Beside the Press was the latest number of the Railway
Magazine opened towards the back of the paper with the page headed 'What the Railways Are Doing' uppermost. This was the classified section of the magazine, and always carried the notices announcing meetings of the Railway Club, who were really a London lot, but whose meetings were open to anyone taking the trouble to write to the secretary for a ticket. At seven o'clock that day - the announcement was circled in my copy of the magazine - Mr A. K. Chambers would be reading a paper entitled 'The New Atlantics with Special Mention of the North Eastern Class Z', and I had the ticket for it in my pocket.
In the office, old man Wright, who distributed the post, had handed me the letter in which it came and I had made a point of satisfying his curiosity by opening the envelope in his presence and letting him see the ticket for himself. The meeting was to be held at the Railway Club's premises: 92 Victoria Street, London SW, and Wright had said, 'You've booked a day of leave for that?' Then, later, when he'd thought about it a bit more, 'Seems a long way to go just to hear about trains,' at which I'd reminded him that he was in fact in the railway police and so ought not be taking that tone.
It was quite in order to josh with Wright. His wife, Jane, would not be coming back to him as she had made plain both to Wright and to my own wife during a meeting of the Cooperative ladies. But he had developed a plan in response: firstly, he would no longer buy his groceries from any of the Co-operative stores, his wife and her new man, Terry Dawson, being employees of the Movement. This went hard with Wright because the Co-operative stores were much the cheapest, and he was a right old skinflint, but it was the principle of the thing. (The Co-operative slogan, 'The Friendly Store', now rang very hollow in his ears, he told me.) Second of all, he would leave work early twice a week to attend the dancing classes given in the room over the Big Coach public house on Nessgate. Once up to snuff with the two-step and the waltz and whatnot, he would go along to the Saturday afternoon tea dances that were held in many of the hotels of central York, and were known to attract the widows of the City.
'The best one's at the Danby Lodge on Minster Walk,' Wright told me one day in the police office. 'I'm going to try my luck there first.' 'You'll need a lot of luck,' Constable Flower had said, in an under-breath, and whether Wright heard it or not, he certainly wasn't put off. He seemed very confident about his plan, and I wondered whether the end of his marriage might not be the making of him.
Of course Wright, being so nosey, had had a field day on my delayed return from Scarborough. Lydia had been into the office twice to ask where I'd got to, the second time in tears. His fixed opinion, he told me later, was that I'd been done in. 'Of course, I didn't say that to her,' he told me, 'or not in so many words', and I dreaded to think what he had said for he was not the sort to play down any drama.
On the Thursday morning, three days after Adam Rickerby put me onto the Lambent Lady, the Chief himself had gone to Scarborough, making straight to Bright's Cliff to see what had become of me. There he'd found a bloke from the council sent to board over the window I'd smashed when I'd pitched the chair through it. That had been quick work. Someone else in the street had gone into the council offices to complain that the house, having evidently been abandoned, was now a magnet for vagrants and burglars. The Chief told me that the bloke from the council had posted a bill for the work through the letter box before leaving.
It seemed very unlikely to me that the bill would ever be paid.
The Chief had broken into Paradise in company with some of the Scarborough coppers. There were signs of people having left in a great hurry, although the gas had been turned off. It was the Chief himself who'd come upon the body of Fielding, which was just as well since he was well equipped to stand that kind of shock.
I'd returned to Bright's Cliff a few days after with the Chief, some coppers from Scarborough and Leeds, and the Scarborough coroner, a Mr Clegg. By then Theo Vaughan had turned up, having walked into the Scarborough copper shop to make a clean breast of... well, not much. He'd staggered back to the house at three in the morning on Tuesday, 17 March, and found it empty. The smashed window and the gas reek had terrified him, and - knowing that he was still under suspicion over the last bit of bad business in the house - he'd taken a few of his belongings (including, I didn't doubt, the remainder of his Continental Specialities) and fled the scene.
