by Nancy Carson
Chapter 9
Dickie Dempster’s eyes lingered on Lucy Piddock as she and Miriam Watson walked up the ramp from Netherton station at Blowers Green, which led to the road and thence to Dudley’s shops. From his guards’ van he had a good view of her. There was something about her reserved nature that appealed, that complemented her elegance. She was tallish with a straight back, and the outward demeanour of a young woman of quality. At least, she was the closest thing to a lady he was likely to encounter again. Her waist was small and he fancied holding her in his arms and feeling her warm slenderness pressed against him.
Still watching, he turned the wheel that let off the brake as the train headed towards the tunnel. By the time his van was disappearing into it, veiled in swirling smoke and steam, she was crossing the bridge over the railway and she waved. Of course, he returned the gesture, a broad grin fixed to his handsome face. Pity he would not be on the return run. It might just coincide with hers.
All the way to Wolverhampton Low Level Station he pondered this Lucy Piddock. There was an innocence, a naivety about her that he itched to exploit. He had no doubt that if ever he could entice her between the sheets, it would be her first time. And he could teach her so much, mould her into what he wanted her to be, a sensuous, willing lover.
At the terminus, the train ground to a halt and those passengers who had remained on it disembarked. He watched them head for the exit in a human swarm, some hurrying, some strolling. The summer air was shrill with the sibilant noise of steam escaping under pressure, and voices hailing each other over the top of it. When Dickie was sure the train had emptied he called a porter to off-load the parcels and freight they were carrying and then made his way, his snap bag over his shoulder, to the stationmaster’s office to sign off.
‘Fancy an hour’s overtime, Dempster?’ William Humphries the stationmaster asked from behind his desk.
‘Doing what, sir?’
‘Cording hasn’t turned in, and the coaches you just brought in are due to be oiled and greased and the wheels checked. They’ll have to be shunted into the far siding. I’d like you to supervise it ready for the wheelwrights, and then check all the shackles and coupling chains.’
Ironic, he thought. It was just as well that Lucy Piddock had not agreed to go with him when he’d finished work; she’d have a long wait. ‘That’s all right by me, sir,’ he replied. ‘Do you want me to do it straight away?’
‘Yes, get the train away from the platform,’ said Humphries. ‘Just tell Baxter the engine driver what’s going on.’
Dickie nodded. ‘I will, Mr Humphries.’
He went out into the sunshine and headed for the engine. Standing beside the two massive driving wheels which were as tall as he was, he yelled to the engineer over the engine’s noise. The driver turned and cupped his hand to his ear.
‘We gotta shunt the train into the far siding,’ he shouted, gesturing with his hands to make himself understood.
The driver nodded and Dickie stepped up onto the footplate with his snap bag. He watched as the driver opened a valve and, with a series of ear-splitting huffs, the powerful locomotive began slowly, smoothly moving backwards. Buffers clanked resonantly as the string of coaches nudged each other in turn at the gentle shove, followed by the squeal and creak of chains and shackles as the couplings took the strain while they drew to a halt again. Dickie gestured to the signalman in the box to change the points, and the train inched slowly forward, coming to rest on the far sidings, as requested by the stationmaster.
‘Had anything to eat or drink lately?’ Dickie enquired.
‘Nothing since we left for Worcester,’ the boilerman answered.
‘Nor me, and I’m half starved. I’m going to eat me snap afore I do anything else. What about you pair?’
‘We’ve finished for the day,’ Baxter said, shutting the engine down. ‘I’ll have my snap at home.’
‘It’s all right for some,’ Dickie jibed good-humouredly. ‘Are you working tomorrow?’
‘Day off tomorrow. I’ll be shepherding the kids to chapel and then Sunday school, I daresay.’
‘Chapel, eh? I didn’t realise you was such a regular Christian, Georgie.’
‘Wesleyan, me, Dickie. Through and through. You ought to try it sometime.’
‘No, chapel ain’t for me, mate. I’d rather be in the alehouse.’
