The Last Train to Scarborough (26 page)

Adam
Rickerby took a deep sigh, for all the world as though I was the simpleton and
not him.

"E med no
complaint!

I
took a sip of the tea. It was perfectly good.

'I'm
obliged to you,' I said.

'Are
yer after a reduction in t'rent?' he enquired anxiously. '... Want yer money
back, like?'

'No,
why ever do you ask that?'

'I
asked yer,' he said, more slowly, and once again giving that flash of
unexpected intelligence, 'because I wanted ter
know!

So
saying he turned about and marched back down to the kitchen. I then moved the
jug over to the wash stand, and I had all on to lift it with two hands let
alone one. After a shave and sluice-down, I went down to breakfast, which was
taken at the kitchen table - apparently this was how it was done in winter.

Amanda
Rickerby was there, which surprised me at that early hour. Then again she was
reading a novel and sipping tea rather than doing any of the breakfast chores.
These had evidently all been left to Adam Rickerby, who was moving plenty of
pots and pans about at the range. The landlady glanced up and gave a sly smile
by way of saying good morning. She was more beautiful than was needful at
breakfast. Over-opposite her - and with his back to me - was Fielding, wearing
a fairly smart black suit and very carefully finishing a kipper.

'Morning!'
he said, taking a bit of bread to the few remaining specks. 'Sleep well, Mr
Stringer?'

'Yes
thanks, 'I said. 'You?'

'Very
well indeed.'

'I
didn't notice the storm, if there was one.'

'Hardly
anyone's out from the harbour,' he said, dabbing his mouth with a napkin, 'so I
think it's still in prospect.'

'Where's
Mr Vaughan?' I asked, and the answer came from Adam Rickerby, who was eyeing me
steadily from the range.

"E
gets up late,' he said.

'His
money came this morning,' Amanda Rickerby put in, 'so I don't think we'll be
seeing much of him today.'

She
indicated a letter propped up against the knife sharpener. It was addressed to
Theodore Vaughan.

'You'll
be for the Scarborough engine shed then,' Fielding said, 'and the run back to
York.'

'Dare
say. If the loco's fixed we'll run it back light engine. That means ...'

'I
know,' Fielding put in. 'Without carriages.'

I
didn't like it that he knew.

'If
I know those gentry, they won't want to keep an engine idle for more than a
day,' he said.

'Those
gentry?'

'The
engineers of the North Eastern Railway.'

'No,'
I said, 'but there was only one fitter at the shed and ... Well, if it comes to
it, I might have to stop here another night.'

'Why
not?' he said. 'Make a holiday of it!'

Amanda
Rickerby read on, but then none of this was news to her.

'If
you do come back, you'll have the infinite pleasure of meeting Mrs Dawson,'
said Fielding, passing his plate to Adam Rickerby.

I
remembered about the daily woman.

'She's
due at ten,' said Amanda Rickerby, still with her eyes on her book, 'thank
God.'

I
thought again of the wife who, being the religious sort of suffragette, never
said 'thank God', and who only read books in bed, being always on the go when
she was
not
in bed.

'Porridge,'
said Adam Rickerby, and it was by way of being a statement of fact.

As
I stared at the porridge that had been put before me, Fielding gave a general
'Morning!' and quit the room.

I
began to eat; Amanda Rickerby read, and sipped her tea.

I'd
almost finished my porridge when she looked up, and said, 'I hear you've been
asking about Mr Blackburn.'

Silence
for a space. I watched her brother at the range. Who'd told her of my
questions? She was not smiling.

'We
believe it was a case of suicide,' she said.

'Yes,'
I said.

'Some
event seemed to have thrown a great strain on him.'

'Kipper,'
said Adam Rickerby, putting it next to my porridge. He retreated to the range,
from where he enquired: 'Kipper all right?' 'I haven't started it yet,' I said.

'What
a time that was,' said Amanda Rickerby. 'The police all over the house - it
does nothing for business, you know.'

There
was a hardness in her eyes for the first time, and I thought: This is what
you'd see perhaps quite often if you were married to her. She was still
beautiful, but in spite of rather than because of her eyes.

'I
thought it would be a miracle if we ever got another railway man in,' she
said.

'Yes,'
I said, contemplating the kipper, 'I can quite see that.'

And
when I looked up she was smiling and her eyes were shining again: 'You are that
miracle, Mr Stringer.'

On the lower level of the
Promenade, a man at a road works was making hot gas, seemingly for his own
amusement. No- one was about. The beach was like black glass. I could make out
a couple of dog walkers on the sand, a few hundred yards in the direction of
the Spa. They minded the sleeting rain; the dogs didn't. It was nine-thirty,
and I had half an hour to kill before I met Tommy Nugent at the station. Facing
the sea on the lower Prom was the iron gate leading into the Underground Palace
and Aquarium. It was padlocked, and there was a poster half slumped in a frame
alongside it. 'Great Attractions of the Season', I could just make out:
'Voorzanger's Cosmopolitan Ladies & Gentlemen's Orchestra, 21 in number
including Eminent Soloists, will give a Grand Concert Every Sunday at 8'.

But not in winter, they wouldn't.

'Swimming Exhibitions', I read
lower down: 'In Large Swimming Bath by Miss Ada Webb and Troupe of Lady
Swimmers, and High Divers at Intervals'.

I walked on towards the harbour:
the sea water baths were closed, and never likely to re-open by the looks of it.
I climbed the wet stone steps to the higher Prom. The ships in the harbour
were huddled tight at all angles. A fishing boat approached, bucking about like
mad, and I was surprised the blokes walking the harbour walls weren't looking
on anxiously. But I soon saw the value of those walls, for the boat steadied
the instant it came between
them.

