I nodded again.
'They chaff us, will not give up their tickets when asked.'
I was tired of nodding.
'And do you know what the other classes of railwaymen call us?'
'The pantomime police.' 'Just so.'
(He hadn't reckoned on me knowing that.)
'We must stand together, then.'
'I have already agreed to that.'
I was pushing it with Shillito, but I seemed to have decided that it was all up for me in any case.
'Very well then, try this: we must not deal each other blows'
Whatever reply I made to that, he wasn't listening, but was standing up, removing some papers from the notecase.
'You want to get your promotion - there it is.'
He dashed the papers down on my desk.
'Now I'm overdue at home,' he said, and he strode out of the office without another word.
There were half a dozen pages, torn from a magazine, a railway journal - not The Railway Rover or the Railway Magazine or anything I'd heard of, but some little journal out of the common. I caught them up, and looked across at Wright, who was still scraping away at the pencil.
'What the hell's going off?' I said.
'You did yourself a good turn when you clouted him,' said Wright.
He put down the pencil, sat back and folded his arms.
'It's Christmas,' he said. 'Do you want an orange?'
There was no sign of any orange, so this might have been a sort of bluff. I thanked him and said that if he was after doing me a good turn, he might record in the log book that I'd gone out on the search for Davitt, the fare evader. I then quit the office and walked under a sky that threatened more snow, to the Punch Bowl in Stonegate, which was known for its twopenny pints of ale. It was a secret-looking pub with many small, half-underground rooms that got smaller the further back you went from the street, so that it was like drinking in a coal mine. In the very furthest snug from the street, I began to read the bundle of papers that Shillito had given me. It was a very strange return for having hit him; in fact, the papers were strange all ends up.
* * *
Chapter Thirty-five
On Christmas Eve morning, Harry was up at half past five, setting a marker, I supposed, for the next day. I came downstairs at six in Peter Backhouse's funeral suit; the wife passed me a cup of cocoa and said, 'It fits to a tee.'
The suit was in fact blue. I had mentioned this to Backhouse over a pint in the Fortune of War, and he'd said, 'Don't say that. It's meant to be mourning black. I'll lose confidence at the funerals if I think it's blue.' But I wasn't over-concerned, since Peter Backhouse didn't have any confidence to begin with.
After breakfast, I opened the front door, and was fairly blinded by the whiteness. The sight of all the new-fallen snow made Harry break out into a kind of hopscotch in the warmth of the kitchen. On the doorstep, the wife passed me my topcoat, which she'd given a good brushing. She then gave me a special kiss of the sort normally reserved for late evening and handed me my bicycle clips.
'Buy a paper at the station bookstall, our Jim,' she said. 'One of the cleverer sort, you know. Then go into the interview with it under your arm.'
'To create the illusion of intelligence, you mean.'
'No, Jim, you are intelligent.'
I put on the bike clips.
'Please try to remember that, Jim,' said the wife.
I went down the side alley, where the Humber was covered by a tarpaulin against the shocking weather. As I walked it along the front path, the wife called, 'And if you get the promotion . . . I'll think on about the boots.' Harry stood behind her, grinning fit to bust, just as though he knew exactly what she meant.
The six wide fields were all piled with a smooth whiteness like well-made beds. I made the bicycle stand at York station after twenty minutes; I then stood there for a further three, blowing on my hands to make them work again. As I blew, I thought of Captain W. R. Fairclough, formerly of the 5th Lancers. Under this gentleman, whose acquaintance I would be making very shortly, the North Eastern Railway Police had grown from sixty-seven men of all ranks to three hundred and forty-two. He was all plans, and I'd been made privy to what was surely the strangest of them by Shillito; or at least, that seemed to be the case, but I could not quite dismiss the thought that it was all a great jape designed to pay me out for hitting him.
I had brought the papers along with me. They were in the side pocket of my topcoat as I approached the bookstall, where I bought both the Manchester Guardian and The Times. Brainpower in journalism did not come cheap, I decided as I handed over the coin, but having learnt that I would be keeping my job, and that there would be another payday after all, I'd been a little freer with the loose change I had remaining. I stuffed the papers into my pocket, and walked over to the police office, where Wright and Constable Baker were the only men about.
Wright turned towards me and gave me my wages: three pounds and seven for the past week, and a pound Christmas bonus. I was so relieved to be in funds that I almost tipped him - almost went back to the bookstall for another clever paper as well. Wright also handed me a telegram along with the wage packet. It came folded, so I didn't read it just then, but walked over the footbridge to take the train for Whitby, where I would, as usual, change for Middlesbrough. Wright had been civil enough, but he'd barely looked at me as he'd given over the wages and telegram. He'd lost interest in me now that I was no longer in bother with my superiors.
As I crossed the footbridge, the telegraph lad came bounding along.
