The Last Train to Scarborough (21 page)

'Did nobody hear anything?' I
said, extinguishing my cigar on the saucer.

'We
didn't,'
said Vaughan, passing out the drinks. 'We'd been at this stuff all night, one
way or another. Absolutely mashed we were, come midnight.'

'I don't care for this
"we", Vaughan,' said Fielding.

'Begin at the beginning,' said
Vaughan, regaining his couch. 'Blackburn turned up at about the same time you
did, Jim. Supper was served directly, and it was a hot supper, then as today.
One of Howard's recipes. The Lady happened to have
some peculiar sort of chops and
some old cheese lying about…'

'Veal Parmesan,' Fielding cut in.

'Well, it was the Lady's first
railway man,' said Vaughan, 'so I suppose she wanted to pull out all the
stops.'

'Who cooked the meal?' I asked.

'The boy of course, Jim,' said
Vaughan, draining his glass. 'When supper was over, I asked the fellow if he'd
care for a pint, and so we walked over to the Two Mariners, just as you and I
did, Jim. Well, it was a bit of a washout in the pub. The fellow hardly said a
word, and I came back with him at about ten past ten, barely half an hour after
we'd set off. I'd forgotten my key so had to ring the bell. Howard here
answered the door and let us in.'

Fielding nodded at me, confirming
this.

'Blackburn then went straight up
to his room,' said Vaughan, 'and Fielding joined me in here, and we had a bit
of a chat about the lad: Adam, I mean. I'd seen him earlier in the day, a
little before Blackburn turned up, acting in a rather queer fashion in this
room, Jim. It was just as darkness was falling, and he was standing by the
window there with no gas lit, and waving ...'

'A shrimp net?' I put in, and
Vaughan frowned.

'No, Jim, not a shrimp net. Why
would he be waving a shrimp net? He was waving an oil lamp about.'

'Waving it out to sea?' I said.
'Signalling?'

Vaughan nodded.

'I thought so, Jim.'

'Perhaps the gas had run out, and
he'd needed the lamp to see by.'

No answer from Vaughan; he was
staring up at the ceiling. Behind Fielding, the wind was getting up, becoming
unruly by degrees, and you just knew it would end badly. If that sea had been a
bloke in a public bar you'd have moved into the saloon. With head cocked,
Fielding watched me watching it, as if to say, 'Why are you surprised? Any man
worth his salt ought to know the ways of the sea.'

'Hand over the gun,' I said to
the kid.

With the revolver in my hand I would
take my chances with the Captain and the Mate, wherever they'd got to. If I
couldn't get it off the kid, I'd go over the side. This was the programme. I
didn't believe the kid would shoot, and he might not have the chance. The other
ship would overhaul us in a couple of minutes' time, which gave me about
thirty seconds' leeway - thirty seconds to leap while in full view of their
bridge. 'If you hand it over,' I said to the kid, 'I'll see the judge lets you
off with a talking-to - got that?'

He shook his head very decidedly,
but he was shivering.

'Hold
on
to it, and you'll be lagged for most of your life. Fire it, and you'll fucking
swing.'

'Come off it,' said the kid.
'Nobody on land knows you're here.'

That couldn't be right.
Somebody
knew - somebody in the Paradise guest house knew. The kid was facing me, but
watching the other ship with the tail of his eye. He was in a funk all right;
the gun hand was shaking, but he now cocked the hammer with his thumb. It cost
him quite an effort, and he had to steady the thing with his other hand, but
now I had the answer to my question: it was a single action revolver, and I was
halfway to being dead.

'What
are
you, son?' I asked him. 'Ship's cook? Captain's boy?'

'You fuck off,' he said, and from
somewhere aft I heard, floating over the waves and the wind and the engine
beat, the voice of the Captain. He was speaking more loudly than he ever had
done to me, and with more anger, although this anger was directed more at
himself, as I believed, than at any other party. 'I don't see it,' I heard him
say. 'I just don't
see
it.'

The kid heard it too, and perhaps
he wanted to talk to drown it out.

'You needn't worry about me,' he
said. 'You ought to be looking out for yourself.'

'You think I'm a stowaway,' I
said to the kid. 'It's customary at sea to shoot stowaways, is it?'

The kid nodded slowly.

'Stowaway,' I repeated. 'What do
you think I am? Hell bent on a free ride to the bloody gas works? That's it,
isn't it, son? We're on a run to Beckton with a load of gas coal. You'll come
back empty, will you? Or with a load of coke? Where've we come from, eh, son?
The Tyne? Dunston Staithes?'

'You're nuts, you are,' he said,
but there wasn't much force behind the words. He was hatless, and his hair blew
left and right. In the weak light of the dawn, I could see clear through to his
scalp. He'd be quite bald in five years' time; he was wasting his best years
at sea.

