The Lost Luggage Porter (19 page)

'This keeps you going until dinnertime, you know,' said the Chief, and his face could not contain his twisted, half- embarrassed smile. He was thinking of the morning he'd left me in the cold Police Office with nothing but a cold kettle. But I was wondering whether we ought to be in the hotel at all. It was the Chief himself who'd made all those rules about our not being seen together, after all.

'You're not a dog, lad,' said the Chief, as he poured coffee, 'a creature trained to absolutely obedience at all times. You must operate in two minds. What most folk - most police­men especially - don't understand about police work is that it's
brain
work of the most confoundedly difficult sort.'

As he said this, the swell sitting opposite a woman at the next table turned to face us, and it was like a field gun swing­ing on its pivot. He was a bastard - I could see that right away.

'You must go along with your bad lads,' said the Chief, 'but stop short before the point of no return.'

'And what then?'

The Chief spooned a lump of marmalade on to his toast. It fell off. He spooned it on again.

'Remember,' he said, 'that you will not have brought the business to that point. It would have arrived there anyway, and when it does come, if there's no help to hand, you must do your best to face down

'Face down what?' I asked after a while, but the Chief was eating his toast and marmalade.

'Evil,' he said, when he'd finished.

'But I have no means of giving the alarm.'

Our neighbour, the toff, was prodding at bacon with a fork. He seemed very down on the whole show. This was not a very good breakfast as far as he was concerned. He looked up at the woman sitting before him:

'Want fruit?' he said, in a dead voice. I did not hear her reply.

The Chief picked up another bit of toast. It was fascinating to watch him eat, and also quite off-putting. I suddenly remembered what the
Police Gazette
had said about Howard or Sampson: 'Will probably be found in hotels'.

'Look,' said the Chief, 'we must net these lads, and we must net them
finely.
And that means an ambush, yes, but at the right time. At the moment what've we got? Theft of a cylinder of some sort?'

Was the aristocratic misery alongside us listening? He was looking at the woman. It was hard to say.

'It'll be used to cut metal, sir,' I said quietly, 'as I've already mentioned.'

'Theft of a cylinder,' repeated the Chief, 'pick-pocketing within the station; an assault. Other minor matters possibly. It's very thin pickings, and yet you suspect this scoundrel - the number one man - of all sorts.'

'I'm sure he killed the Camerons’ I said, in an under- breath. 'They were in his way somehow.'

'Add to that,' said the Chief, who continued loud, in spite of my whispers, 'the fact that you say the next meeting is not the actual doings, but more in the way of . .. plotting?'

I nodded, although I wasn't quite sure of that. As I tried to recall exactly what had been said on the cart coming away from the goods yard, a question came: why would Sampson want Allan Appleby involved in the planning of the great doing?

'We'll meet tomorrow in the Police Office at six in the morning,' the Chief was saying. 'No, meet at five. I've to be in Newcastle at half-past seven. We'll talk over whatever happens tonight and see if we have a better understanding of their final object.'

I asked the Chief: 'Any news on Richard Mariner?'

'Mariner?' said the Chief, a strange look on his face.

'The night porter here who did away with himself.'

'I asked about him. Spoke to the general manager. Noth­ing in it. The fellow always was a miserable sort - he'd had the morbs for years ...'

The girl came up again, with the bacon and eggs and relat­ed matters. She served very daintily, but clumped off when she'd set it all out, which made her even more charming somehow. The Chief watched her as she walked away

'One curious thing about Mariner though ...' the Chief con­tinued. 'He'd worked in the housekeeper's office, later with the banqueting staff... knew all about glass, linen and silver.'

'That fits the bill’ I said, and I thought of the riches of the Company. The glasses on our table, the cruet, the cutlery, the cloth - all carried the North Eastern insignia. I was sure that Sampson had got at Mariner somehow.

'I've hours to kill until I go along to the Grapes,' I said. 'Might I go back to the Police Office for another look at the particulars in the occurrences file?'

