The Last Train to Scarborough

by Andrew Martin

  'They came to blows over this?' enquired the Mate, blowing smoke.

  'Very likely,' I said. 'At any rate they were set at odds. Perhaps Blackburn had threatened to go to the police. In the night, Vaughan must have gone up to him, perhaps to try and settle the matter. They must have fought again. Vaughan killed Blackburn, perhaps not intentionally. He hauled the body downstairs, put it on the cart over the road, took it to the Promenade or the harbour wall, and pitched it into the sea. Vaughan knew I was onto him. He'd over-heard me talking to

  Tommy Nugent in Mallinson's, and so he tried to do me in by the method of...'

  'It is nonsense,' said the Mate, lighting a new cigar.

  'If you don't tell the truth,' said the Captain, 'you'll never leave this ship.'

  I had made an attempt to disentangle myself from the Rickerby family, and failed utterly. Even the bloody foreigner could see the lie for what it was. To cover my embarrassment, I asked the Mate for a cigar, which he passed over together with matches.

  Blowing smoke, I began again. 'The light', I said, 'was not there..

  I had known straight away the meaning. The pain in my head made movement nigh impossible, but I had to find different air. Each inhalation carried the taste of coal into me, and these breaths could not be released. My breathing was all one way, which was no sort of breathing at all. I rolled off the bed, but was now in a worse position than before with more work to do in order to stand upright. I believe the hardest thing I ever did was to rise from that floor, and unlock that door, whereupon I saw the gas bracket on the little landing, which seemed to be saying: Don't mind me; I'm nothing in this; I'm not even burning. But it was on at the tap, and invisible death poured from it. I tried to close the tap, but my hands were not up to the job. I half fell down the first stairs, where I saw in the darkness the first gas lamp of the half-decorated landing. I saw it in the darkness, and proper breathing was not permitted here either. I would shortly burst; I was a human bomb. I crashed against Vaughan's door; it flew open, and his room was empty, the bed still made up.

  In falling, I rolled underneath another gas bracket that played its part in the relay of death-dealing. I regained my feet, but my feet were treacherous, might have belonged to another man altogether. I did not know my hands either, which were stained red by all the coal gas in me. I pushed at Amanda Rickerby's door and she rose instantly from her pillow - instantly and yet drowsily. A bottle and a glass stood on the floor by her bed, but she looked beautiful in her night-dress as she made her strange, dazed enquiry: 'How are you?'

  She was not rightly awake; she had taken in a quantity of the gas, and I was not in my right mind, which is why I replied, 'I'm in great shape,' and I may have vomited there and then onto her bedroom carpet, which was not very gentlemanly of me. I took the stool from before her dressing table and pitched it through her window, marvelling that my red hands were up to the job. I came out of the room revolving, and struck Adam Rickerby, who was there in long johns and no shirt. He looked like the strong man at the fair, or the Creature from the Jungle. But he did not look to have been gassed - or not badly. Had the poison reached downstairs? I would consult the man who had laid it on for my benefit.

  I pushed at Fielding's door, and entered his room for the second time. He sat on his bed; it was all I could do to stand. I felt tiredness as a great weight pressing me down to the floor. The room was in darkness, and I could not see the gas brackets, but I knew that here too the coal vapour streamed. He wore a suit, and sat on his bed.

  'You locked your door, Mr Stringer,' he said, and I somehow gasped out:

  'You sound ... put-out.'

  'No, that was Blackburn,' said Fielding. 'His eye, I mean,' and he gave a little private smile, indicating an object that lay beside him on the bed: the nine inch needle that had been kept in the knife polisher.

  He'd done for Blackburn by stabbing into his eye as he slept, no doubt after observing, or over-hearing, whatever creeping about had gone on earlier in the night. The long needle put swiftly into the closed eye - that way there'd be little blood and no noise. He'd meant to do me the same way. But on finding the door locked he'd fixed on a method that took no account of doors, and would bring an end to everything and everyone.

