the tea, and I picked up the Police Gazette once more. At first, I didn't read, but thought of Baytown, stacked up on its cliff – not so much streets as steps. If you let fall a marble anywhere in the town, it would be on the beach within a minute. I thought of the fishing families, and how they carved model ships and sailed them in the rock pools, which proved they liked the sea in some way. It wasn't just something they were stuck with. Anybody could join in too, even the butcher's son, so I liked the fishermen… But the railway ran around the headland, high and free, and timetables had held more fascination for me than tide-tables.
I looked down at the Police Gazette, and, without thinking, turned over the page reading 'Deserters and Absentees from His Majesty's Service' to that reading 'Portraits of Persons Wanted'.
I read the by-now familiar words: 'Apprehensions Sought.' 'Metropolitan Police District,' I read, lighting on the top one on the page. 'Joseph Howard Vincent, whose arrest is sought for the murder of two police detectives at Victoria on August 23rd, 1902.' There was a bad picture. The fellow was blurred, and further away than the usual Police Gazette lot, as if he'd already started making his escape at the moment the picture was taken. He looked to be on a gangway of a ship. The sky was very large behind him, and half of it might have been sea, when I looked closer. 'Complexion fresh,' I read, 'rather high cheekbones, carries head rather forward, beard, dark grey mixture jacket suit, silk hat. Eyes small and shifty. Blue. Erect bearing; has a habit of biting his nails. Until the date of the murder he lived on the prostitution of a murdered woman. Two days after the murder he is said to have been at Great Grimsby. Sentenced at Durham Assizes, 21st April 1890, to seven years' penal servitude for burglary at a pawnbroker's and shooting at police. Will probably be found in hotels. Warrant issued. Information to be forwarded to the Metropolitan Police Office, New Scotland Yard, S.W.' It was Valentine Sampson. Dad moved suddenly in his chair. I looked slowly across at him, thinking: it should have been me giving a jolt like that. 'I wasn't asleep was I, James?' I said nothing; my mind was elsewhere, but he really wanted to know. The wife was setting out the tea things. 'I wasn't asleep, was I, son?' There was a loud pounding on the door. The wife stepped across, opened it, and in walked Lillian Backhouse. The wife was introducing her to Dad. I was distantly aware of things starting badly, when Lillian handed a package to the wife, saying: 'Here's the scented oil. Now you are to rub it on here.' She was pointing with two hands down towards her cunny. Dad was looking across at me, his face red from the fire, looking like a man trapped in his seat. Was it Valentine Sampson? That was just the kind of name you might make up if you were swell-headed… He did have a fresh complexion, but did he carry his head forwards? I couldn't have said. Dad was now talking to Lillian; or the other way about. He was saying, 'You have children yourself, Mrs Backhouse?' 'I was continually pregnant for eleven years,' she replied. 'Eyes small and shifty.' Valentine Sampson's eyes were not small. They were large and shifty. Dad was looking puzzled. He was turning to Lillian Backhouse. 'But you must have had a child at the end of all that time?' The wife was laughing, trying to steer the sound of it in the direction of politeness, but not quite succeeding. Lillian Backhouse was standing in the centre of the room, hair down like a girl, her legs set further apart than is generally considered ladylike. She was swaying her middle back and forth, moving her thin dress, and saying her piece:
'Eleven children, eight survivors; two miscarriages, and not once under the doctor, and never once with chloroform either.'
Valentine Sampson's eyes were large sometimes, at any rate. Small at others? Maybe.
'… And that was when I felt my membranes go,' Lillian Backhouse was saying.
The wife was remarking upon something.
'My first?' Lillian Backhouse was saying, evidently in reply. 'With my first I had a straight labour but I flooded afterwards.'
'Flooded what?' I thought. Dad was on the edge of his chair, wanting to go but unable. Tea had to be eaten first, apart from anything else. Meanwhile, his object was to shift the talk away from Lillian Backhouse's insides.
'What did you find was the best diet for building up your strength, Mrs Backhouse?'
'Oatmeal and bacon,' said Lillian Backhouse.
