'I consider it a blessing in disguise that the Liberals got in, James. It'll give us the chance to put our house in order.'
He turned to the wife.
'You're still campaigning, are you, dear?'
We're in for bother now, I thought, as the wife nodded, saying:
'Church League for Women's Suffrage and Women's Social and Political Union.'
'Well, that sounds enough to be going on with,' said Dad, as the wife strode on ahead, opening up a little ground between herself and Dad and me. We were walking past the old, ruined church on the riverbank now, and the few gravestones that stood at crazy angles around it.
'You know,' said Dad, to the back of the wife's hat, 'women have got along perfectly well up to now without the vote. Why should they want it now all of a sudden?'
"This is a new century,' said the wife, striding on, as though about to walk into the river, 'and women want new things.'
'They want the vote,' said Dad.
'And other things besides,' said the wife.
'Such as what?' said dad.
'Sexual liberation,' said the wife, without looking back, and Dad turned to me with his mouth open and a look of panic on his face.
We are unbalanced, I thought, as we came to a wet, slippery sty, and Dad helped the wife over, neither of them saying anything; there ought to have been another female in the picture, but there again perhaps there would be in a little under a month's time. We were right by the river now. It was wide and cold, carrying more brightness in its golden colour than the sky, and hard to look at, somehow.
To our left were the private riverside grounds of the Archbishop's Palace, to the right the muddy path that lead towards Naburn Locks. We walked on in silence for a while, then Dad said to me: 'Hodgson has a new shed down on the front.'
'What for?'
'Boils crabs in it.'
The wife looked back at us, pulling a face.
'He doesn't do it for fun, you know,' I called ahead to her. 'He's a fisherman.'
The Hodgsons were one of the three or four big fishing families in Baytown. Dad didn't hold with them. They were vulgar sorts, he thought, stinking at all times of fish or foul cigars. Also, anybody eating fish was not eating meat, and Dad had been a butcher most of his life. Thinking on, it was a wonder he stayed put in that spot for so long. If he could have, he would have taken a rope and dragged the whole of Baytown up the cliff and away from the sea.
We began to hear the noise of the weir, and presently we stood before it, the water racing over the smooth stone slopes. It was not possible to speak in that stream of din. The swing bridge that carried the London trains over the river lay beyond. It looked like a steel tower that had over-toppled.
We turned about, and were back home for two o'clock. It was dinner time but there was no dinner, only tea, which the wife had half-prepared, so I put off the subject of food, made up the fire and lit the gas (for it was already dark outside). Dad looked at the pocket knife on the mantelshelf, saying:
'This is a handsome one, James, where did you get it?'
I don't recall answering, but poured him out a bottle of beer, and sat him on the chair near the fire, where he went to sleep in short order. I suggested that the wife have a lie- down, but she went off to the kitchen to finish the tea, and I picked up the Police Gazette once more. At first, I didn't read, but thought of Baytown, stacked up on its cliff - not so much streets as steps. If you let fall a marble anywhere in the town, it would be on the beach within a minute. I thought of the fishing families, and how they carved model ships and sailed them in the rock pools, which proved they liked the sea in some way. It wasn't just something they were stuck with. Anybody could join in too, even the butcher's son, so I liked the fishermen . .. But the railway ran around the headland, high and free, and timetables had held more fascination for me than tide-tables.
I looked down at the Police Gazette, and, without thinking, turned over the page reading 'Deserters and Absentees from His Majesty's Service' to that reading 'Portraits of Persons Wanted'.
I read the by-now familiar words: 'Apprehensions Sought.' 'Metropolitan Police District,' I read, lighting on the top one on the page. 'Joseph Howard Vincent, whose arrest is sought for the murder of two police detectives at Victoria on August 23rd, 1902.' There was a bad picture. The fellow was blurred, and further away than the usual Police Gazette lot, as if he'd already started making his escape at the moment the picture was taken. He looked to be on a gangway of a ship. The sky was very large behind him, and half of it might have been sea, when I looked closer. 'Complexion fresh,' I read, 'rather high cheekbones, carries head rather forward, beard, dark grey mixture jacket suit, silk hat. Eyes small and shifty. Blue. Erect bearing; has a habit of biting his nails. Until the date of the murder he lived on the prostitution of a murdered woman. Two days after the murder he is said to have been at Great Grimsby. Sentenced at Durham Assizes, 21st April 1890, to seven years' penal servitude for burglary at a pawnbroker's and shooting at police. Will probably be found in hotels. Warrant issued. Information to be forwarded to the Metropolitan Police Office, New Scotland Yard, S.W.'
