The Blackpool Highflyer

by Andrew Martin

The wife was standing by the water in the background.

  'Only he's flitted,' I went on.

  Cicely looked at me straight, then the buzzer went. It was as if all the steam available at that moment had been put through the one tiny whistle. The doors were rolled open and Hind's Mill began to suck in its people.

  I waited. Cicely and the wife waited too.

  'Well, I flitted from him,' said Cicely when the racket had stopped and the people were all inside.

  'Did you go to Blackpool with him?'

  'Oh, he didn't hold with Blackpool. Too common by a long way. But yes, we went, and it was one of the best days we had.'

  'Did you take a picture of him on the flying boats?'

  'You've turned it up, have you?'

  'It was left behind in this room.'

  'I wouldn't go on myself. He went up. George had pluck, and he could be the most charming fellow, you know. Afterwards, we drunk Champagne in the Winter Gardens.' She gave me a look that said: bet you've not done that.

  'I think he put the stone on the line’ I said.

  'Now you fuck off’ said Cicely Braithwaite.

  The wife came up but Cicely put her arm up: just one movement, like a signal. The three of us were alone by the mill pond now, with Halifax working beneath us in the heat.

  'You don't believe he did, then?' I said.

  And there it ended. Cicely turned, the wife took her into the mill, and I set off back down towards Halifax.

  But when I was no more than half a minute down the hill, I looked back at the front doors of the mill. Cicely was standing before them, just as though the mill was her own home. She was looking at me, and as I walked back up towards her, she walked down to meet me. She took off her bonnet and said: 'I'd finished with George. He was up to something crooked at the station and that's what brought it on. He accepted that we were finished, but he said I was not to go to Blackpool without him. I said he was nuts. He is nuts, you know.'

  'I know.'

  'But he loved me.'

  That knocked me; I hadn't expected it to be said.

  'That's perhaps why he did,' said Cicely, and tears and laughter nearly came together in an instant. But instead she said, 'George told me he would stop the excursion.'

  'You're a witness to that, you know’ I said.

  'I am,' said Cicely. 'I've thought about it and I will say what must be said. He's written to me since,' she said. 'Threats. I will not have that. But I still don't believe he tried to cause a train smash, you know.'

  'Where's he now?'

  'Well,' she said, 'is he not at work down there?'

  She pointed at the Joint.

  This I had not considered. He'd flitted from Back Hill Street and was being chased for brass by Don and Max. But what harm could come to him in the booking office?

  'I'm off to look’ I said.

  --------

  At the Joint, Dick and Bob were both at the window. Two clerks for the price of one, arguing over a ledger.

  'Is George in?' I asked Bob. 'I want to see him most particularly.'

  'George!' said Bob. 'We're out with that idle so-and-so. He's not turned up, left us short-handed on one of the busiest days . . . but hold on a moment, he lives with you. Have you not seen him? What's going off?'

  All these questions, like a little summer fly going round and round my head. But Dick was looking at me with a steady eye. We'd had our chat at the Evening Star, and I knew he had an inkling.

  'He's flitted,' I said to Bob. 'Owes back rent.'

  I turned to Dick. 'Where's he gone, mate? Any ideas?'

  'I'll tell you what,' said Dick, 'wherever it is, he wouldn't buy his ticket here, now, would he?'

  This was a joint station, and my eyes went over towards the next-door ticket window, the one operated by the Great Northern.

  Dick shook his head. 'They know him there 'n' all,' he said.

  'Everyone knows George,' said Bob.

  'He may have bought it at the next stop along’ said Dick.

  I nodded. Sowerby Bridge.

  'Let's have a ticket for Sowerby Bridge then, Dick’ I said.

  Half a minute later I had in my hand a third-class single to Sowerby Bridge. I looked at the ticket and I looked at Dick. It was number 6521. A nothing number in a run of ten thousand.

