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

by Richard Whittle

  Spargo’s efforts to get his mother to leave Kilcreg failed miserably. Her good memories of the place outnumbered the bad, she said in her letters, and Kilcreg was where all her friends were. By good fortune the first cottage on the road into Kilcreg – the one opposite the school – came up for sale. By the time Spargo got leave to return to Kilcreg, his mother had bought the place and moved in.

  The mine house was a sorry sight now. Old floorboards had been nailed across what was once the front door. On them, scrawled in black paint, were the words DANGEROUS STRUCTURE, KEEP OUT. The four large front windows had been blinded by sheets of thick plywood nailed firmly in place.

  Turning from the house Spargo looked towards Kilcreg, to the cottage where his mother had died – at the hands of a madman, or what? Remembering, guiltily, that he hadn’t called Jez he took out his mobile. Remembering, too, that Kilcreg was no place to use mobile phones he headed for the mist-clad hillside.

  Many years ago Spargo had clambered all over these hills. At his fittest he had managed to scale the valley side in less than ten minutes. Now, if he could even manage to get to the top, it would take him thirty minutes at least. By the time he reached the seagull-winged tree near the top of the slope a sharp breeze had sprung up and was shifting the mist. It reminded him of that saying of his father’s – Cornish, he supposed – that if you don’t like the weather, just wait a while…

  The signal bars on Spargo’s mobile jumped suddenly, nothing one second to full-strength the next. He tapped a key. Brought up Jez’s number. Down in the valley the headlights of a parked car flashed on and off. It was Mitchell, ready to leave.

  At times like this Jez wished she had a car of her own. She blamed her home town of Edinburgh with its convenient buses – that and the fact she had attended a school and then a university within walking distance of home. She had inherited her father’s love of rocks, and to his great pleasure she’d graduated in geology with First Class Honours. Now she lectured full-time. Same city. Same university. Same walking distance.

  She was born in Zambia. Her parents had met there, she knew the story well. He worked at a mine called Roan Antelope and her mother was the daughter of a diplomat. Her first school was on the mine township, her second in Edinburgh (expatriate rules were that when you got older you were sent home to boarding school). It was a future that had, at the time, scared her. But it didn’t happen. Days before she was due to fly to Edinburgh, on her own, she overheard a parental row she didn’t understand. Days later her father resigned from his job. Within a few weeks she, her father and her mother, were living in Edinburgh.

  The phone call from her father came just after midday. He was at Kilcreg, he told her. He had accompanied a policeman there, a detective called Mitchell. She listened without interrupting and then, when he finished, she started her questions. Despite her insistence he refused to explain why he was there and why the police were involved. He sounded distressed.

  Rather than argue with her father at a time like this, as soon as the call was over she cancelled her seminar with final year geology, jumped on her motorbike, and rode home.

  Her bike was small and intended for town. She had never taken it out of the city, so riding it to Inverness didn’t even cross her mind. She could take boyfriend Joby’s car, she was on his insurance and had driven it a few times. But that wasn’t really an option. There was no way she would tackle the A9 in a soft-top kit car she had driven only on Sunday mornings in half-empty car parks. Flying from Edinburgh Airport to Inverness was a non-starter. Even if she could get a seat it would be a short-notice, full-cost flight she could ill-afford. That left the train, cheaper but tedious, a nineteenth-century solution to a twenty-first century travel problem. A one hundred and twenty mile journey taking over three hours. Or five, if you caught the slow train.

  The bike journey from the university’s King’s Buildings on the south side of the city brought Jez to Edinburgh’s Meadows and Bruntsfield Links, a kilometre of close-mown parkland and fine old trees. Jez took roads around it and arrived, eventually, at the lane behind the ground floor apartment she owned.