'Ah now, bacon,' said Dad in a firmer voice – at last he had something to hold on to.
They were not blue – Valentine Sampson's eyes – so much as blue-ish. But the Police Gazette didn't run to 'blue-ish'.
'The second and third,' Lillian Backhouse was saying,'… things ran along smoothly.'
Valentine Sampson at Victoria Station… I could just picture him there, sweeping towards the trains of the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway. I saw him in Brighton, looking nobly out to sea while dreaming up villainy. The man haunted railways; railways and hotels, it now seemed. Very well then: railway hotels too. He would have a gun about him at all times, of that I was now sure, and the Camerons, I was equally certain, had taken lead because Sampson had brought his gun to York. The wife was still bringing out the tea things. Lillian Backhouse was watching her, saying, 'A mother should have nothing to do with heavy labour for three months before or after.' 'It's only a few potted meat sandwiches' I heard myself saying. I could send a message to the Chief straightaway, and he could telegraph the Metropolitan Police, South Western Division. We had run their man to ground after all. Why, this might be the end of the matter! Dad was up and out of his chair at last, as Lillian Backhouse was saying, 'With the baby always writhing and turning like a…' And now Dad was in front of me, with his gloves, cane and bowler collected up. 'His lungs were not inflated by the midwife,' Lillian Backhouse was saying, as Dad said: 'The three o'clock train'll suit, James, if you don't mind.' And so, with a kiss, and apologies, for the wife, and a bow of a very peculiar sort to Lillian Backhouse, he was out the door with me following along behind. 'Who's her husband?' Dad was saying as we crossed the front garden. 'A man of a rather delicate constitution' I said. 'I'm not bloody surprised,' said Dad. Kettlewell, the carrier, did a three o'clock run into York on Sundays, and we waited for him at the Palace end of the main street, just outside the ill-feted, never-occupied cottage with the wild garden. Dad was saying something about a Middlesborough ship, lost off Filey the week before, and I made a few comments here and there, but I was wondering all the time at the near identity of Valentine Sampson and Joseph Howard Vincent of the Police Gazette.
As I stepped back in through the door of 16A, the ladies were obviously talking about me, because they stopped talking at just that moment.
'Well, shame on me for saying the father ought to be present,' Lillian Backhouse muttered after a short pause.
She looked directly at me, saying: 'We'd all have fewer bairns if fathers attended births, I'll tell you that for nothing, Jim Stringer.'
'I shall be here, Lillian,' I said, sitting on the sofa,'… only downstairs.'
'Lydia will be downstairs, for the hot water,' said Lillian Backhouse. 'That kitchen,' she added, pointing, 'is going to be a hot water factory.'
'Then I will be upstairs,' I said, but with Valentine Sampson to settle, another thought was beginning to cross my mind: would I be here at all?
Chapter Seventeen
Sunday to Sunday
I had a week of waiting and clearing the broken-down pig sties out of the front and back garden. Meanwhile, the wife sat at her typewriter getting bigger by the day. She was in better spirits now though, Lillian Backhouse's bloodthirsty talk having seemed to galvanise her in some strange way. On the Monday, I cut the picture of Joseph Howard Vincent from the sixth Police Gazette, and sent it to the Chief. I had no word back until the Friday, when a telegram told me to report to the Police Office on Sunday morning at seven, later than usual on account, I supposed, of Sunday being a quieter day in the station therefore a safer one for me.
I left 16A on the Humber at six-thirty, wearing the bad suit, and with the glass-less specs in my top pocket. I had the Chief to see, and I was due at the Grapes in the evening, so I would make a day of it in town.
The smoke smell was thin in York station at seven o'clock, for there were long intervals between the trains. The bookstall was open, with the stout party still in place. It was weird, given his full figure, that those books he sold that were not about murder concerned the suppression of fat. There were about fifty souls in the station proper, every one of them on Platform Ten: an excursion party, heading for Scarborough most likely, for a bit of a blow. I wondered if it could possibly matter that some of them were looking on as I walked into the Police Office. I
