Midge had been told Mr Luis would be wearing a black leather jacket and a white, open-necked shirt; also that he was tanned, had combed-back black hair, and was medium height. He would be easy to spot, his caller had said. At least five men from the flight matched that description, and none of them was Mr Luis.
Midge didn’t find Mr Luis, Mr Luis found Midge, he came up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder. Gave him a fright.
Mr Luis pronounced Mister like Meester. Sinister, the way a Mexican bandit might say it. Didn’t look sinister though, not upstairs on the bus. If anything he looked a wee bit camp with his knees tight together and his hands clasped in his lap. To Midge this was part of the man’s cover, a certain coolness Midge would have been happy to emulate – and may have done had the rolled-up Argos bag he carried not kept slipping from his lap.
‘It is not convenient you do not have a car, Mister Rollo.’
Midge, lost in the double negatives, gave a nod and a grin: ‘My idea,’ he said. ‘Taking the bus. Not so conspicuous. Clever, eh?’
Not so much clever, as necessary. A pick-up from the airport and then a drive into town to do the man’s bidding – the first job he’d had for months – and he had screwed up. He didn’t have his car on the road. Hadn’t taxed or insured it and he daren’t drive without, not the number of times he got stopped by the police. For most jobs he got part-payment up front. Always used notes, sealed in a registered envelope.
For this job he’d got nothing, not yet. Three hours’ notice meant a shortage of funds, and a shortage of funds meant the blue bus, reliable and cheap. Not what Mr Luis would expect, perhaps.
The bus pulled up outside Waverley and Midge stepped down. Looking hesitantly at the taxis in the rank across the road he considered explaining his temporary financial predicament to Mr Luis and then ask him to pay the fare. A man like Mr Luis would have wads of notes. And hopefully pounds, not some foreign stuff. He started towards the taxis. Felt a steel grip on his arm.
‘We shall walk, Mr Rollo.’
Mitch’s jaw dropped. Seeking reasons why walking would not be a good thing he looked up at the sky and considered telling Mr Luis that the smart bird who did the TV weather had said it would snow. The blue sky and wispy white cloud overhead made it unlikely.
‘Walk, Mister Rollo. One foot in front of the other, like so.’ The man looked both ways and took brisk steps into the road. ‘I have studied a street guide. The house we are going to is near Tollcross. Do you know that place?’
Mouth still open, Midge nodded. ‘It’s fucking miles!’
‘According to my guide it is approximately one-and-a-half kilometres. If we walk at a reasonable pace the journey will take us twenty minutes.’
Mr Luis raised an arm, slipped back his cuff to reveal a white gold Rolex. Midge had shifted a few fakes in his time. This one was real.
‘We have time,’ Mr Luis said. ‘And Mr Rollo…’
‘What?’
‘… from now on you will refrain from using any vulgar language in my presence.’
Midge’s jaw dropped again. The only person ever to tell him not to swear was his grandmother. And he’d learned most of his obscenities from her.
Mr Luis was ahead of him, heading for Cockburn Street. Midge scurried after him. Caught him up. Together they started the long flog up the hill towards High Street. Cockburn Street is not the steepest road in the city but it is a close contender.
The climb left Midge short of breath and he lagged behind, the carrier bag bumping his knee. Things would be easier if he could get rid of it. With great effort he caught up with Mr Luis and brandished the bag, opening it as he spoke.
‘I was told to get this for you.’
Mr Luis stopped. Using a gloved hand he pulled the top of the bag towards him and looked in. Recoiled as if from a bad smell.
‘Did you carry this into the airport?’
Midge nodded. Couldn’t make out from the man’s expression whether he was pleased or annoyed. He was certainly surprised.
To Midge, still on twenty a day despite having cut down, walking up Cockburn Street was like scaling the Eiger’s North Face. Effing steep, he told himself, choosing his thoughts carefully in case Mr Luis could read minds.
Walking several steps behind Mr Luis seemed right somehow. He had seen it on the movies, the way a minder stays back and keeps an eye on his man. Because that’s what he was, Mr Luis’s minder. The man on the phone said he was up for a serious job with good money, the opportunity to get up there with the big boys. Why else would he have been told to find a gun?