  Jez had sole access to the high walled garden behind her house. A few years ago, intending to grow her own vegetables, she dug up the grass, spent money on gardening tools and a shed to keep them in. What she hadn’t realised was that at some stage in their history the flats had been renovated, and what looked like good soil was a veneer of earth above deep builders’ rubble. Not one for giving up she salvaged a small piece of ground in which she planted seeds. One weekend when she was away, someone shouldered open the gate to the lane behind the garden, prised the padlock off the shed door and stole her tools. All of them. Now the much more heavily padlocked tool shed was a home for her newly purchased motorbike.

  Back in her flat she tried, unsuccessfully, to call her father. Frustrated, she stuffed a few necessities into an overnight bag, tapped the number of a taxi firm into her phone and then, deciding she should try her father again, she cancelled the call.

  ‘It’s Jez,’ she said when he answered. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Hi, love. On my way to Inverness.’

  ‘I’m coming up. I’m catching the train. I’ll let you know when I get there and you can pick me up from the station.’

  ‘Jez… no… don’t… I’m not staying. I’m coming home.’

  ‘Why were you at Kilcreg? Why were you with the police?’

  ‘I still am. I can’t talk now, I’ll tell you later. Must go.’

  She kept talking but he had gone. She took the phone from her ear and stared at it, as if it were to blame.

  She had been pacing her sitting room, her phone clamped to her ear. Though she hadn’t taken much notice of what was going on outside she was fairly sure the young man now walking away from the house had been copying down the names on the doorbells.

  Morag’s funeral was a small affair attended by Spargo, Jez, and a handful of Kilcreg residents who Spargo recognised but didn’t really remember. Detective Sergeant Mitchell made a brief appearance, keeping his distance before slipping silently away before the end.

  Spargo saw and heard little of the short service. Childhood memories blocked reality, throwing him back to the mine house and its garden, the sound of his mother’s voice calling him, a warning to wash his hands and face and scrub the mud from his knees before his father came home. She had loved him, protected him, and after his father died she’d brought him up single-handed. And what had he done in return? He had wallpapered and painted her house. Fixed leaks in her roof. Hadn’t been there when she needed him most.

  Again he recalled how he’d tried to persuade her to leave Kilcreg. Many times, four or five at least. He lifted his head and stared at the coffin. Lying to himself about such things made no sense. Twice, he corrected. Twice since she moved to her cottage. Once when the bus service ceased and again when the doctor retired. She’d told him that having no bus and no doctor made no difference. She was never ill and she never went anywhere.

  He hadn’t persisted. He’d had his own reasons. He was living in Edinburgh at the time and was thinking of moving house. The last thing he and Theresa needed was the added complication of buying a house with a granny-flat.

  More guilt.

  Jez tugged at his sleeve, bringing him back. People were moving, shuffling between rows of chairs, staring at the ground, waiting for him to go first. If he caught their eye they forced weak smiles. Someone slapped his back and said she had gone to a better place – which wouldn’t be difficult – and someone in a surreal but determined whisper said they would get the bastards that did it.

  Get them? He didn’t think so.

  ‘You’re not sleeping, Dad,’ Jez said later, seated in the black Daimler limo that took them away. ‘Are you having your dreams again?’

  Shrugging off the question he shook his head. In the days since his mother’s murder his imaginings were as disturbing as ever and it was not a subject he wanted to discuss, not with Jez. He
didn’t know how much her mother had told her about his problem and he was not about to expand on it.

  ‘Surprised your mother didn’t come,’ he muttered. It wasn’t true. He wasn’t surprised at all. She was organising a trade mission to the Far East and had phoned Jez from Bangkok to express her condolences. ‘Kilcreg always was a bit rural for her,’ he added.

  ‘You know that’s not fair. She loved it.’

  ‘She didn’t like the rain. Or the countryside. She didn’t like Scotland much either. Sorry Love. Not another word, I promise.’

  Unlike his own marriage his mother’s had been a happy one, she’d been content with her lot. He corrected himself: his own marriage had been a happy one in its early years. Perhaps he could have been more tolerant, perhaps he should not have spent half his life abroad on consulting jobs. He certainly shouldn’t have brought his work worries home with him. Then, of course, there were his imaginings.

