The Man Who Played Trains: The gripping new thriller from the author of Playpits Park Read online

  urbanepublications.com

  First published in Great Britain in 2017

  by Urbane Publications Ltd

  Suite 3, Brown Europe House, 33/34 Gleaming Wood Drive,

  Chatham, Kent ME5 8RZ

  Copyright © Richard Whittle, 2017

  The moral right of Richard Whittle to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available

  from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-1-911331-03-2

  eISBN: 978-1-911331-04-9

  Design and Typeset by Michelle Morgan

  Cover by The Invisible Man

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

  urbanepublications.com

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  THE PICTURES IN SPARGO’S HEAD come to him in the no-man’s-land between sleeping and waking. Though they are not dreams they have the way of dreams, occasionally frightening and always nonsensical. People, if those he sees in his visions are indeed human, are corpse-like and pale. Landscapes and skies – when there are landscapes and skies – are dull and drab, they are never in colour.

  Years ago Spargo described to his mother the creatures he saw. Dead people, he called them. Morag, in all other aspects of young Spargo’s life a devoted parent who righted wrongs and made bad things good, had seemed peculiarly indifferent to his problem. Nightmares, he’d called them, a word picked up from school and which seemed to apply. Imaginings, his mother corrected, and attempted to explain them away by saying he was a growing boy – as if this information was new to him and made everything right.

  That his mother dismissed so readily the greatest problem Spargo had encountered in his life affected him deeply. Nevertheless, he did what she said and tried hard to forget. Months later, when she asked him if the pictures still troubled him he lied to her. Said he no longer saw them.

  Many years later, while relaxing on his bed in university hall, Spargo considered how convenient it would be if there was a device that could project films on to the ceiling. His thoughts strayed to projectors and then to his old school, to the projector and cans of film the head teacher hired each Christmas for the annual school treat. These films, Spargo realised, were the first moving pictures he’d seen.

  Kilcreg, Spargo’s home village, tucked away in the far north-east of Scotland, was too small to warrant its own cinema. Television – black and white – had become commonplace in cities and towns but in Kilcreg it was unknown. When the mast that finally brought television signals to that part of the Scottish coast was erected high on a hill above the village, every Kilcreg resident turned out to watch. That was in the nineteen-sixties. John Spargo, in his final year at university, missed the great day.

  While staring at the ceiling it occurred to Spargo that his imaginings might stem from those early films. He and his friends had watched four such movie marathons, reel after reel of Saturday morning cinema serials that, over the years, amounted to around twenty hours of black and white movie stock. Dredging his memories he recalled skeletons, luminous horses and headless ghosts. That he had forgotten about these until that day made his hypothesis even more valid. Isn’t that what you do with your worst fears? Don’t you banish them to dark corners of your mind?

  If this explanation didn’t quite exorcise Spargo’s ghosts it certainly disabled them. For his remaining years at university the no man’s land of near sleep held no fears.

  His decision to become a mining engineer surprised nobody. His late father had been manager of the long-defunct Kilcreg Mine, an underground mine that until the late nineteen-thirties had been a one-man-and-a-dog operation producing small amounts of tungsten, a vital ingredient of steel. The increasing likelihood of war with Germany triggered massive investment in Kilcreg by the Government’s Ministry of Mines. The first change they made was to recruit Cornish engineer Samuel Spargo to expand operations and make it all work.

  That John Spargo graduated with first-class honours from London’s Royal School of Mines came as no surprise either, such was his dedication to his subject of choice. Back then, finding a job in his chosen profession was easy. Metal mining was booming, investment was strong.

  Work meant moving overseas. After leaving London Spargo joined the ranks of engineers recruited by the Zambian copper mines. Within a few days of starting work at he encountered an old school friend, Stuart Campbell, at the bottom of the mine’s new McLaren shaft at Roan Antelope Mine. Unlike Spargo, who had lived in the mine manager’s spacious detached house in Kilcreg, the Campbell family occupied the very last semi in the village’s only street, a stone-built two-up and two-down overlooking the small harbour. A month after Kilcreg Mine closed the Campbell family upped-sticks and left. The same might have happened to Spargo, had his father not died.

  The two young men rekindled their friendship. Over subsequent weeks and many beers they swapped memories – of school, of Kilcreg, of the old tungsten mine. During one of these sessions Spargo steered the conversation around to their school’s Christmas films. Not only did Stuart remember them, he remembered their titles and everything about them. What is more, he insisted that none of the films they watched at school were in the least bit frightening.

