The Spring Street offices had only been taken temporarily for just as long as it took to do up the ones at Newcastle, and the desk that had been placed in the hallway of the building at the foot of a staircase had a lonely look of not belonging. The same went for the bloke sitting at it - he wore a police uniform with a topcoat over, and pointed up the staircase when I told him I had an appointment with Captain Fairclough.
'Third floor,' he said, and his voice echoed against the cold stone, which made me more nervous than I was already.
I climbed the stairs and a black door with the words 'Capt. Fairclough' painted on it in scruffy white letters stood before me. I knocked, a voice called out and there he was.
He was a handsome man; looked the part of a leader, with grey- black hair and a grey-black beard. He sat at a sizeable desk in a room otherwise more or less empty, and it held the wide-awake smells of coffee and paint. It was freezing too, for behind the wide desk was a wide window, with the sash propped open.
But it was all on account of the view, for Captain Fairclough's window looked clean across the Company rows to Ironopolis. Standing before the desk, I took it all in: the great red clouds coming out of the blast-furnace tops, like slowly blossoming flowers; the trains of all shapes and sizes rolling through the snow; the wagons being hauled and lowered; and the tiny, lonely-looking men by the rails, or on the gantries of the blast furnaces or crossing the wastes in between, where, for the present, the snow had killed the ash.
'Sit down, Detective Stringer,' said Captain Fairclough.
I did it - and too quickly. I still wore my topcoat, and the clever papers, folded in my side pocket were sticking into me. They could not be seen by Captain Fairclough, and so had proved a waste of money.
'Do you know Middlesbrough?' he asked by way of preliminary.
It was good that he'd asked, for it meant he'd not heard of my troublesome investigations into the Travelling Club. But then again: what was the correct answer?
'I am not very closely acquainted with it, sir,' I said.
Try not to talk like a copy book, I told myself.
'Now you came to us from footplate work -' said Captain Fairclough.
I nodded, thinking guiltily of the letter I'd written asking for a return to it.
'I have a good general knowledge of railway working, sir,' I said. 'I find it comes in handy to know the business of a marshalling yard or engine shed.'
That was a little better.
'You had the solving of a murder; I believe.'
He meant the business of my first weeks on the force. I began telling him all about it, but after five minutes he checked me and I coloured up at that.
'The tale does you great credit,' he said, but not over-enthusiastically, and I wondered whether he considered me boastful.
After a little more rather strained conversation, I noticed that Captain Fairclough was looking down at a few pieces of paper.
'I have good accounts of you from your superior officers,' he said. Now I'd expected it of the Chief, but it was quite a turn-up to hear that I'd got a recommendation from Shillito. I'd really fixed him with that blow.
Captain Fairclough now fell to thinking about something, and turned to give me the benefit of his profile as he did so. But I was looking beyond him. The snow was coming down again, and it didn't seem to make much difference to Ironopolis until you looked closely and saw that the men were now moving through it as though blind. I looked back towards Fairclough. I had not convinced him that he ought to promote me, that was a certainty, and if I didn't manage it soon then Lydia would not be able to take up her own position. There was nothing for it. I would have to trust to the new-found good intentions of Detective Sergeant Shillito.
'I think dogs might do a good deal in police work given a little more experience,' I said.
I had made my shot; there was no going back. Captain Fairclough turned sharply towards me.
'Dogs?'
'Yes.'
'Did you say "dogs"?'
I was sitting in tight boots now.
'A fine body of trained dogs, yes.'
He turned away from me and looked through his window, taking it all in right across to the Tees with one great intake of breath. Had Shillito been guying me? The pages he'd given over had been from a journal of the Great Western Railway, of which Fairclough had been governor before he'd come north. They had been an account of the use of dogs in police work. It was an idea that had not caught on very widely, as the writer of the article admitted. In fact it had caught on only in Belgium, at a spot called Ghent, which had a dock that needed a lot of guarding. A single sentence in the article was to the effect: 'It is believed that the chief officer of our railway force, Captain Fairclough, favours putting dogs to work in this way,' and I had trusted my whole future to those words.
'A canine police, now ...' Fairclough said, turning back around slowly. 'What gave you the idea?'
I had what I thought a good lie ready for this.
'Just forever walking past signs reading "Beware of the dog", sir. And I thought - why not for police purposes?'
'What breed would you favour for the work?'
The ones in Belgium had been Airedales. An Airedale was the biggest sort of terrier, as I'd discovered in the reference division of York Library. But I ought not to look as though I'd got the whole thing from the article.
'A big enough breed to put fear into a villain,' I said. 'But the animal must be intelligent with it.'
'Would the dogs be on a leash?'
'Yes, and muzzled.'
That was how they had them in Belgium.
'I believe that other forces use them,' I said.
'Where?'
He had me now. I kept silence, hoping he'd put another question.
'Well then,' he said, 'where? Are you aware of any area of operation?'
'Belgium, maybe?'
That might easily have queered the whole thing, for it surely proved that I'd cribbed the notion of dogs from the article, but perhaps Captain Fairclough had never read that particular article, even though he'd been mentioned in it, for he rose to his feet saying, 'I will not keep from you that I have been thinking on remarkably similar lines myself. For thief-taking, or simply as a deterrent, it strikes me that dogs must have a place in our work.'
And I knew from his 'our' that I had done it; or that Shillito had done it for me.
'Imagine some loafer in that goods yard of yours at York,
Detective Stringer - pockets bulging with pilfered whisky bottles and baccy. You approach him with a dog leashed; you ask him to come along quietly ... Now I'd say he'd do it, but let's imagine he refuses your request. You threaten to unleash the beast. You warn him it is trained to attack every man not wearing a police uniform... He'd come along then, wouldn't you say?'
'He'd come along all right, sir . . . why, like a lamb I should think.'
Captain Fairclough laughed a little at that.
'Now,' he said, when he'd stopped, 'any other suggestions?'