The Last Train to Scarborough (35 page)

From
boot soles to neck Tommy looked normal, but his face had the dead whiteness of
a fungus and the same horrifying lack of shape. It was
in
at the left cheek, and
out
at the right
temple. All his hair had moved to the right side, as though to cover the great
lump that had grown there, and his eyes, which were wide open, were no longer
level, no longer a pair, the right one having wandered off to have a look for
once around the back of his head. I looked again at his legs, and I was ashamed
not to be able to remember which one had been crocked. His right hand rested on
one of his kit bags, as though to keep it safe no matter what. The mercy was
that Tommy did not breathe - and I did not breathe either. The Captain lowered
the lamp, so that Tommy seemed to retreat into the locker, and he kept
silence.

It
was the Mate who said, 'Your friend Tom.'

'Tommy,'
I said. 'His name is Tommy.'

Well,
he might have been carrying any number of papers that would have given away his
identity, but of course I'd told them all about him. I thought of Tommy's
fiancée, Joan, wandering alone in her father's shop, the Overcoat Depot on
Parliament Street. I pictured the giant overcoat hanging outside like a man on
a gibbet. Joan would no longer need to go to the Electric Theatre on Fossgate;
she would no longer need to book an aisle seat on account of Tommy's leg, and
so could go to the City Picture Palace on Fishergate, where the seats were more
comfortable, but ...
The Romance of a Jockey, A Sheriff and a Rustler,
The Water-Soaked Hero . .
. nobody saw those films alone; it just
wouldn't be right.

'He
shot at my brother,' said the Captain.

'We
have his guns,' the Mate put in. 'We took them from his bag.'

'Adam
was bringing you out of the house,' said the Captain. 'He didn't know whether
you were dead or alive. He wanted to get you into the fresh air. This ...' said
the Captain, gesturing at the corpse,'... he loosed off a shot the moment my
brother stepped out of the door of the house. He's at least two ribs broken.
How he rowed out to me I've no idea ...' He indicated the corpse again, saying,
'He was re-loading for a second shot. My brother walked up and hit him.'

'He
hit him only once,' the Mate put in.

'And
he doesn't know his own strength,' I said. 'Is that it?'

'He
knew it,' said the Captain. 'It
was this idiot that didn't.'

And
he nodded in the direction of Tommy.

'He
was alive when my brother brought him. He and ... the two of them thought I'd
know what to do.'

'And
do you?' I said.

No
reply.

Had
it been Miss Rickerby's idea to send Tommy and me out to the boat? Had she been
in any fit state to make that decision, having been poisoned by the gas? And
ought I to count it a kindness that she had sent me out? I pictured her waiting
on the harbour wall for her brother's return, and I thought of her and her brother
as two children, whereas the Captain was definitely grown-up, or so they might
think.

'Your
brother made you a present of
two
sacks of
potatoes,' I said. 'You must have been chuffed to bits.'

Again,
no answer. I wondered whether it had been left to the Captain and the Mate to
discover that I was a copper, or whether the two other Rickerbys had made the
discovery for themselves. They had evidently put my suit-coat on me before
rowing me out, and the warrant card had been in there.

'Your
brother might argue self-defence, when taken in charge ... i/what you say is
true.'

'It's
true,' said the Captain,'... and he will argue
nothing.'

He
raised the lantern again, making Tommy come into full view once more.

'Go
in,' said the Mate.

I
stepped into the locker, and the door clanged shut behind me.

As
the smell of Tommy Nugent competed with the smell of paint I sat beside Tommy -
there was no help for it, the locker being so small - and watched, over the course
of perhaps an hour or so, a rectangle of light form around the hatchway, which
was evidently imperfectly sealed. When the rising dawn made the outline
completely clear I began to pound at the door with my boot heels, and must have
carried on doing so for a clear five minutes.

My
fury was directed partly at the door and partly at the Chief. I had been a fool
in the Paradise guest house, but I blamed the Chief for Tommy's death. I ought
to have been free to make an ass of myself alone. I had not wanted Tommy along
and had made that perfectly clear, but the Chief had insisted, knowing very
well that Tommy would go armed and that he was trigger happy. Why had the Chief
done it? Simply to make mischief? He was pushing seventy but that particular
flame never burned out in a man, as far as I could see. Had he sent Tommy to
lay on a bit of adventure for a fellow shootist? Or had he wanted to make
trouble for me because I'd told him I meant to take articles?

