The Last Train to Scarborough (33 page)

Amanda
Rickerby came to mind once more ... How had she come by the badge and why had
she kept it? My head was fairly spinning. Had she asked me to lock my door in
order to protect me from the boy? From Fielding? From Vaughan? (Surely not
from Vaughan?) Or did she mean to come up and sit astride me as the woman on
the post card had sat astride the horse? I did not believe she would do, but I
decided that the moment we'd shared in the ship room ought to mark the end of
our relations. I was a married man after all. I stood up, locked the door, fell
back onto the bed, and even though it was hardly more than late afternoon, I
was asleep in an instant, my boots still on my feet.

'You
were dead wrong about Adam Rickerby,' said the Captain, pushing back his chair
and rising to his feet with the pocket revolver in his hand.

If
he didn't mean to shoot me, then he might be on the point of quitting the chart
room, and I wanted him to stay, firstly because I knew he had secrets of his
own touching this matter and secondly because I wanted to talk on. I wanted to
get behind the mist, and I now knew I could do it. The recollection of my
exchange with Miss Rickerby in the ship room came with many complications, and
the best thing was to talk on because my speech brought back my memory of what
came next and remembering, at least, was something I could be proud of.

The
Mate was eyeing the Captain, and so was I - had been for some little while. It
was the difference that made the similarity so plain: the Captain's face never
smiling, hers almost always; his hair short, curls not given time to begin,
hers abundant. But there was a strength to the Captain's close-cut hair, a
sort of possibility in it. How could I not have noticed before that they had
only the one face between them: wide, symmetrical, cat-like? The boy had the
same face again, but the accident or some earlier event had made mockery of
it, stretching it too wide and piling on the curls. He had been over-done.
Anyhow, I knew that this was Captain Rickerby sitting before me, and that he
had once sent a silver compass set in a miniature ship's wheel to his sister.

'I'll
tell you what happened,' I said to him, just as though he was Peter Backhouse,
sitting over-opposite me in the public bar of the Fortune of War in
Thorpe-on-Ouse with more than a few pints taken; and I
did
feel a kind of drunken happiness, for I could now see the
whole thing clear.

'It
was the light under the door,' I said to the Captain, who'd now sat back down.
'It was not there - the line of white light - and I was half glad of it,
because I knew it would have hurt my eyes if it had been. That was part of my
affliction ... You see, I believe that what happened to me - what was done to
me - impaired my memory, but I have now
recovered
my
memory. I can go on from here and tell you the whole thing. I have the solution
to the mystery.'

I
made my play:

'The
woman in the post cards,' I said,'... not the one on the horse, but the one
that Vaughan had liked particularly... You see, she was Blackburn's fiancée,
and when Blackburn was shown the cards in the Two Mariners he attacked Vaughan,
really laid into him ...'

'They
came to blows over this?' enquired the Mate, blowing smoke.

'Very
likely,' I said. 'At any rate they were set at odds. Perhaps Blackburn had
threatened to go to the police. In the night, Vaughan must have gone up to him,
perhaps to try and settle the matter. They must have fought again. Vaughan
killed Blackburn, perhaps not intentionally. He hauled the body downstairs, put
it on the cart over the road, took it to the Promenade or the harbour wall, and
pitched it into the sea. Vaughan knew I was onto him. He'd over-heard me
talking to

Tommy
Nugent in Mallinson's, and so he tried to do me in by the method of...'

'It
is nonsense,' said the Mate, lighting a new cigar.

'If
you don't tell the truth,' said the Captain, 'you'll never leave this ship.'

I
had made an attempt to disentangle myself from the Rickerby family, and failed
utterly. Even the bloody foreigner could see the lie for what it was. To cover
my embarrassment, I asked the Mate for a cigar, which he passed over together
with matches.

Blowing
smoke, I began again. 'The light', I said, 'was not there..

I
had known straight away the meaning. The pain in my head made movement nigh
impossible, but I had to find different air. Each inhalation carried the taste
of coal into me, and these breaths could not be released. My breathing was all
one way, which was no sort of breathing at all. I rolled off the bed, but was
now in a worse position than before with more work to do in order to stand
upright. I believe the hardest thing I ever did was to rise from that floor,
and unlock that door, whereupon I saw the gas bracket on the little landing,
which seemed to be saying:
Don't mind me; I'm nothing in
this; I'm not even burning.
But it was on at the tap, and
invisible death poured from it. I tried to close the tap, but my hands were not
up to the job. I half fell down the first stairs, where I saw in the darkness
the first gas lamp of the half-decorated landing. I saw it in the
darkness,
and proper breathing was not permitted here either. I
would shortly burst; I was a human bomb. I crashed against Vaughan's door; it
flew open, and his room was empty, the bed still made up.

In
falling, I rolled underneath another gas bracket that played its part in the
relay of death-dealing. I regained my feet, but my feet were treacherous, might
have belonged to another man altogether. I did not know my hands either, which
were stained red by all the coal gas in me. I pushed at Amanda Rickerby's door
and she rose instantly from her pillow - instantly and yet drowsily. A bottle
and a glass stood on the floor by her bed, but she looked beautiful in her
night-dress as she made her strange, dazed enquiry: 'How are you?'

She
was not rightly awake; she had taken in a quantity of the gas, and I was not in
my right mind, which is why I replied, 'I'm in great shape,' and I may have
vomited there and then onto her bedroom carpet, which was not very gentlemanly
of me. I took the stool from before her dressing table and pitched it through
her window, marvelling that my red hands were up to the job. I came out of the
room revolving, and struck Adam Rickerby, who was there in long johns and no
shirt. He looked like the strong man at the fair, or the Creature from the
Jungle. But he did not look to have been gassed - or not badly. Had the poison
reached downstairs? I would consult the man who had laid it on for my benefit.

