Chapter Two

The following Monday, I was back in the Institute after another day of dangling about in York. It was a quarter after five, and this time I planned to be at the Lost Luggage Office in good time for half-past. It was still raining, and the Institute was just as empty as before, only with two quiet, reasonable- looking blokes in place of the Camerons. The day's Evening Press was on the bar, just as it had been on Friday last. I glanced at the front-page advertisements, turned to the sport at the back: 'York v. Brighouse,' I read, 'another defeat for the City team.' The barmaid was looking on.

'Try page two,' she said.

So I turned to it, and saw what must have been a good six paragraphs running down the middle of the page like a scar: 'York Murder' I read at the top, followed by 'Horrible Find at Goods Yard'. 'Last night,' began the article proper, 'Duncan and John Cameron, believed to be brothers, were found shot to death on the cinder path by York goods yard

The rest was just meaningless words to me, about how the York police were enquiring into the matter, appealing for witnesses to make themselves known. I couldn't take any of it in, such was the knock I'd received. Friday last there'd been the cut throat in the Station Hotel, and now this.

The paragraphs . ..

My eye ran up and down them again.

The barmaid was watching me narrowly.

'Surprised you didn't know about that,' she was saying, '... you being a policeman.'

'I'm sworn, but I haven't started in the job yet’1 said, turn­ing to her with no colour in my face. 'Who were this pair, exactly?'

'Well, one was a railway man, on and off. That was John. And his brother was . . . well, I hardly know how to put it nicely . ..'

She thought the matter over for a while.

'He was soft in the head’ she said, eventually, 'as you found out last week.'

'Often caused trouble in here, did they?'

'Often enough.'

She moved away to serve one of the quiet blokes who'd walked up to the bar with the tread of a cat.

The York police were investigating - that meant the regu­lar constabulary, not the railway police. I reached into my inside coat pocket and took out my Police Manual (with the page folded down at the point I had reached in my reading: 'Embezzlement') and hunted through it for 'M' and 'Murder'. But it didn't run to murder. Instead I saw 'Misappropriation', 'Misdemeanour', and 'Money Found on Prisoner'. Small stuff - lawyer's talk. Murder was out of the common. How many times would it come up in the working life of a cop­per? I shoved the book into the side pocket of my new coat, giving a nod to the barmaid, and quitting the snooker hall. On my way out, I glanced into the reading room. There was one man in there again, and this time he was awake all right, hunting through the Yorkshire papers on the big table, look­ing for more news of the Camerons, I was quite sure of it.

The same wagons stood in the Rhubarb Sidings, and now there was a light burning in the lost-luggage place beyond. I clanged through the door and there was an old fellow at a long counter guarding heaps of umbrellas. They were laid flat on a wide shelf ten feet behind him, in a room that smelt of wood and old rain. The walls were whitewashed brick. There was an overhead gas ring, with the light turned too low, and the white shades half blackened with soot, like bad teeth. This shone down on the old man, but its rays didn't quite reach a kid who was sitting on a stool in the shadows between racks of goods running at right angles to the counter. There were many of these, and what they contained I couldn't see, but all the ones parallel to the counter and facing out contained umbrellas.

'How do?' I said to the superintendent of the office.

He gave a grunt.

'What's that?' I said, giving him the chance to try again.

But he just grunted once more - it was the best he could do.

It was hard to say what was greyest about him: his hair, his beard, his eyes, his skin. He was like the old sailors in Bay- town, only they had light in their eyes. I reckoned he must've been with the Company a good half-century, all the while being pushed further and further towards the edge of the show.

'I'm missing a quantity of Railway Magazines,' I said to this dead-ender, 'bundled into dozens, and stowed in a blue portmanteau.'

'Date of loss?' said the old man, with hardly energy enough to make a question of it. He had a telegraph instrument at his elbow, and a ledger set in front of him; beside this was a copy of the Press. Otherwise the counter was empty. The kid in the shadows at the back had only the stool he was sitting on.

