The Man Who Played Trains: The gripping new thriller from the author of Playpits Park

by Richard Whittle

  ‘My condolences, Mr Spargo. I am sure we can reschedule your visit. Please telephone me at a time more convenient to yourself.’

  ‘I met him at the mining show,’ Spargo explained to Jez over dinner. ‘He says he represents a man who could use my services. I was supposed to fly to Madrid today.’

  He took out his wallet, selected a business card and passed it to Jez.

  ‘BarConSA,’ she said, studying it. ‘Odd name.’

  ‘It’s probably Bar Consulting SA. Or Bar Contracting.’

  ‘There’s no address.’

  ‘There’s a Telex number.’

  ‘Who the hell uses Telex these days?’ she mumbled as she turned the card over. ‘There’s nothing. No phone number.’

  ‘He said BarConSa will pay all expenses for my visit, plus two days of my time at top rate. I have nothing to lose. When I made the arrangements my diary was free. I thought the funeral would be weeks away.’

  ‘So your Mr Benares isn’t a happy bunny.’

  ‘He was okay about it. He wants to reschedule.’

  She grunted. ‘You should go. It’ll help take your mind off things.’

  ‘I can’t, can I? There’s the house to clear. There’s all the legal stuff.’

  ‘There’s no rush. The cottage isn’t going anywhere. If you want help then I can stay for a day or two. Or I can ask Joby.’

  ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I can handle it. I’ll stay up here a couple of days to get things rolling.’ It was one of those things. However much he tried, he just couldn’t ask favours of someone called Joby who, he assumed, occasionally slept with his daughter. He knew he was being unreasonable but he just couldn’t help it. ‘I don’t want him here,’ he added, regretting the words as he said them. ‘There’s no need, I mean. As you said, there’s no hurry.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’ve got against him. Don’t tell me in a few weeks that I didn’t offer to help.’

  Spargo had ordered seafood. When it came he picked at it with his fork. Stabbed at the cod and prawn pieces. He had ordered Chablis, a Premier Cru, pushing the boat out in memory of his mother. He wanted to make it a celebration of her life… or something. The waitress had filled his glass. So far it remained untouched.

  ‘Here’s to Gran,’ he said, smiling at Jez and raising his glass. As it touched his lips he felt tears come and he left the room quickly, out through reception and into the cold, not stopping until he reached the seclusion of the firs beyond the bright lights of the car park. There he doubled up, and wept.

  Next morning he checked out and drove Jez to the station. The sky was cloudless and the late autumn sun lit her hair from behind, filtering through it and tinting it amber. It looked so like her mother’s. It reminded Spargo of bright days, never dark ones. He waited until the train pulled out. Waved as it snaked away.

  To help clear his mother’s house Spargo hired a man with a van. When he arrived at Kilcreg the van was already there, parked in his mother’s short drive, backed up near the front door.

  During the day the driver, Stuart Main, amazed Spargo by performing Godzilla-like feats such as lifting the fridge into his van single-handed. Though Spargo did his best to do his share of the work it wasn’t long before he realised he was hindering rather than helping, so instead of doing the big stuff he carried small items to the van, made tea, and wished he’d had the presence of mind to bring a packed lunch like Stuart Main had done.

  By mid-afternoon everything, with the exception of several items of furniture to be collected later by auctioneer’s men, was stowed securely in the back of Main’s van.

  Both men stood at the garden gate, no longer strangers.

  ‘I heard you lived here once,’ Main said. ‘Heard you’re the son of the manager of the old mine. You’re a mining engineer yourself, I’m told.’

  ‘Who said?’

  ‘Word gets around. You know what it’s like, Mr Spargo, everyone into everyone else’s business. So where was the mine?’

  Spargo didn’t want questions. He had done in one day what he thought would take two. Now he wanted to get away.

  ‘I never lived in this house,’ he said. ‘I lived there.’ He pointed up the road to the mine house, swinging his arm in a sweeping gesture to encompass the whole hillside behind it. ‘The mine was up on the moor.’

  Main stayed looking at the mine house. ‘I’ve been here before,’ he said. ‘Came when I was a boy. I thought the mine was in the valley. I remember a compound full of rusty junk.’

