The Lost Luggage Porter Page 3

  'What's become of the money that was in these?' I asked

  the porter. 'Pinched,' he said, still eating.

  'So you reckon the finders lift the money before bringing

  in the pocketbooks?'

  'No,' said the porter.

  'How do you account for it then?'

  I waited quite a while but there was no answer from the

  strange kid.

  'Well, thanks for turning these up’1 said, tucking the portmanteau under my arm.

  He might have said something to that, and he might not. I

  turned towards the door and the rain; I opened the door.

  'Items lost across all the North Eastern territories are forwarded here under a special advice if not called for after a

  week,' the porter said, and I stopped. He was climbing down

  from the high stool, and for some reason - maybe the thought

  of being left alone in that dismal room - was suddenly minded

  to chat.

  'Why are some brollies kept at the front, and some at the

  back?' I said, letting the door close behind me.

  'Paragons and silks at the rear,' he said, 'cotton brollies at

  the front. They would be stood up, only where would the

  water drain off to?'

  'I never thought about that.'

  'I have. All hats are kept high so as to reduce damage by

  pressure.'

  'Eh?' I said.

  'Many curious articles do come to hand,' he said, crumpling up the brown paper in which his bread had been

  wrapped. 'We had a banana in last week.'

  'Where from, mate? Africa?'

  'Leeds. Well, Leeds

  train,

  any road.'

  'What happened to it?'

  'Mr Parkinson entered it in the ledger.'

  'As what?'

  'A banana.'

  'What happened then?'

  'It turned black, and I asked Mr Parkinson for leave to

  pitch it into the stove.'

  'Waste of good grub,' I said. 'If somebody had tried to

  claim it would you have required them to furnish a full

  description?'

  He seemed to hesitate on the point of utterance, but in the

  end simply looked at the black window.

  I opened the door again.

  'Well, I'm much obliged to you, mate!' I said, stepping out

  into the rain with my bag.

  I was skirting around the wagons again, when he called

  after me:

  'Where you off to?'

  'Home,' I called back.

  'Can you get over to the station in one hour from now?'

  'Why?'

  He coughed a little.

  '... See summat,' he said, after a while.

  'Where exactly in the station?'

  'Down side!' he called back with the rain sliding down his

  bent, white face. 'I've to lock up first, but I'll see you at half

  six!'

  'Aye,' I said, 'all right; half six, then.'

  It would mean biking back to Thorpe-on-Ouse an hour

  later. The wife would be put out, but she couldn't expect me

  always home directly in my new line of work. I wondered

  why the queer stick wanted to see me, and then it hit me: I

  was a policeman.

  Chapter Three

  I lugged the magazines with me through Micklegate Bar -

  the grandest of the city-wall gates - and on into the city At

  the Little Coach in Micklegate, I took another drink, putting

  the peg in after a couple of glasses, and when I stepped out

  the rain had eased off, though the streets were still empty.

  I knew York a little, having grown up nearby at Baytown.

  (I'd also had an earlier spell of working for the North Eastern

  Company, my railway start having been a lad porter out at

  Grosmont.) But I couldn't think of where to go, so I pursued

  an aimless way about the centre of the city, where the streets

  were narrow and ancient, the houses all overhanging, falling

  slowly towards the pavements. I turned into Stonegate,

  where a solitary horse was turning on the cobbles, too big for

  the street.

  I walked on through those ancient streets: cobbles, shadows, funny little smoke-blowing chimneys on powdery-

  faced, sagging houses; old buildings put to new uses:

  bakeries, drug stores, tea rooms - newly established or selling off, the shopkeepers came and went at a great rate but

  the old houses carried on, even though some of them

  looked as though they could barely support the gas brackets that sprouted from them. I turned and turned, and

  presently I struck the Minster, the great black Cathedral;

  the Minotaur of the labyrinth, as I thought of it, with its two

  mighty West towers, sharp-pointed and horn-like.

  I doubled back across Lendal Bridge, looking along the

  river at the coal merchants, sand merchants, gravel merchants. They all became one at night: so many shouting men,

  so many cranes, so many dark barges, which were like the

  goods trains - meaning that they seemed to shift only when

  you turned your back.

