The Necropolis Railway

by Andrew Martin

'Who's dead?' I asked again over the rushing of the water and the clanking of the pipe and Barney Rose saying, 'I never have and that's for certain. All the same, there was a capital attendance at the game.' As he turned over a page I asked my question again, even though I knew very well by now what the answer would be.

  Vincent leant down to turn off the injector, then stood up and looked at me. 'Mr Rowland Smith,' he said, sticking out his chin. ‘I believe you were acquainted with the gentleman.'

  I looked at him as hard as I could, and he did the same to me, but at the last moment I turned away because I fancied he was going to grin.

  I thought: if I had replied to Smith earlier he might still be alive.

  Rose took out his pipe, sneezed, and said: 'Brilliant innings by Bosanquet yesterday.' Then I heard the Governor walking up, or rather I heard the sound of his cough. He asked me to come down from Twenty-Nine, and I followed him out over the glittering tracks, with Rose and Vincent no doubt staring after us.

  There was a newspaper under his arm, and he passed it to me folded in such a way that I had a choice of two articles: 'NEW AMBASSADOR TO AMERICA', I read, 'CORDIAL SPEECHES' - that was the wrong one. The other was under a headline reading, 'IN THE CORONERS' COURTS'. 'In the Camden Court,' I read, 'Mr Laurence Drew conducted an enquiry with reference to the death by fire in his apartment of Mr Rowland Hubert Smith, aged thirty-nine, of Grenville Mansions, Dartmouth Park ...'

  So there were no letters after his name, and here was the proof. I continued to read:

  Mr George Collins, a doorkeeper, said that he had noticed smoke pouring into the lobby at 7 p.m. on Friday 11th of December. On rushing upstairs he determined that the smoke was coming from the apartment of Mr Smith, which was to the rear of the building on the lower floor, but the smoke was too dense and the heat too great for him to enter. After raising the alarm within the building, Mr Collins was able swiftly to alert the fire brigade at Kentish Town, the apartment block being equipped with a telephone. The brigade turned out shortly after, at 7.30 p.m., and they succeeded in dousing the flames at 8.30 p.m., having run their hoses into the garden of the apartments and directed them through the windows of the flat. Mr Smith was found on the remains of his bed, horribly burnt, and quite dead.

  Mr Collins stated that he had spoken a few words with the deceased on his arrival at the flat from his business. He had said that he was tired and in need of a good rest, but otherwise seemed to be in the best of spirits. Mr Collins also stated that Mr Smith was a prodigious smoker of cigarettes. He had never seen him without one in his hand. The coroner conjectured that he had lain down on his bed for a brief rest with a cigarette still in his hand, and that this had sadly caused the bed to catch alight. The jury returned a verdict of accidental death.

  When I'd finished the article, I told the Governor of the letter I'd received and the one I'd posted two days later, which Smith would have received on the day of his death.

  He nodded for a while, and said, "The police think the fire might have had a bit of help.'

  'A bit of help from what?'

  The Governor took a box of cigars from his pocket. 'A can of paraffin.'

  'That's not in the paper.'

  'They don't let on that they know that kind of thing. He was done in’ he said, taking a cigar from the box. 'Will there be a police investigation?' 'There will if I can help it’ he said.

  We strolled over the barrow boards, further away from Twenty-Nine. We both looked about to see whether Vincent and Rose were watching us, but Rose had gone underneath and Vincent was at his fire. There were engines coming off-shed all about us, and I had the sensation of many other men turning around on their footplates to keep me in view for as long as possible.

  'Smith told me he believed Henry Taylor was murdered,' said the Governor. He lit the cigar, and neither one of us spoke for quite a while. 'He had the idea that you were a bright spark’ he said, blowing smoke.

  ‘I was sent here to be his eyes and ears,' I said quite suddenly.

  The Governor nodded once.

  'Why didn't he tell me that's what he was about?' I said.

  ‘I expect... Because then you would have known.'

