'I wouldn't have been shitting myself… sir. I would have been developing a plan of action.'
'I didn't want you to develop a plan of action.'
'Why not?'
'Because it would have been crap.'
'Thanks,' I said, and the Chief stood up. He suddenly looked big – too big for Malton station, which we were just then pulling into.
'Where are you off to?' I said.
'The next carriage,' said the Chief, blowing smoke.
The chief said 'carriage' when he meant 'compartment'. He was old-fashioned in that way.
'I don't care for the smell in this one,' he continued, as he pulled open the door.
'And what smell is that?'
'Lawyer,' he said, and he disappeared along the corridor.
I sat alone until Kirkham Abbey came up – a good twenty minutes. Then I too stood up and walked along to the next compartment. From the corridor, I looked through the window at the Chief, who was sitting there with the gas lamps turned up full. He hardly ever read on a train, but would always sit under bright light. The lamp immediately above him illuminated his head in such a way that I could count the hairs. There were not more than a dozen. I shoved open the door, and entered the compartment. I sat down facing the Chief. He met my gaze while exhaling smoke, at which my gaze shifted somewhat to the left – to the 'No Smoking' sign pasted on the window.
'I'm not complaining on my own account,' I said. 'It's my job to go into dangerous places.'
'Congratulations,' said the Chief. 'It's only taken you ten fucking years to work that one out.'
'But you shouldn't have sent Tommy Nugent. Why did you send him?'
'He wanted to go,' said the Chief. 'He was bored. There's a lot of it about, you know. I'm bored listening to you.'
I watched the dark fields roll by the window. There was absolutely nothing at all between bloody Barton Hill and Strensall.
'Who was the man you were speaking to in the station when we came back from the Beeswing?' I said. 'It seems an age since, but it was only Friday. You weren't over-keen that I saw you.'
'None of your fucking business,' said the Chief, and just at that moment I knew.
'Do you want me to stay on the force?' I said.
'It's not obligatory,' replied the Chief, and now we were in his silence, and we remained in it all the way back to York.
On arrival at the station, I walked through the arch in the Bar Walls to Toft Green, where the Grapes public house was dwarfed by the new railway offices. It was a perfect little jewel box of a pub, with the name spelled out in the stained glass of the window. The name of the landlord – the new landlord – appeared over the door: John Mitchell, licensed to sell beers, wines and all the rest of it. He was holding a cheerful conversation at the bar, and I broke in on it directly by asking whether Chief Inspector Saul Weatherill of the railway police had wanted to hold a 'do' in the pub.
'Aye,' said Mitchell, a bit dazed.
'You spoke to him about it at the station on Friday, didn't you?'
Mitchell nodded.
'What was it in aid of?' I enquired.
'Leaving 'do' for a fellow call Stringer. Why?'
The Chief, then, had not bargained on me dying in Scarborough, and not only had he come to terms with my leaving the force, but he was willing to make a party of it. It was this that decided me.
'You may as well forget about it,' I said. 'I'm Stringer, and I en't leaving.'
Chapter Forty-Three
At King's Cross station, a succession of pointing-finger signs directed me to: 'King's Cross for St Pancras', which was the Underground station; the booking office of same, where I bought a penny ticket; and the southbound platform of the Hampstead Tube.
Charing Cross Underground station was being rebuilt, I discovered on arrival, but the pointing fingers were there as well, directing me past the men hammering, sawing, mixing cement – and onto the platforms of the District Railway, where I waited for a westbound train while figuring in my mind a particular bench in the Museum Gardens at York, the one set just before the ruins of St Mary's Abbey. It was there – on the day of my return from the London docks – that I had told the tale of Paradise to the wife, taking care to put a quantity of rouge and kohl onto Amanda Rickerby's face and a good ten years onto her age.
'She was a scarlet woman,' the wife had said, in an amused sort of voice, as though to save me the trouble of going to any further lengths.
Naturally, I also left out my own blushes and faltering speech, my own keenness to be in the company of the lady. But I did admit that she had taken my hand in the ship room on the second, fatal evening.
'And what did you do then?' the wife asked.
'Nothing,' I said, and the wife had kept silence.
'Don't you believe me?' I said.
'I know you did nothing, Jim,' she said, and it seemed to me that she sounded almost disappointed, as though I'd failed her own sex. She also sounded distracted, and it struck me that I ought to have predicted that she would be. Whenever you have some important matter to relate and you've taken a time working yourself up to doing it, you invariably find that the person you're telling it to is thinking of something else entirely – something much more important, or at least more closely touching upon their own lives, which comes to the same thing.
'Have you seen Robert Henderson lately?' I asked, when I'd come to the end of my tale.
'Yes,' she said, and in that moment everything hung in the balance. The white stones of the ruined abbey were no longer beautiful; instead they were just so many tombstones, a representation of death.
'He came over to see me yesterday,' said Lydia.
'To do what?' I said, eyeing her.
'To make love to me.'
'Hold on a minute,' I said, turning to her on the bench.
'I told him to kindly leave the house immediately,' said the wife, and the abbey and the gardens, with the crocuses and daffodils and speckless blue sky were all beautiful again.
'But there was a difficulty, of course,' said the wife.
'I'll say there is,' I said. 'It's his bloody house.'
The wife nodded and stood up, startling the peacock that had wandered up to our bench.
'You've to come with me, Jim,' she said.
'Where are we off to?' I asked, as she set off at a lick.
'He told me', Lydia said, as we tore past the observatory, through the gates of the gardens and out into Museum Street where a trotting pony with trap behind nearly did for us both, 'that there would be a general rent increase across the estate, and that he would let me know about it shortly.'
'Christ,' I said, trotting myself to keep up with the wife as she turned a corner. 'That's going some. He's a bigger bastard than I thought.'
'Don't use that language, Jim,' said the wife, as we marched diagonally across St Helen's Square with very little regard for the folks in the way.
'I told him', the wife said, addressing me over her shoulder, 'that he had better let me buy this house immediately on the terms mentioned when we rented it.'
'And what were they?' I asked, shouting over the barrel organ played by the bloke who stood every day at the start of Davygate. (Wanting to limit my dealings with Henderson, I'd kept out of the detailed negotiations about the house.)
'He'd said we could have it for a hundred and fifty,' the wife called back.
'Well,' I said, dodging one bicyclist and nearly running into another as a result, 'he'll just go back on that, won't he?'
'Oh no,' said the wife, 'he agreed to it there and then. He was very shamefaced. I think he knew he'd done wrong.'
'Well, he'll know for certain when I go round tomorrow and smash his face in,' I said.
'You won't, Jim.'
'I bloody will.'
'You won't, Jim, because he's off to India. Sailing first thing in the morning – looking after his father's interests out there.'
'It's about time he got a job,' I said. 'I suppose that's why he tried it on.' 'Very likely,' said the wife, and we were now outside the door of the Yorkshire Penny Bank on Feasgate. It was where the wife kept her inheritance from her mysterious, very Victorian father who'd died, extremely ancient, shortly after our marriage and who'd owned more than one London property.