He had been welcomed back like the Prodigal nonetheless, and after attending Oxford University he in due course inherited certain interests in shipping that his father had acquired on his own retirement from the sea. He was first on the board of shipyards that had built half a dozen steamers at Whitby during the 1880s. He had then moved from building to owning, becoming a partner in a shipping line that ordered ships from certain yards in the North East. These they would use to trade, or sell on directly. Many of these vessels were bought by mine owners or iron traders for the export of iron and steel, chiefly from Middlesbrough.
In 1906, Falconer had reduced his involvement in the business. He had removed, at the beginning of his old age, to The Cedars, a big house in the country half a mile outside Saltburn. But like the ironman George Lee, he'd kept an office in the commercial district of Middlesbrough, where it seemed that he had played at ship- owning and investing rather than pursuing the business in earnest.
It appeared that Falconer was a man of modest habits. He employed only one part-time slavey; he had no stables, carriage or groom. It was speculated in the police report that he 'preferred to walk', for Falconer was a great outdoorsman, and was often striding out to the moor in his tweed breeches, in pursuit of botany, bird-watching and other interests.
Falconer had also founded the Cleveland Naturalists Club, which met four times a year in a timber hut in woods near The Cedars (that sounded a rum do, I thought), and was president of other fellowships of a similar tramping nature, and patron of the Whitby Seamen's Hospital. He was a churchman (Methodist), charitably inclined and therefore pretty well-liked despite being, according to the report, 'somewhat of a stubborn nature, not easy to manage'. He had been a bachelor lifelong.
A porter put his head around the door and announced the Whitby train. I left the refreshment room, and crossed the icy platform, still reading.
Taking my seat, I found the notice concerning Falconer that appeared in the Police Gazette. Going by the woodcut that accompanied it, he did not look like the sort of man who went missing, but the sort of man who came back: a strong man - a Shackleton of the moors.
The advertisement was headed 'Missing'; then came '£100 reward'. The meat of it was this:
Since December 2nd 1908,Theodore Falconer, aged sixty-five, afflicted by stutter.
Medium height, hair and beard grey and abundant, eyes blue, complexion pale, suit of grey
tweed, silver lever watch and chain, lace boots, black hard hat. Last seen walking towards his
house, The Cedars, Saltburn district, at six-thirty pm on December 2nd. The above reward
will be paid by John Mason, Solicitor, Flowergate, Whitby, to the first person information
leading to the giving whereabouts of Falconer.
I read the date again. He had last been seen the day before Peters had been deprived of one of his two cameras. All the dates were bunching up, but I could not make sense of them. Certainly, Falconer had been wearing what looked like a grey tweed suit in the Peters photograph. But no doubt he wore the same get-up every day.
What did I know? That Falconer was last seen on 2. December; that Peters reported the theft of the camera that contained a picture of Falconer and the Club on the 3rd; that some time shortly afterwards he'd visited Stone Farm for the second time, there to be done in, and to have his second camera not stolen but ransacked; that nine days after the last sighting of Falconer, Lee had been murdered by Gilbert Sanderson . . . Had Sanderson done for the lot of them? But he was a thief, and nothing suggested that anything had been stolen from Falconer - he had simply disappeared. And there was the old man, Moody, who'd 'gone under a train' after Sanderson had hung.
Perhaps Sanderson's friends or confederates had pursued the Club after his conviction. But the Club members had not given evidence against Sanderson, and in any event Falconer had disappeared before the robbery at The Grange had taken place.
Through the carriage window, I saw the world in fragments: a furnace in blast beyond Redcap lighting up a great circle of snow for half a mile around; the flash of an illuminated mine, rotary tipplers circling on wires. Saltburn came, and we reversed out as before. The Club members had been photographed at Saltburn. They were all up by Saltburn.
We next passed Stone Farm: nobody about on the platform, Crystal's passing loop lit up behind. At Loftus, where the murderer Sanderson had lived, I had a clear view through a window into a brightly lit hall where a silver band played. I could not hear them, though. The viaduct came, and we rolled slowly through the darkness a hundred and fifty foot up, the Flat Scar mine appearing as a lonely cluster of lights to the left and far below. As we neared the fishing village of Staithes, I leant towards the window again, trying to spy a homestead that might have been Lee's place, The Grange.
But the train was too fast, and the world was too dark.
Sanderson had argued that he had never visited The Grange; that at the material time he had been in the company of a man called Baxter. But this Baxter could not be found.
I sat back and thought again of the white horse, Juliette by name.
It was always likely that such a notable animal would be traced back to its owner, so why did Sanderson take the beast with him on the robbery? Sanderson's story was that the nag had been stolen from him a day or so before the robbery.
My thoughts suddenly shifted away from this head-racking business and towards the York office and Shillito. I had failed to do what he asked, and it struck me that he really might try to have me stood down. I turned again towards the window, but it was impossible by now even to tell the difference between land and sea.
Chapter Twelve
I slept for a while, and when I woke up, a man was sitting over opposite in the compartment. He was reading the Middlesbrough Gazette. There was the blather about the calendar on the front page of the paper - 'Beautiful illustrations, showing the locality in all seasons' - and something else told the readers it was a red letter day, for the words 'Complimentary Calendar' were written in each of the top two corners of the front page. The two Cs were intertwined in an artistic way.
I stood up and reached for my topcoat, which lay on the luggage rack, and removed from the pocket the photographs of the Travelling Club. The youngest man held the Whitby Morning Post, a newspaper published in the next sizeable place south of Middlesbrough (leaving aside the middling-sized town of Saltburn). He held the paper folded, but I could see one of the two top corners. The artistic Cs were there as well.
The Whitby Morning Post had served Baytown (where I'd grown up, and which lay only eight or so miles south of Whitby), and I recalled that it too had published a complimentary calendar annually. It was at about the time when dad's shop (he was a butcher) began to take in the Christmas fowl - an exciting sign that Christmas was coming, along with the annual visit of my Uncle Roy, dad's brother, who always came over from the Midlands a couple of weeks before Christmas. Uncle Roy was a worried-looking bachelor, and it was as though he thought he'd better get his Christmas visit in early, before anything terrible might cause the cancellation of it. He would always bring me sugar balls.