Death and the Dreadnought

by Robert Wilton

  The conductor was unimpressed. ‘We have to stop at Motherwell anyway.’

  ‘No we damn well don’t!’

  ‘Listen mate, you ever seen a train wreck?’ Even this stark warning was delivered dully. ‘Even if you ‘ad the authority to make us miss the stop, which you ‘asn’t, you can’t straighten out the Lesmahagow loop. If we don’t slow right down on that bend, we goes over.’

  Bunce was livid. Fortunately he had an idea before he could take it out on the conductor. ‘But they’ll have to slow as well, right? Fair’s fair.’

  I was still gazing out the window, willing us closer to the goods wagon ahead. They only had a hundred yards on us, and we were still gaining.

  ‘Course they’ll ‘ave to slow as well.’

  ‘Right then! We’ll have them on the bend then!’

  ‘Doubt it.’

  Bunce swung round into the conductor’s face, and now his pistol was definitely threatening. ‘Old’un, you are properly trying my patience now.’

  A hundred yards only. In the distance there was a town, coming nearer.

  To his credit, the conductor wasn’t backing down. With a finger, he pushed aside the pistol barrel. ‘Just after Motherwell there’s a signal. Up ahead the east-west lines and the local traffic start merging with the London and North Western. Most likely we’ll be ‘eld there a few minutes.’

  ‘No!’ As if to torment poor Bunce, we all felt the train starting to slow as we neared the station and the bend that was making itself so notorious. ‘This is supposed to be an express!’

  ‘You’re the one who keeps buggering about with it. Backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. Take a day for the timetable to recover.’

  Our locomotive came level with the back of their train, and began to pass it. The wagon – the secret apparatus in it – felt so close.

  ‘Don’t stop! Ignore the signal!’

  If I was nearer the front of our train I could actually touch them…

  ‘You gone stupid, mate? You ever seen a train wreck?’

  Bunce actually roared his frustration.

  The buildings of Motherwell were around us. We were going ever slower, and the bend was becoming more apparent. Still we were gaining on the train. Still that goods wagon grew larger in front of me.

  ‘If we stop at the signal we’ll lose them for good!’

  Already I was walking forwards along the train.

  Beside me, just yards away, we came level with their goods wagon. For a moment we seemed to match them for pace, and then we even gained a few yards. I was running down the corridor now, yelling and shoving my way through.

  If the conductor was right about the signal, our advantage would last moments only. Our momentum and my run had carried me ahead of them now, but suddenly the two trains started to separate. I saw their locomotive moving away, saw them slipping away from me.

  We were coming into the station, and the two trains were diverging either side of a platform. Suddenly we started to slow dramatically, and for the first time I saw them pull ahead a fraction.

  Already I had the door open, was ignoring the cries of concern from the passengers around me. The details of the platform were drifting past me, benches and lamp-posts and advertisement hoardings. Beyond them I saw the other locomotive, and then the tender behind it.

  I jumped for the platform and hit it and stumbled and kept moving, fighting to stay upright. I cannoned into something, someone, pushed it away and turned and raced across the platform. Their passenger wagon was moving ahead of me now, and then it disappeared behind a hoarding. Now their goods wagon filled my vision and still I ran. Five yards away and starting to accelerate past me. A final desperate burst of sprinting. Just yards away from me, and on a stupid instinct I lifted my arm towards it, and the corner of the wagon passed in front of my eyes and I could almost touch it and there was the back of the wagon and the empty track behind and I leapt forwards into the void.

  64.

  Recent experience had made me a bit of an expert on the architecture of goods wagon ends. They have a set of iron rungs leading up one side of them. I got a hand on one of these and was jerked madly forward and my shoulder screamed, and then a desperate scrabbling foot found another rung and I got my other wild arm in and grabbed and I was on.

  For a moment I was triumphant. I’d made it. I’d caught them. I’d finally come to grips with the elusive wagon, which the Germans had worked so hard to steal and hide from me. There was a good chance they didn’t even know I was there: my run across the platform had been hidden from their passenger carriage; and what I’d just done was too ridiculous for them to contemplate.

