'Arrested them, did you?'
I shook my head.
'They ran off.'
'What're you going to do about it, then?'
'Make out a report,' I said.
'That'll settle 'em,' said the wife, grinning.
She might tease me but the wife was pleased that I'd joined the police. It was one of the few things she had in common with my dad: they both wanted me to get on. Dad, of course, was an out-and-out snob with about as many aspirations as any comfortably retired butcher could run to, while the wife… Well, she was something of a snob too, for all her belief in the woman's cause and Co-operation.
I had suffered alone after being stood down from my job on the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway To the wife, it was simply a great thing that the tin tub was not now needed every night. Then again, she came from money herself in a modest way. Her mysterious, lonely-looking father had owned several properties in and about the viaducts of Waterloo, and the wife had come into a bit when he'd died, with the result that she was plotting the purchase of a house to replace the one we'd lately sold in Halifax. This, she said, would be equipped with a thirty-shilling walnut bureau 'for our correspondence' and a five-pound pianoforte for 'musical evenings' which I had spent hours trying, and failing, to imagine. (Neither of us could play a note, to begin with.) These were the fixed aims of her domestic life, and housework could go hang in the meantime.
I had supper of boiled bacon, pickles and tea, and read a little more of my Police Manual, telling myself I would keep at it until the biggest log on the fire burnt away, but it didn't seem to burn, only to turn black. There was a lot of it left by the time I got up to 'Fraud' and quit the book.
I went up to bed with the wife at a little after ten. Before pulling the lace curtain of the bedroom to, I peered past the fern that stood on the window ledge. Nobody about in Thorpe. I thought for some reason of the Archbishop sleeping in his Palace, the river flowing slowly by; and it was impossible not to imagine him looking like one of those statues found on church tombs. The Palace would bring a few trippers to Thorpe in summer (I'd been told) but it was a sleepy spot, all right. After Halifax, it was like being left behind by the world. Yet, two weeks before we'd arrived there'd been a windrush through the village – not occurring anywhere else – and forty-nine objects, according to the vicar, had been overturned, including the oak next to the Old Church, which stood marooned by the river.
The wife came into the room carrying her raspberry tea, recommended for those in her condition. Her nightdress hung about one foot higher than usual, because of the baby bulge beneath, and her travel around the bed put me in mind of the orbit of the planet Mercury. Her due date was two months away. If the idea bothered her, it didn't stop her sleeping, and she was quickly off. I wanted a boy – tell him about engines. Except that I was done with them myself. I could hardly think about locomotives now, without going back in my mind's eye to Sowerby Bridge Shed, 12 November 1905. To think that at the start of that day, I'd still been able to see my way clear to a life on the footplate. What with memories of that calamity, and wondering whether I'd be put to chasing murderers come six o'clock in the morning I couldn't sleep, so walked down to the kitchen for a bottle of beer. But we were all out.
PART TWO
The Garden Gate
Chapter Five
It was 5.55 a.m and raining hard when I pedalled up to the bike stand just outside the forecourt of the station and dashed inside. I raced past the bookstall, where the placards of the Yorkshire Post (a morning paper) read 'York Horror', but also 'Terrific February Gales at Coast'. The bookstall was long and narrow like a carriage that never moved, and I didn't care for it. The stout party in charge was laying out his murder library. As a kid, I'd been warned off light literature by my dad, with the result that I read little in the way of fiction at all, having no real liking for the heavier stuff. I had read always of the railways, and railwaymen were the ones I'd looked up to, not detectives, but it would be something to settle the Cameron business, and for the first time in weeks I was entering railway premises with some of the excitement, and some of the fear, of my engine-firing days. I felt lean, forward-thinking, useful again as I strode towards the Police Office.