  Trains from the Joint to Sowerby Bridge are ten a penny. I was aboard one in no time, and climbed off it dead opposite the little booking office at Sowerby Bridge station. I could see the shed in the distance, smoking away in the sun.I'd thought that Dick and Bob were your regulation booking-office types, but this fellow before me took the bun: hair all moved over to one side with Brilliantine; titchy, thick, scientific-looking specs.

  'How do,' I said.

  The Sowerby Bridge booking-office clerk said nothing. I'd never struck this fellow before because I usually just relied on folk knowing me on my runs between Sowerby Bridge and the Joint. And if it came to it, there was always the footplate pass in my pocket.

  'Have you sold a ticket lately to a big fellow in a fancy waistcoat?' I asked him.

  'If I had done,' he said, 'it would be my business, wouldn't it?'

  'It's just that he might have done a murder.'

  'Police matter then,' he said.

  There were two layers of glass between us: the clerk's specs and the ticket-office window.

  'What do you reckon?' I said.

  Still nothing.

  I took out my pocket book.

  'I have an interesting sort of railway ticket here,' I said.

  'What's interesting about it?' he said.

  And I knew I had him.

  'The number,' I said.

  'Four zeroes, I suppose it is’ said the ticket clerk. 'I buy them for myself when they come up, if they're not too pricey.'

  I held up at the window the third-class single to Todmorden that George had given me.

  'One, two, three, four,' said the ticket clerk, reading the number. 'Third class ...'

  'What do you reckon?' I said again.

  'Fair do's,' said the clerk. 'I'll give you thruppence for it.'

  'It's yours gratis’ I said, 'if you answer the question.'

  'I forget’ he said.

  'You forget what?' 'The question.'

  'A big fellow’1 said, 'running to fat; lot of hair; fancy waistcoat. Acts like a lord.' I was still holding up the ticket.

  'I did strike a fellow like him,' said the clerk.

  'When?'

  'Forty-five minutes ago.'

  'Where was he off to?'

  'Goole.'

  I nodded. Step on at Goole for the Continent.

  'When's next Goole train?' I said.

  'Half an hour,' said the ticket clerk.

  I handed over the interesting ticket to the clerk, and had a third-class single to Goole off him in return. I did not look at the number.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  All morning there'd been something amiss; all bloody summer there had been, and, as the train for Goole pulled out of Sowerby Bridge station, the answer came: blue blackness in the sky.

  I had never been to Goole, but I knew it to be an inland port. The barges used the canals that went out from it - and there were any number of those. The sea-going ships came and went by the Humber Estuary, which by the time it reached Goole was called the river Ouse.

  So the steamships went out into a river, and they could only do it when the tide was right.

  The eastward ride to Goole was a two-hour touch, taking me right across Yorkshire. The rain was stalled in the blackness at Sowerby Bridge; skies were clear again over Wakefield, but our little train struck storm conditions once more at Pontefract, where the black ink was spilling across the sky. Here I leant out of the window as the guard was giving the 'right away', and one big raindrop was blown into my face.

  The first lightning flash happened just as Goole appeared, and it seemed to bounce the whole town into my view.

  Lightning is the real light, and all w
as revealed in an instant: the frightening black and red water tower, the tall coal hoists like factories on legs that could roll back and forth, and one of them seemed to be walking through the port in that bright, white moment, but no: that was the coal hoist that floated. I saw the sailing ships, plenty of those - the masts and yardarms made tall crucifixes - and the steamships too, with their backward-sloping funnels. Most would be of the Lanky's own fleet. The station was only a few hundred yards from the docks. As I stepped through the ticket gate, the wind made the sound of a motorcar - a motorcar far off but gigantic. The rain was flying in the wind; the bookseller outside the station had an oilcloth over all his wares.

  'Batten down the hatches,' he said to me as I passed by.

  I stopped beyond the station for a moment, looking at the docks. Goole was not like a town, but more like a giant system, with the moving cranes going one way and the trains running a different way, and the houses hard by the docks with sea water rolling before them instead of roads. The lightning came again from out over the Humber, like the blue lines you might see in the whites of a woman's eye, in the corner of the eye, almost out of sight.

