The Lost Luggage Porter Read online

  I put the notebook away.

  'Work for the Company, do you?' I said.

  But he must have done, otherwise he wouldn't have been drinking in the Institute.

  He nodded.

  'Department?' I asked.

  'Goods station’ he said, with the greatest reluctance. 'Outdoor porter.'

  'And what about the lad?'

  'Not up to working.'

  'Well, if I see you scrapping in here again, you're for it’ I said.

  I turned away and an arm was at my throat, squeezing hard. It wasn't Brilliantine. He was standing before me like a soldier at ease, with snooker cue in lieu of rifle, and seeming to grow smaller, to be shooting backwards in a straight line along the gangway between the tables. It was crazy but the thing that was amiss was of the order of a disaster: I could not breathe. The snooker hall was being shut off by a blackness coming from left and right above and below. But in the light that remained the man before my eyes was moving. He was cuffing the idiot once again, inches away from me, and miles away too.

  'Now do you take my meaning?' said Brilliantine, as the air rushed into my mouth, and my lungs rose faster still. The idiot was back where he'd started from, on the bench, giving me a strange, sideways look.

  'He's round the twist’ said Brilliantine.

  'I'll bloody say’ I said, as I set my collar and tie to rights.

  'Usually it's me that cops it. He ought not to take a drink. In and out of the nutty house like a fiddler's elbow, that bugger is.'

  'Under the doctor, is he?'

  Brilliantine nodded.

  'Bootham,' he said, meaning the York asylum.

  He then went back to his snooker, with the idiot in position as before, holding his cue, waiting for the shot that never came.

  As I saw off my first drink, and bought a second - to unstring my nerves - I couldn't help thinking that I'd been bested twice over by the pair. I sat back down, and carried on with my reading; or at least picked up my book and looked at the entry after 'Accomplice' which was 'Aiding and Abetting', but I had to keep a corner of one eye on the nearby loony, and couldn't concentrate. The brothers carried on their one-sided game until half-past six, when they walked out. By then I was looking at - but not reading - the entry for 'Arrest'.

  I finished my pint, pocketed my book, and walked out of the Institute, skirting around the shadowy wagons in the goods yard that lay between the Institute and the Lost Luggage Office (which scrap of railway territory was called the Rhubarb Sidings, I knew), only to see a notice propped in the door of the latter office: CLOSED. Looking beneath, I read the advertised office hours: 6.30 a.m. to 6.30 p.m. I stood in the rain before that notice, and cursed the bloody Camerons.

  Chapter Two

  The following Monday, I was back in the Institute after

  another day of dangling about in York. It was a quarter after

  five, and this time I planned to be at the Lost Luggage Office

  in good time for half-past. It was still raining, and the Institute

  was just as empty as before, only with two quiet, reasonable-

  looking blokes in place of the Camerons. The day's

  Evening Press

  was on the bar, just as it had been on Friday last. I

  glanced at the front-page advertisements, turned to the sport

  at the back: 'York v. Brighouse,' I read, 'another defeat for the

  City team.' The barmaid was looking on.

  'Try page two,' she said.

  So I turned to it, and saw what must have been a good six

  paragraphs running down the middle of the page like a scar:

  'York Murder' I read at the top, followed by 'Horrible Find at

  Goods Yard'. 'Last night,' began the article proper, 'Duncan

  and John Cameron, believed to be brothers, were found shot

  to death on the cinder path by York goods yard

  The rest was just meaningless words to me, about how the

  York police were enquiring into the matter, appealing for

  witnesses to make themselves known. I couldn't take any of

  it in, such was the knock I'd received. Friday last there'd

  been the cut throat in the Station Hotel, and now this.

  The paragraphs . ..

  My eye ran up and down them again.

  The barmaid was watching me narrowly.

  'Surprised you didn't know about that,' she was saying,

  '... you being a policeman.'

  'I'm sworn, but I haven't started in the job yet’1 said, turning to her with no colour in my face. 'Who were this pair,

  exactly?'

  'Well, one was a railway man, on and off. That was John.

  And his brother was

  . .

  . well, I hardly know how to put it

  nicely . ..'

  She thought the matter over for a while.

  'He was soft in the head’ she said, eventually, 'as you

  found out last week.'

  'Often caused trouble in here, did they?'

  'Often enough.'

  She moved away to serve one of the quiet blokes who'd

  walked up to the bar with the tread of a cat.

  The York police were investigating - that meant the regular constabulary, not the railway police. I reached into my

  inside coat pocket and took out my Police Manual (with the

  page folded down at the point I had reached in my reading:

  'Embezzlement') and hunted through it for 'M' and 'Murder'.

