The Lost Luggage Porter (22 page)

It rocked along in our direction, and every one of us turned to face away, yet the driver, a friendly sort, gave two screams on his whistle, and not only that (I couldn't help but turn about, so catching a glimpse of this), he also stuck his head out of his side window, and waved at us. He had to stand at a crouch as he did it, for all North Eastern Company engines had the cab windows placed too low. So the fellow had put himself out to be amiable, and got nowt in return. It would be nothing to him, though: he would have his mate to talk to, the tea bottle waiting on the ledge above the fire doors, the prospect of some good running on clear Sunday night lines. I admired the man - already gone from sight, Doncaster bound - and I hated him at the same time.

We picked up the cylinders once again, and I thought of Edwin Lund, searching the Gospels in the Lost Luggage Office, trying to seek out God's way. Was it God who'd set me down on the tracks and not up on the footplate? I had no answer to that, so I thought again of Lund: he was the winder; he turned the rope and I skipped. He had kept back the detail of the Lost Luggage Office burglary. Why?

Valentine Sampson and the young bloke were far ahead by now. Sampson was not over bright; he was not as clever as Lund or Miles Hopkins. But he was the striking arm, the man whose actions dictated the fate of his fellows. He walked steadily on, and I could see now that he was making for the south-side roundhouses: the first was the engine shed that stabled those North Eastern locomotives kept south of the station. It was in the cinder triangle between the lines leading into the station mouth, and those swerving away directly north towards the marshalling yards, goods yards and goods station.

Beside it lay the Midland roundhouse. The Midland was the main foreign company holding running rights into York, and such a company was entitled to its own shed, just as a government has its embassies overseas, but Sampson was paying that one no attention, for of course the blokes who booked on there had not been on strike.
Their
wages had not been brought to the shed week upon week to remain uncol­lected. We moved forwards, toward the pillars of a water tower, and Sampson motioned us to remain as he walked on with the young fellow yoked to him by the cylinder.

The two disappeared into the North Eastern roundhouse.

'Isn't there a watchman in there?' I said out loud, to nobody in particular.

It was the clerk who answered:

'Reason it out,' he said.

'Eh?' I said.

'Paid off, en't he?' he said. 'Like all of us.'

I nodded, looked away.

'How come you don't know that, mate?'

I made no answer. He was too curious by half, that bloke, and now he was looking at me sidelong. Had he seen me about the station? Might very well have. And if so would the glasses do their work? I heard a church bell floating across the darkness. It was the strike of one. The wife would be worried sick, or had she already become accustomed to my late hours? Sampson was now at the shed mouth, beckoning us on. Hopkins and I entered with our cylinder a minute later, the clerk coming along behind clutching the sackful of extra kit. And now he took over from the young bloke the task of escorting Sampson to the important spot.

As they went off to the eastern side of the shed, I looked about me. It was the first time I'd been in an engine shed since the accident at Sowerby Bridge, and it was quite fitting, for I was returning to steal off the profession that had dis­owned me. The shed was a roundhouse, as I've said: tracks like the spokes of a wheel, the engines sitting upon them like a gathering of witches in the darkness, with the turntable in place of the boiling pot. Their high smokeboxes gave them a haughty look. There were sixteen stalls in all, only a dozen occupied. Sampson, or the young chap, had hung a dark lantern on the turntable crank handle. Another small allowance of light spilled in from the shed mouth, showing a shining pool of black water in the packed cinders. If the engines in this shed were to be used in the morning there'd be fire-raisers in here from four a.m. at the latest.

The clerk was in fidgets beside me, rattling the articles in the sack. Hopkins was smoking - the first time I'd seen him do so.

Sampson was coming back towards us. There was a revolver in his hand, and it was more of a relief than any­thing to finally clap eyes on the thing. The young man fol­lowed behind, looking sheepish-like. He was making towards the clerk, and I thought: he's going to do him, but no. Gesturing back to the young man, he said: 'Now you'll take no harm, but you must wait until the job's done.'

