The Last Train to Scarborough Read online

  'We must get to the bottom of this business,' I said, and he made no reply. I made two further remarks to him as I climbed the ladder: 'Are you two the whole ship's company?' and then, 'This is a bad affair.' All three remarks went unanswered, and no wonder.

  The ladder took us to a low iron door that was on the jar. I pushed at it, and we were into a saloon: here was a lessening of the coal smell. White-painted planks had been fitted to the iron to make wooden walls. I noted an oil lamp on a bracket, two couches, a wooden chair; books on a folding table. Another ladder, or something between a ladder and a staircase, came down into the middle of this room.

  'Do go up,' the grey man seemed to say. It sounded as though he was asking politely, but that wasn't it. 'Go,' he repeated, as I eyed him. There was spittle always behind his teeth when he spoke, as though the sea rose and fell inside him as well as all around.

  At the top of the stairs was a bare wooden chart room, if that be the right description. It was the room set behind the bridge, anyhow. The for'ard side of it was all window save one slatted wooden door that was half window, and this banged constantly so that the sight of the ship's bows, and the wild seas breaking over them, came and went. The Captain walked directly through this door onto the bridge, and I was left alone with the ghostlike foreigner, who kept silence. The water rolled thickly and slowly over the window like quicksilver; the door clattered, and I glimpsed for an instant the edge of the ship's wheel, the binnacle alongside, and a hand upon the wheel. It was not the Captain's hand - so there was at least a third crewman in the know. I heard a rapid pass of words between the Captain and this new man, but I could make out no word in particular over the crashing waters, the rising wind and the banging door, save perhaps the single faint bell of the telegraph as an order was passed from bridge to engine room. The Captain came back in, removed his cap, and drew his sleeve once over his forehead, which was all that was needed for him to recover from exposure to the storm, just as though he'd been walking fast on a summer's day and worked up a light sweat. The door continued to clatter behind him, and I wished he would shut it permanently, for I was half frozen, and the iron stove in the corner of the room burned too low.

  The Captain's hair was practically shaved right off, which made him look foreign. They went in for shaved heads in France, and I fancied there was something about his square face not quite English. The word came to me at length: his face was too symmetrical; but he was English - north of England too, going by the few words he'd spoken. He stood directly opposite to me, with the chart table in-between us. The uppermost chart was quite as big as the table top, and showed a sea full of tiny numbers, but I could not make out what sea. A parallel ruler rested upon it, together with an oil lamp and a black book. To the side of the table stood the grey man - the grey Dutchman, as I had now decided - who indicated a chair at the table, and seemed to say, 'Sit down, I dink you want shum corfee.'

  I will set down his words normally from now on. He was always only a little 'off in his English, and of the two he seemed the better disposed towards me. But I did not think he was fit for life beyond this ship. Where the Captain was perhaps in the middle forties, the other was in the middle fifties; his beard and face tried to outdo each other for greyness, and it was the dead greyness of driftwood.

  The Dutchman quit the room, perhaps to fetch coffee, and I sat down. This ought to have brought some comfort, but instead the movement brought a worsening of my headache. It was a pain that came as a kind of mysterious brightness, a kind of electricity. But the room we were in was dark, and the Captain's face was dark. He laid the small revolver on top of the chart, took his own seat, and lit an oil lamp that stood on top of the chart. He then took a pen from his pocket, and briefly scrawled something in the book that lay on the chart. I supposed this to be the ship's logbook, but nothing about the book gave away the name of the vessel, and it was impossible to read the Captain's handwriting - which seemed to me illegible in any case - in the brief instant of time before he shut the book.

  'Why do you have the gun?' I enquired.

  'Because we're minded to shoot you,' he said, blowing out the match.

  He sat back in his chair, and picked up a pencil. He looked at it.

  'You are the Captain,' I said, after a space.

  He nodded once, in a mannerly sort of way, still inspecting the pencil. A further interval of silence passed.

  'Being the Captain, you might at least take a glance at that fucking chart occasionally.'

  No answer.

  'And the other one, the one who's gone for the coffee ... he's the First Mate.'

