The Last Train to Scarborough Page 2

  Sewing Machines' and the board fixed to the front said where it was going: the terminus of Line Nine, the Beeswing Hotel.

  That had been the start of it all, but before that there'd been an earlier start. Of course, this too had to be in York, for that was where I started. But the outskirts ... and again I was back in Thorpe-on-Ouse.

  When? Some time before or after my journey to the Beeswing. No, it must have been before. We were in the front parlour of our new house, which had several parlours, depending on how you looked at it, but only one so far cosy. Again, it was spring time: primroses in prospect - in the very air - but not yet appeared.

  And the fire blazing in our new front parlour, rows of tins of paint lined up ready near the door.

  Thursday 12 March, 1914: in the National Gallery, London, the Rokeby Venus had been attacked. The event was reported in the Yorkshire Evening Press and the account lay on the table between us. Mary Richardson, feminist and suffragette, had gone at the painting so named with an axe. Earlier in the day, Robert Henderson, who was the son of Colonel Robert Henderson, whose smooth looks and smooth name I did not like, had stopped the wife in the high street of Thorpe - stopped the wife, I stress. I, walking alongside her, he had quite ignored.

  'I do not know the female equivalent of the word "confederate", Mrs Stringer,' he had said.

  'Nor do I,' Lydia had said.

  'But your confederate, Miss Mary Richardson, has destroyed one of our greatest paintings.'

  'Has she?' the wife had said, not yet having seen the Press.

  'The report was in The Times this morning,' said Henderson.

  'Which painting was it?' enquired the wife. 'Just out of interest.'

  'You seem pretty sanguine about the whole business,' he'd replied. 'But then you are part of the women's Co-operative Movement and you agitate on behalf of the suffragettes.'

  'Agitate!' said the wife. 'I wouldn't know how to agitate if you paid me.'

  'Oh, I think you would,' he said, at which I had to cut in.

  'We're just off actually, Mr Henderson,' I said.

  He tipped his derby hat at me, but continued to address the wife: 'I do believe you are a symptom of the malaise afflicting the country, Mrs Stringer.'

  And then of course he'd given a grin.

  'You are a symptom of the malaise afflicting the country,' I said to Lydia as we walked on down the dusty road, in the light rain, making for the boot maker and mender's with the lamps overdue for lighting but old man Shannon nowhere in sight. 'What do you make of that?'

  'I'm rather flattered,' she said, as we turned in at the gate of the boot maker's long front yard.

  'Yes,' I said, 'I could see. You coloured up.'

  'I certainly did not,' she said.

  But she had done, and the colour was up in her face still as she lay on the sofa in our new front parlour, in the new (and also very old) house a little way outside the village, the house that had been practically given us by that same Robert Henderson: seven shillings a week for a place three times the size of our earlier one, and with a contract giving us the option to buy at some equally favourable rate.

  It was nine o'clock, as I knew by my watch rather than by the clock of St Andrew's church, which did not now reach us, we being so far out.

  'I mentioned the business about the Venus to Peter in the Fortune earlier on,' I said.

  'Oh yes?' said the wife, who was not in the least interested in the sayings and doings of Peter Backhouse, who was the verger of St Andrew's, even though she counted his wife, Lillian, amongst her best friends.

  'He said, "Somebody did what, you say? To the Rokeby what?"'

  The wife sighed.

  'And to think it was done for publicity,' she said.

  She sat back down. The law books were on the tab rug between us.

  'I don't know about all this business,' I said, indicating them. 'All I wanted was to be an engine man, and when that came to nothing, I settled for being a railway copper.'

  'Don't fib, Jim,' said the wife, and we listened to the ticking of the clock, the ticking of the fire, and then the mooing of a cow, of which we heard a good deal in our new house, along with wood pigeons.

