a clock, a lamp, a china figure, a box of collars, a pair of braces, a knife, a thermometer, a birdcage, a pail, a fishing rod. Sometimes like met like: one shelf contained only good cloaks, wrapped in brown paper – against moth, as I supposed. All the top shelves contained nothing but ticketed hats. Walking sticks and travelling rugs had shelves to themselves while another was for gloves by the hundred. And there were more umbrellas at the back, too.
The porter returned, dustier than before, with my blue portmanteau in his hand, and began loading my magazines from several of the metal tins back into it.
I said: 'A charge is made for collection, I suppose.'
'Thruppence,' said the porter.
I fished out the coin from my pocket, and handed it over.
'You've to sign the ledger' he said, 'and put down your address.' So we went over to the counter again.
'You've a lot of umbrellas in here' I said.
No reply from the porter.
'I daresay everyone says that' I said, setting down my name and address in the ledger. 'The brollies ought by rights to be stood up' I said, looking up from the book. The porter had unwrapped his buffet from brown paper. He was sitting on the high stool formerly occupied by Parkinson, and starting to eat bread. '… If they were stood up, they wouldn't rot,' I said. The porter just chewed at his bread, and looked at me. 'The worst weather for you blokes must be rain,' I said. 'You must be head over ears in work whenever there's a downpour.' 'Folk don't forget umbrellas when it's chucking down,' he said. 'They forget 'em when it stops.' 'I see. Because then the brollies are not like… first thing on their minds.' I looked at the clock that ticked above the staff coat hooks: it was nigh on half-past five. 'You must want it pouring all the time then' I said. After a longish pause, the porter said: 'It can do just what it likes.' Behind me, I heard the sound of the rain increasing. I spied a shelf containing nothing but leathern purses and pocketbooks. I went close and saw that they were all empty. 'What's become of the money that was in these?' I asked the porter. 'Pinched,' he said, still eating. 'So you reckon the finders lift the money before bringing in the pocketbooks?' 'No,' said the porter. 'How do you account for it then?' I waited quite a while but there was no answer from the strange kid. 'Well, thanks for turning these up'1 said, tucking the portmanteau under my arm. He might have said something to that, and he might not. I turned towards the door and the rain; I opened the door. 'Items lost across all the North Eastern territories are forwarded here under a special advice if not called for after a week,' the porter said, and I stopped. He was climbing down from the high stool, and for some reason – maybe the thought of being left alone in that dismal room – was suddenly minded to chat. 'Why are some brollies kept at the front, and some at the back?' I said, letting the door close behind me. 'Paragons and silks at the rear,' he said, 'cotton brollies at the front. They would be stood up, only where would the water drain off to?' 'I never thought about that.' 'I have. All hats are kept high so as to reduce damage by pressure.' 'Eh?' I said. 'Many curious articles do come to hand,' he said, crumpling up the brown paper in which his bread had been wrapped. 'We had a banana in last week.' 'Where from, mate? Africa?' 'Leeds. Well, Leeds train, any road.' 'What happened to it?' 'Mr Parkinson entered it in the ledger.' 'As what?' 'A banana.' 'What happened then?' 'It turned black, and I asked Mr Parkinson for leave to pitch it into the stove.' 'Waste of good grub,' I said. 'If somebody had tried to claim it would you have required them to furnish a full description?' He seemed to hesitate on the point of utterance, but in the end simply looked at the black window. I opened the door again. 'Well, I'm much obliged to you, mate!' I said, stepping out into the rain with my bag. I was skirting around the wagons again, when he called after me: 'Where you off to?' 'Home,' I called back. 'Can you get over to the station in one hour from now?' 'Why?' He coughed a little. '… See summat,' he said, after a while. 'Where exactly in the station?' 'Down side!' he called back with the rain sliding down his bent, white face. 'I've to lock up first, but I'll see you at half six!' 'Aye,' I said, 'all right; half six, then.' It would mean biking back to Thorpe-on-Ouse an hour later. The wife would be put out, but she couldn't expect me always home directly in my new line of work. I wondered why the queer stick wanted to see me, and then it hit me: I was a policeman.
