well, they've made several – and they turned up a few of my choicest cards in one of them. I had them stowed away in two places in this room, and they evidently found both. No action was taken. They just gave me a bit of a rating, you know. They were quite decent about it really. I think they knew it was a bit unsporting, the way they came upon them, and to be honest I think they rather enjoyed the experience. Bit of light relief. Now I knew that Blackburn had threatened to split on me to the Lady, and I didn't know whether he had done, or whether she'd told the coppers. So I thought it best to come right out with it, and let on that I'd shown Blackburn a couple of samples.'
He took a long pull on his beer before continuing:
'But if I thought that would bring an end to the matter I thought wrong, Jim. Three times in the past five months I've been called in to the copper shop on Castle Road.'
'I can't imagine the Lady splitting,' I said. 'She seems pretty free and easy – she'd just think those cards were a bit of a laugh.'
Vaughan seemed quite bucked by the thought. He nodded and said, 'I can just see her in a series of her own, Jim. She'd be shown all day about her normal activities only without a stitch on. You're getting pretty hot at the thought, I can see it, Jim.'
'No, no, I'm just, you know… rather hot.'
'Mind you,' he continued, 'what you'd end up with would be a lot of photographs of the Lady drinking glasses of wine.'
'If the cards drew the interest of the coppers,' I said, 'and they've been all over this house, how come you've still got all the cards?'
'I haven't nearly as many as I once had,' said Vaughan. 'They've had some of the best ones off me, and I generally keep the few I do have in a little hidey hole outside this house.'
'Where's that then?' I asked, taking a pull on my beer.
'Just now, Jim,' he said, 'it's the left luggage office at Scarborough station.'
I finished my beer, and put the bottle on the mantel-shelf.
'I'm off to get my boots cleaned,' I said, 'if the lad's still about.'
'You back at work tomorrow, then?' asked Vaughan.
'If they've fettled the engine,' I said, opening the door, 'then yes. But I've got a feeling I'll be stuck here another night.'
No railway man was ever required to wait two nights for an engine. It made no kind of operating sense, but I had decided that I was on the track of something. Besides, Vaughan showed no sign of thinking anything amiss. I turned in the doorway, and took a last look at the room.
This was the real meaning of the term 'bachelor's lodgings'. The phrase was meant to mean something different but this was it in practice.
'We'll talk about a business connection tomorrow, shall we?' said Vaughan, and I nodded in a vague sort of way.
'You look about ready to move out of here,' I said.
'I've always got an eye out. After all that's gone on here I'm a bit sick, but then everyone's under the gun because of this bloody never-ending investigation.'
'Even Fielding?' I said.
'Him most of all,' said Vaughan.
'How come?'
'I shan't say, Jim. I'm sworn to silence.'
But I didn't doubt that he'd let on eventually, and here was another reason for staying on at Paradise.
'Night then,' I said.
On quitting Vaughan's room I needed a piss, and so stepped into the bathroom he'd earlier come out of.
The cabinet by the side of the toilet stood open. Inside was a mass of razor blades in paper wrappings, a length of elasticated bandage, a big bottle of Batty's Stomach Pills, something called Clarke's Blood Mixture, Owbridge's Lung Tonic, some ointment for puffed-up feet, Eczema Balm ('the worst complaint will disappear before our wonderful skin cure'), and a red paste-board packet with a picture of a dead rat on it. Rat poison in the bathroom cabinet: 'Fletcher's Quick-Acting Rat Poison', to be exact. The ingredients were printed on the back: 'Lampblack, Wheat Flour, Suet, Oil of Aniseed, Arsenious Acid'. This last came from arsenic, and it struck me that there was a whole murder kit in this cabinet. But the investigating officers had obviously not thought so – otherwise they'd have taken the stuff away. I wondered whether it was Vaughan's stuff, or whether it belonged to the household in general. I unbuttoned my fly, and I was just slacking off, playing the yellow jet spiral-wise in the toilet bowl and thinking on when the door opened behind me. It was Vaughan again. It was less than a minute since I'd seen him last.
'I know you won't mind me interrupting, Jim,' he said.
'It could have been worse,' I said, craning about.
'Old Fielding,' he said, as I left off pissing and pulled the chain.'… Guess where he was in the three months before he came here?'
The flushing of the toilet was so loud (it was as if the thing was throwing down half the German Sea) that I couldn't hear what came next, and had to ask Vaughan to speak up.
'York gaol!' he repeated, over the dinning of the waters.
Chapter Twenty-Five
With gun in hand, I began to turn about, but stopped to watch the kid. He had backed away from me, and his right hand rested on the gunwale. Behind him, on the other ship, the man who had raised his arm had lowered it, and he had turned a different way, looking for another bit of good to do; his vessel was also bouncing and swinging away from us, taking him on to the next business.
The kid, leaning against the gunwale, turned from me to the departing ship. But I ought not to be bothering about him. I had a decision to make. I could go for'ard with the gun or I could go aft. At present, I was looking aft. I could see clear past the bridge house to the wake our ship was making. I ought first to make for the engine room, stop the blokes who were creating that wake. They were party to a crime as long as they continued their work. I pictured them as small, half deafened and blinded, blackened blokes who never questioned the ringing bells that brought their commands. I would go to the bridge, and work the lever that told them to change direction. Suddenly a great wind came, and the fore-deck behind me went low and the bridge house tilted towards me, as though its illuminated windows were eyes, inspecting me. The ship righted itself, and there came the sound of hammering – a hammering on iron. I turned fully about, facing away from the kid, and I was instantly felled by a giant, flying sailor.
The gun flew from my hand as I collapsed to the deck. The ship made another slow rise as our struggle began. There were not at first any blows; at least, I did not think so at the time. It was more like a kind of wrestling, in which I was ever closer smothered by the sailor's great weight and his wide oilskin. I was under him, and his stinking breath, and then for an instant I was up, seeing the sea from the wrong angle as the ship pitched again – and catching a glimpse of the gunwale, where the kid had been standing, and was no longer. In that moment of distraction, the sailor had caught hold of my ears, one in each hand. They made convenient handles for him as he contemplated me. His great face was in two halves: black beard and the rest – and the rest was mainly nose. You are ugly, I thought, and perhaps he meant to say the same to me. He got as far as 'You' before rage over-took his speech, and he dashed my head down onto the iron deck.
The next time I lifted my head, I lay in the iron parlour again, my only companion the mighty slumbering anchor chain. The ship rose and fell, and I slipped in and out of dim dreams. Presently I looked down at my right hand, which lay like a thing defeated. No gun there.
I had been on the deck, and removed in one dark instant from it. The same had happened to the kid, only I was sure he'd gone overboard in hopes of reaching the second ship. Why had he given over the gun? Because he knew he was in queer, and didn't want any part of what was going on or was about to go on.
I fancied, over the next long while, that I occasionally heard the ringing of a bell but it was nothing more than a