  But it didn't run to murder. Instead I saw 'Misappropriation',

  'Misdemeanour', and 'Money Found on Prisoner'. Small

  stuff - lawyer's talk. Murder was out of the common. How

  many times would it come up in the working life of a copper? I shoved the book into the side pocket of my new coat,

  giving a nod to the barmaid, and quitting the snooker hall.

  On my way out, I glanced into the reading room. There was

  one man in there again, and this time he was awake all right,

  hunting through the Yorkshire papers on the big table, looking for more news of the Camerons, I was quite sure of it.

  The same wagons stood in the Rhubarb Sidings, and now

  there was a light burning in the lost-luggage place beyond. I

  clanged through the door and there was an old fellow at a

  long counter guarding heaps of umbrellas. They were laid

  flat on a wide shelf ten feet behind him, in a room that smelt

  of wood and old rain. The walls were whitewashed brick.

  There was an overhead gas ring, with the light turned too

  low, and the white shades half blackened with soot, like bad

  teeth. This shone down on the old man, but its rays didn't

  quite reach a kid who was sitting on a stool in the shadows

  between racks of goods running at right angles to the counter.

  There were many of these, and what they contained I couldn't

  see, but all the ones parallel to the counter and facing out

  contained umbrellas.

  'How do?' I said to the superintendent of the office.

  He gave a grunt.

  'What's that?' I said, giving him the chance to try again.

  But he just grunted once more - it was the best he could

  do.

  It was hard to say what was greyest about him: his hair, his

  beard, his eyes, his skin. He was like the old sailors in Bay-

  town, only they had light in their eyes. I reckoned he

  must've been with the Company a good half-century, all the

  while being pushed further and further towards the edge of

  the show.

  'I'm missing a quantity of

  Railway Magazines,'

  I said to this

  dead-ender, 'bundled into dozens, and stowed in a blue

  portmanteau.'

  'Date of loss
?' said the old man, with hardly energy enough

  to make a question of it. He had a telegraph instrument at his

  elbow, and a ledger set in front of him; beside this was a copy

  of the

  Press.

  Otherwise the counter was empty. The kid in the

  shadows at the back had only the stool he was sitting on.

  I told the bloke the date, and the man started turning the

  pages of the ledger back towards it: 7 January, that stormy

  Sunday when the wife and me had had our first tiff, a real

  set-to on the platforms of Halifax Joint station as we took our

  leave of the town for good. There was the wife, angry and in

  the family way - not a good combination - and there was I,

  still mourning the job I'd lost, and all around us the four

  bags we'd not entrusted to the guard's van.

  When we'd got to York, I'd attempted to carry those four

  but, looking back, I only picked up three. When we discovered the loss, the wife had said: 'We'd have had no bother if

  you'd not been too mean to fetch a porter', and it hadn't

  sounded like the wife speaking at all but like something read

  from a book called

  Familiar Sayings of Long-Married Women.

  'No,' the old clerk said after a while. 'I can turn nothing up

  in that line.'

  'All right then,' I said. 'I'm much obliged to you.'

  I turned towards the door, and I heard a scrape of boots

  from the shelves. The kid in the shadows was standing up.

  He called out: 'They were marked down as "Books: miscellaneous", Mr Parkinson. I have 'em just here.'

  The kid had a high, cracked voice, as if rusty from want of

  use.

  Parkinson, the lost-property superintendent, looked at my

  belt buckle for a good long time, evidently annoyed that I

  should have struck lucky. Then he rose to his feet, saying: 'It

  is long past my booking-off time.'

  He drew a line in the book and signed his initials against

  it.

  'If the porter can be of any assistance you are free to consult him,' he went on, 'but I can spend no more time on the

  matter.'

  Parkinson walked to the wall where his waterproof hung

  on the same peg as a dinty bowler. He put them both on,

  and walked towards the umbrellas, looking at them all for a

  moment, quite spoiled for choice, before finally giving a

  heave on a bone-handled one. He said nothing to the porter

  but walked to the doorway where he opened the door and

  shook the brolly furiously for a while, making a good deal of

  racket about it. When at last the brolly was up and over his

  head, it was like the moment when a kite takes off, and he

  walked away fast under the rain. Then the telegraph bell

  began to ring. After four of the slow dings, I looked towards

  the porter who was still standing in the shadows, now with

  a pasteboard box under his arm.

  'Will you answer that,' I said, 'now that the governor's

  gone home?'

  'He's not gone home,' said the porter.

  'Where's he gone then?'

  'Institute.'

  That was rum. The superintendent had launched himself

  out into the rain with the look of a man at the start of a long

  walk.

  The bell was still ringing.

  'But will you answer it?'

  He shook his head.

  'Not passed to do it, mister.'

