There were many folded sheets from the Scarborough Post. 'Yesterday the sea was black with bathers,' I read, under the heading 'Shortage of Lifeguards Complained Of. The paper was dated Tuesday, 25 August. There were also handwritten papers headed 'Menu'. The first offered a choice of celery soup or shrimp paste and biscuits; then beef and macaroni stew could be had, or cottage pie. No date was given, but just the word 'Wednesday'.
I looked down again, and saw another piece of paper – this one printed – and it looked familiar. It was a fragment torn from a booklet I'd often seen but never owned: the rule book for North Eastern company engine men. I reached down slowly, and with shaking hand caught it up: 'On Arriving at the Shed', I read. And then, beneath this heading, 'On arriving at the shed, your engine requires to be thoroughly examined.'
Was it Blackburn's? Had this been his room? I thought of his black eyes reading it. Or had they had another engine man in since? If it was Blackburn's property, how did it come to be in the scuttle?
I began to put the papers back, including the torn page from the rule book, but I was checked by a further discovery: a thin item, small, brown and reduced almost to the condition of scrap paper, but still recognisably a cigar stub. According to Tommy Nugent, the limit of Blackburn's vices was the smoking of the odd cigar.
I sat still and heard only the eternal sighing of the gas from the landing beyond; I looked at the wallpaper: the ship in danger over and over again. I thought of Blackburn. Surely he was at the bottom of the sea.
I sat breathing deeply on the bed, telling myself that I could breathe whereas Blackburn could not. That was the main difference between the two of us. I thought of the Chief, who had sent me to this old, faded house and its queer inhabitants. Who, I wondered again, was the man the Chief had been talking to in the station when I'd come down from the tram?
I quickly changed my shirt and fixed the smarter of my two neckers in place without aid of a mirror. I stepped out of my room and was confronted by the cupboard door over-opposite. The man Vaughan would be waiting in the hallway but…
I pulled at the little door. At first, it wouldn't come. I tried again, and it flew open. The gas was saying 'Shuuuuush' as I looked down to see a crumpled paper sack: 'Soda 6d' read the label. There was a bottle of ammonia, a beetle trap. Propped against the wall a shrimp net with a long, uncommonly stout handle, two faded sunshades, two folded wooden chairs. I closed the door feeling daft for having opened it. What had I expected to find? The bleached bones of fireman Blackburn?
In the hallway, Miss Rickerby waited instead of Vaughan. She looked very grave, standing sideways before the front door, under the old glass of the fanlight, with arms folded. She turned and saw me, and slowly and surely she began to smile. She seemed to find great amusement and delight in the way we kept coinciding about the place, like two holiday makers repeatedly clashing in a maze. Vaughan now appeared from the side of the stairs, with coat over his arm, and hat in hand.
'Old Jim and I are just off for a quick pint, Miss R,' he said.
'We keep a barrel of beer in the scullery so that the gentlemen don't have to bother,' Miss Rickerby said, addressing me directly as before.
'But it's the Two X,' said Vaughan, putting on a brown bowler, 'and I generally go for the Four. Besides, I like a smoke with my glass of beer.'
'I don't mind smoking in the least,' said Miss Rickerby, again addressing me even though it was Vaughan who'd spoken. 'I like to watch it.'
It wasn't a coat that Vaughan was putting on, but an Inverness cape, and he'd acquired from somewhere a paper package.
'Shall I hold that for you?' said Miss Rickerby, indicating the package. 'That way you'll be able to use your arms.'
Vaughan clean ignored her, but just carried on wrestling with the cape.
'What about the lifeboat?' Miss Rickerby asked him.
'They've got it into the water,' he said, the cape now positioned about his shoulders.
'Well,' said Miss Rickerby, 'I suppose that's a start.'
She was responding to Vaughan, but she addressed the remark, and the accompanying smile, at me. With the cape on, Vaughan looked like a cross between Dr Watson and Sherlock Holmes. Theatrical, anyhow. He was trying his best to stuff the package into the pocket of the cape, but it wouldn't go. Meanwhile Miss Rickerby had taken a step towards me. I thought: There's nothing for it but to reach out and touch her. Begin with the hair. It was a little way in her eyes. Move it aside. That would be only polite…
'Goodbye, you two,' she said, reaching out and opening the door for us. 'Don't be late back.'
And in spite of that word 'two', she'd again looked only at me.
Chapter Eighteen
We turned right at the top of Bright's Cliff, and were soon walking along the narrow cobbled lanes of the Scarborough Old Town. The gas lamps showed lobster pots, upturned boats and other bits of fishing paraphernalia at every turn, as though the sea had lately washed over and left these items behind. The sea wind came and went according to which way we turned in the narrow streets. Vaughan walked leaning forwards with his hands in his pockets and the mysterious paper parcel under his arm. Directly on leaving Paradise, he'd blown his nose on a big blue handkerchief, and this had left a trail of snot hanging from his moustache.
'Are there any other guests in the house apart from you, me and Fielding?' I enquired.
'Just at present? No, Jim. There was a chap in a week ago. Ellis.'
'What was he like?'
'He sold galoshes, Jim, and I don't think there was a great deal more to him than that.'
'How old was he?'
'Old.'
'Did you take him out for a pint?'
Vaughan stopped and looked at me as though I was crackers.
'Well, you're taking me out.' 'Different matter entirely, Jim,' he said, walking on.
'Did he stay in my room, the top one?'
'No, Jim. He was on my floor.'
'But that's all being decorated?'
He explained, under questioning, that there were four guest rooms in total on that floor, including his own, which was not being decorated, and there were no plans in hand to do so. As of last week, Adam Rickerby had only got round to whitewashing two of the other three, so there'd been one spare for Ellis.
'Wouldn't you like your own room done?' I said.
'I like it just as it is, Jim.'
'It's a pretty good house, isn't it?' I said, cautious-like, because it only was pretty good at best. Then again, it might have been a palace to Vaughan.
'It's the best house in Scarborough at the price, Jim,' said Vaughan. 'They don't leave off fires until May; glorious views; and then you have Miss Rickerby into the bargain. What I wouldn't give for a rattle on the beach with her,' he added.
So that was that out of the way.
'How long have you been there?' I enquired, looking sidelong at him and rubbing my own 'tache, in the hope that he'd do the same, and discover the dangling snot.
'Oh, since last summer,' he said, not taking the hint but just striding on.
That would comfortably put him in the house at the time Blackburn disappeared, but I would reserve my questions on that front. Instead, I asked about the house, and he gave his answers without reserve, or so it seemed to me.
The Paradise lodging house was run by Miss Amanda Rickerby and her brother Adam, who was, according to
Vaughan, 'a bit touched'. Their father had bought the place two years since, dying immediately afterwards, his life's aim completed. He'd been a coal miner; he was a drinking man and pretty hard boiled, but evidently a man determined to take his children away from the life of a South Yorkshire pit village. He'd saved all his life, and Paradise was the result. It was now in the hands of his beautiful daughter and her odd brother. There was one other son and another daughter, but they'd 'cleared out entirely', not being able to stand the father.