'I'd give a lot to know how you brought me up on board without the rest of the crew seeing,' I said.'... Hauled the boat up on the windlass, I suppose, and if anyone asked you'd say your brother was paying a visit, bringing a present of a sack of potatoes perhaps.'
'You think you know everything, don't you?' said the Captain, rising to his feet.
I eyed him levelly. I knew a good deal but I had not fully understood the actions of Amanda Rickerby when we'd stood alone in the ship room. Why had she taken my hand? Where did that fit in with the game she was playing? Had she heard the approaching steps of her brother, and mistaken them for the approach of Fielding, wishing to test him further, to really bring him to the point of murder? Well, she'd been half drunk, and was perhaps more than that later in the evening - knocked out by the stuff - which, I preferred to think, was why she'd let me take my chances against Fielding with the protection only of a locked door. She hadn't even bothered to protect herself- not that she could have known he'd go for the whole bloody house.
As I spoke - giving something of this to the Captain and the Mate - a voice in my head said, 'Leave off, Jim. Face facts, man: she ran rings around you.' And I fell silent.
'We now show you something you don't know,' the grey Mate said. 'Come and follow me.'
Chapter Forty
The Captain came too, with pistol in hand. We descended to the room below the chart room, and then we were out on the mid-ships ladder. Again I could see no crew, and could not get a good view of the rear of the ship.
'What's aft?' I enquired, as we descended.
'A red flag,' said the Mate, setting foot on the deck. 'Some coal. Nothing for you.'
'Where are the crew?'
'Mostly ashore,' said the Captain. 'So think on.'
He meant that he had a free hand with me; might do what he liked. I supposed that an unloading gang of some sort remained on board, since it seemed likely that we were about to put off the coal at the gas works.
It was still dark. I still saw the lights on the cranes before the cranes themselves. But the world was stirring. More cranes turned and talked to their neighbours; a train wound through the streets before the flat, moon-like gas works. Every wagon was covered with white sheeting, and the sheets were numbered at the sides - giant black numbers, but they were not in order, so that it looked as though the train had been put together in a hurry. The gas works still seemed to slumber, and the line of dark, sleeping ships of which we were a part remained as before waiting patiently. Yet the factories that commanded the streets were gamely pumping out smoke, making the black sky blacker, keeping it just the way they liked it; and the air was filled with a constant clanking noise, as though great chains were being dragged in all directions.
'Your sister's in the clear and so is your brother,' I said to the Captain as we descended onto the deck, 'even though he rowed me out to this bloody tub. But I'll tell you this for nothing: you'll be in lumber if you don't put me off directly.'
No answer from the Captain; he had collected a lamp from the railing at the foot of the ladder.
'Young Adam would have been banking on you doing the sensible thing,' I said. 'You've still the chance to come right - just about.'
We had remained in the shadow of the mid-ships, and we now stood before the hatchway of a locker new to me. The Captain held up his lamp for the benefit of the Mate, who was removing a padlock from the catch of the iron door. The door swung open, and the Captain stepped forward, holding the lamp to show me a quantity of brushes of all descriptions: long-handled paint brushes, brooms and mops, buckets made of wood and iron, paint tins, a quantity of ropes, a stack of folded oilskins, a hand pump of some sort, a length of rubber hose, and Tommy Nugent in his shirt sleeves. He sat against the far wall, with legs outstretched before him and crossed in a civilised way, as he might once have crossed his legs while leaning against a tree trunk and eating a picnic.
From boot soles to neck Tommy looked normal, but his face had the dead whiteness of a fungus and the same horrifying lack of shape. It was in at the left cheek, and out at the right temple. All his hair had moved to the right side, as though to cover the great lump that had grown there, and his eyes, which were wide open, were no longer level, no longer a pair, the right one having wandered off to have a look for once around the back of his head. I looked again at his legs, and I was ashamed not to be able to remember which one had been crocked. His right hand rested on one of his kit bags, as though to keep it safe no matter what. The mercy was that Tommy did not breathe - and I did not breathe either. The Captain lowered the lamp, so that Tommy seemed to retreat into the locker, and he kept silence.