  'But it could be a pressing matter’ I said.

  'Such as what?' he said.

  I couldn't think.

  We listened until the bell stopped, and then we were left

  with just the sound of the rain. There was one mighty crash

  from the goods yard outside, and the kid said:

  'I have your magazines here, mister, if you'd like to step

  through.'

  There was a part of the counter that was hinged. I lifted

  it up, and walked towards the shelves, the lair of the lost-

  luggage porter.

  'You a policeman?' he said.

  'Sworn as a detective with the Railway force. How do you

  know?'

  He pointed at the book that was sticking out of my side

  pocket: I put my hand to it, and saw that the words 'Police

  Manual', written in gold, could be made out.

  As I closed on the porter, I could see that there wasn't

  much difference in width between his head and his neck. It

  was as though his neck just kept going up through his stand-

  up collar until it met his fair hair. My guess was that he had

  had some disease, and been growing in the wrong way ever

  since; he looked like a sort of ghostly worm. He wore the

  uniform of a platform porter, with the same low cap, but

  there was no company badge. Even the telegraph boy in the

  station had sported a badge, but they couldn't run to one for

  Lost-Luggage Porter.

  The porter showed me the box. Looking inside, I read the

  familiar words: 'The

  Railway Magazine,

  6d'. On the topmost

  one, there was a picture of an express inside a little circle as

  if seen through the wrong end of a telescope. I was glad to

  have them back, though they brought back sad memories -

  which was why I'd put off collecting them. Over the years

  since schooldays I'd supposed the purchase of each one to be

  a milestone on the way to the job of engine driver, but it

  would be a miracle if I ever attained that goal, after what had

  happened at the back end of 1905, in the Sowerby Bridge

  engine shed at Halifax.

  'Miscellaneous, eh?' I said, looking down at the magazines.

  The lost-luggage porter nodded, or shook his head; I

  couldn't really tell.

  'All items are entered by Mr Parkinson,' he said presently,

  'and he is very fond of that word.'

  'Do you have the portmanteau they came in?' I asked.

  'Reckon so’ said the porter, and he moved deeper into the

  maze of shelves, giving me a clearer view of the one containing the books. Each volume was inside its own little tin coffin,

  with a number chalked on the side. I looked into the first of

  the tins:

  A History of Hampton Court Palace.

  The second one I

  saw held

  Every Man his Own Cattle Doctor.

  I began drifting along the lines of shelves. As far as most of

  it went, 'miscellaneous' was pretty near the mark: a ball of

  string, a stethoscope, a fan, a muff, some sort of automatic

  machine, a pair of field-glasses, a length of lace, sundry pictures, hair brush, shovel, leather hatbox, tin ditto, scent bottle, whistle, a pair of scissors, a clock, a lamp, a china figure,

  a box of collars, a pair of braces, a knife, a thermometer, a

  birdcage, a pail, a fishing rod. Sometimes like met like: one

  shelf contained only good cloaks, wrapped in brown paper -

  against moth, as I supposed. All the top shelves contained

  nothing but ticketed hats. Walking sticks and travelling rugs

  had shelves to themselves while another was for gloves by

  the hundred. And there were more umbrellas at the back,

  too.

  The porter returned, dustier than before, with my blue

  portmanteau in his hand, and began loading my magazines

  from several of the metal tins back into it.

&
nbsp; I said: 'A charge is made for collection, I suppose.'

  'Thruppence,' said the porter.

  I fished out the coin from my pocket, and handed it over.

  'You've to sign the ledger’ he said, 'and put down your

  address.' So we went over to the counter again.

  'You've a lot of umbrellas in here’ I said.

  No reply from the porter.

  'I daresay everyone says that’ I said, setting down my

  name and address in the ledger.

  'The brollies ought by rights to be stood up’ I said, looking up from the book. The porter had unwrapped his buffet

  from brown paper. He was sitting on the high stool formerly

  occupied by Parkinson, and starting to eat bread.

  '... If they were stood up, they wouldn't rot,' I said.

  The porter just chewed at his bread, and looked at me.

  'The worst weather for you blokes must be rain,' I said.

  'You must be head over ears in work whenever there's a

  downpour.'

  'Folk don't forget umbrellas when it's chucking down,' he

  said. 'They forget 'em when it stops.'

  'I see. Because then the brollies are not like

  . . .

  first thing

  on their minds.'

  I looked at the clock that ticked above the staff coat hooks:

  it was nigh on half-past five.

  'You must want it pouring all the time then’ I said.

  After a longish pause, the porter said:

  'It can do just what it likes.'

  Behind me, I heard the sound of the rain increasing.

  I spied a shelf containing nothing but leathern purses and

  pocketbooks. I went close and saw that they were all empty.