  ‘That was the plant yard. They stored the heavy stuff there, broken underground locomotives, spare rail and old pumps. The mine was reached up a track.’ Spargo stretched out an arm, pointing beyond the old yard. ‘There, the gash in the hillside, overgrown now. It’s fifteen years at least since I went up there. There’s nothing up on the moor now, just a building or two. They dismantled everything and filled in the shaft.’

  ‘Didn’t realise there was a shaft.’

  ‘It was sunk in the late nineteen-thirties. Before that, the main entrance to the mine was in the sea cliffs. My father said they collapsed into the bay… the cliffs, I mean. There are boulders there the size of buses.’ He swivelled on his heel, looked down the street towards the sea and did the pointing thing. Main looked. From where they stood they could see only houses.

  ‘Time I was leaving, Mr Spargo.’

  Spargo dipped a hand into his back pocket, took out a mix of banknotes and counted them out. He added a few more to the price they’d agreed.

  ‘Generous of you. Very generous…’

  Main’s van pulled away in a haze of blue smoke. Spargo watched it pass by the long wall of the old plant yard and commence its climb up the hill. Heard gears change as the hill steepened. At very top of the hill its brake lights flashed as it took the sharp bend.

  Spargo blinked. He was tired, though thanks to Main’s efforts, nowhere near as tired has he might have been. Twice during the day the man had commented that he had cleared many houses belong to elderly people and this was one of the easiest – nothing in the garage except a few gardening tools and nothing at all in the attic. Spargo told Main what he’d told Mitchell – that his mother, like his father, didn’t keep what she didn’t need. It was a fine dictum. One he should apply to himself.

  He turned and looked back at the cottage. Its now curtain-less windows looked back at him, hollow and ghostly. With luck the place wouldn’t be on the market for long before somebody bought it. He would rather give the place away than have it crumble away like the school.

  Everything his mother had owned was now crossing the high moor on a single lane road, her books and her bedding, curtains and cutlery, pot-plants and pictures. It would be sold and the proceeds given to charity. The few things that had been dear to Spargo long ago were safe in the boot of his car.

  Sea mist drifted in, as did fine drizzle. Spargo flexed his arms in mock-exercise as if fooling himself he was fit. Earlier he had watched fifty-something Main heave a garden roller up a ramp and into his van using his Sumo-wrestler’s build to propel the thing upwards. The roller had belonged to Spargo’s father and was so difficult to push that Spargo had never used it. Who uses garden rollers these days, anyway?

  Gravel crunched beneath his feet as he walked to the side door. In the kitchen again he reached up, flipped a switch in the box above the door and checked the electricity was really off by trying a light switch. It was part of a ritual, one his father had performed in the mine house on the few occasions they all went on holiday. Water off, electricity off, windows secure and doors locked. Once done, Spargo stepped outside, turned the key in the lock and then stood for a while, ticking things off his mental list. He had finished. There was nothing more to do.

  What seemed so wrong to Spargo was to leave Kilcreg without speaking to Rosie. She still hadn’t returned. He could come back to see her, he supposed, but in his heart he knew it wouldn’t happen. The gate to the drive, always open, now thudded closed on a part of his life.
Not on a part of his childhood – that had happened years ago when he left home – but on something more recent, more evil.

  At the top of the hill he pulled into a passing bay, got out and looked down the valley, first at the cottage and then at mine house. Had the weather been better he might have walked back down the hill to the plant yard, perhaps even attempted to walk up the miners’ track to the mine. Or perhaps not.

  Midge Rollo slid into the driving seat of his small black Fiat and pulled away from the pumps. The belated payment for services – services so far only partly rendered – had arrived in the post, a padded envelope containing used banknotes. With cash in his pocket he had taxed his car and filled up its tank. The Fiat was well known to the police, who for reasons best known to themselves pulled him over fairly regularly. Tax and insurance wouldn’t stop it happening. But why give them the satisfaction of finding something wrong?

