The Blackpool Highflyer js-2

by Andrew Martin

  Stringer here' she said to the boy, 'are to take a turn about in the gardens.'

  It was the first I'd heard of it.

  Mr Ferry picked up his newspaper, saying, 'I think I'll come along' which I was very glad of.

  We walked back along the corridors, with Mr Ferry merrily asking about engines, and keeping the conversation going. The boy dragged behind. As we walked along a corridor, a door opened, and a great wave of children, all boys, all in their great black capes, swept towards us. There was no adult or master in sight, and as they swept by on either hand – all silent, but all nearly speaking – I half expected to see that they'd carried Arnold Dyson off with them. He was one of their own after all, and did not belong with us. But when I looked back he was still there.

  Outside the front of the college, on the raised level that ran around the house, Mr Ferry leant against a stone urn full of flowers and began reading his newspaper.

  I stood a few feet away with the boy, holding out Pearson's Book of Fun.

  'This is yours,' I said. 'You left it on the train.'

  No answer. He was looking out at the gardens like a little lord of the manor. Mr Ferry was making a lot of noise with his newspaper.

  'Would you like me to read out some riddles?' I said.

  'Read 'em to yourself' said the boy.

  'Come on now.' I opened the book at 'Some Riddles', and began reading the first one I struck: "'Why is a football round?'"

  'Leave off' said the boy.

  'Leave off, Mr Stringer' called Mr Ferry from behind his newspaper. 'Remember your manners.' I could not see Mr Ferry's face but somehow knew he was smiling over this.

  I closed the book. 'Well then…' I said. I very much wanted the meeting to be over, being sure that at any moment the boy was going to accuse me of murdering his mother.

  After a while longer of being stared at by him, I said: 'What did you do today?'

  'Nowt.'

  'Trigonometry first half of the morning,' called Mr Ferry from over by the urn, 'then Euclid. Afternoon: nature walk, composition, scripture.'

  'Are you liking it here?' I said to the boy.

  'I take as I find,' he said.

  'If you would ever like to take a turn on one of the engines we have down at the shed I'm sure it could be sorted out.'

  'What shed?'

  'Sowerby Bridge shed. It's where the Halifax engines are mostly kept.'

  'Why are they not kept at Halifax?' He sounded like the wife.

  'It's all to do with history,' I said. 'The railways went to Sowerby Bridge before they came to Halifax, so the shed was put there.

  'Well,' said Arnold Dyson, 'I wish they'd never come at all.'

  I took off my cap and put it back on again, cursing myself. Of course most boys, like the son of Robinson, the light-suit- ing man sacked from Hind's Mill, were engine mad, but this one had the best of reasons not to be.

  Mr Ferry seemed to be really taken up with his newspaper now.

  'What's the name of your dog?' I asked Arnold Dyson. 'Reuben Booth, that's the guard on the train, the one that has it for safekeeping… He wants to know.'

  'I'm not telling.'

  'Why not?'

  'Because then he'll be somebody else's dog.'

  'But there's nothing else for it, is there?' I said. 'Reuben's a great hand with dogs, you know.'

  'He's going to have to be,' said the boy. 'He's not too particular about getting bitten, I hope. Bob's a quarrelsome sort when he's -' 'That's his name is it? Bob?'

  The boy looked away. 'Is not,' he said.

  'I know a ticket clerk called Bob,' I said.

  The boy turned and looked at the door of the college. 'So what?' he said to the door. He smeared his hand hard across his hair. Then he looked at his hand. He didn't like the Brilliantine. He put his hand through his hair again, harder.

  A clock began to strike seven, and, all in a moment, Mr Ferry put down his newspaper, collected the boy, and took him back inside the college.

  I stood on my own. I felt bad about Arnold Dyson because I'd tricked the dog's name out of him, and what was more, Pearson's Book of Fun was still in my hand.

  Mr Ferry came back through the door towards me, saying: 'He's tough stuff, isn't he?'

  'Well, I'm not a great hand at talking to kids.'

  Mr Ferry nodded. 'Ticklish,' he said.

