The thought of taking articles and becoming a railway solicitor made me hot and cold. It was like a fever. One minute, I could imagine the whole enterprise going smoothly on and myself going to the Dean Court Hotel alongside the Minster – which was the refuge of the top clerks in the North Eastern offices – wearing a grey, well-brushed fedora hat. But it would keep coming back to me that the profession I was entering was unmanly. It came down to this: the lawyers only talked about the railway, instead of doing anything to make the trains go.
I wore my great-coat on top of my second best suit. I had on a white shirt and white necker, and I carried in my kit bag a change of shirt and a tie in case the boarding house should turn out to be a more than averagely respectable one. I carried no rule book, but on my suit-coat lapel I'd pinned the company badge, this being the North Eastern Railway crest about one inch across. All company employees were given one on joining, and the keener sorts would wear it every day. You'd be more likely to see a driver or a fireman wearing his badge than a booking office clerk because the footplate lads took more pride in their work.
I had taken off my wedding ring, partly because it didn't do to fire while wearing a ring – there were plenty of things to snag it on – and partly because Ray Blackburn had been a single man, and I wanted to place myself as far as possible in his shoes. (He'd been engaged, evidently, but surely no engine man would ever wear an engagement ring.) My railway police warrant card I carried in my pocket book, which was in the inside pocket of my suit-coat. I'd need it if it came to an arrest, but I did not envisage having to produce it, and it must be kept out of sight for as long as I was passing myself off as an engine man.
The Super guarded the shed from his little office, which was stuck onto the front of it like a bunion, spoiling what would otherwise have been a perfectly circular brick wall, for the North Shed was a roundhouse. He was expecting me, and seemed to have been thoroughly briefed by the Chief. He had me sign the ledger which was kept underneath a clock in a little booth of its own, the whole arrangement putting me in mind of a side altar in a church. The ledger was really a big diary. The left hand page for Sunday, 15 March 1914 was the booking-on side, and that was clean. But the booking-off side was dirty because those blokes had spent the past ten hours at close quarters with coal, oil ash and soot. It came to me that this was just how it had been at Sowerby Bridge shed when I'd been firing for the Lancashire and Yorkshire railway eight years since.
As the Super looked on, smoking a little cigar, I signed my name.
'What shall I put under 'Duty'?' I asked
'Well,' said the Super, inspecting the end of his cigar, 'you're working the last York train of the day to Scarborough, then running back light engine… Only you're not, are you?'
And he practically winked at me.
'I've no notion what I'm doing,' I said. 'All I know is I'm stopping in Scarborough.'
'Your engine'll break down there, lad,' said another voice, and it was the Chief, who had now entered the booth, and was lighting his own cigar from the Shed Super's. 'That way you'll have a good excuse for staying.'
'What's going to be up with the engine?' I said.
'Injector steam valve's shot,' said the Chief.
'Leaking pretty badly,' said another voice, and there was a fourth man in the tiny booking-on place. 'Just come and have a look!' he said.
In the confusion of us all getting out of there, and walking into the shed proper, the new man was introduced to me by the Chief, and he was Tom, or Tommy, Nugent. He didn't look like an engine man – too small and curly- haired, and too talkative by half – but he would drive the locomotive to Scarborough. He'd then come on with me to the boarding house called Paradise and obligingly make himself available as a second mark for any murderers that might be living there. He would also be a kind of guard for me, and it did bother me that the Chief thought this should be necessary, especially since he hadn't seemed over-protective of me in the past.
We entered the great shed, and the galvanising coal smell hit me. I thought: How can blokes keep away from a place like this? But there were not many in there and not many engines. Half of the berths, which were arranged like the spokes of a wheel, stood empty. Tommy Nugent led the way, talking thirteen to the dozen. I couldn't quite catch his words, which were directed to the Shed Super and the Chief, but I saw that he walked lame, and I liked the combination of his excited patter and his crocked right leg. He was half crippled but didn't appear to gloom over it.
The air in the shed was grey, and every noise echoed. A shunting engine was being cleaned by a lad I'd often seen about the station, and as he went at the boiler with Brasso, an older bloke, who sat on the boiler top near the chimney, was saying, 'It's a half day and double time, so what are you moaning about?'
They both nodded at Nugent, who seemed a general favourite in the shed. We then passed one of the Class Zs; a bloke lounging by the boiler frame nodded as we went by.
'Aye aye,' he said, and gave a grin, as if to say, 'Look what I've got to lean on.' ('An engine of exceptional grace and power', the Railway Magazine had called the Z Class.)
But now our party had come to a stop before a little tuppenny ha'penny J Class. It was in steam, and too much of the stuff was trailing away from the injector overflow pipe beneath the footplate on the right hand side.
'And the fire door's jiggered into the bargain,' Nugent was saying. 'It jams on the runners and it's a right bugger to shift it.'
'Seems a bit hard on the passengers,' I said. 'I mean, we are going to take passengers, aren't we?'
'You're the 5.52 express,' said the Chief. 'I'll say you're taking bloody passengers!'
'She's been in this state for ages,' said Tommy Nugent. 'She'd get us back home tonight with no bother, but we don't want to come back, do we?'
'We want to come back eventually,' I said.
'Paradise,' he said, climbing onto the footplate with some difficulty. 'They've got a nerve calling it that, when they're killing off the fucking guests. Here, what shall I call you when we get there? Not Detective Sergeant Stringer, I suppose?'
The Chief looked at me, and gave a grin. He seemed more easy-going today, perhaps pleased that his plans on my behalf were running smoothly.
'No flies on Tommy,' he said.
'Just call me Jim,' I called up to Tommy.
'But that's your real name.'
'I don't see any harm in using it,' I said.
I didn't see the need of all this palaver either. The aim was to kid any spies the Paradise guest house might have in Scarborough station or engine shed, but it seemed highly unlikely there'd be any.
'Either there's something going on in that house,' I said, 'in which case the offenders will be brought to book, or there isn't, in which case we have a pleasant Sunday night in Scarborough.'
'Or they kill you,' said the Chief, blowing smoke.
The Chief knew I was inclined to nerves, and so would rib me in this way, and I preferred this open style of joshing to the strange smiles he'd given in the Beeswing Hotel.
'Just let 'em try,' said Tommy Nugent. 'I hope they bloody do!’
Having collected an oil can from the footplate, he was now touring the lubrication points of the engine. He carried on talking as he did it, but sometimes he'd go out of sight and in one of those moments I said to the Chief:
'Seems a pleasant enough bloke, but he talks a lot… might be a bit of a handful in the house.'
'He's plucky though.'
'How'd he come by the leg?'
'Shot wound. Tom was in the York Territorials… wandered onto the target range at Strensall barracks.'
No wonder he was in with the Chief then. The Chief was not in the Territorials himself, but as an old soldier he had many connections with them. And he liked any man who shot. He was forever trying to get me at it – and he'd described the missing man, Blackburn, as a good shot.
Nugent's voice had gone muffled as he oiled underneath the engine, but it came clear again as he climbed up out of the inspection pit:
'The good thing is, Jim, that I really am a driver, and you really were a fireman or so I've heard.'
'I was a passed cleaner, but I did plenty of firing. Then I turned copper… and now I'm very likely off to be a solicitor.'
'Blimey,' said Tommy Nugent. 'Restless sort, en't you?'
'He has a restless wife,' said the Chief, 'which comes to the same thing', and so saying he shook both our
