The Blackpool Highflyer js-2

by Andrew Martin

  As I crashed down through the bracken towards Lowther, I saw a long, thin man down at the beck. He was running hard along its banks, leaping the water as clear flat grass for running came up on either side: long feet, big strides, like Little Titch in flight, with legs as wings, and head going backwards and forwards like a pump. It looked as if he was racing the water itself. He was nobody that I knew.

  Letting my coat slide off my shoulders, I tumbled down the little mountain and fell in behind him.

  The long fellow scarpered up a bank and struck the valley road, Lees Road. But as I went up the bank to follow, a thorn scraped through my bandage and touched my burn. I stopped for a moment to stare as the red line came alive with blood; then, smearing the bandage back round as best I could, I set off again.

  There were not many on the road, just a few half-hearted stragglers: tardy sorts, and now they were all in my way. They'd seen one man running, now they saw another. They didn't connect us – at least no one called out any encouragement.

  The trees seemed to be rolling in a light wind. This was blowing the rain away, and the sun was coming out with a violent force. It had got a taste for shining that summer, and was out to cause a sensation. I forced myself on like a human hammer, boot segs clattering on the stony road. I could not see the killer but when the road twisted in the right way, I'd see the oncoming crowds part and come together, as if someone was going through them at a lick. Ahead of me, shaking in my line of sight at the bottom of the valley, was Hebden again. A rainbow was over the top of the town, and beyond that was a second rainbow, fainter but bigger – for Mytholm- royd further along the valley.

  I came into Hebden, and the sound of my boots changed to a ringing echo in the streets.

  The place was full of happy excursionists: the skylarking, drink-taking sort who didn't fancy the hike up to the Crags. They roved between the pubs, or stood crowding pavements near the jug-and-bottle doors. I skidded into half a dozen streets about the main square, seeing nothing, and came to rest in front of the town chapel. But the sound of one desperate fellow's boots clattering continued. The runner, with his jerking head, was five hundred yards off, the only man on Burnley Road, and he was going hard for the right turn that'd take him over the canal and river, and into the railway station.

  He was on the bridge as I came onto Burnley Road. As I hit the bridge, the railway station swallowed him up. I shot past the booking office and onto the down platform. The light changed, got brighter and darker all in a moment. Light rain was coming down all around the station, but I was under the canopy. I could see the rain but it was not real to me. I was far too hot for anything, and the platform did not seem to be quite level.

  I turned and turned. There was a porter standing next to me on the down. A clerk was coming out of the General Room. There were four passengers on the down, more in the waiting room. All my thoughts were of the down. A train came in, blurring everything. Very short train, three rattlers on. The porter shouted 'Rochdale train!' The four on the platform looked at him and got on, as if they were obeying him. The engine began to blow off steam – bad driving – and as the steam turned to rain there was another noise from beyond and behind. I turned and saw the finger-pointing sign to the footbridge and the 'up'. In my mind the sign was saying, Hurry up to the up! There was another train in – already in and waiting on the up. I was over the bridge, and onto the platform and into the train.

  A bloody rattler. No corridor. The last of the doors was slammed and I heard the tail end of the guard's shout of 'Manchester train!' As we moved out of the station and began shaking through fields, I threw off my waistcoat, but the sun soon found my compartment and ran alongside the train, roasting me all the same. I could not cool down in the compartment, which I had to myself. I sat on the seat, and a lot of dust came slowly up, sucking the breath from my lungs. There was no longer any possibility of any more rain ever. I was on the same train as the running killer, and we were going towards Manchester, the London of the North, the city where the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway had sprouted from.

  I stayed sitting, leaning forwards on my seat, which somehow seemed the best way of coping with the burning, falling feeling. We came to some little station on the Lanky that I'd never been in: I caught the name as we went through slowly: Littleboro. One proud stationmaster in shirtsleeves, viewing miniature trees in tubs. More hot, lonely fields came up, sheep moving away with short, bumpy runs – couldn't be bothered to do more. We rolled into Smithy Bridge station, going slowly along the length of a poster showing a row of happy faces: it was an advertisement for Blackpool. But our three-carriage train did not stop, and we were into fields again, smaller ones, rising and falling beside us like waves. I could not picture in my mind the route from Hebden Bridge to Manchester that I was now following, and I could not remember the direction, could not move my thoughts.

  I got to my feet in the carriage and turned a slow circle to help me get my bearings. I then recalled that I had boarded the train on the up. The direction we were moving in was south. I wanted to put my head out of the window to see whether the killer was looking out from his own compartment, but I could not rise.

  I knew that a big town lay between Hebden Bridge and Manchester, but could not remember its name, was too hot to remember its name. Directly we stopped, I would put my hands on the other fellow, then shout for the nearest constable. But why? I clean forgot for a moment. It came back to me in a blue flash, like electricity. He had killed Lowther, the ticket inspector. He had done it for some reason to do with the stone on the line.

