Devil Take the Hindmost

by Martin Cathcart Froden

  ‘I don’t know anything about farming.’

  ‘You’ve got a bit of money. You’ve got common sense and you’re savvy, more so than anyone I’ve ever met. You’ll work it out. Hire people, ask people, get to know them. They’re a friendly bunch. They will be once they realise you’re there to stay. Once they realise you’re a friend of mine and not my father’s.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘You provided me with a roof over my head when I came to London.’

  ‘That was different.’

  ‘You trusted me, took a chance on me, a stranger.’

  ‘It wasn’t quite like that.’

  ‘Now I’m repaying the favour. Just you’re not a stranger, you’re a friend.’

  ‘About that time, the time at King’s Cross when I first met you, I need to tell you something.’

  ‘Whatever it is, it can wait. We have to go. Thanks for everything Silas. I’ll write. To the farm.’

  ‘You insolent pup,’ Silas says, ‘I wish you were wrong, but there’s some sense in what you’re saying. I can’t stay. I can’t go to any of my known haunts. Not till this has died down at least. If it ever will.’

  Paul runs back into the café and borrows a pen and some paper. He writes a quick note to his uncle. Not much more than his name and that he’s giving the farm to Mr Silas Halkias. He folds up the paper and writes his uncle’s address in terrible copperplate on the back, then rushes out and hands the paper to Silas. Presents his family farm to Silas.

  ‘Paul, Paul,’ Silas shakes his head, then takes Paul’s hand solemnly. The Greek’s eyes shining. Then Silas looks at Miriam who nods and then he says, ‘Fine. There’s nothing else for it. I need to disappear from the face of the earth and what better place than Lewistown?’

  ‘Lennoxtown.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Lennoxtown, that’s where I come from. That’s where you’re going. Well first to Edinburgh, to see my uncle.’

  ‘Wait here you two, I need to use the bathroom,’ Silas says. He motions for Paul to hand him the suitcases. Silas walks off back into the café and navigates past the counter and into the kitchen, suitcases held high. A minute later he comes back and hands Paul one of the suitcases. They are now equally heavy. Paul opens it an inch and peers inside, and Miriam who’s standing next to him sees the stacks of notes too, and gasps, putting a hand to her mouth.

  Silas says, ‘So what are you two waiting for? Scram.’

  ‘Scotland will do you good Silas,’ Paul says, holding the handle of the suitcase extra tight. ‘I know where you are. I know exactly where you are. Take care of the old house.’

  Silas stands on his tiptoes and kisses Paul on his stubbled cheek. ‘It’s been a pleasure Miriam,’ Silas says and kisses her on both cheeks. ‘I’ve always loved the way you smell of pine, lemon, geranium,’ he says. She smiles.

  ‘Come on Little Crow,’ Paul says to Miriam and Silas cries openly as the couple walk off. They are soon swallowed by a curtain of rain.

  Chapter 42

  Paul and Miriam get on the last train of the day to Southampton. No luggage apart from the suitcase and Miriam’s handbag. Paul is still in shorts and his racing top, a quilted jacket on top. Miriam is wearing a dress with tiny specks of Drago’s blood on it. She’s too breathless, too scared to talk. She imagines spies and grimy boys reporting back everywhere. Thanks to the drugs, Paul is much calmer. ‘We must have passed thousands of people giving us away on the way to the station, a whole army, a nation of snitches just waiting for their reward,’ she whispers to Paul.

  She pulls the curtain of the compartment they’re in and leans back in her seat peeking out through the inch-wide gap. Her chest is rising and falling quickly. Her cheeks flushed. Her eyes are big and her hair is dishevelled. She’s nothing like her usual self.

  Then they hear the first creak of the carriages. The whistle and the goodbyes shouted out through compartment windows. For the first time since getting on the train she looks over to Paul. He’s sleeping, childlike. An arm draped across his forehead. The blue panda marks on either side of his boxer’s nose now fainter.

  She keeps an eye on the door to their compartment and her hand on the ivory gun inside her bag. It’s not until they have been on their way for almost two hours that she relaxes.