Sampson looked at the clerk, who was looking at the gun.

'How many poor buggers have had a taste of that, then?' the little bloke asked.

I looked across at Hopkins, who was shaking his head. The little ink spiller was past finding out.

'Four,' said Sampson, 'since you ask.'

I put two and two together: the detectives at Victoria . . . and the Camerons.

Then the clerk gave voice to my own thought:

'And I suppose two of those were the Cameron boys. I knew those lads - one worked at our place.'

Long silence. Sampson broke his gun, looked down at the cylinders, perhaps weighing up whether he could spare a bullet on the little clerk.

'I enjoyed that business,' he said, shutting the gun sharply and looking up. 'Clean sweep, you see. Once you've done one, what's the point of leaving the other hanging about in the world? I mean, it's fucking untidy. No earthly use to any living soul, the pair of 'em, and one's absolutely cracked into the bargain.'

All the men about ought to be given into the charge of the police without further ado. But it was past time for worrying about that. My job was to keep alive.

Hopkins crushed his cigarette stump under his boot. I heard a train go jangling past beyond the shed walls.

'Here, you,' Sampson was saying to the little clerk, 'show us your writing hand?'

'I'm right-handed,' the clerk said brightly. 'What of it?'

Sampson had picked up an old, dead lantern. He passed it over to the clerk, saying, 'Cop hold . .. right hand.'

He walked away ten paces, and asked the rest of us to step back from the clerk. He raised the gun, and I thought: this is worse than all; this is the point at which I must step in. But I did not, and the gun was fired and the lamp shattered. In the silence that followed Hopkins folded his arms, and I looked at Sampson. He was now side on to us, drinking whisky from the bottle.

The clerk was holding his hand under my nose, seeming­ly overjoyed that it was still attached to him. 'Five hundred invoices a day,' he said, making a writing motion, '. . . and demurrage bills are a great scarcity across my desk, I can tell you that.'

Sampson walked over to the clerk, and presented him with the whisky bottle; the clerk drank.

'Pass it round,' said Sampson.

As the bottle came my way, Sampson led us all off the part of the shed he'd visited a moment before. We were approaching a little brick room built on to the shed wall. The door to it was shut, and the two cylinders stood outside: the big man and the little man (as I thought of them), waiting to be put to work. The little clerk had the key, or
a
key, and he opened the door without being asked. We all then crowded inside. There was a gas lamp, which Sampson lit with a match, immediately turning it to the lowest setting. The room was somewhere between an office and a workshop. There was a desk, a metal cabinet, boxes of papers; boxes of engine bits. I made out some corks for oil pots, an old whis­tle, tins of screws. A smaller version of one of the shed's church windows was set into the back wall, and in the corner was the safe. It was about four foot high, with a metal crest on the front showing a lion and a snake in a tangle. Woven in between them was a ribbon on which appeared the words 'Croft and Son', and then something in Latin that probably meant: 'If you think you're going to break into this bugger, think on'. There was an ordinary lock, an American lock, I thought - a knob that you turned to find certain numbers. It was the opposite case to that of the Lost Luggage Office, in that they'd obviously not been able to find, or buy, the man who held the key or knew the numbers.

Sampson and the young fellow were now putting their boots to the top of the very dignified safe, and kicking it over. It fell on its back with a mighty crash, making matchwood of the desk chair on its way.

'Can we not bring it away?' said Hopkins, looking on. 'We're right underneath the fucking window.'

Sampson pointed at me, 'Fetch us a tarpaulin, won't you?' all friendliness quite gone, for now the business was under way in earnest.

I went out into the darkness of the shed, and Hopkins fol­lowed, although he then diverted away towards the shed mouth. Had he reckoned on me bolting? I walked between the locomotives. There was a Class
R ...
also a Q Class, with its weird glass roof let into the cab top - that would give you a view of the clouds going in the opposite direction as you ran along. From the shed mouth, Hopkins was watching me as I looked at the engines. I fancied he knew that I was able to see them for what they were.