I told the bloke the date, and the man started turning the pages of the ledger back towards it: 7 January, that stormy Sunday when the wife and me had had our first tiff, a real set-to on the platforms of Halifax Joint station as we took our leave of the town for good. There was the wife, angry and in the family way - not a good combination - and there was I, still mourning the job I'd lost, and all around us the four bags we'd not entrusted to the guard's van.

When we'd got to York, I'd attempted to carry those four but, looking back, I only picked up three. When we discov­ered the loss, the wife had said: 'We'd have had no bother if you'd not been too mean to fetch a porter', and it hadn't sounded like the wife speaking at all but like something read from a book called Familiar Sayings of Long-Married Women.

'No,' the old clerk said after a while. 'I can turn nothing up in that line.'

'All right then,' I said. 'I'm much obliged to you.'

I turned towards the door, and I heard a scrape of boots from the shelves. The kid in the shadows was standing up.

He called out: 'They were marked down as "Books: misc­ellaneous", Mr Parkinson. I have 'em just here.'

The kid had a high, cracked voice, as if rusty from want of use.

Parkinson, the lost-property superintendent, looked at my belt buckle for a good long time, evidently annoyed that I should have struck lucky. Then he rose to his feet, saying: 'It is long past my booking-off time.'

He drew a line in the book and signed his initials against it.

'If the porter can be of any assistance you are free to con­sult him,' he went on, 'but I can spend no more time on the matter.'

Parkinson walked to the wall where his waterproof hung on the same peg as a dinty bowler. He put them both on, and walked towards the umbrellas, looking at them all for a moment, quite spoiled for choice, before finally giving a heave on a bone-handled one. He said nothing to the porter but walked to the doorway where he opened the door and shook the brolly furiously for a while, making a good deal of racket about it. When at last the brolly was up and over his head, it was like the moment when a kite takes off, and he walked away fast under the rain. Then the telegraph bell began to ring. After four of the slow dings, I looked towards the porter who was still standing in the shadows, now with a pasteboard box under his arm.

'Will you answer that,' I said, 'now that the governor's gone home?'

'He's not gone home,' said the porter.

'Where's he gone then?'

'Institute.'

That was rum. The superintendent had launched himself out into the rain with the look of a man at the start of a long walk.

The bell was still ringing.

'But will you answer it?'

He shook his head.

'Not passed to do it, mister.'

'But it could be a pressing matter’ I said.

'Such as what?' he said.

I couldn't think.

We listened until the bell stopped, and then we were left with just the sound of the rain. There was one mighty crash from the goods yard outside, and the kid said:

'I have your magazines here, mister, if you'd like to step through.'

There was a part of the counter that was hinged. I lifted it up, and walked towards the shelves, the lair of the lost- luggage porter.

'You a policeman?' he said.

'Sworn as a detective with the Railway force. How do you know?'

He pointed at the book that was sticking out of my side pocket: I put my hand to it, and saw that the words 'Police Manual', written in gold, could be made out.

As I closed on the porter, I could see that there wasn't much difference in width between his head and his neck. It was as though his neck just kept going up through his stand- up collar until it met his fair hair. My guess was that he had had some disease, and been growing in the wrong way ever since; he looked like a sort of ghostly worm. He wore the uniform of a platform porter, with the same low cap, but there was no company badge. Even the telegraph boy in the station had sported a badge, but they couldn't run to one for Lost-Luggage Porter.

The porter showed me the box. Looking inside, I read the familiar words: 'The Railway Magazine, 6d'. On the topmost one, there was a picture of an express inside a little circle as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope. I was glad to have them back, though they brought back sad memories - which was why I'd put off collecting them. Over the years since schooldays I'd supposed the purchase of each one to be a milestone on the way to the job of engine driver, but it would be a miracle if I ever attained that goal, after what had happened at the back end of 1905, in the Sowerby Bridge engine shed at Halifax.

