Overnight Express Read online

  Something else he disliked was kids. He saw no reason why a working man should wait upon the little upper-class buggers; and this trip there were two bloody kids in his coach. Also, there was a coloured man. On this point Sam Frudge found a dichotomy in his mind: as a member of the SWP he naturally revered coloured persons who had as much right to be aboard his train as anyone else — that went without saying. At the same time he had a number of unemployed white friends and this gave rise to certain wicked thoughts. Standing outside on the platform before the train had left King’s Cross, Sam Frudge had spotted other coloured persons, all male, all carrying their grips with what seemed to be an effort. They were not in fact ordinary coloured persons and they very probably considered themselves to be white. In short, they came, Sam believed, from the Middle East. If they happened to be heading north to do Mrs Heffer, good luck to them.

  That Mrs Heffer!

  Sam Frudge had attended upon her before, twice. She was always very gracious, which got his hackles up to start with, but she was critical and spent every journey pernicketting: there was a draught, her bed linen had been turned down too far, a fly was buzzing, or a moth; her morning tea was too strong. It had been pretty evident she didn’t like British Rail and Sam Frudge was convinced she used it only so she could moan and complain and then later see that more staff were made redundant and less government money was available.

  As the night express moved through the northern London suburbs Sam Frudge answered bells, smiled and smirked, being efficient and helpful and turning the other cheek when he trod on some kid’s foot and the little bitch put her tongue out at him and then said ‘ouch’ loudly so that her mother’s attention was caught and he had to apologise.

  *

  Shard, always the policeman, always on the ball, had taken a walk along the train shortly after it had pulled out of the station. No particular purpose, just a cop’s natural curiosity especially when he was going north as an extra precaution in the interest of the PM and her Cabinet. It was all typical FO, really: something of a yardarm clearer. The Special Branch, the Diplomatic Protection Group too, might not be enough. If anything should happen, then Shard, representing what might be called the Special Special Branch of the FO, ought to be around.

  A man with a Mediterranean aspect bumped into him.

  “I am sorry.” He didn’t sound it.

  “That’s all right.” A dark face, but there were plenty such in London, and he didn’t know this one. Shard moved on, swaying to the train’s motion. Speed was increasing now. He looked out through the windows, down into a roadway as the train went over a viaduct. Plenty of lights, traffic still on the move. Aboard the train people were yawning, starting to settle down for a long night in their seats. In one coach there were a number of yobos, skinheads, talking loudly in an unintelligible accent and their leather jackets obliterated with a variety of badges. One of them, a big fat man with a moth-eaten beard, was glugging noisily from a bottle of brown ale — Newcastle Brown the label proclaimed, but the back of the fat man’s jacket proclaimed that he belonged to some club from Birmingham. Standing up, he was blocking the gangway.

  “Excuse me,” Shard said pleasantly.

  The man turned. “Wha’?”

  “I’d like to get past.”

  “Get past, then!” The man stood firm like a rock, belching.

  “If you wouldn’t mind moving.”

  “For Chris’ sake!”

  “Will you please —”

  “Get stuffed, mate.”

  Shard’s face darkened and his lower jaw came out. Seeing danger signals one of the fat man’s mates reached out a long arm and pulled him aside. Shard walked on, listening to a bellow from behind, something about effing nobs who thought they owned the effing train and would do better to eff themselves before someone else did it for them. Shard shrugged it off: he’d heard plenty similar in his time with the Met. Along the train he found more anonymous Middle Eastern men, plus some West Indians, all behaving themselves. Shard reflected that it was a pity some whites were incapable of decent behaviour. Coming back along the train, he saw a face he knew leaving a first-class compartment to head with a woman for the sleeping car section: Sir Richard Cross of the Treasury, plus wife. Hedge hadn’t said anything about him but there was really no reason why he should. Cross wasn’t FO and to Hedge only the FO dwelt in the realms of God. For an instant Shard met Sir Richard’s eye but there was no flicker of recognition from the bigwig — again, no reason why there should be. To men in Cross’s position detective chief superintendents were two a penny, people who turned up when there was danger and maybe saved your life.