After
a long interval of my pounding on the door the whole locker about me began to
vibrate, and at first I thought this was my doing, but then the ship seemed to
lift, Tommy fell softly against me, and my head was filled with the vibration
of the engines. I pushed Tommy off, in an apologetic sort of way, marvelling
that I might lately have been carted about in a sack with him; then the
tree-house motion came back and I knew that we were moving. Beckton gas works
had stirred itself for the day, and we were making for the jetty ready for the
unloading of our cargo.

My
particular fear, ever since the word 'Beckton' had crossed my mind, was that
the Captain would put me off with the coal. Once dead I would be taken up by
the mighty steel claw of a crane, swung into a wagon, and carried along the
high-level line into one of the retort houses where I would be dropped and
burned, becoming who knew how many cubic feet of gas, for the benefit of some
ungrateful London householder. A better way of disposing of a body could
scarcely be imagined.

It
was not that the Captain was evil natured, but I believed him to be weak. This
was why he had fled from his own father; it was why he'd heard me out, letting
me tell the full tale as he tried to make up his mind what to do with me; it
was why he'd showed me the body of Tommy Nugent, letting me see his dilemma in
hopes of gaining my sympathy; in hopes I would understand better his reason for
killing me. Then again his determination to keep his mentally defective brother
out of the arms of the law perhaps went to his credit. The lad had suffered
enough - Captain Rickerby might be thinking - at the hands of North Eastern
Railway Company employees. Anyhow, he was judge and jury in my case, and I was
quite sure it was a role he would have given anything to avoid taking on.

What
would the weak man do? He would put a bullet in me and toss me in the hold
ready for burning. But the accusing finger then began to point in my own
direction. Who was I to charge anyone with weakness? I had lingered in the
Paradise guest house half in hopes of fucking the landlady. My mind had been
only partly on the case as a result; and why had I wanted to ride the lady?
Because she was beautiful, yes. But also to get revenge on the wife, who had
taken advantage of my own weakness to gain her own ends.

It
came to this: I needed some fire in me; I needed to play a man's part; I needed
a gun. I turned to Tommy and, in the light that came from the halo around the
door, my eye wandered down from his broken head to his right shoulder, along
his right arm and up to his right hand which rested on his kit bag. At first
Tommy had had two bags, and where the other one had got to I had no notion. But
I was sure that Captain Rickerby and the Mate had been through it with a fine
toothed comb. They must have been through this one as well - only for some
reason they'd left it in the locker. From one or both of the kit bags they'd
removed Tommy's guns - that was the word the Mate had used: 'guns' in the
plural. Accordingly there was no prospect of finding a gun in the bag. But it
just so happened that when I opened it, I laid my hand directly upon the two-
two pistol.

In
fact, it was partly wrapped in a towel, but I hadn't had to fish for it. The
Captain and the Mate must have been in a panic and no doubt a tearing hurry as
they went through the bag. I put my hand into the lucky dip again and found
nothing but clothes ... only something somewhere rattled. I pulled out a cloth
bag, and here were the two-two cartridges. The pistol seemed to me - as someone
more familiar with revolvers - very primitive: hardly more than a length of
pipe with handle, trigger and lever forming three short outgrowths. I pressed
the lever; it was very accommodating and the gun broke. I stuffed a cartridge
in the general direction of the barrel, and whether

I'd
done it right or not I had no idea.

I
found out less than a minute later when the door opened and the Captain,
holding both his revolver and a coal black sack, appeared before me with the
mighty mechanical hand of the Beckton gas works crane descending into the
opened hold behind him.

