Lost baggage porter

Chapter Two

The following Monday, I was back in the Institute after another day of dangling about in York. It was a quarter after five, and this time I planned to be at the Lost Luggage Office in good time for half-past. It was still raining, and the Institute was just as empty as before, only with two quiet, reasonable- looking blokes in place of the Camerons. The day's Evening Press was on the bar, just as it had been on Friday last. I glanced at the front-page advertisements, turned to the sport at the back: 'York v. Brighouse,' I read, 'another defeat for the City team.' The barmaid was looking on.

'Try page two,' she said.

So I turned to it, and saw what must have been a good six paragraphs running down the middle of the page like a scar: 'York Murder' I read at the top, followed by 'Horrible Find at Goods Yard'. 'Last night,' began the article proper, 'Duncan and John Cameron, believed to be brothers, were found shot to death on the cinder path by York goods yard

The rest was just meaningless words to me, about how the York police were enquiring into the matter, appealing for witnesses to make themselves known. I couldn't take any of it in, such was the knock I'd received. Friday last there'd been the cut throat in the Station Hotel, and now this.

The paragraphs…

My eye ran up and down them again.

The barmaid was watching me narrowly.

'Surprised you didn't know about that,' she was saying, '… you being a policeman.'

'I'm sworn, but I haven't started in the job yet'1 said, turning to her with no colour in my face. 'Who were this pair, exactly?'

'Well, one was a railway man, on and off. That was John. And his brother was… well, I hardly know how to put it nicely…'

She thought the matter over for a while.

'He was soft in the head' she said, eventually, 'as you found out last week.'

'Often caused trouble in here, did they?'

'Often enough.'

She moved away to serve one of the quiet blokes who'd walked up to the bar with the tread of a cat.

The York police were investigating – that meant the regular constabulary, not the railway police. I reached into my inside coat pocket and took out my Police Manual (with the page folded down at the point I had reached in my reading: 'Embezzlement') and hunted through it for 'M' and 'Murder'. But it didn't run to murder. Instead I saw 'Misappropriation', 'Misdemeanour', and 'Money Found on Prisoner'. Small stuff – lawyer's talk. Murder was out of the common. How many times would it come up in the working life of a copper? I shoved the book into the side pocket of my new coat, giving a nod to the barmaid, and quitting the snooker hall. On my way out, I glanced into the reading room. There was one man in there again, and this time he was awake all right, hunting through the Yorkshire papers on the big table, looking for more news of the Camerons, I was quite sure of it.

The same wagons stood in the Rhubarb Sidings, and now there was a light burning in the lost-luggage place beyond. I clanged through the door and there was an old fellow at a long counter guarding heaps of umbrellas. They were laid flat on a wide shelf ten feet behind him, in a room that smelt of wood and old rain. The walls were whitewashed brick. There was an overhead gas ring, with the light turned too low, and the white shades half blackened with soot, like bad teeth. This shone down on the old man, but its rays didn't quite reach a kid who was sitting on a stool in the shadows between racks of goods running at right angles to the counter. There were many of these, and what they contained I couldn't see, but all the ones parallel to the counter and facing out contained umbrellas.

'How do?' I said to the superintendent of the office.

He gave a grunt.

'What's that?' I said, giving him the chance to try again.

But he just grunted once more – it was the best he could do.

It was hard to say what was greyest about him: his hair, his beard, his eyes, his skin. He was like the old sailors in Bay- town, only they had light in their eyes. I reckoned he must've been with the Company a good half-century, all the while being pushed further and further towards the edge of the show.

'I'm missing a quantity of Railway Magazines,' I said to this dead-ender, 'bundled into dozens, and stowed in a blue portmanteau.'

'Date of loss?' said the old man, with hardly energy enough to make a question of it. He had a telegraph instrument at his elbow, and a ledger set in front of him; beside this was a copy of the Press. Otherwise the counter was empty. The kid in the shadows at the back had only the stool he was sitting on. I told the bloke the date, and the man started turning the pages of the ledger back towards it: 7 January, that stormy Sunday when the wife and me had had our first tiff, a real set-to on the platforms of Halifax Joint station as we took our leave of the town for good. There was the wife, angry and in the family way – not a good combination – and there was I, still mourning the job I'd lost, and all around us the four bags we'd not entrusted to the guard's van.

