Lost baggage porter js-3

by Andrew Martin

  'Let's have the acetylene,' he said, looking at all of us at once. But it was the young man who answered the command. Taking his wrench or spanner he turned a nut on the smallest cylinder; there came a low whoosh, and Sampson lit a match, and put it to the end of the blowpipe. But the rushing gas simply blew it out. He tried again with a second match, obtaining the same result.

  'Well I'd say you need a flint,' said the little clerk. 'You can't blow a spark out, you know,' he said, addressing me for some reason, 'instead of going out, it just blows away.'

  Sampson turned his weird, goggle eyes towards the clerk.

  He tried again with a third match. No go. I supposed that the room must be filling rapidly with the gas. It smelt like onions… fried onions.

  Sampson tried a fourth match, and this one did the job, only the result was a let-down: a weak, ragged orange flame with a good deal of smoke into the bargain. I had expected the flame to be white, like the cylinder from which it came.

  Sampson took a step to one side in surprise as the oxygen came, for the roaring increased ten fold, and the flame changed in an instant, both narrowing and lengthening into the shape of a sword. It was also now blue, and the young man at the cylinders was shouting over the roar: 'It's the light blue at the heart of it that does the cutting, mate.'

  Sampson made no answer, but fell to his knees, and bent low over the safe, like a man praying. At the instant he touched the flame to the steel he was surrounded in a whirl of orange sparks. They flew about everywhere in the office, seeming to bounce and roll across the desk, quite able to survive an impact like game little acrobats.

  It was hard not to think of this wonderful display as being the whole point of the exercise, and in fact Sampson did seem to be having some trouble with the cutting itself. He'd gouged a red groove across the face of the steel but as he moved the flame back and forth along it, the metal seemed to flow back into the trench, filling it in again, like time itself rolling forwards and backwards. The mark he'd made was no longer-lasting than a line drawn in sand. He looked up, once again staring at all of us and everything from behind the black lenses.

  'Now he's thinking: maybe I ought to have spent ten minutes practising this,' said the little clerk, and the goggles turned once again in his direction.

  The young man evidently called Tim was now at Sampson's shoulder. 'Don't touch the flame down so close,' he said, 'and go at it more at an angle.' He was so thoroughly in the know of the business that I wondered why he wasn't doing the job himself. But I supposed he would then have been a different order of helper, and liable to a longer sentence if caught.

  The burning continued, and then there was an extra column of smoke, coming from beyond Sampson. The tarpaulin had caught light. The young man tapped Sampson on his shoulder, and yanked down the goggles, shouting straight at Hopkins, 'Water!'

  At the window, the tarpaulin had slumped to one side, the flames beginning to creep across it from the corner place they'd started in.

  The little clerk was shaking his head, saying: 'Beats all, that does.'

  Hopkins looked across at me: 'You can give a hand,' he said, and we ranged out into the shed again.

  'Where would you find water in a spot like this?' said Hopkins. I replied, 'How the bloody hell should I know?' but why had he asked me in the first place? Hopkins never called me Allan. Never believed it was my name, that's why.

  Sampson was charging out of the office now, with the little clerk and the young bloke spilling out behind him. It was no longer possible to remain in there. 'Get a fucking shift on,' Sampson roared, 'the cylinders'll go up any second!'

  'I can take a bucket to one of the water cranes outside,' I called to Sampson, but he wouldn't have that. There was nothing for it. If the cylinders blew we'd all be done for. I pointed down at the hydrant that lay at our feet. It was marked out for the engine cleaners by a square stone – there was even a canvas tube attached, though half buried in ash. I lifted the steel flap to get at the little wheel, which turned easily enough, and the tube stirred, leaping crazily three times as the water speed rose to its fastest. Sampson himself pointed the nozzle into the office, where the flames were quickly put out, and every light article sent flying by force of water in the process. The cylinders held their ground though: the big man and the little man, standing over the fallen safe.

  Sampson and the young bloke fell to starting up the gas again, as we all crowded back into the little room – the floor of it was now a pond. The water continued to stream out of the hose in the shed beyond.