'There've been no occurrences since you last looked,' said the Chief. 'None in that line, I mean.'

He appeared to be thinking; he pulled out his pocket watch, saying, 'It's eight o'clock turned.'

He then took out of another pocket a silver key, which he handed to me.

'I want you out of there at eight-thirty sharp,' he said, passing me the key.

'Should I lock up when I'm finished?'

'Leave the door open and put the key in my desk,' he said, 'Shillito will be in at nine.'

He was calling for more coffee as I walked away.

The breakfast had fairly dazed me, and I walked back into the station wondering who I ought to be: myself or Allan Appleby. I worked it out by degrees as I strolled along Plat­form Four, and I saw the Lad, the telegraph boy, watching me from the footbridge, as if he was trying to puzzle it out at the same time. I stopped before the Left Luggage Office, where I collected my bad suit. I changed into it in the gentle­men's, and took my good one back, receiving the ticket in lieu, which I placed in my trouser pocket.

In the Police Office, I picked the 'Occurrences - Large Theft' file out of the cabinet near the door. I read again the first one: 'Attempted (possible actual) burglary at office of goods superintendent, York Yard South . . . Mr Cambridge (Goods Super) will endeavour to ascertain losses.' The writer of that was a great one for brackets.
When
would Mr Cam­bridge make that endeavour? Or was the setting down of the intention the end of the matter? I wondered which of the absent sportsmen had written this: Shillito? Langborne? Wright? If I hung on, I'd be able to ask Shillito directly, but no, that was not permitted; I must be kept from him, and all the other railway coppers of York.

I turned over the leaf, and read again of the assault on the wagons - also in the South Yard. I knew all about that, and had a fair idea who'd replaced the broken seals - Valentine

Sampson's tame little goods clerk. They'd tried the Acety­lene company van on the same night but given up because they couldn't put their hands on the right cylinder, as I sup­posed. Well, they had it now. I turned over again, and read of the robbery at the Station Hotel on 16 December, only this time the list of missing items went on to another sheet, and seemed to run on too long. I was reading of 'silver cigarette cases (two), silver snuff boxes (two), gold Alberts (three), good jewelled bracelets (two), cash (estimated £200)', and more besides until the penny dropped. This latest sheet did not belong to the account of the hotel robbery. I went back­wards through the pages, and saw that there was another stray mixed in with the papers to do with the burglary at the office of the Goods Super. The two went together and the second one I'd found was meant to be read as the first of the two. I looked to the top of this page: the date was 21 Decem­ber 1905, the occurrence detailed as follows: 'Theft from Lost Luggage Office'.

I stared at the words while an engine pulled out of the sta­tion, somewhere on the down side. The rising bark from its cylinders ought by rights to have ended in some mighty explosion, but instead the engine simply left the station. Silence returned, and I had the great perplexity of this new occurrence before me. There were no more details - only the list of items stolen. Had no statements been taken for this or any of the thefts?

If this matter was part of the series then it was an inside job, and there were only two blokes on the inside of the Lost Luggage Office: Parkinson and Lund. I bundled up the file again, and returned it to its cabinet. Why had I not seen those papers before? Had I simply missed them? It was not out of the question. I'd first looked at them on my first day in the job, and I'd been in a tearing hurry. It was very important to find out how Lund was connected to Valentine Sampson and his band - and that before I met Sampson at the Grapes. I could do with knowing about Parkinson too but I had no address for him whereas I had a street name at least for Lund: Ward Street, Layerthorpe.

The sun was doing its work, even in Layerthorpe. The shad­ow of a cloud moved faster than me along Fossgate and, run­ning on ahead, it rolled easily up and over the silos of Leetham's Mill. The same breeze made cigar and cigarette stumps tumble along the cobbles at my feet. Although I wore the Appleby suit, I did not sport the fake spectacles. Some of the pubs had their windows open; they were getting an air­ing, and the voices that floated out of them were still at this time of the day normal voices, kept low. In between the pubs were the tiny alleyways and side-streets where the consta­bles walked in twos. Ward Street was one of them, or con­nected to one.