  Over the years he had sought other explanations for his visions. After Campbell in Zambia blew holes in his theory he had latched on to mines. Mines were responsible. When he was nine years old his father took him underground at Kilcreg. By mining standards the shaft they descended wasn’t deep. To the young Spargo, who at the time had never even seen a lift, the journey in the cage to the mine’s lowest level was a descent into hell. Excitement at the prospect of going where his father went each day on his tour of inspection soon changed to fear – fear he dare not exhibit as he followed his father along narrow workings, ankle deep in syrupy mud.

  Unlike the Zambian mines, the Kilcreg shaft and its underground drives were unlit. Father and son carried cap lamps, young Spargo’s fixed to a coal miner’s helmet several sizes too big for him. The weight of the lamp, combined with the heavy rubber cable linking it to the battery on the leather belt around his waist caused the helmet to slip and twist, a motion he could correct only by gripping the helmet with one hand as he walked.

  Claustrophobic passages led to underground voids. Stopes, his father told him – voids left behind when the ore had been mined. Each one he saw was large enough to house two or three double-deck buses. In the largest of these his father switched off their lamps and they stood side by side in blackness and silence. Silence punctuated only by sounds of their breathing and a regular drip-drip-drip from somewhere far off.

  Spargo, scared, had opened his eyes wide and waited, expecting them to become accustomed to the dark like at night in his bedroom. But there was nothing. It was, he thought at the time, like having no eyes.

  It was inconceivable to Spargo that such huge voids lurked beneath the ground he walked on and played on. Were they under the houses in Kilcreg? Under the Mine House and the school? It was also inconceivable that he – young Spargo – could ever find himself in a situation worse than this. His trousers were soaked. His wellies were filled with wet mud. The battery belt was so big and heavy that his free hand, the hand not holding his cap, struggled to keep it in place. But worse was to come.

  When they returned to the shaft his father realised they couldn’t use the cage to ascend to the surface. The ore skip – the huge steel tub hanging beneath the cage – was being used to raise ore to the surface. These skip operations, his father told him, could not be interrupted.

  Running up one side of the shaft, adjacent to the vertical rails that guided the cage and the ore skip, were small wooden platforms, one above the other and quite far apart. The timbers supporting each platform were jammed against the rock walls and held there by wooden wedges. Long wooden ladders linked one platform to the next. There were no handrails, not on the platforms or ladders. Nothing to stop a man – or a boy – slipping and falling into darkness and certain death.

  Young Spargo cried when he was told to start climbing. His father told him that if he didn’t climb out then the alternative was to wait for three hours for the cage to become free. So with aching arms and legs he struggled up ladders from ledge to ledge. Every few minutes, when the ore skip roared past like a piston, he wrapped his arms around the ladder in case the wind accompanying the passing monster tore him away from it.

  His search for explanations for his imaginings didn’t stop there. If they weren’t rooted in his first trip underground, then they came from the stories. Not all the miners at Kilcreg were Scots. Some, like his father, came from Cornwall and they told tales of disasters. Disasters like the one at Levant.

  Back in the days before cages, miners descended Levant Mine’s shaft on a man-engine. Its very name had invoked fear in young Spargo. The man-engine, the old miners explained, was a long wooden rod that ran the full depth of the shaft. At the surface it was attached to a rocking beam driven by steam. It rose and fell, raising the rod up and down. Fixed in the shaft were small wooden platforms like those he had come up in the manway. Smaller platforms were fixed to the rod, and each one could carry a man. When the rod rose and fell the men stepped off and on, from the moving platform to the fixed one and then back again. This allowed them to travel up or down, as they wished.

  Several times in his life Spargo had tried to imagine one shift of men and boys going underground at the same time as another shift came up. He never quite got his mind around it. Never quite worked out the logistics.

  One hundred years ago the pin holding the moving rod to the rocking beam at Levant snapped. Two shifts of miners plunged to their deaths. ‘Broken arms,’ the Kilcreg miners told him, as if they had been there themselves. ‘Broken legs, broken necks and broken bodies. Men and boys, some as young as yourself, piled up in black water at the bottom of the shaft, dead and drowned’. And if that wasn’t enough for the young Spargo there was another mine, Wheal Oates where the ocean broke through to the subsea workings. Unsurprisingly, everyone died there, too.