  'The gas', he said, from the bed, 'will spare you a deal of trouble even if you don't quite see it. For one thing, you would have been forever buying the lady wine, and she likes the good stuff you know. You would have had to learn all about the best vintages to keep her happy, and you would be starting as far as I can judge, Mr Stringer, from a position of complete ignorance ...'

  With every new remark that he made more of the truth - which was not quite as Fielding saw it - came home to me. He too was now breathing wrongly, fighting for it, and rocking on the bed as he did so. His dainty feet were raised from the floor, so that he looked like a child too short for the school form. He had put on a soft-tasselled hat for his own death; a species of indoor hat - a smoking hat, as I believed it was called. He was not smoking but held some long implement - not the needle, which was by his side - but some other long implement, which he passed constantly from left to right hand. If I might lay my own hands on either it or the other... But that was impossible without air, and I found myself dreaming - and it was a kind of floating dreaminess - about a gun. That would be so much faster, and I heard myself wasting air by saying, 'I ought to shoot you down.'

  How had he carted Blackburn, a big fellow, down the stairs? The window. The bed in the small room was level with it. Fielding might have fed the body through, and it would then have dropped directly to the Prom; Fielding would have sent the suit down after. He himself, in that different world in which everyone could walk, would have descended by the stairs and the streets, and dragged Blackburn into the water.

  ... But I couldn't believe I had that quite right. It was odds- on that a body dropped into the harbour would turn up again. I stumbled a little way forward.

  'Spooning, you would call it,' Fielding was saying. 'He was the first at it, and then you. She spoons with you in the presence of the man who pays the bills. Well, I am sparing you a good deal of expense ...'

  And he seemed to concentrate hard on taking a breath, as though he might out-think the gas, then the word burst out of him:

  'Distemper... costlier than you might think when bought in bulk... wallpaper at a shilling a roll...'

  With great effort he took another breath; he was better at it than me. But I could see that it did not come easily, and he now had to pause and fall silent every few words.

  ' . . . And the Lady forever changing her mind about the colour.'

  It came to me that I was now nearer to him, to the dangerous implement in his hand, and the other one beside him on the bed.

  'No!' I said, and I could not say any more, and it was a wasted word into the bargain. But I had meant to say that the Lady's colour was lavender.

  Two paces to go before I was at Fielding and the bed. But why kill a man who was dying anyway? I looked to the windows: the first one - closed. To the second one - closed. I should have smashed the glass. I had wasted my time in not doing it, and accordingly I had wasted my life. The room was whirling at lightning speed; my legs were buckling under me and I wanted to be on the floor, stretched right across it; I could not support the weight of my own head. I tried to take a breath but nothing came. I saw bookshelves, a bed, fireplace, Fielding himself, but there was no air in-between any of these objects. I was drowning on dry land, drowning on the first floor but I was not ignorant. Rather, Fielding was. I recalled those late silences of the Lady, which were the true indication of her feelings towards me, which were no feelings at all.

  'You tell me ... that you have hopes of becoming a ... solicitor,' Fielding seemed to be saying, and his voice had gone very high on that last word; he'd fairly squeaked it out. 'But there is no royal road to the acquisition of knowledge ... Mr Stringer, you were born to a world of dirt... dirt and dust and coal... and that...'

 
; I managed another step forwards as he unfolded the jewelled implement in his hand.

  'Your presumption,' he said, rocking faster now, his face pink, far, far too pink. 'It scarcely... It takes one's breath ... It takes the breath ...'

  I first thought that the implement might be for the fine adjustment of shirt cuffs, for he held it positioned over his left wrist. He made a smooth, practised movement.

  'This gas ... too ... slow,' he said, and he breathed in, making a fearful dry squeaking, before swiftly transferring the implement to his other hand, and moving it over the other wrist. He raised it to his neck, and for an instant I thought: The contraption adjusts shirt collars too - just the thing for a faddish fellow. But Adam Rickerby, standing behind me, called out: 'He'll 'ave blood all over!'

  Fielding moved the thing quite slowly and carefully from right to left across his neck.

