'What's become of the money that was in these?' I asked
the porter. 'Pinched,' he said, still eating.
'So you reckon the finders lift the money before bringing
in the pocketbooks?'
'No,' said the porter.
'How do you account for it then?'
I waited quite a while but there was no answer from the
strange kid.
'Well, thanks for turning these up’1 said, tucking the portmanteau under my arm.
He might have said something to that, and he might not. I
turned towards the door and the rain; I opened the door.
'Items lost across all the North Eastern territories are forwarded here under a special advice if not called for after a
week,' the porter said, and I stopped. He was climbing down
from the high stool, and for some reason - maybe the thought
of being left alone in that dismal room - was suddenly minded
to chat.
'Why are some brollies kept at the front, and some at the
back?' I said, letting the door close behind me.
'Paragons and silks at the rear,' he said, 'cotton brollies at
the front. They would be stood up, only where would the
water drain off to?'
'I never thought about that.'
'I have. All hats are kept high so as to reduce damage by
pressure.'
'Eh?' I said.
'Many curious articles do come to hand,' he said, crumpling up the brown paper in which his bread had been
wrapped. 'We had a banana in last week.'
'Where from, mate? Africa?'
'Leeds. Well, Leeds
train,
any road.'
'What happened to it?'
'Mr Parkinson entered it in the ledger.'
'As what?'
'A banana.'
'What happened then?'
'It turned black, and I asked Mr Parkinson for leave to
pitch it into the stove.'
'Waste of good grub,' I said. 'If somebody had tried to
claim it would you have required them to furnish a full
description?'
He seemed to hesitate on the point of utterance, but in the
end simply looked at the black window.
I opened the door again.
'Well, I'm much obliged to you, mate!' I said, stepping out
into the rain with my bag.
I was skirting around the wagons again, when he called
after me:
'Where you off to?'
'Home,' I called back.
'Can you get over to the station in one hour from now?'
'Why?'
He coughed a little.
'... See summat,' he said, after a while.
'Where exactly in the station?'
'Down side!' he called back with the rain sliding down his
bent, white face. 'I've to lock up first, but I'll see you at half
six!'
'Aye,' I said, 'all right; half six, then.'
It would mean biking back to Thorpe-on-Ouse an hour
later. The wife would be put out, but she couldn't expect me
always home directly in my new line of work. I wondered
why the queer stick wanted to see me, and then it hit me: I
was a policeman.
Chapter Three
I lugged the magazines with me through Micklegate Bar -
the grandest of the city-wall gates - and on into the city At
the Little Coach in Micklegate, I took another drink, putting
the peg in after a couple of glasses, and when I stepped out
the rain had eased off, though the streets were still empty.
I knew York a little, having grown up nearby at Baytown.
(I'd also had an earlier spell of working for the North Eastern
Company, my railway start having been a lad porter out at
Grosmont.) But I couldn't think of where to go, so I pursued
an aimless way about the centre of the city, where the streets
were narrow and ancient, the houses all overhanging, falling
slowly towards the pavements. I turned into Stonegate,
where a solitary horse was turning on the cobbles, too big for
the street.
I walked on through those ancient streets: cobbles, shadows, funny little smoke-blowing chimneys on powdery-
faced, sagging houses; old buildings put to new uses:
bakeries, drug stores, tea rooms - newly established or selling off, the shopkeepers came and went at a great rate but
the old houses carried on, even though some of them
looked as though they could barely support the gas brackets that sprouted from them. I turned and turned, and
presently I struck the Minster, the great black Cathedral;
the Minotaur of the labyrinth, as I thought of it, with its two
mighty West towers, sharp-pointed and horn-like.
I doubled back across Lendal Bridge, looking along the
river at the coal merchants, sand merchants, gravel merchants. They all became one at night: so many shouting men,
so many cranes, so many dark barges, which were like the
goods trains - meaning that they seemed to shift only when
you turned your back.