It was Valentine Sampson.
Dad moved suddenly in his chair. I looked slowly across at him, thinking: it should have been me giving a jolt like that.
'I wasn't asleep was I, James?'
I said nothing; my mind was elsewhere, but he really wanted to know. The wife was setting out the tea things.
'I wasn't asleep, was I, son?'
There was a loud pounding on the door. The wife stepped across, opened it, and in walked Lillian Backhouse. The wife was introducing her to Dad. I was distantly aware of things starting badly, when Lillian handed a package to the wife, saying: 'Here's the scented oil. Now you are to rub it on here.'
She was pointing with two hands down towards her cunny. Dad was looking across at me, his face red from the fire, looking like a man trapped in his seat.
Was it Valentine Sampson? That was just the kind of name you might make up if you were swell-headed ... He did have a fresh complexion, but did he carry his head forwards? I couldn't have said.
Dad was now talking to Lillian; or the other way about. He was saying, 'You have children yourself, Mrs Backhouse?'
'I was continually pregnant for eleven years,' she replied.
'Eyes small and shifty.' Valentine Sampson's eyes were not small. They were large and shifty.
Dad was looking puzzled. He was turning to Lillian Backhouse.
'But you must have had a child at the end of all that time?'
The wife was laughing, trying to steer the sound of it in the direction of politeness, but not quite succeeding. Lillian Backhouse was standing in the centre of the room, hair down like a girl, her legs set further apart than is generally considered ladylike. She was swaying her middle back and forth, moving her thin dress, and saying her piece:
'Eleven children, eight survivors; two miscarriages, and not once under the doctor, and never once with chloroform either.'
Valentine Sampson's eyes were large sometimes, at any rate. Small at others? Maybe.
'. . . And that was when I felt my membranes go,' Lillian Backhouse was saying.
The wife was remarking upon something.
'My first?' Lillian Backhouse was saying, evidently in reply. 'With my first I had a straight labour but I flooded afterwards.'
'Flooded what?' I thought. Dad was on the edge of his chair, wanting to go but unable. Tea had to be eaten first, apart from anything else. Meanwhile, his object was to shift the talk away from Lillian Backhouse's insides.
'What did you find was the best diet for building up your strength, Mrs Backhouse?'
'Oatmeal and bacon,' said Lillian Backhouse.
'Ah now, bacon,' said Dad in a firmer voice - at last he had something to hold on to.
They were not blue - Valentine Sampson's eyes - so much as blue-ish. But the Police Gazette didn't run to 'blue-ish'.
'The second and third,' Lilli
an Backhouse was saying,'.. . things ran along smoothly.'
Valentine Sampson at Victoria Station ... I could just picture him there, sweeping towards the trains of the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway. I saw him in Brighton, looking nobly out to sea while dreaming up villainy. The man haunted railways; railways and hotels, it now seemed. Very well then: railway hotels too. He would have a gun about him at all times, of that I was now sure, and the
Camerons, I was equally certain, had taken lead because Sampson had brought his gun to York.
The wife was still bringing out the tea things. Lillian Backhouse was watching her, saying, 'A mother should have nothing to do with heavy labour for three months before or after.'
'It's only a few potted meat sandwiches’ I heard myself saying.
I could send a message to the Chief straightaway, and he could telegraph the Metropolitan Police, South Western Division. We had run their man to ground after all. Why, this might be the end of the matter!
Dad was up and out of his chair at last, as Lillian Backhouse was saying, 'With the baby always writhing and turning like a ...'
And now Dad was in front of me, with his gloves, cane and bowler collected up.
