by Tim Standish
Church glanced around the compartment. ‘Bit pokey in here.’
‘Billiards?’ I asked.
‘Billiards it is,’ said Church.
We left our bags in the compartment but took our coats with us, mine with the waistcoat camera plate still tucked safely into a pocket. We followed the signs for the bar towards the end of the train, past two more carriages, one of which, I noticed, was the home of the train enthusiasts I had seen on the platform. They seemed perfectly delighted with themselves and were chattering away noisily as they compared notes and tucked into their packed lunches.
The bar took up an entire carriage, the half-glazed doors and the glass panels on either side all covered by blinds. We opened the doors and walked in to find a small bar immediately to the left of the door, a few armchairs and small tables opposite it while further, fixed to the floor at the rear of the carriage, was the billiard table. Pairs of short, red velvet curtains were drawn and corded back either side of each of the large windows that were spaced along both walls. Between the windows were three-branched electric lights, fashioned to look like candles. Two chandeliers of a similar design hung overhead. I nodded to the barman as we walked in. ‘Thought we’d play a little billiards.’
‘Can I bring some drinks over to you, sir?’ the barman asked.
‘Not just yet, thank you. In a while perhaps,’ I replied. He nodded and bent briefly under the bar in front of him, evidently to switch on a cylinder player as piano music suddenly boomed from speakers around the room, the volume swiftly reduced to a background level as the barman frantically darted back down. Above the bar a hunting horn and riding switch hung either side of an inexpertly stuffed and rather startled-looking fox.
Church and I walked past the billiard table to where a selection of cues was clipped to a rack on the rear wall. On either side was a chair where we dropped our coats. A small set of drawers under the cues proved to contain different sets of ivory balls.
‘Look here,’ I said, opening the bottom drawer, ‘they have a set of pool balls. We used to play with these in Canada. What do you say to a game?’
‘Why not? Let’s have a go at it,’ replied Church.
‘It’s easy enough to pick up.’ I pulled out the box, reached for the triangle on top and set up the pack. ‘You break,’ I said, walking over to the chalk board. ‘When you pot a ball, you score the number on it. First to sixty-one wins.’ Church bent to the table and set the cue ball on its spot, then hit it down the table to smash open the pack with a loud crack, immediately potting two balls.
‘Hmm,’ he said, looking down the table. ‘What was that? Eleven for me? I think I might have the hang of this.’ He bent down for another shot and over the next thirty minutes proved himself right, winning our first game and the next in quick succession. I pulled back the next while Wigan came and went and we still had the carriage to ourselves. We had paused for a glass of ale at the barman’s thoughtful suggestion and I was setting up the balls for another game when the doors at the end of the bar opened and several men walked in, our red-headed friend at their head, the bearded bowler hat wearer next to him.
They walked down the carriage towards us, the four behind spreading across it in a ragged arc behind their leaders. Their suits were smart enough, but no one would have mistaken them for anything but the thugs that they surely were. The Inspector had been right in his assessment of them. They were large framed and hard faced, bruisers all, and filled the carriage with the promise of imminent violence.
‘Could I see your tickets, please gentlemen?’ asked the barman in an understandably nervous voice.
The leader, who in my head I had christened Ginger, stopped in his tracks, his men doing the same. He his eyes on both of us, moving his head only slightly to shout over his shoulder. ‘Pipe down and fuck off.’ His voice was harsh and loud, the London accent sharp. The barman didn’t need telling twice, edging his way speedily out through the door. ‘Ralph. Watch the door.’ Again, he didn’t stop looking at us to speak and started moving again without waiting for an answer. Behind him one of his men pulled a cosh out and, holding it at his side, walked back to the door. The rest of the group stopped a few yards from us, confident in their aptitude for the task at hand.
Church and I matched most of them for height except for one: the monster of a man next to Ginger whose thick, black beard looked in severe need of horticultural attention. He caught my eye and smiled. Next to me Church shifted as he put his glass of beer down on the side of the billiard table, leaning his hand on the edge of the table.
