57I-23393-9

  2468 10 97531

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank, in no special order, Dominic Le Foe of the Player's Theatre; George Behrend and Frank McKenna, railway authors; John M. Clarke (anyone wanting the hard facts on the Necropolis line should consult his excellent short book, The Brookwood Necropolis Railway); Professor Chris Lawrence of The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at the UCL; Jonathon Green - a font of slang from all eras; Keith Gays and the staff of the North Yorkshire Moors Railway; Clive Groom of the 'Footplate Days and Ways' steam engine driving courses; ex-train drivers Les Willis and Ron Johnson; the archive staff of the National Rail Museum in York; Tim Baker-Jones of the W. H. Smith archive; the staff of the Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution; the staff of the Silver Moon Women's Bookshop, which is now within Foyles; Matthew Sturgis for some tips on Edwardian mores; Elizabeth Cook, Barbara Blackford and Anna Rawlinson of the Highgate Bookshop; Bill Simpson (ex of Nine Elms Engine Shed); David McWilliam of the Institute of Directors; the staff of the London Ian Allan bookshop; Dave Notarius and the staff of Motor Books; the Reverend Paul Walker; and Messrs French of Lamb's Conduit Street, wci, undertakers.

  All departures from historical accuracy are mine.

  Author's Note

  The London Necropolis and National Mausoleum Company became the London Necropolis Company in 1927 and still exists under that name. It ran funeral trains from just outside Waterloo to Brookwood Cemetery from 1854 to 1941, using locomotives and footplate crews supplied first by the London and South Western Railway, then the Southern Railway.

  The service, roughly as it was in 1903, provides part of the backdrop to this story, but it should be stressed that no events such as those described here ever took place, nor did any people such as those presented here ever exist.

  I am deeply indebted to the LNC for letting me employ the earlier name of their company in amongst my swirling imaginings.

  by the same author

  Bilton

  The Bobby Dazzlers

  IN THE JIM STRINGER, STEAM DETECTIVE SERIES:

  The Blackpool Highflyer

  THE NECROPOLIS RAILWAY

  Chapter One

  Saturday 14 November 1903

  With the letters from Rowland Smith in my pocket, I had a lively ride from York to London: just four and a half hours in all. The engine was one of the new Atlantics of Mr Ivatt, and when she came down Stoke Bank I put aside The Railway Magazine I was reading, and leant out the window at the carriage end to experience the amazing velocity.

  After Peterborough I took down my box and opened the parcel my dad had packed for me, which turned out to contain three tubs of Melton cream for my boots, and two tins of Nugget's polish, also for my boots. My dad was red-hot for smartness, smart boots especially. There was an alarm
clock too - which was the next best thing to Dad coming with me because he'd always woken me up himself at home - and a green Lett's pocket diary, which might seem an out of the way sort of thing to give somebody, November sort of time, but I knew it was the kind of thing Dad would have thought gentlemanly.

  I opened the first page, which was headed 'The King and the Royal Family, showing ages and annuities', and stared at it for a while, thinking: well, it's all right, but I would rather have a map of the railways. Then I took out from my pocket the letters from Rowland Smith, which had been sent to me, not from the place he worked, but from his home address: Granville Mansions, Dartmouth Park. Whenever I saw that I thought with wonder, 'In the house of the Lord there are many mansions.' It was in the Northern Division of London. I put the letters away after a few more minutes of marvelling but took them out over and again throughout the journey.

  We came into Platform One at King's Cross, which was as I had expected, but what I had not expected was that half of London would be there, and most of them attempting to force me into the Ladies' Waiting Room, where I had no right nor any desire to be.

  When I finally struggled free, the first thing I saw was the road packed with darting waggons, then, over the road from King's Cross, and three times the size, St Pancras. I could not believe there had ever been so many bricks in the world - it must have had more than the Eskdale viaduct and I knew for a fact there were more than five million in that. The clock said five to three; I turned back and looked at the clock on King's Cross, and that said five after, and I thought: now, that is strange, because it was impossible to imagine either the Midland or the Great Northern making a bloomer over the time, of all things, but one of them must have, and it seemed that I was only getting in everybody's way by standing there and fretting over it.

  Then I spied a stream of hansoms pouring out of a little arch at the bottom of St Pancras like beetles from under a stone, and decided I would take one for the first time in my life. But as soon as I stepped into the road between King's Cross and St Pancras, I was put into another cab - one of a completely separate lot - by a lad who had lately been holding a horse's head and eating a fish. Now he was tipping his head back, and, blowing spinning bits of fish into the air from his mouth, saying, 'If this keeps up, we might be in with a fighting chance, eh, guv?'

  He was talking about the sun. It had been raining in Yorkshire but the day was set fair in London, and I might just as well have stepped off a boat train, such was the newness and strangeness of it all.

  'Where you off to?' shouted the fish-eating kid.

  I said, 'Waterloo,' sounding not like myself, but even the horse seemed to have heard of the place for he set off without coaxing.

  There were just too many people in London, and that was all about it. Sooner or later, I thought as we rolled away from

  King's Cross, they will have to bring this madness to a halt and get everything put straight. All the buses were marked 'Vanguard' and there was no end of motor cars. There was no end of everything else either, so that after a sprint of a start we soon settled down to a crawl, and I added a second half crown to the one I already had in my hand for the fare, fearing the price might be to do with time spent as well as distance covered.

