sixteen bob.
I'd gone with the wife to the tailoring department of one of the big York stores for a fitting, and the design that we – by which I mean the wife – had settled on was a slate-blue mix twill; pilot cloth, 27 ounces to the yard, with Italian silk lining.
I was now wearing it in… and it was sodden from the day's rain.
Next to the bar were notices in a glass cabinet. The minutes of the North Eastern Railway's Clerks' Amateur Swimming
Club were posted up there. Membership was not up to its usual standard, the locomotive department having for some reason dropped out. I wondered whether it was to do with the strike: some York enginemen had been on strike for the best part of a month.
I looked above the bar: 5.45 p.m.
I would drink my pint before asking after my magazines, and I would have ten minutes' study. So I left the
Evening Press and, taking from my side coat pocket my
Railway Police Manual,
I sauntered over to one of the long wooden benches lining the room.
The book was set out like a police work dictionary, and I began at 'Accomplice' while supping at my pint. But the queer talk of the two snooker players kept breaking in. They were both weird-looking: something wild about them, but something half dead too. One had his black hair kept down by Brilliantine (or a superior sort of engine grease); the other's hair sprang up. But they had about the same quantity of hair, so I guessed they were brothers, and pretty close in age, too: middle-twenties or so. Brilliantine was making all the shots, although he wasn't a great hand at potting. Curly hair was just looking on. 'I like the red balls,' curly hair said, and a lot of spittle came with the words. 'I like them to stay up.' 'You're in luck then, en't you?' said Brilliantine, taking aim, and making another poor shot. 'Will I get a turn soon, our kid?' asked curly, who was evidently a bit cracked. 'You'll get what you're given.' No sound but that of missed shots for a while. 'I have a glass of beer but no cigarette,' said the crackpot. Brilliantine moved around the table, looking at the balls. 'Will I have a cigarette soon, our kid?' said the crackpot. 'How do I fucking know?' said Brilliantine, still pacing the table. 'It's nowt to do wi' me.' The crackpot caught me eyeballing him. 'You all right?' he said, fast. 'Aye,' I said, colouring up a little at being found out spying. 'Keeping all right?' this funny fellow said, in the same rushed way. 'Topping,' I said. 'Still raining out?' 'It is that.' Brilliantine looked up from the table, saying: 'Don't mind him. Lad's a bit simple.' I nodded, made a show of going back to my reading. Brilliantine made a few more shots in the game he was playing against himself, then took out a tin of cigarettes and lit one, grinning fit to bust. He handed a cigarette to the younger one, and struck a light. 'I like you, our kid' said the crackpot in his gurgling voice. 'Nice, wide smile…' Brilliantine played on for a while, and the idiot brother smoked. At last Brilliantine struck a red ball sweetly, and it went away straight towards an end pocket, or would have done but for the brother, who stepped forward, put his hand down over the hole and blocked it. Brilliantine looked up sharply, saying, 'What are you playing at, you soft bugger?' He walked the length of the table, and lammed out at his brother. As the lad went down, I stood up. 'Hold on,' I said to Brilliantine. 'That's an offence you've just committed.' 'Who are you… Talking like a fucking copy book?' 'I'm detective with the railway force,' I said, only half believing it myself. 'Give over,' said the bloke. After a space, he added: 'Prove it.' I held up the warrant card. 'Means nowt to me,' he said. 'I don't know me letters.' He nodded towards the cracked kid, saying, 'How will he ever learn if I don't learn him? Smart table, this is – slate bed, best green baize. She'll not thank me for letting him put his grapplers all over it.' He pointed along the hall towards the barmaid, who was looking on from the far end. 'It does not justify blows,' I said. Nothing was said for a moment; then the bloke piped up with: 'Reckon you're going to nick me, then?' I didn't know whether I was or not. 'Or would you let us off with a caution?' That was a good idea. I looked back at the nutty one. 'How's that cut?' 'Champion,' he said. There was a bright, brimming red line at his eye. 'You all right?' the boy then called out to me, 'Keeping all right?' His affliction took him in such a way that he never uttered the first of those two questions without adding the second. At any rate, I ignored him. A caution would meet the case, I decided. 