The Last Train to Scarborough

by Andrew Martin

  'Well,' I said, dodging one bicyclist and nearly running into another as a result, 'he'll just go back on that, won't he?'

  'Oh no,' said the wife, 'he agreed to it there and then. He was very shamefaced. I think he knew he'd done wrong.'

  'Well, he'll know for certain when I go round tomorrow and smash his face in,' I said.

  'You won't, Jim.'

  'I bloody will.'

  'You won't, Jim, because he's off to India. Sailing first thing in the morning - looking after his father's interests out there.'

  'It's about time he got a job,' I said. 'I suppose that's why he tried it on.' 'Very likely,' said the wife, and we were now outside the door of the Yorkshire Penny Bank on Feasgate. It was where the wife kept her inheritance from her mysterious, very Victorian father who'd died, extremely ancient, shortly after our marriage and who'd owned more than one London property.

  'You've not enough to buy the house,' I said.

  'Have you never heard of a mortgage, Jim?' said the wife, pushing open the door; and I saw that she'd brought all sorts of household papers in her basket.

  An hour later we were at our other favourite bench - in the little park next to the Minster. The wife had arranged the mortgage in record time but even so we'd missed the start of Evensong in the great cathedral, about which I was secretly quite pleased - and the wife hadn't minded too much. She was happier than I'd seen her in a good while.

  'What's the medieval word for what he was proposing, Jim?'

  'Same one as today,' I said. 'A fuck.'

  The wife frowned at me, for a pair of respectable ladies happened to be passing by our bench at just that point.

  'I don't think those blokes with the broad swords and the boiling oil were too particular about polite language,' I said.

  'Droit de seigneur;' said the wife, 'that's it,' and she shook her head.'... Incredible in this day and age.'

  'We might go in after the first reading, if you like,' I said, nodding towards the Minster.

  'All right, let's,' she said, and she took my hand.

  'By the way,' I said, rising from the bench, 'I'm not going into that solicitor's office.'

  I had been expecting an explosion; instead we kissed.

  'I'm so relieved, Jim,' she said. 'I could hardly bear to bring it up after all the work you've put in. But now that we've a mortgage to repay you've got to be earning, and the wages of an articled clerk just wouldn't have been enough.'

  We walked over to the east entrance of the Minster, and an usher in a red robe came up to us just inside the door, whispering, 'Are you for Evensong?'

  'I am,' said the wife. 'My husband's going to take a pint of beer and meet me afterwards.'

  I grinned at her, and we might have kissed again had it not been for that usher.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  I found 92 Victoria Street within ten minutes of quitting Victoria Station. One brass plaque by the door read 'William Watson, Tailor', another 'The Railway Club, est'd 1899'. The door was firmly locked, but then the talk would not begin for another six and a half hours, it being just then only one o'clock. I might return for it, but really I had only walked up to the door in order to establish the exact location - just in case any railway-minded person should ask me about it.

  I turned and retraced my steps, entering the station on the west side, under the awning belonging to the London, Brighton and South Coast end of the Victoria operation. The names of the principal destinations were painted on a long board mounted over the awning, and I read: 'Hastings, St Leonard's, Bexhill, Pevensey, Eastbourne ...'

  I bought my ticket, and found the train waiting on the platform with all doors invitingly open. As the guard began slamming them shut I was not so much reading as gazing down at my copy of the Yorkshire Evening Press. In Scarcroft Road a York councillor had made a miraculous escape from a burning house. I'd been reading the same words for five minutes, and it seemed impertinent for the paper to be telling me about York while I sat in one of the grandest stations in London, so I folded it up and put it aside. Shortly after, the train jolted into life and we were rolling out from under the glass canopy into a beautiful, sky-blue afternoon. We soon began to make good speed, and I wondered a little - but only a little - about the engine. I had not walked up for a look at it, just as I had not looked at the one that had carried me south from York, and I believe that I only really noticed one station on the way from Victoria: Lewes, where the gulls screamed over the goods yard even though we were still twenty miles from the sea.

  I continued in my distracted state as I walked south from Eastbourne station along Terminus Road. Why did I walk south? I had no firm idea, but that way led to the front, which was the main attraction of Eastbourne in sunny weather. After ten minutes' walking I came to the sea, and in my mind's eye the paper fan unfolded.

  The frontage was called the Grand Parade, and it was just that: motors, carriages, bath chairs and pedestrians - and every face turned towards the glittering waters of the English Channel. I joined the throng for a while, before descending towards the Prom where a narrower parade was going on for walkers and bath chair patients only. Out on the milky sea there was only one vessel to be seen - a sailing boat - and it brought to mind a sign posted in York station for the benefit of engine men: 'Make No Smoke', which made me think in turn of Captain Rickerby. Since his escape, it had come out that one of the constables meant to be guarding him and Klaason at Greenwich had been a seaman who'd sailed under Klaason in deep waters ten years since, and I'd thought it very big of the Port of London Authority police to admit as much.

  I came to a bandstand that projected out from the Prom and hung over the beach. The crowds were particularly dense here even though a dozen notices, fixed all around the bandstand, said that the concerts would not begin until the Saturday. The seaward edge of the beach (which was pebbly, as Howard Fielding had said) was crowded with bathing machines and, as I looked on, one of them rolled forwards, which set the people standing about applauding. A little while after, two men emerged from it, waded a little way out, and began to swim. Some of the crowd clapped again, some cheered, and some laughed in derision for the water must still be freezing.

  Won't be for long though, I thought: the day was beautiful, and all the predictions were for a fine summer.

  I continued my walk, looking for a lavender coat and a mass of curls under a feathered hat, but most of the ladies wore white that day, and perhaps she did too. Or perhaps she was nowhere near Eastbourne.