  In Railway Street, on the approach to the station, I passed

  by two dark, dripping trees with

  Evening Press

  posters pasted on to the trunks. The first read 'York Brothers Slain'; the

  second made do with

  'Yorkshire Evening Press

  - The People's

  Paper'. A constable was coming towards me. I'd seen him

  before about the station, but he was not with the railway

  police. Of all the lot from Tower Street - which was the main

  copper shop of the York Constabulary - he was the one

  whose patrol took him nearest to the railway station. He was

  a smooth, dark, good-looking fellow with a waxed moustache; he looked like a toff who'd dressed up as a policeman

  for a lark, and he passed me by without a glance or any hint

  that we were in a way confederates.

  A two-horse van nearly knocked me over as I wandered

  under the arches into the station forecourt, and another came

  charging close behind. I walked past the booking halls, and

  struck the bookstall, and here were

  Evening Press

  posters by

  the dozen, loosely attached to placards and pillars, and this

  time every one of them reading, 'York Brothers Slain'. The

  posters moved in the cold breeze that blew through the station, and I thought of each one as soaked in blood, so to

  speak, like pieces of newspaper stuck on to shaving cuts. The

  whole bookstall was blood-soaked, now that I came to think

  of it: the shilling novels full of murders; the periodicals with

  their own mystery killings, moving towards their solutions

  in their weekly parts, and each tale with its own detective

  hero - a sleuth hound with peculiar habits but a mighty

  brain. The man who stood in the centre of all this sensation -

  the stout party who kept the bookstall, who was nearly but

  not quite to be counted a railwayman ... he stared out at me

  with no flicker of recognition in his piggy eyes. Did he not

  see in me the invincible detective type?

  I moved in on to Platform Four. The station was alive even

  if the city was not, and it was ablaze with gaslight. 'Down

  side,' the lost-luggage porter had said. That meant crossing

  the footbridge, and, as I put my boot on the first step, the

  telegraph lad came skipping down towards me w
ith telegraph forms in his hands.

  'You found it then, chief?'

  He was looking at the portmanteau.

  'Aye,' I said, grinning at him, 'office and bag both.'

  'Champion,' he said, before haring along Platform Four to

  the telegraph office, where he would doubtless have a couple of minutes' rest before being shot out again like a

  bagatelle ball.

  'Down' side ...

  Well, half the platforms were on the 'down'.

  With the portmanteau seeming to grow heavier by the

  minute I walked over the bridge to Platform Five, where a

  train was about due. A dozen folk stood waiting, and there

  was a big fellow lying on a luggage trolley smoking: a station

  lounger, waiting for a 'carry'. I walked west of the platform,

  through an arch in the station wall to Platform Fourteen. It

  was a wooden platform - a new addition - but this was where

  the Scotch expresses called, and there must have been one

  due, for thirty or so people waited, including the platform

  guard with his silver whistle strung about his neck, and his

  little army of porters, all talking in short bursts, as if nervous.

  The clock on Platform Fourteen showed 6.40 when I saw

  the engine come swerving through Holgate Junction, steam

  flowing from the chimney like a witch's hair, the line of lights

  behind bulging to the left, then to the right. I heard a cough

  behind me, and it was the lost-luggage porter, sopping wet

  and with a small valise over his shoulder. He said nothing but

  just gave me a half-nod as the engine came up, the handles on

  its smoke box making the shape of half-past four.

  The engine pulled up alongside us, and it was another

  thing again close to, with the leaking steam, and the rain on

  the boiler like sweat. Hard to credit that it needed the permission of signals or the help of men to get to its destination.

  'What's going off then?' I asked, just as the engine came to

  a stand alongside us.

  'Summat

  is,' said the porter. 'The Blocker's pitched up, so

  the Brains'll be here presently.' He was looking vexed, staring along the length of the platform, observing all the give-

  and-take of train arrival.

  'What's your name?' I said.

  'Edwin Lund.'

  He said it fast, without putting out his hand; he didn't

  seem over-keen to learn mine but I gave it him:

  'Stringer,' I said. 'Detective James Stringer.'

  No; still didn't sound right.

  A man came up, half running half walking through the

  arch that led to Platform Five.

  'The Brains, I call him' said Lund in an under-breath nodding in the direction of the man. As he spoke, Lund was

  shifting along towards the north end of the platform, looking

  away from the man he'd just identified.

  The man was too tall for his coat, and his long hands were

  held out to the side, so that he settled like a bird onto the

  platform. He began looking about. Then the really big fellow,

  the lounger from Platform Five, was with him.

  'You'll have your bob's worth now, mister,' said Lund,

  who'd taken up position on the opposite side of a porter's

  cabin from the two blokes we were watching.

