by David Haynes
The train screeched to a lumbering halt and as it did Godfrey walked to the carriage door. It had stopped some distance from the station and he was forced to step onto a damp and grassy bank. Whatever next? he thought as he pushed his hat firmly onto his head and walked quickly toward the cover of Paddington. He had a mind to tackle the driver about it but since he was not entirely legitimate, he thought better of it. Besides, it was still snowing and the thought of a warming tumbler of whisky urged him away from the steaming leviathan.
With wet and freezing feet, he climbed up to the platform and looked into the shadow of the station. A great crowd had gathered at the end of the line. He marched forward and accosted the nearest attendant. He was thankful it was not the same individual he had met on the previous night.
“What on earth is all this?” He pointed at the throng and noticed several constables amongst them.
The attendant’s face was grave and his voice matched the expression perfectly. “They’ve found a body.”
“A body?” Godfrey’s heart sank.
“Yes sir, when they was widening the track. A little boy, they say, but...”
Godfrey did not wait to hear any more and barged his way through the crowd. “Move aside! I know the boy!” he barked at them. It had to be poor Howard. It just had to be.
He reached the edge of the platform and looked down on the excavation.
A constable placed his hand on Godfrey’s chest. “Steady there, sir. It’s a long way down.”
“Where is he? I know who it is.”
“Sir?”
Godfrey turned to the constable. “His name is Howard Yates and he was murdered on that very train last night.” He pointed at the ghost train waiting outside the station. “I saw the man who did it. I saw him murder the boy!”
The constable looked at him strangely and rubbed his whiskers. “Are you quite well, sir? Had a drink, have you? I don’t blame you but...”
Godfrey turned away and watched as they dragged a pathetic-looking bundle of rags from the earth and lay it to rest beneath him. The body was nothing more than a wizened corpse, and a long time dead at that.
“Reckon the poor little blighter’s been in there a good twenty years, probably more.”
Godfrey looked down on the boy. Inside his skeletal frame of his mouth was a ball of brown and tattered paper. One of the other constables dropped down and pulled it from the boy’s mouth.
“I can’t read much. It’s faded to nothing, looks like it might be a legal notice or something. A Will?” He passed it up to the other officer who held it up to the light, such as it was.
“Something to do with a residence and wealth but there ain’t any names. At least none I can see.”
“Hand it to me!” Godfrey snatched it from the constable and examined it. The ink had faded to nothing but amongst the swirls of legal penmanship he recognised the number five and the word Howard. It was undoubtedly the same piece of paper the boy had shown him last night. He passed it back to the officer. What good would it do to say anything? They would think him mad and send him to Bethlem.
“What did you say your name was, sir?” the officer asked.
Godfrey turned away. “I did not say.” He shuffled back through the crowd and made his way to the bench farthest away from the circus. His head span with the possibilities. How could this be? It did not seem possible yet there it was, as clear as a summer’s day. One thing was for certain, he could play no further role in the excavation of the poor wretch lest he find himself arrested for the crime.
Had he been the victim of some terrible trick? Had he fallen asleep and dreamed it all up? He knew the answer to both of those questions without considering them further and it left only one explanation. What he had witnessed and heard last night on that train was an apparition and both the boy and his vile uncle were phantoms. Nothing more. He would return to his house in Buckinghamshire and think nothing more of it.
He rose wearily and found the booth where he purchased his ticket home.
“There is nothing earlier?” he asked the attendant.
“Midday, sir. That’s the first train.”
He turned away with a heavy heart and watched the excited voyeurs gain their grisly pleasure. He could not watch but he could not avoid hearing the chatter of the throng. He looked about the station for some form of diversion, something to take his mind to another place. His eyes settled on the newspaper stand. The political machinations of the country did not interest him but today it would provide a suitable, if boring, distraction from the exhumation of Howard Yates.
He selected the paper without looking at the headline, folded it and returned to his bench. A great cheer went up from the far end of the station and he was unable to stop himself from looking in that direction. Society’s morbid fascination with death never ceased to amaze him.
