The Man Who Played Trains: The gripping new thriller from the author of Playpits Park

by Richard Whittle

  Without moving his head the man swivels his eyes upwards as if trying to see through his own head. The policeman swaps places with Raincoat, lifts two identical suitcases from the rack and drags them to the corridor. Without saying a word the passenger stands and leaves. As the compartment door slides shut Theo’s fellow passengers, who have watched events unfold without apparent interest, glance surreptitiously at one other as if linked by a bond. Nobody speaks.

  Theo dozes, his thoughts drifting to events that have so changed his life. He has no wish to dwell on them but he has no choice, they have become part of him. At quiet times like this they haunt him.

  The train travels smoothly; it runs on straight track and the two locomotives are well matched – though every so often something gets out of sync and sets up vibrations, a regular drumming that unnerves the others but comforts Theo, reminding him of his boat, the sounds it makes when it break surface and the diesels start up.

  He hears something else now, something familiar. The purposeful tap-tap of steel-tipped shoes hesitates at a nearby compartment and then continues. Theo stares at the door. Watches as it slides open. Watches as a tall, slim, middle-aged man steps inside. It is the man from the platform, of that, Theo is sure. What surprises Theo is that though the man has the bearing of an officer he is not wearing uniform but a finely woven grey woollen suit. When he turns to slide the door closed his right leg moves in an unnatural manner, doesn’t turn as it should. To close the door he places the briefcase he is carries on the floor, transfers his folded raincoat from one arm to the other arm, slides the door closed and then reverses the process, raincoat to other arm, briefcase picked up.

  All, including Theo, watch with expressions of feigned disinterest. A man of such an age, so smartly dressed in times of hardship, is a man to be reckoned with, a man who must be bad news. All of them know that if Helmut Sauer returns to claim his seat – an eventuality they consider most unlikely – then he will have to fight his own battles.

  The man has his back to Theo. As he turns around all heads snap back. Eyes look down. Or up. Or anywhere but at the man. Feet shuffle, legs pull back.

  ‘Kapitänleutnant...?’

  Theo looks up. The man is looking down at him. He has made no attempt to lift his briefcase and coat to the luggage rack, it is a task requiring two hands. Theo stands smartly, takes the man’s case and slips it on to the rack. He takes the coat and the Homburg hat, both passed to him awkwardly. Still looking at Theo the man sits down, taps his arm and smiles briefly. Theo nods. There is no need to explain. Too many have been crippled by wars, both this and the last. Avoiding the man’s eyes Theo sits again. All strangers are bad news, especially those that smile.

  Theo, reflecting on what just happened, gazes absently up at the man’s belongings. The man came directly to this compartment, he opened no other doors. The window blinds are down in this and the others, he could not have seen the vacant seat. Theo ponders, concluding there is no mystery. The man was told about the space by an attendant, just like he was.

  The stranger is one of the lucky ones. Losing an arm is a mere personal setback in a war that takes thousands of lives week by week. That Theo has survived unscathed after almost five years of war is something he dwells upon often. Something he cannot explain.

  For the first two years of the war things went well for the navy. Then fortunes changed and in a single month they lost forty U-boats. Friends gone forever. Somehow he survived this hell and with survival came a reputation he didn’t much care for – a reputation that he was one of the favoured few. A survivor. A commander men want to serve under.

  On his last mission his luck failed him. His boat was caught on the surface and shot-up by a Wellington bomber – six crewmen dead and four wounded. They patched up the hull and limped back to Bremen, one diesel gone and a ballast tank holed. Four days ago – five, now – he brought her limping down the Weser with her deck tilting so steeply it couldn’t be walked on. He berthed her, without assistance from tugs, in the bombed-out dockyards, slipping her gently between the shattered shells of what had been, until a few days previously, two newly commissioned U-boats.

  It is four years since the Party men came to his town. They pestered his colleagues – his fellow mining engineers – attempting to sweet talk them into believing their future lay not in the Harz Mountain mines of their motherland, but in the iron mines of Lorrain.

