The Lost Luggage Porter (4 page)

'Miscellaneous, eh?' I said, looking down at the maga­zines.

The lost-luggage porter nodded, or shook his head; I
couldn't really tell.

'All items are entered by Mr Parkinson,' he said presently,
'and he is very fond of that word.'

'Do you have the portmanteau they came in?' I asked.

'Reckon so’ said the porter, and he moved deeper into the
maze of shelves, giving me a clearer view of the one contain­ing the books. Each volume was inside its own little tin coffin,
with a number chalked on the side. I looked into the first of
the tins:
A History of Hampton Court Palace.
The second one I
saw held
Every Man his Own Cattle Doctor.

I began drifting along the lines of shelves. As far as most of
it went, 'miscellaneous' was pretty near the mark: a ball of
string, a stethoscope, a fan, a muff, some sort of automatic
machine, a pair of field-glasses, a length of lace, sundry pic­tures, hair brush, shovel, leather hatbox, tin ditto, scent bot­tle, whistle, a pair of scissors, a clock, a lamp, a china figure,
a box of collars, a pair of braces, a knife, a thermometer, a
birdcage, a pail, a fishing rod. Sometimes like met like: one
shelf contained only good cloaks, wrapped in brown paper -
against moth, as I supposed. All the top shelves contained
nothing but ticketed hats. Walking sticks and travelling rugs
had shelves to themselves while another was for gloves by
the hundred. And there were more umbrellas at the back,
too.

The porter returned, dustier than before, with my blue
portmanteau in his hand, and began loading my magazines
from several of the metal tins back into it.

I said: 'A charge is made for collection, I suppose.'

'Thruppence,' said the porter.

I fished out the coin from my pocket, and handed it over.

'You've to sign the ledger’ he said, 'and put down your
address.' So we went over to the counter again.

'You've a lot of umbrellas in here’ I said.

No reply from the porter.

'I daresay everyone says that’ I said, setting down my
name and address in the ledger.

'The brollies ought by rights to be stood up’ I said, look­ing up from the book. The porter had unwrapped his buffet
from brown paper. He was sitting on the high stool formerly
occupied by Parkinson, and starting to eat bread.

'... If they were stood up, they wouldn't rot,' I said.

The porter just chewed at his bread, and looked at me.

'The worst weather for you blokes must be rain,' I said.
'You must be head over ears in work whenever there's a
downpour.'

'Folk don't forget umbrellas when it's chucking down,' he
said. 'They forget 'em when it stops.'

'I see. Because then the brollies are not like
. . .
first thing
on their minds.'

I looked at the clock that ticked above the staff coat hooks:
it was nigh on half-past five.

'You must want it pouring all the time then’ I said.

After a longish pause, the porter said:

'It can do just what it likes.'

Behind me, I heard the sound of the rain increasing.

I spied a shelf containing nothing but leathern purses and
pocketbooks. I went close and saw that they were all empty.

'What's become of the money that was in these?' I asked
the porter. 'Pinched,' he said, still eating.

'So you reckon the finders lift the money before bringing
in the pocketbooks?'

'No,' said the porter.

'How do you account for it then?'

I waited quite a while but there was no answer from the
strange kid.

'Well, thanks for turning these up’1 said, tucking the port­manteau under my arm.

He might have said something to that, and he might not. I
turned towards the door and the rain; I opened the door.

'Items lost across all the North Eastern territories are for­warded here under a special advice if not called for after a
week,' the porter said, and I stopped. He was climbing down
from the high stool, and for some reason - maybe the thought
of being left alone in that dismal room - was suddenly minded
to chat.

'Why are some brollies kept at the front, and some at the
back?' I said, letting the door close behind me.

'Paragons and silks at the rear,' he said, 'cotton brollies at
the front. They would be stood up, only where would the
water drain off to?'

'I never thought about that.'

'I have. All hats are kept high so as to reduce damage by
pressure.'

'Eh?' I said.

'Many curious articles do come to hand,' he said, crum­pling up the brown paper in which his bread had been
wrapped. 'We had a banana in last week.'

'Where from, mate? Africa?'

'Leeds. Well, Leeds
train,
any road.'

'What happened to it?'

'Mr Parkinson entered it in the ledger.'