It was the Mate who said, 'Your friend Tom.'
'Tommy,' I said. 'His name is Tommy.'
Well, he might have been carrying any number of papers that would have given away his identity, but of course I'd told them all about him. I thought of Tommy's fiancée, Joan, wandering alone in her father's shop, the Overcoat Depot on Parliament Street. I pictured the giant overcoat hanging outside like a man on a gibbet. Joan would no longer need to go to the Electric Theatre on Fossgate; she would no longer need to book an aisle seat on account of Tommy's leg, and so could go to the City Picture Palace on Fishergate, where the seats were more comfortable, but ... The Romance of a Jockey, A Sheriff and a Rustler, The Water-Soaked Hero . . . nobody saw those films alone; it just wouldn't be right.
'He shot at my brother,' said the Captain.
'We have his guns,' the Mate put in. 'We took them from his bag.'
'Adam was bringing you out of the house,' said the Captain. 'He didn't know whether you were dead or alive. He wanted to get you into the fresh air. This ...' said the Captain, gesturing at the corpse,'... he loosed off a shot the moment my brother stepped out of the door of the house. He's at least two ribs broken. How he rowed out to me I've no idea ...' He indicated the corpse again, saying, 'He was re-loading for a second shot. My brother walked up and hit him.'
'He hit him only once,' the Mate put in.
'And he doesn't know his own strength,' I said. 'Is that it?'
'He knew it,' said the Captain. 'It was this idiot that didn't.'
And he nodded in the direction of Tommy.
'He was alive when my brother brought him. He and ... the two of them thought I'd know what to do.'
'And do you?' I said.
No reply.
Had it been Miss Rickerby's idea to send Tommy and me out to the boat? Had she been in any fit state to make that decision, having been poisoned by the gas? And ought I to count it a kindness that she had sent me out? I pictured her waiting on the harbour wall for her brother's return, and I thought of her and her brother as two children, whereas the Captain was definitely grown-up, or so they might think.
'Your brother made you a present of two sacks of potatoes,' I said. 'You must have been chuffed to bits.'
Again, no answer. I wondered whether it had been left to the Captain and the Mate to discover that I was a copper, or whether the two other Rickerbys had made the discovery for themselves. They had evidently put my suit-coat on me before rowing me out, and the warrant card had been in there.
'Your brother might argue self-defence, when taken in charge ... i/what you say is true.'
'It's true,' said the Captain,'... and he will argue nothing.'
He raised the lantern again, making Tommy come into full view once more.
'Go in,' said the Mate.
I stepped into the locker, and the door clanged shut behind me.
Chapter Forty-One
As the smell of Tommy Nugent competed with the smell of paint I sat beside Tommy - there was no help for it, the locker being so small - and watched, over the course of perhaps an hour or so, a rectangle of light form around the hatchway, which was evidently imperfectly sealed. When the rising dawn made the outline completely clear I began to pound at the door with my boot heels, and must have carried on doing so for a clear five minutes.
My fury was
directed partly at the door and partly at the Chief. I had been a fool in the Paradise guest house, but I blamed the Chief for Tommy's death. I ought to have been free to make an ass of myself alone. I had not wanted Tommy along and had made that perfectly clear, but the Chief had insisted, knowing very well that Tommy would go armed and that he was trigger happy. Why had the Chief done it? Simply to make mischief? He was pushing seventy but that particular flame never burned out in a man, as far as I could see. Had he sent Tommy to lay on a bit of adventure for a fellow shootist? Or had he wanted to make trouble for me because I'd told him I meant to take articles?
After a long interval of my pounding on the door the whole locker about me began to vibrate, and at first I thought this was my doing, but then the ship seemed to lift, Tommy fell softly against me, and my head was filled with the vibration of the engines. I pushed Tommy off, in an apologetic sort of way, marvelling that I might lately have been carted about in a sack with him; then the tree-house motion came back and I knew that we were moving. Beckton gas works had stirred itself for the day, and we were making for the jetty ready for the unloading of our cargo.