I
pulled the trigger; the gun flashed orange; the Captain fell back, and I was
quite deafened. In that deafened state I took up the cloth bag, and re-loaded
the gun. I stepped out of the locker and over the Captain, who still moved,
and who might have been screaming. I saw the Mate, who held no gun and looked
at me in a different way; alongside him stood - perhaps - the big man who had
floored me. The claw of the crane was rising behind them, and Beckton gas works
was far too close on the starboard side. I looked towards the foc's'le and saw
two crewmen I did not know, had not seen before, but my surprise was nothing
to theirs. I walked over to the port side with the shooter in my hand and
there, running fast alongside, was a launch with a rough looking sailor at the
wheel and an evident gent in a long, smart, official-looking great-coat
standing very upright beside him.

Behind
the two was a funnel hardly bigger than either of them, and the top of it was
ringed with red paint. They were not quite coppers, I decided, but were somehow
in authority. I looked down at them from the gunwale on the port side, and that
did no good at all. So I raised my two-two pistol and fired, making not the
least effect on the generality of the sailors and crane operators and wharf
men. But the two fellows in the launch looked up.

Forty
minutes south of York, I looked through the compartment window at the town of Retford:
red bricks in the morning sunshine, and a smoking chimney that I believed to
be the brickworks, and which I always thought of as a sort of factory for
making
Retford.

I'd
run through the place on the main line many times, and had passed through it
going the other way only a little under a month before, on my return from
London and my imprisonment aboard the steam collier
Lambent Lady,
owned and operated by the firm of Hawthorn and
Bruce of West Hartlepool, and contracted to the Gas, Light and Coke Company for
the Beckton run. The Captain
was
a Rickerby:
John, brother of Adam and Amanda; and the First Mate was Gus Klaason. The
great-coated fellow I'd alerted by firing Tommy's pistol was Wharf Master of
the Gas, Light and Coke Company who'd quickly alerted the Port of London
Authority, an outfit that ran its own police force, and it was those boys who'd
taken in Klaason and Rickerby (whose shoulder my bullet had broken). The two
had been left unguarded for a minute before a remand hearing at Greenwich
Magistrates Court; they'd done a push and were no doubt steaming fast to the
far side of the world very soon after. An enquiry was to be held into the
matter and a Chief Inspector Baxter of the Port of London Authority Police had
written me a letter of apology. But I hardly cared about the escape. Yes,
Captain Rickerby had meant to kill me at the last, but his intention had been
to save his family from disaster, and he'd certainly put off the moment as long
as he could. He had also saved that petrified lad - name of Edward Crozier -
from drowning by going about to collect him after he'd tried to swim to the
foreign ship that came alongside. (Crozier had by chance seen me brought
aboard, and then been roped into the job of guarding me.)

The
PLA coppers had been decent sorts, and they'd made me a present of the blue
serge suit they'd given me after my rescue. I'd had my choice of any number of
suits or sports coats and flannels, since they'd seemed to have an entire
tailoring department on the strength. They also had a first class police
doctor, who'd told me that carbon monoxide (as from coal gas) combines with
haemoglobin in the blood to make carboxyhaemoglobin.

He
wrote the name down in my pocket book as a kind of souvenir, saying that this
was a very stable compound - and this stability was not a good thing. The
poison prevented the lungs sending oxygen to the bodily cells that need it, and
it might stop heart, lungs or brain. When it took over half your blood, then
you were done for one way or another. I might have been saved, the doctor said,
by not having jammed the paste-board into the window frame of my room on my
second night - that small amount of ventilation might have been all- important.
The doctor did not believe I had taken any permanent injury from my
experience, but he did fret about my loss of memory. He asked me questions to
test the membranes of my brain, and seemed quite satisfied with the results of
this quiz, which ran to enquiries such as 'What is the name of the Prime
Minister?' But I had been testing
myself
ever since.
I would run through all the railway companies that ran into York station, or
try to put a name and rank to every man in the police office, and do it fast. I
would hit a sticking point every so often. For instance, the name of the
painting that had been attacked could not have been the
Rickerby Venus,
could it? I asked myself the name of the oldest
pub in York and could not recall whether it was the Three Cranes on St
Sampson's Square, the Three Crowns on Coney Street or, for the matter of that,
the Three
Cups
on Coney Street. I had certainly known the answer once, and
I wondered whether the forgetting might not be down to the gas.