  The Captain nodded again, put down the pencil.

  'I want a change of clothes, hot water and soap,' I said.

  I considered letting this fellow know that I had a family, but it would have been wrong to bring them into it. I had considered them too little of late. In fact I had done them some wrong that I could not quite bring to mind, and this was the penalty: I would be removed from their lives altogether.

  'Sea captain,' I said, looking up. 'In the town where I was born every other bloody man was a sea captain.'

  'Who are you?' asked the Captain.

  I raised my hand to the inside breast pocket of my suit-coat. The pocket had survived whatever had happened to me; the warrant card had not.

  'You know,' I said.

  'But, you see ... we want to hear it from you,' said the Mate, returning with coffee.

  I nodded slowly at him, and the thing was: I didn't know the half of it.

  PART TWO

  Chapter Nine

  The North End shed, a quarter mile beyond the station mouth, was where the Scarborough engines were stabled. I felt a proper fool, approaching the Shed Superintendent's office with my kit bag, just as I had in the days when I'd been working with a company rule book in my inside pocket, and not as some species of actor.

  It had turned into a nothing sort of a day -1 would have had it hotter or colder, darker or sunnier. The church bells of the city would not leave off, and their racket drifted over the complicated railway lands that lay at the very heart of York. I was tired out. I'd hardly slept on Friday or Saturday night. There were many new noises in our new house: Sylvia reckoned that the branch of the big sycamore tree tapped on her window - 'but only at nights'.

  'It taps when there's a wind,' Harry had corrected her.

  The thought of taking articles and becoming a railway solicitor made me hot and cold. It was like a fever. One minute, I could imagine the whole enterprise going smoothly on and myself going to the Dean Court Hotel alongside the Minster - which was the refuge of the top clerks in the North Eastern offices - wearing a grey, well-brushed fedora hat. But it would keep coming back to me that the profession I was entering was unmanly. It came down to this: the lawyers only talked about the railway, instead of doing anything to make the trains go.

  I wore my great-coat on top of my second best suit. I had on a white shirt and white necker, and I carried in my kit bag a change of shirt and a tie in case the boarding house should turn out to be a more than averagely respectable one. I carried no rule book, but on my suit-coat lapel I'd pinned the company badge, this being the North Eastern Railway crest about one inch across. All company employees were given one on joining, and the keener sorts would wear it every day. You'd be more likely to see a driver or a fireman wearing his badge than a booking office clerk because the footplate lads took more pride in their work.

  I had taken off my wedding ring, partly because it didn't do to fire while wearing a ring - there were plenty of things to snag it on - and partly because Ray Blackburn had been a single man, and I wanted to place myself as far as possible in his shoes. (He'd been engaged, evidently, but surely no engine man would ever wear an engagement ring.) My railway police warrant card I carried in my pocket book, which was in the inside pocket of my suit-coat. I'd need it if it came to an arrest, but I did not envisage having to produce it, and it must be kept out of sight for as long as I was pa
ssing myself off as an engine man.

  The Super guarded the shed from his little office, which was stuck onto the front of it like a bunion, spoiling what would otherwise have been a perfectly circular brick wall, for the North Shed was a roundhouse. He was expecting me, and seemed to have been thoroughly briefed by the Chief. He had me sign the ledger which was kept underneath a clock in a little booth of its own, the whole arrangement putting me in mind of a side altar in a church. The ledger was really a big diary. The left hand page for Sunday, 15 March 1914 was the booking-on side, and that was clean. But the booking-off side was dirty because those blokes had spent the past ten hours at close quarters with coal, oil ash and soot. It came to me that this was just how it had been at Sowerby Bridge shed when I'd been firing for the Lancashire and Yorkshire railway eight years since.

  As the Super looked on, smoking a little cigar, I signed my name.

  'What shall I put under "Duty"?' I asked

  'Well,' said the Super, inspecting the end of his cigar, 'you're working the last York train of the day to Scarborough, then running back light engine ... Only you're not, are you?'

  And he practically winked at me.

