I knew that for the first time in our acquaintance this was my silence rather than one of his. I'd been stirred up by my success in the pub, and I now felt I had the measure of the Chief. I would let him stew before I said my piece.
He smoked and I sat over-opposite, looking sidelong.
'Will you have a cigar?' he enquired, just after we'd come out of Seamer.
'I reckon not,' I said.
'It is a smoking compartment, you know.'
'Yes,' I said, 'but that doesn't mean it's obligatory, does it… sir?'
'Obligatory,' he muttered under his breath.
A silence of twenty minutes followed that exchange.
'I want to say something about this case,' I said, as we flew through Rillington.
'Fire away,' he said.
'You sent me into that house unprepared.'
'Correct.'
I was a bit knocked by that but I ploughed on: 'Unprepared in the following ways: number one…'
'No,' said the Chief, who had now turned and was looking through the window.
'Eh?'
'Don't put numbers to it. I'm liable to get a bit cross if you do that. Put it shortly.'
'I had no sight of the case papers,' I said. 'Well, I had the witness statements, but none of the reports. I had no account of the personalities in the house.'
The Chief was still looking through the window.
'Firstly,' he said,'… Christ, you've got me at it now… you had all the papers that were to hand. The others were missing and have never turned up since.'
'That's a bit funny, isn't it?'
'Well, you don't seem to be laughing about it. And even if more papers had been to hand, do you think those Leeds and Scarborough blokes are up to writing an account of anyone's personality7.' He fairly spat that word out. 'What do you think they are? A bunch of fucking novelists?'
'… And you gave me no advance warning of the job,' I said. 'Well, one day – not enough.'
'I didn't want you shitting yourself for a whole week, did I? It might have been bad for your health.'
'I wouldn't have been shitting myself… sir. I would have been developing a plan of action.'
'I didn't want you to develop a plan of action.'
'Why not?'
'Because it would have been crap.'
'Thanks,' I said, and the Chief stood up. He suddenly looked big – too big for Malton station, which we were just then pulling into.
'Where are you off to?' I said.
'The next carriage,' said the Chief, blowing smoke.
The chief said 'carriage' when he meant 'compartment'. He was old-fashioned in that way.
'I don't care for the smell in this one,' he continued, as he pulled open the door.
'And what smell is that?'
'Lawyer,' he said, and he disappeared along the corridor.
I sat alone until Kirkham Abbey came up – a good twenty minutes. Then I too stood up and walked along to the next compartment. From the corridor, I looked through the window at the Chief, who was sitting there with the gas lamps turned up full. He hardly ever read on a train, but would always sit under bright light. The lamp immediately above him illuminated his head in such a way that I could count the hairs. There were not more than a dozen. I shoved open the door, and entered the compartment. I sat down facing the Chief. He met my gaze while exhaling smoke, at which my gaze shifted somewhat to the left – to the 'No Smoking' sign pasted on the window.
'I'm not complaining on my own account,' I said. 'It's my job to go into dangerous places.'
'Congratulations,' said the Chief. 'It's only taken you ten fucking years to work that one out.'
'But you shouldn't have sent Tommy Nugent. Why did you send him?'
'He wanted to go,' said the Chief. 'He was bored. There's a lot of it about, you know. I'm bored listening to you.'
I watched the dark fields roll by the window. There was absolutely nothing at all between bloody Barton Hill and Strensall.
'Who was the man you were speaking to in the station when we came back from the Beeswing?' I said. 'It seems an age since, but it was only Friday. You weren't over-keen that I saw you.'
'None of your fucking business,' said the Chief, and just at that moment I knew.
'Do you want me to stay on the force?' I said.
'It's not obligatory,' replied the Chief, and now we were in his silence, and we remained in it all the way back to York.
On arrival at the station, I walked through the arch in the Bar Walls to Toft Green, where the Grapes public house was dwarfed by the new railway offices. It was a perfect little jewel box of a pub, with the name spelled out in the stained glass of the window. The name of the landlord – the new landlord – appeared over the door: John Mitchell, licensed to sell beers, wines and all the rest of it. He was holding a cheerful conversation at the bar, and I broke in on it directly by asking whether Chief Inspector Saul Weatherill of the railway police had wanted to hold a 'do' in the pub.
'Aye,' said Mitchell, a bit dazed.
'You spoke to him about it at the station on Friday, didn't you?'
Mitchell nodded.
'What was it in aid of?' I enquired.
'Leaving 'do' for a fellow call Stringer. Why?'
The Chief, then, had not bargained on me dying in Scarborough, and not only had he come to terms with my leaving the force, but he was willing to make a party of it. It was this that decided me.
'You may as well forget about it,' I said. 'I'm Stringer, and I en't leaving.'
Chapter Forty-Three
At King's Cross station, a succession of pointing-finger signs directed me to: 'King's Cross for St Pancras', which was the Underground station; the booking office of same, where I bought a penny ticket; and the southbound platform of the Hampstead Tube.
Charing Cross Underground station was being rebuilt, I discovered on arrival, but the pointing fingers were there as well, directing me past the men hammering, sawing, mixing cement – and onto the platforms of the District Railway, where I waited for a westbound train while figuring in my mind a particular bench in the Museum Gardens at York, the one set just before the ruins of St Mary's Abbey. It was there – on the day of my return from the London docks – that I had told the tale of Paradise to the wife, taking care to put a quantity of rouge and kohl onto Amanda Rickerby's face and a good ten years onto her age.
'She was a scarlet woman,' the wife had said, in an amused sort of voice, as though to save me the trouble of going to any further lengths.
Naturally, I also left out my own blushes and faltering speech, my own keenness to be in the company of the lady. But I did admit that she had taken my hand in the ship room on the second, fatal evening.
'And what did you do then?' the wife asked.
'Nothing,' I said, and the wife had kept silence.
'Don't you believe me?' I said.
'I know you did nothing, Jim,' she said, and it seemed to me that she sounded almost disappointed, as though I'd failed her own sex. She also sounded distracted, and it struck me that I ought to have predicted that she would be. Whenever you have some important matter to relate and you've taken a time working yourself up to doing it, you invariably find that the person you're telling it to is thinking of something else entirely – something much more