  For Theo, recently married to Erika and living in his parents’ cramped house, a transfer to France had its attractions – if only because of the promise of more spacious accommodation. And, luxury of luxuries, the possibly of a lavatory inside the house instead of the communal one in the yard.

  There were other attractions. When Theo left mining school the Hartz mines were small affairs, run privately. Then the government took over production and put in its own men. At first all went well, they replaced old machinery, increased production and improved safety. Then the military established vast camps to accommodate what were said to be new miners. Most turned out to be conscripted Poles who knew nothing about mines.

  The promise of France lost its allure when his father, a mining engineer like himself, remarked over dinner that his mining engineer colleagues had become prison warders. In France it was worse, he said. The Schutzstaffel – the SS – ran the French mines with slave labour. It was, Theo’s father insisted, time his son left mining for good.

  Theo took his father’s advice. A snap decision took him into the navy, the Kriegsmarine. Another snap decision, taken by someone else, assigned him to the U-boat school at Wilhelmshaven.

  The train carriage shudders. Buffers clank. The train draws slowly to a stop and then, as if unsure what it should be doing, eases forwards and stops again. Theo remembers another train, the train that took him from Erica when he left home for Wilhelmshaven – how she ran along the platform in the cold and the rain, managing to stay beside his carriage window until she could run no more. And the letters she sent to him, he remembers those too, they are all safe in his kitbag. One letter, his favourite, both surprised him and shocked him. Erica wrote, in very few words, that she was expecting their child.

  At the outbreak of war Theo’s brother, a miner, joined the regular army. His wife Matti followed him from posting to posting, dragging her two children from Hanover to Berlin and finally to Hamburg. When he was posted to the Eastern Front Matti couldn’t follow him. And when they told her he’d been taken prisoner she believed them, they hadn’t the guts to tell her the Soviets took no prisoners.

  A few months after the birth of Peter, Theo’s son, Erica left home with him and travelled to Hamburg. The reason, she explained in a letter Theo received five weeks later, was that she felt duty bound to help support Matti, to comfort her and help her look after her boys. The news disturbed him. It was common knowledge that Hamburg, with its shipyards, docks and railways, suffered nightly, devastating bombing raids.

  These memories bring guilt. What Theo did not know when he received the letter was that Erika was already dead. If he had gone to France like the Party men wanted, Erica might have gone with him, she would still be alive.

  The train moves again and then jerks to a stop. The boy in the corner lifts the blind, peeks around it, then drops it abruptly when the woman slaps his arm. The train creeps again. Continues to creep.

  All eyes but the stranger’s are on the woman as she stands up, reaches for a string bag, bunches its neck in her fist and drags it down. She takes from it a long sharp blade and a bundle of muslin she unrolls on her lap. Using the knife she pares off thin slices of sausage and lays each one neatly on a slab of dark bread. She attempts to fold the slab over to encapsulate the meat, but before she does it the boy takes it from her, rips at it with his teeth and chews it, quickly and noisily.

  The boy is nine or ten, much older than Peter. Without turning his head Theo wonders, as he watches the boy, what Peter does all day on his grandparents’ farm. And, worryingly, how long he will be safe there, now t
he enemy has reached Belgium.

  Theo has seen Peter only once. On his first week’s leave he took a train to Munich, hitched a lift south to Ingolstadt and then walked to the farm – three days to get there, one day with Peter and three days to get back – a single day spent with his own flesh and blood, a three year old child who screamed when he held him.

  It is right Erika’s parents should have Peter. Without them the boy would be lost. Before Theo heard what had happened to Erica they had travelled to Hamburg, found Peter in an orphanage and taken him with them, back to their farm. Trouble is, both grandparents are old. Arthur is arthritic; Barbara is unwell.

  Theo tilts his head back and looks up at his kitbag. It is as if he can see through the canvas to the letter from Barbara, the small, neat writing telling him Erica was dead and Peter had been dug out of rubble. He asks himself the question he has asked many times: what kind of husband leaves his wife to the mercy of bombing raids? What kind of man puts his child through such hell? The answer he denies himself is simple. Most husbands. Most fathers. He blinks hard as if to stem tears but there are none, not now, not after the things he has seen.

