Lost baggage porter js-3

by Andrew Martin

  I stepped through the outer door as the sound rose to its highest pitch, and there, ten feet away and leaking steam, stood the engine that had brought in the fish special from Hull. Four doors opened along the three carriages, and half a dozen unimportant people walked away to fade into the city of York. After a space, another passenger climbed down in a Homburg hat and Norfolk jacket; he placed a portmanteau on the ground as another man approached him. The gentry in from Hull was Sampson, and he was being met by Mike. Of Hopkins there was no sign, and that was because Sampson had put his lights out.

  Mike stood before Sampson; I was looking at Mike's wide back. He was up to his old tricks: blocking… although he didn't know that he was standing between me and his governor. At the very moment that I stepped back towards the Police Office, Mike turned aside, great head dipped low under his low, wide cap, and Sampson was looking directly at me, revolver in hand.

  He advanced upon me, gun in one hand, portmanteau in the other. A long article, half muffled in rags rested on top of the portmanteau. Beyond him, at the far end of the train, the fish boxes were down, but not attended to on the platform, which was quite deserted. The engine was now retreating beside the train it had brought in a moment before; it would be coupled at the opposite end presently. An engine going backwards… It was a crazy spectacle, like time itself in reverse.

  Sampson, still walking forwards, said: 'You know what I've come looking for, little Allan.' 'The left-luggage ticket?' I said, sounding as if I was trying to be helpful, and so sounding daft. He continued to advance. He had travelled to Hull by steamer, crossing the North Sea, and missing the Channel ports. 'Hopkins said you had it. Whether he put you up to it, I don't know. But he came at me with a fucking cutter in his hand…' His voice went high as he said those final words. Even now, he couldn't credit it. But of course… the knife had been meant only to put the wind up me. I was backing towards the door of the Police Office. 'Where's Miles?' I said, for some reason. Sampson shook his head. 'Gone case, little Allan,' he said. I thought of the tracks running below the window of the hotel room in Paris, the word 'Vins' painted on the wall of that great French hole. Sampson said: 'One hour I sat there looking down, little Allan… Waiting for a train to roll over him… Waited in vain, too.' 'Well, it was late on,' I said. My back was against the door of the Police Office. Sampson was shaking his head once more. 'Long time to wait for nothing to happen,' he said. 'Oh, I don't know,' I said. 'I reckon it's about average.' 'Hopkins told me you were a copper, in which case the ticket may be out of your hands, resting in a box marked "Evidence". Or then again, little Allan, you might just have held on to it, knowing you'd touch for a fortune just by taking a trip to London… And do you know something, little Allan? I'm having difficulty trying to decide which of those two actions would be the most cuntish?'

  It was only then the light fell from his eyes.

  'I don't have the ticket' I said.

  I made my breakaway at that moment, having realised that the article in the portmanteau was an axe. How he had put his hands on such a thing on the way in from Hull, I could not have said. Perhaps Mike had handed it to him as he stepped from the train. At any rate, it meant there might be worse in store than a bullet in the brain.

  I was running as I had these thoughts, and I was not my present self as I ran, but a young boy caught in a thunderstorm on the beach at Baytown, fleeing the one lightning bolt that would do me, while the lugger I'd been watching out to sea rocked on the waves and waited. The bullet came into my back, pushing me forward, so that I flew a little way before landing in darkness.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  It was the rumbling boots of the railway clerks that brought me back to the world. They were coming down off the footbridge, and swerving away as they caught sight of me. I was lying on the hardest of beds: Platform Four, but with half a dozen blankets placed over me. And I was shivering. A train came in over the way on Platform Five, and I had the notion that it was shivering too. The sky was bright blue, springlike beyond the roof glass miles above me, but my teeth were chattering.

  Some of the clerks looked sidelong at me as they raced towards the ticket gates. What were they thinking? Passenger in bother? Company man in bother? Either way, the Company would deal with it. The right side of me, I realised, wasn't somehow keeping up with the left.

  The Stationmaster was standing a little way off talking to a station official I did not know. I noticed him before I saw the Chief, even though the Chief was closer. He was talking to another stranger, and all these men were different from me, for they were all standing. I put my hand under the blanket towards my chest, feeling as if they must have placed a hot bottle or hot brick there, but there was none to be found and when I removed my hand, I saw and tasted blood at the same time; I turned my head to try to spit away the blood, and that brought the second stranger kneeling down beside me. I tried to look again at my hand, for it had been whiter than I had ever known it before, and I wanted to marvel again at the colour. I knew there was a bullet in me, and I badly wanted it out.

  Somebody, another upright person I didn't know, was coming forwards from the refreshment rooms, carrying a glass; it was handed to the man kneeling beside me, who lifted my head and made me drink; it was warm wine, which mixed with the warm blood in my mouth. Other people came racing forwards now, ambulance attendants, carrying a stretcher. As they lifted me, and the blankets slid away, a great commotion broke out in my body, and I was shaking rather than shivering; it took them all aback, I could tell, and I tried to apologise for it, but could not control my speech, so that the word 'sorry' was more like 'surround'. I also tried to ask for immediate extra-special protection for the wife – for yet more men to be posted outside the house near the church at Thorpe-on-Ouse, and I believed that the message got through. At the moment they hoisted me, a train came in on Platform Four, and I caught a glimpse of my reflection – head bandaged, I had not bargained on that – and the mortified faces streaming by at the carriage windows.