  And then the lightning came again, from a different side of the seaway, as if the light was blown by the wind.

  I walked on into the docks. The first thing I struck was a church that stood in the centre of the low dock buildings, like the hub of a wheel. The flag on the steeple was having a rare old time of it. I saw that the clock was lit by lightning- coloured gas.

  The time was midday - midday in summer and the town was dark, with gas lamps lit all across the docks.

  I walked on, and the water that should have been down there in the docks was up and at me, and there was a sharpness to the wetness. There were half a dozen docks before me, each like a town square filled with water. At one dock close by, two men were winding wheels on opposite sides of a small pump. A white tube, shining in the rain, came from the pump and hung down over the dock wall into the water, and I thought: there's a man down there on the end of that. Well, he was out of the rain at any rate. Over the road from where I stood were two warehouses with a pub crammed between them. Along from the warehouses was a building that looked like a chapel, but was not. The wide doorway was propped open. Above it was a carving of two small galleons bobbing about on a sea, and, above these, a flagpole flew the seagoing version of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway badge. It was the shipping office for the Lanky.

  The place was stifling: long lines of men in bowlers and steaming Ulsters stood queuing for tickets. The two blokes giving out the tickets at a long table were both smoking pipes. It took a long time for any man to get his ticket, for it was all a lot of fishing in pocket books, presentation of passports, checking of same; and finally the issuing of tickets that looked like little books, with each page needing to be stamped.

  Behind the ticket clerks was a wide painting showing the fleet of Lanky steamers, each in its own bit of sea, and all set in a circle going around a sort of gravestone on which were two columns headed 'CONTINENTAL PORTS' and 'DAYS OF SAILING'. Today was Monday. On Monday there were sailings to Amsterdam, Antwerp, Ghent, Hamburg, Rotterdam. All ships conveyed merchandise, but would take passengers too - it was ten bob to most places.

  I walked up alongside one of the fellows in the queue. 'What time are the ships going off today?' I asked him.

  'Four o'clock.'

  He'd answered without looking at me. He looked like a criminal. Every man jack of them in that queue looked as if he was escaping from somebody or something. And then I noticed a copper standing in the corner of the room, and for the first time I was set thinking about what I would do if I tracked down George. Up to then I'd just been dreaming of saying to him: 'I know you did it, you fucking rotter.'

  I don't know exactly why, but I never tried asking the ticket clerks in the shipping office whether they'd sold a ticket to a fellow with the particular looks of George Ogden. It was something about the length of the queue, and the way the blokes silently smoked as they tore and stamped the dockets. I knew it would be like talking to a wall.Then there was the copper.

  I could put the whole matter in his hands. But no, not yet. It would be Manchester all over again if I did that.

  I walked out of the shipping office and the storm was still there. I watched the rain hitting the sea like a quarrel and streaming through the circles of light around the gas lamps. The two men were still winding the wheels on the small pump connected to the air tube. And something being done in the docks was sending an underwater-bell sound floating over Goole.

  I walked into one terraced street, turned into another. Between two houses was a shop with a wide black iron panel fixed to its front. Pressed into the iron was the shape of three balls, as if three iron balls had been hurled there when the iron was hot. I saw the remains of gold paint in the hollows, and below, also driven into the iron, the words 'HARPER BROTHERS, MONEY ADVANCED ON PICTURES, BRONZES, VIOLINS & C & C.'

  I stared at this place, and George Ogden walked out of its door holding a little case.

  I was over the road from him and along a little. I shouted out and he ran directly around the corner with his funny, wobbling run. But it served him well enough because, as I stepped forward, I slipped on the slimy kerbstone, dashing the back of my head on the cobbles. I put my hand directly up to the wound that had been sewn. It was not torn. Then I hared around the corner, striking a long, empty street, dead straight. It ended in lines of railway wagons. As I watched, the nearest line of wagons jangled into life, and the words 'TRANSHIPMENT', 'COAL FACTORS AND EXPORTERS', 'TRANSHIPMENT', 'COAL FACTORS AND EXPORTERS', over and again in alternation, were dragged across the end of the street.

