The Lost Luggage Porter (3 page)

'Well, if I see you scrapping in here again, you're for it’ I
said.

I turned away and an arm was at my throat, squeezing
hard. It wasn't Brilliantine. He was standing before me like a
soldier at ease, with snooker cue in lieu of rifle, and seeming
to grow smaller, to be shooting backwards in a straight line
along the gangway between the tables. It was crazy but the
thing that was amiss was of the order of a disaster: I could
not breathe. The snooker hall was being shut off by a black­ness coming from left and right above and below. But in the
light that remained the man before my eyes was moving. He
was cuffing the idiot once again, inches away from me, and
miles away too.

'Now do you take my meaning?' said Brilliantine, as the
air rushed into my mouth, and my lungs rose faster still. The
idiot was back where he'd started from, on the bench, giving
me a strange, sideways look.

'He's round the twist’ said Brilliantine.

'I'll bloody say’ I said, as I set my collar and tie to rights.

'Usually it's me that cops it. He ought not to take a drink.
In and out of the nutty house like a fiddler's elbow, that
bugger is.'

'Under the doctor, is he?'

Brilliantine nodded.

'Bootham,' he said, meaning the York asylum.

He then went back to his snooker, with the idiot in posi­tion as before, holding his cue, waiting for the shot that
never came.

As I saw off my first drink, and bought a second - to
unstring my nerves - I couldn't help thinking that I'd been
bested twice over by the pair. I sat back down, and carried on
with my reading; or at least picked up my book and looked
at the entry after 'Accomplice' which was 'Aiding and Abet­ting', but I had to keep a corner of one eye on the nearby
loony, and couldn't concentrate. The brothers carried on
their one-sided game until half-past six, when they walked
out. By then I was looking at - but not reading - the entry for
'Arrest'.

I finished my pint, pocketed my book, and walked out of
the Institute, skirting around the shadowy wagons in the
goods yard that lay between the Institute and the Lost Lug­gage Office (which scrap of railway territory was called the
Rhubarb Sidings, I knew), only to see a notice propped in the
door of the latter office: CLOSED. Looking beneath, I read
the advertised office hours: 6.30 a.m. to 6.30 p.m. I stood in
the rain before that notice, and cursed the bloody Camerons.

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.