“Howard,” he whispered.
Godfrey folded the newspaper and dropped it on the ground. He had given his word, he had given the boy hope where none existed and now he was sitting reading a newspaper as if nothing mattered. What was he thinking? Had he slipped so far that the plight of another no longer mattered? No, this was not the Thomas Godfrey who had served his country with distinction and bravery on the battlefields of France.
He puffed out his chest and walked quickly into the snow-covered streets beyond Paddington Station. A rank of cabs waited patiently outside. The horses snorted and stamped and blew steam from their nostrils. They were not as patient as the drivers who huddled beneath their blankets and sipped at their flasks.
“Five Henry Crescent!” He tapped his cane on the Hansom and jumped inside.
The journey was blessedly short for if he had been given time to consider his actions, Godfrey knew he would have wavered and turned back. He did not know what he would find when he climbed from the warm safety of the cab but he owed it to the boy, and to himself.
Henry Crescent was much like the other residential streets in the city. Although it was only a short distance from the hideous factories and the associated gloom, it could have been another country. Birdsong replaced the grind of toil and endeavour, and pristine pavements allowed feet to fall without being assaulted by human detritus. It was London but it was not the London of the masses.
The houses stood elegantly and, with their gleaming windows, proudly around the crescent overlooking a pretty little green. All save for one. That one house, Godfrey knew without looking, was number 5 and it had the brutish and savage quality of a man who had claimed it murderously for his own.
Godfrey climbed down and waited for the cab to depart before knocking on the door with his cane. His knock echoed beyond the door like an ominous rumble of thunder before the storm proper. He braced himself and puffed his chest out as far as it would go. His memory of the man was still fresh and the overbearing sense of violence he had purveyed was alarming to say the least.
He knocked again and pushed against the door. He did not know whether it was good fortune or not but the door creaked open revealing a gloomy hallway.
“Hello!” he called and waited for a reply. When none came he continued, “I’ve come to see Mr Francis Yates. Does he still reside in this place?”
The skies were leaden and the day a dismal affair, but the inside of 5 Henry Crescent looked as if it had not seen the warmth of the sun for many a year.
“Hello!” he called again and with a look over his shoulder stepped inside.
As his eyes adjusted to the murk he was better able to gauge the size and layout of the property. It made his own house appear modest in comparison but it was clear both lacked the touch of a woman.
“Mr Yates?” He did not know whether Yates lived here, or indeed had ever lived here, but he needed to know one way or another.
A thin wail came from the room at the rear of the property. It was followed by the loud thud of someone banging their fists onto a table.
“Mr Yates? Is that you?”
A snarling voice boomed down th
e corridor. “Who enters my home unannounced and uninvited? I shall thrash you!”
Godfrey remained silent but his heart pumped blood with deafening loudness through his tense body.
“I shall not ask again! Servant, hand me my gun!”
Godfrey turned and grabbed the door handle to let himself back out. He had not come here to be shot at by a lunatic. It was then that he realised there was no door handle, merely a round hole where a spindle had once been. He was trapped.
He clawed at the door but it was stuck fast. “I was mistaken. I have come to the wrong address, sir. Please do not shoot me!” He turned slowly and looked back along the passage. There was no hulking shadow pointing a revolver at him, but there was a crumpled and twisted figure sitting in a wheelchair in the doorway.
“Who are you?”
“My name is Godfrey and I seek Francis Yates.” Godfrey spoke with assured confidence, although he felt neither of those things.
The man backed out of the doorway and disappeared.
“Yates?” Godfrey marched down the passageway. “Is that you, Yates?”
He entered the room and was greeted by a stench so foul that he retched immediately. What had once been a kitchen was now a bedroom, parlour, larder and, clearly, lavatory. He dug in his pocket and found a handkerchief to protect his nose from the assault.
The wasted figure of deplorable appearance before him could not be the man he sought. It was simply not possible that this was the murderer.