  'Shouldn't have had a tarpaulin in here in the first place' the little clerk was saying. 'It was bound to catch. Half of it's tar, after all. Why do you think it's called a tarpaulin?'

  I looked up to see that – as I had somehow suspected – he was addressing me again.

  'What's that tap in the ground for?' he said, and I made no reply.

  Sampson had the blowpipe lit once again, and was kneeling before the safe for a second go. If the flame was seen beyond the window, then it was just hard lines. Before he began, he called Hopkins across to him, and the two exchanged a few words while Sampson held the flame away. Then Hopkins motioned me and the clerk out of the room. 'Keep him pinned' Hopkins said to me, and so the two of us sat down on a sleeper that had been placed across the tracks behind one of the engines – the weird- looking Q Class. I wondered whether they had any particular reason to fear that the little clerk would take off. If they did have a reason, then why had they brought him along in the first place? They could have had the keys off him with no bother. But the answer was easy enough to guess at: they wanted him involved – make him a guilty party. And if he was sitting here in the South Shed, then he couldn't be chattering to the night-duty coppers at Tower Street. Hopkins had returned to his former pitch at the shed mouth, so that the little clerk was now in a double prison: I was guarding him, and Hopkins was guarding me. If I made a run for it, he'd call for Sampson, who'd shoot me. Well, perhaps he'd miss, but Sampson and Hopkins would do a push in any case with one man gone and liable to split. The cutting of the safe was continuing, with the door of the office kept open, so that I could see clear through toSampson as he worked away, like a magical figure in a cloud of bright sparks.

  I thought I heard a church bell: three o'clock. But how could it be so late? I felt my eyes prickling. I ought not to be looking at the cutting flame. I remembered not to rub them by poking my finger directly through the frames of my glasses, but took the specs off first. It seemed as though my eyes were full of grit; and they felt better closed. I rested my head on my hand.

  And then it was a different Sunday, late afternoon; darkness coming in to make sense of the gas lamps already lit across Sowerby Bridge, which rose on its bank above the engine yard. We'd run in light from Leeds – me and Terry Kendall. 'Grandfather Kendall', he was, to the blokes at the shed: the oldest driver on the goods link, or any link. The engine was 1008, the first of Mr Aspinall's radial tank engines, with bogies designed for making tight curves.

  We were stood over a pit on an in-road, and it was one of those evenings with the coldness locked into the sky. No developments in the weather were imaginable.

  I began lifting the fire out with the long clinker shovel, which was slightly bent a little way out of true, and when I'd done, I finished off the dregs in my tea bottle. Grandfather Kendall was fussing about somewhere near the front of the engine. I called out to him that the clinker shovel wanted replacing, and that I meant to go and see the toolman about getting another. He said 'Right enough' to that, and I went off. When I returned with afresh shovel, I expected to find 1008 in the shed – put there by her driver. But she remained over the pit on the in-road with Kendall now up on the footplate. There was a quantity of engines round about, most being prepared for stabling, and there were happy shouts coming up from the blokes at work, whether in the engines, on top of them, or under. It was coming up to the time when they'd stroll off to the pubs for the latch- lifter (first pint of th
e evening) and a smoke. To these shouts, I joined my own, for I called over to Kendall: 'Can I take her in myself?' Like most firemen I was keen for any scraps of driving I could get.

  He climbed down and I climbed up, and I thought he looked a little dazed. We exchanged some words during this crossing over: 'Warmed the brake, have you, Terry?' I said. T have that,' he replied. There was nothing to that conversation; we were as casual as you like, but it touched an important matter. It was necessary to give a couple of tugs on the engine brake after the engine had been at a stand – this to put steam into its chambers, and prevent condensation occurring when it was next used in anger. If the chambers were not warmed, and condensation occurred, the brake would not do its job.

  There was no fire in 1008, but there was steam in the boiler, and that would take her into the shed. It was magical: an engine rolling under the power of a memory. I gave a scream on the whistle, and a yank on the regulator, not thinking about the brake. I did not need to warm it, for Grandfather Kendall had told me he'd done that.

