'Have you had this off, mate?' I asked the man, pointing to the changing box.
He shook his head.
'And I don't believe the bloke who brought it in had done either.'
'Why not?'
'He didn't look my idea of a whatsname - photographic artist.'
'Who was he?' 'Reckon I'd let on if I knew?'
'Er, no,' I said.
'That's just where you're wrong,' he said. 'I'm not bent, though you might think it from the looks of this place. A bloke came in, sold me a stack of stuff for a tanner. I took it sight unseen, granted. But that en't a crime now, is it?'
'Would you recognise the bloke again?'
'Big cap ... thick muffler ...' said the shopkeeper.
'That's narrowed it down to about thirty million.'
'I can't help that, mister,' he said.
I believed him, just as I'd believed Clegg and the men of Vulcan Athletic. They seemed to be part of an honest network - or had they been guying me from start to finish?
'Mind if I take it?' I said. 'It's evidence.'
'You're the boss,' he said.
Anything to get shot of me.
I carried the Mentor Reflex into the middle of town. The wide, new streets were all in straight lines, and the trick was to avoid the ones along which the sea wind raced. The streets were prettily lit, for all the cold, and the shops crowded with Christmas tomfoolery. There was a clear-cut line between the sexes: the men were moving fast, thinking of business, the women moving slow, thinking of Christmas. I was turning a corner in the locality of the railway station when I was checked by the sight of a small fir tree from which dangled little medicine bottles of coloured glass. 'Milner,' read the sign above the window. 'Druggist.' The important notice was in the corner of the window: 'Photographs Developed'.
I pushed open the door, entering a sort of warm, chemical Christmas. Approaching the counter, I removed my gloves and loosened the catch that held the plates on to the camera. A man waited at the counter: white-coated and clean - struck me as a doctor who'd missed his mark, like all druggists.
'Can you do these for me express?'
'Two hours,' he said, and whether that was express or no, I couldn't have said from his tone.
'How many exposures in here?' asked the man, taking the tin from me.
'Well, there'd be two at most, wouldn't there?' I replied. 'Or there might not be any.'
He looked at me narrowly, saying, 'If there aren't any, it won't take two hours.'
I requested the largest print size, and then went off for a bite and a warm, eventually walking into Hintons, although not the select parts used by Steve Bowman and his wife, but a smoke-filled, publike part of it, where I ate fried eggs and drank a cup of cocoa.
It was five o'clock when I returned to Milner, the druggist.
'Anything doing?' I asked, and by way of reply he handed over an envelope, saying, 'Two and fourpence.'
Chapter Ten
I paid the money over without a thought for the cost, and pulled first from the envelope the two negatives. Five men stood on a platform before a special carriage. It was the one I'd viewed at Bog Hall Sidings, Whitby. Above it was visible a part of the platform canopy, and I knew that right away for the broken one at Saltburn. The men's eyes seemed to be burning, and all about their boots was a mass of rough blackness - snow in reverse.
I then pulled out the prints. Going from left to right, the first man was clean-shaven and wore a silk hat (which he held in his left hand, along with his gloves) and a topcoat buttoned right up; there would be a smart black morning coat underneath, no doubt. He was handsome, and his hair went backwards in waves. His dashing looks put me in mind of fine copperplate handwriting.
He looked slightly sidelong at the photographer, as if to say, 'Photograph me, would you?' and his left arm somehow did not belong about the shoulder of the next man, number two, but that's where it was. Number two was perhaps half the age of number one. He had a friendly face and smiled straight at the photographer. He carried a folded copy of a newspaper, the name of which I could make out: it was the Whitby Morning Post, which served the whole of the coast of North Yorkshire. He wore a derby hat, and had a fine winter flower in his buttonhole, as did the next man, who was about of an age with the first; his rough, grey hair and beard were all of a piece with his tweed suit. He might have been an explorer, freshly returned from the Arctic Circle. The fourth had a round face (he was bareheaded and bald) and round glasses. He gave a cautious smile. The flower in his buttonhole did not suit him. It was too flowery. Number five was older than the rest. He wore a stovepipe hat, and had blind-looking eyes; he looked dirty and confused, but also rich. He might be Moody - the man who'd gone under a train, father of another Moody now living in Pickering. I looked them over again, thinking of them in turn as handsome fellow, young fellow, wild-looking fellow, bald fellow and old fellow.
The second print was more or less the same, save for the fact that the young man was looking down, and I saw immediately that this was the difference between a photograph that could be used in a picture paper, and one that could not. The prints themselves made an impression not very different from that of the negatives - and this, I believed, was on account of the strangeness of the snow light; I could not tell whether the picture had been taken in the morning or afternoon.
What had become of these men?
I had already been told that one was dead, and I knew this much: that there was only one way your fortunes could go once you'd attained the distinction of your own railway carriage, and that was down the hill. I found myself turning one of the prints over, half expecting the druggist to have written their names on the reverse. I looked at the man, now serving a cold cure to another customer. Smart shopkeeper like himself - he might know one of the Club gents; he might know all six. So might any man in Middlesbrough, come to that. . .
I had meant to take my trophy straight to Detective Sergeant Williams, but a new notion came to me as I exited the druggist's, and I struck out for the largest building in my line of sight: the Middlesbrough Exchange. I crossed a wide square that was filled with trams come to the rescue of the freezing citizens. In the cold darkness, the iron-making smell had descended on the middle of the town: the strange, out-of-the-way smell of burning sand.
One of the mighty double doors of the Exchange was being swung to as I approached, and the place was evidently closing up. A fossil in a gold-braided uniform watched me go in, as if to say, 'I won't trouble to ask your business; you'll be ejected before long in any case.' In the great hall of the Exchange, the remaining groups of buyers and sellers talked under clouds of cigar smoke. Wooden stands were placed at intervals, each one an island under its own electric light. Notices were pinned to the stands: the day's prices of coal, ironstone, iron, steel and ships, as I supposed - all the goods that had raised Middlesbrough from nothing to a city of a hundred thousand souls in less than a lifetime.
Some clerks remained at the counters that were set into the walls beneath a great gallery, but most were already shuttered. I walked towards one group of businessmen with my warrant card and the photograph held aloft. 'Detective Stringer of the railway police,' I said, and they turned to me as one. It cost them quite an effort to look civil, but the warrant card made them do it. What did they see? A thin, youngish bloke with a camera over his shoulder; topcoat a little out at the elbows. It was my work coat. A new one, in a better grade of cloth, would be served out to me if I gained my promotion. As they eyed me, I felt very strongly the want of that word 'Sergeant' - 'Detective Sergeant' would have testified to at least one promotion successfully secured. One of the men took the photograph and passed it among his fellows. The second one to clap eyes on it spoke immediately.