'Whoever finds the caddy short,' said Wright.
'But that's always me,' said Crawford. 'Whenever I go to make a pot of tea there's none left, and I have to go to the stores for more, which sets me back a tanner.'
'If you're the one who most often finds it empty,' said Constable Baker, who was leaning against the wall near the open door that gave on to the Chief's room (he wouldn't have been doing that if the Chief had been around), 'then that proves you must drink the most.'
'Let's have this right,' said Crawford, looking up from the smoking fire. 'You're saying that I never have the chance to drink tea on account of the large quantity of tea that I drink?'
'Yes,' said Baker. 'That puts it very nicely. But in my view the tea ought to be paid for out of the swear box.'
The two constables looked at Wright, who kept the swear box on his desk.
He was shaking his head, saying, 'I got the swear box up for the superannuation fund.'
Shillito looked up from his writing.
'Will you lot quit blathering and get down to some police work? Crawford,' he continued, pointing, 'fettle that fire instead of gawping at it.'
I knew that he was about to start in on me next, but he only eyed me for a moment, then rose smartly to his feet and stepped out of the door. Here was my chance to telephone Bowman. But no, there was a telegram form in Shillito's hand, which meant he'd only be gone for a moment. When Shillito wanted his business kept secret, he'd go out into the station, and give the form directly to the telegraph boy.
'What do you think, Jim?' said Crawford, who was now halfheartedly poking the fire in accordance with Shillito's instructions.
'Eh?' I said.
'Do you think the swear box should pay for the tea? Speaking as a regular contributor to the swear box—'
'—or a regular swearer, at any rate,' put in Baker.
But just at that moment Shillito returned, killing all amiability with his habitual order:
'Your notebook, Detective Stringer.'
The office fell silent as I picked it up from my desk, and passed it to him.
'I went to the Cape,' I said, 'but I did not arrest Clegg.'
My heart was galloping as I spoke, but I tried not to let him see it. This was the first time that I had crossed him in any serious way. He said nothing to my answer, making a show of reading the book for a space; but I could see the colour rising in his face.
He initialled the book and handed it back to me.
'I have sent you twice to bring in this man, and twice you have failed to do it, and for no good reason. Your book is once again full of this business of the - Club.'
I reached over to my desk, and handed him the photograph.
'This is the picture described in the book. It shows the Travelling Club. It was taken by Peters, who was murdered. I know for a fact that one of these men in the pictures has also been killed and another more than likely. One of 'em's Lee, who was done in the Lame Horse Murder - you might remember that. Burglary gone wrong. But everything points to all the blokes having met a very sorry end.'
Shillito had a dead look in his eyes; he was staring hard at the top button of my suit coat.
'I am placing you on report, Detective Stringer. I will speak to Chief Inspector Weatherill later today, with the recommendation that your application for promotion should proceed no further.'
'But the interview with Captain Fairclough is all arranged,' I said.
'One stroke of the pen will fix that,' said Shillito.
Suddenly, the end of my time in the police force came into clear view. I would not continue in any event if I did not achieve the promotion on Christmas Eve. Shillito spoke on. I hardly listened, but I saw in imagination the Gateshead Infant crossing the high level into Middlesbrough station, and the picture of it somehow reassured me. I was a railwayman through and through, where Shillito was not, even though he got his living from the railways. He hardly ever gave a glance to the traffic notices that were pinned up in the police office, and were meant to keep us in touch with the world out there on the lines. The Iron Roads held no romance for Ernest Shillito, and it was wrong that he should prosper in the North Eastern, and therefore he would not. I would win out over thin double-gutted bastard in the end, whatever setbacks there might be on the way.
Shillito was now mentioning a name that was for an instant unfamiliar: Williams. He held a telegram in his hand. Detective Sergeant Williams had been in communication - letter sent express overnight, written in haste - forgive scribble, but Williams most unsettled as a consequence of his interview with Detective Stringer. Stringer, it appeared, had a bee in his bonnet about a case long since solved and closed: the murder of George Lee. A very vicious individual of proven bad character, Sanderson, had been hanged for this, a point seemingly not taken by Stringer, who had appeared, all in all, a rather curious sort of fellow, if one detective sergeant might so put it to another ...
Williams, then, was a bigger bastard even than Shillito, for he presented himself as something else. Face to face, you'd take him for the whitest bloke that ever stepped, with his kindly manner and 'Do take the documents away with you, if you'd rather'.
'You are to return the files you took from the Middlesbrough office by the next post,' Shillito was saying, 'and then you are to go back to your normal duties.'
'What about the photograph?' I said.
But Shillito had gone back to his work.
