Death on a Branch Line(4)

I looked again beyond the station end. The signals resembled so many soldiers with shouldered arms. Out there in the great unroofed world, passing trains were setting cornfields ablaze, signal boxes were catching fire for no good reason and all kind of trouble was brewing: the miners were out, the dockers were out and the great heat had been given as the cause of many suicides. The ancient city of York itself had become a kind of Turkish bath.

The gunman was in fits now, pointing and repointing the revolver at the Chief. He looked the part of an ink-spiller – it ought to have been a fountain pen and not a revolver that rested there in his hand. The Chief stood three feet before him, one ruffian to either side of him.

The Chief repeated his request:

‘Hand it over.’

The gunman shook his head, and sweat flew. The stuff was rolling down from underneath his hat all the time.

One of the ruffians spoke up:

‘He reckons you’re after his bag.’

The Chief turned around and looked at the fellow for a while.

The Chief’s face … well, it was a bit of a jumble: little brown eyes that lurked behind slanting cracks in his head like those sea creatures that live inside stones; big, no-shape nose. The only orderly feature was the well-balanced brown moustache, which looked twenty years younger than the rest of him.

The Chief turned back to the gunman.

‘I don’t want your bag, only the gun.’

The gunman kept silence.

‘Can I tempt you to a glass of ale?’ the Chief suddenly asked him.

No reply from the gunman.

‘Strikes me you might prefer a glass of ale to twenty years’ hard labour,’ said the Chief.

The gunman said, ‘If I give you the gun, there’ll be nothing to stop you taking the bag.’

‘Look, I keep forgetting about this fucking bag,’ said the Chief. ‘That’s on account of the fact I’ve no interest in it and do not bloody want it.’

‘You’re one of them,’ the gunman said, addressing the Chief, but nodding towards the two roughs. ‘They know you. When you came up, they said, “It’s Weatherill.”’

‘And did they look pleased about it?’ asked the Chief.

The Chief took two steps towards the gunman, and there was now not more than a yard’s distance between him and the revolver.

‘So now then,’ the Chief said, and he advanced again.

The gunman looked down at his bag, then up at the Chief.

‘One more step and I’ll fire,’ he said.

The Chief took one more step; he removed the revolver from the hand of the gunman, who stared at the Chief amazed.

‘That was painless, wasn’t it?’ said the Chief, smiling, and I winced at that for I knew what was coming: the fast blow that sent the man to the ground.

It was then that the two roughs made their breakaway. I turned and scarpered over the bridge after them. In the middle of the bridge, I was ten feet behind the slower of the pair; then seven feet, five, closing … But the five became seven again, and he had ten yards on me by the time he reached the ticket barrier, where he went out through the ‘in’ gate, clattering against the pole that supported the sign: ‘Please show your own ticket’.

I nearly gave up the pursuit just then, but I saw that the second one had crocked himself on that pole, and that I was gaining on him again as we pounded through the cab shelter.

We came out from under the glass roof of the shelter and ran on hard under the great heat of the blaring sun, but we were both slowed by it, as was the man in the lead, who was also back in my sights now.

I was separated from the first bloke by seventy yards’ distance, from the second by thirty. As we went along by the dying gardens of the Royal Station Hotel, pink-cheeked, bewildered women in white dresses came and went; black-suited, sweltering railway clerks were presented to us in a steady stream, and were pushed aside or dodged if lucky. To my left, I saw Leeman Road, and the central post office of York, with a dozen vans queuing up before it to deliver the letters that people would insist on writing in spite of the suffocating heat.

Under the arch of the Bar Walls, and the headquarters of the North Eastern Railway came up. Beyond the offices was the Cocoa Factory, hard by the river, and I was now running under the raying sun and the smell of burning chocolate combined. At the river’s edge, the first man ran right, heading along the road that ran between the two towering buildings of the cocoa works, while the second man ran straight – gaining Lendal Bridge ten seconds before me. I was keeping on the tail of this second man, since I knew that he was in the same state as me: half-dead. Under the bridge, the river was low and dirty, over-crowded with pleasure cruisers that puffed out bad-tempered black smoke. In Museum Street, the man dodged right. Was he in the doorway of the Conservative Club? Half-fainting, I stopped and verified that he was not … and I gave up the chase.