  We were more thrown together, living so far out, and that was good and bad. The wife's aim was to set us up with our own little empire, and her work for the women's cause was starting to take second place to that, although she would never have admitted it. She'd gone all out for the country life, stealing a march on me, for I was the Yorkshireman. I was the one who'd taken her north, having struck that bad business while apprenticed for the footplate with the London and South Western Railway. For me, life in the North Eastern Railway police was next best thing to life on the footplate. I'd been promoted detective sergeant in double quick time, and I now made fair wages. But the wife wanted to make me a sort of gentleman farmer-cum-solicitor, and her pushing had earned its reward. I was on the point of giving in my notice, with a view to starting as articled clerk in the offices of Parker and Wilkinson, an arrangement subject to my performing satisfactorily during what was billed as a 'conversation' with Mr Parker himself about railway law. His outfit was one of several firms that did work for the North Eastern, and their particular speciality was cases of personal injury: the paying off - or, better yet, fending off - of passengers' claims for damages.

  I knew very well that this conversation was to be a test, albeit of a gentlemanly sort, and it was now less than twelve hours off. Going into the office of Parker and Wilkinson would entail at first a cut in my earnings, but the wife had told me to see this as taking a step back in order to make a great leap, and she was prepared to dip into the inheritance she'd had from her father in order to help fund my training for the law.

  'Shall we have another look at Buckingham?' she enquired.

  'Go on then,' I said, and she picked up the book.

  'The train he's waiting for is running late,' said the wife, after an interval of reading lying down with her head propped in her hand. 'He takes a carriage instead, and then sends the bill to the railway company. Will they settle?'

  'They'd be better off just paying him not to use the railway,' I said. 'They should pay him to leave the bloody country.'

  The wife eyed me.

  'It depends on the lateness of the train,' I said. 'If it's only running half an hour late, that would be a reasonable delay. A day late would be unreasonable. Anything in-between, you argue about.'

  The wife yawned as she said, 'That's about right, Jim. I'm sure you'll do brilliantly tomorrow.'

  'Are you?'

  'It's really nothing to worry about. Mr Parker said it would be a formality.'

  'That's just what bothers me.'

  She came across and sat on my sofa, lifting her skirts as she stepped up, like a tomboy climbing a hill.

  'You'll have a lovely day of it tomorrow,' she said. 'Your meeting with Mr Parker will be over in no time, and when it's done, you'll be on the road to being a solicitor ... I know you've the whole day off, but you might call into the police office to let them know how you get on.'

  'To put on swank, you mean?'

  '... You'll perhaps take a turn in the Museum Gardens, then perhaps go to Brown's to see how your new suit's coming on.'

  Owing to the slowness of Brown the tailor my new suit would not be ready in time for the interview, and I would be making do with my best suit.

  'I think I'll sit by the river and watch the trains going over the Scarborough railway bridge. They've the new Z Class on the Scarborough branch. They're just running her in, you know.'

  'What are you, Jim? Ten years old?'

  'I'm pushing thirty, which is too late to be starting a new job.'

  'It's not a job, it's a profession. You might come back here for a nap, then you've your office "do" at the Beeswing.'

  'The Chief says he has an important bit of business he wants to mention to me at the Beeswing,' I said, and the wife frowned.

  'But you've practically left.'
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  Silence for a space. I had deliberately stirred the wife up, and felt rather bad about it.

  'It's not a dangerous bit of business, is it?' she enquired. Would she be so concerned if she knew that Robert Henderson might be put in the way of violence? I liked to think not.

  Chapter Four

  A needle hung before me. It was the common run of needle - it had an eye in it - only much bigger, and it did not go away until I started to count the seconds of its persistence, whereupon it vanished immediately. I saw next a line of paint tins against a wall in a room. They were not opened, and I knew that I did not want to see them opened, for I did not like the smell of paint. Close by, I strongly suspected, was a rattling window and beyond that the sea, which was black with something ... something starting with the letter B, and ending in S. The sea was black with butlers: dark-coated men bathing. No, couldn't be. That wasn't the word.

  Now bells rang about me on the dark coal plain, and the floorboards over my head were being lifted one by one. It appeared that they were not nailed down, for they came away very easily. Two men worked at the job. Both wore rough guernseys and some species of gumboots, and as they worked they rose and fell with the coal plain, and with me. Above them, a night sky was gradually being revealed: a mighty and expanding acreage of stars and racing wisps of cloud. I fixed on one very bright star, and that was a mistake, for the act of watching it brought back the sickness, and the French word came to me: mal de mer. I had heard that somewhere of late.