I'd talked to Vaughan in the coroner's court and had given him the whole tale over a cup of tea during an adjournment in the inquiry. I asked him whether he'd known that Fielding was sweet on the lady of the house.
'Not in that way, Jim,' he said, 'not in that way.'
He was every bit as familiar as he had been before, despite the fact that he now knew me for a policeman. When I told him how I'd come upon the special post cards in Fielding's bedside drawer, he said, 'He must have had 'em away from my room, Jim. I tell you ... no man can resist.'
He then leant towards me, with droplets of cold tea dangling from his 'tache, and might have been on the point of again offering to sell me some at a knockdown price. I believe he was only put off by the clerk of the court coming up to me at that moment and addressing me as 'Detective Sergeant Stringer'.
Mr Clegg had praised me before his court, and the Leeds and Scarborough coppers also seemed to think I'd done a good job. It came down to this: I'd made myself the mark, and I'd cracked the mystery - and it was cracked all right, papers amounting to a confession to the killing of Blackburn having been discovered amongst Fielding's belongings. He'd known Blackburn as soon as he turned up at the house; had seen him about in Scarborough on earlier occasions with the Lady. He had observed them buying oysters on the harbour wall, later walking in Clarence Gardens. It was perhaps there that Blackburn had made her a present of the North Eastern badge that she so much admired.
In exposing Fielding I had left two dead bodies in my wake, but this seemed to be taken quite lightly by everyone in authority: one of the dead was a man who would have swung anyway, and that went down as quick and violent justice of the sort the Chief and many another favoured. But as regards the death of Tommy Nugent, I blamed the Chief. He'd been too reckless from start to finish, and I meant to have it out with him.
During the visit to the house in company with the Leeds and Scarborough men, I saw a different side to the man. He knew he'd made a bloomer over sending Tommy Nugent with me, and he acted accordingly. I believe that 'chastened' is the word. He'd liked Tommy Nugent, was saddened by his death, and seemed to take the responsibility for it, but that wasn't enough for me.
We'd all (the Leeds and Scarborough coppers, the Chief and me) gone off to the Two Mariners after inspecting the house, and I'd given the story, which was fast becoming a party piece, over a few pints. As when addressing Captain Rickerby, I'd played down my infatuation with the Lady of the House, although I think one of the Scarborough coppers guessed at it; he'd questioned her over the disappearance of Blackburn and had evidently half fallen in love with her himself. When we coincided in the gentlemen's halfway through our session in the Mariners, he congratulated me on saving her life by the smashing of the window, for that was the supposition - theirs and mine: that she had survived the gas, and made off with her brother to avoid being taken in charge over the killing of Tommy.
'She was a peach, wasn't she, that one?' the Scarborough copper said. 'I wouldn't have minded tomming her myself.'
He told me that he was circulating her and Adam's descriptions in the Police Gazette as being wanted for questioning over the death of Tommy Nugent. 'But I'll tell you this,' he added, buttoning up his flies, 'I half hope we never find her.'
'I don't suppose you ever will,' I said, which might have been taken as rather rude, but I was the star turn that day and could have got away with anything. As I told my tale, one of the Leeds blokes kept saying, 'Well, who'd have thought it?' and 'What a turn-up'. He might have been a stooge, paid to boost me.
The Chief had kept silence as I gave my account,
even when, towards the end - and made brave by my three pints - I'd eyed him and said in front of everyone, 'Tommy Nugent ought not to have been sent. He was gun crazy - out for any opportunity to loose off a bullet.'
Later, on the train back to York, as I sat with the Chief in a smoking compartment we hardly spoke a word, and I knew that for the first time in our acquaintance this was my silence rather than one of his. I'd been stirred up by my success in the pub, and I now felt I had the measure of the Chief. I would let him stew before I said my piece.
He smoked and I sat over-opposite, looking sidelong.
'Will you have a cigar?' he enquired, just after we'd come out of Seamer.
