The Lost Luggage Porter (33 page)

I had brought along
Paris and its Environs
so as to get the spellings of some of the French words right, but after the best part of an hour I was still describing events in the round­house. Knowing the young Company man who'd come along with us only as 'Tim', I did my best to describe his looks, with a funny feeling of digging the man's grave as I went about it. Did I want them to see him run-in? Yes and no. I'd liked him in a way, and he hadn't seemed a violent sort.

I had a second hesitation as I came to recall just what

Sampson had said in the roundhouse about the killing of the Camerons. The Chief wanted Sampson charged with their murder, should he ever be found. This was because Sampson had shot at the Chief and made him lie down between the tracks. It was one thing to keep back Lund's confession, but it would be another again to lie in writing about what I'd heard, with the words repeated on the carbon beneath . . . And then stand to it all in court.

Roberts, the Clerk, had it wrong. Sampson had said 'I enjoyed that business', meaning he enjoyed hearing of it or reading of it - at least so I believed, and I would write my account accordingly, letting people make what they would of his words. But in fact I wrote nothing. Instead, I sat back and thought again of all the crimes of Sampson, beginning with the ones I suspected him of (he had somehow caused the hotel man, Mariner, to make away with himself; he had very likely killed the two detectives at Victoria), and then running on to the ones I was witness to, which included rail­way trespass at the lowest, attempted murder of the Chief Inspector at the highest. But you could not swing for attempt. Why should that concern me either way? Was my goal the execution of Valentine Sampson? It would have been nearer the mark to say that my goal was the saving of Lund, but unfortunately the two could not go together.I stood up and made another pot of tea. I looked at what I now knew to be the armoury cupboard, tried the door - locked, of course. I wandered over to the mantel, looking at the photograph of the Grimsby Dock Police Football team of 1905. Did every man in that team suffer the same vexation as me over police work? You would not have thought it from their faces. I went back to the desk and picked up
Paris and its Environs.
On the second page, I read 'A Railway Map of France will be found at the end of the book', and I turned to the map, where the English Channel was put down as 'La Manche'. The lines shown extended a good way beyond France, and the sea routes to England from Belgium and Holland were also drawn in. As I looked at the map with an idea dawning, a mighty noise rose within the Police Office, the sound of a wind or a great wave rolling into shore.

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.

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 cannot 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.