The Blackpool Highflyer (32 page)

I sat still for a while, working on my breathing. The trou­ble was that I was unable to take in as much air as I was breathing out. Other people who were waiting to be seen, I noticed, were taken off to special rooms, and I couldn't work out whether it was good or bad that I was kept on the bench. I told at least three policemen that I wanted to make a statement in connection with a crime, and nothing was done, but glasses of water kept coming for me, and I would watch the scenes at the desk. Mostly it was people with complaints that came in, and mostly the complaints were about horses.

Presently, a fourth or fifth copper came up, saying: 'How about a spot of grub?' He gave me a menu chart, divided up according to different times of day. I looked up at the clock, thinking it was about six, when bread and butter and tea came to an end going by the chart, and pea soup started, but somehow it was quarter to eight, when hotpot was nearly fin­ished; and the fan, although not turning, was quite fitted into the ceiling with the stepladder below it, and I knew then that I must have been asleep. Manchester had been so large, and now it was so small: just this police station and the question of the fan.

The pea soup was brought on a tray, with suet pudding and syrup and half a pint of tea. As I started to eat it my ban­dage, which I had tried to fix, came unwound again and dropped into the soup, so it became green, but it became sticky too, so that when I wound it back - which everybody in the copper shop saw me do - it stayed put.

The copper who came to collect the pots when I'd finished had a sideways sloping face, and teeth going backwards. I reminded him that I had a statement to make, and he said, with eyes to the floor: 'Yes, you've taken a funny turn, but we mean to get it down.'

But I did not believe him because he wouldn't look at me.

He finally took me into one of the writing rooms, using more pushing and shoving than I cared for. I said, 'I've had a fair wait, you know,' and he said, 'Well, we wanted to take a look at you for a while.'

'Why?'

'You seemed a bit steamed up ... bit of a beer smell coming off you ...'

He was looking away all the time, so there was no telling if this was the real reason.

'I have been running for miles,' I said. 'So I have taken a glass of beer.'

The policeman nodded.

More water came from somewhere, so I drank it. 'You boys must have had me down as loony,' I said, 'a loafer.' I knew you ought not to call policemen 'boys'. It was asking for trou­ble.

The policeman smiled very uncertainly while producing a pen and a ledger from the drawer in the desk. He said: 'All right now, you've come here on the train from Switzerland but you don't even have a coat. ..'

It was a long statement, starting with an explanation of the difference between Switzerland and Little Switzerland, which I became better at as I went along. I told the policeman all, and he wrote it down. Well, mostly. I told him about the stone on the line, and my notions concerning it, including that it could have been the first attempt by the runner of today to get Lowther, but even as I spoke, I remembered that nobody could've known Lowther would be on the train. I myself had seen him
decide
to get on it.

The copper came in with: 'Why would a fellow wreck a whole train on the off-chance of doing for one man on it?'

That was my question too, but I said: 'Well, it has been known.'

'When has it?'

I thought of all the
Railway Magazines
I'd ever read, all the reports of smashes and inquiries but nothing came of it.

'I couldn't say for certain’ I said, feeling that this was throwing away all the work I'd put in to make him think I was of strong mind.

'What happened today’ said the policeman (and I knew that he was thinking
'If
it happened'), 'might very well have started out as an argument over a fare. Ticket inspecting can be a dangerous line to be in, you know.'

Yes, I wanted to say: if you were canned, or just the violent sort, you might crown a ticket inspector if your blood was up. But you wouldn't follow him on his private Saturday after­noon jaunts, when he was minding his business and not wearing his gold, and do him then.

The policeman ended by saying he'd be sending a letter to Hebden Bridge Police, and writing me out a chit that would see me from Manchester Victoria station back to Halifax.

Well, he had to get out of it all somehow.

When I walked out of the police station, Manchester was all aglow in the hot, soft darkness, and the river air was spread­ing, yet somehow I was feeling stronger. To stand at shoulder height like the statues in the streets would be nothing. As I approached the booking office with my chit, I wondered whether I needed to explain how I had come by it, or did they see a hundred roughy reds a day in possession of police 'spe­cials'? Another fancy came to me as I approached the booking office: If the murder of Lowther was not to do with one ticket, it might very likely be to do with hundreds. George Ogden had told me tickets had gone missing. And George Ogden was on the fly.

When I came half stumbling through the door of 21 Back Hill Street, the wife was in the process of walking across the par­lour, and my coat was lying on the sofa looking as though it was taking a rest in my place. I put it onto the floor and lay down.

'Are you all right?' she said, but she did not kiss me and continued on her way to the scullery. 'A man of your descrip­tion was seen flying through Hebden Bridge,' she called out, while moving pots within the scullery, 'then leaping on a train to Manchester . . . Without a ticket, the booking clerk said.'

'If you knew I was going towards Manchester,' I called back from the sofa, 'why didn't you tell the police? Then they could have had men waiting.'

The movement from the kitchen stopped for a second at this, but soon started up again. The Erasmic Soap and the good towel were laid out for me next to the tub, and the tub was near the open window, which was the summer equiva­lent of in front of the fire. The first gas lamp of Hill Street gave a glow on the bath when set just there, and it was my favourite place for reading. But I was so tired that it seemed a long way from sofa to tub. There was a letter for George Ogden on the mantelshelf.

'So I knew where you'd gone,' the wife continued, walking back into the parlour, 'but I didn't know how you'd get back without your pocket book.' The wife picked the coat up from the floor and put it on the hook behind the door. Her face was very brown from the sun; her eyes darker, hair lighter.