  She prods Paul awake. Knows that he needs to drink and move for the drugs to leave his body. He doesn’t want to open his eyes, but she won’t let him sleep. She opens the windows, forces him to stand up, which he does with eyes closed. Forces him to move his limbs. Once he’s awake she tells him she’ll read for him. ‘For a change,’ she says.

  ‘That’s nice,’ he says and sits down again. Comes close to her.

  ‘I wrote this one in Coventry. When you were in the bath. Remember we had just had that fight,’ she says.

  ‘I do,’ Paul mumbles.

  ‘I was so afraid of losing you, but I didn’t know how to tell you.’ Miriam now puts her handbag on the floor, covers her gun with a scarf. ‘I did some thinking in that hotel room, and I decided I don’t want to be like my mother. She had a terrible life, but she let her circumstances shape her. I won’t let that happen to me. This is her one.’

  Paul closes his eyes.

  No. 50

  I watched her become more thorn than rose

  Cut off from all that blossoms and grows

  I saw how her scars made her wither and die

  Unable to love, unable to fly

  The greatest promise I can make

  Is this, I won’t make the same mistake

  ‘She had a man for a few years, Frank. He was nice to her. Nice to me and my brother, but she didn’t treat him right. Not because she didn’t want to, but because she couldn’t do it. She wasn’t very good with people after everything that happened to her.’

  Paul opens his eyes.

  ‘I’m not leaving you Paul. I’m not like the people who came before me.’

  He sits up straight and kisses her. She cries a little. Then he sits back and says, ‘It’s so nice to hear you read. It’s a shame we’ve not done it before.’

  ‘There’ll be plenty of time on the boat.’

  ‘The boat,’ Paul says. ‘America.’ Then he tells her about the time she brought him up on the roof of the Baths. Makes sure she remembers the towel she dropped and the dogs that ripped it apart. She laughs. He can tell she also remembers what happened once they went downstairs.

  He brings out the box he meant to give her then. He has kept it behind a loose brick at Copenhagen Street and only remembered to pick it up before his last supper with Silas. The pendant, shaped like an eight, made from a link of bicycle chain, hangs beautifully around her neck.

  As the train picks up speed thousands and thousands of chimneys, millions of lives, billions of coincidences pass by outside their carriage window.

  Chapter 43

  It’s easy to stand here and philosophize about how great things are, seeing the rear lights of their train recede into the tunnel to what I sincerely hope is the safety of the sea and the anonymity of a new continent. It’s easy to forget about my own peril, but when it comes back to me it lands on me like an anvil dropped from the fourth floor. The relative relief of seeing the two of them disappear matched with the sudden insight of my impending death, unless I somehow convince myself I can cut it as a Scottish gentleman farmer, buckles my knees.

  I suddenly feel sick. My inner ear off-kilter. The schism between hope and reality widening. I can’t leave London. I can’t stay in London. I can’t be anyone else. I can’t be me.

  My father would have gone straight to the lion’s lair and fought. My mother, always the wiser, wouldn’t have mixed up courage and stupidity. She would have known when to keep quiet and run away. Survival is the highest proof of intelligence, not bravery or bloodshed.

  At King’s Cross I board the first northbound train that comes in. It’s only for Liverpool, but at this stage I don’t mind. Anywhere is better than home. Anywhere is b
etter than what, and possibly who, I’ve been.

  I’m now as rich as I would ever need to be, but I’m a fox listening out for trumpets and dogs. If I run fast, if I run far, those will fade away behind me.

  Once underway I ask a conductor, to take me to a first-class carriage. I tell him there’s a little something for him if he can find me an empty compartment, which he does. I sit down, facing the direction of travel. Facing the new. Lennoxtown at the end of the ball of string in front of me. London, that cesspool of rats and bets, soon nothing but a story. I smile a little. I relax a little. Open the window four inches, a horse hand — Paul would have known. I watch the smokestacks and coachworks of London town recede. Watch the world I know fade into a memory.

  I’m away. I’m scot-free. I smile sadly at my joke.

  I had a good run with the boy, I had a good time with him. It’s not for me to find someone to share everything with. It’s not for me, this domestic happiness seen in others.