  I remembered the Farthing Everlasting Strip, still in my pocket. I had made a poor fist of things all round: it had been crazy to offer Dyson a ride on the footplate. But Mr Ferry was still smiling at me with his newspaper folded under his arm, as if he knew all would come right in the end.

  'Oh, while I think on,' he said, looking up at me, 'why is a football round?'

  Chapter Twenty

  It was only a little way across town from the Crossley Porter Orphanage to the other frightening mansion: the Infirmary. I walked from the one to the other across Savile Park, stopping at a drinking fountain on the way. All around me were children playing, jumping about in funny boots like little comedians. The killer had taken all that away from Dyson; the killer and me, working together. And now he was cut off from the world by a beautiful garden.

  The garden in front of the Infirmary was not quite up to the same mark, although there were little clusters of people in bathchairs admiring it. I walked through the lodge and found myself in a wide, high room with lilac walls, and white, empty fireplaces. The nurses were in lilac and white too, criss-crossing underneath a sign reading 'accident cases' with an arrow beneath. I watched them for a while, liking the sound of their skirts – and there wasn't one not beautiful.

  There were two bearded doctors laughing, and when they moved aside I saw a small woman, neither a doctor nor a nurse, standing behind a high desk and smiling across at me: 'Can I help you, sir?'

  I pulled off my cap and walked towards her in noisy boots. 'I would like to see a Mr Martin Lowther. He would have come in on Saturday, I think, with two broken legs.'

  'Ward Seven,' she said, without so much as a glance at a ledger or paper. 'Follow the signs.'I walked along many bright, empty corridors with tall windows. A lot of glaziers had been here, and the windows gave on to gardens that could compare to the ones at the orphanage, with wide lawns and many strange-shaped hedges, like chess pieces. You might come round from breathing ether and, looking at these, not be quite sure which world you were in. It didn't look like any part of Halifax, and that was the fact.

  I came to double doors that had the sign 'ward 7' above them, and then the words, 'mrs bailey, matron'. I walked through the doors and there was a desk with a woman sitting at it: half nurse, half lady-clerk, and I did not like her face. You could have put over what it was like by just drawing a cross. She seemed to be signing, or making some kind of mark, on slips of paper.

  'Excuse me,' I said, 'but I've come to see Mr Martin Lowther.'

  'Well, you've come at visiting time,' she said, adding, as she glanced up at me,'… by accident or design.'

  'It was by design,' I said.

  'Mr Lowther is not at all well,' she said, 'and I don't think he'll see you.'

  'Oh, but if you just once asked him…'

  She sighed. 'What's the name?'

  'Stringer,' I said. 'Jim Stringer, fireman of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway.'

  'Is it necessary for him to know that last part?'

  'It wouldn't hurt,' I said.

  'But are you a friend of his, or family, or… what? I'll not have him disturbed over a work matter.'

  I was about done with pretending to smile, so I gave it up, saying: 'You'll find that he'll see me.'

  She stood up and went off into the ward, but not for long, and she came back grinning, so I knew it was a bad look-out. 'He'll not see you,' she said, 'I knew he wouldn't. Two gents came along not twenty minutes since; they gave me their names, just as you've done; I went in to ask and he turned them away as well. Taken very bad, he was, just at hearing they'd turned up.'

  'What were the name
s?' I asked, and she answered before thinking about it: 'Mr Crocker and Mr Kilmartin.' She bit her lip directly after the words were out.

  'Well, I shouldn't wonder he was taken poorly,' I said. 'Do you honestly think they're real names? Because if so, think on… What did the two of them look like?'

  'I don't know, I'm sure,' she said, for she'd clammed up now.

  'But you saw them, so you do know.'

  The woman looked at me and said in a loud voice: 'Doctor Laing!'… Then, quieter, to me, 'I'm having you sent away from the hospital.'

  The doors moved and Dr Laing was there. It was like shuffling a deck of cards. He was small and he was smiling. 'You would like to see Mr Lowther?'

  'I would,' I said.

  He turned to the nurse-clerk. 'What is the gentleman's name?' he asked.