  The smart-suited stranger takes spectacles from his jacket, puts them on and looks straight at Theo. Theo looks away, his eyes dare not dwell. His split-second glance fleshed out a man in his mid-forties, possibly younger, with close-cropped hair that has already turned grey; there are no rings on his fingers; on the wrist of the arm that never moves is a gold watch with a wide leather strap. He has already noticed the man’s shoes are old but well-made and that they shine. Theo’s deduction that the man holds high rank was right. Who else would dare stare at him so blatantly?

  The train travels steadily at a reasonable speed. Theo, sandwiched between the woman and an old man who snores, drifts gradually into sleep. When he wakes some hours later there is daylight. The window blinds have been raised to a cold, misty dawn.

  ‘Elbe-Havel Canal,’ the stranger says to nobody in particular and with a nod towards the window. His words are well-pronounced with no trace of an accent. ‘Brandenburg very soon…’ he says.

  All look away. Gratuitous geography lessons from smartly dressed strangers are unwelcome.

  ‘Potsdam first, then Berlin,’ he adds, directing his revelations towards an unreceptive Theo. ‘Two more hours, my friend.’

  Theo nods. Nobody speaks. The train varies its speed for a while and then stops. Fifteen minutes later it still hasn’t moved and the stranger, glancing at his watch for the third time in so many minutes, stands up, leaves his coat and his luggage and steps into the corridor. He soon returns.

  ‘I fear the news is not good. Our train is unable to enter Berlin and will terminate at Potsdam.’

  The other passengers ask questions the man is unable, or unwilling, to answer. There will be other trains, he says, and there will be trucks, or buses. And in any case, Potsdam is only twelve kilometres from Berlin, a distance that can be walked in a few hours.

  Theo sighs audibly. His trip is jinxed.

  As the train approaches Potsdam the corridor comes alive. Passengers, preparing to alight, drag cases and bags to the doors. The boy in Theo’s compartment clambers on to the seat and reaches for his mother’s suitcase but it is too heavy for him, it slips to the floor and spills open. The woman goes to strike him but all eyes are upon her and she stays her hand. The boy scoops up the spilled clothes. Crams them back in the case. Fastens the catches.

  Three of the compartment’s occupants have moved into to the corridor. Finally Theo stands up, reaches for his bag and places it on the floor. He does the same with the stranger’s and it earns him gratitude. Also, it gets him the man’s unwanted company as he walks along the platform.

  ‘An air raid last night,’ the man says. ‘A small one by all accounts but it damaged the rail tracks. We have been lucky lately. I was hoping they had forgotten us.’

  Theo grunts but doesn’t speak. The man could be Gestapo – though that, Theo has already decided, is unlikely.

  The ground they walk on changes from gravel to concrete. Theo notes the stranger’s shoes have steel tips at the heel as well as the toe. They make a distinctive double click as first the heel, and then the toe, touch the ground.

  Both men walk slowly, the stranger with his briefcase and Theo with his kitbag, shouldered high. Theo, unwilling to start a conversation, continues to respond to the man’s questions with grunts. The man lives in Berlin, he says. It has been badly damaged by bombs.

  ‘Though not as badly as our northern cities,’ he says. ‘So how is Bremen? I hear it suffered badly last summer.’

  Theo swallows. Even between close friends such talk is unknown. After more than four years of war Party paranoia has reached a peak. Not only do suspected dissenters now vanish, so do their families, their friends and their distant relations. Theo, on his boat, is occasionally outspoken but he trusts all his crew – or he did until now. What else does this man know? Has one of the new men been talking? It could be William, a former Hitlerjugend boy… not that Theo holds membership of the Hitler Youth against anyone these days. The kids don’t have a choice, they reach the age of fourteen and their parents put their name on the role – and if they do not do that then they suffer the consequences, they lose their jobs and their homes.

  Yes, Bremen is all but destroyed. But why ask about Bremen? That Theo is a submariner is obvious to those that know uniforms, but he could just as easily have come from any one of the northern ports.

