bookshelves. Novels, collected numbers of Notes and Queries, a digest of The Railway Magazine, Famous Sea Tales, Marine Painters of Britain, A Catalogue for the Collectors of Post Cards, The Literary Antiquary; some volumes on book collecting, some guides to Scarborough. I walked to the little bedside table, opened the drawer set into it, and here was not a box but an envelope. On the front was written: 'Railway Selection – Line-side Curiosities & C'. The flap of the envelope was tucked into place but not sealed. I lifted it up, and there were two post cards: the first showed a woman in a riding hat sitting side saddle on a white horse; the second showed her sitting astride the horse. She was quite naked in both.
I froze, listened to the house; watched the door. There came faint voices from below, nothing besides.
The overall picture was now composing, but the light of day was also fading, and Fielding's room was half enclosed in darkness as I replaced the cards – for there'd been half a dozen in the envelope, all of the same sort – and walked smartly out of his room and into the corridor. Here, I listened again before I approached the opened door of Miss Rickerby's bedroom.
It was not exactly blue but lavender – her colour. The paraffin heater roared faintly as before. In combination with the low burning fire, this made the room too hot, also as before. I made first for the dressing table and opening the top-most drawer I did not care for the look of my face in the triple mirror (which seemed to give all the angles of the photographs in a criminal record card). The drawer held a great mix-up of buttons, buckles, beads, chains, lockets. I pricked my finger on the pin of a butterfly brooch. The stones on the brooch and on the chains and pendants were not precious as far as I could judge, and it made me feel sorry for the owner.
There was some silver there however – just pitched in anyhow with everything else. I saw a decorated paper fan. I caught it up, and opened it out, bringing to life a sea-side scene: a long promenade with happy bicyclists, and strollers with parasols and sun hats. I could not make out the words at the top, so I held it towards the seething blue flame of the paraffin heater and read: 'Eastbourne, Sussex'. She liked Eastbourne. I knew that already.
I tried the second drawer. It held some mysterious bundles of cotton and muslin that I knew I ought not to look at, two folded corsets; also a pair of small binoculars, another jumble of jewellery and some documents pinned together. I removed the pin. The first paper was a clipping from a magazine: 'Are You Troubled by Poor Eyesight?' An optician's advertisement – and I felt a surge of love for Miss Rickerby. The next paper was a handwritten letter, and I could hardly read a word of it; there were a couple more in the same shocking hand. I stared at the final page of the final one, and swung it in the direction of the blue light. At length, I made out 'a compass – only a trinket but it works'. The document that came after was type-written, perfectly clear… and all the breath stopped on my lips as I read the heading that had been underlined at the top: Re: Your
As
I returned to the top of the letter. The address was that of Messrs Robinson, Farmery and Farmery of Middlesbrough, and carried the date 11 March, 1910.1 supposed they would have known that Adam Rickerby was unable to read, and that the business would be dealt with on his behalf by his sister. She, at any rate, had been the one who'd kept the letter, and it proved that Adam Rickerby had not been made strange by the collapse of a pit prop. He'd tangled with a train, and it was odds-on that the money paid over as a consequence – and paid through the agency of the firm that I would shortly be working for – had bought the Paradise guest house.
I could make nothing of the other papers. I replaced the pin, and my eye fell on the one box in the drawer. It was about three inches square, the lid decorated with sea shells. I lifted the lid, and saw a small silver compass set into a miniature replica of a ship's wheel. But it was the object lying alongside it that I picked up. In the half light I saw the crest of the City of York, the Leeds crest, the sheep, the ears of corn. Here was the badge of the North Eastern Railway, and I was quite certain that it had once belonged to Ray Blackburn.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
I stepped out of Amanda Rickerby's room and walked along the dark corridor to the top of the staircase, where I heard the sound of rainfall. The front door was open, but it closed as I looked down. Fielding appeared at the foot of the stairs. His gramophone club business evidently concluded, he was putting on his coat in the hall, under the gas chandelier. I had not seen his coat before. It had a velvet collar.
'You look tired,' I called down, for he did, and I wanted to appear mannerly, not like a burglar. He looked up the stairs and nodded his head a few times.
'I believe we all are,' he said.
I called down, 'A lot of drinking goes on in this house,' and he tipped his head to see if I was joking, looking for a clue as to how to take this.
He gave a half smile, and said, 'What else can you do on a day like today in Scarborough?' and he put on a wide- brimmed hat.
'Where are you going?' I enquired, and he might easily have told me to mind my own business, but he said: 'Take the air. A saunter… Can one saunter in a storm?'
'Where's Miss Rickerby?' I called down.
This was forward of me again, but he said, 'She left a moment ago to do the same, I think. The boy went with her… There's some of the wine left chilling in the larder, Mr
Stringer,' he added with great weariness as he opened the door and contemplated the wind and the rain. Then he stepped through it and was gone.
I cannot say for certain why, but in the next moment I dashed down the stairs and entered the dining room, kitchen and scullery in turn. Only in the scullery, where the walls were of white-glazed brick, did a gas light burn. The rough wooden door beside the mangle must be the entry to Adam Rickerby's room. I knocked – no answer. I lifted the latch, pushed the door, and the light from the scullery fell on another scullery, or so it appeared, but this with a truckle bed in it. A good-sized barrel stood in the room, an old washing dolly, a quantity of carefully folded sacks, and a bicycle with the front wheel smaller than the back so as to make way for a great basket. There was no carpet on the stone floor, and no fireplace but many thick blankets on the bed, which was neatly made up with hardly a crease in the pillow. A trunk stood by the side of the bed. I lifted the lid, and saw rough clothes, neatly folded. Many objects hung from nails on the wall: a bike tyre, an oilcloth, a sou'wester, an apron, and a cork lifejacket. Well, Adam Rickerby lived by the sea, so it was not surprising that he owned a boat. Most who owned boats owned lifejackets. None of this was out of the common, except that I couldn't quite imagine him in charge of a boat, at large on the seas without his sister to encourage him and set him right when he went wrong.
I stepped out of the room, closed the door behind me, and returned to the gloomy kitchen, where something drew me over towards the knife polisher. It looked like a round wooden wheel, the rim of which had been repeatedly stabbed by knives, although in fact they rested in slots. One of the holes accommodated several long, thin items: three skewers of some sort, and a nine inch needle with an eye, which was perhaps for trussing up meat prior to roasting. In the centre of the polisher was a handle connected to a circular brush: you wound it and the blades inside were cleaned.
I climbed the steps, which were all in darkness; had a piss in the gloomy bathroom on the half decorated floor and wandered along towards the door of the apartment-in-the-making. I turned the handle, and stepped through to see amid the shadows the rags of half stripped paper hanging from the walls, the bare boards and the parade of paint tins. The window stood open as before, and I watched for a while the waves hitting the harbour wall a quarter of a mile off. I knew what I was doing: I was putting off looking through the hole in the wall. I watched the sea make three attempts to send spray to the top of the lighthouse, and then I approached the hole, which was about man-sized.
The shreds of faded green-stripe wallpaper made a kind of curtain over it. I pushed them aside, stepped through, and my boots came down silently -1 was on carpet, which was a turnup. I could feel the carpet but not see
