The Last Train to Scarborough

by Andrew Martin

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  When I awoke the lighthouse beam was off, and all was grey along the front. Throwing the bed clothes aside and moving rapidly towards the window I thought some calamity had occurred, but it was just an early winter's morning in Scarborough. There came a knock at the door.

  'Yes,' I said.

  'Yer tea,' said Adam Rickerby.

  'Morning,' I said, opening the door - and he passed me an enamel tray with tea things set out on it. My boots, highly polished, were strung by the laces about his neck. These he set down just inside the door, together with a big jug of hot water for shaving. He'd carried the tray in one hand, and the jug in the other. He was dressed as before, in the long apron, but his hair had grown a little wilder in the night.

  'Do you know what time it is?' I enquired.

  'I bring t'tea at seven o'clock.'

  I had forgotten our arrangement.

  'You bring the tea at seven, therefore it is seven o'clock,' I said, putting the tray down on the bed.

  'Put it on t'table,' he said, and just for a quiet life I did so.

  'Did you sleep well?' I enquired, because I was determined to discover more about this queer bloke.

  'I've ter be off down now,' he said. 'I've t'breakfasts to do.'

  I had a topping sleep,' I said,'... only the fire smoked a little.' 'I'll tek a broom 'andle ter t'chimney,' he said.

  'Do you know why it smoked?'

  'Gulls,' he said. 'They nest in chimneys.'

  'But it's only March,' I said.

  '... Don't follow yer,' he said.

  'Gulls don't nest until April or so. I was born in a sea-side town so I know.'

  He eyed me for a while.

  'Could be last year's,' he said, very rapidly.

  'But has no-one else complained of a smoking chimney in this room? Did the fellow Blackburn not complain?'

  'Who?'

  'Blackburn. You might remember him. He was the one that vanished into thin air while staying here.'

  "E did not.'

  'Didn't vanish?'

  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.'

  PART FOUR

  Chapter Thirty

  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 wal
king 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.

  Chapter Thirty One

  The engine simmered outside the Scarborough shed like a prize exhibit, freshly cleaned and with not a whiff of steam coming from the injector overflow. The tall fitter, who stood by it with the Shed Super alongside him, explained that he'd left the steam pressure from yesterday's run to decline overnight and then, first thing in the morning, he'd replaced the valve, having by a miracle had exactly the right part lying about in the shed. Steam had then been raised again; the Super had telephoned through to Control, who'd told the signalmen along the line to expect to see the engine running back light to York very shortly, and meanwhile some lad had gone at the engine with rape oil so that the boiler fairly gleamed.

  'But we can't take it back today,' I said.

  The Super had a white flower in his top pocket; the fitter had a mucky rag in his. The fitter was twice the size of the Shed Super and half the thickness, but they both now folded their arms and looked knives at me. Tommy was up on the footplate. On the way over to the engine shed, I'd told him all about the goings-on at Paradise and he'd accepted that he couldn't come into the house himself but he still held out against finding a relief fireman and running back to York on the J Class. He wanted to stay in Scarborough for as long as I did.

  Suddenly, I'd had enough of the pantomime; I decided to

  get down to cases with the two blokes.

  'Look here,' I said, 'the fact is, I'm a copper.'

  'You sure?' asked the Super, and I produced my warrant card from my suit-coat pocket.

  He inspected it closely, and the fitter had a good look as well.

  'You're not a fireman then?' the Shed Super enquired presently.

  'I'm on a bit of secret police work,' I said, returning the card to my pocket, 'or at any rate, I was. If you want the chapter and v
erse, you can telephone through to Chief Inspector Saul Weatherill at the York railway police office - and your opposite number at York North Shed's in on it as well. Best thing is if you ask them to send a new crew.'

  'Here,' shouted Tommy, who'd now climbed up onto the footplate, 'you've sorted out this fire hole door!'

  'Cylinder oil!' the fitter called up, then he went back to eyeing me.

  'Can I have a read of your ledgers?' I asked the Shed Super.

  He looked dazed as I explained: 'I want to know how many times a Leeds bloke called Ray Blackburn fired engines into Scarborough.'

  'Name rings a bell,' said the Shed Super.

  But it did more than that with the fitter.

  'Blackburn?' he said. 'He's dead.'

  'He is,' I said, 'but how do you know?'

  'Scarborough Mercury,' he said, as we turned and entered the shed.

  Scarborough being a terminus, every engine that came in had to go on the turntable before heading out, and the turntable was in the shed. The number, make and point of origin of all the engines that came through would be recorded in a ledger, together with the names of the crew, and those ledgers were kept in the Super's office, which was in the back of the shed. We exchanged the falling rain for the shouts, clanging and smoke smell as we made towards those ledgers. But it turned out that the big fitter had all the vital entries in his head.

  As we stood in the Super's office, supping tea from metal cups, the fitter explained that the name of any crew man who came into the shed more than half a dozen times would get about, and Blackburn had been through on just about that many occasions. He then related the fact I already knew: at the time of his last turn, Blackburn had been running Leeds-York, and had volunteered to fire his train on the extra leg to Scarborough, the York fireman booked for the job having been ill. I'd assumed this Scarborough trip to be a one-off until the sight of Les White had reminded me that very few railway men go into any station just once.