Alive.
And next he heard something in the air.
A whining sound, growing slowly.
A mechanical chug. A rising rhythm growing in force, accompanied by a whistle. A train.
As it approached he saw plumes of vapour. It was a steam engine.He recognised it as a three-cylinder passenger express engine, specifically, complete with carriages trailing behind. He knew this because as a boy he’d had this precise train, but in miniature. It had been his pride and joy. TheDuke of Gloucester. It looked exactly the same, but larger, gleaming with deep, dark-blue magnificence.
But in place ofDuke of Gloucesterwritten on the grey nameplate on the side of the boiler, it said, in bold black letters:
THE MIDNIGHT TRAIN
Someone stepped off the first carriage.
An old-fashioned but not particularly old-looking woman.
She was dressed in the style of a former time. Possibly the same time as the train. Long pencil skirt, prim blouse, cloche hat. She had perfect posture and a small, stern mouth. He felt like he recognised her from somewhere.
‘Good day there, I’ve been expecting you,’ she said in a mildly tremulous voice, a clipped, old-fashioned English that was instantly familiar but from where he couldn’t recall.
‘Sorry,’ Wilbur said. ‘If you don’t mind me asking – whoareyou?’
‘Let’s start on a first-name basis. I’m Agnes, and this is the Midnight Train.’
Death was also the death of sense, it seemed. ‘I’m really sorry,’ he said. Exasperated, bewildered, scared. ‘But – I hope you don’t mind me asking – what the bloody hell are you talking about?’
What Agnes Was Talking About
‘When you came into Bagdale’s Bookshop as a little boy, years before you worked there, you used to see an old woman who once ran the shop,’ said Agnes. ‘Well, that woman was me.’
‘Mrs Bagdale!’ said Wilbur, as it all fell into place.
MrsAgnesDeborah Amaryllis Bagdale of Bagdale’s Bookshop, Commercial Street, Sheffield. In her day – before Wilbur had known it – the shop had been a delight on the inside, but a rather unassuming place from outside except for the fact that it was next to a bakery. Passers-by who stopped to browse the books in the window also inhaled the scent of bread, which had the rather magical effect of giving the stories they were looking at a fittingly well-baked scent.
It was a bookshop that had thrived for three reasons.
First, there was no competition; it was the only bookshop in a city of nearly five hundred thousand people.
Second, it was the kind of shop no one was intimidated to enter. Partly because there was a wire-haired fox terrier called Clementine who always lay on whatever patch of floor hadn’t been colonised by piles of detective novels.
And the third reason, the main reason, was the bookshop owner, Mrs Bagdale herself. She was from Norwich but had moved to Sheffield and set up a bookshop after her husband died in the trenches at Ypres.
Agnes Bagdale loved books and loved people and believed that life could be improved by having more people read more mystery novels. Besides this, or because of this, she had an almost supernatural ability for pairing the right person with the right book. Shecould chat to a steelworker who hadn’t read a book since childhood and know within a minute the perfect book for him. If they had a certain nostalgic twinkle in their eye, she might give themThe Time Machineby H.G. Wells, for instance. If they were particularly interested in Clementine, she might recommend Hugh Lofting’sThe Story of Doctor Dolittle.
‘Books,’ she once said, ‘are mirrors for the soul. So if you catch a glimpse of someone’s soul, you will know the mirror for them.’
The bookshop had thrived. But eventually Agnes’s health deteriorated and her son Arthur took over. Now, Arthur Bagdale was a trier, but he just didn’t have his mother’s knack for bookselling, or her charm. And over the decades the passion and the handselling and the fox terrier were replaced by a sense ofticking over.
Still, Wilbur had always enjoyed the shop when he went in as a child in the 1950s, long after Arthur – Mr Bagdale, as he knew him – took the reins. Wilbur loved being there, even as Mr Bagdale scolded him for never buying anything.
And he had met her a few times, Agnes Bagdale, in her later years, wheezing from her bronchiectasis as she sat in a chair reading a Raymond Chandler or Patricia Highsmith or some other twisted detective novel. Often scolding her son at how he was running the shop, his refusal to follow her principles of bookselling, or simply telling him to treat Wilbur kindly.
And there she was now, in front of him. The kind but formidable and possibly unyielding woman he had met, like the aged photograph in the back of Bagdale’s stockroom.
‘Call me Agnes, please.’
Wilbur was eighty-one years old, and also dead, but he nodded like a scolded schoolboy. ‘Sorry. Agnes.’
