I turned around, and saw that none of the company had removed his hat; yet all the hats scraped against the grimy roof beams that swooped low across the room, which was more like a cave than a room. Small David now opened a door leading to a sitting room of sorts, and it seemed that I was free to follow him in.
The stove was black and cold here too. The young man, Richie, was in the room already, lighting greasy, evil-smelling paraffin lamps at either end. It was a long, low place with several truckle beds pushed against the three stone walls away from the fire. Filthy tab rugs were placed anyhow on the floor; and stacks of papers, books and journals were placed around the fireplace, whether to be burnt or read, I could not say. Richie then began remaking the fire, and he proved a shocking bad hand at doing so. Instead of cleaning the grate, he poked at it with the tool, which constantly rang against the iron of the door, striking a high, unpleasant note. He had obviously lit it earlier on in the day, but it had gone out because the draught was not properly created. As he poked and prodded, I wondered whether he had ever lit fires before he came to this place. I doubted it of a man who was a barrister's son. He got a burn going eventually, but I could see that it might not last.
'The trick of keeping a slow burn,' I said, 'is to close the top flue a little more - the lever wants tipping another ten degrees.'
'And who're ye tae tell him?' Small David called out.
I had not seen him enter the room. He carried a bucket in place of the revolver. For all his size, I ought not to be held off by a man who wore yellow socks and carried a bucket, but my thoughts would keep going back to that revolver of his, evidently close at hand in one of his coat pockets.
'I'm trained up as a fireman,' I said.
'Fireman?' said Small David. 'Ye are a dirty polis.'
'I was first trained up as a railway fireman,' I repeated.
'But he was fired.,' said Bowman, who had also entered the room, and whose speech was now slurring.
'Sorry, Jim,' he added, as he sank down on one of the truckle beds. He'd got a bottle from somewhere, though I couldn't make out the contents.
The stove was warming up after a fashion - it would keep me at close quarters as surely as any manacle. I claimed for myself one of the beds, but Small David ordered me off - I guessed from what he said that it must have been his. He then quit the room, and a moment later, I thought I caught sight of him walking past the one tiny frosted window that served the sitting room. Bowman sat silent on his bed, perhaps asleep, while Richie occupied another of the beds, reading a paper. He had never passed a word to me, and come to that, I had not seen him speak to his father or to Bowman. He only ever seemed to speak to Small David, who had evidently taken the place of his father in his affections. He seemed very young for his years, this fellow, but he must be in - or rather he must have been in - employment himself, otherwise he wouldn't have been in the habit of riding up to Whitby with the Travelling Club.
We had all kept our topcoats on, and all sank into them; and the room was quite silent now, save for the crackling of the fire. I could hear no stream rushing by, but only the baaing of sheep, which were at very close quarters.
Why were they all here? My thoughts raced in a circus. They'd fled Yorkshire after the disappearance of Falconer and the murder of their Club confederate George Lee, but why had either been killed in the first place? Not for the few silver candlesticks that had been taken from Lee's house. I looked again through the tiny window, where I saw that the lawyer Marriott had joined Small David; they were holding a conference in the falling snow, which seemed to muffle up their words, but I heard my own name mentioned twice by Marriott.
He came into the room a moment later and stood before the stove for a warm. He had removed his topcoat, and he managed to cut a handsome figure even in that old black guernsey. He then moved over to one of the two vacant beds. This, I saw, was better ordered than the others, with the blankets properly folded, and the papers over there were in better order than in the other parts of the room. As far as I could see, they were mostly shipping-line brochures. He caught up one of these, and read it for a few minutes before impatiently leaving the room once more.
I turned to the son, Richie, and repeated my earlier question.
'What's the programme?'
He just gave a shrug, and went back to his reading matter. The arrangements of the mean lamps meant that the shadow of the page he read covered the whole wall behind him.
I glimpsed Bowman, who now stood in the doorway, watching me with bottle in hand. I glanced that way, and he turned on his heel and disappeared. He could not bear to be in my company, now that he had betrayed me. I looked down at the crumpled papers under my boots. They seemed to have come from a holiday agent: 'Winter in the Cornish Riviera'; 'Railway Map of the British Isles'; 'Bournemouth, the Land of Pines and Sunshine.'
'Can you see us in Bournemouth, Detective Stringer, taking tea in an hotel?'
It was Marriott, standing by me and looking down at my reading matter. The householders would keep coming and going, but much as they wanted to keep clear of one another, they were all drawn back to the fire before long. The lawyer held a small glass in his hands - quite dainty by the standards of the cottage. I imagined it might be valuable to him; an object saved from his earlier life. From the kitchen came the smell of food, and I wondered how many more meals would be left to me.
'I cannot bear to see the daylight lost as early as it is here,' Bowman said, moving towards the fireplace, 'and so a flight to the south is contemplated - but a good deal further south than Bournemouth.'
'A flight?' I said.
'The trip has been in prospect for some time, Detective Stringer, but I would not have called it a flight until I heard about you.'
Small David entered the room, saying, 'Where's yon bottle, man?' Receiving no answer, he called out, 'Hey, Bowman!' at which Marriott turned on him.
'Don't shout so, you fucking Scottish hooligan!'
I had never heard swearing in such refined tones.
'You see,' said Marriott, turning towards me again, 'I must get out of this quagmire . . . And I must make a satisfactory arrangement about you before I do so. I brought you here to save you, don't you see that?'
'Strikes me this is a good place to bring a fellow if you wanted to do him in.'
'Now Small David would disagree with you there, Detective Stringer,' Marriott said. 'He holds that the best place for that business is the Cleveland Hills.'
'You pitched Theodore Falconer down an old iron shaft,' I said.
But then another, and better, thought hit me like a thunderclap.
'No, you put him into a blast furnace. His body was never found, and that's because it was melted away to nothing.'
Small David was watching me from the doorway. Marriott kept silence. He stood before me with his arms folded - a good-looking man with too much on his mind.
'Richard's a good fellow,' he said suddenly, nodding towards his son.
The boy looked up at him. 'Stow it, father.'
'But he has a poor physique - a defect on his mother's side, I suppose, for she died young herself. Small David, now -'
Marriott indicated the Scotsman, who had sat down on the last remaining free bed.
'Small David is a practical man, if not a very great hand at conversation.'