'I reckon not,' I said.
'It is a smoking compartment, you know.'
'Yes,' I said, 'but that doesn't mean it's obligatory, does it... sir?'
'Obligatory,' he muttered under his breath.
A silence of twenty minutes followed that exchange.
'I want to say something about this case,' I said, as we flew through Rillington.
'Fire away,' he said.
'You sent me into that house unprepared.'
'Correct.'
I was a bit knocked by that but I ploughed on: 'Unprepared in the following ways: number one ...'
'No,' said the Chief, who had now turned and was looking through the window.
'Eh?'
'Don't put numbers to it. I'm liable to get a bit cross if you do that. Put it shortly.'
'I had no sight of the case papers,' I said. 'Well, I had the witness statements, but none of the reports. I had no account of the personalities in the house.'
The Chief was still looking through the window.
'Firstly,' he said,'... Christ, you've got me at it now ... you had all the papers that were to hand. The others were missing and have never turned up since.'
'That's a bit funny, isn't it?'
'Well, you don't seem to be laughing about it. And even if more papers had been to hand, do you think those Leeds and Scarborough blokes are up to writing an account of anyone's personality7.' He fairly spat that word out. 'What do you think they are? A bunch of fucking novelists?'
'... And you gave me no advance warning of the job,' I said. 'Well, one day - not enough.'
'I didn't want you shitting yourself for a whole week, did I? It might have been bad for your health.'
'I wouldn't have been shitting myself.. . sir. I would have been developing a plan of action.'
'I didn't want you to develop a plan of action.'
'Why not?'
'Because it would have been crap.'
'Thanks,' I said, and the Chief stood up. He suddenly looked big - too big for Malton station, which we were just then pulling into.
'Where are you off to?' I said.
'The next carriage,' said the Chief, blowing smoke.
The chief said 'carriage' when he meant 'compartment'. He was old-fashioned in that way.
'I don't care for the smell in this one,' he continued, as he pulled open the door.
'And what smell is that?'
'Lawyer,' he said, and he disappeared along the corridor.
I sat alone until Kirkham Abbey came up - a good twenty minutes. Then I too stood up and walked along to the next compartment. From the corridor, I looked through the window at the Chief, who was sitting there with the gas lamps turned up full. He hardly ever read on a train, but would always sit under bright light. The lamp immediately above him illuminated his head in such a way that I could count the hairs. There were not more than a dozen. I shoved open the door, and entered the compartment. I sat down facing the Chief. He met my gaze while exhaling smoke, at which my gaze shifted somewhat to the left - to the 'No Smoking' sign pasted on the window.
'I'm not complaining on my own account,' I said. 'It's my job to go into dangerous places.'
'Congratulations,' said the Chief. 'It's only taken you ten fucking years to work that one out.'
'But you shouldn't have sent Tommy Nugent. Why did you send him?'
'He wanted to go,' said the Chief. 'He was bored. There's a lot of it about, you know. I'm bored listening to you.'
I watched the dark fields roll by the window. There was absolutely nothing at all between bloody Barton Hill and Strensall.
'Who was the man you were speaking to in the station when we came back from the Beeswing?' I said. 'It seems an age since, but it was only Friday. You weren't over-keen that I saw you.'
'None of your fucking business,' said the Chief, and just at that moment I knew.
'Do you want me to stay on the force?' I said.
'It's not obligatory,' replied the Chief, and now we were in his silence, and we remained in it all the way back to York.
On arrival at the station, I walked through the arch in the Bar Walls to Toft Green, where the Grapes public house was dwarfed by the new railway offices. It was a perfect little jewel box of a pub, with the name spelled out in the stained glass of the window. The name of the landlord - the new landlord - appeared over the door: John Mitchell, licensed to sell beers, wines and all the rest of it. He was holding a cheerful conversation at the bar, and I broke in on it directly by asking whether Chief Inspector Saul Weatherill of the railway police had wanted to hold a 'do' in the pub.