‘Royal Mile,’ Mitch said as he struggled into High Street. ‘Edinburgh Castle at the top, Holyrood Palace at the bottom where they’re building a new Parliament.’ With so little breath to spare for talking the same time as walking, he stopped. Called after Mr Luis, ‘Apologies… wee bit knackered.’
Mr Luis, street guide open, negotiated Edinburgh as if he had been born there. Midge, trailing behind as they passed the pale stone of the National Museum, observed the man from a distance. The description he had been given could not have been more wrong. Mr Luis wasn’t wearing a jacket but a long leather coat. He wasn’t of moderate height but was short, an inch or two shorter than himself and with a long body and short legs. His leather heels clicked as he took short, determined steps. He looked, Midge realised, rather like that Poirot bloke on the box. But thinner.
They walked on. Turning right into Teviot Place he remembered he hadn’t been pointing out landmarks.
‘Royal Infirmary,’ Midge proclaimed. ‘Knocking it down. Building new flats.’
‘Lauriston Gardens,’ Mr Luis said, a short time later, street guide still open and fingers tapping the page. ‘We turn left here, I think.’
‘For Tollcross we keep walking.’
Mr Luis ignored him and Midge followed. Wondered how much further he could go at this pace before he dropped dead. Tall houses of Lauriston Place soon gave way to Bruntsfield Links – close-mown grass extending eastwards to even more close-mown grass.
‘We go here, I think,’ Mr Luis said, indicating a gap in the railings, heading for it and passing through it to the moist grass of the Links.
Midge followed dutifully, avoiding mud and leaves. Grass was not his thing. One thing he did know for certain was The Links was the world’s oldest golf course. Probably. Reputedly.
Mr Luis stopped. Looking back at the long Victorian terrace overlooking the parkland he stopped and opened his street guide, this time taking from between its pages a small scrap of paper that he handed to Midge.
‘These houses are apartments, are they not? Many people live in them. Locate number twenty. Walk to the door and read the names beside the doorbells.’
‘The names?’
‘The names, Mr Rollo. The names written on the bell pushes. You can do that, possibly?’
Though the question may have been a slur on Midge’s education or upbringing he shrugged it off. Mr Luis was foreign. He was also a client, no doubt one that was paying handsomely. Crossing the road as instructed Midge stared at the flights of stone steps. Reading the names would mean going up them. Ascending them.
He supposed that if he was challenged he could say he was delivering pizzas, though as he was empty-handed it might not sound convincing. Lost, then. Lost and wanting directions. Nobody can prove you’re not lost.
He found number twenty and placed a foot on the first step. Still unable to read the labels he went right up. Sure he wouldn’t be able to remember all of the names he went through his pockets, found a chocolate wrapper and a stub of blunt pencil and wrote down each name: Mackie, Robinson, James & Brown. Morrison, Somerton, and Jessica Spargo.
CHAPTER
FIVE
THOUGH IT IS TOO DARK TO SEE THE MAN, Theo is sure he is an officer. The car that brought him here was large, he could tell from the sound of the engine. A Mercedes Benz, perhaps, a military staff car. He’d heard the slam of the driver’s door and the trot-trot of boo
ts, he’d seen the silhouette of the car’s uniformed driver as it passed in front of masked headlights. Then there was the salute, of course – heard but not seen – a sharp scuff of grit as the driver attempted, but failed, to click heels on the railway yard’s clinker.
In his private little guessing game Theo has cheated. Even without the salute the car had to be military, for who else in these troubled times can get petrol? And he is prepared to go further; the man holds high rank; who but a high-ranker would be dropped off in absolute silence? Also, the man is most likely in uniform, because most people are these days.
The guessing game Theo plays has a purpose. A high-ranker dropped off at the station means a train is due. Why else would such a man dismiss his driver?
With no such foreknowledge Theo arrived in dull daylight eight hours ago in the hope trains would come. There have been four so far. The first engine pulled tank wagons transporting fuel. The second had open trucks carrying timber and coal, also closed wagons containing who knows what. Maybe munitions. Maybe food. The third and fourth came later, shapes in the dark that passed by at speed.
