'I had to take a drink with the Chief,' I said. 'I saw him this afternoon at the shooting gallery -' 'He was at a funfair, was he? I wouldn't put it past him, from what I've heard.'
'Shooting range,' I said, 'if you want to split hairs. It was necessary for me to take a glass of punch in order to keep in with him.'
'Does he take your part against the man you hit?'
It was a cute question, but I gave a nod, just as though the matter could not possibly be doubted.
'You must have your promotion, you know,' she said. 'Otherwise I will not be able to take up my own.'
Wright was signalling to me from behind her.
'I must see this chap,' I said, indicating Wright.
The crowds of ladies pressing in from all sides were threatening to part us in any case. I cut through to kiss the wife, and moved towards the old clerk, who looked very anxious at the strangeness of being overwhelmed in this way, and very curious.
'I didn't know your missus was in the Movement,' he said.
'Aye,' I said. 'Well, what's up?'
'The London friend - Bowman -'
Wright was eyeing my suit.
'He's been coming through on the line every hour.'
'I thought he was dead.'
'Not him. You look half-dead yourself. What's up?'
'I crowned Shillito.'
We were walking towards the door of the Ebor Hall.
'You crowned Shillito?' he repeated in a sensational whisper.
He'd repeated it twice more by the time we were out in Coney Street, with the Co-op ladies' piano becoming faint in the background.
'I gave him a damn good hammering,' I said.
Wright was fairly bursting with questions, and the one he eventually gasped out was: 'When?'
'Four o'clock time,' I said
'I was out of the office then,' said Wright, and I could tell he was cursing himself for that. He then started in on a hundred other questions, but I checked him with one of my own for him:
'Where are we going, mate?' I said.
'You're going to telephone this Bowman fellow. He told me he's stopping late in his office, and I said I'd let you know if I happened to run into you.'
I was going to telephone, and old Wrighty was going to listen.
Ten minutes later we were in the empty police office, and the snow was dripping off our coats as Wright wound his magneto. The cold air had sobered me somewhat, though I still felt queer as Wright passed me the mouthpiece and did not move away. We were elbow to elbow as I said into the instrument, 'Mr Bowman? It's Detective Stringer here.'
But he didn't quite take that.
'Jim?' he said. 'It's Steve here.'
He might have been moving fast on a train from the sound of him - an Underground train.
'There's been a bit of a turn-up over the Peters business,' he said. 'A man has been stationed outside my house every morning and evening for four days.'
'What's he doing?'
'Watching the place. Watching me.'
'All the time - morning and night?'
'Not quite. He comes and goes. He must've taken lodgings roundabout.'
'Do you know him?'
'Certainly not.'
'What does he look like?'
'Big, wide - not over-pleasant, strange stockings.'
'How do you mean?'
'Yellow. Nobody wears yellow stockings in Wimbledon.'
'How do you know it's touching on the Peters business?'
'Well, isn't it?'
The line went and then came back, swallowing what might have been a moment of fear on Bowman's part.
'Look,' he said, as the connection came back, 'this man's not your Wimbledon type, and it's a little anxious-making.'
Bowman was an intelligent man who was not at that moment in drink. He was speaking to me as though I was the same, and I was galvanised just as I had been at Stone Farm. Bowman was not an adventurous sort himself, but he brought adventure to me. Here was movement in the mystery, and I heard myself say, 'I'll come up to London directly - come and see you tonight.'
'Tonight?' he said.
But even as I spoke, I was thinking: I'll arrive in the early hours, too late for the Underground ... I didn't fancy the cost of a cab across London.
'Well, I've got to look into the timings - that might not be on. But I'll run up to London tonight, put up somewhere near King's Cross and meet you first thing in the morning.'
'Then come to the office. But it can't be first thing - it's press day, and there's a lot of copy to get off. We'll meet at midday underneath the big clock at the Royal Courts of Justice on Fleet Street. Do you know it?'
I did - from my Waterloo days.
'I could spare an hour before I'd have to be back here,' Bowman continued, 'but we can sink a few pints and I'll put you in the picture.'
'Scrub out the beer if it's your press day,' I said.
'No fear.'
'But now you're going to have to go through another night of being watched. You might contact the Wimbledon police.'
'I've thought of it, but that would mean alerting Violet, which I'd rather not - and then again, what do I have to complain of? There's a man standing in the street. Well, it's not my street.'
Wright stepped back and marvelled at me as I put down the receiver.
'What now, then?'
'He's being followed.'
'It's to do with your photograph, is it?'
'You're beginning to believe there's something in it, aren't you?'
'I didn't say that.'
Wright was holding the door of the police office open for me. We stepped out and he locked up behind us.
The cold wind of Platform Four was cutting like no other.
'You can't go to London,' said Wright, as he followed me into the booking hall where the timetables were pasted up.