  The Blocker was straight into a party of ladies boarding at

  a door somewhere about the middle of the train. He seemed

  set on doing the job of a porter, and was offering to help a

  lady with her basket, but she was shaking her head, and so

  he only added to a mix-up of cloaks, bags, and over-sized

  bonnets. The Brains stood looking on. A porter was coming

  up the crowd now. The Brains stopped him in his tracks, and

  started trying to chat with him, but the porter would have

  none. He was after the tips from that scrimmage of train-

  boarding women.

  At the front end of the train, the north end, the fireman was

  down on the tracks, wrestling with the coupling and the vacuum pipe. The engine he'd helped bring in belonged to the

  Great Northern Company. It would now be replaced, and the

  train taken onward by one of the North Eastern's locomotives.

  The fireman was right below my boots. The fellow was sodden from the rain that had blown into the cab on the trip; he

  was clarted with oil and coal dust, and his oilcloth cap had a

  great burn hole in its middle. I was jealous of him all the same

  ...

  I was jealous of every engine man that stepped.

  I moved to try and make out the number of the engine,

  which was an Ivatt Atlantic.

  'Look out’ said Lund.

  The confused ladies had been abandoned. The Blocker

  was walking fast along the platform in our direction, and the

  other was following behind, but he was the one you noticed,

  and what you noticed most particularly were his long

  hands. The Ivatt Atlantic was now pulling away from the

  front carriage, leaving a great gap in the air. It always

  looked wrong when an engine uncoupled, like a head being

  chopped from a body. You half expected blood.

  But I should have been looking south, as Lund was.

  'Wham!' he cried, and his thin voice cracked at the word,

  just as the Blocker clattered straight into a man who'd lately

  climbed down from a carriage, and was fishing in his waistcoat for his watch.

  And now the Brains was on the scene, also assisting the

  gent who'd been knocked down. The Great Northern engine

  was off and away, leaving the train beheaded. The knocked-

  over gent was set back on his feet, helped into the train, and

  Lund was saying quietly, half to me, half to himself: 'They

  have it now, I'm certain they do.'

  Brains now had his back to us; after a second, a small black

  object twirled away from him and landed under the carriage of

  the train into which the toff had stepped. Almost before it had

  landed, he was walking away, his hands held out and down,

  like something precious, and the Blocker was at his side.

  Then they were running, as they went through the arch

  leading to Platform Five.

  'Watch that,' I said to Lund, pointing at my bagful of magazines, and I scarpered after them. 'I am a detective, and I shall

  arrest you on a charge of theft.' The words ran through my

  head as I came onto Platform Five, where there was a man

  leaning against a pillar . . . and

  another

  man leaning against a

  pillar. They were not the Brains or the Blocker; they had similar weird looks to the fighting Camerons of the Institute. All of

  a sudden, the station seemed full of loungers - fellows who

  could not be relied on to come and go with the trains.

  I dashed onto the footbridge. I was the arresting officer,

  and I would bring the charge; I would be in the Police Court,

  and in the

  Yorkshire Evening Press,

  too: 'Detective James

  Stringer, of the North Eastern Railway force, who is stationed at York, took the stand .

  .

  .'

  The thing was not to fret about the job. Get in deep. Then I

  again couldn't see the Blocker and the Brains even from the

  centre of the footbridge, which gave views of the whole station. I looked about for a constable, and gave a glance over
in

  the direction of the Police Office, which was also on Platform

  Four. My view was blocked by the signal box that overhung

  the bookstall on that platform, and I couldn't even make out

  if light burned in the Police Office.

  I gave it up, walked back to Platform Fourteen.

  The 'down' express had gone, carried by its new North

  Eastern engine off to Newcastle, Berwick, Edinburgh. Lund,

  the lost-luggage porter, stood on the platform coughing. The

  pocketbook was in his hand, caught up from the tracks.

  'Did you tell the gent that his pocketbook had been lifted?'

  I said.

  He shook his head.

  'Why ever not?'

  'Train pulled out in double quick time,' he said, and he

  began coughing again - a real workhouse cough.

  'You all right, mate?' I asked him.

  He nodded. His uniform gave him a schoolboy look, but it

  was impossible to make out his age.

  'I'd have thought you'd take an umbrella with you on

  evenings like this.'

  'Why?'

  'Well you've about three thousand to hand in your place of

  work.'

  'It's against regulations to take 'em out.'

  'But your governor, Parkinson, does it.'

  No answer to that.

  'Why did you not tell the police before

  -

  about those two,

  I mean?'

  I gestured along the empty platform.