  The dismissal of the school movies as the cause of Spargo’s imaginings did him no good at all.
Campbell had, unknowingly, demolished at a single stroke the barriers Spargo built to keep out his demons. A barrier that even now, in late middle age, he hadn’t quite managed to rebuild.

  The news that Morag was in hospital came from Jessica, Spargo’s daughter. It came as a shock to him because though his mother was well past what she often referred to as her allotted span – the three-score-and-ten years she reached healthily and then romped past as if still in her sixties, she was remarkably fit and well.

  ‘Inverness,’ Jez said, her voice shaky but firm. ‘Raigmore Hospital. They want you there, Dad. It sounds bad…’

  Luck rather than good timing took Spargo north out of Edinburgh on unusually clear roads. Deep in thought he approached the Forth Road Bridge with his mind on his mother, trying to recall when he’d last made the trip. Kilcreg was, dependent on traffic, two hours beyond Inverness, in total a five hour drive on roads not made for high speeds.

  He had visited Morag at Christmas and then again in March, a weekend stay to replace a gutter that fell in the snow, a gutter the local handyman hadn’t managed to repair because he was too old to climb ladders. By the time Spargo was well into the journey he was admitting to himself it was seven months since he’d last seen his mother, seven long months since he’d swept the dead woodlice from between the same sheets he had slept in at Christmas – short flicks of his hand that sent the tiny grey balls bowling across the spare bedroom.

  He had phoned Raigmore before leaving and they’d used the same words to him as they had used to Jez. He had quizzed them the same way he had quizzed her, learning only that his mother was brought in by ambulance and her condition was serious.

  As far back as Spargo could remember his mother’s hair had been tied back in a bun. Now, laid on her back in her hospital bed, her hair had been let loose by nurses, combed out straight to frame her face like twin pillars. Tidied for him, perhaps, an attempt to make bad things look less bad. Her eyes were closed, not tightly but peacefully. Her arms were on top of the bedclothes, resembling, he thought, a brass rubbing on the tomb of a medieval knight.

  He was drifting again, fantasising. In truth the woman in the hospital bed looked nothing like his mother; her right eye was hidden behind a puffy bruised cheek and the skin around her other eye had yellowed. A sterile pad, taped to her forehead, had loosened to reveal twin tracks of tight stitches running back through her scalp.

  He had not gone in. He had frozen in the doorway of the one-bed room.

  ‘I had no idea…’ he mumbled. ‘No idea it was so bad...’

  The nurse who led him there didn’t hear him, she was no longer there. Glancing back along the corridor he saw her returning, no longer alone, attempting to keep up with a woman a head and shoulders taller than her who walked with long strides, her legs flicking the edges of her unbuttoned white coat as she walked. A stethoscope, the medical badge of office, poked up from a side pocket.

  ‘Mr Spargo? John Spargo?’

  Spargo nodded. By the time the doctor reached him he still hadn’t moved.

  ‘Mr Spargo… how much do you know?’

  He frowned. Fought for words and failed. The doctor waited. Stared impatiently.

  ‘We have done all we can for your mother,’ she said. ‘I have to say it’s a miracle she survived at all.’

  ‘I had no idea,’ Spargo repeated, this time to listeners. ‘No idea it was so bad.’

  The nurse remained patiently in the corridor while the doctor eased herself past Spargo. Once in the room the doctor beckoned Spargo. Flicked impatient fingers.

  ‘Come in properly, Mr Spargo…’

  Using the doctor as a shield he moved close to the bed, his legs, like his voice, under his control again. He noticed for the first time his mother’s right arm was bandaged from wrist to shoulder.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘The injuries. Did she fall?’

  Had it not been for the fact that for the last thirty years his mother had lived in a bungalow he would have sworn she had fallen downstairs. Or if not stairs, then perhaps the stone step outside the back door. Had she tripped going out to the garden? The stones bordering the flower bed were lethal. Years ago he’d turned some of them over to bury their fang-like points. It was his fault she was here. He should have moved the lot.

  The doctor wore glasses, frameless but for a thin strip of bright steel along the top of the lenses. When she looked at him she peered over them as if looking over a garden fence. Looked judgemental.

  ‘Have you spoken to the police?’

  ‘Police? No. The hospital called my daughter, they said Morag was here. I drove here straight away. It took almost five hours.’

  What was meant as an apology sounded more like a complaint. The judgemental stare intensified. This time it was accompanied by furrowed, puzzled brows.

  ‘The police have not spoken to you?’

  ‘Why the police?’

  ‘Your mother was attacked in her home, Mr Spargo. You should have been told.’

  Spargo opened his mouth. Closed it again and took time to find words. ‘Mugged? Is that it? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘Not exactly. I understand someone broke into her house. Your mother was beaten. Beaten viciously and deliberately.’