My particular fear, ever since the word 'Beckton' had crossed my mind, was that the Captain would put me off with the coal. Once dead I would be taken up by the mighty steel claw of a crane, swung into a wagon, and carried along the high-level line into one of the retort houses where I would be dropped and burned, becoming who knew how many cubic feet of gas, for the benefit of some ungrateful London householder. A better way of disposing of a body could scarcely be imagined.
It was not that the Captain was evil natured, but I believed him to be weak. This was why he had fled from his own father; it was why he'd heard me out, letting me tell the full tale as he tried to make up his mind what to do with me; it was why he'd showed me the body of Tommy Nugent, letting me see his dilemma in hopes of gaining my sympathy; in hopes I would understand better his reason for killing me. Then again his determination to keep his mentally defective brother out of the arms of the law perhaps went to his credit. The lad had suffered enough - Captain Rickerby might be thinking - at the hands of North Eastern Railway Company employees. Anyhow, he was judge and jury in my case, and I was quite sure it was a role he would have given anything to avoid taking on.
What would the weak man do? He would put a bullet in me and toss me in the hold ready for burning. But the accusing finger then began to point in my own direction. Who was I to charge anyone with weakness? I had lingered in the Paradise guest house half in hopes of fucking the landlady. My mind had been only partly on the case as a result; and why had I wanted to ride the lady? Because she was beautiful, yes. But also to get revenge on the wife, who had taken advantage of my own weakness to gain her own ends.
It came to this: I needed some fire in me; I needed to play a man's part; I needed a gun. I turned to Tommy and, in the light that came from the halo around the door, my eye wandered down from his broken head to his right shoulder, along his right arm and up to his right hand which rested on his kit bag. At first Tommy had had two bags, and where the other one had got to I had no notion. But I was sure that Captain Rickerby and the Mate had been through it with a fine toothed comb. They must have been through this one as well - only for some reason they'd left it in the locker. From one or both of the kit bags they'd removed Tommy's guns - that was the word the Mate had used: 'guns' in the plural. Accordingly there was no prospect of finding a gun in the bag. But it just so happened that when I opened it, I laid my hand directly upon the two- two pistol.
In fact, it was partly wrapped in a towel, but I hadn't had to fish for it. The Captain and the Mate must have been in a panic and no doubt a tearing hurry as they went through the bag. I put my hand into the lucky dip again and found nothing but clothes ... only something somewhere rattled. I pulled out a cloth bag, and here were the two-two cartridges. The pistol seemed to me - as someone more familiar with revolvers - very primitive: hardly more than a length of pipe with handle, trigger and lever forming three short outgrowths. I pressed the lever; it was very accommodating and the gun broke. I stuffed a cartridge in the general direction of the barrel, and whether
I'd done it right or not I had no idea.
I found out less than a minute later when the door opened and the Captain, holding both his revolver and a coal black sack, appeared before me with the mighty mechanical hand of the Beckton gas works crane descending into the opened hold behind him.
I pulled the trigger; the gun flashed orange; the Captain fell back, and I was quite deafened. In that deafened state I took up the cloth bag, and re-loaded the gun. I stepped out of the locker and over the Captain, who still moved, and who might have been screaming. I saw the Mate, who held no gun and looked at me in a different way; alongside him stood - perhaps - the big man who had floored me. The claw of the crane was rising behind them, and Beckton gas works was far too close on the starboard side. I looked towards the foc's'le and saw two crewmen I did not know, had not seen before, but my surprise was nothing to theirs. I walked over to the port side with the shooter in my hand and there, running fast alongside, was a launch with a rough looking sailor at the wheel and an evident gent in a long, smart, official-looking great-coat standing very upright beside him.
Behind the two was a funnel hardly bigger than either of them, and the top of it was ringed with red paint. They were not quite coppers, I decided, but were somehow in authority. I looked down at them from the gunwale on the port side, and that did no good at all. So I raised my two-two pistol and fired, making not the least effect on the generality of the sailors and crane operators and wharf men. But the two fellows in the launch looked up.