The oil lamps hanging on the slender iron posts along the platform have not been lit for years. What would otherwise be absolute blackness is broken only by a vertical sliver of yellow light from the station’s small signal box. Twisted blackout curtains, perhaps. Theo looks skywards. His navigation skills tell him that up there, behind dense cloud, is a full moon.
So why would a high ranker wait here rather than Hanover or Braunschweig? Why choose a halt, a railway station where milk trains stop every morning at a god-awful hour and where cattle are loaded for market?
Sounds break the silence. The stranger is walking, not in boots but with a slow rhythmic step in shoes tipped with steel. Theo listens, hearing the sound fade as the man walks away. Hears it stop, restart, then get louder. The man is pacing to keep warm – an officer with a desk job maybe, a man unused to such cold. And there is something else, a fault in the man’s step, an almost imperceptible, lazy-leg drag. Theo listens intently for the tap of a stick. There is none.
There was a time when Theo would have walked to the man, struck up a conversation and perhaps shared a smoke but you don’t do that now. It would be just his luck to come face-to-face with an immaculately dressed Schutzstaffel colonel. The very last person you want to meet when you are dressed in a shabby leather jacket without military markings is a high ranking SS man.
As if it matters in the dark, Theo reaches up with one hand and adjusts his cap. At least he still has one.
The first hint of an approaching train comes as a barely perceptible, high-pitched squeal. At first Theo mistakes it for the noise that lives in his head, the sharp, constant hiss put there by engines. Or pressure. Or gunfire. Or any number of things that conspire to destroy hearing.
The track sings loudly now, a thousand feint bells with sharp, intermixed tones. Theo turns towards the sounds and detects, in the night sky, a feint red glow. He waits and watches. Soon the glow sharpens. Becomes an incandescent plume lighting up the whole sky. Two plumes, he tells himself; twin pillars of bright sparks from two chimneys. Two locomotives, burning bad coal. Night trains are such easy targets, so thank god for the clouds. Tonight there will be no bombs.
Theo waits nervously, wondering if the train is for passengers and if it will stop. He relaxes only when the steam that drives these things is cut back. The towers of sparks vanish; the brakes tighten on steel with long, painful groans. Then, almost unexpectedly, the noise is upon him, two hundred tons of steel pulling god-knows-what.
Way down the platform a hand lamp is swinging, a red light for the locos to head for. Bright burning coals in open fireboxes flash eerie orange glows as they pass buildings and railings, porters’ barrows and the glass bowls of the oil lamps.
Fireships that slip silently alongside.
For a few seconds there is silence, broken only by a slow rhythmic pumping of the engines. Then, suddenly, the slam of a single door, and raised voices; window blinds move; faces peer out but there is nothing to be seen. Theo, overtired, comes to life quickly, heaves his bag to his shoulder and moves to the train. Searching for a seat he walks beside carriages and hauls himself up, opens carriage doors but sees no spaces. Though this is a main line these are not main line coaches. They have no corridors. There is nowhere to stand.
A railwayman shouts. Further down the train a carriage door hangs open. Theo heads for it and just as gets there the train starts to move. Strong arms reach out and haul him inside, arms that belong to a women. He mumbles his thanks. Gives a quick smile that in the dark goes unseen. He stands for a while and recovers his breath. Only then does he realise he is in a corridor, not a compartment.
Only two of the lamps in the corridor are lit. The outer windows are obscured with thick paper, pasted on, and the windows of the compartments have their blackout blinds down. These days most train corridors are packed tight with travellers and baggage, often soldiers, sailors and airmen on leave. This corridor is remarkably clear and he works his way down it, sliding doors open and peering inside. That none of the passengers look back at him does not surprise him. People don’t do that, not now.
Unable to find a seat Theo dumps his kitbag on the floor and sits down on it. He is considering whether or not to light his pipe when a man in railway uniform and forage cap beckons to him. Tells him there is an empty seat in the next carriage.