  Spargo pinched his wrist. Nothing changed. Never in his worst nightmares – and he knew about nightmares – had things been this bad.

  The nurse slid a chair up close to the bed, put her hands on Spargo’s shoulders and guided him down onto it. The paper cup she slipped into his hand some time later was hot and it hurt his fingers but he hardly noticed. For most of the next hour he sipped dutifully at a sugary liquid that might well have been tea, all the time staring at his mother, this stranger in surgical dressings. He tried, in vain, to edit-out the bruises, the swellings and the outrageous colours.

  It was as well the police hadn’t told Spargo what had happened to his mother. During his journey from Edinburgh he had driven too fast on a road well-known for fatalities. Had he known the facts he would have driven even faster, risking his life and the lives of others for no purpose. Because, at three minutes to midnight, his mother died.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  ‘MR MITCHELL HAS BEEN TOLD about your mother, Mr Spargo. That she died, I mean. He is still at Kilcreg but he’s due back at first light. It’s a bad business.’

  Spargo gave a nod, an acceptance of sorts. Flicking back his cuff he stared down at his watch. First light? When the hell was first light? Seven o’clock? Eight?

  ‘Who is Mitchell?’

  ‘Detective Sergeant Mitchell. He’s dealing with it.’

  Spargo had driven from Raigmore on the outskirts of Inverness to a police station in town, a brand new building well hidden in back streets. In the dark it had taken him half an hour to find the place – time to work out what to say to police who had neglected to call him and explain what had happened. By the time he found the police station, parked in one of the many vacant slots and walked in through the front doors to the officer at the desk, he had lost what little confidence he’d had.

  ‘The doctor at Raigmore said my mother was attacked,’ Spargo grunted. ‘I want to know what happened. I want to know why I wasn’t told.’

  ‘I don’t know any details, Mr Spargo. Best you wait for the DS. I’ll get word to him that you called.’

  Spargo, again in the cold, eased himself into his car, pulled the door closed and sat lost in thought, only thinking to start the car’s engine when he started to shiver. Once the car was warm he reclined the seat and lay back, thinking and dozing. Only when the buzz of his mobile phone woke him did he realised he had slept. He fumbled in the dark for it.

  ‘Spargo…’

  ‘Dad? Where are you? You said you would call me!’

  He had been dreading Jez phoning him. He hadn’t the guts to phone her, not last night. He moistened dry lips with his tongue.

  ‘She didn’t make it,’ he mumbled. Realising how pathetic he sound
ed he sat up straight and turned off the engine. ‘I’m sorry, love,’ he said. ‘Gran died last night, just before twelve.’

  He hoped she wouldn’t ask questions. Hoped she would accept her grandmother’s death in the same way he had accepted the news of her hospitalisation. Morag was an old lady. Old people got ill. Sometimes they died.

  ‘She had a good life,’ Jez said. ‘We knew it might happen soon.’

  Jez, always practical. If she believed her grandmother had died a natural death then that suited him, for now.

  ‘The doctor said she had a stroke,’ he said. ‘A massive one. They really didn’t expect her to recover.’ Not just economical with the truth but blatant lies. Later she would give him hell. For now he could live with that.

  The morning sun rose suddenly, lighting the dark undersides of dense cloud with a brilliant orange glow. Then, in the manner of a reversed sunset, it started to fade as the sun rose higher until it was obscured by cloud. Spargo, oblivious to dawn’s fine display, realised he could now see his car clock. He stared at it absently, unaware he was counting the seconds between the clock’s passing minutes, expecting its digits to change when every time he reached sixty. Got it wrong every time.

  At five to seven he tugged his collar high against cold wind and walked to the police station’s glass doors. The constable he had spoken to in the early hours had been replaced by a stocky, surly sergeant with deep-set eyes. Spargo faced him squarely and said who he was. Didn’t have a chance to say more before a voice interrupted him.

  ‘John Spargo?’

  The voice came from behind him. He turned, took in the man’s square face, thick eyebrows and dark hair that greyed at the sides. Mitchell – he assumed it was Mitchell – was about forty years old and fit and lean. Somehow, Spargo wasn’t sure how, the man didn’t fit his image of a detective. Too dapper and darty, too small. He readied himself for a handshake. It didn’t come.

  ‘Detective Sergeant Mitchell… I’m sorry to hear about your mother.’

  Spargo gave a sharp nod. ‘I want to know what happened to her.’

  ‘Don’t we all.’

  It wasn’t the answer he expected. He wanted explanations, not sharp comments. He considered pressing the man for information but thought better of it.