  That’s the trouble with these logical planning fellows. Bit of lunacy throws them completely.

  On the downside, I was now clinging to the back of an accelerating train. I had little idea where it was going, and no idea when it was going to slow down.

  But – partly out of stubbornness at my achievement, and partly because the alternative was letting myself fall to serious injury or death – there I stayed.

  My predicament wasn’t so uncomfortable. Bit of a surprise at first, of course, but once I had hands and feet all comfortably on rungs, I was stable enough. Sheltered behind the back of the wagon, I found the wind was bearable.

  And thus it was that I journeyed from Motherwell to Glasgow on that September afternoon: clinging to the back of a speeding railway wagon, while the scenery of southern Scotland flickered past me. I’d almost recommend it as the economic option, should you find yourself hard up and needing to get north.

  It’s a journey of some twenty miles. For a locomotive only pulling one tender, one carriage, one goods wagon and one well-dressed stowaway, it took around half an hour. Towards the end I was feeling the strain. I could be steady enough, but for that I had to keep myself pulled close in to the wagon, and my arms started to feel it. In the end I squeezed one whole forearm behind the rung and more or less jammed myself in place. Now and then a freak of wind would rush a gust of smoke and soot into my face.

  I can’t pretend I’d been very aware of what was happening around me, not in the first moments of the escapade. I’d not heard or seen any other train nearby, or passing. I had to assume that the conductor had been right: the other train, with Bunce and his policemen, had been held near the station and was now well behind. I was on my own.

  Once I’d got used to the somewhat unconventional accommodation, I wasn’t worrying about the journey. I was worrying about the end of the journey. I took it for granted that Hertenstein and his First XI were in the passenger coach ahead. Sometime in the near future the train would arrive at some isolated bit of dockside, and they’d be all over the goods wagon unloading the fire-control table. They would find it hard to miss a man in a tweed suit stuck to the outside. At this climax of their operation, they wouldn’t be fooling around.

  The infinite stone dourness of the outskirts of Glasgow passed around me. I tried adjusting my grip on the rung. It didn’t help.

  Glasgow, by extension, was another problem. Back in the open country, I’d had the world to myself and there was no chance of anyone seeing me. In a built-up area, when the train would probably be slower, any number of signalmen or navvies might be lurking around the track; pedestrians would be stopping at level-crossings, and bored domestics would be staring out of back windows. And they would see a gentlemen in correct country wear hanging off the back of the train, and surely one of them would shout or scream, and Hertenstein would learn he had an unexpected passenger.

  Through the suburbs we rolled. Occasionally, for a bit of variety, I would twist my head around and watch the backs of the houses, the little fragments of domesticity and squalor. Otherwise I rested my chin on my straining forearm and concentrated on gently flexing and easing the muscles in my legs and arms.

  In particular, if we passed through one of the Glasgow stations en route the docks, I would certainly be spotted. I’d at least have the chance of jumping off the wa
gon and getting lost in the crowd, but I didn’t want that. I wanted to stay with my prize. I had to wait for the moment when… when what, exactly?

  We rolled on. The stink of smoke and soot hung heavy around the wagon. I had to wait for the moment when I had worked out what I would do when the moment came.

  We didn’t pass through any of the Glasgow stations. The special had been booked onto lines that went through the southern districts of the city without the risk of getting stopped at a signal in a station. Understandably, from the German point of view. Once, at some significant junction of the tracks, I saw a signal box passing beside us, and I pressed closer to my wagon and hoped the signalman in the box was particularly busy, or blind.

  Then we stopped. The sudden jolt of the wagon was matched by a great thump in my chest, as I wondered if the crisis had come. I stared around me. We weren’t at the docks. We were still in the outskirts of the city, surely: houses and factory buildings around us. From ahead I heard a shout, and remembered that I was clinging to a vehicle full of very efficient murderers. I wrenched my forearm out its rung, and shifted round until I was held by one hand and one foot only, ready to jump at whoever appeared round the back of the wagon.