  As I watched in wonder, I counted the bells. Had there been eight strokes in all? One of the two men wore a hat that might have been a captain's peaked cap, but there was no braid and no badge, as though he wanted to keep back his identity. His face was brownish and square. The other's face, beard and hair were all grey, and he was now down on the coal with me, fastening up a tunic with two rows of brass buttons. The man who remained above, standing on the edge of the ragged skylight that he'd had a hand in making, shouted a question to the one standing over me, and I could not make it out, but I knew from the tone that he must be the governor, and I heard the reply: 'They're all aft, skipper.' He was foreign in some way, this second man. He put a bit of a'd' sound at the beginning of 'they're', in a way that made the word seem babyish. But he looked a hard case, as did the other.

  Another bell was rung - a bell that existed in an altogether different world - and it brought me to wakefulness sitting alone in my best suit on the top deck of the Number Nine tram. Friday evening and the tram running along, and my memory doing so once again as well. We ran along under the York lamps and only a scattering of stars, making for the place where easternmost York came to a stop: the Beeswing Hotel. The conductor was hanging off the platform, and joshing with various street loungers that we passed, like a performer on a moving stage. His high, cracked voice floated up the staircase but hadn't kept me from sleep. I had not slept in the afternoon as the wife had suggested, and I was dead tired, for I'd been awake all night fretting about my meeting with Parker.

  In fact, our 'conversation' had been just that, and we had not touched on the doings of Mr Buckingham, reasonable or otherwise. 'I have satisfied myself that you are not a fool, Mr Stringer,' Parker had said, but he'd taken two and a half hours about it, in the course of which he'd introduced me to every man in the office. He'd asked me a good deal about Lydia, and I wondered at first whether he was one of her not-so-secret admirers like Robert Henderson, but I decided he was more nervous of her than anything. 'She is a rather forward party,' he had said, which I thought rather forward of him. Then again, in the summer of i9i3 she had intercepted him on his bicycle in the middle of York, and put it to him that I might have a start in his office.

  'How did she know it was me?' Parker had asked, towards the end of our interview. My answer was pretty well-greased. I told him he was a famous York character, often mentioned in the Yorkshire Evening Press as chairing the police court or speaking at society events, or addressing the Historical Society on the Merchant Adventurers of York, on which he was an expert.

  'Yes, but there's never a photograph, is there?'

  That was true enough. The Press only ran to photographs for convicted murderers.

  '... So how did she know?'

  The truth was that Mr Parker had made the mistake - if that's what it was - of bicycling out to Thorpe-on-Ouse one summer's evening. As he went on his stately way along the high street, Harry had called out, 'That's an Ai bike!' It was one of the best made: a Beeston Humber. As Harry went on about the bike - he was excited over the expanding sprocket on the rear, which gave half a dozen different gearings -1 explained to the wife about the rider: about how he was the star of the police court, the top man in the office to which I often took our witness statements should a prosecution be under consideration. The wife had taken note of the man, or perhaps most particularly the bike, and flagged it down in central York not a week later, just as people stop the knife grinder on his bike when they want something sharpened.

  As we clattered on over the new-laid tram rails, I saw from the windows that a light rain was falling, and the wind getting up. After the stop at the Spotted Cow, I caught the whiff of the gas works at Layerthorpe, and heard drunken chatter coming up the stairs. I turned about and saw Constables Flower and Whittaker from the York police office, the conductor shouting some jest up after them. I'd known that Whittaker lived somewhere hereabouts. They were on their way to the 'do' but half canned already. They nodded along the gangway when they saw me, but took care to sit well short of where I was.

  Everyone likes having the top deck to themselves, and the arrival of Flower and Whittaker annoyed me. I knew they thought me a queer fish, and they could never quite hide the fact. I tried to imagine myself as they saw me: a railway copper genuinely keen on railways - that marked me down as a nut, for a start. Neither Flower nor Whittaker would have cared a rap for the Class Z.