  I was taken by fast-trotting horse to the County Hospital; I tried to say to one of the attendants that I had never expected to go so fast along Monkgate while flat on my back, but that was quite beyond me. It bothered me that nobody spoke back, even so. I was about to try again as we flew along the hospital drive but it suddenly came to me that I'd done a great piss in my trousers, and that silenced me.

  I was whirled about the whiteness of the hospital on a trolley, catching some of the words passed between the people moving about me: 'gunshot', 'concussion of the brain', 'fixity of the chest' and 'heart' and 'great vessels'. In a tiny, crowded room a needle came towards me, and somebody was good enough to say 'ether' as they put it in. It put me into a daze, not right out, and I was quite aware of my head being shaved by a very fast woman barber, and then painted, while at the same time my suit was removed, and my undershirt cut by mighty shears that moved from my waist to my neck in three great bites. A man entered the room whom I knew straightaway to be the top man, for he moved a little slower than all of the others. He was looking at my ribs, and I thought I was supposed to be looking too, and I raised my head like an idiot to see an open eye there on my chest. The man pushed my head down, and ordered me to be turned over, where he looked at my back, saying some words I did not care for, like 'lodged bullet', 'traversed the whole thickness of the chest'. Then the bandage was unwound from my head, and I don't believe that he liked the look of that either. I saw the Chief in the room, in his long coat as ever. But not for long, and soon a pair of fat India rubber lips came towards me and put an evil-smelling kiss on my whole face that sent me sinking into the bed below with all the voices roundabout becoming bent out of true.

  The top medical man appeared out of nowhere some time later; he was carrying something small and silvery. I was in a long dark room, and there were other people there, all in beds and at the head of each bed was a shuttered window. The man sat on my bed, and his name came out: Kenneth Munroe; we had a conversation, but I cann
ot recall it, except that he made it clear the wife was quite safe. He returned again some time later, when I was still in the same place, with all the beds, and the closed shutters as before, but this time sunlight was fighting to come through them. He carried the silver object, also as before, and he placed it in my hand. He was smiling a very beautiful sort of smile, but there was a better one behind him: the wife, without the baby… free of the baby She watched me as Kenneth Munroe said, 'These are for you', in words as clear as a bell. I raised my hand and saw a pair of forceps. His speech ran on just as clearly, like a stream, but he spoke a little faster than I could understand.

  'Bullet forceps,' he said,'… they grip the bullet with great force… seize it, you know, with no entanglement of the soft parts… smoothly rounded blades as you see… It is the extractor of preference for the British army.'

  Everybody – for there were some more people around the bed by now – waited as I said, 'It is a very pretty instrument.'

  'Thank you,' said Kenneth Munroe, 'they are constructed to my own design.'

  He said that I might keep them, adding, as he rose from the bed, and the wife replaced him there, that he had many more besides.

  'Where's the baby?' I said, and the wife said, 'Oh, he's…'

  But I had fallen back to sleep already.

  When I woke I had my hand to my head, feeling the bandage. I saw the bullet extractors on the cabinet beside me, and there was a thing like a metal tooth beside them: their trophy, the bullet itself. Kenneth Munroe was there again, and now the shutters had won their fight against the light outside; it was night time, the gas low in the long room. He explained that I had taken a bullet to a lung; it had gone clean through without causing over-much damage.

  'If you must be shot,' he said, 'be shot in a lung.'

  But there had been worse bother higher up. I had fractured my skull on falling and a fragment of bone had become lodged in the crack, like a penny in a 'Try Your Weight' machine, and Kenneth Munroe proudly told me that he had fished it out with his little fingernail. There had been no compression of the brain, and after telling me this he walked away into the darkness once again.

  The bullet had notched a rib, and my chest was strapped. I was put on a low diet, and the next little while was all gruel, beef tea, and darkness followed by the swelling light at the shuttered windows. I would cough some blood from time to time, but it was always quickly wiped away by the nurse, as though it was an embarrassment over dinner and nothing more. I was in the room for head cases rather than lung cases, and here the rules were darkness, perfect quiet and regular dreams of Paris and babies.

  After a while, I became more aware of York beyond the shutters: trotting horses in the far distance, faint cries of the drivers and church bells. The Chief came with two cigars, a bottle of John Smith's, a pen – the Swan – and with my report, which he said I might finish in due course. He would not speak about the manhunt that was going on across the city. It would agitate me too much. When he went away, the cigars were removed without a word by the nurse, although she opened the beer for me.

  … But I couldn't face it.