The last London train was nine thirteen. I knew the one. The night stationmaster turned out to see it off, then everything went quiet until six in the morning. I had no need of a ticket; my warrant card would see me to London.
'You'll be for it, you know,' said Wright, as we walked back to Platform Four. He had evidently decided to wait and see me off, being in no great hurry to get back to the Co-op ladies.
I was looking in my pocket book: two fivers might be in there, or one and a quid. I couldn't bear to look. I had a bit of silver besides, but that was all I had until payday - if there would ever be another payday. And there was still Harry's aeroplane to be bought, amongst many other Christmas items.
'You know my missus, don't you?' I said. 'Will you go back to the Ebor Hall and tell her I've gone to London in connection with a case - with the case, for she'll know what you mean - and that I'll most likely be back tomorrow?'
'Most likely!' exclaimed Wright. 'You've belted your superior officer, and now you're making off without permission.'
There was nothing to say to that. Above our heads, the great minute-hand of the station clock shuddered to the mark of half past ten.
It was a shame I had to go to London with my suit in such a state, for they were all dapper dogs down there. Further along the platform, a lass in a cape stood singing 'God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen'. I'd seen her on the station before; she sang with a toy dog on a decorated box at her feet with an upturned straw hat placed alongside. By rights she was loitering and liable to a forty- shilling fine. Wright looked on as I walked up to her and put a shilling in the hat.
'Why d'you do that?' he said, as I returned to where he stood at the platform edge.
'For luck,' I said
'I'd say you'll need it,' said Wright, as the London train came into view behind him.
* * *
PART THREE
The Railway Rover
* * *
Chapter Nineteen
As I took my seat in an empty Third, I realised that I had boarded the London train partly in order to get properly warm. Even with my topcoat on, it took a good half-hour for the steam heat turned
to maximum to thaw me out. Wherever there were lights beyond the window, they showed snow scenes, but the track was clear - at least the main line along which I travelled was. I saw gangers just before Doncaster, burning rags in the points of the branch lines, fighting the ice. On the platform at Doncaster, a tea wagon pulled up alongside my compartment. I opened the window and bought a cheese roll, a long bottle of water and a basket of chocolate biscuits off the boy, and these together killed the last of the Chief's rum punch. Then I cleared the stuff under the seat, kicked off my boots and stretched out. I watched the telegraph wires rise and fall against the dark blue of the night sky.
What were the chances that I would be returning the following day with the whole thing knocked and the case closed? Nil. For a start, I was most likely heading in the wrong direction. This was a northern matter, somehow tangled up with the iron-mining industry of the Cleveland Hills; it was in the slice of moon over Stone Farm; the lonely pit tops; beacon fires burning on the cliffs; the mineral train going between the legs of the Kilton Viaduct like a mouse between table legs. I watched the telegraph wires rising and crashing into the telegraph poles at an ever greater rate as we sped towards Peterborough, and somewhere on that stretch I fell asleep, waking on arrival at London King's Cross.
I walked along Platform One, going by a long line of trolleys piled with mailbags. A barrier had been erected around the parcels office so as to make extra space for working through the Christmas rush. Everybody who worked in that station looked in need of a good night's sleep, and the ones not moving about were shaking with cold. I stepped across the road from the station. The constant flow of traffic had turned the snow into black slush, but some remained on the pavements. I bought an orange from a bloke with a white beard who sold oranges and chestnuts - he looked very Christmassy, but wouldn't have thanked you for pointing it out. I looked along the Euston Road: it roared with life. I glanced upwards, at the giant white face of the clock on the Midland Grand Hotel, and it looked wrong for a moment. One hand had fallen off. But no - midnight.
I would not be spending fifteen bob on a night in the Midland Grand. Instead, I walked north to the small house-sized hotels that served King's Cross. The first was called the Yorkshire Hotel. Well, London was anybody's, and this place got custom by reminding folk of the places the nearby railways went to. A notice on the door of the Yorkshire Hotel read 'Respectable Persons Only', and I wondered whether that included me. For instance, I was probably out of a job at that very moment, but I'd brushed most of the loose mud off my suit, and it passed muster with the not very respectable customer who ran the place. He showed me to a sooty room at the top that had no fire, but two beds, and he advised me to take the bedclothes from one and pile them on top of the other. That was the Yorkshireness of the place, I thought: the bitter cold. But after putting my boots to air on the windowsill, I got my head down and slept through until ten o'clock, when I pulled back the curtains to see a bright, bitter day.
I was too late for the serving of breakfast in the Yorkshire Hotel, so walked to a stall near the station and drank a cup of Oxo and ate a bacon sandwich. I then rode the Inner Circle line to Charing Cross. There were faster ways of getting to Fleet Street, but I had time to kill until my midday meeting, and I liked the Inner Circle. They'd put on electric trains since I'd seen it last, but it was still a railway in a coal cellar; you were still looking up from below the streets at the towering, blank backs of the buildings, many of them covered with giant posters for Lipton's tea.