  Shard went back to his seat and started reading a paperback he’d found wedged down the side of a cushion. The express moved on, steady and muted on welded rails. Twenty minutes after leaving King’s Cross it passed through Stevenage in a blur of platform lights. Peterborough was forty minutes ahead. In the cab the driver glanced at a clock, checking: he looked nervous, keyed-up. So did his co-driver: neither man was of the scheduled cab crew. The scheduled driver was a man named Jim Horton, who had slept throughout the day in his home in Camden Town. Arriving at the depot he had checked in with the British Rail clerk at the timekeeper’s window, made his routine checks for any alterations to the schedule, due maybe to speed restrictions and so on.

  “All clear,” he reported back to the clerk.

  “Righto, mate. Have a good trip.”

  Jim Horton, a tubby man with a cheery face, gave a wave and went to his locker for his work satchel and put in the sandwiches Ethel his wife had made, picked up his Bardic lamp with its red, yellow, green and white lenses for use in emergency, a warning to other drivers. This done, he reported to his supervisor for information as to which of the many sidings held his scheduled train for the north. At the engine he joined up with his co-driver, checked the fuel gauges, checked that the main battery switches were on, climbed into the cab and made more checks: brake on, front and rear power units, safety equipment box, red flags, shorting-out clips for signals, detonators for use as warnings on the track if needed, fire-fighting equipment, cab lights, headlights. More checks in the engine space: circuit breakers and fuses, pneumatic brakes, isolating switches, cooling system.

  All correct.

  Along with his co-driver, Jim Horton got down to check the suspension, brake pipes, the connections between the carriages. As he bent to make these final safety checks he heard the voice behind him.

  “Excuse me.”

  He began to straighten; so did his co-driver. The two men behind them moved very fast: lengths of lead piping came down on the drivers’ heads and they made no sound thereafter. Quickly they were lifted and carried into the leading cab, where already two more drivers were ready to take the train into King’s Cross mainline station. The lead-pipe-wielders were swarthy, dark skinned, moustached and not in British Rail uniform; the new drivers were genuine and knew their job. As the dark-skinned men joined them in the cab and then concealed themselves from sight, they put the train in motion.

  *

  The guard was Mike Bragg, aged thirty-four, a cockney with a sour face because he suffered from indigestion owing to irregular meal times and kept himself going on mild ale and Rennies. He walked the length of the train just after passing through Stevenage, showing his presence and satisfying himself that all was in order. It was, or so he believed, except for the badge bearers; these, led by the fat man with the Birmingham device on his back, were having a sing-song. The other passengers were complaining, some of them moving their gear out of the compartment in the hopes of finding quieter surroundings.

  Mike Bragg expostulated, had no success, was advised to get stuffed and eff off. He threatened to halt the train but no-one seemed to hear. An old lady seized him by the arm and bellowed into his ear that she would report him if he didn’t stop the noise.

  “I’m sorry, madam —”

  “It’s no use being sorry. Please do something about it!”
/>   Bragg felt indigestion rise, a sharply sour feeling in his stomach and all the way up his tubes to the back of his throat. “Fat lot o’ good me telling ’em,” he said. “If you’ll kindly wait till Peterborough, madam … it’s not far ahead now. If they’re still at it, I’ll have ’em put off the train.” He hurried on, closing his ears to both the racket and the anger of the other passengers. What could a man do? Once, a guard had carried authority. Not these days. If you were authority you got all the crap that was going, and Mike Bragg had been involved before now in a punch-up that had been none of his making. The result had been a bloody nose, a stiff jaw, and a disciplining from British Rail while the bloody passenger concerned got away with it. Not that British Rail didn’t know the score, so the bollocking hadn’t been anything more than a formality, but guards were never expected to answer passengers back and if they did they had to take the consequences.

  Experience had taught Mike Bragg a thing or two: keep as deaf an ear as possible and bugger off.

  He came to the sleeping car section, where he had a word with Sam Frudge. “All right your end, mate?”