  To Spargo, these are the reasons for his visions, the nights when the white ghosts walk, the men, the women and the children who drift past in silence, white ghosts that turn to him, stare at him with unseeing eyes. Then he wakes. He always wakes. If he doesn’t wake, he knows he will sleep for ever. These are the things he has kept from his mother. Kept from everyone.

  Ghosts, he told his mother and the doctor. Dead miners, he told Theresa years later during long, sleepless nights – which, seeing as how he was working underground in Zambia at the time, was not the wisest choice of explanations. He dismissed her concerns by explaining Roan Antelope wasn’t in the least like Kilcreg: Kilcreg was dark and claustrophobic, while the Zambian workings he mapped and measured each day were illuminated by bright mercury floodlamps. The mines were, he attempted to explain to her, far better lit than most underground car parks.

  She told him to seek help. When he refused she booked an appointment with a specialist – a shrink, Spargo said. That she had done such a thing led to rows. Rows and sleepless nights meant tiredness and tension. Tiredness and tension meant more rows and more sleepless nights. Theresa was now living with a top civil servant in Brussels. And very happily, so Jez had once tactlessly told him.

  It wasn’t just Theresa who’d quizzed him. Jez had done it too. He had dismissed her concerns, blaming it all on that first trip underground. For a while she accepted his explanation. Then, a couple of years ago and out of the blue, she challenged him about it. Told him his timing was muddled.

  ‘Gran once told me you were having those dreams long before your trip underground with your father.’

  So they wouldn’t have to return to Edinburgh immediately after the funeral, Spargo had booked them both into a local hotel. One his way there, to prove to himself that things were back to normal, he switched on his mobile phone. As the black Daimler turned onto the hotel drive his phone rang, filling the car’s reverentially plush interior with a coarse, sacrilegious ring tone. Glancing guiltily at the driver’s mirror he rummaged through his pockets, Jez staring in disbelief as he retrieved it and pressed buttons.

  ‘For god’s sake, Dad! Don’t answer it! Switch it off!’

  In the days between his mother’s death and the fune
ral he had kept working. He had kept his business appointments, trying but failing to put what had happened to his mother to the back of his mind. Flying to London had helped. He had spent five days at a mining show in the hope of meeting potential clients. With business the way it was, he needed everything he could get.

  The oily voice on his mobile brought it all back – the man in the light cotton suit who had drifted past Spargo’s small display stand, a mobile held to his ear. He was one of those irritatingly ageless men, perhaps mid-thirties but probably older. Not so much elegant as dapper. More a high-class pimp than a mining man.

  He was the man with no name. Visitors to the exhibition were issued with badges and the man’s wasn’t showing. Finally he stopped and proffered a hand and a handshake. It was unexpectedly firm and powdery dry.

  ‘Meester Spargo,’ the man had said. ‘Meester John Spargo. My name is Luis Benares. You are a mining consultant.’

  Spargo knew that already. It said so on his badge and on his stand. Trying to place the man’s accent he had nodded and smiled. Not quite Spanish. South American, possibly. Perhaps Portuguese.

  Flicking through Spargo’s brochures they talked about mines. It didn’t take Spargo long to realise that Benares, despite professing to represent several mining companies and contractors, knew absolutely nothing about mining.

  Now, in the Daimler, Benares was on Spargo’s mobile.

  ‘Please, Mister Spargo, where are you? I am at Barajas International Arrivals. But I think you are not here.’

  As the Daimler pulled up at the front of the hotel Spargo kept the phone to his ear. He flicked back his cuff so he could read the date on his watch.

  ‘Mr Benares, I am so sorry, I am in Scotland. Something came up.’ He swivelled in his seat and met Jez’s stare. ‘A death in the family,’ he added. ‘A close relative. My mother, actually.’