  I walked easterly until I came to a round fortification sitting on a hummock of grass. It had been built to keep Napoleon off but was now part of a pleasure ground. I bought an ice cream from an Italian with a barrow, and turned around and walked back towards the pier. That seemed promising, being so packed, and as I approached I studied the men and women walking up and down, and the thing in general. The highest of the white wooden buildings on it was crowned with a kind of white, round summer house, and this - as I realised when I approached the pier turnstiles and all the signs announcing the attractions available for my penny - was the famous camera obscura of Eastbourne, being some species of magic lantern that captured scenes from all along the front. I might see her inside there, projected two inches high and flickering in whatever the camera obscura made of the glorious sunlight. But the queues leading up to it were too long.

  I walked to the end of the pier and back with no luck.

  ... Or was it just as well?

  On the Grand Parade once again, I was practically trampled to the ground as I took out my pocket book where I'd noted the times of the return trains. It was now nearly four o'clock, and there was one at a quarter after: an express too. I would be in plenty of time for A. K. Chambers and his thoughts on the New Atlantics. But I decided to wander inland a bit, and so, with my suit-coat over my shoulder, I walked for nearly an hour amid the comfortable villas, which all had names: The Chase, The Sycamores, The Grove, The Haven. I had half an eye out for a house called Paradise,
but the names in Eastbourne were a cut above that.

  I returned to the front thoroughly over-heated, although the sun was now going down and making a golden road running out to sea. I was a good way further east than I had been before, towards Beachy Head and the cliffs, where Eastbourne becomes country. The sounds of the Grand Parade came to me faintly, and I saw that the Promenade here was ail-but deserted. A zig-zag path winding through ornamental gardens brought me down onto it, and looking right I saw her. She was gazing out to sea in a blue dress, a straw boater in her left hand. Well, it would never have fitted on top of her curls, and I believed that she only carried it for form's sake. Something told me she was about to look my way, so I darted towards a laurel bush that stood between us, and when I stepped out again she'd gone; and I found that I could hardly catch my breath because she was alive and looking just as before; because I had seen her; and because I now could not.

  I then noticed the shelter on the Prom, made to look old and quaint with white plaster, black beams and a thatched roof. She must be in there. The thing was open at the front and I knew that, short of walking directly up to it, the best way of getting a look inside would be to drop down from the Prom to the beach, and walk a little way towards the sea.

  This I did. In fact, I walked right to the water's edge, where two lads stood throwing stones at some rocks a little way out. I faced out to sea with the shelter now behind me, not quite directly and at a distance of, say, forty yards. I half turned and saw her on the bench inside it with legs crossed, kicking her top-most boot. She might be sheltering from the continuing sun, or from the slight breeze that was picking up, or just lazing after a long day of doing not much. I decided that she was most likely not working. She was supposed to be lying low after all, and I knew she was in funds. On my visit with the Chief to Paradise I'd inspected the vanity case and all the other boxes in Fielding's tall chest of drawers, and the forty pounds was nowhere to be seen.

  I looked again towards the Prom, but this time the other way, for I had to ration my glances at the shelter ... and there was Adam Rickerby, walking .slowly. He looked thinner, though still not right, and he seemed to list as he walked. What was wrong with his face? Was his hat on backwards? That was the effect somehow; there also seemed less of his curls under it, and I knew from the way his sister rose to greet him in the shelter that he was poorly. I wondered whether the bullet was still in him; I hoped not, for where would he find a doctor to take it out? I looked forward again, watching the stones thrown by the two lads into the little waves.

  What had I done wrong in the Paradise guest house? As far as everybody else was concerned, it seemed very little. But then I was the only one who knew that I'd fallen for Amanda Rickerby.

  What had been the result of my doing so as far as the investigation was concerned? One consequence was that I'd given too little time and thought to Tommy Nugent. I ought to have taken him in hand on the Monday: packed him off home - flatly insisted that he leave Scarborough. But I'd been too keen to get back to Miss Rickerby.

  Would I have stopped in the house for that second night had it not been for my feelings towards her? And the thought that something might happen between us? I believed I would have done ... Then again, it was my feeling towards her that had finally made me lock the door against her.

  Why had she told me to lock the door? I wanted to ask her that, at least. Had she really known of the danger presented by Fielding? In which case, why had she not done more to protect us all? I believed she had been on the point of telling me to lock my door on the first night. She had begun to say it, late on in the kitchen, but she had pulled up. She wanted to make sure of her suspicions, and by flirting with me she was able to approach certainty.

  And then again - the question of questions - why had she held my hand in the ship room, having used me for her own purposes for the entire ... What had it been? Only an evening and a day; and I'd only been in her presence a fraction of that time. Had she taken my hand to apologise for what had happened, or for what was to come? Or had there been some other reason for it?

  'Mister,' one of the lads was saying (and he'd probably been saying it for a while), 'we're aiming for that rock.'

  He pointed out to sea.

  'Want to try?' he said, and he walked up with a handful of stones.

  'I'll only need one,' I said, taking the biggest. I shied it and scored a direct hit, no doubt because of not trying at all.

  I turned about and saw Amanda and Adam Rickerby in the shelter, both looking forwards. She, I believed, was smiling.

  The first boy was eyeing me in amazement, but the second was a bit of a harder nut: 'Bet you can't do it again,' he said, but I knew from his face that I could rest on my laurels, that no second throw was required. I glanced down at my watch.

  'Where are you off to now?' enquired the first lad, doubtless wanting to know what amazing feat the hero of the hour might perform next.

  'I'm off to catch a train,' I said.

  He nodded, and it evidently seemed the right course of action to him, as it did to me for a dozen different reasons.

  Table of Contents

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  PART TWO

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  PART THREE

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  PART FOUR

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  PART FIVE

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four