  'I don't recall,' she said, and I wondered whether she'd tried it on Lowther in the first place – not that it would have cut much ice.

  Laing turned back to me, still smiling. 'You see, Mr Lowther has just got nicely off to sleep after being very upset.' And I could see now that this smile of his was more of a brick wall. 'Who shall I say has called?' he said.

  I thought of the names given by the two earlier fellows. 'Say that a friend came by,' I said, and, by doing that, I meant to set Lowther's mind at ease, but as I walked back out of the Infirmary it struck me that I'd likely done nothing of the sort, for, as far as I knew, Martin Lowther didn't have any friends.

  PART TWO

  Wakes

  Chapter Twenty-one

  In the week before Wakes we were mainly holding fire on the excursion trains, for it was the last time anyone would want to go away. After the Skipton run, we were back on the Rishworth branch for the Tuesday and Wednesday, with another Scarborough excursion booked for the Thursday.

  In that week, Halifax was full of scuttling people, cancelling their orders for milk or newspapers, stocking up on straw hats and other summer goods, taking their money out of the banks. All pleasures were kept in check, the better to enjoy the jamboree coming up.

  Halifax was living in the future, and every day the Courier contained The Wakes Outlook', giving reports on all the places that the townsfolk might be heading for in the coming week. At Rhyl, bowling, yachting and golfing were in full swing. At Penzance, the outlook was good for holidays; glass steady, wind from the north. At Yarmouth, the Winter Gardens stood ready to accommodate the people if it rained. Military bands were on the beach. Fine weather was almost sure at Douglas, Isle of Man, and as for Blackpool…

  Blackpool, we were told day after day, was 'ready', and the Courier gave a list of the 'Principal Attractions' in the town. On the Tuesday I read, while rolling into Rishworth, that these included the Singing Simpsons at the Tower and the Palace, and 'Henry Clarke and Young Leonard' at the Seashell. He was a fine ventriloquist but I wondered why he'd been mentioned and not the other, grander one, Monsieur Maurice. Perhaps he would take his turn as a Principal Attraction another day. He was a regular bill-topper at the Seashell, after all.

  But Monsieur Maurice certainly wasn't mentioned the next day, as I sat reading the Courier around the back of the Albert Cigar Factory, with George Ogden waiting beside me.

  We were kicking our heels, sitting on a wall at the loading bay while the narky little fellow who dished out the damaged cigars kicked around boxes in search of half a dozen 'A's for each of us, George having said he would stand me them.

  He was a queer sort about money. He'd already asked for a rent reduction, and half the time I expected him to put the bleed on. Yet he'd paid me for the window. Whenever I thought about George and money, I thought about the missing tickets, and that led on to thinking about all the other business.

  He was about five feet away from me, wiping his face with a little handkerchief. We'd met at the Joint and walked up together after our day's work. I hadn't seen him in a while, for he'd stuck to his usual habit of staying out late. 'Blessed hot,' he was saying now.

  It was smoky, too. From the amount of black stuff tumbling upwards from the Albert chimney, they seemed to be at the highest pitch of cigar-making for that day.

  'What's the blooming fellow up to?' George fretted. 'You wouldn't think it too taxing to find a dozen cigars in a cigar factory.'

  'But it's substandard ones we're after,' I reminded him.

  'The difficulty in this place', George said, 'would lay in finding any other kind.'

  George seemed out of sorts. He went back to his pacing, I to the Courier and the Wakes Outlook.

  '"A telegram from the Isle of Man today'", I read out loud, '"says if the weather is fair, the nights are as enjoyable as the day. This arises from the… "'I hesitated a little over the next word, '"pellucidity of the atmosphere and the play of light on the mountains and sea.'"

  'Mountains!' said George, turning about to face me. 'On the Isle of Man! That's obviously written by some fellow who's never seen the Pyrenees.'

  'You've seen 'em yourself, have you?'

  'I might run over there one day,' he said, standing still and running his hands up and down his marvellous waistcoat.

  'What are you doing for Wakes?' I said.