‘Right,’ said Ginger, ‘I am here to give you a message. I don’t care who you are, I don’t care where you’re from. I only care what happens when you get off this train and that is nothing, fuck all, do you understand?’ Neither of us said a thing. ‘You went poking your stupid faces around in Blackpool and someone died.’ He paused, waiting for a reaction but, finding none, continued. ‘Stop asking questions. The past is the past so don’t go raking it up. If you do it again, you will get properly hurt. And when I say properly, I mean properly. You understand?’
I waited for a few moments before replying. Behind him, a gloomy palette blurred past the window: the dark dirt of ploughed fields, damp green of low hills, sullen grey sky.
When I did speak, it was with the apologetic but cheery tone of a minor baronet who may have shot someone’s dog by mistake. ‘I must confess,’ I said, ‘I’m dreadfully sorry to tell you this but I don’t speak English, so I’m afraid that I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about.’ I heard Church give a low chuckle from the other side of the table. I shrugged apologetically. ‘I am so sorry.’
I saw a few furrowed brows in the back row as they tried to work out what I was playing at. Ginger didn’t miss a beat. ‘You don’t speak English?’
‘Not a word. Sorry, it really is the most awful bother, I know.’ I smiled at him and shrugged my shoulders again.
One of the men behind Ginger stepped forward but he reached out an arm to stop them. ‘Hold on,’ he said and stepped forward until he was only a few feet away from me, close enough for me to see the small patch of stubble on his chin that he had missed during his morning shave.
‘And what about your friend?’ he asked. Does he speak English?’ I turned slightly to look at Church, stepping slightly in his direction as I did.
‘Do you know, I’m not sure?’ I said. ‘But then, even if he did I wouldn’t be able to tell you because, you know, I can’t speak a word of it myself.’
‘Actually, old son, It’s even worse for me,’ Church said.
‘Is that right?’ asked Ginger.
‘Oh yes. You see I’m a deaf mute,’ said Church.
‘What?’ Ginger asked. Behind him his men had caught up and by the looks on their faces were about ready for a game of ‘beat the lights out of the jokers’.
‘Yes, it’s tragic really, my old mother always hoped I’d be on the stage.’ Church smiled a broad smile.
‘Well that’s a real shame for you,’ said Ginger, his face colouring in anger, ‘because now we’re going to have to find another way to get the message across. Right lads?’ He turned his head to the right as he added this, nodding to the men behind him as he did, a signal to ready themselves.
I was never much of a sportsman growing up, consistently disappointing throughout my schooldays as far as rugby and cricket went. Even association football was beyond me. But there were two areas in which I always excelled. In the first case I have always been a more than fair shot with pretty much any sort of gun. In the second case I am, as I was delighted to discover during a turbulent time in my first year at school, a natural boxer. And so, as the tension wound up in the carriage, I found myself shifting my feet slowly, unnoticed by my ginger friend, into the required position.
Thus, it was a good punch that I struck against the side of his jaw. As good, I think, as any I ever landed, a fluid rotation that ran from foot to shoulder into a right cross that put
our red-whiskered friend down and I knew, as I felt it connect, that he wouldn’t be getting up again.
I was moving past Ginger before he even hit the floor, back on balance, feet moving and guard up as surprise turned to fury and the nearest of the other men came for me, stocky and grim faced with an evil-looking scar that ran up the right side of his face. A fighter he was; a boxer he was not. I slipped past the punch he threw at my head and sent a left hook into his body that must have hurt but not enough to put him off; though staggering, he still managed to send a wild swing of a punch in my direction. I bobbed under it, then rose smoothly to plant a sharp combination to stomach, face and chin that sent him crashing back into a window and grabbing onto the curtains for support. Abandoning Queensbury for a moment, I kicked his legs from under him and he crashed to the floor, the curtain coming away in his hand and pulling the curtain pole with it.