'Miscellaneous, eh?' I said, looking down at the maga­zines.

The lost-luggage porter nodded, or shook his head; I couldn't really tell.

'All items are entered by Mr Parkinson,' he said presently, 'and he is very fond of that word.'

'Do you have the portmanteau they came in?' I asked.

'Reckon so’ said the porter, and he moved deeper into the maze of shelves, giving me a clearer view of the one contain­ing the books. Each volume was inside its own little tin coffin, with a number chalked on the side. I looked into the first of the tins: A History of Hampton Court Palace. The second one I saw held Every Man his Own Cattle Doctor.

I began drifting along the lines of shelves. As far as most of it went, 'miscellaneous' was pretty near the mark: a ball of string, a stethoscope, a fan, a muff, some sort of automatic machine, a pair of field-glasses, a length of lace, sundry pic­tures, hair brush, shovel, leather hatbox, tin ditto, scent bot­tle, whistle, a pair of scissors, a clock, a lamp, a china figure, a box of collars, a pair of braces, a knife, a thermometer, a birdcage, a pail, a fishing rod. Sometimes like met like: one shelf contained only good cloaks, wrapped in brown paper - against moth, as I supposed. All the top shelves contained nothing but ticketed hats. Walking sticks and travelling rugs had shelves to themselves while another was for gloves by the hundred. And there were more umbrellas at the back, too.

The porter returned, dustier than before, with my blue portmanteau in his hand, and began loading my magazines from several of the metal tins back into it.

I said: 'A charge is made for collection, I suppose.'

'Thruppence,' said the porter.

I fished out the coin from my pocket, and handed it over.

'You've to sign the ledger’ he said, 'and put down your address.' So we went over to the counter again.

'You've a lot of umbrellas in here’ I said.

No reply from the porter.

'I daresay everyone says that’ I said, setting down my name and address in the ledger.

'The brollies ought by rights to be stood up’ I said, look­ing up from the book. The porter had unwrapped his buffet from brown paper. He was sitting on the high stool formerly occupied by Parkinson, and starting to eat bread.

'... If they were stood up, they wouldn't rot,' I said.

The porter just chewed at his bread, and looked at me.

'The worst weather for you blokes must be rain,' I said. 'You must be head over ears in work whenever there's a downpour.'

'Folk don't forget umbrellas when it's chucking down,' he said. 'They forget 'em when it stops.'

'I see. Because then the brollies are not like . . . first thing on their minds.'

I looked at the clock that ticked above the staff coat hooks: it was nigh on half-past five.

'You must want it pouring all the time then’ I said.

After a longish pause, the porter said:

'It can do just what it likes.'

Behind me, I heard the sound of the rain increasing.

I spied a shelf containing nothing but leathern purses and pocketbooks. I went close and saw that they were all empty.

'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 with 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 looked wrong when an engine uncoupled, like a head being

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.No reply.

'What'll you do?' he said after a while.

I thought hard for a second.

'I'll make a report’ I said.

He looked at me and then looked away. He'd been gal­vanised by the activities of two vagabonds, but now he'd gone back to his silent ways.

'You'll be a witness, won't you?' I said. 'You'll stand to all we've just seen?'

He might've nodded; hard to tell. I picked up my bag, just as an S class 4-6-0 rumbled up to the place recently left by the Scotch Express. More steam, more rain-sweat. It was a mighty green beast, hard to ignore, but Edwin Lund managed, stand­ing there on Platform Fourteen with his cap in his hand and his long, twisted face turned away from the engine.

As I made to walk off, he suddenly called: 'Garden Gate!'

'You what?' I said, stopping in my tracks.

'Garden Gate,' he repeated. 'Public house. You'll be able to put your hands on those chaps in there.'

'How do you know?' I said.

He shrugged.

'They're regulars there. Never fail.'