The three men stepped down from the footplate one after the other, the driver last so that he could check that his steam pressure was decreasing. Georgie Baxter and Trudle the fireman made their way across the railway track while Dickie sat beside it sunning himself. He took out his dinner and his bottle of tea from his snap bag and ate, thinking again about Lucy Piddock, while the engine’s hissing gradually diminished. He hoped he would not be called upon to do overtime next Saturday when he was due to see her.
He finished his snap and stuffed the wrappings inside his bag and laid it back on the footplate. He would pick it up when he had finished checking the couplings in the absence of Cording. He’d have a word with Cording, make sure he rolled up for work next Saturday. No doubt the bone-idle bastard had drunk too much beer last night and had woken with a thick head. He tended to be a bit unreliable, did Cording.
Dickie began working backwards from the engine’s tender, checking the centre couplings and the side chains, ensuring none were broken and that they were all securely fastened. He looked at the flanged wheels cursorily, solid and unbreakable, and marvelled at this age of the railway in which he was privileged to live, with all its brilliant feats of British engineering that led the rest of the world. All seemed fine and it took him about half an hour to properly check all the couplings down the whole length of the carriages. Done, he turned around, ready to collect his snap bag from the footplate.
As he walked along the side of the train he thought he saw a man sitting in one of the third class compartments and stopped to investigate. Dickie peered through the window of the compartment. The man was quite still, unmoving, not even breathing as far as he could make out, and deathly white. Possibly dead. Dickie’s heart suddenly started beating fast at the discovery. Just what had he stumbled across? What if there had been a murder on the train when he was in charge of it? He tapped the window hard to try and wake him up, just in case it was somebody who had fallen asleep and gone past his station. But the body did not stir. The face had the sickly pale hue of a corpse. Whoever he was, he must be dead, poor sod.
Ignoring his snap bag, Dickie raced across the tracks towards the company’s office and rapped urgently on the stationmasters door.
‘Come in!’
‘There’s a body in one of the third class compartments,’ Dempster uttered breathlessly. ‘In the train we shunted over to the far sidings.’
‘A body?’ William Humphries stood up at once, alarmed at hearing such news. ‘You’re sure it’s a body and not somebody sleeping, Dempster?’
‘I tried to wake it by hammering on the windows, Mr Humphries, but to no avail.’
‘Is it male or female, this body?’
‘Male, sir.’
‘I’d better take a look. Come with me, Dempster. Show me where it is. I don’t like the sound of this.’
So Dickie Dempster ran back across the tracks to the sidings, William Humphries following hard by, puffing and panting from the heat and his excess weight. They stopped at the carriage that held the body, and Dickie pointed it out.
‘Jesus Christ!’ Humphries exclaimed under his breath. ‘The last thing we want on the Oxford Worcester and Wolverhampton Railway is for somebody to have been found dead in one of our coaches. Especially at our station, Dempster. It won’t look very good in the news sheets.’
‘Maybe he’s been murdered, sir.’
‘Jesus Christ! Murdered?’
‘It’s a possibility, sir. He looks very pale, as if he’s been suffocated or strangled.’
‘Well, I can’t see any blood …’
‘Shall I go inside the compartment and f
eel if he’s still warm, sir?’
‘Better not, Dempster,’ Humphries exclaimed decisively. ‘We’d better call in the police. Let them deal with it. If it’s a murder it’s outside our jurisdiction. We must be sure. Until we are, we must not touch the body, nor go anywhere near it. What if the poor soul has died from some contagious disease? We’d have to fumigate everywhere.’ He put a handkerchief over his mouth and nose for protection, alarmed at his own frightening suggestion. ‘Come on, Dempster. Somebody will have to go and fetch a couple of bobbies.’
‘I’ll go, sir.’
‘Good man.’ They leapt down from the carriage and shut the door. ‘Meanwhile, Dempster, I’ll have the train cordoned off. In fact, I’d better get the whole station cordoned off. Nobody must come near until the police have investigated thoroughly.’
‘I’ll be as quick as I can, Mr Humphries.’
So Dickie ran to the police station and Humphries organised some of the station workers and engineers to cordon off the train. While they waited for the police to arrive the men speculated wildly on the unfortunate victim inside, and invented fabulous notions of how the poor devil might have met his fate.
‘Just imagine,’ somebody said, ‘the murderer stepping calmly down from that compartment and then calmly walking out of a station along the line as if nothing had happened.’
