Vincent put his pipe on the coal, and gave me one of the hypnotising looks he went in for. 'No, mate,' he said, 'he's not.'
With this, all the ground went from beneath my feet; but I tried not to let on. 'Who is he then?'
'I can't believe you don't know all,' said Vincent. 'You must have had a few chats with the gent.'
'I've had one chat with him,' I said, 'and some letters were sent.'
'Smith used to be part of this show,' said Vincent, 'the London and South Western Company, I mean, and he still comes back to cause trouble from time to time, but now he's with another lot.' 'What other lot?' I was desperate for the answer, which might make everything plain, but Vincent first caught up his bottle and had another long go at his tea.
'Ever heard of the London Necropolis and National Mausoleum Company?' he said after a while. 'No.'
'They run the bodies out to Brookwood Cemetery. Well, they do the ceremonials; we lay on the trains, and the half-link runs 'em.' 'And I'm to work on this funeral train?'
'If you ever get off these coal heaps,' said Vincent with a horrible little grin.
Vincent stood up and put the cork in his bottle. 'You've been sent to work on that show for a reason.'
I was still too busy trying to imagine 'that show' to be thinking of reasons, but I said in a daze: 'What?'
He didn't answer, but instead asked, 'This fellow Smith… he's not been in touch since?' 'No.' 'And he was helpful towards you?'
A funeral train. I had heard of a funeral train, but not a funeral train. 'I say,' said Vincent, 'was he helpful towards you?' 'A proper gent in all regards.' 'Think he might be a Tommy Dodd?' 'A what?'
'Don't know? Then count yourself lucky. Let's say that you're here because he's got friends who've pulled strings, and now, you see, Arthur doesn't like that because he can think of other people who should have had this start before you.' 'Like who?'
'Like friends of his.' Vincent was watching me like a coal rat. 'Friends of his from London. You see, we don't go up there and take your work, poking our nose into your ways…'
I thought of Grosmont, and how the sun had shone every single day as I worked my notice and the rooks had risen off the trees at dusk like cinders off a fire, and then I thought of Smith, and how he had gulled me from start to finish. He had heard of my liking for high speed, yet had brought me down to work on a funeral train. But why had he done so?
'Hunt thinks I earn too much money for a new lad, doesn't he?' I said. 'That's one of the reasons he's got his knife into me.'
'No,' said Vincent, 'he thinks you earn too little, and that nobody should agree to come on at that rate. But you did, and so did those other out-of-town blokes – bloody Taylor and bloody Mike.'
Then I saw a big man stumbling towards us wearing a bowler that was more on his hair than on his head: the Governor. As he began to climb the coal hill, Vincent turned to face him; the two closed, and I thought the Governor looked fit to explode as he reeled back and crowned the side of Vincent's head, roaring, 'Get back to your fucking duty!' For a moment I thought Vincent was going to be up and at him, but he did saunter off eventually, cool as a cucumber, and the Governor led me into the shed to finally start me on the long road to engine driving, by which I mean that he started me cleaning Bampton Number Twenty-Nine. The Bampton tank was green. It looked somewhat like an M7, being thirty-five tons of muscular-looking side tank, but there was something not right about it. The dome was too big, like a big, ever-growing bubble rising out of the boiler, threatening to burst.
I spent the rest of that Saturday going at it with paraffin rags on the motion and frame, and tallow on the boiler, and thinking about the private war I'd struck. The missing man, Henry Taylor, was to do with it, I was sure, and so was Mr Rowland Smith. When I was not thinking of that I was revolving in my mind funerals and trains, and how the two might go hand in hand.
For all my troubles, I was glad to be cleaning at last, and I would like to have set to with Brasso on the controls as well, but a fire-raiser came onto the engine at four o'clock and ordered me off the footplate. He didn't seem to mind, though, that I watched him about his work as best I could from down on the tracks. The lights were all lit and the shed was almost pretty – quieter than usual, too, for there didn't seem to be many blokes about.
After a while the fire-raiser looked up from the firehole door, where he'd been spreading out the coal, and shouted, 'I hear you're from the North Eastern.'
'That's it,' I said, and I was glad he was willing to chat, but anxious as to what he'd heard about me.
'Some good running up there,' he said, and his voice came out with an echo to it, as though his head was half in the fire-hole.
'Our first Rs', I shouted back up at him, 'did almost a hundred and fifty thousand miles between Newcastle and Edinburgh with no valve-wear to speak of.'
But by that remark I had somehow killed the conversation, for there was no answer.
Having no other duties, I hung around that funny little hunchback, Twenty-Nine, sitting on the buffer bar drinking tea until late in the evening, and watching the fire blokes come out of their mess at the top of the shed, which must have been a pretty uncomfortable spot, as it had a great fire burning at all times inside it. They were off to raise steam in the engines going out on 'dark days', which is what nights were called at Nine Elms, and they carried torches or sometimes buckets of burning paraffin held on wooden spars. They never used the engines' proper names but called out nicknames instead, and the talk was all of Jumbos, Piano Fronts, Town Halls and the like. As the evening progressed they were shouting about the Turnstile too, the pub near to the Nine Elms gates. I had seen it, of course, but that was all.
I was just thinking this was a bit of all right, that maybe things were looking up, when Arthur Hunt came out of the darkness with a black-bearded fellow. One nightmare glance went shooting between us, then he and his mate leapt up onto Thirty-One, and he took her off somewhere – I did not care where.
That night the streets were full of girls, and I suddenly knew how they got their living. From my lodge I saw washing flying on the line in the yard. There were three pairs of my landlady's knickers and three of her blouses, and they were all lit up by the light on the soap works wall. But there was no sign of the lady herself.
Chapter Eight
Tuesday 24 November
The following Tuesday I walked in on Crook, bent over his board. He seemed to be playing a game of chequers against himself, but then there came a fearful shriek; he glanced out of his window, and what he saw galvanised him into speaking.
'The Bug!' said Crook, and his eyebrows jumped, giving me high hopes of a conversation.
'What's the Bug, Mr Crook?' I said, for I had stopped siring him.
'A four-two-four tank,' he said after a while, looking over my head as he spoke. 'Anything special about it?'
'It contains at all times Sir Roger White-Chester.' He was back at his chequers game now. 'An important gentleman, is he, Mr Crook?'
'Board member,' said Crook, who was now back to mumbling, 'and more important than the locomotive superintendent, Mr Drummond, who was meant to have that thing to himself.' 'What does Mr White-Chester do?' 'Comes in weekly to inspect the shed.' 'To inspect it for what?' 'Slackness,' said Crook. 'Slackness of what kind?' 'Your kind would do,' he said, looking up at me. 'Standing about talking when you should be on the job.' And he went back to his tokens.
Walking out of Crook's place, I saw the Bug directly: a little squashed-up tank revolving on one of the turntables with a lot of smoke twisting out of its chimney in a spiral. I walked into the shed and found the Governor coughing outside his office with papers in his hand. He was walking me over for another cleaning turn when there came a second shriek from the Bug. It was pounding up towards the shed now, with us directly in its sights.
The Bug lurched to a stop and a johnny in a top hat and frock coat leapt out of the side and started striding along the very road on which we were standing. At first I thought there was something the matter with his face but this turned out to be his moustache. 'Sir Roger,' said the Governor in an under-breath.