Godfrey raised his hand. “I apologise for my rudeness. I have made a mistake. Good day, sir.”
“You seek Yates, do you not?”
“I do.”
The man smiled up at him, baring all his rotting teeth. “Then you have made no mistake.”
Yates sat at a small wooden table. It was covered with rotten morsels of food which he pushed about the table as if they were cards. Upon the table there was also a small brown bottle sealed with a cork. The label bore a scarlet skull and crossbones with the word ‘ARSENIC’ in capital letters below it.
Yates followed Godfrey’s gaze toward the bottle and took hold of it. “I give it to the rats. I like to watch them wriggle and squirm as the poison takes them.”
Now the moment was upon him, Godfrey realised he had not the slightest idea what to say. The man before him was a pathetic creature who lived out his miserable and vile existence in squalor and loneliness. He was a murderer but Godfrey did not have the stomach to harm the man, at least not yet.
“I do not know why I have come,” he blurted out.
Yates edged forward in his wheelchair and met Godfrey’s gaze. “I know you,” he whispered. His eyes widened momentarily before he flinched. “You are the devil come to take me to hell.” He threw his head back and laughed. “Then take me if you can. Take me, Lucifer!”
Godfrey edged forward, the anger rising in his chest from Yates’ taunts. “I am no devil, sir, but for what you did I will see you hang!”
Yates stopped laughing immediately and narrowed his eyes. “You? It cannot be. It cannot be for... You are of my dreams, you cannot be real.”
Godfrey dropped his handkerchief and took the arms of the wheelchair. The vision of poor Howard burned in his eyes. “Oh, but I am real.” He raised his cane and brought it down on Yates’s pathetic skull.
*
A few shillings was all it had taken for the attendant to help Godfrey load Yates onto the train.
“I’m afraid my comrade has sipped too much port. This is the train to Gerrard’s Cross, is it not? The ghost train?”
The attendant eyed him suspiciously and nodded. “The same one you caught last night, sir.”
“Good, very good. I do not expect I shall catch this train again.”
The attendant climbed out of the carriage and Godfrey watched him walk back along the platform.
“Now then you miserable creature, it is time you woke up.” He shook Yates until the man finally opened his eyes.
“Do you know where you are, Mr Yates?”
Yates groaned and blinked several times before licking his lips. “I cannot be here. You must release me.”
Godfrey narrowed his eyes. “And why is that, Yates?”
Yates looked rapidly about the carriage. “I know this place. It is not safe for me.” He turned his rheumy eyes toward Godfrey. “I am begging you.”
“As your nephew no doubt begged you.”
Godfrey crouched so he could better look at Yates. “Your hands betray you, Yates. They are not the smooth hands of someone used to the comforts of wealth. They are the hands of a man who has done hard labour. You worked here, didn’t you? You helped build this station and you buried poor Howard beneath its very foundations.”
“Please, sir! I must get off before it is too late.”
“Too late for what?”
Yates lurched forward and took Godfrey’s collar. “He is here, on board this very train, and he will find me,” he whispered.
Godfrey pushed the other man away. “Yes, I believe he will.”
The train whistled loudly. As much as Godfrey wished to see Howard take his vengeance, he did not wish to spend another minute in the company of this awful creature. He stood and tipped his hat at Yates before closing the compartment door behind him. There was no way Yates could stand, let alone leave the carriage. His withered legs and pallid complexion were an indication of how the man had spent the last twenty years – locked away in a house he had slaughtered an innocent boy to obtain.
Now he was trapped again. Trapped in the final compartment on the ghost train to Gerrard’s Cross. Except this time he was not the aggressive brute he had once been. He was a petrified old man.
Godfrey climbed out of the carriage just as the train shunted forward. The screams of the man inside the train were as shrill and loud as any engine could make.
“Find peace, Howard Yates, for I have delivered on my promise.”
The ghost train to Gerrard’s Cross rolled away into the night and Francis Yates screamed with utter terror as he was at last reunited with his nephew.
The End