  'Why, I'll be slaving in the booking hall of course,' he said. 'But that's my style, you know. When the common herd are gallivanting about, I'm getting my head down for a bit of serious work.' He nodded at me to drive home his point: 'And vice versa,' he added.

  I'd been kicking my boots against the wall, and suddenly a clod of soot from Sowerby Bridge shed fell down from one of them. We both looked at it.

  'Things'll be pretty slow after the first couple of days' I said. 'Everyone'll be gone by then.'

  'Yes' said George, 'but then it's all stock-taking and putting the records of the whole year straight.'

  Here was my opportunity. 'Did those missing tickets ever turn up?'

  'Missing tickets, old man?'

  'It was you that told me of it.'

  'You should be on the halls,' he went on. 'A Man of Marvellous Memory. But it comes back to me now… No, they never did show up, and the devil of trouble was caused by it. No end of bombardments from Knowles.'

  The cigar fellow put his head out of his little office and called: 'I've got a dozen 'A's here.'

  We began making for his little room.

  'The tickets for the Joint are sent along from Manchester, aren't they?' I asked George.

  'That's the idea, old man.'

  'The tickets that went missing: were they singles or returns? And where were they for?'

  George blinked a few times. 'Can't just remember,' he said. 'Gosh! I'll be forgetting me own name next!'

  'Did you hear about what happened to Lowther, the ticket inspector?' 'Fell off one rock and smashed his legs on another, didn't he? Out at Hebden Bridge? In the mountains they've got there! Well, I expect the fellow was canned.'

  'What makes you think so?'

  'The poor fellow's famous for it. How do you think he got to be so glum? It always takes you like that in the end, you know.'

  The 'A's were pushed over towards us. George took one of the cigars out of its box, and rolled it under his nose.

  'Do you have a light?' he asked the little cigar man.

  'No,' replied the cigar man, rather angrily, 'and I don't have the bob you owe me for those smokes either.'

  George began fishing in his waistcoat.

  'I was at Hebden Bridge with the wife and a friend of the wife,' I said. 'I had sight of what happened, and I thought he was pushed. I chased the fellow I thought did it all the way to Manchester. I couldn't see his face, but I'm sure he must have been connected with tickets in some way. Do you have any notion who it might have been?'

  This was the facer.

  But George simply turned to the cigar man, saying: 'Two shillings. I'm paying for this gentleman's half dozen as well.' He paid over the money and turned to me: 'You chased him to Manchester!' he exclaimed.

  And now I felt he was joshing, or wanting to seem to be.
'I chased him to Hebden station and got on the same train. But I lost him at Manchester Victoria.'

  We'd walked back out into the loading bay by now. 'Well,' said George, 'ain't you the dark horse?'

  'Who do you think might have wanted to crown Lowther?' I asked him.

  George stopped in the loading bay and his eyes went wide: 'There's absolutely hundreds that would,' he said. 'The fellow was a regular bastard.'

  'He was on the train when the stone was found on the line,' 1 said. 'I wondered whether that might have been somebody's first crack at him.'

  He was on the point at once. 'As to that, nobody knew Lowther's movements beforehand. So no wrecker could have guessed he was going to be on that train, and it'd be a damned queer way of trying to kill him, wouldn't it? I mean, talk about going round the houses.'

  I knew the first part of this to be true, and the second part seemed the soundest of good sense. 'You know'I said, 'every time I look at the Wakes Outlook, I expect to read, "It is pleasing to report that no grindstones have been found on the lines going into the resort."

  'I'd say you were becoming rather overwrought about the matter,' said George, who had the cigar in his mouth. 'Anyway,' he went on, 'as I've already mentioned to you, chances are they were going for the train that came along after – the regular Blackpool service. Cheerio, old chap.'

  I watched him walk away across the empty, sunlit yard that lay behind the cigar factory. I'd not yet mentioned to him about the Socialist Mission telegram to the Courier. It came to me that George had described himself as a socialist, but I couldn't see him being in with that show. Besides, I was a socialist myself, of sorts.

  Come to that (and this was a new thought), from all that the wife said, Robinson, late of Hind's Mill, might even be counted a socialist, of a toffy kind.