'You are to be cautioned' I said to Brilliantine, wishing I'd reached up to 'C' in my Railway Police Manual. The bloke was chalking his cue. I took out my notebook. 'Name?' 'Cameron,' he said, blowing loose chalk off the cue tip. 'John Cameron.' 'What's your brother's name?' 'Duncan,' he said. I set down the date and then: 'I, John Cameron, having committed the affray of assault, have been cautioned by Detective Stringer of the Railway Force.' 'Sign here,' I said, passing over the pencil and the notebook, which came back with a great cross over the entire page, and most of what I'd set down obliterated. 'There's no need to look like that,' he said, 'I told you I didn't know me letters.' I put the notebook away. 'Work for the Company, do you?' I said. But he must have done, otherwise he wouldn't have been drinking in the Institute. He nodded. 'Department?' I asked. 'Goods station' he said, with the greatest reluctance. 'Outdoor porter.' 'And what about the lad?' 'Not up to working.' 'Well, if I see you scrapping in here again, you're for it' I said. I turned away and an arm was at my throat, squeezing hard. It wasn't Brilliantine. He was standing before me like a soldier at ease, with snooker cue in lieu of rifle, and seeming to grow smaller, to be shooting backwards in a straight line along the gangway between the tables. It was crazy but the thing that was amiss was of the order of a disaster: I could not breathe. The snooker hall was being shut off by a blackness coming from left and right above and below. But in the light that remained the man before my eyes was moving. He was cuffing the idiot once again, inches away from me, and miles away too. 'Now do you take my meaning?' said Brilliantine, as the air rushed into my mouth, and my lungs rose faster still. The idiot was back where he'd started from, on the bench, giving me a strange, sideways look. 'He's round the twist' said Brilliantine. 'I'll bloody say' I said, as I set my collar and tie to rights. 'Usually it's me that cops it. He ought not to take a drink. In and out of the nutty house like a fiddler's elbow, that bugger is.' 'Under the doctor, is he?' Brilliantine nodded. 'Bootham,' he said, meaning the York asylum. He then went back to his snooker, with the idiot in position as before, holding his cue, waiting for the shot that never came.
As I saw off my first drink, and bought a second – to unstring my nerves – I couldn't help thinking that I'd been bested twice over by the pair. I sat back down, and carried on with my reading; or at least picked up my book and looked at the entry after 'Accomplice' which was 'Aiding and Abetting', but I had to keep a corner of one eye on the nearby loony, and couldn't concentrate. The brothers carried on their one-sided game until half-past six, when they walked out. By then I was looking at – but not reading – the entry for 'Arrest'.
I finished my pint, pocketed my book, and walked out of the Institute, skirting around the shadowy wagons in the goods yard that lay between the Institute and the Lost Luggage Office (which scrap of railway territory was called the Rhubarb Sidings, I knew), only to see a notice propped in the door of the latter office: CLOSED. Looking beneath, I read the advertised office hours: 6.30 a.m. to 6.30 p.m. I stood in the rain before that notice, and cursed the bloody Camerons.
Chapter Two
The following Monday, I was back in the Institute after another day of dangling about in York. It was a quarter after five, and this time I planned to be at the Lost Luggage Office in good time for half-past. It was still raining, and the Institute was just as empty as before, only with two quiet, reasonable- looking blokes in place of the Camerons. The day's Evening Press was on the bar, just as it had been on Friday last. I glanced at the front- page advertisements, turned to the sport at the back: 'York v. Brighouse,' I read, 'another defeat for the City team.' The barmaid was looking on.
'Try page two,' she said.
So I turned to it, and saw what must have been a good six paragraphs running down the middle of the page like a scar: 'York Murder' I read at the top, followed by 'Horrible Find at Goods Yard'. 'Last night,' began the article proper, 'Duncan and John Cameron, believed to be brothers, were found shot to death on the cinder path by York goods yard
The rest was just meaningless words to me, about how the York police were enquiring into the matter, appealing for witnesses to make themselves known. I couldn't take any of it in, such was the knock I'd received. Friday last there'd been the cut throat in the Station Hotel, and now this.
The paragraphs…