  Crook the gatekeeper was prowling past us. The Governor smoked for a little while longer, looking across to Twenty-Nine, which was doing the same. 'As from this morning,' he said, 'Vincent is firing on the half-link. I couldn't keep him off any longer.'

  'Why were you keeping him off to begin with, Mr Nightingale?'

  'Because I didn't like him; I was obliged to give him a few firing turns, but I wanted him in the shed as much as possible where I could watch him.'

  'He's Hunt's nephew, isn't he?'

  The Governor nodded. 'But Taylor and Mike were brought on by myself - well, it was Mr Smith's doing, really. He wanted to change the way things went on here, with any engine man thinking he could get a start for his own grandmother if he wanted. We were worried over what happened to Taylor, and told the investigators so, although we could never prove anything. But we also told them we were set on not going back to how things were. Any new lad corning in would have to be from outside, otherwise . . . well, they'd have won the day, wouldn't they?'

  'So that's how I got my start.'

  'I expect that now you know, it all seems a bit heartless,' said the Governor after a while. 'I was to be a sort of spy.'

  ‘I was under instructions to watch out for you on-shed,' he said, 'but also to let you see as much as possible of the half-link off-shed, where their tongues might be a bit looser, so that meant getting you on a few trips with them. I knew Mr Smith had it in mind to quiz you, and when Mike got bashed he said it was going to be done directly, but I don't suppose he had the time until he came to write you that note.'

  'How could Mr Smith control so much here, Mr Nightingale, after he'd left the South Western?'

  'It was his aim always to come back. Our lot were only lending him to the Necropolis, so to speak.'

  'Why exactly is Mr Hunt on the half-link?'

  The Governor drew on his cigar.

  'Because he's a fucking socialist, and you've always got to watch out for those fellows.' He was smoking and smiling at the same time, which made a strange sight. 'Hunt ran the strike here in 1901, so they cut him down to size.'

  'Who's they?'

  'Who's they? Rowland Smith, giving orders to the District Locomotive Superintendent, with a little help from myself, I don't mind admitting.'

  He gave me time to let all this sensational stuff sink in, then he said, 'Now look, the shed's not safe for you and I want you out. There's going to be a bit of a paper war over it, but I can

  get you a start in any station on the territory.' 'You mean I'll be back portering?' I said. 'Nothing's fixed up’ he said.

  One of the Atlantics came out alongside us under steam, sending out a mass of blackness. 'I'll have that bastard’ said the Governor, eyeing the chimney.

  Why did I not take the chance to flee? I did not want to go back to portering, but there again I could see the moving shadow coming for me, and present in my mind always was the cemetery, with the railway on hand to take me there on a one-way ride. It was better to be a porter imprisoned in a too-tight, over-decorated waistcoat than to take that trip before my time. But I now somehow knew that all these horrors had always been waiting for me, because becoming an engine man was no mere matter of book learning. Engine men, I could not deny, looked different from me, and they looked different because they had been through just such a thing as this. This was the life of London and the life of men, where threats and fears came, and they had to be stood down.

  'I'd rather stick at the job’ I said.

  'All right’ said the Governor. 'For now you can, but watch out.' He smoked, watching me for a while with a shrewd look.

  'Can I go up with Rose and Vincent today?'

  I thought there would be long odds against this, but the Governor just shrugged: 'Don't see what harm you can come to on a jaunt like that - the
entire board of the Necropolis is going along from what I've heard. You'll need a ribbon, though.'

  He meant a black one. 1 can tear up some rag,' I said.

  ‘I nearly forgot to ask’ he called to me with smoke tumbling from his mouth as I set off for the rag store, 'have you got any notions about all this business?'

  'No,' I called back, because it seemed the best answer at the time. 'I can't think who did for Taylor, Mike and Smith, and,' I added, ‘I don't know who murdered Sir John Rickerby of the Necropolis Company either.'

  Now it was the Governor's turn for a shock, and I fancied there was greyness mingled in with the redness of his face. 'Oh Christ, let's leave him out of it,' he said.