I saw a tarpaulin: folded over the boiler of a tank engine, like a horse blanket. I yanked it down, making a cloud of dust and muck; and a black lace was left dangling from my fingers: a cobweb. The sight of the thing checked me: I had given nothing but aid to this operation so far, and every new piece of assistance I gave made me less of a detective and more of a burglar. I wiped away the cobweb, and hauled the tarpaulin towards the little office. Hopkins closed with me as I did so, and I looked past him, beyond the shed mouth where - five hundred yards off - a figure was walking towards one of the cabins set between the tracks. Company man on a late turn. He might've had his hands in his pockets. At the same time I heard another train come rattling up, but it didn't go by the shed mouth.

Hopkins followed me into the crowded little room, where the cylinders - big man and little man - stood in place. Lengths of rubber tubing were now connected to the taps on their tops, and these came together in the brass blowpipe that rested in Sampson's hands. It was a double gun, able to mix the two gases.

'Put that against the window,' he ordered when he saw me with the tarpaulin, so I moved around the desk. The thing was pretty stiff, and stood up of its own accord. I made a kind of cone of it, and it shut out the window pretty well.

'Good-o,' he said, so I'd got points for that, as well as everything else.

With stout leather gloves now on his hands, Sampson was removing his hat, putting on a pair of goggles. They were like the eye shades sometimes worn by the blind but they gave Sampson the look of one who could see everything, just as though they were a pair of giant black eyes. He had not troubled to protect his suit, which surprised me.

'Let's have the acetylene,' he said, looking at all of us at once. But it was the young man who answered the com­mand. Taking his wrench or spanner he turned a nut on the smallest cylinder; there came a low whoosh, and Sampson lit a match, and put it to the end of the blowpipe. But the rush­ing gas simply blew it out. He tried again with a second match, obtaining the same result.

'Well I'd say you need a flint,' said the little clerk. 'You can't blow a spark out, you know,' he said, addressing me for some reason, 'instead of going out, it just blows away.'

Sampson turned his weird, goggle eyes towards the clerk.

He tried again with a third match. No go. I supposed that the room must be filling rapidly with the gas. It smelt like onions . .. fried onions.

Sampson tried a fourth match, and this one did the job, only the result was a let-down: a weak, ragged orange flame with a good deal of smoke into the bargain. I had expected the flame to be white, like the cylinder from which it came.

Sampson took a step to one side in surprise as the oxygen came, for the roaring increased ten fold, and the flame changed in an instant, both narrowing and lengthening into the shape of a sword. It was also now blue, and the young man at the cylinders was shouting over the roar: 'It's the light blue at the heart of it that does the cutting, mate.'

Sampson made no answer, but fell to his knees, and bent low over the safe, like a man praying. At the instant he touched the flame to the steel he was surrounded in a whirl of orange sparks. They flew about everywhere in the office, seeming to bounce and roll across the desk, quite able to sur­vive an impact like game little acrobats.

It was hard not to think of this wonderful display as being the whole point of the exercise, and in fact Sampson did seem to be having some trouble with the cutting itself. He'd gouged a red groove across the face of the steel but as he moved the flame back and forth along it, the metal seemed to flow back into the trench, filling it in again, like time itself rolling forwards and backwards. The mark he'd made was no longer-lasting than a line drawn in sand. He looked up, once again staring at all of us and everything from behind the black lenses.

'Now he's thinking: maybe I ought to have spent ten min­utes practising this,' said the little clerk, and the goggles turned once again in his direction.

The young man evidently called Tim was now at Samp­son's shoulder. 'Don't touch the flame down so close,' he said, 'and go at it more at an angle.' He was so thoroughly in the know of the business that I wondered why he wasn't doing the job himself. But I supposed he would then have been a different order of helper, and liable to a longer sen­tence if caught.