The Last Train to Scarborough Read Free Page B

dark-coated men bathing. No, couldn't be. That wasn't the word.
    Now
bells rang about me on the dark coal plain, and the floorboards over my head
were being lifted one by one. It appeared that they were not nailed down, for
they came away very easily. Two men worked at the job. Both wore rough
guernseys and some species of gumboots, and as they worked they rose and fell
with the coal plain, and with me. Above them, a night sky was gradually being
revealed: a mighty and expanding acreage of stars and racing wisps of cloud. I
fixed on one very bright star, and that was a mistake, for the act of watching
it brought back the sickness, and the French word came to me: mal de mer. I had heard that somewhere of late.
    As
I watched in wonder, I counted the bells. Had there been eight strokes in all?
One of the two men wore a hat that might have been a captain's peaked cap, but
there was no braid and no badge, as though he wanted to keep back his identity.
His face was brownish and square. The other's face, beard and hair were all
grey, and he was now down on the coal with me, fastening up a tunic with two
rows of brass buttons. The man who remained above, standing on the edge of the
ragged skylight that he'd had a hand in making, shouted a question to the one standing
over me, and I could not make it out, but I knew from the tone that he must be
the governor, and I heard the reply: 'They're all aft, skipper.' He was foreign
in some way, this second man. He put a bit of a'd' sound at the beginning of
'they're', in a way that made the word seem babyish. But he looked a hard case,
as did the other.
    Another
bell was rung - a bell that existed in an altogether different world - and it
brought me to wakefulness sitting alone in my best suit on the top deck of the
Number Nine tram. Friday evening and the tram running along, and my memory
doing so once again as well. We ran along under the York lamps and only a
scattering of stars, making for the place where easternmost York came to a
stop: the Beeswing Hotel. The conductor was hanging off the platform, and
joshing with various street loungers that we passed, like a performer on a
moving stage. His high, cracked voice floated up the staircase but hadn't kept
me from sleep. I had not slept in the afternoon as the wife had suggested, and
I was dead tired, for I'd been awake all night fretting about my meeting with
Parker.
    In
fact, our 'conversation' had been just that, and we had not touched on the
doings of Mr Buckingham, reasonable or otherwise. 'I have satisfied myself that
you are not a fool, Mr Stringer,' Parker had said, but he'd taken two and a
half hours about it, in the course of which he'd introduced me to every man in
the office. He'd asked me a good deal about Lydia, and I wondered at first
whether he was one of her not-so-secret admirers like Robert Henderson, but I
decided he was more nervous of her than anything. 'She is a rather forward
party,' he had said, which I thought rather forward of him. Then again, in the summer of i9i3 she had intercepted him on
his bicycle in the middle of York, and put it to him that I might have a start
in his office.
    'How
did she know it was me?' Parker had asked, towards the end of our interview. My
answer was pretty well-greased. I told him he was a famous York character,
often mentioned in the Yorkshire Evening Press as chairing
the police court or speaking at society events, or addressing the Historical
Society on the Merchant Adventurers of York, on which he was an expert.
    'Yes,
but there's never a photograph, is there?'
    That
was true enough. The Press only ran to photographs for
convicted murderers.
    '... So how did she know?'
    The
truth was that Mr Parker had made the mistake - if that's what it was - of
bicycling out to Thorpe-on-Ouse one summer's evening. As he went on his stately
way along the high street, Harry had called out, 'That's an Ai bike!' It was
one of the best made: a Beeston Humber. As Harry went on about the bike - he
was