  “You could say so.”

  “You’re lucky.” Bragg recounted his experience in the rear of the train. “What a bleedin’ load! Pissed out o’ their minds, some of ’em.” He sucked at a hollow tooth and felt again the bile-bite from his gut. “Can’t bloody well behave … people moan about the coloureds, God knows why. We’ve a bunch of them aboard, as good as gold.” He paused. “What you got up this end, eh?”

  “Nobs. A sir and lady. Kids. Two what aren’t married, not to each other that is, in a two-berth.”

  “How d’you know that, eh?”

  Sam Frudge gave a sardonic laugh. “I been on this job long enough. I see it in their eyes, mate! Couldn’t even wait till the train left King’s Cross, that’s if a locked door means what I know it means.”

  “Well, good luck to ’em if that’s what they want. See you.” Mike Bragg went back along the train towards his own kingdom, his guard’s van. Only towards: he lingered half-way along, by an exit door and a toilet, the latter engaged. He didn’t want to encounter the yobs until they were almost into Peterborough. As he lingered a tall man emerged from the toilet, tall with a firm and authoritative face and quietly dressed in a good suit. This man gave Bragg a sweeping look, nodded and said, “Good night.”

  “’Night, sir.”

  Bragg watched the man’s back: there was something about him that said fuzz. The set of the shoulders, the straight spine, the face and eyes. Could be worth bearing in mind if there was trouble at Peterborough, trouble with ejection. Bragg looked at his watch: not long now, he’d better get moving as soon as the train slowed, show his face to the complaining passengers, look like dealing with the yobos, and then beat it for the platform and assistance from the station staff the moment the train stopped.

  Walking back, he began to feel an odd sense of unease: never mind the good-as-gold aspect, there was something about the gentry from the Middle East, a kind of passive watchfulness, eyes on him as he went by almost as if they were waiting for something to happen. A flicker of apprehension travelled along Bragg’s spine and he was bloody glad he wasn’t carrying yesterday’s load, the PM and all the other VIPs. Anyway, it wasn’t his concern, and he’d be daft to let it worry him. When you suffered from such bad indigestion, worry was to be avoided.

  *

  Peterborough had come and gone and the train was full away for Waverley Station and still carried the yobo revellers who were no longer revelling. At Peterborough they had turned out to be quiescent, not because they’d relented but because most of them had passed out and Mike Bragg had deemed it wiser to let sleeping dogs lie and never mind the old dear who said she could smell vomit. So could Mike Bragg, but he considered vomit a lesser thing than a knife slid between the ribs if the drunks had been disturbed from slumber. So he by-passed the vomit and the snail-like trails of saliva that drooled from open mouths. A while after Newark-upon-Trent two things occurred although only one of them was known to Mike Bragg: he was approached, whilst on passage once again along the train, by an elderly man who asked what time the train was due into York.

  “No stop at York, sir, not this train.”

  “Eh?”

  “Don’t stop at York was what I said.”

  “But it must do!” Mr Irons’ mouth hung open. “Trains always stop at York, doan’t they?”

  “Not as I’ve noticed, no.”

  “What’s next bloody stop, then?”

  “Edinburgh.”

  “Oh, crikey!”

  The old buffer was really upset and worried: Mike Bragg said he was sorry but there was nothing he could do now. Departure boards, he said, were there to be read, all said and done. He moved on, leaving the passenger to wake up his wife, who was as worried as her husband. Edinburgh was a long way from York and they had no tickets for the difference; there might be trouble over that, and the expense of getting back … Mr and Mrs Irons fumed and fretted impotently, all sleep gone now. There was the christening, and they would not only miss it but be dead tired into the bargain. What a thing to go and happen. Mr Irons remembered a poster that used to be seen on railway stations years ago, using a popular music hall ditty to advertise something or other. He’d first seen it on his honeymoon: Oh Mr Porter, what shall I do, I wanted to to to Birmingham and they carried me on to Crewe. It had showed a distressed young flapper and her suitcases. He’d thought it funny then, but he didn’t now.