He stayed down and with Ginger out for the count I turned my attention to the others, revelling in the joy of the moment as, for the first time since I had landed, I was in a situation where I understood the objective, the rules and the opposition. I smiled as I watched Church twirl one of the billiard cues like a quarterstaff, one ruffian lying senseless on the floor at his feet, a second being subjected to a series of rapid strokes to head and body that had him crashing backwards into the bar and thence to the floor at the feet of the only two of Ginger’s merry band left standing. As if emphasising the point, Church swung the cue around his body in an impossibly quick series of arcs ending with it pointing downwards from under his arm, like a swagger stick. I smiled and caught Church’s eye. Nodded in recognition. This was almost too easy, I thought to myself.
And suddenly I was flying.
I crashed into the corner of the carriage, all the wind gone from me. Trying to pull myself to my feet, I heard someone shout ‘Do for him, Ralph’. I desperately threw myself to one side and heard something narrowly miss my forehead, instead catching my left arm just above the elbow and all but paralysing it with a blow that cause me to exhale sharply in pain.
I got to my feet to see Ralph the door-watcher step cautiously towards me, waiting to see if I would get back up. He was smaller than the others, a rodentine specimen of a man dressed incongruously in a pin-striped suit that gave one the impression of being assailed by a renegade bookkeeper. Clutching his cosh, he stood still for a moment, sizing me up, then suddenly threw a wild, overhand swing at me. I moved outside it, sent a hard right into his face and aimed a ragged punch at his chin as he followed through. He swung at my head again, and I threw myself backwards, narrowly avoiding the blow. Encouraged, he threw a third blow at me and this time I moved in close, barging him into the wall and, still unable to feel my left arm, used it to pin him there while I sank punch after punch into his body with my right. The air exploded out of him and he staggered. I waited for a moment, fists ready, but he dropped the cosh and sank to the ground, grey faced and whining in pain.
I turned back to the room, trying to massage some feeling back into my arm. Church was moving around, keeping his distance from Blackbeard, cue smoothly spinning from one hand to the other as he rained blows onto the larger man’s arms and body, though with little discernible effect. The giant laughed at him and, when the next blow came, he grabbed the cue out of the air and pulled Church towards a vicious headbutt that, had it landed fully, would have ended the fight there and then. Church twisted and the blow glanced off the side of his head, a lesser hit but still throwing him off balance. Seeing his opportunity, Blackbeard wrenched the cue out of Church’s hand, before grabbing his lapels and throwing him bodily in the direction of the bar. Church somehow turned the fall into a shoulder roll that brought him back to his feet as Blackbeard, looking disappointed, stepped forward to finish the job.
My swing with the cosh caught him on the back of the head and I was expecting that to be the end of it but Blackbeard’s skull must have been made of teak for all the good it did. Far from taking the fight out of him it only seemed to further enrage him and, forgetting Church for the moment, he turned and slammed me into windows of the carriage, unperturbed by the few, feeble blows I managed to throw into his body. A single, flat-handed blow from him set my head ringing and a moment later his hands were around my neck and slowly but surely tightening their grip. I struggled, flailing at anything I could reach with my right hand and my slowly un-numbing left but he laughed off the blows and pressed harder.
Suddenly Church was behind him and grabbed him, locking his forearm to create a tight stranglehold on the larger man. It seemed to have little effect. My head felt like it would burst, my limbs strange and distant lumps over which I had no control. Light and colour leached from my vision till all I could see was darkness.
A bright explosion roared close to my head and I felt the fingers slacken ever so slightly. Another came and a third and the grip on my neck fell away so that I slumped against the window and slid down it to the floor, drawing in short, painful gulps of breath, vision slowly clearing, hearing deafened. I realised that my face was wet and, putting my hands up to my head, saw them come away smeared with blood and fragments of flesh and bone. Glancing next to me, I saw the big man lying on his back, arms by his side, sightless eyes staring straight up, while a red stain spread around his head and into the carpet. Church stood the other side of him, leaning on the snooker table, a small revolver smoking in his right hand.