'But how do you know?'

'I live close by, Ward Street, and I've seen 'em in there’ he said. 'Well... going in, any road.'

'You didn't follow 'em in?'

He shook his head.

'Taken the pledge, like.'

'Well’ I said, 'I might get across there tomorrow ... That's my starting day on the force.'

'Garden Gate, Carmelite Street’ said Lund, before being overtaken once again by his cough.

 

Chapter Four

I walked over the footbridge, heading for the bike stand at the front of the station. My way took me near to the Police Office and sure enough it was shut for the night. A notice on the door asked any passenger in distress to contact the night station manager. I'd been in the Police Office once before, very briefly, on the day I was sworn.

At the bicycle stand, the Humber was waiting. I took the lamp out of the saddle bag. There was water in the top all right but I was rather low on carbide. I pulled the little han­dle that set the water dripping on to the powder, opened the front of the lamp, lighted a match and put it in. The rain in front of the lamp now fell through white light. I fixed the lamp to the front fork and set off for home.

I cycled up Railway Street with a trace of acetylene smell coming to me from the lamp. It had been a twenty-third birthday present from the wife, and at five bob was worth more than the bicycle. I was glad of it, of course, but while beforehand I'd thought of every subject going during my cycle rides, I now thought of only one: the bloody lamp. It would keep going out, and it would keep falling off the bracket.

Along Thorpe-on-Ouse Road new, white-brick houses were going up. In the ones already occupied, light burned brightly, as if for swank: look at us, nicely settled with electric light, running water upstairs and all modern conveniences laid on. I thought of the Camerons, and then I thought of Edwin Lund. He had a down on the pickpockets of York station .. . But why were they any concern of his?

Beyond the building line, I was flying past the racecourse when the gas gave out in the lamp, and so I went on just as fast, but with a little nervousness. I came along by St Andrew's Church. The field in front was like the night stretched out and laid flat on the ground. One minute later I was skirting the gates of the Archbishop's Palace and skid­ding into Thorpe-on-Ouse Main Street, which was really the only street, separating the two rows of trim cottages set in nearly straight lines. Johnson, the bootmaker, faced Scholes, family butcher; Lazenby's post office faced Daffy, newsagents; the Grey Mare public house faced the Fortune of War public house, and if one shop or business should close down, it was like a tooth knocked out of a mouth. And so it had long been.

No man in Thorpe-on-Ouse supped in both the Grey Mare and the Fortune of War. It would be like bigamy. The Mare had its lot and the Fortune its own. I was for the Fortune of War, but I couldn't have said why. I looked across to the front bar. No noise from there and no movement behind the lace curtains. I could hear a horse shifting in the stables behind, but that didn't mean it wasn't asleep and dreaming. I stood under the street's one gas lamp, listening to the River Ouse rolling on out of sight past the eastern edge of the village. You could hear the river at any time in Thorpe, but you needed to work at it. It came to you if you paid attention. I looked up at the sky, trying to make out the planet Mercury - the Twinkling Wanderer, the Yorkshire Evening Press had called him. There were a few stars staring straight back. Nothing twinkling. Over the road and along, I saw an Evening Press placard propped outside Daffy's newsagent and seeming to glow somewhat. I could not make out the words, but I knew they would be 'York Brothers Slain', the news blaring out though the shop was long since shut. Would the placard be there the next day? For John and Dun­can Cameron would still be dead then.

I opened our garden gate. The cottage we'd taken at five bob a week was just over from the Fortune of War, cut away from the road with a long garden in front and another behind. It was number 16A, as though squeezed in at the last minute between numbers 16 and 17. The people who'd had it before had risen to pig keeping, and there were makeshift sties to front and back. It was only as I approached the front door that it struck me I was without the portmanteau and its magazines. 'Buggeration!' I said out loud. Where had I left the bag: on Platform Fourteen or at the bike stand?

