Andrew Martin - The Last Train to Scarborough

'Miss Rickerby,' said Fielding, 'my dear Miss Rickerby, won't you…' For a moment I thought he was stuck for words, but he finished:'… give us something on the piano.'

'No, Mr Fielding,' she said, smiling, but privately now and looking down at her shoes. 'No, I most certainly will not.'

Fielding said good night, walked along to his bedroom, and closed the door. Standing just outside the sitting room I watched him do it, which was easy enough as his bedroom was on the same floor (and faced the right way to have the sea view). There were two other doors on that floor. One stood open, giving onto a fair-sized bathroom, all white with gas light burning. The other was closed. I walked over to it and knocked, and there was no answer. I was alone on the silent landing. I turned the handle and opened the door a fraction, gaining a view of a large, pale blue room that smelt of talcum powder. I saw a dressing table with triple mirror, and a nightdress was thrown over the bed like a dead body. A low fire burned in the grate, and there was a paraffin heater hard by that was turned up to the maximum judging by the stifling heat. This was Miss Rickerby's room.

She's like a cat, I thought – luxuriates in the heat. I closed the door as gently as possible, and I heard a rattle from behind me. It was Fielding's door opening. He wore a night-shirt, dressing gown, and his hair was all neatly combed; but he was only tripping his way across to the bathroom.

I turned and walked up the stairs towards the floor being decorated. My own bathroom was on this landing somewhere. Most of the wallpaper had been stripped from the landing walls but some remained in patches, showing the green stripes that still survived upstairs. The gas jets roared, giving a shaking white light, and I wondered whether they kept going all night. I stopped next to a dangling strand of the green wallpaper and felt minded to pull it away. I was reaching out towards it when the roaring of the gas gave way to the roaring of water – a whole waterfall seemed to have been set in motion somewhere out of sight beyond the walls. A door flew open along the corridor, and Vaughan appeared in shirt sleeves, with braces dangling and the seething din of the flushing lavatory behind him.

'Is that the bathroom?' I said.

'It is, Jim,' he said, 'but I haven't had a bath. When you've had a heavy supper, I always think it's best to…'

'I know,' I said, cutting him off.

'I've been twice in the past ten minutes,' he said, which made me worried again about the food we'd eaten, even though I felt all right.

'This is me,' Vaughan said, indicating a closed door. 'Care for a peek?'

He proudly occupied the worst room I'd seen so far in the house. It had the green and less-green wallpaper on three walls, and the dried-blood roses on the fourth. The effect was of two rooms that had crashed into each other. The roses were singed and discoloured behind two copper gas pipes that rose up either side of the fireplace. These ran up to little pale green shades that made the whole room look sickly. On the mantelshelf a pipe stand had spaces for a dozen pipes but held just one. The small fireplace was dead, but Vaughan too had a paraffin heater going. It was directed at the wall, like a child being punished for naughtiness in a school form room.

'A few damp spots there,' he said as I looked at it.

Vaughan had evidently been lying on his bed, and right next to the pillow end was a portmanteau stuffed with clothes, and a pile of copies of Sporting Life. The only furniture besides the bed and washstand was a wicker chair and a cabinet with the door open. A black trunk marked, for some reason, 'WELLINBROUGH' in white painted letters stood alongside the cabinet. There were no pictures at all on the walls. The flimsy curtains were drawn, but Vaughan too would have overlooked the sea. He was sitting on the wicker chair and removing his boots. I thought: I've got to get out of here before he takes off his trousers.

'You an early riser, Jim?' he said.

'Do you call seven o'clock early?' I said.

'I call it bloody ridiculous,' he said. 'Have a care tomorrow, will you, old man? I can hear most of what goes on up there.'

I looked up.

'But you heard nothing the night that Blackburn disappeared.'

'I was half cut then, Jim… And you know, there might have been something… something about two, something again about four. A sort of rumbling.'

'Did you mention it to the coppers?'

He shook his head.

'Not certain of it, Jim… not certain. You don't go in for physical jerks, I hope?' he added as I looked at the gas pipes, noting that they continued rising beyond the two shades, disappearing into the ceiling… and yet there was no gas plumbed into my room.

Vaughan, having thrown one boot towards the cabinet, now threw the second in a roughly similar direction.

'I should take these downstairs for the lad to clean,' he said.

'And will you?'

'Doubt it,' he said. 'I give that youth a wide berth.'

'Does he ever fly off about anything?' I enquired. 'He always seems liable to.'

Vaughan frowned.

'Shouldn't wonder,' he said. 'He's cracked.'

'But you've never seen him do it?'

'I've seen him on the point of blowing up – then I've made myself scarce.'

'When did you find out about his accident?'

'Oh, that all came out when the police started asking questions. They could see he was nuts, and wanted to know why. Miss Rickerby told them, and then she told us all.'

'You don't suppose he did for Blackburn, do you?'

'Blackburn jumped into the sea, Jim,' said Vaughan, who was now kneeling down and fishing about inside the trunk. '… Or that's what we all tell ourselves in this house. I mean, none of us likes to think we're sharing lodgings with a murderer.'

He lifted a book out of the trunk, and rifled through the pages, as if to make sure they were all properly bound in.

'Well,' I said, 'no-one can say what happened.'

Vaughan stowed the book back in the trunk.

'The lad's got a hell of a job on with that decorating,' I said.

'Well, he's making an apartment, Jim. It's Fielding's idea, and he's persuaded the lady of it. Eliminate the rough element.'

I looked upwards again, following the pipes with my eye.

'Where do they go?' I said, indicating them.

'Up into the floorboards. Up into your room, I expect.'

'But there's only an oil lamp in my room.'

'Well,' he said, 'perhaps there was gas once.'

There had been. The painting in the dining room showed my room the brightest.

'Why would it be stopped?'

'Economy,' said Vaughan with a shrug, and he was now at my side.

'Here's our little friend again,' he said, and he passed me a post card showing a woman – the bicycling woman. Only now she was painting a picture. You couldn't see it because the easel faced away from the camera but you could see everything else. The card came from a new envelope, lately fished from the trunk.

'Who is this bloody woman, Theo?' I said.

'Yorkshire lass,' he said, and he passed me another card.

'Told you she was game,' he said, and she was now sitting on a gate before a meadow and dangerously close -1 would have thought – to a country road. Vaughan said, 'You can tell it's a windy day, can't you?'

'Why put these sorts of picture on post cards?' I said. 'I mean, it's not as if you can post 'em, is it?'

'For collectors,' he said. 'And you can post 'em in envelopes, Jim.'

I glanced over towards his bed. There was a tin of something there. At first I'd taken it for a tin of lozenges, but I now read 'Oglesby's Pilules', and, underneath, 'Oglesby's Pilules are a Certain Cure for Blind and Bleeding Piles'.

'Do you have piles, Jim?' he enquired, seeing where I was looking and holding out another post card. 'Sometimes I can't walk around town. Rather fancy studio shot. I presume that swan is stuffed,' he added, passing me the card.