He stood up straight, stretching his back, and stepped across to where I lay on the floor, offering me his left hand. The muscles in my arm protested and I let out a gasp of pain as he pulled me to my feet and helped me across to a bar stool.
‘Okay?’ he asked me, concern briefly overlaying the look of murderous determination on his face.
‘No,’ I said, in a hoarse and painful whisper.
Church slipped his pistol back into a holster in the small of his back and picked up a bar towel which he used to wipe my face and shoulders. He patted me on the shoulder, saying, ‘There you go, good as new.’ He left me where I was and went around the room, searching the pockets of the men and throwing the contents onto the billiard table as he did: coins, a few banknotes, a knife, a wallet. There were no protests from the men lying on the floor.
‘It’s alright, inspector,’ he said, ‘you can come in.’
The inspector opened the door fully and walked into the room, the barman hovering outside the doors. Both stopped in shock.
I tried to speak but couldn’t manage little more than a croak.
‘Hello, inspector. Rowdy bunch,’ said Church. ‘Got a bit overexcited but they’re having a little lie down now. Don’t worry, though, we’ll keep an eye on them till we get to Rugby. Is there a transport constabulary detachment there?’
‘Er, yes, there is,’ the inspector replied, eyes fixed on Blackbeard’s body.
‘And do you have a wireless telegraph on board?’
‘Yes, we do.’
‘Well, tell them that they’ll need to pick up four men to charge with disorderly conduct. And there’ll be one to box up.’
The inspector paled. ‘He’s dead?’
‘Resisted arrest,’ replied Church. ‘We’ll be taking Ginger here into custody and escorting him back to London by the way. Probably best if we stay here for the rest of the trip don’t you think?’ The Inspector nodded quickly. ‘Which reminds me,’ continued Church, ‘do you have any kind of restraints on board?’
‘We have some sets of police handcuffs but they’re for emergencies really.’ The Inspector paused for a moment and Church gave him a meaningful look. ‘Which, of course, this plainly is. I shall be back as quickly as I can. Come on, Laurie.’ This last to the barman who followed him out and back down the corridor.
‘You idiots. Do you have any fucking idea who I am?’
I looked over to where Ginger was pulling himself up by holding onto the billiard table. The side of his face was already swelling up nastily. A few of the others were stirring themselves into motion too, struggl
ing to lift themselves to their feet.
‘Well it says here “Detective Sergeant Harris, Birmingham Special Branch”,’ said Church, reading from one of the wallets that were lying on the table. ‘So that would be my first guess.’
‘That’s right.’ He tried to smile but it obviously hurt too much so stopped. ‘And as soon as we get to Rugby the two of you are going to be in a vast heap of shit.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t worry yourself about that,’ said Church, holding out his own ID open, ‘they’ll give these to anyone nowadays.’ With his other hand, he reached inside his jacket and pulled out another pistol, a boxy automatic that was much bigger than the one he had used to kill Blackbeard, and pointed it at the other man. ‘Now, Detective Sergeant Harris, you come over here to one of these chairs and make yourself comfortable unless you want a taste of what did for your friend over there. And the rest of you useless shower: stay where you are and lie down facing the floor. And behave yourselves like good little boys because, rest assured, if you don’t your day will most definitely take a turn for the worse.’
14. Frame
I stood at the French windows staring through the panes at the small garden outside the briefing room. It looked lifeless in what little of the day’s light remained, trees and bushes drearily bare, the last of their leaves long since swept away. A lone sparrow darted down for a hopeful inspection of the lawn, hopping lightly around for a few seconds before taking flight for better prospects. I edged past the screen and projector, still set up across the window, and walked back to the mantelpiece to pour myself a cup of tea. It was cold but I was thankful for its soothing coolness on the still-painful rasp of my throat.
The room was less starkly furnished than it had been yesterday. Someone had found a large dining table for us to sit around and against the wall opposite the door stood a pair of noticeboards, supported on large easels, displaying a collation of papers and photographs.