  A little while later, I drank it, flat, while sitting up and continuing with the report, writing at a lick, and setting down all of Sampson's words just as I remembered them, and putting the confession of Lund quite out of my mind, except to wonder whether he had perhaps made it to The Chief himself by now… But the matter did not seem very pressing for it was now all in the same category as the dreams.

  The wife returned at some point. She kissed me, and I gave her the report. She read it on my bed, the press of her body making me realise I needed a fuck.

  'Firstly,' she said, when she'd finished, 'you can't spell.'

  'Can't spell what?'

  'Anything.'

  'Can't spell hardly anything, you mean.'

  'Second of all,' she continued, 'you must send the London police to the left-luggage place in Charing Cross Station because I'm sure he means to collect the money he left there.'

  'We've already done that,' I said with a grin.

  'Well then…' said the wife,'… I thought you would've.'

  She coloured up (for she'd thought nothing of the sort).

  It was night time, no light at the shutter edges, when the Chief came again. He looked sad, and placed a large brown paper sleeve on my bed. Inside was a photograph. I began to pull it free, and stopped halfway, but he nodded at me to continue.

  The photograph showed a long white head sleeping in a hat box. It was turned a little to one side, just as if resting between the long spells of hard work that might be the lot of a head trying to make its way in the world without benefit of a body. Around it was blood, but not the colour of blood.

  I sat upright, and stared at the Chief, who said, 'Three of his fingers were found in the hat box besides', at which the quantity of beef tea that had been set whirling within me sprang from my mouth. I had done this to Lund. As far as Sampson and Mike were concerned, he and I were in league. What had they asked and not been told three times? Had they, even with a manhunt going on, come by 16A and, finding it empty, tried to discover the house to which I had removed – the place where the ticket might be? Or where, failing that, the clean sweep might be made as a settling of accounts?

  The nurse came and took away the stained top cover as the Chief waited with hands in his pockets.

  'Can we get a nip of something?' he said.

  She shook her head, walking away, adding that if we were to talk, we must do it in whispers. As she moved off, the Chief muttered, 'I have my hip flask about me…' before nodding at the photograph and continuing more loudly, 'The box was found on Platform Six yesterday, and carried over to the Lost Luggage Office by a porter.' 'Just as it was meant to be,' I said. 'Lund had been missing for three days,' said the Chief. 'Whether they came upon him at his home, about the station or somewhere in between, I couldn't say.' 'He put me on to the whole investigation,' I said, 'out of conscience at what he'd done.' The Chief said nothing. '… He killed the Camerons,' I went on. 'He let on to me, but I kept it back because I didn't want to see him swing.' I repeated all of Lund's confession to the Chief, and he lost interest by degrees as I did so. He was looking down at his boots as I added: 'There ought to have been a guard for Lund, but I wanted him kept out of the whole…' The Chief looked up. 'Sampson, or Joseph Howard Vincent, was taken this morning at the Charing Cross Left Luggage office. The arresting officers found the pistol on him that shot the bullets into the Camerons.' 'That's because he took it off Lund,' I said. 'The Surete in Paris,' continued the Chief, 'have found a body, believed from the pocketbook to be an Englishman, on the railway lines by a spot called… Boulevard de la Chapelle.' He could not say it right. 'That was Hopkins,' I said. 'No face left on him,' said the Chief, 'all smashed away. What'll happen over that I don't know, but I daresay it'll come to naught because you can't hang a man twice. Sampson is to be sent back to us. We'll charge him for this…'He indicated the photograph. '… But if you ask me the magistrates will not commit. There was not a spot of blood on him when he was run in; we have nothing to connect the bastard to it.' 'You'll have the evidence of Parkinson,' I said. 'He knew what Lund was about.' No reply from the Chief. 'And Mike,' I said. 'He makes a connection.' 'That bugger's scarpered,' said the Chief. 'But I en't bothered because what will get past the committal is the charge of murdering the Camerons. We have the gun, we have the evidence of the goods clerk, Roberts; we have yours. They were vagabonds, that pair; they had a lot to say about any bad business – we have that from the Institute staff – and they'd turned copper in the past…' I had twisted my body away from the Chief as he added, 'I mean to say… they'd inform from time to time.' The Chief sighed, out of sight. 'There's Sampson's motive, do you not see?' He rose to his feet. 'Sampson'll swing for killing the Camerons,' he said, picking up the photograph, 'and you'll be commended to the Super at headquarters.' By killing Lund, Sampson had removed the one obstacle between himself and a capital
charge. It was another new thought; another new sickness. And everything marched in the direction of death. As I closed my eyes in an attempt to go directly to sleep, the Chief chucked something heavy onto my bed. 'Here, lad,' he said. 'Medicine.'

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Dad shut the door of his house at the top of Baytown, after a good deal of palaver over closing all the curtains in the front room.

  'I always close the curtains so as not to fade the dining room carpet' he'd said to the wife, who had immediately turned and whispered to me, 'I swear he has that from the "Ladies' Column".'

  But the sun was strong as Dad came up to us, and we all turned to face the sea. The wife was carrying little Harry, for the steep cobbled streets didn't suit the baby carriage that Lillian Backhouse had given us.