The Last Train to Scarborough (19 page)

'One of those timbers in a mine...'
said Vaughan, 'that holds up the whatsname.'

'A pit prop,' Fielding put in,
'that holds up the shaft.'

'One of 'em broke,' continued
Vaughan, 'and a quantity of coal came down on him.'

'Two and a half tons, Mr
Stringer,' said Fielding.

'It rather put him off coal
mining,' said Vaughan, who was now staring at the ceiling and stroking his
moustache. 'Well... as you can imagine.'

'So you see,' Amanda Rickerby
said to me, 'this house really
is
Paradise
to my brother.'

At length, the way became clear
for my return to the chart room. The youth led me up in silence; he would not
meet my eye. The Captain and Mate waited with chairs pushed back from the
table, as though they'd just put away a good supper. The Mate indicated one of
the chairs, and the two made no objection when I moved it closer to the stove.
This burned too low as before. I asked them to put more coal on from the scuttle
that stood alongside, and the Mate did this readily enough as the Captain eyed
me. It wasn't as though they lacked fuel on that bloody ship. The pocket
revolver was on the table at the Captain's place as before, together with
coffee, bread, cold meat of some description and a round cheese. It was all I
could do to look at the stuff, let alone eat it.

'Well?' asked the Captain when
I'd settled down.

'I'm not at
all
well,' I said. 'I've a terrible headache.'

'Not what I meant,' said the
Captain.

'You were not asking after my
health?' I said.

'He means carry on with the
talking,' said the Mate.

I eyed him. It did not seem
likely to me that the common run of collier - of the sort that carried coal
from the North of England to the great gas works of London - would have a foreigner
as First Mate. But these two were confederates of long standing -
had
to be, since they were together weighing the idea of doing murder.

Most likely it
was
an ordinary collier, and an English one at that. Sometimes, they had funnels
that were hinged, like ships in bottles, so that they could go all the way
upriver - up the Thames - but the usual trip was to the mighty gas works at
Beckton, which came just before the start of the London docks. The colliers
were in competition with the coal trains. The North Eastern company carried
coal to London over its own metals and those of the Great Northern, but most of
the stuff made the long journey by sea. Had I been put on with coal? None was
loaded at Scarborough, I knew that for a fact. But this ship would have passed
Scarborough on its way south.

The chart room swayed like a tree
house in a high wind, and for a moment I was in that tree house, for my mind
still wasn't right. I looked down at my hands: the redness was fading somewhat
from them, and my memory returning by degrees. 1 started talking. I did not let
the Captain and the Mate see my mind entire as I spoke, and tried to make
myself seem cooler towards Amanda Rickerby than I had been in reality. I talked
to them about her much as I might have talked to the
wife
about
her. I was rehearsing, so to say, the way I might tell the tale of Paradise to
Lydia. It was only when, after an hour or so, the Captain once again consulted
his watch and nodded towards the Mate - who rose to take me from the chart room
- that I wondered whether I would ever have the chance to put the story right,
and to make amends.

But make amends for what,
exactly?

The Mate was descending the outer
bridge-house ladder behind me, and the over-grown kid I'd seen before waited on
the deck below. They had entrusted him with a gun, and he continued to look at
me as though I was a dead man. It broke in on me that I was a prisoner under
escort. It was as though I was the criminal; as though the Captain and the Mate
were sitting in judgement on me, the hearings of the trial being conducted in
instalments fitted around the performance of their duties in the ship. I
supposed they could only hide themselves from the crew for short intervals.

But how long was the run to
London from the northern places where the coal was dug? It was roughly four
hundred miles' distance, and a ship making about six knots would do the journey
in three days and nights at the maximum. By that reckoning there would be only
the one more hearing to come.

I descended to the gunwale on the
starboard side, facing the land, which ran along with us, rising and falling.
The night sky was darker that way; the light rose from behind me. The land,
then, lay to the west. I thought I made out bays, hills, perhaps a thin wood on
a low stretch of cliff. And now there was a new sound rising on the air, a
beating, on-rushing sound, the source of which disturbed the waves of our wake.
At the foot of the ladder, a conference was taking place between the Mate and
the lad.

I looked back towards the land, and
now saw a beautiful, flowing ribbon of lights being drawn over the cliff top. I
do not believe that I had ever been happier to see a train, even though I had
no hope of catching this one. I then turned my head to the right and saw the
source of the new noise: another ship, blazing light on our starboard side, the
landward side. It was bigger than us and gaining on us at a great rate. I knew
that I had seen this all before, and of course I was now inhabiting the scene
shown on the painting in the ship room at Paradise. The very sky was the same
colour: a dark blue with a rising pearly light on the horizon.

The Mate had gone aft; the
over-grown kid remained. The mass of the mid-ships blocked my view in that
direction, but I hoped that a row was brewing, that the crew had mustered on
the after deck, pressing to know why they must keep to one half of the ship,
and threatening mutiny.

The kid had evidently had his
orders, for he motioned me to come down the ladder, and to move for'ard with
him. I did so, with the gun on me. It was a revolver that he held, a biggish
one. I could see by the mid-ships lamps that it was clarted in grease, which
might mean it had only lately been taken out of storage, which might in turn
mean it would be stiff to operate. But if that trigger, with the kid's finger
presently upon it, travelled one quarter of an inch I was a goner.

