Free The Necropolis Railway by Andrew Martin

education,' said Rose, as I tried to place Mike's accent. It was certainly not London. 'Necropolis means city of the dead,' he continued, 'and that's what we have at Brookwood: the biggest cemetery in the world.'
    'What locos are commonly used on the run?' I asked.
    Rose shrugged. "The Bampton tanks: Twenty-Nine and this one - also known as the Green Bastard and the Red Bastard.'
    I said, 'They are a pair of beasts, really, aren't they?' but I knew I could never call an engine a bastard, and didn't think a chap of the right sort ever would. (I was wrong about that, however, along with many other things.)
    "They're not fast,' said Rose, 'but that doesn't matter because the funeral trains never go above thirty, unless Arthur's at the regulator.'
    'He's still on the expresses to Devon - inside his head, I mean,' put in Mike. 'You've not lived 'til you've been put off a footplate by him.'
    He smiled after saying this - it was an odd smile, because of the need to cover up his teeth - and then went red. Rose looked at Mike again but said nothing, and I thought Mike had gone a bit far in poking fun at Hunt, even though he was a pill.
    'Would Henry Taylor ever have been on this Necropolis run?' I asked Rose, for I seemed to have more in common with the missing man than I would have liked.
    He said nothing for a while, then: 'All cleaners get rides out'
    Now Mike spoke up, and Rose gave a strange little sort of gasp as he did so. 'Henry liked the cemetery,' he said. He had the eyes of Rose and myself on him now.
    'Why?' I asked.
    'It's beautiful there. You've got, you know, grass . . . trees. It's something a bit different.'
    'What was this fellow like?' I asked.
    'You shouldn't say that,' said Mike, and it was the first bit of sharpness I'd had from him. 'Shouldn't say what?' 'Was.'
    He'd stopped putting on coal now; he was leaning on his shovel. 'We got to be good mates, me and him, and I've had the coppers on at me no end of times, twice in the last month, trying to get to the bottom of it, and they haven't finished with me yet. If you'll take a pint with me sometime,' he went on, 'I'll tell you all about him, because he really was a first-class fellow.'
     
    At which Rose cut in: 'We got the road for the Necrop?' Mike leant out of his side and nodded back to him.
    The Necropolis terminus was two private lines and two private platforms of no great length. It was just outside Waterloo, and the branch that led into it veered off at the last moment from the thirty or so roads going into the great station. We came in with Mike reading all the signals, the steam hammers from Waterloo beating away and echoing for miles in the hot, dirty air around the factories and houses.
     
    The little station had a simple metal and glass canopy on each platform. It looked like a place that everyone had recently left, and when Rose shut off steam late, giving the carriages a bit of a whack against the buffers, I thought: he's trying to wake somebody up. Even though it sounded like it might be a breakdown job, though, nobody came out from any of the black doors on either platform. After a couple of minutes, however, a little tidy man in blue did come out. He looked about him a bit, then hopped down behind the tender to start uncoupling our set, and Rose told me I could go off for a quarter hour and take a look about.
    I walked down the platform we'd come in on, past a row of doors in a low, blank building. The first two doors were closed, but the third was open, so I looked in. There was a fat young fellow standing in a shadow holding a broom. He was being given a scolding by an older, taller, dismal-looking fellow. They were both in black suits - neither of the best cloth - and there were posters on the walls showing folks at funerals. 'Mourning Suits Made by the Gross', I read, and 'Dickins and Jones, Mourning in All Its Branches'.
    "The address is to begin in ten minutes ’ the older man was saying, 'and the room is not swept.' He sounded devilish