  Then we started rolling forwards again. I lurched and swung from the rungs, and pulled myself back in. Below me I saw the tracks, different sets merging and diverging. Points. Hertenstein’s gang had had to switch lines manually.

  Of course they had. When they’d chartered the special, they’d had to give ninety percent of their true course so that the train would be routed properly at the many junctions between Crewe and Glasgow. But for the last stretch they’d no doubt given a false destination.

  Again, I had to admire the planning. They would have hoped that the authorities wouldn’t have known about the switch, wouldn’t even know that the fire-control table had been snatched, certainly wouldn’t be tracking the train. But just in case, Hertenstein had given a false destination: in no circumstances would there be any policemen lurking when he got there. I was even more isolated. As far as the London and North Western Railway was concerned, the Germans and their booty, and I, had just ceased to exist.

  The houses were gone now. First we passed factory buildings, and then fragments of open country to the south, and then the buildings were growing up around me again, more factories, and then warehouses. At last, over my left shoulder, I glimpsed water: the River Clyde, and the route to the sea.

  65.

  A grey brown world of wharves and warehouses, rough ground and rough buildings, as we weaved through the docks that crowd the banks of the River Clyde, as it opens out westwards from Glasgow. A bustling shouting world, as I watched gangs of workers scurrying over the waterfront and the ships tied alongside it and pressed myself tight into my wagon. An industrial jungle, into which I was disappearing.

  Then things seemed quieter, as our train coughed its way into a new section of the docks. The Clyde was clear to the left. No one to see us here. No way Bunce could track us through the maze of junctions and docks.

  I was on my own with Hertenstein and his gang, going wherever they were going. Germany, presumably; if they didn’t find and murder me first.

  I reached into my jacket for the Webley.

  And then I remembered that I’d given it to Quinn to cover me, back on the Glasgow Express.

  I was obliged, it turned out, to confront a gang of ruthless foreign bandits armed only with a packet of sandwiches.

  The train was going at walking pace. We were nearly there, wherever there was.

  I could have dropped off the back of it, and they probably wouldn’t have seen me. But they might; and what would I achieve? I had to watch them, I had to stay with them, to the very end.

  I wondered if I should have been dropping a trail of breadcrumbs, from my sandwich. But the rats would have got them long before the police bloodhounds did.

  The locomotive was coughing hard now. Warehouses to the right. The river to the left. No signs of life. We were definitely slowing.

  I poked one eye round the edge of the wagon. A couple of hundred yards ahead, a steam yacht was moored to the dockside. Journey’s end.

  Slowly, clumsily, feeling the strain in muscles frozen by the half-hour clutching at the rungs, I climbed up onto the roof of the wagon. I squirmed forwards, keeping flat.

  We were a hundred yards from the yacht now, coming in parallel to it along the waterfront. Elegant thing: two masts for when they wanted to pretend to be sailors; funnel in the middle for steaming back to Germany without any fuss. Already there were men bustling around on the deck. Hertenstein wasn’t one to dawdle.

  And not another soul. Glasgow’s supposed to be one of the great cities of the Empire, a heaving metropolis of humans. And I couldn’t see a single solitary one of them, not for a mile in any direction. Typical of the Scots to be so damned contrary.

  Then, in the distance, my eye caught movement. At first I thought I’d imagined it, and then I couldn’t interpret it. And then the odd shifting in the distance resolved itself into a man on a bicycle. A man on a bicycle, heading towards us.

  And so what? Shouting would only ensure my death sooner. I had no other way of–

  Then I was wrenching into my jacket pocket and pulling out the packet of sandwiches. I opened it, removed half the sandwich and scribbled on the paper ‘HELP. SMUGGLERS. URGENT ALERT POLICE.’ The cyclist was fifty yards away. In my haste, and my attempts to cling to the roof, and the last jolting of the train over the dockside the letters were mostly illegible, but hopefully he’d get the gist. I repackaged it around the half-sandwich.