  'I've no notion what I'm doing,' I said. 'All I know is I'm stopping in Scarborough.'

  'Your engine'll break down there, lad,' said another voice, and it was the Chief, who had now entered the booth, and was lighting his own cigar from the Shed Super's. 'That way you'll have a good excuse for staying.'

  'What's going to be up with the engine?' I said.

  'Injector steam valve's shot,' said the Chief.

  'Leaking pretty badly,' said another voice, and there was a fourth man in the tiny booking-on place. 'Just come and have a look!' he said.

  In the confusion of us all getting out of there, and walking into the shed proper, the new man was introduced to me by the Chief, and he was Tom, or Tommy, Nugent. He didn't look like an engine man - too small and curly-haired, and too talkative by half - but he would drive the locomotive to Scarborough. He'd then come on with me to the boarding house called Paradise and obligingly make himself available as a second mark for any murderers that might be living there. He would also be a kind of guard for me, and it did bother me that the Chief thought this should be necessary, especially since he hadn't seemed over-protective of me in the past.

  We entered the great shed, and the galvanising coal smell hit me. I thought: How can blokes keep away from a place like this? But there were not many in there and not many engines. Half of the berths, which were arranged like the spokes of a wheel, stood empty. Tommy Nugent led the way, talking thirteen to the dozen. I couldn't quite catch his words, which were directed to the Shed Super and the Chief, but I saw that he walked lame, and I liked the combination of his excited patter and his crocked right leg. He was half crippled but didn't appear to gloom over it.

  The air in the shed was grey, and every noise echoed. A shunting engine was being cleaned by a lad I'd often seen about the station, and as he went at the boiler with Brasso, an older bloke, who sat on the boiler top near the chimney, was saying, 'It's a half day and double time, so what are you moaning about?'

  They both nodded at Nugent, who seemed a general favourite in the shed. We then passed one of the Class Zs; a bloke lounging by the boiler frame nodded as we went by.

  'Aye aye,' he said, and gave a grin, as if to say, 'Look what I've got to lean on.' ('An engine of exceptional grace and power', the Railway Magazine had called the Z Class.)

  But now our party had come to a stop before a little tuppenny ha'penny J Class. It was in steam, and too much of the stuff was trailing away from the injector overflow pipe beneath the footplate on the right hand side.

  'And the fire door's jiggered into the bargain,' Nugent was saying. 'It jams on the runners and it's a right bugger to shift it.'

  'Seems a bit hard on the passengers,' I said. 'I mean, we are going to take passengers, aren't we?'

  'You're the 5.52 express,' said the Chief. 'I'll say you're taking bloody passengers!'

  'She's been in this state for ages,' said Tommy Nugent. 'She'd get us back home tonight with no bother, but we don't want to come back, do we?'

  'We want to come back eventually,' I said.

  'Paradise,' he said, climbing onto the footplate with some difficulty. 'They've got a nerve calling it that, when they're killing off the fucking guests. Here, what shall I call you when we get there? Not Detective Sergeant Stringer, I suppose?'

  The Chief looked at me, and gave a grin. He seemed more easy-going today, perhaps pleased that his plans on my behalf were running smoothly.

  'No flies on Tommy,' he said.

  'Just call me Jim,' I called up to Tommy.

  'But that's your real name.'

  'I don't see any harm in using it,' I said.

  I didn't see the need of all this palaver either. The aim was to kid any spies the Paradise guest house might have in Scarborough station or engine shed, but it seemed highly unlikely there'd be any.

  'Either there's something going on in that house,' I said, 'in which case the offenders will be brought to book, or there isn't, in which case we have a pleasant Sunday night in Scarborough.'

  'Or they kill you,' said the Chief, blowing smoke.

  The Chief knew I was inclined to nerves, and so would rib me in this way, and I preferred this open style of joshing to the strange smiles he'd given in the Beeswing Hotel.

  'Just let 'em try,' said Tommy Nugent. 'I hope they bloody do!’