'His lungs were not inflated by the midwife,' Lillian Backhouse was saying, as Dad said:
'The three o'clock train'll suit, James, if you don't mind.'
And so, with a kiss, and apologies, for the wife, and a bow of a very peculiar sort to Lillian Backhouse, he was out the door with me following along behind.
'Who's her husband?' Dad was saying as we crossed the front garden.
'A man of a rather delicate constitution’ I said.
'I'm not bloody surprised,' said Dad.
Kettlewell, the carrier, did a three o'clock run into York on Sundays, and we waited for him at the Palace end of the main street, just outside the ill-feted, never-occupied cottage with the wild garden. Dad was saying something about a Middlesborough ship, lost off Filey the week before, and I made a few comments here and there, but I was wondering all the time at the near identity of Valentine Sampson and Joseph Howard Vincent of the Police Gazette.
As I stepped back in through the door of 16A, the ladies were obviously talking about me, because they stopped talking at just that moment.
'Well, shame on me for saying the father ought to be present,' Lillian Backhouse muttered after a short pause.
She looked directly at me, saying: 'We'd all have fewer bairns if fathers attended births, I'll tell you that for nothing, Jim Stringer.'
'I shall be here, Lillian,' I said, sitting on the sofa,'. . . only downstairs.'
'Lydia will be downstairs, for the hot water,' said Lillian Backhouse. 'That kitchen,' she added, pointing, 'is going to be a hot water factory.'
'Then I will be upstairs,' I said, but with Valentine Sampson to settle, another thought was beginning to cross my mind: would I be here at all?
Chapter Seventeen
Sunday to Sunday
I had a week of waiting and clearing the broken-down pig sties out of the front and back garden. Meanwhile, the wife sat at her typewriter getting bigger by the day. She was in better spirits now though, Lillian Backhouse's bloodthirsty talk having seemed to galvanise her in some strange way. On the Monday, I cut the picture of Joseph Howard Vincent from the sixth Police Gazette, and sent it to the Chief. I had no word back until the Friday, when a telegram told me to report to the Police Office on Sunday morning at seven, later than usual on account, I supposed, of Sunday being a quieter day in the station therefore a safer one for me.
I left 16A on the Humber at six-thirty, wearing the bad suit, and with the glass-less specs in my top pocket. I had the Chief to see, and I was due at the Grapes in the evening, so I would make a day of it in town.
The smoke smell was thin in York station at seven o'clock, for there were long intervals between the trains. The bookstall was open, with the stout party still in place. It was weird, given his full figure, that those books he sold that were not about murder concerned the suppression of fat. There were about fifty souls in the station proper, every one of them on Platform Ten: an excursion party, heading for Scarborough most likely, for a bit of a blow. I wondered if it could possibly matter that some of them were looking on as I walked into the Police Office. I was not yet wearing the glasses, not yet Allan Appleby.
The Chief was waiting at his desk with the Police Gazette photograph of Valentine Sampson or Joseph Howard Vincent before him.
I saluted, and the Chief winced.
There's no need to do that, you know.' he said. He sat back looking at me; he had a different suit on - a little better than his regular one, and wore a diamond stick-pin in his neckerchief. It seemed that he became half-gentleman come Sunday. But he was still too big and wild-looking, cut out for desperate deeds, not Sunday visiting. He moved forwards, saying:
'It's much like when you go into a Church of England service .. . You don't need to cross yourself.'
'Oh,' I said. 'But you do need to take your hat off.'
'What the heck's that got to do with it?' said the Chief, who seemed quite put out. He shook his head for a space before picking up the page I'd sent him.
'Now this scoundrel's been cropping up in the Gazette for donkey's years, always the same photograph, always the shooting of the two detectives mentioned. I think they put him in at slack times, fill up space.'
He held up the page featuring the photograph for us both to see.
'I've spoken on the telephone to the right fellow at the Met,' he continued. 'And they know him only as Joseph Howard Vincent, not. .. whatever you said.'
'Valentine Sampson, sir,' I said, adding rather sharply: 'It's a hard name to forget.'