‘He might have left the train at our station,’ another conjectured. ‘We might have a murderer in our midst in Wolverhampton.’
‘I bet he owed money,’ yet another theorised. ‘Murders am generally over somebody owing money.’
‘Or over women,’ the first suggested.
‘Aye, or over women.’
And so it went on until Dempster got back twenty minutes later with two bobbies in tow.
‘He’s still dead, I take it?’ Dickie asked inanely.
‘Once you’m dead you’m dead, mate,’ one of the policemen, a sergeant, stated with all the wisdom of authority. ‘We’d better go in and have a look at him, and see if there’s any evidence of foul play.’
Dickie Dempster opened the door to the compartment and followed the two policemen in. They peered at the body and one of them gently prodded it with his forefinger, then gently placed the backs of his fingers against its brow to assess its temperature.
‘He ain’t been dead long,’ the sergeant – who was full of authoritative wisdom – declared, bending down to inspect the body more closely. ‘Rigor mortis ain’t set in yet.’ He raised the arm of the corpse and let it drop. ‘He’s cold, poor bugger, but he ain’t as cold as he would have been if he’d been dead a couple of hours.’
Humphries the stationmaster joined them. ‘Do you suspect foul play, sergeant?’
‘Hard to say, but we can’t rule it out. There’s no injuries as I can see, no marks on his neck where he might have been strangulated … He could have been suffocated though.’
‘That’s what I said,’ remarked Dickie. ‘He might have been suffocated.’
‘I wonder if he’s got a ticket?’ Humphries said. ‘Can one of you policemen feel in his pockets. It’ll tell where he boarded the train.’
The younger officer withdrew a ticket from the fob pocket of the corpse’s waistcoat and handed it over. He handed it to Humphries who scrutinised it.
‘Kidderminster.’
‘Well, there’s nothing for it but to send for the coroner,’ the sergeant pronounced. ‘It’ll be up to the coroner to ascertain the cause of death. I wonder who the poor bugger is … We’d better check his pockets …’
Just then, the other policeman, a younger man, happened to glance up and spotted a tool bag in the luggage rack above. ‘Aye up!’ he ejaculated. ‘He’s got a bag o’ tricks up yonder, look …’ He reached up, retrieved it and opened it up.
‘Chisels … A mallet …’ the sergeant said, rummaging. ‘And what’s all them sheets o’ gold? Think that’s what it’s over … gold?’
‘With all them chisels and that mallet, I reckon he’d been up to no good anyroad,’ the younger officer said. ‘A thief or burglar, I wouldn’t be surprised, with all them tools. They use ’em for picking and breaking locks and padlocks, you know. Vile people.’
‘Hmm …’ The sergeant turned pensively to Mr Humphries. ‘Let’s get the coroner, Mr Humphries. Can you arrange for a couple o’ porters to carry the body to your office on a shutter or something?’
‘Yes, I’ll organise it straight away, sergeant.’
‘If you could keep it there till the coroner arrives.’
‘It won’t start to smell or anything, will it?’ Humphries queried, his face an icon of aversion.
‘The coroner shouldn’t be that long, Mr Humphries,’ the sergeant replied reassuringly.
The police sergeant departed and more railway workers left their posts, accompanying the porters who were carrying a shutter, to hurry over the railway tracks so they could get a peek at the corpse of the vile young burglar who had come to a sticky end on one of their trains. Then when they had loaded the body onto the shutter they trooped in slow procession, bearing it with all the solemnity of a state funeral, and deposited it with the silent reverence accorded the dead, across the desk of Mr Humphries.
‘I can’t say as I like having a dead person on my desk,’ Humphries said with distaste.
‘Upsets you, does it, sir?’ Dempster said.
‘Makes me feel creepy. I’m a bit tickle-stomached about death.’
‘It don’t bother me, Mr Humphries. Would you like me to stay here with you till the coroner comes?’
‘That’s decent of you, Dempster. Thank you. If you’re sure you don’t mind.’
‘I’m in no rush, Mr Humphries. Glad to help out.’
