Chapter 48 #2
‘So… the train. On the twenty-seventh of December 1950, it finally is able to resume its journey. But something goes horribly wrong when the train leaves St Hilda. The signalman on duty was not aware of a diversion in place to avoid a bridge which had been flagged for faults, and so he sends the train on the standard route over the River Pledd. The line should have been blocked, but for whatever reason it wasn’t.
The train goes over the weak bridge, which has been further weakened by the extreme weather conditions: the snow, the ice, the flooding.
The bridge collapsed as the train went over it. ’
‘Good god,’ said Grace. ‘Was anyone killed?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Jane. ‘Three died, three… four were injured.’
Frank wasn’t sure where this was going, vaguely interesting as it was, what with the coincidence of a train being held up as they were. But it would have been rude not to humour her.
She pulled out another printout. It was a copy of a copy of a copy and so the photograph on it was unclear, hardly identifiable.
‘PLEDD brIDGE HERO’ said the headline.
‘That is a photo of a man called… Henry Smith. He saved three people, including the guard Albert Barclay and the driver Leonard Pitts, who was in a very bad way, but he did survive, thanks to Henry Smith. They were both trapped under metal and would have drowned had he not dragged them out. His own leg was badly cut open in the effort, he almost lost it which made what he did even more admirable. He couldn’t save the newly-boarded engineer who was picked up at St Hilda along with a chef and a steward, but he went under the water and tried. ’
‘Listen to this,’ said Frank, reading aloud. ‘Henry Smith was pressing down on the chest of twenty-three-year-old butler-in-training John Tattersall when the ambulance arrived, an action which no doubt saved Mr Tattersall’s life as his heart had hitherto stopped beating.’
Hark! Hark.
Grace remembered Roo teaching Henry how to do CPR, singing the carol in the lounge on Christmas Day. But Christmas Day 2025, not 1950. She couldn’t quite connect the dots and that showed on her face.
Jane pulled out more sheets, unfolded them.
‘Once I got my teeth into this, I couldn’t let go.
Henry Smith was arrested at the hospital.
He had escaped from prison days previously.
He’d served years for a vicious assault on a train guard in 1942.
He was on the run, hoping to secure evidence to prove his innocence but instead of taking his chance to get on the London train, he ran to the scene of the accident to help. ’
Frank, sipping his coffee, because at those prices he was going to savour every drop, suddenly spluttered.
‘Eh?’
‘Jane, what are you telling us?’ Grace half-laughed, confused because she couldn’t make head nor tail of this.
‘I drew a blank with the prison… at first,’ replied Jane.
‘Us too. We couldn’t find any prisons in the area at all. Nearest is about thirty miles away from where we were stuck,’ said Frank, flicking at the coffee drops on his shirt, glad he’d chosen black and not the white one.
‘There was one, Harden Row, built in the eighteen hundreds, so bleak, grim and in such a state of dilapidation, inmates started to call it Rose Garden as their private joke.’
Henry had said to her, you’ll never see anything less like a rose garden in your life and she hadn’t twigged it wasn’t its real name until she did some forensic-level digging. ‘That was the one Henry was in. It closed in nineteen fifty-five and was demolished the following year.’
Frank looked over at Grace; it was plain she was still as befuddled as he was.
Jane presented them with another copy of a newspaper article: a clearer, more modern printout of a smiling old man in an armchair.
BELOVED VICAR AND HERO DIES AGED 105
‘Recognise him?’
Frank laughed at the thought in his head. It looks like a pensioner version of Henry. He didn’t need to say it though, Jane saw the answer in his expression.
She read aloud.
‘ “A much beloved retired vicar, Henry Smith, died peacefully in his sleep, 27 December 2025, in Belle Vie House, Whitby. As a youngster, Henry was a self-confessed reprobate who spent eight years in prison but for a crime he did not commit. He was named as part of a gang of robbers who targeted a goods train but was actually “fitted up” by a fellow gang member in revenge for him running away before the train was flagged down. When evidence was uncovered that could have proved Henry’s innocence beyond all doubt, it was suppressed by the establishment, leading to Henry’s desperate escape from prison to prove he was not responsible.
He holed up over Christmas in a luxury train, heading for Scotland on its maiden journey, which had been temporarily abandoned when the brakes failed.
When that train eventually set off, a signalman’s error sent it over a closed bridge and both collapsed into the River Pledd.
Henry, about to board a train to London where he hoped to find legal representation to clear his name, instead ran to help and saved three lives.
He was returned to Harden Row prison after a stay in hospital where surgeons managed to save his mangled leg.
But his story reached venerable legal persons of the day who volunteered to take on his case”.
‘Now this is where it gets very odd, if it can get any odder,’ said Jane.
She recapped a little for context: ‘ “who volunteered to take on his case… including celebrated barrister August Wutheridge KC, whom Henry chose to represent him”.’ Jane looked up to deliver her killer fact.
‘August Wutheridge was my father-in-law.’
Frank opened his mouth to say something but nothing came out.
‘He won the case, of course he did, because August was redoutable. George the Sixth pardoned Henry Smith in January 1952, one of the king’s last acts before he died just three weeks later.’ Jane turned the page. ‘Here’s a photo of Henry and his mother outside the court on the day he was freed.’
Underneath it there was a quote from him:
I never doubted this day would come. My God was with me, and His angels. But He also sent me the best of secular help. The kindest of people.
‘To cut a long story short, Henry Smith, upon his release, studied hard and for years to become a clergyman and for a while he was the incumbent vicar of St Stephen in the small North Yorkshire parish of… Figgy Hollow.’
Frank found something to say then: ‘Fuck me!’ for which he immediately apologised.
‘I said exactly the same,’ admitted Jane.
‘This is screwing with my head,’ said Grace.
Jane carried on. ‘He married and stayed married for fifty-five years until his wife’s death; they had a daughter – Jane.
’ She smiled fondly. ‘Henry outlived her by five years. He was still holding services in his nineties. Did the owner of the Yorkshire Belle ever contact you about paying the bar bill, Frank?’
‘No, he didn’t,’ said Frank, still in shock and trying to unscramble what he was hearing.
‘A couple of carriages were salvageable but not much else was. There’s a article from the sixties about a train that never accommodated a single passenger in its opulent rooms, apart from a lucky convict on the run who found it broken down in the snow in the Christmas of 1950.
The owner – an American businessman – was paid out by his insurance firm but “considered the project cursed”, so from that I’d guess he stayed away from buying another train, though I couldn’t say for certain because that was as much as I could find out about Mr Dwight J. Ingleton.’
Jane stopped a passing waiter and ordered more coffees and a couple of large brandies. She thought Frank and Grace were in need of one.
‘Henry Smith died on the day we last saw him,’ said Jane, trying to pat it into a digestible shape for them.
‘He was one hundred and five. We could never have met him at thirty. And we spent Christmas on a train with him that crashed and burned seventy-five years previously. It isn’t possible. None of it.’
‘But we did,’ said Frank, doubting his own memories for a moment. ‘Didn’t we?’
‘Yes, Frank. We most definitely did,’ said Jane.