  And he tilted his head at me.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  'And you believe that he'd killed Blackburn?' enquired the Captain.

  I had the idea that the question was asked out of duty, that he was now restless, his mind elsewhere. I believed that I had understood most things in the seconds before Fielding's death, and now that I could recall that understanding, I gave my theory in outline to the Captain. And while speaking I thought the thing through in a different way.

  All the trinkets in those drawers of Fielding's, too neatly stored in boxes: they signified a lack of love. Oh, he had the friendship of Vaughan all right, and I pictured the two of them in the ship room, smoking silently: Vaughan lying flat on the couch, Fielding sitting daintily, periodically crossing his legs in a different way. But anyone could have the friendship of Vaughan: he was like a spaniel, and about equally given to cocking his leg in public. The love of Amanda Rickerby was a different matter. Ray Blackburn, a handsome, well set-up man of marriage-able age, had been the beneficiary of her love, and she had kept the company badge as a token of it. He had been to Scarborough several times before the fatal night, although never before to Paradise. I saw the two of them about the town, falling into conversation in the railway station perhaps. She sees him coming along the platform, his dark face further darkened and made more impressive by coal dust, and she chooses to ask him, rather than the funny-looking little platform guard, the time of the train. Where would she want to go to? Hull, Stockton, York, Leeds? It did not matter; the trip would only be a vague plan, anyhow. They would find that they had walked and talked for the entire length of the platform, that they had gone together through the station gates... and then they had the whole of Scarborough in which to walk and talk. I did not put it past her to have been drawn by his sober character, which came out of his strong religion. He might keep her on the straight path.

  Later on, Blackburn would have been torn. He could not resist the opportunity to travel to Scarborough and to stay at Paradise when the chance arose in the course of his work. I supposed that he'd passed some of the night in Amanda Rickerby's bed. I saw the two of them there, sweating under the sheets in the hot talcum smell of the lavender room, and Fielding lying in his own bed just across the landing and knowing. Why? Because he had been listening for it. Had he seen them about the town beforehand? •

  It would make a married man feel strange to be in that lavender room, at least in the moments before and after the event, the prospect of which had drawn him there. Blackburn had gloomed about the house throughout his stay, which was down to guilt, and his own serious-minded nature.

  Earlier on, Vaughan had showed him the special cards, which was just exactly the wrong thing to do to a man of Blackburn's mind. I pictured the two of them walking through the Old Town in the evening: the lobster pots rocking in the wind; the flashing of the lighthouse showing by modern means all the oldness of the Old Town. Blackburn would wonder what he was doing there, with this strange, unmannerly fellow loping along too close-by his side.

  Blackburn had no doubt blown up at Vaughan, who had taken stick from the coppers ever since for an act he was only now beginning to think of as shameful. But it might become less shameful every time it was repeated. I believed he half hoped I would walk into the copper shop on Castle Road to say he'd shown me the cards as well, but that it had only been in fun and nothing had come of it.

  As to Vaughan's whereabouts on that Monday ... Well, he was a man under pressure and he was in funds. It would not have surprised me if, between Mallinson's and the luncheon- that-never-was, he had paid for something different from what the cards brought him to - some advance on that action. He certainly knew where the accommodating ladies were to be found. I pictured him walking down the alleyways - those alleyways in the shadow of the Grand Hotel, the ones that echoed to the sound of rushing rainwater - and looking in at every doorway in turn. Or were those women to be found on the main streets, above the shops selling trinkets for trippers? It was a sea-side town after all, a place of pleasure. As he stood next to me in the gentlemen's he might have been nerving himself up to asking me to accompany him. I supposed that he often resorted to the Scarborough night houses - resorted to them even during the day - for Vaughan was not an attractive fellow and this was his usefulness as far as Fielding was concerned. He was no rival for the affections of Amanda Rickerby. Fielding made no objection to ugly or old men staying in the house - or families, hence the push to make family apartments. He objected to single young men, such as Armstrong, the fellow who'd collected seaweed.