Theo has checked all the compartments. He knows there were no seats. He even remembers the passengers in the one he is led to – the men in their suits, the woman with the smartly-dressed boy. The seat next to the woman is unoccupied; he wonders if he simply missed it.
The train is up to speed and rocking gently. The passengers in the compartment move their feet grudgingly as Theo shuffles in with his kitbag held high. To make space for it on the overhead rack he shoves other bags aside and heaves it up. The compartment is over hot and stuffy so he shrugs off his leather jacket, bundles it up and adds it, with his naval cap, to the pile. Finally, as a concession to smartness, he tugs down the hem of his naval tunic and straightens his neckerchief.
His clothes might not be smart but at least they are clean. He had hoped for a new uniform for his shore leave but there was no chance of that. Naval stores at Bremen, the port where he docked, had been flattened by bombs. He senses passengers sneaking looks, their eyes on his blue serge tunic and the twin stripes on each cuff, stripes now more dirty yellow than gold. Just a naval lieutenant. Nothing too grand.
The train changes tracks with a judder and Theo, uncharacteristically off-balance, drops clumsily into his seat space. The woman beside him shuffles as if to give space, somehow managing to take up more than before. That the seat is warm surprises him. He wonders if the railwayman himself vacated he seat and if so, why. While attempting to make himself comfortable he glances surreptitiously around him, moving only his eyes. His fellow passengers are waxen faced dummies, all with closed eyes, corpses in a crypt now with standing room only.
The compartments, like the corridors, are dimly lit. The only evidence there were once reading lamps on the walls is the small ragged screw holes that once held brass fittings. Fittings removed, no doubt melted down to make cartridge and shell-cases. Where is the brass now, he wonders? At the bottom of the Atlantic? In a field on the Russian Front? And the Allies, where are they now? Rumour has it they are already in France and Belgium. Rumour also has it the Soviets have reached Warsaw. Nobody is sure. And anyway, who can you believe?
The train moves slowly now. When the locomotives change speed the carriages vibrate and make the passengers nervous. They glance at the door, the floor, the roof of the compartment or its blind-covered windows. Theo hardly notices. He is used to such things. He is also used to bad air like he breathes now. Despite these things he struggles to stay awake; like the others he is lulled by the beat of the engines and the song of the wheels; like the others his head droops forwards. Slowly, very slowly, he drifts into
sleep.
He wakes to the sound of voices. Some way down the corridor a compartment door slides open. Like him, his fellow passengers are awake. Like him, they recognise the sounds of a spot check on papers. He hears two voices. Two officials. Shrugging off sleep he gropes in his tunic for a white canvas envelope with his pass book and permit to travel. Others in the compartment fumble through pockets and bags. The woman stands clumsily, reaching up to tug at a brown leather bag. Fumbling with it, it slips off the rack and falls on to Theo. He looks up at the woman and smiles. It is not returned.
As the woman sits down the compartment door opens. Two men, one a uniformed railway policeman and the other wearing a raincoat, step inside and study faces. Theo moves mechanically, opens his naval passbook to his photograph and unfolds his travel permit. Tucking the permit in his passbook as a marker, he holds it out. He knows the drill: leave the passbook closed or the travel permit folded and you are insolent, they will be taken from you and thrown back in your face. Present both documents wide open and they wonder why you don’t want them to see other pages.
There are more of these rules: be casual but not too casual; let them see your face clearly but don’t look them in the eye unless they speak to you; show no interest whatever in what they do to others. And never, ever, smile.
Ignoring other passengers the man in the raincoat elbows the policeman aside and takes Theo’s papers, glances at them and hands them back. Then, one by one and much more thoroughly, he checks those of the other passengers.
The last to be checked is an elderly man sitting opposite Theo, a man around sixty with long grey hair. The man in the raincoat glances several times from the man to the photograph.
‘You are Helmut Sauer. You travel to Berlin.’
The man nods. He seems to shrink into his seat as if wishing it would swallow him. His eyes are wide, his hands tremble.
‘Your bags, which are they?’
The Man Who Played Trains: The gripping new thriller from the author of Playpits Park Page 4