Murder At Deviation Junction

    'Cut
you in half, it will!' shouted the bloke.

    He
was talking about the wind coming in from the river.

    He
called to me again: 'Step over here, lad,' and I walked into the lee of the
five great blast furnaces. They were as big as railway tunnels set on end, and
joined by gantries at the top along which ironstone tubs ran. In between stood
banks of coke, which made the sound of the wind different on this side, but
just as loud. Men worked at the hearths set into the bottom of the furnaces -
on this freezing day, men without shirts.

    'I'm
looking for a bloke!' I shouted to the bloke. He grinned and looked up; there
came a fast upwards roaring, and the sky above the furnaces turned red. The
redness held - like a man-made sunset - and when I looked down again, the bloke
was closer to me.

    'Name?'
he shouted.

    I
couldn't bring to mind the name of my quarry, although it was set down on the
arrest warrant in my pocket, and I carried a photograph of the bloke there too.
I knew him as 'Number Nine'; and I knew his place of work.

    'Hudson
Ironworks!' I bawled at the bloke, and he pointed with his right hand, an
action that came easily to him, for he had only one finger attached there. He
began to smile, letting me see he had no teeth either. Eighty feet above our
heads, I could feel the heat descending, and the wind rising again. I looked at
that lonely finger, and the bloke shook it, as if to unfasten my gaze, and get
it fixed where it ought to have been: upon the roaring Ironopolis of
Middlesbrough.

    I
began crossing the railway lines half-buried in hot cinders, making towards the
centre of this city of blast furnaces. Strange trains criss-crossed in front of
me, like black curtains being drawn and redrawn, all towed by short tank
engines that looked as though they'd been run hard into a wall and made taller
than they were long by the smash.

    Some
of the lines were operated by the company that employed me - the North Eastern
Railway Company, I mean - and some were not. Over towards the black River Tees,
I watched a line of small hopper wagons move forward, and then it was taken
up,
a little mineral train rising through the sky towards the top of a line
of furnaces, brought by the turning of the endless iron rope. The inclined line
was mounted on steel struts, and they were shaking in the wind, but the little
train kept on. The tops of the blast furnaces were fifty feet high, and the
track was - what? one in fifteen for five hundred yards? Men waited for it on
the high gantry.

    And
then I saw giant Hs painted on a row of three. That would have to be Hudson's
furnaces. I moved across the ashfield with my coat wrapped round me
blanket-wise. I had entered the iron district directly from the Whitby train,
without having fastened the buttons, and now my hands were too cold to do them
up. I was in want of a decent pair of leather gloves.

    As I
made towards the Hs, I opened my coat to reach in for my pocket book, and the
wind came at me. That's pneumonia right there in that single stab, I thought. I
fished out the arrest warrant, and my warrant card. The arrest warrant was
inside an envelope, and my hands wouldn't work to open it. I thought again of
the bloke's name, but no, it wouldn't come.

    I was
supposed to lay my hands on Number Nine - orders from Detective Sergeant
Shillito, the bastard who breathed beer fumes at me all day long across the
floor of the Railway Police office in the station at York. Number Nine was
evidently inclined to rowdiness, and Shillito had promised there'd be a
Middlesbrough constable to help with the arrest. But no man could be spared, as
Shillito had told me with satisfaction just before I'd set off.

    Number
Nine was a centre forward; turned out for Middlesbrough Vulcan Athletic (Vulcan
being the name of the road that skirted the west side of the iron district). At
a game played at York on Saturday last he'd crowned Shillito in a football
rush. As well as being my governor, Shillito was captain of Holgate United. But
I wasn't being sent after Number Nine on account of that first assault. No, I
was to arrest him because he'd then laid out the Holgate United goalie during
an argument over a penalty kick. The goalie was called Crowder, and his skull
had been split. He was at death's door in the York Infirmary, if Shillito was
to be believed.

    I
walked on with head down, thinking again that the affair was not, rightly
speaking, a railway police matter at all. Yes, Holgate was the railway ground,
but neither of the teams had been Company teams. It was Shillito's personal war
that I'd been sent to fight.

    I was
now directly before the Hudson furnaces. Red molten iron was flowing away from
their bases, just as if they were bleeding. Men wearing undershirts or no
shirts at all attended the streams with long steel poles as they flowed away
into a great building near by.