  I close my eyes and think of the race and the lucky pile-up, of meeting him at King’s Cross, of him starving himself half to death in that disgusting house. The tenants will come to grief, probably Rupert too, as a result of me jumping ship. It can’t be helped. If you want to make an omelette you have to break some eggs. I think of the humiliation Mr Morton put him through. The poor Russian secretary, evicting the Sorensens with no explanation, the evenings I spent following Paul, at a respectful but watchful distance, to Hampstead Heath.

  I look at the way the trees line the railway line. Real trees, ones that grow where they want to. Not where they were planted, not in a park. I realise I’ve not properly been outside the city for years. Not since Eastbourne.

  Even when I did go, it was always to civilised places, to bars, cafés, hotels, parks. Other towns and cities, little islands of the burgeoning bourgeois looking at, and laughing at races. Men or horses. I forgot to look beyond. Never to nature, never to the unspoilt. The exact qualities I enjoyed in Paul.

  The sky is a beautiful purple. The whole carriage at the back of the train, far from the noisy engine, seems shushed and the sound of the wheels on the tracks, the sleepers and seams in the metal offer a steady rhythm to the journey.

  I wake up with a start. The first thing I do is to pat the air between my legs for the suitcase. It’s still there and my heart comes back into its casings in my chest. I touch my throat and the speed of my pulse scares me.

  A man sits across from me. From what I can see of him from behind the broadsheet he’s unfolded between himself and me, he’s dressed entirely in black. Like an undertaker. A shadow.

  I look up and smile, only the masthead smiling back. I look at his shoes, often an easy way to judge character. Black brogues, neither here nor there. Old but well kept.

  I keep the smile on, remind myself that I’m good with people. I don’t want the company, but if this man is travelling somewhere and has decided to come and sit facing me, even though there seems to be a lot of space in the first-class carriage, I’ll make it a pleasant, if unremarkable, journey for him. I won’t be too quiet or too talkative. I won’t say, or do, anything out of turn. I won’t offer too much information nor hide any if he asks. Lies, obviously: Edward S Penderton, shipping merchant, the company has been in the family for generation, going to a funeral up in Liverpool, an old aunt, not seen her for years, the wife would have come but has been feeling under the weather the last couple of days, think the damp has gotten into her lungs a bit, nothing serious, prefer doing the trip on my own anyway.

  Then a few questions, maybe a clarification or two about my own circumstances, barring the unfortunate event of the man also being a shipping merchant, in which case I will backpedal a little, tell him I’m very detached from the running of it, hint at old money. Then a little chat about cricket, which I know nothing about, rugby which I know a little about, and horses, which I know a tremendous amount about, but would pretend to be only marginally interested in, intentionally getting facts muddled up.

  I look at the man’s hat jutting up over his paper. He is either sleeping, or engrossed in an article because he hasn’t turned the page since I woke up.

  I settle in the seat, glance out over the pastures and towards darker clouds on the horizon. It’s a bank which looks like it could bring lightning and thunder, both things quite nice when you’re in a cosy compartment flying north. I’m just about to take off my coat, when the man across from me folds down his paper, clears his throat and looks straight at me.

  ‘Silas. Silas.’ He sounds disappointed. I know him. It’s Drago, the bastard.

  For the second time in a short space of time my heart flies up into my throat. A sensation I’ve not felt for many years. One I’ve made sure never to have to come to experience, and when I’ve been forced to feel it, I’ve trained myself not to gasp, or get confused. Not to feel anything, show anything. But this, this I can’t fence off.

  ‘We are not happy about this Silas,’ he continues. ‘Mr Morton saw great potential in you. And in your boy. But now...’ here he opens his arms in a gesture of a stingy embrace, then clasps his hands in the manner of a preacher praying.

  He looks out the window, and my gaze follows his. It’s now dark. All I see is the reflection, like a pear cut in half, our faces staring back at us.

  The grip and hammer of a well-oiled gun sticks up out of his armpit in a tight holster, in his belt a pair of handcuffs. How proud he is to show them to me, as if by accident. What kind of a man does this? A dog on a leash hoping for a sausage, that’s who. A coward who can’t be bribed. Not because he has any moral standards. But because of his fear. Because of his unquestioning respect for his master. I have seen this class of men before. Subservient and vain. I have made use of them myself, I’m not proud to say, and from experience they have been very efficient.