  Mr Luis had left Edinburgh the same day he’d arrived. Refusing Midge’s offer of a bus ride to the airport he had taken a taxi. He had also refused the pistol, with a curt comment that he had not asked for it and didn’t want it. Last night, in his Gran’s kitchen, Midge had stripped the gun down, cleaned the parts and reassembled them. Dead-easy. He’d been doing it with replicas for years.

  Mr Luis’s departure meant Midge had changed from minder to watcher. His new task, Mr Luis told him, was to familiarise himself with the Spargo woman’s movements, with her work, and with her friends.

  For a couple of days he’d hung around in the road outside her house but had felt too conspicuous – what with the kiddie’s playground so close and the young mothers and grannies who eyed him suspiciously. He now knew the times Jessica Spargo left for work – on a motorbike she kept in a shed – but because he’d no vehicle he didn’t know where she went. She came home at odd hours. Sometimes she was picked up in a grey Volvo driven by a man old enough to be her father. At the end of each day, as instructed by Mr Luis, Midge wrote out neatly the things he had learned and then sent them, in an envelope, to a London address.

  Having the Fiat back on the road didn’t make things much easier. He had pictured himself parking up the road from the flat with the car heater on and a tape playing, but residents’ parking zones conspired against him. He ended up parking two streets away and walking, as before.

  Today, like every other day, he found a space and parked neatly. He stepped out of the car and inspected his parking, checking his wheels were tucked close to the kerb. Always conscious of what had happened to Robbie he found the nearest ticket machine and fed it with coins. Back at his car he stuck the ticket in his windscreen. Unstuck it again and adjusted it. Got it square.

  As Midge was walking across the entrance to the lane behind the houses, a motorbike came out fast and missed him by inches. The bike wobbled, the engine stalled. The rider lifted the helmet visor, looked at Midge, and mumbled apologies. Midge stared at her. Went on staring while Jessica Spargo restarted her bike and continued out onto the road.

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  THE TICKET INSPECTOR who snatched Theo’s papers says nothing. She glances over Theo’s shoulder and gives an almost imperceptible nod to someone behind him, someone in the queue. Theo turns. The stranger from the train is there, he flashes Theo a smile.

  ‘Kapitänleutnant,’ he says. ‘Take your papers and walk on. I wish to speak with you.’ The ticket inspector is holding Theo’s papers high, keeping them from him. At a nod from the stranger she hands them back. Theo takes a few steps past the checkpoint and stops. The stranger speaks again. ‘Forgive my inquisitiveness. Do you know Berlin?’

  ‘I do not.’

  ‘And you are hoping to continue your journey beyond the city?’

  ‘I am. How do you know these things?’

  ‘Unless you are a fool you will not be travelling east, so I assume you hope to go south. That will not be easy for you.’

  ‘I have a permit to travel.’

  ‘Such a permit allows you to travel, it does not provide you with the means. Is that not so? Trains for passengers are rare, Kapitän.’

  ‘I understand that.’

  He takes care with his words. Even the most innocent responses hold dangers. All responses would beg the same question: So who told you that, Kapitänleutnant?

  ‘As you may have guessed, I know this railway station. Despite what I told your fellow passengers you will find no transport to take you further tonight.’

  ‘That does not trouble me.’

  ‘I am sure it does not. Please listen to what I have to say. I can help you – not to travel south, for that is your own concern – but tomorrow I shall travel to Berlin, I have transport. I have a place in Potsdam where I will stay tonight. I can find a bed for you.’

  ‘That is considerate of you. But I shall make my own arrangements.’

  ‘Kapitänleutnant, I must now telephone for a car. When I telephone I can also ask that you be given a meal and a bed for the night. It is up to you.’

  Passengers from the train, seeing there are no buses or taxis, mill around in the concourse. Experienced travellers, accepting that they are stranded, are taking over the waiting rooms and staking claims to sheltered alcoves. The stranger speaks again.

  ‘Tell me? First thing tomorrow I will leave for Berlin. You can accompany me there if you wish, or you can make your own way.’

  Theo looks the stranger in the eye and nods. There can be no harm in it. The sooner he gets to Berlin, the sooner he travels south to his son.