'Morning, squire!' he shouted.
'What are you doing here?' I said. 'It's Christmas, en't it?'
'It is for some,' he said. 'You had a wire from London, you know. Come in just now.'
'I've got it, thanks,' I said.
The message had evidently come first into the main telegraph office rather than the police office - but that was often the way.
There were many distractions on the Whitby train, and they took my mind off the wire in my pocket. There were more kids about than usual and the adults were a sight livelier than on any normal day. It was Friday and it was Christmas Eve - as a combination it was nigh-on unbeatable.
All the corridors were blocked by giant trunks and going-away portmanteaus and brown paper parcels, and it took me a good ten minutes to find a seat. When I sat down I took the newspapers out of my pocket: 'To-Day's Speeches,' I read on the front page of The Times. I then put my hand in my pocket to get out the telegram, but it wasn't there. I hunted through all my pockets, under the wondering eyes of every person in the compartment, but it was nowhere to be found. I had somehow mislaid it.
It could only have been from Steve Bowman, for he was about the only man I knew in London. I didn't want him waking up the whole case of the Travelling Club now that I'd seen my way clear to dropping it, but it was not in his interests to do that. I then remembered that he still didn't know I'd dropped it. As far as he was concerned, he had a gaol term in prospect, and no doubt the telegram had been expressing anxiety on that score, and looking out for my answer.
I would try to reach him by telephone before the day's end. There was no sense leaving him stewing all over Christmas.
I couldn't quite get on with the clever newspapers, and so passed the rest of the journey looking at the white landscape beyond the window, and reading again over the papers given me by Shillito, which seemed no less weird now than they had at first sight in the Punch Bowl tavern.
* * *
Chapter Thirty-six
Stepping off the train, I walked past the Middlesbrough police office, hoping not to run into the two-faced Detective Sergeant Williams who'd dished me to Shillito; or attempted to. It seemed that Shillito, having been soundly belted, had come round to me and removed the bar he'd placed on my way to promotion. There was no great mystery involved. He was a double-fisted man himself, and I'd spoken to him in the language he understood.
The police office was separa
te from the police headquarters, which lay on Spring Street, the very place in which Paul Peters's camera had been lifted. It was not a long street, and so the camera must have been taken practically on the doorstep of railway police headquarters - a fact it might be better, all considered, not to mention to the head of the force. (I also made a mental note not to bring up the matter of the shooting of Small David, for I was sure it had not been a planned event, and that the force would count it an embarrassment.)
The Spring Street offices had only been taken temporarily for just as long as it took to do up the ones at Newcastle, and the desk that had been placed in the hallway of the building at the foot of a staircase had a lonely look of not belonging. The same went for the bloke sitting at it - he wore a police uniform with a topcoat over, and pointed up the staircase when I told him I had an appointment with Captain Fairclough.
'Third floor,' he said, and his voice echoed against the cold stone, which made me more nervous than I was already.
I climbed the stairs and a black door with the words 'Capt. Fairclough' painted on it in scruffy white letters stood before me. I knocked, a voice called out and there he was.
He was a handsome man; looked the part of a leader, with grey- black hair and a grey-black beard. He sat at a sizeable desk in a room otherwise more or less empty, and it held the wide-awake smells of coffee and paint. It was freezing too, for behind the wide desk was a wide window, with the sash propped open.
But it was all on account of the view, for Captain Fairclough's window looked clean across the Company rows to Ironopolis. Standing before the desk, I took it all in: the great red clouds coming out of the blast-furnace tops, like slowly blossoming flowers; the trains of all shapes and sizes rolling through the snow; the wagons being hauled and lowered; and the tiny, lonely-looking men by the rails, or on the gantries of the blast furnaces or crossing the wastes in between, where, for the present, the snow had killed the ash.
'Sit down, Detective Stringer,' said Captain Fairclough.
I did it - and too quickly. I still wore my topcoat, and the clever papers, folded in my side pocket were sticking into me. They could not be seen by Captain Fairclough, and so had proved a waste of money.
'Do you know Middlesbrough?' he asked by way of preliminary.
It was good that he'd asked, for it meant he'd not heard of my troublesome investigations into the Travelling Club. But then again: what was the correct answer?
'I am not very closely acquainted with it, sir,' I said.
Try not to talk like a copy book, I told myself.
'Now you came to us from footplate work -' said Captain Fairclough.
I nodded, thinking guiltily of the letter I'd written asking for a return to it.
'I have a good general knowledge of railway working, sir,' I said. 'I find it comes in handy to know the business of a marshalling yard or engine shed.'
That was a little better.
'You had the solving of a murder; I believe.'
He meant the business of my first weeks on the force. I began telling him all about it, but after five minutes he checked me and I coloured up at that.