The coroner, a weedy little man, eventually arrived with another policeman. He doffed his tall hat and introduced himself as Mr Eccles. His beard and moustaches made up for hair he lacked on top of his head. ‘I trust this is the body?’ he said with professional gloom.
‘Yes, this is it, Mr Eccles,’ Humphries replied. ‘The police seem to think he’s been suffocated. Mixed up in some criminal goings on, they suspect. Everything points to him being a professional burglar. But I wonder if he died of some contagion.’
‘Any identification?’
‘Not as yet.’
‘Did they look for any in his pockets?’
‘Not fully, but we found his rail ticket.’
‘We must identify him before any inquest.’ Eccles said impatiently and rooted clumsily through the pockets of the deceased man. He withdrew a small green bottle and held it up suspiciously. ‘Hmm … Poison, I’ll wager. Looks to me as though the silly fool might have poisoned himself. Suicide looks a distinct possibility. Pity the police didn’t find this.’
While everybody was looking at the small green bottle, they heard a strange blowing of lips, not unlike the sound a horse makes. All eyes were suddenly upon the corpse as it opened its eyes and looked about itself with a dazed, puzzled look.
‘Lord! Where am I?’ it said.
The coroner detached his eyes from the remaining policeman to look at Humphries, then at Dempster and then at the animated corpse, with a look of both disbelief and frustration to add to his natural cheerless disposition. ‘Pardon me, but you are supposed to be a dead person, sir, whom we are trying to identify.’
‘Identify? Well, there’s no mystery about me. My name’s Arthur Goodrich.’ Arthur propped himself up on his elbows and looked about him, confused. ‘I can’t believe I’m dead neither. Where am I?’
‘In the stationmaster’s office at Wolverhampton Low Level station,’ Humphries replied, the expression on his face depicting shock and relief simultaneously. ‘We were of the opinion you were dead, Mr Goodrich. We had shunted our train into sidings to be serviced and checked, when Mr Dempster here noticed you in a carriage. We could not rouse you and presumed therefore that you were dead. We found this bottle of poison on your person.’
‘Poison? What poison? That ain’t p
oison, it’s laudanum. I took some when I got on the train at Kidderminster. It must have knocked me out. What time is it?’
Dempster looked at his watch. ‘It’s twenty to four.’
‘Twenty to four? Oh, no, I’ve missed me cricket match.’
The coroner shifted his weight from one foot to another in agitation. ‘Is that all you can say for yourself after all the trouble you’ve caused us, Mr Goodrich?’ he said bleakly. ‘I have been fetched from my home just to attend to you, a live person who foolishly knocked himself out with an excess of laudanum. The police have been unnecessarily interrupted from their important work keeping the peace in the town, the station has been shut for fear of an outbreak of some infectious disease, the stationmaster has been detained here unnecessarily, as has this other gentleman from the railway, and all you can say is a trifling “Oh no, I’ve missed my cricket match”. Do you realise the trouble you have caused, Mr Goodrich?’
‘How could I know?’ Arthur answered defensively. ‘I was asleep.’
‘Well, now that you have woken up, might I suggest that you find your way home.’ The coroner picked up his bag and put his hat back on his bald head. ‘I’ll bid you good day, gentlemen.’
‘He’s a bit prickly,’ Arthur said resentfully, ‘him with the upside-down head.’
‘Hardly surprising,’ the stationmaster replied, ‘the trouble you’ve caused. Where are you from, Mr Goodrich? We know you travelled from Kidderminster.’
‘I live in Brierley Hill.’
‘There’ll be a train calling at Round Oak and Brettell Lane in half an hour, Mr Goodrich. Perhaps you would be good enough to be on it.’ He turned to the guard. ‘Dempster, would you take Mr Goodrich for a cup of tea or something and make sure he’s quite fit to travel before he embarks on another of our trains?’
‘I will, sir.’
‘Thank you.’ William Humphries sat down in his chair, sighed profoundly, and buried his face in his hands as Dickie Dempster led Arthur Goodrich out of his office.
‘This way, Mr Goodrich,’ Dickie said sympathetically. ‘I imagine it must be a bit of a shock waking up like you did and finding yourself in a strange place, surrounded by strange folk, all prodding you about.’