I stood before his desk with my arms folded, photograph in hand, feeling like an ass. Shillito looked up at me, saying, 'I've done with you for the present, Stringer.'
I said, 'Do you want me to go back for Clegg?'
At this he gave a mock laugh, and set down his pencil.
He leant back in his chair and looked at me.
'Now that beats all,' he said. 'Do you honestly think I'm going to send you back so you can sup another few pints with your pal Clegg? Why, you'll be turning out for his blinking football team next.'
Nobody would be arresting Clegg, for Shillito had now realised that he would be in bother if the matter went any further.
I walked back to my desk, where I collected up the papers on Lee and Falconer, preparatory to posting them back to Middlesbrough.
'That photograph of yours,' Shillito called across. 'What does it signify? You might have a picture of any lot of men - the Institute Billiard Club for the matter of that - and if you came to look at it again a year on you might see that some of them had come a cropper. It's called damned bad luck, Stringer.' He said this last with impressive force, as if he really knew something of damned bad luck - and perhaps he did. After all, he'd missed his way in life, as I'd missed mine. My goal had been the footplate, his playing football as a professional.
I could not prove the importance of the photograph, and I had staked my future on inadequate data. Well, that was too bad. As Shillito got his head down again, for another hour of loud breathing and effortful writing, I got out my own pen, and composed, not a flash report, but a letter to a good fellow called John Ellerton. He was the shed superintendent for the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway at Sowerby Bridge where, four years ago, I had driven a locomotive through a wall after a day of firing that engine in the company of an old boy called Terry Kendall.
Kendall, my driver and therefore my governor, had asked me to stable the engine at the end of the turn. It had been quite in order for him to do so, but he had also told me that the engine brake had been warmed, which it had not. As a result, the steam by which it worked condensed in its tubes instead of putting the brakes to the wheels.
It ought by rights to have been Kendall who was jacked in and not me. I had always known this, but had held off saying it. I would not say it now either, but it was the conclusion that I hoped would be drawn from my letter. In any case, Father Kendall, as he had been known, would be out of consideration by now, superannuated long since.
My letter began: 'My dear John, You will be surprised to read my name after such a long time . . .
' and went on to ask whether he might see his way clear, if he could do so without entrenching on his own convenience (which expression was used, as far as I could see, by all police letters of a non-threatening nature), to inquire as to the possibility of my appealing against the decision to dismiss me, which I had always felt was unjust, and which over time might have come to seem so within the motive power office. With Shillito labouring away at his letters before me, I went on to say that my heart was not in railway police work, and that my experience in the force had only confirmed my decided inclination for the life of the footplate.
I closed with a few friendly remarks, and news of the birth of my son. I used police-office paper, but crossed out that address and wrote in my own at Thorpe-on-Ouse. I did not look over the letter on finishing it, because I knew that I might not have the brass neck to send it if I thought too hard about what I'd put. In fact, I was in such a rush to get it off that I swept my arm across my ink pot as I reached for an envelope, sending a tide of blue across the green leathern top of my desk, and towards the photograph of the Travelling Club, which I automatically tried to protect by making a barrier with my arm - with the sleeve of my good suit coat.
'Fuck!' I shouted, and Shillito's head rocked upwards.
I turned to see Wright, who, instead of shaping to help me mop the ink, was tapping the swear box with his pencil. I ran off into the jakes with the idea of soaking my coat sleeve, and when I returned, Wright was now blotting the ink, and Shillito had left. It was as though there could be fellowship in the office, but only with Shillito out of it.
'I'm obliged to you, mate,' I said to Wright.
'No harm done to your precious picture,' he said, handing it over to me.
It was on account of the picture that I had ruined the coat (for it was ruined), and I began to think the damned picture cursed. Perhaps it brought ill luck to every man connected with it.
My letter had escaped the ink flood, and I gave it for posting to Wright, who was pointing at the picture.
'I know this one,' he said.
He was indicating the distinguished-looking cove in black. But he was frowning at the same time.
'Can you put a name to him?'
He closed his eyes for a space, which, Wright being very old, made him look dead.
'No,' he said, opening them again. 'But I have a mental picture of him here in York - somewhere about the town.'
I looked again at the gent in the picture, contemplating the blank wall of mystery.
'Everyone thinks they know this bloke,' I said, at which Wright looked a bit put out, so I said, 'But thanks anyway.'
'I'd drop it if I were you,' he said, and he glanced at Shillito's empty chair, adding, 'Never mind missed promotion - he means to have you stood down.'
A mental picture came into view: the high wall that ran around the York Workhouse.
'That would be a shame, wouldn't it?' I said. 'I know what a lark it is for you to watch our battles.'
Then Wright knocked me by saying, 'It would be more of a lark if you stood up to him.'