  I was in addition a plain suit man - the only one in the office just then - and they were uniformed. I was their superior, and Chief Inspector Weatherill's favourite into the bargain. But being the Chief's favourite . . . well, it came with complications. He had a great liking for danger and excitement but, since he was nearly seventy, his days of experiencing bother directly were about done. So he put all the trouble my way, perhaps suspecting I enjoyed it as much as he had. Or was it just that he thought I had the makings? That I might be trained up to enjoyment of tangling with the really bad lads if only I was given enough experience in that line? I didn't know, and it certainly wouldn't do to ask. The Chief was a force of nature: you took what came from him.

  I'd had the solving, after a fashion, of three murders, while the constables' quarry was of the order of fare evaders, card sharpers and makers of graffito on carriage windows. I had a wife who went out to work, and who thought herself superior. She was one of those suffragettes, very likely a bomb thrower in the making, and on top of all that I was practically a solicitor already, and the lawyers were the enemy. They decided on who we could or could not go after, and in the serious cases they took the prosecution - and the victory, if it came - all for themselves.

  I thought again of Parker and his office. It commanded a view of the old station, which was now used as an overflow siding for coal wagons, but it was a world away from those wagons, with the oil paintings on the wall, the thick carpets, the law books as heavy and handsomely bound as bibles. There were rows of silent ledger clerks, who recorded the decisions of the office brains, and everything flowed smoothly and silently on a river of black ink.

  Behind me, Whittaker and Flower, who'd fallen silent on first seeing me, had regained their pep and were bickering after their usual fashion.

  'How many drinks have I stood you over the years?' Flower was saying (or maybe Whittaker, but it hardly mattered).

  'I've no idea,' came the reply,'... Not many.'

  'No, no, think about it. Tot it up.'

  'I should say it comes to about exactly half the amount I've bought yo
u.'

  'I should say it does not.'

  There hadn't been a single cross-grained individual in that law office; every face had smiled at me at every turn. But when I got out of there I was relieved ... in which case how would I stand a lifetime of it? The money I'd be earning after five years would smooth the way, of course: I would eat luncheon at dinner time, and ride in cabs. Or I saw myself atop my own Beeston Humber, with a gearing to meet every condition of road.

  And I would be James, not Jim.

  I looked up at the window, and thought: Lightning! but it was the conductor flashing the electric lights and bellowing up, 'Terminus!' I looked back: Flower and Whittaker had bolted. They would already be inside the hotel, the name of which filled the top deck windows on the left side: BEESWING. Just the one word. The letters were green, and seemed to glow in the blustery night even though they were not illuminated. For some reason, I knew they meant trouble.

  As I stepped off the tram, I gave the conductor a cheery enough 'Good night!', but I was thinking that we ought not to have been dragged out all this way for the 'do'. It ought to have been held at the Railway Institute, which was hard by the station and our office, but the Chief had had a falling out with Dave Chapman, who ran the bar and booked out the social rooms there. Chapman had found the baize scraped and a little torn after a billiards session involving some of the men from the Rifle League. He had sent the bill for repair directly to the Chief, who was one of the high-ups of the League. Well, there'd been a hell of a row. The Chief wouldn't pay the bill. He made out that Chapman was down on all shootists because his flat was right next to the shooting range, and he was kept up at all hours by the firing. The Chief had turned on Chapman even though the two had been great mates, which was how the Chief had come to know the whereabouts of Chapman's flat and so on. He had a habit of turning on people, especially lately, and I marvelled at the way I managed to keep in his good books, and wondered how long it would last.

  The Chief had set about trying to get Chapman stood down, and meanwhile started looking out for another venue for the 'do'. Favourite was the Grapes in Toft Green next to the railway offices, which was really called Ye Grapes, but not by the railway police blokes, who preferred it to all the nearby Railway Taverns and Railway Inns, and pubs named after locomotives, perhaps because the new landlord of it had been in the railway police himself before my time. But he hadn't had a licence for functions, or was short-handed or something. So that was out, and the Beeswing was in.