I opened the door, which gave directly on to the parlour, and there was the wife, sitting at the strong table by the fire, and going at her typewriter as usual - fairly racing at it. Whereas some women took in dress-making, the wife took in typewriting from an agency in York, and that by the armful.

'How do?' I said, kissing her.

'Did you get your magazines then, our Jim,' she said, not stopping typewriting.

'I got 'em, but then I lost 'em again’ I said.

'You 'aporth,' said the wife, clouting the lever that slid the typewriter carriage. We had the machine on hire; it was a Standard, and the wife said it was worn to pieces but it seemed to serve pretty well.

'I collected it from Lost Luggage all right, but then I left it near the bike stand, what with all the palaver of ...'

It was unfair to blame the lamp, so I stopped there. I fettled up the fire a bit, saying: 'How's t' babby today?' and giving a grin. The wife didn't like these Yorkshire speaks. Between her and the typewriter was her belly under the maternity gown. She had all on to reach the keys.

'I'm too busy to be thinking about that,' she said, and I looked across at the page in the machine: 'Thank you for yours of 14th inst. ..'

'That kid's going to be born writing letters,' I said, walking through to the kitchen where I found a bottle of beer in the pantry.

'Oh I was forgetting. There's a telegram for you!' the wife called.

I hurried back into the living room with the bottle unopened - news of a telegram could make you do that.

The wife was pointing at the mantle shelf, at an envelope addressed: 'Detective Stringer, 16A, Main Street, Thorpe-on- Ouse, York'. It was a shock to see myself called a detective in print. The form read: 'REPORT TO POLICE OFFICE 6 A.M. TOMORROW'. My instructions had been to book on for my first day's duty at eight, so this was a turn-up. But it was the name at the bottom that really knocked me: Chief Inspector Saul Weatherill.

It had to be concerning the Camerons. What police busi­ness in York could not be just at that time?

The wife had stopped typewriting, and was looking at me.

'It's from the Chief Inspector,' I said to the wife. '. . . Top brass.'

'What's he say?'

'He wants me in at six.'

'In where?'

'The police station.'

'Where is that, exactly?' said the wife, going back to her typewriting, only more slowly.

'It's at the railway station.'

The wife frowned over the keys, saying: 'So you're stationed at the station?'

Was she the one person in the vicinity of York who knew nothing of the murder? Ought I to tell her? She'd pushed me towards police work, and she ought to see what it meant in practice . . . But she was not in the condition to receive shocks.

'There must be something on,' I said, dropping the telegram into the firewood basket.

'We had a letter as well,' said the wife. 'Your dad . . . He's coming here on Sunday.'

No smile came with these words. My dad and the wife did not get on. Dad had turned out in all weathers to listen to the Conservative chap in the late election, and the wife . .. Well, the wife was a suffragist.

'If he's coming, he's coming,' I said, sitting down on the sofa.

'Yes,' said the wife, still typewriting. 'The train service between Bay town and York is unfortunately excellent.'

'On the day,' I said, 'you are to make a big tea.'

The wife was like a cat on hot bricks whenever the subject turned to cooking. Cheese, bread, cocoa, yes: anything more, a fellow had to fight for it.

'I will make a tea,' she said carefully.

We had many more hot dinners out than other couples similarly placed, and ate a sight more from tins than was probably good for us. Then again, the wife earned money typewriting, and a good deal of that went on the housekeep­ing.

'When he comes,' I said, standing up and walking over to the fire, 'will you try to avoid a set-to?'

'How am I to do that?'

'Just don't bring up the subject of votes for women as soon as he steps through the bloody door.'

I crushed a speck of coal that had flown out on to the linoleum. I could not sit down when having these discus­sions with the wife.

'Is it my fault if your dad suffers from sex prejudice?' said the wife.

'He's sixty-five’ I said. 'He didn't know what sex preju­dice was until you showed up.'

'Well then’ she said, 'I'm only too happy to have been of assistance to him.'