  The saloon that arrives for them is driven by a girl in Luftwaffe uniform who alights from the car and salutes stiffly, her arm held straight and high, a salute accompanied by an inevitable and overly-enthusiastic Heil Hitler. The salute is for the stranger and not for him. Confirmation the man holds higher rank than he does.

  The girl attempts to take the stranger’s bag but he tugs it back. Surprised and embarrassed she apologises and turns her attention to Theo, seeking his consent with a quick, enquiring glance before taking his kitbag. The brief smile he gives her is not returned. By the time she is back from the car’s boot the stranger is already in the car. She holds the door open for Theo, and salutes him. Clicks her heels. So much wasted energy.

  Potsdam is dark and deserted. Their car creeps forwards, guided only by a pool of yellow light from its blackout-masked headlights. Other than that there are no lights at all, no streetlights, no lights in buildings and no other vehicles.

  Apart from the girl’s salutation no words have been spoken. It is a strange world in which people dare not talk freely. What talk there is speaks of war, of hollow victories, of food production figures and praise for the leadership. Theo, when on his boat, talks with trusted colleagues about failures, about those who call themselves leaders, about the paranoia of the Führer and the prancings of Göring. Even Dönitz, their Grand Admiral, seems to toe the party line. And what about last summer’s attempt on Hitler’s life? Surely that means his own generals doubt him? Rumours abound that Feldmarschall Rommel was involved in the plot and now he is dead, his car conveniently strafed by an enemy plane. Germany, Theo muses, remains a fantasy land, a Thousand Year Reich doomed to die.

  ‘We will arrive very soon, Herr Kapitän. I would not submit you to yet more long distance travel.’

  Theo’s smile is not seen. Long distance for him is the German Ocean, the Norwegian Sea and the Denmark Strait to the North Atlantic. His journeys take weeks, not days.

  Fat raindrops attack the car’s roof. Wipers come on and move lazily. Smear the screen. The driver changes gear and the car slows to walking pace. With such rain and poor lights it is a miracle she can see anything.

  Unexpectedly the car turns sharply and stops. Theo, whose view through the car’s windscreen resembles the slow-moving frames of a cinematograph film sees, ahead of him, a white barrier like those at the entrance to dockyards. From the darkness comes a running man holding an oil lamp. Car windows are lowered and papers presented, checked and hand
ed back; the barrier rises, hinged at one end. The car moves on.

  Dim headlights pick out concrete roads and cropped grass. On Theo’s left, looming from the darkness, is a many-windowed building. The stranger speaks, the driver nods. The car changes direction and drifts, silently but for the hiss of its tyres on wet concrete, towards the main doorway of the building. It stops, with just a touch on the brakes, at the foot of a flight of stone steps.

  Though the driver moves quickly she is beaten to the stranger’s door by a uniformed Luftwaffe officer who runs down the steps from the building’s main door. Out of compassion or pity Theo waits for the girl to open his door, and as he clambers out she salutes him, her arm held high. He returns a naval salute with his hand flat, his fingers to the peak of his cap. Refusing his help she struggles with his kitbag, heaving it from the car’s boot, on to her shoulder and up the stone steps.

  The stranger and the Luftwaffe officer have gone on ahead. They are already through the double doors of the building and standing just inside, talking loudly, laughing and joking.

  Theo shelters from the rain under the flat stone canopy of the entrance and watches the car turn. Sees twin pools of yellow light sweep across more neatly trimmed grass. A great lawn. Probably a sports field. He can smell it, sweet and newly mown, a smell he has not known for years.

  The double doors swing open. The stranger comes up behind him, places a hand on his shoulder and turns him.

  ‘Major Shomburg, this is Kapitänleutnant Theodor Volker. I have promised him a bed for the night, so please arrange it for me. Tomorrow morning he will accompany me to Berlin.’

  That Theo was introduced by name didn’t surprise him. He had presented his papers at the station and again at the checkpoint. Clearly, the man has keen eyes. Theo senses this is not the place for a naval salute, and for Shomburg he extends his arm smartly. Shomburg is not wearing a cap so the salute is not returned. Instead he nods and clicks heels.