I nodded.
'I always mean to,' I said, 'but when it comes to the touch -'
The thought of my own weakness shamed me, so I changed tack, saying to Wright, 'I'd like to telephone London again. Could you put me through?'
Wright took my letter for posting and wound the magneto for me.
A moment later, I was speaking this time to a very cheery bloke who worked on The Railway Rover.
'Editorial,' he said.
'Is Mr Bowman about?' I asked.
'Not presently,' I think he said, which was followed by something that might have been: 'He's been out of the office a good deal lately, and I haven't seen him all day today.'
The sound of what seemed like a gale blowing down the line took all expression out of his voice, so that he might have been delighted by Bowman's absence or greatly worried by it. I said I would call back; but the idea was growing on me that Bowman had bloody well disappeared too.
* * *
Chapter Fifteen
'Where's the Chief?' I asked Wright.
'Don't you know?' he said. 'He's at a shooting match.'
I struck out along Platform Four with the photograph in my hand.
A couple of dozen people waited there, huddled into their comforters under the station's sky - the great frosted-glass canopy. Passengers always looked lonely until the train came. A sort of Christmas lean-to, hung with tinsel, had been put up by the side of the Lost Luggage Office for the sale of nuts and sweetmeats. It was an assistant from the bookstall who'd been put to working inside.
I gave him a nod, thinking the while of the letter I'd written to Ellerton, and already wincing at the memory. It was all sob stuff. What did anyone at the Lancashire and Yorkshire care that I was miserable in my new employment; and had I really suggested that they might change their minds?
I saw the telegraph boy walking towards me - the Lad, as he was always known.
'How do, Mr Stringer?' he called out.
'How do?' I said.
'Where're you off to?' he asked, as we closed.
'Platform Thirteen,' I said.
'Good-o,' he said.
He was always cheerful, the Lad.
I jumped down off the edge of Thirteen, which was against regulations, and strode out over the sidings, on to which a few snowflakes that looked like bits of paper were falling. I was making for the old loco-erecting shop, which having been disused for years had lately been converted into a shooting range for the
Company rifle club, of which Chief Inspector Weatherill was the governor.
I pushed through the door of the great shed, which at first seemed empty as well as freezing, and then a shot rang out, quite deafening me for a space. In front of me were booths roughly made out of railway sleepers. Each booth corresponded to a target dangling from a wire stretching the width of the building at the far end, and the bullets flew to these targets through half a dozen columns of light from gas rings high in the roof. There was a balcony above the line of targets, and, set into the wall behind it, a vast clock with no hands, but the central spindle that had once held them remained, and it struck me that it must have made a tempting supplementary target for the riflemen.
I walked along the line of booths, and they were all empty but the last one, in which the Chief sat at a low stool, hunched over with the rifle on the stone floor beside him. Evidently the contest hadn't started yet—that, or it had just finished.
'Sir?' I called. 'Might I have a word?'
The Chief seemed not to have heard; he wore a cravat against the cold, but no topcoat or jacket (to allow free movement to his arms, as I supposed), and he was bareheaded, allowing me sight of his scant strands of dirty yellow hair, which fell across his head at intervals of about half an inch, like the lines drawn on a globe.
I heard a thin squeal of metal, and the targets fifty yards off began to moving to the right. They were being winched towards a hut made of old boiler plates in the right-hand corner of the building. The target marker sat in there, I knew.
I called to the Chief again, and then I spied the ear defenders bundled into his earholes. He was still looking down at the floor, perhaps muttering to himself, but what he was saying I could not make out, just as I could never make out what the Chief was thinking. I couldn't make him out full stop, but I liked him, and I'd always felt he had a liking for me, though he'd given me the hard word on plenty of occasions.
I had taken the photograph out of my coat pocket, and was advancing towards the Chief when an electrical bell sounded from the far end of the shed. This made enough din to rouse the Chief, who looked up in a daze as I passed him the photograph.
'If you have a second, sir, I wanted you to see this.'
'Eh?' he said.
I passed him the photograph, and he looked at it with his ear defenders still in. Behind him, at the far end of the range, the marker had opened the door of his iron shelter, and was approaching us u
nder the line of gaslights.
'It's the Club,' I said.
He knew the story of the Travelling Club in rough outline, but this was the first time he'd had sight of the photograph. He was studying it as the marker leant across the low timber barricade that separated the firing positions from the main part of the range; he passed the Chief a target that had been riddled with the Chief's bullets, and the Chief passed the photograph back to me as he received the target. It was about the size of a newspaper, and the Chief took a while getting to grips with it, which annoyed me, for it was a hard job to keep his mind fixed on a subject even without distraction.
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