I looked about the room.

'Where's the sewing machine?' I said.

'It's in a safe place, where it will not get in the way.'

Or used, I thought.

Dad had bought the wife a sewing machine, sent together with a note suggesting that she might make a layette for the baby. But the wife meant to buy a layette for the bairn, and that was all about it. He'd also taken to sending her "The Ladies' Column", snipped out from the Whitby Gazette. It was all recipes and household hints. The wife had read the first one only. 'I don't believe it's written by a woman at all’ she'd said, before pitching it into the fire.

'We must put the sewing machine out again when Dad comes’ I said.

'Very well’ said the wife.

'He's trying to make you a wife more like his own’ I said. 'She loved cooking, you know, my mother ...'

'The poor soul’ said the wife, typewriting away.

But it was best not to dwell on this subject, for Dad's wife, my mother, had died in childbirth (with me the child in question).

I sat down, thinking once again of the Camerons, but say­ing:

'. .. Chased some pickpockets today at York station.'

'Arrested them, did you?'

I shook my head.

'They ran off.'

'What're you going to do about it, then?'

'Make out a report,' I said.

'That'll settle 'em,' said the wife, grinning.

She might tease me but the wife was pleased that I'd joined the police. It was one of the few things she had in common with my dad: they both wanted me to get on. Dad, of course, was an out-and-out snob with about as many aspi­rations as any comfortably retired butcher could run to, while the wife . .. Well, she was something of a snob too, for all her belief in the woman's cause and Co-operation.

I had suffered alone after being stood down from my job on the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway To the wife, it was simply a great thing that the tin tub was not now needed every night. Then again, she came from money herself in a modest way. Her mysterious, lonely-looking father had owned several properties in and about the viaducts of Waterloo, and the wife had come into a bit when he'd died, with the result that she was plotting the purchase of a house to replace the one we'd lately sold in Halifax. This, she said, would be equipped with a thirty-shilling walnut bureau 'for our correspondence' and a five-pound pianoforte for 'musi­cal evenings' which I had spent hours trying, and failing, to imagine. (Neither of us could play a note, to begin with.) These were the fixed aims of her domestic life, and house­work could go hang in the meantime.

I had supper of boiled bacon, pickles and tea, and read a little more of my Police Manual, telling myself I would keep at it until the biggest log on the fire burnt away, but it didn't seem to burn, only to turn black. There was a lot of it left by the time I got up to 'Fraud' and quit the book.

I went up to bed with the wife at a little after ten. Before pulling the lace curtain of the bedroom to, I peered past the fern that stood on the window ledge. Nobody about in Thorpe. I thought for some reason of the Archbishop sleep­ing in his Palace, the river flowing slowly by; and it was impossible not to imagine him looking like one of those stat­ues found on church tombs. The Palace would bring a few trippers to Thorpe in summer (I'd been told) but it was a sleepy spot, all right. After Halifax, it was like being left behind by the world. Yet, two weeks before we'd arrived there'd been a windrush through the village - not occurring anywhere else - and forty-nine objects, according to the vicar, had been overturned, including the oak next to the Old Church, which stood marooned by the river.

The wife came into the room carrying her raspberry tea, recommended for those in her condition. Her nightdress hung about one foot higher than usual, because of the baby bulge beneath, and her travel around the bed put me in mind of the orbit of the planet Mercury. Her due date was two months away. If the idea bothered her, it didn't stop her sleeping, and she was quickly off.

I wanted a boy - tell him about engines. Except that I was done with them myself. I could hardly think about locomo­tives now, without going back in my mind's eye to Sowerby Bridge Shed, 12 November 1905. To think that at the start of that day, I'd still been able to see my way clear to a life on the footplate. What with memories of that calamity, and won­dering whether I'd be put to chasing murderers come six o'clock in the morning I couldn't sleep, so walked down to the kitchen for a bottle of beer. But we were all out.