  The second thing that happened took place in the cab and it happened as the express began to approach a bridge over a river, fast-flowing after much rain, and swollen. A door was opened and the bodies of Jim Horton and his co-driver, each man shot neatly through the head with bullets from a silenced revolver, were lifted and, as the train slowed, were hefted out by the dark-skinned men and cast towards the river. There were two splashes and then the train once again increased speed. Mike Bragg didn’t hear the splashes but had wondered why there had been that brief reduction in speed. Once again he decided it was better not to agitate himself.

  *

  In the sleeping compartment noted by Sam Frudge as having been locked so early in the proceedings a youngish man, an incorporated accountant travelling to Edinburgh on business with his secretary, did notice the braking, the slowing and the return to normal speed: he noticed this because the braking, slight though in fact it was, put him off his stroke, literally, at a vital moment.

  He said, “Bugger! Sorry, Angela.”

  “It’s these damn bunks.”

  “Yes. What was that?”

  “What?”

  “Thought I heard a splash.”

  “Splash?” The girl wasn’t in the least interested.

  “The Trent’s somewhere around here.” The incorporated accountant had done this journey many times: his firm had an Edinburgh office. “Perhaps it’s the kitchen, throwing out the garbage …”

  “Blow the garbage,” the girl said crossly. “What are you waiting for now?”

  “Oh, sorry.” Rearrangement of tangled limbs took place; it would be a lot better tomorrow night, in an immobile Princes Street hotel. The incorporated accountant, an earnest man, liked doing things properly and doing things properly involved serious study, as with accountancy exams: his recent studies had been of a paperback entitled The Ins and Outs of Sex, which contained a number of useful hints with line drawings of a variety of positions new to him, all crying out to be attempted, and there simply wasn’t enough room in a train.

  *

  The men from the Middle East were dispersed throughout the different coaches. They ranged in age from twenty to thirty or thereabouts and none of them had spoken so far throughout the journey, keeping themselves to themselves and wafting garlic with each outward breath. Each had a grip which he had placed either in the overhead rack or in the spaces between the seat-backs, or, in two instances where there was a lot of other people’s gear, uncomfortably behind the own
er’s legs between floor and seat. Some of them slept, some glittered their eyes darkly at passing passengers and Mike Bragg.

  None of them left his seat. They all appeared to have leather bladders. Because of the smell of garlic and sweat they were not welcome travelling companions aboard an InterCity, the coach windows of which didn’t open but there was nothing to be done about that. Fortunately none of them was in the coach with the badge boys from Birmingham. Mike Bragg was thankful that the twain had not met. Yet, anyway. A pessimist, he always feared the worst. There could be a clash when the toilets were in demand as they approached Edinburgh: it was amazing how, at the end of a long journey, everyone wanted to pee at once, just as if they hadn’t had all night. Or all day as the case might be.

  There were other apprehensions in addition to garlic, sweat and the fulfilling of natural functions: at least one of the passengers was very aware of Colonel Gadaffi’s potential for terrorism. This was a large, drooping-gutted US citizen doing Europe, and currently about to do the Scottish Highlands with his buddy, a Chinese girl delivered to a West End hotel as a result of a phone call to an agency where she’d been earning some cash by employing her skills as a masseuse. She had jumped at the offer from a lonely Yank of an all-expenses-paid trip round the Highlands and Islands even though she didn’t like Westerners who, in Chinese eyes, were gross and vulgar and had a funny smell. The Yank, or so he said, had plenty of bucks to spend on her and was travelling second-class because, he said, he wanted to get the genuine feel of the British who were mostly unemployed. The Yank had in fact once been a Scot and his name was Sickert J. MacCantley and before going on north he wanted to visit where his family had come from, which was an Edinburgh slum. Out of respect for ancestors who had fled British poverty inflicted on them by the aristocrats, emphasis on the ra, he wouldn’t come home in pomp and style. All of this Sun Wun Foo accepted with an obliging smile but an open mind. And she went on smiling when the Yank began muttering darkly about the Middle East’s proximity.