  At the very moment 1008 went under the shed roof I knew something was amiss: not with the engine, but with the whole business of engines and engine sheds. This beast was meant to be at large outdoors, and now it was confined to a building, and, as we rolled on, past the workbenches on the south wall of the shed, I thought: this is like a lion in a living room; it is not right.

  I pulled the brake as 1008 approached its berth. Nothing. I pulled again, only this time I did so as a dead man.

  'Want to know what brought me to this?' the little clerk was saying.

  'Eh?' I said.

  'Miles away, en't you?' said the clerk.

  The sparks were still flowing from the cutting flame in the little room before us.

  'I said "Do you want to know what brought me to this?'" repeated the clerk.

  'I shouldn't think there's any great mystery over that' I said, replacing my glasses.

  'I've been with this company since I quit school. I'm fifty- two now. This year I rose to thirty bob a week, and it en't enough – not when you've a wife and kids, and ten bob a week rent to pay. Even so, I'd always operated the rule book to the letter. No surreptitious removal by yours truly of little titbits from the goods yard.'

  He turned and looked at me.

  'Don't believe me, do you?'

  I shrugged. My mind was still at Sowerby Bridge, my eyes were on the flying sparks.

  'Six months back, I saw a fellow having his boots cleaned on Coney Street. Dazzled up lovely they were, by that little bootblack in livery outside the Black Swan. Do you know the fellow?'

  I nodded; I knew the chap. He had deformed hands – no thumbs – but was a marvel with a shammy leather.

  'Well, I was minded to have my own boots done,' the clerk continued, 'seeing the job he'd done for the other fellow, so I walked up and sat down on his chair, and after he'd done the first boot, I said, "By the way, pal, how much is it?" He said, "It's a tanner, guv", and I stood up there and then, gave him thruppence for the one boot he'd done, and walked off. The price was too high, and I en't saying it was unreasonable, but I couldn't run to it.'

  The sparks had stopped now. Sampson and the young fellow were crouching over the safe. Sampson was looking chuffed.

  'It's pissing through it,' I thought I heard him say. 'Well that was when the light dawned,' the clerk was saying.'I looked down at that one clean boot all the rest of the day, and a fortnight later, I heard of a bloke who would be willing to supplement my wages.'

  He nodded towards Sampson, who was back at his metal cutting.

  'It was him, your governor, Duncannon. Of course he's not an easy bloke to get along with, but if I hadn't made his acquaintance I'd have run into debt six month since. Practically kept me out of the workhouse, he has.'

  'And how will you feel when you come to serve your term?' I said.

  'Beg pardon?' he said, in a startled voice. When I made no further remark, he rose to his feet, saying: 'Just going to see how things are getting on.'

  He walked towards the office where, I noticed, the sparks had again stopped.

  'Taking your flipping time, en't you?' the clerk asked Sampson, who was pushing his goggles up onto his forehead with one gloved hand.

  'We're done now,' said Sampson. 'Here, you – catch.' I believe that I tried to reverse that instruction, by shouting 'Don't catch' as the rough oblong of red-hot steel flew towards the little clerk. But he did catch it.

  PART FIVE

  The Crack Boat

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Whatever had happened to his hands, the clerk could run, and he could scream, and it was as if this scream was the particular cause of an event that had been inevitable all along: the clerk running out of the shed mouth, and Sampson calmly making towards the shed mouth while shooting the revolver at the clerk.

  I ran at Sampson as one, two, three shots were fired. As the fourth bullet was loosed, I crashed into the side of Sampson roaring 'Police!'

  Sampson went down with the gun in his hand, and before any expression could come over his features, I heard Miles Hopkins calling, 'He's fucking right n' all!'