I
wound my way up towards the shopping streets. The Scarborough citizens had the
sea, the cliffs, the great sky and the Castle to themselves, but all was black.
I saw a broken bathing machine in a back yard. Because Scarborough was a
happier place than most in summer, it was a more miserable one come winter. I
walked up Newborough, heading the opposite way to most of the trams, which
thundered down the road from the railway station as though they meant to hurl
themselves into the sea when they reached the bottom.

According
to the station clock tower it was dead on ten when I walked through the booking
office and onto Platform One. The station was still guarded by the moody coal
trains. It was biding its time until summer, and there was hardly a soul about.
The station bookstall stood like a little paper encampment, and the magazines
hanging by clothes pegs from it fluttered in the wind that blew along Platform
One. Tommy Nugent was buying a paper -
The Scarborough Mercury.
He hadn't seen me yet. The two kit bags were at his feet, and he was having a
laugh with the bloke who ran the stall.

'Bloody
hell,' he said, when I walked up to him, 'I'm surprised to see you. I thought
you'd be dead.'

'Well,
you didn't seem too upset about it,' I said, as we walked away from the
bookstall. 'Where did you put up?'

'Place
called the Rookery or the Nookery, or something.'

'Did
you have a sea view?'

'Did
I fuck. Anyhow, I was hardly in the room. I came by your place twice in the
night, you know. First at midnight, then at five.'

'Five
o'clock? Not with the guns?'

'Of
course.'

'I
appreciate that, Tommy. But there was no need.'

'The
house was all right then, was it?'

He
seemed quite disappointed.

'It
was very interesting,' I said. 'Now I'd better see if the Chief's sent the case
papers.'

'I
have 'em here,' said Tommy.

He'd
evidently collected the envelope from the station master just before I'd
arrived. It had come up in the guard's van on the first train of the day from
York, and the Chief had marked it, 'For the Attention of Nugent and Stringer,
York Engine Men'. It was better than seeing 'Detective Stringer' written there,
but then again the Chief hadn't troubled to seal the envelope, and it turned
out that it held no case report but just witness statements from the residents
of Paradise. This was the Chief all over: rough and ready, not letting a fellow
relax.

Til
have a read of these later,' I said.

'Aye,'
said Tommy, 'we've to collect our engine. It's all ready according to the SM.'

'It
might be,' I said, 'but I'm staying on.'

'But
you said the house was all right.'

'Well,
it is and it isn't.'

'I'm
coming back with you, then.'

'No,
Tommy.'

'Why
not?'

'They've
no more rooms going today than they had yesterday,' I said, and he began
protesting and questioning me over the sound of a train that was materialising
out of the rain beyond Platform One. Behind Tommy, pasted onto the station
building that housed the ladies' and gents' lavatories, was a poster showing
what had been on at the Floral Hall six months before. Alongside it was a post
card machine. I must've seen it

dozens
of times before but I'd never remarked it until now. Was it one of the ones
filled by the firm of Fielding and Vaughan? The words 'Post Cards' went
diagonally up the front of it; underneath was written '2d, including Vid
postage'. You put the coins in a slot and I said, 'pulled out a little drawer
indicated by a picture of a pointing finger. You couldn't
select
your card but had to take pot luck. I fished in my pocket
for a couple of pennies.

'You
can get yourself a relief fireman and run the engine back,' I told Tommy. 'But
I'm not coming.'

'You
were meant to be a relief, if
you remember, Jim,' he replied. 'They'll think I'm poisoning my bloody firemen
. .. Who are you sending a post card to?'

'Nobody,'
I said, dropping in the coins and telling myself that whatever was on the card
would be a clue to the goings-on at Paradise. I pulled the drawer and the card
showed a country station scene, hand coloured. All that was written on it was
'Complicated Shunting'. A tank engine, running bunker-first, was pulling a rake
of coaches away from one side of an island platform; another two carriages
waited on the other side. This activity was being watched by a schoolboy. A few
feet beyond the rear end of the engine, a man who carried his hat in one hand
and a bunch of bright red flowers in the other, and whose hair had been
coloured a greenish shade, was crossing the line by barrow boards. Nobody
looked out from the engine, so the bloke appeared to be in mortal peril.

The
picture made me think of Mr Buckingham: 'While crossing the tracks at a country
station, Mr Buckingham was run over by a reversing tank engine. He survived the
accident, but it was necessary to amputate his legs ...'

A
flicker of an idea about the Paradise mysteries came to me but it was lost
beyond recall when Tommy said, 'You're buying a card for no reason? It's turned
you a bit bloody nuts, this bloody business.'

The
train had come in, and stopped with the sound of a great sneeze from the
engine. I looked to my right, and saw the guard stepping down. It was Les
White, with his leather bag over his shoulder and his glasses in his hand. He
was polishing the lenses with his handkerchief, and he looked lost without them
on, but when he set them back on his nose and swivelled in our direction . . .
well, it was like the beam of the bloody Scarborough lighthouse. He nodded at
Tommy, who said a few words about the state of our engine. White then set off
along Platform One. I was glad he hadn't been the guard who'd brought in the
witness statements; glad that a fellow could only come in from York to
Scarborough
once
in a morning. As I watched him go through the ticket gate,
another idea about the case broke in on me, and it made me very keen to get to
the engine shed.

'Come
on, Tommy,' I said, and a couple of passengers who'd stepped down from the York
train looked on amazed as we went beyond the end of the guard's van, and jumped
onto the tracks. You could do that if you were a Company man and to ordinary
folk watching, it was as though you'd stepped off a harbour wall into the sea.