  After twenty minutes or so we came up to the river, which was something more like ten rivers side by side, all brown and glittering and packed with rolling, smoking boats, with big factories on the Waterloo side. Through a gap between two of them, I could see the engine shed of Waterloo rising above the factories and houses like a lot of giant greenhouses at an angle to the river, but the greenhouses gave out after a while, and then there were metal girders, and the automatic hammer was somewhere in there: you'd hear the bang, and then the black cloud would come up after every one.

  On the other side of that rusty bridge - and I believe that in my excitement I forgot to breathe all the way across - I realised I had gone from what they called the Northern Division to the Southern Division, and when I remembered that Rowland Smith lived in the Northern Division yet worked in the Southern Division, I began to think of that gentleman as being even grander than I had already imagined, and resembling the Colossus of Ancient Greece who stands over whatever river it may be.

  We came onto what I now know as Westminster Bridge Road, where trams were surging up to the people like steeplechasers. We had also struck the smell of Waterloo, which came from the station and the chimneys on the river. It was the smell of bad beer, or good pickles, or something that kept you thinking, mingled with engine smoke and another smell that was like the sea captured by factories.

  We carried on under a long, low viaduct with a slow-goods hammering overhead, and when we emerged I saw a great vibrating building with steam and smoke rushing out of a line of chimneys. I had thought this would be another factory, but a sign on the roof told me it was the 'Lambeth Skating Rink'. We did not reach that building, however, but turned sharp right, going immediately under another black viaduct with another goods pounding overhead. This viaduct was enormous, and, when we came out from under, the day was not as bright as it had been before.

  This dark street, which was called Lower Marsh, was all in the shadow of that great viaduct, and so the people there lived in a world of under and over: under went the houses and shops, the pubs, the people and the lines of stables, and over went the trains with a constant clanging. The shops spilled out into the street and had more goods outside than in: everybody was selling everything to everybody else, and everybody was shouting to make themselves heard over the trains. The most important thing in the street apart from the viaduct seemed to be a round pub called the Citadel: a big, orange-glowing beer-barrel sort of a place with a sign saying Red Lion Ales and Reid's Stout over and over again -1 would soon learn that in London they are never happy to just do something once.

  Above the pub, above the street, and really above all, was the great station itself, the spider in the middle of the viaduct web. I knew it to serve the grandest railway in the world, the London and South Western, and yet I was surprised, for there was nothing glorious to it. Waterloo seemed to have no front and no back. It did have a roof - in parts - but there were many huge tarpaulins rising and falling in the dirty breeze over the rambling mass of bricks and glass. Under these great tents, I was sure, they were making the station bigger still, and I did not doubt that it would finish up the mightiest in the Empire. Already, as I knew from The Railway Magazine, Waterloo received 700 trains every day, compared to 250 at King's Cross. St Pancras received ... a good many, I did not know the exact number, and I realised, alone in the dark little cab, that it would be a very long time before I would be able to look it up, for I had only brought the latest two numbers of The Railway Magazine in my box.

  But there was no time to fret over that because the cab man called down to me through his hole. He might as well have been talking in a foreign language, but did not sound happy, so I gave him the two half crowns, thinking: well, he'll give me some of it back, at any rate. Having taken the money, though, he just opened the door. I thought: he'll hand over the change when I've stood down; it's probably that way about with hansoms. I climbed down in front of a pharmacy that seemed entirely given over to selling Vianola Soap, and watched the cab man turn in a circle, thinking: as the horse turns he'll count out the change, but the fact of the matter was that he was lighting his pipe as the horse walked, and then he was gone altogether, and the whole of my five shillings with him. I did not have much time to worry about this, though, because I now saw a sign that hit me like a bullet: Hercules Court.

  I cannot now say how, on the journey down from Yorkshire, I had thought my lodge and my landlady might actually be because any memory of it has been blotted out by the thought of how they actually were. The lodge was on a corner, half in Lower Marsh and half in Hercules Court. The wall facing Lower Marsh was covered in posters, all saying, 'Smoke Duke of Wellington Cigars', except for one going out on a limb with 'Stower's Lime Juice, No Musty Flavou
r'. I knocked on the door of this giant cigar box and a lady opened it, releasing a smell of wash day. She was certainly not from the common run of landlady, and while she did not look well-to-do, she looked clever - her faded skirts did not matter. Her eyes were very large and yet she herself was very small, and that to me was the right way about. It would have been very easy to lift her up, I thought, but I perceived instantly that nobody would ever dare to try.

  She stood aside and looked away as I dragged my box through the doorway. On the floor was brown linoleum, and the wallpaper was black, with big, glowing orange flowers. This continued up the stairs, which were so narrow that my landlady's skirts touched both walls at once. She opened a door and showed me into a room.

  'It's quite commodious,' I remarked after a while, for this was the best that could be said. The wallpaper was a design of roses on a trellis; there were two windows opposite each other, not at all clean. I walked towards one of them and my landlady said, 'As you see, they give on to the garden.'

  There being no grass or plants of any description, but just bricks and a coal shed, this was more of a yard, I thought. I knew about yards because we had one at home. Immediately beyond this one was a brick wall that must have been sixty foot in height, if not greater, with an oil lamp burning towards the top of it. I was just trying to think of a way of asking about it when the landlady said, with a faraway look, 'Soap works. You'll have no trouble from it.'