In Railway Street, on the approach to the station, I passed
by two dark, dripping trees with
Evening Press
posters pasted on to the trunks. The first read 'York Brothers Slain'; the
second made do with
'Yorkshire Evening Press
- The People's
Paper'. A constable was coming towards me. I'd seen him
before about the station, but he was not with the railway
police. Of all the lot from Tower Street - which was the main
copper shop of the York Constabulary - he was the one
whose patrol took him nearest to the railway station. He was
a smooth, dark, good-looking fellow with a waxed moustache; he looked like a toff who'd dressed up as a policeman
for a lark, and he passed me by without a glance or any hint
that we were in a way confederates.
A two-horse van nearly knocked me over as I wandered
under the arches into the station forecourt, and another came
charging close behind. I walked past the booking halls, and
struck the bookstall, and here were
Evening Press
posters by
the dozen, loosely attached to placards and pillars, and this
time every one of them reading, 'York Brothers Slain'. The
posters moved in the cold breeze that blew through the station, and I thought of each one as soaked in blood, so to
speak, like pieces of newspaper stuck on to shaving cuts. The
whole bookstall was blood-soaked, now that I came to think
of it: the shilling novels full of murders; the periodicals with
their own mystery killings, moving towards their solutions
in their weekly parts, and each tale with its own detective
hero - a sleuth hound with peculiar habits but a mighty
brain. The man who stood in the centre of all this sensation -
the stout party who kept the bookstall, who was nearly but
not quite to be counted a railwayman ... he stared out at me
with no flicker of recognition in his piggy eyes. Did he not
see in me the invincible detective type?
I moved in on to Platform Four. The station was alive even
if the city was not, and it was ablaze with gaslight. 'Down
side,' the lost-luggage porter had said. That meant crossing
the footbridge, and, as I put my boot on the first step, the
telegraph lad came skipping down towards me w
ith telegraph forms in his hands.
'You found it then, chief?'
He was looking at the portmanteau.
'Aye,' I said, grinning at him, 'office and bag both.'
'Champion,' he said, before haring along Platform Four to
the telegraph office, where he would doubtless have a couple of minutes' rest before being shot out again like a
bagatelle ball.
'Down' side ...
Well, half the platforms were on the 'down'.
With the portmanteau seeming to grow heavier by the
minute I walked over the bridge to Platform Five, where a
train was about due. A dozen folk stood waiting, and there
was a big fellow lying on a luggage trolley smoking: a station
lounger, waiting for a 'carry'. I walked west of the platform,
through an arch in the station wall to Platform Fourteen. It
was a wooden platform - a new addition - but this was where
the Scotch expresses called, and there must have been one
due, for thirty or so people waited, including the platform
guard with his silver whistle strung about his neck, and his
little army of porters, all talking in short bursts, as if nervous.
The clock on Platform Fourteen showed 6.40 when I saw
the engine come swerving through Holgate Junction, steam
flowing from the chimney like a witch's hair, the line of lights
behind bulging to the left, then to the right. I heard a cough
behind me, and it was the lost-luggage porter, sopping wet
and with a small valise over his shoulder. He said nothing but
just gave me a half-nod as the engine came up, the handles on
its smoke box making the shape of half-past four.
The engine pulled up alongside us, and it was another
thing again close to, with the leaking steam, and the rain on
the boiler like sweat. Hard to credit that it needed the permission of signals or the help of men to get to its destination.
'What's going off then?' I asked, just as the engine came to
a stand alongside us.
'Summat
is,' said the porter. 'The Blocker's pitched up, so
the Brains'll be here presently.' He was looking vexed, staring along the length of the platform, observing all the give-
and-take of train arrival.
'What's your name?' I said.
'Edwin Lund.'
He said it fast, without putting out his hand; he didn't
seem over-keen to learn mine but I gave it him:
'Stringer,' I said. 'Detective James Stringer.'
No; still didn't sound right.
A man came up, half running half walking through the
arch that led to Platform Five.
'The Brains, I call him' said Lund in an under-breath nodding in the direction of the man. As he spoke, Lund was
shifting along towards the north end of the platform, looking
away from the man he'd just identified.
The man was too tall for his coat, and his long hands were
held out to the side, so that he settled like a bird onto the
platform. He began looking about. Then the really big fellow,
the lounger from Platform Five, was with him.
'You'll have your bob's worth now, mister,' said Lund,
who'd taken up position on the opposite side of a porter's
cabin from the two blokes we were watching.