  I walked off to the rag store revolving two thoughts: that Rowland Smith had given me a shot at the footplate, and that I now knew for certain that he had also put me in a very dangerous spot and used me as a spy. I did not give much time to mourning that gentleman.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Thursday 17 December

  continued

  I came back from the rag room with a blackish ribbon - or rag, if you were going to be particular - on my arm. The Governor took me up onto the footplate of Twenty-Nine, and there was no trouble as we picked up just two from the funeral set: a passenger carriage and a hearse. As we came into the Necropolis, Rose was half driving, half reading the paper, and every so often exclaiming, 'Oh, my eye,' at some new sporting sensation. Vincent was swanking at his regulator and fire, keeping the pressure at dead on 180 per square inch, which was the right mark for Twenty-Nine. I was staring at them both without minding if they knew it.

  We backed into the Necropolis station, where a small crowd waited on the platform, all in fine black coats and toppers. They were all men and looked like a lot of ravens, but one of the ravens had the lined and worried head of Erskine Long, the Necropolis chairman. I watched the coffin come along after the last of the mourners had climbed up. Smith's coffin was as exquisite as his coats. It had panelling, fancy handles and a mass of hothouse flowers on top, and I could tell the Necropolis bearers - not Saturday Night Mack's gang, but a smarter-looking lot - were struggling with the weight of it, even though I guessed there would be little of the man himself left inside. The door marked 'first' was opened to receive the casket.

  When I went back onto the footplate, Vincent was at his fire again, and Rose was putting something back in the box under his seat. I had seen him do that before.

  Vincent put coal on as I hosed down the cab. After being given the off, Rose settled down to smoking his pipe and driving, both of which he did very badly, knocking ash everywhere and repeatedly relighting his pipe, and jabbing on the vacuum brake instead of brushing it on in the approved way. So we made jerky progress as we passed through the signals and speed limits of the Southern Division.

  As we came to the edge of the city, I ran out of jobs to do on the footplate and looked at the passing scenery while a million questions raced through my head. It was a queer business, travelling south of London. The countryside, when it came, was of a very pretty sort, although more comfortable than I was used to, with bright green fields, churches covered in ivy and winding, dusty lanes with tempting inns dotted along the way. But there was no end of building taking place, and you'd get whole streets going up in the middle of fields. You could never quite say that London had finished, and it was vexing because you thought it ought to.

  Towards Brookwood, I thought London had really given up the ghost, but then we suddenly rose out of a cutting and I looked down into a wood and saw men with axes and machines steaming away. London, according to the Necropolis idea, could not hold all of its dead, but it could not hold all of its living either, so it had to be ever restless, ever growing.

  After a lot of fussing about from Rose, we were into the Necropolis running, bunker-end first, along the single track between the lines of mighty trees. We passed by North Station, which seemed closed up and forgotten like a cricket pavilion in winter. As we approached South Station, however, there was a parson in strange togs waiting on a bench with a pipe in his mouth. Smith must have been church.

  The parson stood up as we came closer but did not knock out his pipe until after Rose had struck the buffer bars with his usual bang. I stepped off the footplate and saw the four bearers put the wondrous casket onto their shoulders. They aimed themselves towards the little church that went along with South Station. A moment later the procession was off, with the parson in the lead and the Necropolis board in a semi-march - all save the man at the back, the youngest of the lot, who swished at the tops of the grass with his stick. As they went on, though, they did begin to fall in step in a ramshackle sort of a way, like loose-coupled waggons, and presently they disappeared from view.

  It now struck me that I was alone with Barney Rose and Vincent, and at their mercy if they decided to try something. And no sooner had this thought come to me than I heard a crack, like a gunshot, in the bushes, and turned about to see a bony fox racing through the graves. I called up to the pair on the footplate: 'Did you see that?' Looking up, I saw Rose with a bottle of some spirit at his lips. I looked away so as to give this horrible vision a chance to disappear, and when I looked back the bottle had gone.