The Chief gave me a warning look.
'How did they come by the picture?' I asked.
'It was taken by his fiancee.'
'Where?'
'Not known,' said the Chief. 'Some holiday ground. He's at the start of a pleasure cruise by the looks of it. The fiancee sent it to the police with a note: this is the fellow you want for that shooting at Victoria. She kept her name back but offered to make a statement, and so a time and a place was set, but she never turned up.'
'Why would she make an offer then withdraw it?'
'There can be no great mystery there,' said the Chief, kicking his chair back, and putting his arms behind his head, like a man preparing to go to sleep in a play. 'She knew he'd done it, perhaps witnessed the crime; he then chucked her over, which sets her thinking: blimey, he really is a rotter, this one.'
The Chief shook his head.
'Stupid bloody cow,' he said.
'Why were the detectives after him in the first place?'
'Attempted robbery of a bank.'
'Is it known how he was attempting to rob it?' (Of course, I was thinking of the cylinder). 'Was there any machinery involved?'
'Yes,' said the Chief, 'a revolver.'
'Well, I think it's my man, and I'm going to meet him this evening at the Grapes on Tanner Row.'
'Convenient, is that,' said the chief. 'Why, it's just around the corner.'
'Convenient for an ambush,' I said.
The Chief said nothing.
'Am I not to have any support from fellow officers?' I said, and I couldn't help but give a quick glance behind, through the open door towards the general office beyond, which was, as always, quite empty.
'If I get in much further with this lot’ I continued, 'I'm going to have burnt my ships with the law.'
'How do you mean?' said the Chief, and I surprised myself by what I said next.
'I was given the shove by the Lancashire and Yorkshire’ I said, 'but what happened wasn't my fault. I was always up to the mark with the work. Given a job to do, I'll do it well, whether it be firing an engine or robbing a bank.'
The Chief was grinning at me. He seemed to like this talk.
'You want me to save you from yourself,' he said.
He took out a cigar and lit it.
'You hungry?' he said.
I knew straightaway that he meant to take me over to the hotel.
'I'd best change my suit,' I said, shocked.
'That's right,' said the Chief. 'Can't go in your knockabout clothes.'
'It's my disguise,' I said.
The Chief nodded, mind elsewhere once more.
I dashed off to Left Luggage (which had just opened for business), took out my best suit, changed into it in the gents, and replaced it with the bad suit, all at the cost of a tanner.
'Natty’ said the Chief, when I returned to the office, and five minutes later we were aiming for the dining room of the York Station Hotel or rather, one of the three dining rooms. The one we were after lay on the second floor, and, as we approached along a corridor wide as a road, I heard a droning noise to the right: there was a housemaid, alone in a ballroom and pushing an electrical cleaner. The Chief grinned at me as we passed her, and the sound of the machine was gradually replaced by a mighty rising tingle-tangle. We turned a corner, and doors opened on to something resembling a great wedding feast or banquet: Sunday breakfast at the Station Hotel.
A man in livery approached us, and led us towards a bonny serving girl. She said, 'Do you wish to view the breakfast?' You'd have thought it was a work of art, and in fact it was - all laid out on three sideboards before the high windows overlooking the hotel pleasure gardens. I noticed for the first time that Sunday, 11 February had become a fine winter's morning, and this feast required nothing less. At the sideboards, well- to-do folk were eyeing bacon, scrambled eggs, sausages, devilled kidneys, haddock, hams and cold meats and roasts, all on silver plates and warmed by spirit lamps. We took our seats, informed a waitress of our selections; she brought the preliminaries of coffee, toast, pots of marmalade, honey, unknown imported jams. She smiled often as she worked and it was a very good smile indeed; you didn't tire of it.
'This keeps you going until dinnertime, you know,' said the Chief, and his face could not contain his twisted, half- embarrassed smile. He was thinking of the morning he'd left me in the cold Police Office with nothing but a cold kettle. But I was wondering whether we ought to be in the hotel at all. It was the Chief himself who'd made all those rules about our not being seen together, after all.
The Lost Luggage Porter Page 13