Andrew Martin: Lost baggage porter

'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.