'As what?'

'A banana.'

'What happened then?'

'It turned black, and I asked Mr Parkinson for leave to
pitch it into the stove.'

'Waste of good grub,' I said. 'If somebody had tried to
claim it would you have required them to furnish a full
description?'

He seemed to hesitate on the point of utterance, but in the
end simply looked at the black window.

I opened the door again.

'Well, I'm much obliged to you, mate!' I said, stepping out
into the rain with my bag.

I was skirting around the wagons again, when he called
after me:

'Where you off to?'

'Home,' I called back.

'Can you get over to the station in one hour from now?'

'Why?'

He coughed a little.

'... See summat,' he said, after a while.

'Where exactly in the station?'

'Down side!' he called back with the rain sliding down his
bent, white face. 'I've to lock up first, but I'll see you at half
six!'

'Aye,' I said, 'all right; half six, then.'

It would mean biking back to Thorpe-on-Ouse an hour
later. The wife would be put out, but she couldn't expect me
always home directly in my new line of work. I wondered
why the queer stick wanted to see me, and then it hit me: I
was a policeman.

I lugged the magazines with me through Micklegate Bar -
the grandest of the city-wall gates - and on into the city At
the Little Coach in Micklegate, I took another drink, putting
the peg in after a couple of glasses, and when I stepped out
the rain had eased off, though the streets were still empty.

I knew York a little, having grown up nearby at Baytown.
(I'd also had an earlier spell of working for the North Eastern
Company, my railway start having been a lad porter out at
Grosmont.) But I couldn't think of where to go, so I pursued
an aimless way about the centre of the city, where the streets
were narrow and ancient, the houses all overhanging, falling
slowly towards the pavements. I turned into Stonegate,
where a solitary horse was turning on the cobbles, too big for
the street.

I walked on through those ancient streets: cobbles, shad­ows, funny little smoke-blowing chimneys on powdery-
faced, sagging houses; old buildings put to new uses:
bakeries, drug stores, tea rooms - newly established or sell­ing off, the shopkeepers came and went at a great rate but
the old houses carried on, even though some of them
looked as though they could barely support the gas brack­ets that sprouted from them. I turned and turned, and
presently I struck the Minster, the great black Cathedral;
the Minotaur of the labyrinth, as I thought of it, with its two
mighty West towers, sharp-pointed and horn-like.

I doubled back across Lendal Bridge, looking along the
river at the coal merchants, sand merchants, gravel mer­chants. They all became one at night: so many shouting men,
so many cranes, so many dark barges, which were like the
goods trains - meaning that they seemed to shift only when
you turned your back.

In Railway Street, on the approach to the station, I passed
by two dark, dripping trees with
Evening Press
posters past­ed on to the trunks. The first read 'York Brothers Slain'; the
second made do with
'Yorkshire Evening Press
- The People's
Paper'. A constable was coming towards me. I'd seen him
before about the station, but he was not with the railway
police. Of all the lot from Tower Street - which was the main
copper shop of the York Constabulary - he was the one
whose patrol took him nearest to the railway station. He was
a smooth, dark, good-looking fellow with a waxed mous­tache; he looked like a toff who'd dressed up as a policeman
for a lark, and he passed me by without a glance or any hint
that we were in a way confederates.

A two-horse van nearly knocked me over as I wandered
under the arches into the station forecourt, and another came
charging close behind. I walked past the booking halls, and
struck the bookstall, and here were
Evening Press
posters by
the dozen, loosely attached to placards and pillars, and this
time every one of them reading, 'York Brothers Slain'. The
posters moved in the cold breeze that blew through the sta­tion, and I thought of each one as soaked in blood, so to
speak, like pieces of newspaper stuck on to shaving cuts. The
whole bookstall was blood-soaked, now that I came to think
of it: the shilling novels full of murders; the periodicals with
their own mystery killings, moving towards their solutions
in their weekly parts, and each tale with its own detective
hero - a sleuth hound with peculiar habits but a mighty
brain. The man who stood in the centre of all this sensation -
the stout party who kept the bookstall, who was nearly but
not quite to be counted a railwayman ... he stared out at me
with no flicker of recognition in his piggy eyes. Did he not
see in me the invincible detective type?