The wife said cocoa was waiting in the stove cup - the tin cup - and that it 'ought to be just about right', which meant I was to fetch it from the stove because it would be too hot for her hands. When I walked into the kitchen there was food set on the table: a boiled egg, a pork pie, a parkin, a bowl of peach halves in syrup. The wife sat down opposite, watching me start on the egg, which meant she had something to say. Water was steaming in the boiler.

'Do you want to know what happened?' I said, crossly.

'A man suffered an injury at the Crags,' she said, 'and you chased another man to Manchester.'

'The fellow that died,' I said, 'was Martin Lowther, a ticket inspector who was on the excursion when we hit the stone. And I didn't chase "a man", I chased the wrecker.' But I was starting to doubt it once again.

'Well,' the wife said presently, 'did you
catch
the man?'

'You've asked at last,' I said.

She sighed. 'Are you not going to eat your peach halves?' she said.

'No,' I said. 'No, I did not catch him, and, no, I do not mean to eat my peach halves. I do not care for them. When you've been hard at it, trying to catch a murderer, you don't want fruit.'

'What do you want?'

'A bottle of beer.'

She stood up and took the peach halves away to the sink. She was still wearing the holiday dress, but the holiday was over. She turned around and looked at me for a little while longer.

'I daresay,' I said, 'from your look, that you think when a fellow sees murder done, he should just let the killer stroll off.'

'I do not say that,' said the wife, and she continued to look at me.

I was thinking of railway tickets, and I was thinking of our lodger. 'Where's George?' I asked the wife.

'He was in earlier, then he went out.'

'What time?' 'Just as I got back.'

'Did you tell him what had happened?'

'That you'd gone haring off to Manchester without any money? No I did not.'

'What's that letter for him on the mantel?'

'How should I know?' said the wife, but after a short pause she added, 'It's from the Society for the Diffusion of Knowl­edge ... It is to be hoped they put him straight on questions to do with the payment of rent.'

'Oh go on then,' I said. 'You mean to say something, so let's have it.'

'Well,' she said, moving to the table to clear up the rest of the pots, 'it's just this: he's not dead.'

'Who's not?' I said. 'The man who was killed? Lowther?'

'There was a doctor dancing up at the tea rooms, and he went down to him and said it was two broken legs ...'

'But he wasn't moving,' I said.

'Nor would you be if you'd two smashed legs. The ambu­lance was sent for,' said the wife, 'and while it was coming the doctor talked to the man.'

'To Lowther?' I said.

'Whatever his name is ... And he said he'd fallen.'

'Fallen?' I glanced down at the pea soup stain on my shirt; I thought of the chit given to me in the police station - they had never stopped thinking me a loony, and had meant to get me out of their city in double-quick time. The wife thought I was a crackerjack, too. If she could've handed me a one-way ticket to somewhere just then, I'm sure she would have done it.

I thought of myself as seen in the carriage glass: a little man.

A fellow who lived in Hebden Bridge, who happened to have been on a train that somebody had tried to stop, had suffered a fall at the place he lived. And I brought to mind once more that I had seen Lowther at the Joint station on Whit Sunday, at the very moment that he had decided to board our excursion, after waiting for the Leeds train and giving it up. Nobody could have banked on him making that decision; nobody could have known he'd be on our train. But with old Hind it was different: everyone knew he was aboard. It was his first train ride ever: a red letter day.

I was wrong over Lowther, just as I'd been wrong over the correct treatment of concussion cases. I ought to stick to firing engines, but I was filled with anxiety every time I did
that.

I felt like somebody lying at the bottom of the sea.

'He tumbled off a rock that he'd been sitting on,' the wife continued.

'Why would Lowther be sitting on a rock?' I said, staring at the table edge.

'That spot is England's Alps, you said, and in the Alps, they climb.'

'But he's a bloody ticket inspector.'

'There's no need to start cursing just because you've been a juggings. Anyway, what's his job got to do with it?'

'Ticket inspectors', I said, 'don't generally go about climb­ing mountains. They make things hot for
them as haven't got railway tickets.'

'The doctor said he'd been drinking wine too.'

'Now that I can credit,' I said.

The kitchen was too hot and too small. I pushed the chair back.

'You're all in,' said the wife. 'You should get in the tub and go to bed.'

'I'm off to go to the
pub,'
I said.

'Are you?' said the wife. 'Well, I would change that shirt.'

'They're not particular in the Evening Star,' I said.

She was on the edge of laughing, now.

'It is a definite fact,' I said, 'that...'

Something was a definite fact, but I was too tired to remem­ber what.'It is a definite fact,' I went on, 'that the man I chased was moving like greased lightning.' 'Well’ said the wife. 'Some people are close to an accident, and they don't like to be pestered to death over what they've seen. Or they think they might catch the blame if they hang about.'

'What rot,' I said.

'For all you know,' said the wife, 'he might have been run­ning to catch his train.'

'Well, that beats all,' I said, and I was laughing now.

'Why does it?' said the wife, who was taking down her hair, letting the door-knocker fall.

'I expect there's a train every half hour going between Heb­den Bridge and Manchester. Instead of half killing himself on the hottest day in memory, don't you think he'd stroll to the station for the next one?'

'I really don't know’ said the wife.

'No’1 said, 'and nor do I.'

'But it is a fact that he never touched the man found with broken legs.'

I suddenly thought of the Socialist Mission. Anybody could
say
anything. 'It is a fact,' I said, 'that Lowther
said
the fellow never touched him.'