Chapter Three
I lugged the magazines with me through Micklegate Bar – the grandest of the city-wall gates – and on into the city At the Little Coach in Micklegate, I took another drink, putting the peg in after a couple of glasses, and when I stepped out the rain had eased off, though the streets were still empty.
I knew York a little, having grown up nearby at Baytown. (I'd also had an earlier spell of working for the North Eastern Company, my railway start having been a lad porter out at Grosmont.) But I couldn't think of where to go, so I pursued an aimless way about the centre of the city, where the streets were narrow and ancient, the houses all overhanging, falling slowly towards the pavements. I turned into Stonegate, where a solitary horse was turning on the cobbles, too big for the street.
I walked on through those ancient streets: cobbles, shadows, funny little smoke-blowing chimneys on powdery- faced, sagging houses; old buildings put to new uses: bakeries, drug stores, tea rooms – newly established or selling off, the shopkeepers came and went at a great rate but the old houses carried on, even though some of them looked as though they could barely support the gas brackets that sprouted from them. I turned and turned, and presently I struck the Minster, the great black Cathedral; the Minotaur of the labyrinth, as I thought of it, with its two mighty West towers, sharp-pointed and horn-like.
I doubled back across Lendal Bridge, looking along the river at the coal merchants, sand merchants, gravel merchants. They all became one at night: so many shouting men, so many cranes, so many dark barges, which were like the goods trains – meaning that they seemed to shift only when you turned your back.
In Railway Street, on the approach to the station, I passed by two dark, dripping trees with Evening Press posters pasted on to the trunks. The first read 'York Brothers Slain'; the second made do with 'Yorkshire Evening Press – The People's Paper'. A constable was coming towards me. I'd seen him before about the station, but he was not with the railway police. Of all the lot from Tower Street – which was the main copper shop of the York Constabulary – he was the one whose patrol took him nearest to the railway station. He was a smooth, dark, good-looking fellow with a waxed moustache; he looked like a toff who'd dressed up as a policeman for a lark, and he passed me by without a glance or any hint that we were in a way confederates.
A two-horse van nearly knocked me over as I wandered under the arches into the station forecourt, and another came charging close behind. I walked past the booking halls, and struck the bookstall, and here were Evening Press posters by the dozen, loosely attached to placards and pillars, and this time every one of them reading, 'York Brothers Slain'. The posters moved in the cold breeze that blew through the station, and I thought of each one as soaked in blood, so to speak, like pieces of newspaper stuck on to shaving cuts. The whole bookstall was blood-soaked, now that I came to think of it: the shilling novels full of murders; the periodicals with their own mystery killings, moving towards their solutions in their weekly parts, and each tale with its own detective hero – a sleuth hound with peculiar habits but a mighty brain. The man who stood in the centre of all this sensation – the stout party who kept the bookstall, who was nearly but not quite to be counted a railwayman… he stared out at me with no flicker of recognition in his piggy eyes. Did he not see in me the invincible detective type?
I moved in on to Platform Four. The station was alive even if the city was not, and it was ablaze with gaslight. 'Down side,' the lost-luggage porter had said. That meant crossing the footbridge, and, as I put my boot on the first step, the telegraph lad came skipping down towards me with telegraph forms in his hands.
'You found it then, chief?'
He was looking at the portmanteau.
'Aye,' I said, grinning at him, 'office and bag both.'
'Champion,' he said, before haring along Platform Four to the telegraph office, where he would doubtless have a couple of minutes' rest before being shot out again like a bagatelle ball.
'Down' side…
Well, half the platforms were on the 'down'.
With the portmanteau seeming to grow heavier by the minute I walked over the bridge to Platform Five, where a train was about due. A dozen folk stood waiting, and there was a big fellow lying on a luggage trolley smoking: a station lounger, waiting for a 'carry'. I walked west of the platform, through an arch in the station wall to Platform Fourteen. It was a wooden platform – a new addition – but this was where the Scotch expresses