  You might think Fielding a nancy but once you knew different it was obvious that he loved Miss Rickerby. I saw him fairly springing about with pleasure when she had complimented him in the ship room, the whole black sea behind him, utterly forgotten. He coloured up when she addressed him; and he never made any of his little cracks at her expense. But he did not stand an earthly with her, being twice her age and nothing to look at, and while he was not a pauper he was a failure in business and a gaol bird into the bargain. But for a while he'd tried. You might say that he'd tried bribery. He was paying for the redecoration of the house; he hung his pictures about the place; laid in cigars and Spanish sherry, and he gave her the benefit of his business advice. The more profit the house turned, the less chance of Miss Rickerby selling up and leaving. But he mustn't have been thinking straight when he recommended that she bring in railway men, for the law of averages said that a marriage-able one would land on the doorstep eventually. Having dealt with one, he had another on his hands directly. But he had read the signs wrongly in my case.

  At first, she had given me her smiles and flirtatious glances wholesale, especially in the company of Fielding. But they had been replaced by thoughtful silences when she'd discovered what she needed to know: that he was jealous. I recalled the ways he had tried to take me away from her when she was being over-friendly. At dinner, he had lured me to the ship room with the promise of a cigar; he had done the same at the luncheon that never was, practically ordering me from her presence on that occasion. Late at night in the kitchen he had urged me to go up and look at the waves. The following morning he'd been keen that I should go off to the station to reclaim my engine. And I believed that his hatred of me - and his jealousy - were made plain to Amanda Rickerby when I'd said that the white wine 'went down a treat', and he'd exclaimed, 'Just so!' in a sarcastic way, unable to keep his feelings in check. I saw Amanda Rickerby's face turning quickly, the sight of her face in profile - the sudden sharpness of it. She would have seen him then for the murderer of Blackburn, and known he might try something similar on me.

  'I do not say that your sister is a party to murder,' I said to the Captain, 'or complicit in any way. No charge against her would stand. Her behaviour was ...' And a convenient phrase came to me from my law studies:'... It was too remote from the crime. She couldn't know for certain that Fielding would try anything. It might have seemed tantamount to slander to have confided her suspicions, you know. In the end she settled for telling me to lock my room.'

  The Captain eyed me for a while, perhaps not keen on the
sight of a fellow trying to get himself off the hook. At the same time, he was weighing some further plan, I knew.

  'And he just dropped the body into the harbour?' he enquired. 'That would be a risk, wouldn't it?'

  'I believe your brother, Adam, may have helped him get rid of the body,' I said, and the Captain did not flinch but just glanced sidelong to the Mate, who enquired, 'How, would you say?'

  'I don't mean the lad was involved in murder. It would be just tidying up to him. He was neat-handed, and he had a boat. He was also clever enough to know that this business might bring the house down, so to say. Paradise was everything to him, so he perhaps did Fielding's clearing-up for him. Whether he believed that Blackburn had been killed or made away with himself I don't know. Fielding might have told him anything, threatened him with God knows what. They never spoke again, anyhow.'

  'You think they brought Blackburn to us?' the Mate cut in.

  'No,' I said, 'Adam brought me to you knowing the movements of your ship, and knowing the times it passed Scarborough at no great distance from the shore. But Blackburn .. . what would be the point? The boy would just pitch him into the sea a good way out.'

  'You're dead wrong,' said the Captain, eyeing me. 'Fielding killed Blackburn, but Adam Rickerby was not involved in any way.'

  He continued to use the surname when speaking of his brother, as though the youth was a stranger to him.

  'Well,' I said, 'that's as maybe.'

  I had to admit that I could not imagine Adam Rickerby lying to the police, or to anyone. It was his sister who'd invented the story of the mining accident. All he had to do was keep quiet on the subject. Amanda Rickerby had done it for the boy's own protection: it would not do to seem to have a grievance against the North Eastern Railway Company in light of what had happened to Blackburn, as Fielding had no doubt discovered for himself when questioned.