PART FIVE
Chapter Forty-Two
Forty minutes south of York, I looked through the compartment window at the town of Retford: red bricks in the morning sunshine, and a smoking chimney that I believed to be the brickworks, and which I always thought of as a sort of factory for making Retford.
I'd run through the place on the main line many times, and had passed through it going the other way only a little under a month before, on my return from London and my imprisonment aboard the steam collier Lambent Lady, owned and operated by the firm of Hawthorn and Bruce of West Hartlepool, and contracted to the Gas, Light and Coke Company for the Beckton run. The Captain was a Rickerby: John, brother of Adam and Amanda; and the First Mate was Gus Klaason. The great-coated fellow I'd alerted by firing Tommy's pistol was Wharf Master of the Gas, Light and Coke Company who'd quickly alerted the Port of London Authority, an outfit that ran its own police force, and it was those boys who'd taken in Klaason and Rickerby (whose shoulder my bullet had broken). The two had been left unguarded for a minute before a remand hearing at Greenwich Magistrates Court; they'd done a push and were no doubt steaming fast to the far side of the world very soon after. An enquiry was to be held into the matter and a Chief Inspector Baxter of the Port of London Authority Police had written me a letter of apology. But I hardly cared about the escape. Yes, Captain Rickerby had meant to kill me at the last, but his intention had been to save his family from disaster, and he'd certainly put off the moment as long as he could. He had also saved that petrified lad - name of Edward Crozier - from drowning by going about to collect him after he'd tried to swim to the foreign ship that came alongside. (Crozier had by chance seen me brought aboard, and then been roped into the job of guarding me.)
The PLA coppers had been decent sorts, and they'd made me a present of the blue serge suit they'd given me after my rescue. I'd had my choice of any number of suits or sports coats and flannels, since they'd seemed to have an entire tailoring department on the strength. They also had a first class police doctor, who'd told me that carbon monoxide (as from coal gas) combines with haemoglobin in the blood to make carboxyhaemoglobin.
He wrote the name down in my pocket book as a kind of souvenir, saying that this was a very stable compound - and this stability was not a good thing. The poison prevented the lungs sending
oxygen to the bodily cells that need it, and it might stop heart, lungs or brain. When it took over half your blood, then you were done for one way or another. I might have been saved, the doctor said, by not having jammed the paste-board into the window frame of my room on my second night - that small amount of ventilation might have been all- important. The doctor did not believe I had taken any permanent injury from my experience, but he did fret about my loss of memory. He asked me questions to test the membranes of my brain, and seemed quite satisfied with the results of this quiz, which ran to enquiries such as 'What is the name of the Prime Minister?' But I had been testing myself ever since. I would run through all the railway companies that ran into York station, or try to put a name and rank to every man in the police office, and do it fast. I would hit a sticking point every so often. For instance, the name of the painting that had been attacked could not have been the Rickerby Venus, could it? I asked myself the name of the oldest pub in York and could not recall whether it was the Three Cranes on St Sampson's Square, the Three Crowns on Coney Street or, for the matter of that, the Three Cups on Coney Street. I had certainly known the answer once, and I wondered whether the forgetting might not be down to the gas.
Beyond the window, Retford had been replaced by flying fields. I stretched out my legs, loosened my tie, and thought about doing a spot of reading. Beside me on the seat was a copy of the previous day's Yorkshire Evening Press, which struck a happy, holiday note in some of its articles, the Easter week-end being in prospect: 'Great Rush to the Sea-side Predicted'; 'Everybody on Pleasure Bent'. All the regiments of the York garrison would be marching through the streets in aid of a recruitment drive, and there would be the showing of a film, The British Army Film, at the Victoria Hall in Goodramgate. It promised 'some very wonderful pictures of bursting shrapnel, of quick-firing guns springing out shells at the rate of thirty a minute'. Also, Constable Flower had arrested a 'drunk and incapable' on one of the far platforms of the station. He'd taken him into the cells in the police office by means of a luggage trolley, and this news had caused laughter when, later on in the day, it was announced in the police court.
The Last Train to Scarborough Page 23