The Body on the Train
The Body on the Train
A Kate Shackleton Mystery
FRANCES BRODY
To Judith Murdoch and Rebecca Winfield
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Staff at Leeds and Rothwell Libraries and to Simon and Susan Bulmer, Stephanie Carncross, Sylvia Gill, Ralph Lindley, Janet Oldroyd-Hulme, Anthony Silson, Noel Stokoe and Roy Sumpner.
Once again it’s a pleasure to thank Emma Beswetherick and the team at Piatkus as well as copy editor Robin Seavill. Jenny Chen and the team at Crooked Lane pulled out the stops to ensure a speedy passage across the Atlantic. Thank you.
Eyes Only
Riga
15 February 1929
A J Cook
Miners’ Federation of Great Britain
Fraternal Greetings Comrade,
The time is ripe to work for the election of a British government that will lead to the resumption of diplomatic relations with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and solidarity between the working classes of our countries. Our emissary will make his way to Friends in the North. Ensure good use of gold. May the shade of your Vernal Parliamentary Election blaze the colour of the people’s flag.
We salute you,
Grigoriy Yevesyevich Radomyslskly
Unloading The Rhubarb Special
King’s Cross Railway Station
Saturday, 2 March, 1929, 2.15 a.m.
Steam, smoke in your eyes. Rattling, shunting engines, thundering in your King Lears. Fingers numb. Nice light boxes, lift ’em from the truck. Splinter of wood in the flesh of your thumb. Try to bite it out with your new gnashers and off it breaks. Daft how a tiny hurt can pain that much. Heard a story. Lad in the school hall, P.T. lesson, vaulting, spell in his finger from the vaulting horse. Turned septic. Lad died.
Young. Old. Never know when your time’s up.
Speedy job, unloading rhubarb. Perishable. Due at Covent Garden, due at Spitalfields, due, due, due. Always one eye on the clock. Who’d be a porter?
He would. Railways in his blood. King’s Cross. Centre of the world. Stomp up from all corners of the globe. Bankers and country bumpkins. Penniless foreign royals. Swanking riff-raff.
But he belongs, proud to belong. Known here. On York Street born. On York Street he’ll die.
By two in the morning, he’d murder for a pint, murder for his bed.
Best thing about this special? The smell. Lean into the truck and reach for the crates lined with blue paper, blue setting off the red of the rhubarb. Breathing in takes him back to the country. A boy again, on the hop-picking. Setting off for Kent with a slice of bread and marge sprinkled with sugar, a bottle of water.
Magic to be here in the smoke and steam and in the same instant back in a field of hops, back in an orchard of English apples.
Slam the door of the empty truck. Open the next one.
Reach out. Touch what shouldn’t be there, not on the rhubarb special.