  As they near the station concourse the man stops, turns to Theo and frowns. ‘I understand the U-boat construction yards at Bremen have taken a beating.’

  The man is expecting an answer. If it is a test, it is a crude one. Theo mumbles a response barely loud enough for the stranger to hear:

  ‘It is not right to ask such questions.’

  ‘I apologise, Kapitänleutnant, how insensitive of me, how indiscreet, you will forgive me.’ He resumes his walk and his questions. ‘You travel to Berlin? I only ask because you will find nowhere to stay. People will assume last night’s bombing is the start of a campaign, and because of that you will find yourself sleeping in a shelter with many hundreds of others. Some of them can be quite unsavoury.’

  Theo shakes his head. He wants to laugh. To him, crammed in a shelter with bombs raining down is normal. He is a U-boat man. Unsavoury is part of his life.

  It is time to break from the stranger. Deciding to test his suspicions that the man does indeed have a peculiar interest in him he lengthens his pace. Changing direction he joins the most distant checkpoint queue.

  The woman and boy from his compartment, labouring under the weight of their case, stand in front of him in the queue. The woman presents her papers to a ticket inspector who takes them, glances at them, hands them back and waves the woman and boy through. Theo, his papers ready, hands them over. The woman checks them and hands them back. As Theo is folding them ready to slip them back into his canvas wallet, the woman snatches them back and holds them high.

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  A GOOD HOUR HAD PASSED since Mitchell told Spargo they were about to leave for Inverness. The man had become sidetracked, inevitable in the circumstances, Spargo supposed. He regretted not being more forceful with Mitchell at the start because if he had brought his own car he would be well on his way home by now. When Mitchell wasn’t in the cottage he was in the incident van. And whenever he walked between them he called out to Spargo:

  ‘Be with you in a minute or two...’

  Words that were starting to grate.

  Spargo stood near the schoolhouse in the rain, inspecting the flora growing in the stone wall. When he tired of that he ventured further afield. A stroll down the road, a walk to the beach, perhaps – though not a beach in the proper sense because there was very little sand, just patches of pebbles and a mile-long stretch of boulders and collapsed cliffs.

  The walk was not a success. When he reached the turning circle at the end of the
road and the police turned him back. He walked back up the road, past his mother’s cottage and Mitchell’s parked car. He followed the stone wall bordering the grounds of the mine house, stopping when he reached the twin stone pillars that once held the entrance gates to the grounds. One pillar was still standing, the other had fallen. It was now a tumble of stone blocking the drive.

  The stone wall continued well beyond the limits of the mine house grounds. Further along the road stood a similar pair of stone pillars at the entrance to what had once been the mine’s plant yard, the store for the mine’s surplus machinery and its stockpile of ore. The yard was empty now, one of the valley’s flat fields of green.

  Spargo stared at the mine house. The three acres of grounds had once seemed huge to him. At least half of it had been cultivated, and like other gardens in Kilcreg it had grown vegetables rather than flowers. When Spargo was eight he had planted seeds in a patch of ground near the front door of the mine house, marigolds, he remembered, flowers that beamed like small suns. He glanced left and right in the hope he would see their descendants. There was no trace of them. Wrong time of year anyway.

  The house stood well back, almost at the foot of the hillside. Spargo made his way to it, picking his way through a wilderness of tall tufted grass. In more southerly climes this would now be a jungle of brambles, bracken, and self-seeded trees. Such growth didn’t happen here. Here the winter winds reduced even the most hardened, determined gardeners to tears, slicing through everything, freezing the sap, beating down all but the toughest of the land’s native firs.

  Spargo and his mother stayed on in the building long after Samuel Spargo died - rattled around in it, his mother had said. She knew it was only be a matter of time before her boy left home, and when that happened she would move somewhere smaller. And John would leave Kilcreg, she had no doubts about that. The youngsters all did.

  Morag was still living in the mine house when winter winds felled the chimney stack. She wrote to him, saying how it had come through the roof in the night, tearing through beams and rafters and ending up in the hall. Mercifully she was unharmed, but the damage done to the house was so severe the building was declared unsafe. Spargo was in Zambia and couldn’t return.