'The tale does you great credit,' he said, but not over-enthusiastically, and I wondered whether he considered me boastful.
After a little more rather strained conversation, I noticed that Captain Fairclough was looking down at a few pieces of paper.
'I have good accounts of you from your superior officers,' he said. Now I'd expected it of the Chief, but it was quite a turn-up to hear that I'd got a recommendation from Shillito. I'd really fixed him with that blow.
Captain Fairclough now fell to thinking about something, and turned to give me the benefit of his profile as he did so. But I was looking beyond him. The snow was coming down again, and it didn't seem to make much difference to Ironopolis until you looked closely and saw that the men were now moving through it as though blind. I looked back towards Fairclough. I had not convinced him that he ought to promote me, that was a certainty, and if I didn't manage it soon then Lydia would not be able to take up her own position. There was nothing for it. I would have to trust to the new-found good intentions of Detective Sergeant Shillito.
'I think dogs might do a good deal in police work given a little more experience,' I said.
I had made my shot; there was no going back. Captain Fairclough turned sharply towards me.
'Dogs?'
'Yes.'
'Did you say "dogs"?'
I was sitting in tight boots now.
'A fine body of trained dogs, yes.'
He turned away from me and looked through his window, taking it all in right across to the Tees with one great intake of breath. Had Shillito been guying me? The pages he'd given over had been from a journal of the Great Western Railway, of which Fairclough had been governor before he'd come north. They had been an account of the use of dogs in police work. It was an idea that had not caught on very widely, as the writer of the article admitted. In fact it had caught on only in Belgium, at a spot called Ghent, which had a dock that needed a lot of guarding. A single sentence in the article was to the effect: 'It is believed that the chief officer of our railway force, Captain Fairclough, favours putting dogs to work in this way,' and I had trusted my whole future to those words.
'A canine police, now ...' Fairclough said, turning back around slowly. 'What gave you the idea?'
I had what I thought a good lie ready for this.
'Just forever walking past signs reading "Beware of the dog", sir. And I thought - why not for police purposes?'
'What breed would you favour for the work?'
The ones in Belgium had been Airedales. An Airedale was the biggest sort of terrier, as I'd discovered in the reference division of York Library. But I ought not to look as though I'd got the whole thing from the article.
'A big enough breed to put fear into a villain,' I said. 'But the animal must be intelligent with it.'
'Would the dogs be on a leash?'
'Yes, and muzzled.'
That was how they had them in Belgium.
'I believe that other forces use them,' I said.
'Where?'
He had me now. I kept silence, hoping he'd put another question.
'Well then,' he said, 'where? Are you aware of any area of operation?'
'Belgium, maybe?'
That might easily have queered the whole thing, for it surely proved that I'd cribbed the notion of dogs from the article, but perhaps Captain Fairclough had never read that particular article, even though he'd been mentioned in it, for he rose to his feet saying, 'I will not keep from you that I have been thinking on remarkably similar lines myself. For thief-taking, or simply as a deterrent, it strikes me that dogs must have a place in our work.'
And I knew from his 'our' that I had done it; or that Shillito had done it for me.
'Imagine some loafer in that goods yard of yours at York,
Detective Stringer - pockets bulging with pilfered whisky bottles and baccy. You approach him with a dog leashed; you ask him to come along quietly ... Now I'd say he'd do it, but let's imagine he refuses your request. You threaten to unleash the beast. You warn him it is trained to attack every man not wearing a police uniform... He'd come along then, wouldn't you say?'
'He'd come along all right, sir . . . why, like a lamb I should think.'
Captain Fairclough laughed a little at that.
'Now,' he said, when he'd stopped, 'any other suggestions?'
'I think there ought to be a special class of men to do things like ticket inspections and lost luggage reports,' I said.
'I see.'
'I believe this is not a good use of the detective mind.'
'And who would do the work instead?'
'Men developed from the grades of clerks,' I said, thinking: let's give Wright some bloody work to do; get his nose out of other folks' affairs. What Captain Fairclough made of my idea I don't know, but he made a note of it. He then strode around his desk to shake
my hand.
'I have enjoyed our talk very much, Detective Stringer,' he said. 'You need have no apprehension as to the outcome of it. A very happy Christmas to you.'
'A very happy Christmas to you too, sir.'
* * *
Chapter Thirty-seven
Well, I was on velvet. My job was safe, and I had secured my promotion, which in turn meant that Lydia could take up the job of her dreams. Our money troubles were at an end. And the case seemed to have resolved itself beautifully. It was like a mathematical problem that had looked very involved but that, after a long, head-racking while, was discovered to come out at zero. Marriott had killed himself or been killed by Small David, and there was some justice in either outcome. If it had not been suicide then it would have been made to look like it, for Small David seemed to be a great hand at that. There need be no questions asked.
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