  Just in time. The cyclist – some kind of dockworker – was coming level with the train, and paying it no attention. He didn’t see me half rise, didn’t see the arc of my arm; and nor, I think, did anyone on the yacht.

  It’s probably typical of my odd life that one of the finest feats of marksmanship I will ever have pulled off was executed with half a sandwich against a Glasgow watchman on a bicycle. Two moving vessels, just as Hugh Stackhouse had described the challenges of naval gunnery. The sandwich packet took a long trajectory across the dockside and caught the cyclist smack in the face. I didn’t even need a fire control table.

  He wobbled, and fell, and then I lay down flat again. I had to hope he’d instinctively look at what had hit him, that it would be half open, that he’d investigate, that he’d have the sense to hurry to the police. A lot of hoping.

  Stretched flat on the wagon roof, as the train juddered to a halt, I ate the other half of the sandwich.

  Duck pâté.

  Now I could only wait. Before the train had completely stopped, I heard doors opening. Then below me, between the wagon and the yacht, there was movement. Hertenstein’s gang were quick about their business.

  I daren’t raise my head. I couldn’t be seen from immediately below me, but anyone who walked towards the yacht could turn and see me, and I was in plain view of the deck. Any movement might attract fatal attention. I fancied I heard Hertenstein’s voice. Otherwise, the men were quiet. Orders given, orders followed, no fuss.

  There was a shot, and I felt my heart kick. Then the wagon door slid open. Not a man to trifle with a lock, your hun. Immediately there were boots up and echoing around in the wagon. I could only wait, and hope reinforcements arrived before the fire-control table was loaded aboard the yacht and the yacht was away to Germany, and hope fervently that none of the Germans bothered to look up at all.

  ‘Hoi! Wha’ the ‘ell d’ye think yeer playin’ a’?’

  For a moment I assumed it was directed at me. In another moment, I realized that this squawk had been in the most un-German accent imaginable.

  It was the cyclist.

  I almost swore aloud. I couldn’t resist twisting my head around to look. Perhaps he hadn’t even read the message. Perhaps he had, but his pride was too wounded at being struck down by an unexpected sandwich. However it was, rather than doing the logical, sensible thing and going for
the police, the stupid sod had come over to investigate.

  I could see him now. He was wheeling his bike towards the wagon. He looked unhappy, and he was ready to expand on the point. ‘Wha’ en God’s name d’ye–’

  He stopped. He didn’t sound a man who’d shut up easily, so he’d obviously seen something pretty striking. From what happened next, it must have been Hertenstein appearing round the end of the wagon with his pistol out.

  There was silence for a moment. Then Hertenstein’s voice came quiet and clear: ‘Go away.’

  One last time, the watchman’s pride overcame prudence. ‘No I w–’ and the gun fired and there was a yell of pain.

  Surprisingly, he wasn’t dead. At this stage I doubt Hertenstein would scruple to murder another innocent, but perhaps the watchman had been too far off. Or perhaps Hertenstein was using his wrong arm because someone had shot him in the other. That was one the watchman owed me.

  That was the end of that episode. My great hope had manifested itself as one angry Scotsman, who’d jumped into something beyond his imagination and got shot for it. Had he not still been alive, swerving and swearing on his bicycle, it would have been tragedy. Instead it was merely farce.

  There was one benefit only from the whole nonsense: the distraction gave me the opportunity to drop down from the landward side of the goods wagon, out of sight of all the Germans gathered on the other side and watching the fleeing cyclist. It was twenty yards to the nearest buildings, and I did them at a sprint and ducked into an alleyway.

  66.

  Instinct, and the familiar sense of an impending bullet between my shoulder blades, told me to keep running. About as far as Edinburgh would have done nicely.

  Unfortunately, I had spent the last hours desperately trying to catch up with the damn crate and not to get separated from it. Now, a minute or two before it was hauled up the gangplank onto a yacht for Germany, was not the time to set off in the other direction. The alley ran perhaps thirty yards between two warehouses, and by the end of it I had slowed to a walk.