  What would be the first stop? Looking up, I saw a mighty advertisement for Victory V lozenges go rocking past. I heard the friendly echoing of a station, and I knew this was Rochdale, but I also knew I had brain fever from the heat. I grasped the window strap to pull myself up, but our driver was proving very tardy in shutting off steam. If he doesn't push that regulator to the home position in a minute, I thought, there'll be no station left. But the exhaust beats continued, steady as the ticking of a clock. Our train may have been short, but it was very determined. I sat back down with the notion that if we weren't going to stop at Rochdale, we weren't going to stop anywhere until the end of the line.

  I fancy that I may have slept before Manchester. I do not recall approaching the station: Manchester Victoria.

  When we arrived, I stumbled out of the compartment, and saw the illuminated display revolving in the hot dirty air: 'visit the Ardennes'; Visit… somewhere else; 'visit the ardennes' again. I turned to look at the platform gates, and there was the long thin man going through fast, leaving money in the hand of the ticket collector.

  I broke into a run, but it came out wrong, all wobbly, like, and I knew I was being marvelled at by a lot of people coming down off a train that had pulled up on the opposite platform. I had my waistcoat in my hand, but no jacket and no pocket book. I had left them behind in Little Switzerland, England's Alps.

  The ticket collector was coming up to me – 'Where's your ticket, mate?' but he didn't say it, I was only imagining him saying it. There seemed to be some difficulty in my head as to what was happening, and what I thought was happening, for although they were mostly the same, they were sometimes not.

  I got past the ticket collector because he'd seen somebody he knew. Somebody was walking towards the fellow and putting his hand to his cap, ready to raise it and say 'Now then'. So the collector forgot his business for a moment, and I was through the gates and in the clear. But there was another revolving sign that delayed me: 'England'… 'continent'… 'England'… 'continent'. I dragged my eyes away. I was in the great hall of Manchester Victoria station, which was all white tiles, like a giant washroom. The offices of the Lanky were hard by, I knew, tacked on to the station.

  There was no air. Close to the entrance was a refreshment room, where a man was drinking a glass of water. I saw the silver sparkle of it, and that delayed me too, but the drinking of water was something that went on in another world.
r />   I stepped out of the station. The cathedral might have been carved from coal, and there was a river smell floating up around it. In the mystery of Manchester, I was keeping my eye out for anyone moving away fast from the station, but there were dozens doing that, even though it was early evening on Saturday. All along the steaming wet roads they went, for it had lately rained; under the hot orange sky they went, under the mighty gas lamps, the size and shape of diamonds.

  On all sides enormous words were being carried across streets by viaducts and bridges: 'gramophones below cost', 'umbrellas re-covered'. It seemed to be a city of policemen with slowly turning heads, and everybody a winner or a loser and nothing in between. There were great statues in the streets, controlling the people, and the trams were like moving spiral staircases, everybody walking towards them full of mean thoughts, not really walking but pushing on grimly. It was hard to credit that only one train could bring a fellow from Little Switzerland to here.

  The sun was sinking, but still I could not get cool. I thought I might raise a breeze by walking fast so tried that for a while. It didn't work, so I sat down in a coal yard near the cathedral. There was a grindstone there, and a fellow lifting sacks of coal onto a cart. I stared at the grindstone, and the coalman looked at me for a longer time after every heave, until I walked over the road to a pub which turned out to be tiny – just a dark, tiny box of hot air, with dusty pictures of soldiers all around the walls. I bought a glass of beer, handing over what I realised, too late, was my last shilling. Then I bought another because the damage was done. Besides the barman, there was one other fellow in the pub. He was smoking a clay pipe. He was one of those old men with eyes that are frightening because too young and lively: the kind that haven't done enough in life.

  'I saw you,' he said, 'sleeping in a coal yard.'

  'Was not,' I said. I might have been five years old.

  'Hard on, you were. You're barely awake now.'

  'It's not a crime is it?' I said.

  'So you admit it? You'd better watch him,' he said to the barman; 'turn your back for a minute, he'll be out like a light.'

  He turned to me again as I tried to tuck my hand bandage back into place. 'What are you up to?' he said.

  'Looking out for a murderer,' I said.

  The old boy just muttered something very quietly to himself at that, and went back to his pipe, disgusted that there was somebody even stranger than himself about the place.

  I came out of the pub and immediately saw a very promising sign reading 'ice station'. But then a tram moved and it was 'police station'. I thought about walking in and saying I believed a man who had done a murder at Hebden Bridge was now at large in Manchester. It would be like saying that I believed him to be 'in the world'.

  I decided to do it, though.

  As I walked into the copper shop, it was hot, but in a different way again, which turned my head. I realised that my bandage was dangling down from my wrist like a dog lead with no dog on the end.

  I started to tell my story at the long desk, and a man who was something between a policeman and a clerk said the smart thing would be for me to sit down on a bench. He talked to somebody else about me, and the only words I heard were 'no effects', which he said with a laugh. But it was all songs and whistling in the copper shop because a man was fitting an electrical fan into the ceiling.

  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 hund
red 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.

  Chapter Eighteen

  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.