I turned into one of the entries, and saw two men standing in the doorway of a little broken-down hotel called Hem- ming's. One was peeling an orange, and throwing the peel at the other as he did so. It might have been a lark, but neither one was laughing. I turned again, and was facing the curved wall with the posters on it - the one I'd seen after quitting the Garden Gate on my first meeting with Miles Hopkins and Mike. The gas lamp was there but, not being lit, looked dif­ferent. The advertisements for the pantomime remained, and if they'd survived this far, I reckoned, they'd probably see out the year.

On this occasion I obeyed the order: 'Turn right for Cap­stan's Cigarettes', and I was now into a new part of Lay­erthorpe, walking along a terrace where there was not enough window, so that the people in the houses had not been accommodated so much as bricked up. From some­where, one voice was screaming out 'Dad!' over and over, and a dog barked after every cry. Eventually the voice gave up, but the barking continued, the loneliness of the sound driving the dog itself crackers. I didn't know the number of Lund's place and, as I walked, I realised that the matter was complicated by the fact that the dull, brown doors came irregularly. Some in the terrace were shuttered so that two houses were turned into one, and there were intervals of wall in between the houses, as though the builder's meagre supplies of glass had run out completely while his abundance of bricks had continued or increased. But the real surprise came at the end of the terrace where the last two houses had collapsed, or been demolished, with the rubble remaining, so that the terrace was like a cigar which had been smoked up to a certain point. On the facing terrace, the opposite numbers of the fallen houses remained and one carried a sign, not proudly but against its will as it seemed to me: 'Ward Street.'

But which was Lund's place? I turned around, and there was a man approaching one of the doors. I walked towards the man.

'How do?' I said, and he smiled.

He'd looked all right until he did that, but the inside of his mouth was a calamity: too-many-teeth and no-teeth all at once.

'How do?' I said again, for the sight of the mouth had knocked me. 'I'm looking for a fellow called Lund.'

The man pushed at the door, and walked in, motioning me to follow, which I did with no time to prepare for the second shock: the reek of the room. The man did not explain himself, but just sat down on a broken-down sofa next to a broken- down woman. Half a single curtain at the window, no fire; poker in the middle of the bare wooden floor, tab rug hard up against the wall. It was as though a wind had lately blown through. The pair in the room were canned, and I was somehow sure they were drinking at that moment, too but I could see no bottles. The man leant forwards, slowly reveal­ing a worn spot on the top of his cap, like a bald patch.

Silence until the woman spoke up:

'You must take us for what we are,' she said.

Was this Lund's mother? The person in want of a linoleum?

'I'm after a word with Lund,' I said, 'Edwin Lund.'

It was as if the man had forgotten what I was about but, now remembering, he rose to his feet, and caught up the poker that lay in the middle of the floor.

'Cold is cruel, en't it?' said the woman as he did so.

The man continued forwards, holding out the poker, mak­ing towards the fireplace, where something smoked in the blackness of the grate. He pushed the poker up the chimney, and rattled it against the flue. As he leant over to perform the action, a ripped part of his coat slipped, taking with it a portion of ripped shirt, so that I could see clear through to his white, washboard ribs, and what might have been the beginnings of a scar. Soot came down into the grate as the poker rattled, and then, behind me, something else that was coloured black set­tled quietly into the room: Lund. He wore a black suit, old and not pressed. His kerchief was something special, but not ele­gant; he held two black books in his hand. He nodded slowly at me; he didn't seem put-out, as I'd hoped, and he suddenly looked to me like a crafty, secretive fellow. He might have been about to say something - it was impossible to guess what - when the man holding the poker righted himself with a loud groan. The woman on the sofa was looking towards him; she then nodded at me, saying, 'Weakened insides, Mister.'