I stepped out of Charing Cross Underground into muddy snow, and the black shadow of the Hungerford railway bridge. Having taken my bearings, I put up my collar and walked north up Villiers Street, turning right on the Strand. I was under the clock a quarter of an hour before time and I felt a proper ass for standing still in that weather. Nobody else in Fleet Street stood still. They pushed on fast in their good suits, clicking canes and highly polished boots - all the dapper dogs, with many straw hats worn even in the extreme cold. Everyone walking was really working; there were no loafers in Fleet Street.
And the ones in the shiniest boots and hats were the lawyers - the thoroughbred black horses among the London nags. They were an exquisite lot, which made you suspicious of them. As I watched, they came and went from the ancient alleyways opposite in capes or fur-collared coats, and I thought of Marriott, the barrister of the Travelling Club who was known to the Chief. Every brief in the country came from that ancient place opposite - from it or other, similar places near by. They came to York for the Assizes, and I pictured them riding into the city like a pageant.
At twelve o'clock, about a dozen clocks struck, driving the people on to faster walking, and the vibration of the air seemed to bring on snow, for it started again now - just the odd, accidental snowflake, escaping from the dark, moving clouds above. Where was Bowman? I tried to recall his looks: the red, ridiculous face, the nose at once too big and too small. His head put me in mind of a teapot, somehow. He was strange-looking - and as a clever man, he knew it. He didn't like to be stared at and would seldom meet your eye. It would be wrong to take against him on that account.
I watched the road. I had the feeling that Bowman would cross it to get to me. Fleet Street contained as many cabs as the pavement did people, and they could only fit on to the road as long as they all kept moving - if one of them stopped, they all would. None did stop, though. Anybody in a cab in this weather would be inclined to stay in it, while the omnibuses, being open to the snow, ran empty.
A hand touched my shoulder and I whirled around.
He'd already had one or two, I could tell. The cold had made his face extra-red. Same green topcoat, same flat sporting cap, which was like a saddle on a donkey, for he was not at all the sporting type.
'Good to see you,' he said, and his eyes settled on mine for longer than at any moment during our time at Stone Farm, but even so, not for very long.
'This way, Jim,' he said.
'Where are we off to?'
'Licensed premises,' he said without looking back. 'He was there again last night. Looking at the living-room window when I sat in the dining room, then at the bedroom when I went upstairs ...'
There were pageboys everywhere, dashing about with great piles of newspapers - fresh batches, newly made.
'Snowing up north, is it?' Bowman asked me, looking ahead.
'It was bitter when I left,' I said.
We were passing newspaper offices: the Yorkshire Observer, the Irish Independent, the Aberdeen Free Press. The grander ones hung out a clock, just as a rich man will show off his watch.
'"Truro as a Railway Centre",' Bowman was saying. 'That's the masterpiece I've been slaving over this morning. Truro, you know, is one of the largest towns in Cornwall . . . which is saying absolutely nothing. The station is quite modern; there is still some tin traffic.'
He was talking more than he had at Stone Farm - still sounding worried, but in a different way. A newspaper placard read 'African Doctor Cooked and Eaten By Natives', and the hundreds of people and the hundreds of cabs just flowed on by. It took more than that to cause a sensation in Fleet Street.
'In the end I decided on leading off with the fact that every train on the main line stops there, but then Fawcett walked up - he is the leading railwayac of the office - and he told me of two that don't, including one that stops everywhere but Truro.'
He had stopped walking, and was standing before two pubs, weighing them in the balance.
'It's champagne or beer,' he said.
Both pubs had black windows with white writing on them: 'Saloon Bar and Buffet', 'Luncheons and Teas', 'Dining Rooms First Floor'.
'Will you take a glass of champagne?' Bowman asked, pushing at the door of one of the pubs. 'No thanks,' I said, as we entered, 'I had a skinful last night, and I'm a little -'
But Bowman had already moved off towards the bar. It was a good-sized, jolly wooden hall in full swing with a decorated tree just inside the door and giant beer barrels end-on ove
r the bar, like locomotive wheels. The customers stood at tall tables - or just anywhere. Bowman was giving good morning to a man at the bar; he held two glasses of champagne in his hand. As he turned away from the man and approached me, I said, 'I didn't want a drink, thanks', at which he just frowned.
'It's on expenses, for heaven's sake,' he said. 'You'd better force it down because I'm getting you another in half a minute.'
He emptied his glass and folded his arms.
'I don't want to over-dramatise, but do you carry a gun?'
'No,' I said, downing the champagne.
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