  Vincent was working next to him, putting a bit of oil on the fire-door runners, and for the first time I felt sorry for the fifty-face kid, having to do his best to learn from a semi-drunk. 'He only takes a nip,' he said, looking at me, then added, 'You'd better not split.'

  I just stood there dumbfounded.

  'Smith's gone,' said Vincent, ‘But there's still a lot you can blab to if you're daft enough to try.'

  Rose leant forwards and threw the bottle, and cork after it, into the fire, slamming the door immediately after. 'Cat's out of the bag,' Barney Rose said, pushing past Vincent and coming down onto the platform of South Station. As he stood next to me there was a wrong smell about him, and I now realised it had always been there, that it was the reason he'd been looking away from me after the death of Mike.

  'You're risking it a bit, aren't you,' Vincent called down to Rose, 'with top brass riding on the train?'

  'That's the whole reason for it,' said Rose. 'We've got a carriage-load of swells with us today . . . fellow's got to get his screw somehow.' He turned to me and smiled his usual smile - which now looked different. 'We nearly had White-Chester up,' he went on, 'but he's sent his excuses, or so I've heard. I would've needed a whole other bottle if that gent had shown his face.'

  'You'd have been stood down straight away if he'd seen you, though,' I said.

  'Leave off,' said Vincent.

  'I don't know,' said Rose. 'The Necropolis lot are one thing, but White-Chester likes a drop himself, or so I believe.' 'But he's not driving a train,' I said.

  'Well,' said Rose, giving me a queer look, 'in a way he's driving hundreds of them, wouldn't you say?'

  He's a socialist like Hunt, I thought, although not so urgent.

  Half an hour went by, during which, to my relief, a bloke appeared and started doing odd jobs about the platform, Vincent played with the injector and Rose read his paper, remarking on how the 'men from Marylebone had not persevered with Knight' in Australia but had persevered with somebody else against all odds. I just sat on the platform bench flunking how it was not important that Rose was not the right sort. What was important was that I had struck more sadness in a month in London than in all my time in Bay, and there was nothing left for me but to play out my part of the little detective and find out the cause of it all.

  The clock on the chapel over in the trees gave ten dings and Rose said, 'Here they all come, minus one' - the one being Smith.

  The parson was leading the way once more. He was very cheery, as were they all, really. There was even a smile on the face of Erskine Long, who was directly behind. The same man was at the rear as before, swiping the grass with his stick. Even when they had been walking away from me it had been pretty obvious that he was the youngest, but I now saw
that he was the youngest by at least twenty years. He was also the only one who did not look mild as milk: you could picture him in olden times, with a sword in his hand.

  The four bearers walking behind looked lost without their coffin.

  The crowd did not trouble the bar - there was to be some grand event later at the American Hotel near Waterloo - and boarded the train directly.

  'You'll find the ride up a deal smoother than the down run’ said Rose, 'now that I've had my pick-up.'

  It was faster and that's for certain. I could not make out the names of any of the stations this time, and we fairly crashed across the points as we aimed for the Necropolis branch. Vincent was putting too much on - the pressure was above 200 - and I couldn't stop myself thinking of him as the friend of the fire, or saying out loud over the crashing of the engine, 'It's my opinion someone put the kybosh on him.' But Vincent just kept putting coal on, and Rose opened the regulator ever wider.

  I leant out of Twenty-Nine, and saw the Necropolis station with all the lamps lit, for even though it was only shortly after eleven the light had gone out of the day.

  I leapt down as soon as we pulled up because all of a sudden I could not stand to be close to half-link men. As I walked along the platform, I struck the Necropolis toffs climbing from their carriage and talking of some private business. First down was the young one, who I heard saying, 'He was not of our kidney.' He then gave a hand to Erskine Long, who, from his looks, was back to his old fretful self, and was saying, 'But what would you have brought it to, Mr Argent?'

  1 should like to have brought it to a vote’ the younger man replied.

  Erskine Long put his top hat on his head and said, 'But it has all been carried on with the agreement of the board, has it not?'

  'Not precisely, no. I should have said main force was nearer the mark.'