'Aye,' said Mitchell, a bit dazed.
'You spoke to him about it at the station on Friday, didn't you?'
Mitchell nodded.
'What was it in aid of?' I enquired.
'Leaving 'do' for a fellow call Stringer. Why?'
The Chief, then, had not bargained on me dying in Scarborough, and not only had he come to terms with my leaving the force, but he was willing to make a party of it. It was this that decided me.
'You may as well forget about it,' I said. 'I'm Stringer, and I en't leaving.'
Chapter Forty-Three
At King's Cross station, a succession of pointing-finger signs directed me to: 'King's Cross for St Pancras', which was the Underground station; the booking office of same, where I bought a penny ticket; and the southbound platform of the Hampstead Tube.
Charing Cross Underground station was being rebuilt, I discovered on arrival, but the pointing fingers were there as well, directing me past the men hammering, sawing, mixing cement - and onto the platforms of the District Railway, where I waited for a westbound train while figuring in my mind a particular bench in the Museum Gardens at York, the one set just before the ruins of St Mary's Abbey. It was there - on the day of my return from the London docks - that I had told the tale of Paradise to the wife, taking care to put a quantity of rouge and kohl onto Amanda Rickerby's face and a good ten years onto her age.
'She was a scarlet woman,' the wife had said, in an amused sort of voice, as though to save me the trouble of going to any further lengths.
Naturally, I also left out my own blushes and faltering speech, my own keenness to be in the company of the lady. But I did admit that she had taken my hand in the ship room on the second, fatal evening.
'And what did you do then?' the wife asked.
'Nothing,' I said, and the wife had kept silence.
'Don't you believe me?' I said.
'I know you did nothing, Jim,' she said, and it seemed to me that she sounded almost disappointed, as though I'd failed her own sex. She also sounded distracted, and it struck me that I ought to have predicted that she would be. Whenever you have some important matter to relate and you've taken a time working yourself up to doing it, you invariably find that the person you're telling it to is thinking of something else entirely - something much more important, or at least more closely touching upon their own lives, which comes to the same thing.
'Have you seen Robert Henderson lately?' I asked, when I'd come to the end of my tale.
'Yes,' she said, and in that moment everything hung in the balance. The white stones of the ruined abbey were no longer beautiful; instead they were just so many tombstones, a representation of death.
'He came over to see me y
esterday,' said Lydia.
'To do what?' I said, eyeing her.
'To make love to me.'
'Hold on a minute,' I said, turning to her on the bench.
'I told him to kindly leave the house immediately,' said the wife, and the abbey and the gardens, with the crocuses and daffodils and speckless blue sky were all beautiful again.
'But there was a difficulty, of course,' said the wife.
'I'll say there is,' I said. 'It's his bloody house.'
The wife nodded and stood up, startling the peacock that had wandered up to our bench.
'You've to come with me, Jim,' she said.
'Where are we off to?' I asked, as she set off at a lick.
'He told me', Lydia said, as we tore past the observatory, through the gates of the gardens and out into Museum Street where a trotting pony with trap behind nearly did for us both, 'that there would be a general rent increase across the estate, and that he would let me know about it shortly.'
'Christ,' I said, trotting myself to keep up with the wife as she turned a corner. 'That's going some. He's a bigger bastard than I thought.'
'Don't use that language, Jim,' said the wife, as we marched diagonally across St Helen's Square with very little regard for the folks in the way.
'I told him', the wife said, addressing me over her shoulder, 'that he had better let me buy this house immediately on the terms mentioned when we rented it.'
'And what were they?' I asked, shouting over the barrel organ played by the bloke who stood every day at the start of Davygate. (Wanting to limit my dealings with Henderson, I'd kept out of the detailed negotiations about the house.)
'He'd said we could have it for a hundred and fifty,' the wife called back.
The Last Train to Scarborough Page 24