I
pushed at Fielding's door, and entered his room for the second time. He sat on
his bed; it was all I could do to stand. I felt tiredness as a great weight
pressing me down to the floor. The room was in darkness, and I could not see
the gas brackets, but I knew that here too the coal vapour streamed. He wore a
suit, and sat on his bed.

'You
locked your door, Mr Stringer,' he said, and I somehow gasped out:

'You
sound ... put-out.'

'No,
that was Blackburn,' said Fielding. 'His eye, I mean,' and he gave a little
private smile, indicating an object that lay beside him on the bed: the nine
inch needle that had been kept in the knife polisher.

He'd
done for Blackburn by stabbing into his eye as he slept, no doubt after
observing, or over-hearing, whatever creeping about had gone on earlier in the
night. The long needle put swiftly into the closed eye - that way there'd be
little blood and no noise. He'd meant to do me the same way. But on finding the
door locked he'd fixed on a method that took no account of doors, and would
bring an end to everything and everyone.

'The
gas', he said, from the bed, 'will spare you a deal of trouble even if you
don't quite see it. For one thing, you would have been forever buying the lady
wine, and she likes the good stuff you know. You would have had to learn all
about the best vintages to keep her happy, and you would be starting as far as
I can judge, Mr Stringer, from a position of complete ignorance ...'

With
every new remark that he made more of the truth - which was not quite as
Fielding saw it - came home to me. He too was now breathing wrongly, fighting
for it, and rocking on the bed as he did so. His dainty feet were raised from
the floor, so that he looked like a child too short for the school form. He had
put on a soft-tasselled hat for his own death; a species of indoor hat - a
smoking hat, as I believed it was called. He was not smoking but held some long
implement - not the needle, which was by his side - but some other long
implement, which he passed constantly from left to right hand. If I might lay
my own hands on either it or the other... But that was impossible without air,
and I found myself dreaming - and it
was
a kind of
floating dreaminess - about a gun. That would be so much faster, and I heard
myself wasting air by saying, 'I ought to shoot you down.'

How
had he carted Blackburn, a big fellow, down the stairs? The window. The bed in
the small room was level with it. Fielding might have fed the body through, and
it would then have dropped directly to the Prom; Fielding would have sent the
suit down after. He himself, in that different world in which everyone could
walk, would have descended by the stairs and the streets, and dragged Blackburn
into the water.

...
But I couldn't believe I had that quite right. It was odds- on that a body
dropped into the harbour would turn up again. I stumbled a little way forward.

'Spooning,
you would call it,' Fielding was saying. 'He was the first at it, and then you.
She spoons with you in the presence of the man who pays the bills. Well, I am
sparing you a good deal of expense ...'

And
he seemed to concentrate hard on taking a breath, as though he might out-think
the gas, then the word burst out of him:

'Distemper...
costlier than you might think
when bought in bulk... wallpaper at a shilling a roll...'

With
great effort he took another breath; he was better at it than me. But I could
see that it did not come easily, and he now had to pause and fall silent every
few words.

'
. . . And the Lady forever changing her mind about the colour.'

It
came to me that I was now nearer to him, to the dangerous implement in his
hand, and the other one beside him on the bed.

'No!'
I said, and I could not say any more,
and
it was a wasted
word into the bargain. But I had meant to say that the Lady's colour was
lavender.

Two
paces to go before I was at Fielding and the bed. But why kill a man who was
dying anyway? I looked to the windows: the first one - closed. To the second
one - closed. I should have smashed the glass. I had wasted my time in not
doing it, and accordingly I had wasted my life. The room was whirling at
lightning speed; my legs were buckling under me and I wanted to be on the
floor, stretched right across it; I could not support the weight of my own
head. I tried to take a breath but nothing came. I saw bookshelves, a bed,
fireplace, Fielding himself, but there was no air in-between any of these
objects. I was drowning on dry land, drowning on the first floor but I was not
ignorant. Rather,
Fielding
was. I recalled those late silences of the Lady, which
were the true indication of her feelings towards me, which were no feelings at
all.

'You
tell me ... that you have hopes of becoming a ...
solicitor,'
Fielding seemed to be saying, and his voice had gone
very high on that last word; he'd fairly squeaked it out. 'But there is no
royal road to the acquisition of knowledge ... Mr Stringer, you were born to a
world of dirt... dirt and dust and coal... and that...'

I
managed another step forwards as he unfolded the jewelled implement in his
hand.

'Your
presumption,' he said, rocking faster now, his face pink, far, far too pink.
'It scarcely... It takes one's breath ... It takes the breath ...'

I
first thought that the implement might be for the fine adjustment of shirt
cuffs, for he held it positioned over his left wrist. He made a smooth, practised
movement.

'This
gas ... too ... slow,' he said, and he breathed in, making a fearful dry
squeaking, before swiftly transferring the implement to his other hand, and
moving it over the other wrist. He raised it to his neck, and for an instant I
thought: The contraption adjusts shirt collars too - just the thing for a faddish
fellow. But Adam Rickerby, standing behind me, called out: 'He'll 'ave blood
all over!'

Fielding
moved the thing quite slowly and carefully from right to left across his neck.

And
he tilted his head at me.

'And
you believe that he'd killed Blackburn?' enquired the Captain.

I
had the idea that the question was asked out of duty, that he was now restless,
his mind elsewhere. I believed that I had understood most things in the seconds
before Fielding's death, and now that I could recall that understanding, I gave
my theory in outline to the Captain. And while speaking I thought the thing
through in a different way.