Andrew Martin - The Last Train to Scarborough

Amanda Rickerby came to mind once more… How had she come by the badge and why had she kept it? My head was fairly spinning. Had she asked me to lock my door in order to protect me from the boy? From Fielding? From Vaughan? (Surely not from Vaughan?) Or did she mean to come up and sit astride me as the woman on the post card had sat astride the horse? I did not believe she would do, but I decided that the moment we'd shared in the ship room ought to mark the end of our relations. I was a married man after all. I stood up, locked the door, fell back onto the bed, and even though it was hardly more than late afternoon, I was asleep in an instant, my boots still on my feet.

'You were dead wrong about Adam Rickerby,' said the Captain, pushing back his chair and rising to his feet with the pocket revolver in his hand.

If he didn't mean to shoot me, then he might be on the point of quitting the chart room, and I wanted him to stay, firstly because I knew he had secrets of his own touching this matter and secondly because I wanted to talk on. I wanted to get behind the mist, and I now knew I could do it. The recollection of my exchange with Miss Rickerby in the ship room came with many complications, and the best thing was to talk on because my speech brought back my memory of what came next and remembering, at least, was something I could be proud of.

The Mate was eyeing the Captain, and so was I – had been for some little while. It was the difference that made the similarity so plain: the Captain's face never smiling, hers almost always; his hair short, curls not given time to begin, hers abundant. But there was a strength to the Captain's close-cut hair, a sort of possibility in it. How could I not have noticed before that they had only the one face between them: wide, symmetrical, cat-like? The boy had the same face again, but the accident or some earlier event had made mockery of it, stretching it too wide and piling on the curls. He had been over-done. Anyhow, I knew that this was Captain Rickerby sitting before me, and that he had once sent a silver compass set in a miniature ship's wheel to his sister.

'I'll tell you what happened,' I said to him, just as though he was Peter Backhouse, sitting over-opposite me in the public bar of the Fortune of War in Thorpe-on-Ouse with more than a few pints taken; and I did feel a kind of drunken happiness, for I could now see the whole thing clear.

'It was the light under the door,' I said to the Captain, who'd now sat back down. 'It was not there – the line of white light – and I was half glad of it, because I knew it would have hurt my eyes if it had been. That was part of my affliction… You see, I believe that what happened to me – what was done to me – impaired my memory, but I have now recovered my memory. I can go on from here and tell you the whole thing. I have the solution to the mystery.'

I made my play:

'The woman in the post cards,' I said,'… not the one on the horse, but the one that Vaughan had liked particularly… You see, she was Blackburn's fiancée, and when Blackburn was shown the cards in the Two Mariners he attacked Vaughan, really laid into him…'

'They came to blows over this?' enquired the Mate, blowing smoke.

'Very likely,' I said. 'At any rate they were set at odds. Perhaps Blackburn had threatened to go to the police. In the night, Vaughan must have gone up to him, perhaps to try and settle the matter. They must have fought again. Vaughan killed Blackburn, perhaps not intentionally. He hauled the body downstairs, put it on the cart over the road, took it to the Promenade or the harbour wall, and pitched it into the sea. Vaughan knew I was onto him. He'd over-heard me talking to

Tommy Nugent in Mallinson's, and so he tried to do me in by the method of…'

'It is nonsense,' said the Mate, lighting a new cigar.

'If you don't tell the truth,' said the Captain, 'you'll never leave this ship.'

I had made an attempt to disentangle myself from the Rickerby family, and failed utterly. Even the bloody foreigner could see the lie for what it was. To cover my embarrassment, I asked the Mate for a cigar, which he passed over together with matches.

Blowing smoke, I began again. 'The light', I said, 'was not there…

I had known straight away the meaning. The pain in my head made movement nigh impossible, but I had to find different air. Each inhalation carried the taste of coal into me, and these breaths could not be released. My breathing was all one way, which was no sort of breathing at all. I rolled off the bed, but was now in a worse position than before with more work to do in order to stand upright. I believe the hardest thing I ever did was to rise from that floor, and unlock that door, whereupon I saw the gas bracket on the little landing, which seemed to be saying: Don't mind me; I'm nothing in this; I'm not even burning. But it was on at the tap, and invisible death poured from it. I tried to close the tap, but my hands were not up to the job. I half fell down the first stairs, where I saw in the darkness the first gas lamp of the half-decorated landing. I saw it in the darkness, and proper breathing was not permitted here either. I would shortly burst; I was a human bomb. I crashed against Vaughan's door; it flew open, and his room was empty, the bed still made up.

In falling, I rolled underneath another gas bracket that played its part in the relay of death-dealing. I regained my feet, but my feet were treacherous, might have belonged to another man altogether. I did not know my hands either, which were stained red by all the coal gas in me. I pushed at Amanda Rickerby's door and she rose instantly from her pillow – instantly and yet drowsily. A bottle and a glass stood on the floor by her bed, but she looked beautiful in her night-dress as she made her strange, dazed enquiry: 'How are you?'

She was not rightly awake; she had taken in a quantity of the gas, and I was not in my right mind, which is why I replied, 'I'm in great shape,' and I may have vomited there and then onto her bedroom carpet, which was not very gentlemanly of me. I took the stool from before her dressing table and pitched it through her window, marvelling that my red hands were up to the job. I came out of the room revolving, and struck Adam Rickerby, who was there in long johns and no shirt. He looked like the strong man at the fair, or the Creature from the Jungle. But he did not look to have been gassed – or not badly. Had the poison reached downstairs? I would consult the man who had laid it on for my benefit.

I pushed at Fielding's door, and entered his room for the second time. He sat on his bed; it was all I could do to stand. I felt tiredness as a great weight pressing me down to the floor. The room was in darkness, and I could not see the gas brackets, but I knew that here too the coal vapour streamed. He wore a suit, and sat on his bed.

'You locked your door, Mr Stringer,' he said, and I somehow gasped out:

'You sound… put-out.'

'No, that was Blackburn,' said Fielding. 'His eye, I mean,' and he gave a little private smile, indicating an object that lay beside him on the bed: the nine inch needle that had been kept in the knife polisher.

He'd done for Blackburn by stabbing into his eye as he slept, no doubt after observing, or over-hearing, whatever creeping about had gone on earlier in the night. The long needle put swiftly into the closed eye – that way there'd be little blood and no noise. He'd meant to do me the same way. But on finding the door locked he'd fixed on a method that took no account of doors, and would bring an end to everything and everyone.

'The gas', he said, from the bed, 'will spare you a deal of trouble even if you don't quite see it. For one thing, you would have been forever buying the lady wine, and she likes the good stuff you know. You would have had to learn all about the best vintages to keep her happy, and you would be starting as far as I can judge, Mr Stringer, from a position of complete ignorance…'