  From down on the ground, I saw a figure walking along the tracks towards us from the southerly end of the station. As I watched, the man's thin hair blew upright in the breeze that had come with the dawn, and then it fell again. What I had said had miraculously turned out to be the truth, for it was the Chief. He wore his long overcoat, and was carrying a walking stick, except that this stick never touched the ground. It was no stick but a rifle. Somebody had noticed the disturbance in the shed, and he had been sent for. A call boy would have gone out from the station. The clerk was between us and the Chief. He was a dark, low shape crawling along one of the tracks towards the station, and then he was just a dark low shape. The Chief was hard by him now, crouching down. After a moment, he stood up and walked on. Valentine Sampson was frozen into a firing position, gun pointed at the Chief. It seemed impossible that Sampson would ever move. He was like a signpost, and Miles Hopkins was next to him, talking fast, reasonable-like, saying: 'Put the gun down, we can take the readies and be out of here…'

  Sampson seemed to think it over for a second.

  'I'll fire once more; see us right,' he said, and immediately did so.

  The Chief went down.

  Sampson and Hopkins were straight into the office, pulling money out of the hole in the safe, and putting it into the sack that the clerk had been made to carry. I looked out again. The clerk was still down; the Chief was still down. Behind them, the station was making its own dawn: a few more gas lamps lit as work started; a few men moving about. Had they heard the shots? One engine was in – standing at one of the bay platforms on the 'down' side, and so looking the wrong way. I looked sidelong to Sampson and Hopkins, still stowing money in the bag. Of the young bloke, I could see no sign. I started to run for the shed mouth, and the Chief rose to his feet from down on the tracks; as he did so, his hair rose too, and he lifted his gun.

  'Chief!' I bawled, but the shot came anyway, and it checked me at the shed mouth. Sampson was by my side now. If he'd heard the shout of Chief, and taken it amiss… well, there was no sign of that in his face. He was back in his gun-firing pose, only this time with the money sack over his shoulder. He tilted his head backwards a couple of times, as though aiming with his sharp beard. He looked like Robin Hood. He fired. I looked out again, and couldn't see the Chief.

  'Chief'1 said to Sampson, so as to make him think I'd been calling for him in the first place, 'let's away.'

  He clean ignored me. He was still in his firing pose, but he relinquished it a moment later, with a look of irritation. Hopkins was by his side once again. They were both going into a kind of crouch.

  Sampson gave a roar, and they ran off to the right, out through the shed, skirting the tracks of the 'up' side. I ran a little way with them, keeping low, as they were, but as we came towards the carriage sidings where the joint stock sleeping cars were berthe
d, I thought: 'What am I about?' and stopped dead.

  My body was perfectly still in the freezing darkness, and my mind in a whirl. If the Chief was alive, then…

  Sampson was facing me, the joint stock carriage behind him. His gun was facing me, too.

  'You come along with us, Allan,' he said.

  'I'm just thinking on'1 said, for want of anything else to say.

  I fell in behind them as they walked quickly over the tracks through the carriage sidings and towards the disused Queen Street loco erecting shop. No further shots came. The Chief had approached us alone. I thought of him striding south out of the station with his gun in his hand. There was more to him than breakfast, and that was fact… But he was crazy, as I'd suspected all along. He'd put me in this fix, and given me no way out.

  We were into the Rhubarb Sidings once again. Two blokes stood by the wagons of the night before, but there was no engine in sight. They watched us as we passed. Had they heard the gunshots? If so, they might have taken them for fog detonators, because the darkness of the day was clearing too slowly, and it would be a misty morning. We pushed on up Queen Street, on to Station Road, and then turned right into Blossom Street, running now, away from railway lands.

  Sampson, walking fast beside me, had the revolver still in his hand, although somewhat disguised by the money sack, which was half wrapped round his fist, like a bandage. We were on Tadcaster Road; trees and big houses to our right, Knavesmire and the racecourse to our left. A carriage or cart came past every couple of minutes, appearing from, or disappearing into, the rising mist. Lights were glowing in some of the grand houses, as the servants started them up, like fire lighters in an engine shed.

  Sampson was crossing the road now, me and Miles Hopkins following. I wanted to think about many things, but the only thought that would come: I had failed in police work as I had in engine driving. I had failed (as I saw it) because of others, but was it right to be always throwing blame? Did the case not come down to this: that the world was more full of difficulty than I had ever imagined?