The Blocker was straight into a party of ladies boarding at
a door somewhere about the middle of the train. He seemed
set on doing the job of a porter, and was offering to help a
lady with her basket, but she was shaking her head, and so
he only added to a mix-up of cloaks, bags, and over-sized
bonnets. The Brains stood looking on. A porter was coming
up the crowd now. The Brains stopped him in his tracks, and
started trying to chat with him, but the porter would have
none. He was after the tips from that scrimmage of train-
boarding women.
At the front end of the train, the north end, the fireman was
down on the tracks, wrestling with the coupling and the vacuum pipe. The engine he'd helped bring in belonged to the
Great Northern Company. It would now be replaced, and the
train taken onward by one of the North Eastern's locomotives.
The fireman was right below my boots. The fellow was sodden from the rain that had blown into the cab on the trip; he
was clarted with oil and coal dust, and his oilcloth cap had a
great burn hole in its middle. I was jealous of him all the same
...
I was jealous of every engine man that stepped.
I moved to try and make out the number of the engine,
which was an Ivatt Atlantic.
'Look out’ said Lund.
The confused ladies had been abandoned. The Blocker
was walking fast along the platform in our direction, and the
other was following behind, but he was the one you noticed,
and what you noticed most particularly were his long
hands. The Ivatt Atlantic was now pulling away from the
front carriage, leaving a great gap in the air. It always
chopped from a body. You half expected blood.
But I should have been looking south, as Lund was.
'Wham!' he cried, and his thin voice cracked at the word,
just as the Blocker clattered straight into a man who'd lately
climbed down from a carriage, and was fishing in his waistcoat for his watch.
And now the Brains was on the scene, also assisting the
gent who'd been knocked down. The Great Northern engine
was off and away, leaving the train beheaded. The knocked-
over gent was set back on his feet, helped into the train, and
Lund was saying quietly, half to me, half to himself: 'They
have it now, I'm certain they do.'
Brains now had his back to us; after a second, a small black
object twirled away from him and landed under the carriage of
the train into which the toff had stepped. Almost before it had
landed, he was walking away, his hands held out and down,
like something precious, and the Blocker was at his side.
Then they were running, as they went through the arch
leading to Platform Five.
'Watch that,' I said to Lund, pointing at my bagful of magazines, and I scarpered after them. 'I am a detective, and I shall
arrest you on a charge of theft.' The words ran through my
head as I came onto Platform Five, where there was a man
leaning against a pillar . . . and
another
man leaning against a
pillar. They were not the Brains or the Blocker; they had similar weird looks to the fighting Camerons of the Institute. All of
a sudden, the station seemed full of loungers - fellows who
could not be relied on to come and go with the trains.
I dashed onto the footbridge. I was the arresting officer,
and I would bring the charge; I would be in the Police Court,
and in the
Yorkshire Evening Press,
too: 'Detective James
Stringer, of the North Eastern Railway force, who is stationed at York, took the stand .
.
.'
The thing was not to fret about the job. Get in deep. Then I
again couldn't see the Blocker and the Brains even from the
centre of the footbridge, which gave views of the whole station. I looked about for a constable, and gave a glance over
in
the direction of the Police Office, which was also on Platform
Four. My view was blocked by the signal box that overhung
the bookstall on that platform, and I couldn't even make out
if light burned in the Police Office.
I gave it up, walked back to Platform Fourteen.
The 'down' express had gone, carried by its new North
Eastern engine off to Newcastle, Berwick, Edinburgh. Lund,
the lost-luggage porter, stood on the platform coughing. The
pocketbook was in his hand, caught up from the tracks.
'Did you tell the gent that his pocketbook had been lifted?'
I said.
He shook his head.
'Why ever not?'
'Train pulled out in double quick time,' he said, and he
began coughing again - a real workhouse cough.
'You all right, mate?' I asked him.
He nodded. His uniform gave him a schoolboy look, but it
was impossible to make out his age.
'I'd have thought you'd take an umbrella with you on
evenings like this.'
'Why?'
'Well you've about three thousand to hand in your place of
work.'
'It's against regulations to take 'em out.'
'But your governor, Parkinson, does it.'
No answer to that.
'Why did you not tell the police before
-
about those two,
I mean?'
I gestured along the empty platform.