When we'd got to York, I'd attempted to carry those four but, looking back, I only picked up three. When we discovered the loss, the wife had said: 'We'd have had no bother if you'd not been too mean to fetch a porter', and it hadn't sounded like the wife speaking at all but like something read from a book called Familiar Sayings of Long-Married Women.

'No,' the old clerk said after a while. 'I can turn nothing up in that line.'

'All right then,' I said. 'I'm much obliged to you.'

I turned towards the door, and I heard a scrape of boots from the shelves. The kid in the shadows was standing up.

He called out: 'They were marked down as "Books: miscellaneous", Mr Parkinson. I have 'em just here.'

The kid had a high, cracked voice, as if rusty from want of use.

Parkinson, the lost-property superintendent, looked at my belt buckle for a good long time, evidently annoyed that I should have struck lucky. Then he rose to his feet, saying: 'It is long past my booking-off time.'

He drew a line in the book and signed his initials against it.

'If the porter can be of any assistance you are free to consult him,' he went on, 'but I can spend no more time on the matter.' Parkinson walked to the wall where his waterproof hung on the same peg as a dinty bowler. He put them both on, and walked towards the umbrellas, looking at them all for a moment, quite spoiled for choice, before finally giving a heave on a bone-handled one. He said nothing to the porter but walked to the doorway where he opened the door and shook the brolly furiously for a while, making a good deal of racket about it. When at last the brolly was up and over his head, it was like the moment when a kite takes off, and he walked away fast under the rain. Then the telegraph bell began to ring. After four of the slow dings, I looked towards the porter who was still standing in the shadows, now with a pasteboard box under his arm. 'Will you answer that,' I said, 'now that the governor's gone home?' 'He's not gone home,' said the porter. 'Where's he gone then?' 'Institute.' That was rum. The superintendent had launched himself out into the rain with the look of a man at the start of a long walk. The bell was still ringing. 'But will you answer it?' He shook his head. 'Not passed to do it, mister.' 'But it could be a pressing matter' I said. 'Such as what?' he said. I couldn't think. We listened until the bell stopped, and then we were left with just the sound of the rain. There was one mighty crash from the goods yard outside, and the kid said: 'I have your magazines here, mister, if you'd like to step through.' There was a part of the counter that was hinged. I lifted it up, and walked towards the shelves, the lair of the lost- luggage porter.

'You a policeman?' he said.

'Sworn as a detective with the Railway force. How do you know?'

He pointed at the book that was sticking out of my side pocket: I put my hand to it, and saw that the words 'Police Manual', written in gold, could be made out.

As I closed on the porter, I could see that there wasn't much difference in width between his head and his neck. It was as though his neck just kept going up through his stand- up collar until it met his fair hair. My guess was that he had had some disease, and been growing in the wrong way ever since; he looked like a sort of ghostly worm. He wore the uniform of a platform porter, with the same low cap, but there was no company badge. Even the telegraph boy in the station had sported a badge, but they couldn't run to one for Lost-Luggage Porter.

The porter showed me the box. Looking inside, I read the familiar words: 'The Railway Magazine, 6d'. On the topmost one, there was a picture of an express inside a little circle as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope. I was glad to have them back, though they brought back sad memories – which was why I'd put off collecting them. Over the years since schooldays I'd supposed the purchase of each one to be a milestone on the way to the job of engine driver, but it would be a miracle if I ever attained that goal, after what had happened at the back end of 1905, in the Sowerby Bridge engine shed at Halifax.

'Miscellaneous, eh?' I said, looking down at the magazines.

The lost-luggage porter nodded, or shook his head; I couldn't really tell.

'All items are entered by Mr Parkinson,' he said presently, 'and he is very fond of that word.'

'Do you have the portmanteau they came in?' I asked.

'Reckon so' said the porter, and he moved deeper into the maze of shelves, giving me a clearer view of the one containing the books. Each volume was inside its own little tin coffin, with a number chalked on the side. I looked into the first of the tins: A History of Hampton Court Palace. The second one I saw held Every Man his Own Cattle Doctor.

I began drifting along the lines of shelves. As far as most of it went, 'miscellaneous' was pretty near the mark: a ball of string, a stethoscope, a fan, a muff, some sort of automatic machine, a pair of field-glasses, a length of lace, sundry pictures, hair brush, shovel, leather hatbox, tin ditto, scent bottle, whistle, a pair of scissors, 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.