  There was a little hotel. I hurried along to it and burst through the front door. It was full of very dry people in strange hats, and all smoking cigars. I was in the public bar and for a moment thought my hearing had gone west, for they were all speaking words I could not make out. They were all foreigners.

  I came out of there double-quick and ducked into the next place. It was a little watery fishmonger's, with things floating in pails of cloudy water, but most of the fish already sold and the owner swabbing down the floor.

  'You've not seen a fellow come by this way, have you?'

  The fishmonger shook his head.

  I gave it up. Back into the rain; back into Goole town.

  George was in Goole at any rate, and he would only be leaving the town on a boat, and the boats could not set sail just yet.

  So I walked about for an eternity in the blackness and the rain, keeping my eyes skinned. I must have stood for half an hour in front of a butcher's, with a line of dead rabbits over my head holding the rain off. Presently, I turned back to the docks, where the black water looked as though it was being beaten by hammers. There might have been getting on for half a dozen steamships loading. Horses were being walked up onto one of them, but it was mainly coal that was going in. As I looked on, a coal barge came by, snaking through the docks with smaller barges towed behind, all heaped with coal. I thought of the swan at Hebden Bridge, with the signets following behind in a line.

  I found myself after a while back in the place near the church, bang outside the Lanky shipping office once again. I looked up at the flag, the little galleons carved over the door. Right over the road was the pub I'd spotted before. It also had two galleons on show - these on the pub sign. They were friendly-looking little ships, but the pub was just a white room, heaving with sea-going blokes. There was nothing on the wall but gas flares with no mantels, giving out a bright white light. Everybody was supping, and everybody was smoking, for what else do you do while waiting for your ship to leave? There were bags and portmanteaus all over the floor, and the fashion was to stand there swigging your ale with your foot placed on top of your bag, so as to stop it being carried away.

  I pushed my way through to the bar, trying to avoid the hazards of the luggage pieces, and asked for a glass of ale from the barman, w
ho was small and rough-looking, like his pub. Just as he passed the beer over, I saw something red in the far corner of the room: the redness of a glass of wine, the one glass of wine being drunk in that room.

  Well, it was George Ogden drinking it.

  As I moved over to him with my own glass in my hand, one of the big fellows waiting for transhipment knocked against Ogden, and half the wine was down his fancy waistcoat. When I got over to him, he was trying to rub it away, saying to himself, 'Just need a little something in a bottle to furbish it up.'

  'It's all up, George,' I said.

  He was not wearing his stiff collar. He was wearing the white shirt as usual, but he had on no collar at all and I saw his neck for the first time. There was a fair amount of it.

  He closed his eyes for a second, as if he could magic me away by the power of his mind. But then he looked back. 'Hello, old man,' he said, putting his hand inside his coat and taking out a pocket book. He handed me a pawn-shop ticket and a banknote. 'Look, old sort,' he said, 'the fellow in that pawn shop's as tight as Kelsey's Nuts. He let me have a sovereign for the gold cross, and I'm now giving you the ticket and ten shillings. You'll have the balance directly I get myself straightened out.'

  I put down my glass of ale on the nearest table, took hold of his shirt and pitched him against the wall. He bounced back off it. The blokes around us barely moved - it was a normal sort of event in this place.

  'Careful, old sort’ George said presently, 'I will not be slighted.'

  'Let's have it’ I said. 'Tell me about the tickets first.'

  'Had a few away, that's all,' he said. 'Just a lark, really. I began by thinking it rather a pretty little scheme.'

  'You needed help with it though.'

  'Ha!' said George, 'and that's where things got a little tangled. I'll tell you what, old boy: you wouldn't believe - good chap like yourself - the vagabonds they've got on the ticket- collecting side over at Blackpool.'