  Having collected an oil can from the footplate, he was now touring the lubrication points of the engine. He carried on talking as he did it, but sometimes he'd go out of sight and in one of those moments I said to the Chief:

  'Seems a pleasant enough bloke, but he talks a lot... might be a bit of a handful in the house.'

  'He's plucky though.'

  'How'd he come by the leg?'

  'Shot wound. Tom was in the York Territorials ... wandered onto the target range at Strensall barracks.'

  No wonder he was in with the Chief then. The Chief was not in the Territorials himself, but as an old soldier he had many connections with them. And he liked any man who shot. He was forever trying to get me at it - and he'd described the missing man, Blackburn, as a good shot.

  Nugent's voice had gone muffled as he oiled underneath the engine, but it came clear again as he climbed up out of the inspection pit:

  'The good thing is, Jim, that I really am a driver, and you really were a fireman or so I've heard.'

  'I was a passed cleaner, but I did plenty of firing. Then I turned copper ... and now I'm very likely off to be a solicitor.'

  'Blimey,' said Tommy Nugent. 'Restless sort, en't you?'

  'He has a restless wife,' said the Chief, 'which comes to the same thing', and so saying he shook both our hands and went off. I watched him hunch up as he retreated between two engines. He was lighting a new cigar. What did it say on the firework tins? Light the blue touch paper and retire. The question biting me was this: did he know more about the situation in Paradise than he was letting on?

  The Shed Super had gone off too, and I was left alone with Tommy Nugent and the busted engine. Tommy took his watch from his waistcoat pocket.

  'All set?' he said.

  'Aye,' I said,

  'Be a lark, this, won't it?' he said.

  'Aye,' I said. 'Hope so.'

  Chapter Ten

  'I want this rolling to stop,' I said.

  It helped not to look at things - to keep my eyes closed. But there was no help for it; I had to look. On the table beside the chart was the coffee pot, a tin of Abernethy biscuits, a box of wax matches (the label showed a cat with glowing eyes and the words 'See in the Dark') and the Captain's pocket revolver. It had a beautiful walnut stock, worn from use by the looks of it. The chart itself I had given up on. It showed only sea: there was a fold where there might have been the beginnings of land. A north point was drawn at the top of it: a sort of glorious exploding star with a capital
N riding above, and I felt we must be moving in that direction for the chart room was growing colder by the second. If I had thought on, I might have come to a different conclusion about our direction of travel, but all I knew was that the sun was rising somewhere and making the sky violet, which was more or less the colour, I also knew, of one of the last rooms on land that I had been in.

  As the light rose, the rain had eased a little and the figure on the bridge stood a little more clearly revealed as a man in a great-coat and a woollen hat. He hardly touched the wheel, but just stood by it with arms folded, looking always forward (I had not seen his face) where the prow of the ship plunged and rose with great determination. I could see it all through the windows of the chart room: the fore-deck rising one second, half under swirling waves the next.

  Until I'd fallen to staring at the objects on the table I had been talking, but I could not now quite remember what I had been saying or for how long. I could not lay hands on my pocket watch, and I could not see any clock in the chart room. I'd started by demanding - in-between the head racking electric pains - to know how I had come to be aboard, and where we were going. I'd told them that I was a copper, and the Captain had said, 'I am the authority on this ship.'

  I'd wanted to know whether my face was as red as my hands, whether or how the Captain and the Mate were connected to the Paradise guest house, and how long I had spent on the coal heap. But I'd given up with the questions after a while: the two would not answer, and the Captain barely spoke at all. I'd always known it would be like this on a ship: the man in charge would be the man who said least. It was a little that way on the railways.

  Instead, and in return for a borrowed shirt, guernsey and oilskin, and coffee in a metal cup (they had offered me bread but I was not up to food), I had begun to tell them what had happened. I resolved to lay it all out, in hopes that the more I spoke the more I would know. There was much more to it than I said, but I began to give the Captain and the Dutchman the main points of the tale. I did not know what to leave out, so I left out nothing that seemed material and I was encouraged in my speech by the way the pair of them listened closely, and by the way they were not put off even when my own tales began to include the stories of others, as a ship carries lifeboats.