I pictured the great wooden piers
at Dunston where the coal was pitched from railway wagons into the colliers day
and night under a black cloud that rolled eternally upwards. That was the main
starting point for the coal-carrying vessels. But the ship gaining on us
carried a clean cargo; it had a smart red hull. I saw now that two blokes stood
on the foc's'le, facing each other and still as statues. Was there a hand
signal for 'Come alongside'? I ought to have paid more attention to the
super-annuated skipper who had
given talks on seamanship to the Baytown Boys' Club.

The kid had one eye in that
direction too.

'How do I know you're a copper?'
he said.

How
was
I to prove it without my card? My mind raced in a circus.

'Do you know York station?' I
said.

'No. And what's that got to do
with it?'

I could hear the throbbing
engines of the other ship now, quite distinct from the roar of the sea.

'...
Because
I'm a railway copper,' I said, 'and that's where I work. The police office on
Platform Four.'

'Come off it,' said the kid.

I tried to recollect the words on
my warrant card but could not, perhaps because of whatever had happened to me.
There was some stuff on it about the directors of the railway company. It was
more about them than it was me, and very wordy and over-blown.

'Just you take my bloody word for
it,' I said, and the kid almost laughed. Well, I couldn't blame him for that.

I put my hand out for the gun,
saying, 'Give it over,' but he made no move. I'd seen the Chief take a gun off
a man. He did it by force of character -
and
by shouting abuse. You could scare a man by shouting even if he was armed and you
were not.

I glanced down at the restless
waves; a wind blew up from them. The sea was waiting for me to come in - then
there'd be some fun. Only you were liable to be killed outright if you jumped
straight into freezing water. Your heart would attack you in revenge for the
shock. I looked over again to the other ship, where the faces of the blokes on
the foc's'le showed white.

They were looking our way. They
contemplated us calmly, and their vessel was swinging closer.

The kid watched them too.

'Witnesses,' I said. 'I can read
the name of that ship. I can hunt up those blokes later on, and they'll testify
to what they
saw ...
Hand over
the shooter.'

But I
couldn't
read the name. It was something foreign. However, it appeared that one of the
two mannequins on the foc's'le was fitted with a moving arm, for he saluted us
just then.

'They see us,' I said. 'I reckon
they're coming alongside.'

I put my hand out again for the
gun.

'You won't like it in gaol, son.'

'It'll be just like here,' he said,
and the gun was in my hand.

I tried to look as though I had
expected this development. I held the gun; I commanded the ship - the whole of
the seas.

I held up my glass of Spanish
sherry as though trying to decide whether it agreed with me or not. It looked
like cold tea, and tasted like cold, very
sweet
tea.

'Vaughan left me at quarter after
eleven, Mr Stringer,' said Fielding, with the black sea boiling behind him. 'I
then remained here, reading, until half past, when I decided I'd better take
my boots down to the boy. He's generally in the kitchen at that time, and one
of his last duties is to clean the boots.'

'And as you were coming back up,
you saw Blackburn going down with
his
boots,'
Vaughan put in.

'That is correct,' said Fielding
slowly, as though not over- keen on the fact having been mentioned. 'We crossed
on the bottom stairs.'

'How did he seem?' I asked.

'How did he
seem?
'
Fielding repeated, cocking his head. 'Rather morose. He barely gave me good
night.'

'So the last person to see him
would have been the boy?'

'Or our landlady,' said Vaughan.
'She'd been in the kitchen when you'd taken your boots down, hadn't she,
Howard?'

'I believe that she
had
been,' said Fielding, 'but she'd gone up to her room by the time I got there.'
He turned to me, explaining: 'It is the Lady's habit, Mr Stringer, to read
articles from the newspapers to her brother, last thing.'

'And to drink wine,' added
Vaughan.

I felt the urge to defend Amanda
Rickerby against this slur, and immediately felt guilty on that account. A man
ought to have feelings like that only for his wife. But then again my wife
smiled at Robert Henderson, and yet every time I met him while walking, the
bastard cut me dead.

A strange kind of flat boat was
putting out from the harbour. It looked like a brightly lit, floating station
platform with three men waiting for trains on it, and it was bucking about
pretty wildly. Fielding saw me eyeing it.

'It works in combination with the
Scarborough dredger,' he explained. 'They scour out the harbour approach every
few weeks.'

'We think we know what happened
to Blackburn, Jim,' Vaughan said. 'We think he jumped into the sea.'

'Why would he do that?'

'Well, he was pretty cheesed off
about
something
,' said Vaughan, 'and that's fact.
I often worry whether it was something I said to him after supper. You see,
he'd been quite
bright
at supper.'

'You're advertising for railway
men again,' I said, 'or at any rate, Miss Rickerby is.'

'Is she?' said Fielding, and he
frowned. It wasn't like him not to know something.

'That's why I'm here,' I said.

'Of course,' said Fielding, with
a single rapid nod of the head.

'The house is still on the North
Eastern list,' I said. 'Any lodge within five minutes of the station is
eligible, although strictly speaking, I don't think this
is
within five minutes.'

'It is if you run like mad,' said
Vaughan. 'I'm off to the toilet,' he went on, rising from the couch.'... Toilet
then bed.'