  My dreams of freedom, of Lennoxtown and – this I hadn’t even admitted to myself until this black bishop appeared – of one day crossing the Atlantic. Pulling into New York, finding Paul somewhere. His name in letters as tall as double-decker buses on a sign outside Madison Square Garden, inside he’s mid-race. After we would go for eel or whatever the equivalent is over there, and talk about the past, laugh about this whole mess.

  ‘Silas, what do you propose we do about the situation?’ Drago’s question pulls me out of my self-pitying reverie. He continues, ‘I know you took the money, I know you gave some to the boy and that whore. I know you sent him somewhere, it’s just a matter of time before they are found. And dealt with.’

  ‘I’m not afraid you know,’ I say. ‘This is something I can explain to Mr Morton. He knows me. I’ve known him a lot longer than you have.’

  ‘I don’t think you can. He sent me. He wants you. Dead or alive, he doesn’t care. And he knows he can trust me to do the job properly,’ he says and begins to study his fingernails.

  ‘You’ve got quite the reputation,’ I say. At this he merely bows his head. Self-important prick, proud that his fame has preceded him. Which is fine with me. A bit of pride might be a loose rock in his wall of Eastern European stoicism, one I can prod.

  ‘I’ve got nothing to hide. I’m a man on a train. Going to Liverpool to visit a friend. That’s all,’ I continue.

  He looks up and says, ‘I don’t have a preference. I don’t mind what happens to you, I am just a courier. But you and I are returning to London. You are telling me where your prized horse and his whore are right now and I will cable the Carousel. Once we are back you can tell Mr Morton in person.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘My medical training and scalpels,’ here he pats the pocket of his suit jacket, ‘says you do.’

  I look out of the window. He is sitting with his back to the direction of the train, but I have a full view of the track. Up ahead there’s a slow right, going into a series of tunnels. I pull on my left kidskin glove, put my right hand in the pocket of my coat, look him in the eye and say, ‘I’m going to close the window, seems chilly all of a sud
den.’

  ‘I always took you for a weakling Silas.’

  I ignore this. Continue, ‘Then let’s get this over and done with. I’ll come with you if that’s what you want.’

  I put the right glove on, as if I need a better grip on the mechanism. I look at him, smile and continue, ‘Actually I’m very impressed you found me.’ This puts him at ease. The little rock possibly looser.

  I focus on my hands. Hands that used to handle white-eyed horses on race tracks, then white-eyed men. Hands that delivered money first to my father, then to Mr Morton. Hands that have broken open hundreds of lobsters at the Strand, hands that have put hundreds of drunk men to bed. Hands I once hoped would make me enough money to not worry about money. Hands that over the years and through the things I have seen have always been steady. Only once or twice have my palms been wet from nervous sweat. Last time it was at the race. Now I can’t afford that. Now I wear gloves.

  ‘Drago, you must be very good at what you do,’ I say.

  My hands are calm enough. Instead it’s my legs that shake as I stand up and reach for the clasp of the window. I pretend to struggle, notice Drago’s snigger. I buy time until the last second before the train rushes into the tunnel.

  The compartment is plunged into darkness. Now I pull the straight razor out of my pocket. I unfold it, secure it and plunge it into Drago’s throat. While he’s still surprised, I hack, saw, push. Lean into him, almost breaking the blade. In a rage I’ve never felt before I go and go and go until the hilt is stuck and his eyes show white. Until he stops gurgling, until his rasping, wet breaths are spaced out, stop altogether. His hands, at first clasped around my sawing arm, slowly lose their grip. Then his arms flop onto the seat with a meaty thunk.

  I shudder. Look at my ruined gloves. Dry the blade on his right lapel. First one side, then the other, with a care that surprises me.

  Instead of closing the window I gulp air, though we are still in the tunnel. I pluck the gloves off, soaked finger by soaked finger. Drop them out of the window. I take down my hat and my mohair scarf from the coat rack. His head lolls in time with the train. Severed tendons, a lump I realise is his Adam’s apple cut in half. Red blood, a torrent. White bone and cartilage remaining ivory white in the dusk of the compartment. I gingerly wrap my scarf around his throat, concealing the wound.