'I hope you know what you're
about, son,' I said, as we walked halfway for'ard. 'This is a serious doing:
kidnap of a police officer, assault. Twenty-five-year touch if you're run in.'

The boy kept silence.

'And what about that gun?' I
said. 'Are you sure you're up to firing it?'

He re-pointed the thing at me,
but he was watching the oncoming ship. We both were. It wasn't a collier - too
clean, sat too high in the water. It was a superior ship altogether to our own,
with two funnels amidships and a high foc's'le, proudly carried. It lagged back
not more than a couple of hundred yards now - not close enough to hail, but
close enough perhaps to strike out and swim to.

'That gun,' I said. 'Fire it, and
the fucking flash'll blind you.'

'Eh?' he said.

'Are you sure you can work it? I
mean, is it double or single action?'

'You'll find out soon if you
don't shut up,' he said.

The other ship was starting to
make us roll in a different way. I might swim into its path and wait in the
water, but would the cold kill me? Would I be spotted, and if so would I be
rescued? The ship gave a long, low horn-blow, like the mooing of a giant cow,
and the sound threatened to deafen me and I think the kid also, for the look in
his eyes was one of shock and fear. He looked down at the gun, then up at me,
and something had made him talkative.

'Don't come it about being a
copper,' he said. 'You're a bloody stowaway.'

'You're talking through your
fucking braces,' I said.

The kid was again eyeing the
other ship.

'Stowaway...' I said. 'That's
what you've been told, is it?'

'And you can't kidnap a dirty
stowaway,' said the kid, turning back towards me. 'You're no copper,' he said
again. 'You'll be
given
to the
coppers at the turnaround.'

'Turnaround?' I said. 'Where?'

We were close to the gunwale,
practically leaning on it. I put my left hand on the cold iron, and the kid
made no move to stop me. A deck ring bolt was between us, and a pile of rope.
The rope might prevent him from making a grab at me, should I attempt the leap.
I edged still closer to the gunwale. The sea was - what? - twenty feet below
and quite black. It looked like oil; smelt like oil for the matter of that. But
then again it seemed to roll almost playfully, with only the occasional wave
uncurling itself to make a leap and hitting high against the hull with a slap
that set the iron ringing. Now the oncoming ship was blowing its horn again, as
if in encouragement, just as if to say: 'What are you waiting for, man? Make
the leap!'

I stayed behind alone in the
dining room after the meal. I was studying the painting opposite to the
fireplace because something about it troubled me.

I hung back there about five
minutes, and when I came out, I saw Adam Rickerby moving rapidly towards the
foot of the stairs with a giant tin of paint or white-wash in each hand. The
wife had laid in a couple of similar-sized cans at our new place, all ready for
me to start decorating, and it was all I could do to lift one of them. Adam
Rickerby carried two with ease and was now fairly bounding up the stairs with
them. Well, he had evidently washed the pots in double-quick time.

I followed him up to the first
landing, where the door of the ship room was closed. Were Fielding and Vaughan
already in there? But Rickerby was climbing at the top of his speed to the next
landing, and again I followed him up. Coming to the floor that was being
decorated I could not see him: the corridor stretched away darkly. But there
came a noise from the second door down on the left. That door stood ajar, and I
walked in directly to see Rickerby standing by an open window with a shrimp net
- very likely the one I'd seen in the cupboard upstairs - in his hand. The low
gas showed bare, flaking walls, white-wash brushes and rolls of wallpaper on
every hand - and it was the green stripe again. Why did the landlady persist
with that? Her colour was grey-violet, the colour of her coat
and hat. The sea wind surged
fiercely against the frame of the open window like a roll of drums, and I saw
that behind Adam Rickerby a hole had been knocked in the wall, showing another,
darker room beyond.

'Can I
help
you?' he said.

Of all the questions I might have
asked, the one that came out was: 'Why is the window open?'

'Carry off the smoke,' said
Rickerby.

'There is no smoke,' I shot back.

'It's been carried off.'

With his wild hair, the
smock-like apron and the long-handled shrimp net he held, the lad was halfway
to being bloody King Neptune.

'Smoke from what?' I said.

The room had one of the small
iron fireplaces but it was not lit. Rickerby's gaze drifted down to an object
on the floorboards by his boots, half hidden in scraps of torn wallpaper: a paraffin
torch of the sort used for burning off paint. It might have smoked at one time;
there might have been something in his tale.

'Why are you holding that shrimp
net?'

'I mean to use t'pole.'

'For what?'

'Reaching up.'

'To what?'

'Ceiling.'

'Why do you want to reach up to
the ceiling with the pole?'

'I don't.'

And I nearly crowned him just
then, which might not have been so clever, given the size of him.

'I mean to reach up wi'
t'brush
,'
he said.

'So you'll tie the brush - the
white-wash or distemper brush - onto the pole, is that it?'

He kept silence, watching me.
Presently he said, 'Aye,' and I wondered whether there might not have been a
note of sarcasm there, and - once again - whether he was brighter than I took
him for.