I stayed sitting, leaning forwards on my seat, which somehow seemed the best way of coping with the burning, falling feeling. We came to some little station on the Lanky that I'd never been in: I caught the name as we went through slowly: Littleboro. One proud stationmaster in shirtsleeves, viewing miniature trees in tubs. More hot, lonely fields came up, sheep moving away with short, bumpy runs – couldn't be bothered to do more. We rolled into Smithy Bridge station, going slowly along the length of a poster showing a row of happy faces: it was an advertisement for Blackpool. But our three-carriage train did not stop, and we were into fields again, smaller ones, rising and falling beside us like waves. I could not picture in my mind the route from Hebden Bridge to Manchester that I was now following, and I could not remember the direction, could not move my thoughts.
I got to my feet in the carriage and turned a slow circle to help me get my bearings. I then recalled that I had boarded the train on the up. The direction we were moving in was south. I wanted to put my head out of the window to see whether the killer was looking out from his own compartment, but I could not rise.
I knew that a big town lay between Hebden Bridge and Manchester, but could not remember its name, was too hot to remember its name. Directly we stopped, I would put my hands on the other fellow, then shout for the nearest constable. But why? I clean forgot for a moment. It came back to me in a blue flash, like electricity. He had killed Lowther, the ticket inspector. He had done it for some reason to do with the stone on the line.
What would be the first stop? Looking up, I saw a mighty advertisement for Victory V lozenges go rocking past. I heard the friendly echoing of a station, and I knew this was Rochdale, but I also knew I had brain fever from the heat. I grasped the window strap to pull myself up, but our driver was proving very tardy in shutting off steam. If he doesn't push that regulator to the home position in a minute, I thought, there'll be no station left. But the exhaust beats continued, steady as the ticking of a clock. Our train may have been short, but it was very determined. I sat back down with the notion that if we weren't going to stop at Rochdale, we weren't going to stop anywhere until the end of the line.
I fancy that I may have slept before Manchester. I do not recall approaching the station: Manchester Victoria.
When we arrived, I stumbled out of the compartment, and saw the illuminated display revolving in the hot dirty air: 'visit the Ardennes'; Visit… somewhere else; 'visit the ardennes' again. I turned to look at the platform gates, and there was the long thin man going through fast, leaving money in the hand of the ticket collector.
I broke into a run, but it came out wrong, all wobbly, like, and I knew I was being marvelled at by a lot of people coming down off a train that had pulled up on the opposite platform. I had my waistcoat in my hand, but no jacket and no pocket book. I had left them behind in Little Switzerland, England's Alps.
The ticket collector was coming up to me – 'Where's your ticket, mate?' but he didn't say it, I was only imagining him saying it. There seemed to be some difficulty in my head as to what was happening, and what I thought was happening, for although they were mostly the same, they were sometimes not.
I got past the ticket collector because he'd seen somebody he knew. Somebody was walking towards the fellow and putting his hand to his cap, ready to raise it and say 'Now then'. So the collector forgot his business for a moment, and I was through the gates and in the clear. But there was another revolving sign that delayed me: 'England'… 'continent'… 'England'… 'continent'. I dragged my eyes away. I was in the great hall of Manchester Victoria station, which was all white tiles, like a giant washroom. The offices of the Lanky were hard by, I knew, tacked on to the station.
There was no air. Close to the entrance was a refreshment room, where a man was drinking a glass of water. I saw the silver sparkle of it, and that delayed me too, but the drinking of water was something that went on in another world.
I stepped out of the station. The cathedral might have been carved from coal, and there was a river smell floating up around it. In the mystery of Manchester, I was keeping my eye out for anyone moving away fast from the station, but there were dozens doing that, even though it was early evening on Saturday. All along the steaming wet roads they went, for it had lately rained; under the hot orange sky they went, under the mighty gas lamps, the size and shape of diamonds.
On all sides enormous words were being carried across streets by viaducts and bridges: 'gramophones below cost', 'umbrellas re-covered'. It seemed to be a city of policemen with slowly turning heads, and everybody a winner or a loser and nothing in between. There were great statues in the streets, controlling the people, and the trams were like moving spiral staircases, everybody walking towards them full of mean thoughts, not really walking but pushing on grimly. It was hard to credit that only one train could bring a fellow from Little Switzerland to here.
The sun was sinking, but still I could not get cool. I thought I might raise a breeze by walking fast so tried that for a while. It didn't work, so I sat down in a coal yard near the cathedral. There was a grindstone there, and a fellow lifting sacks of coal onto a cart. I stared at the grindstone, and the coalman looked at me for a longer time after every heave, until I walked over the road to a pub which turned out to be tiny – just a dark, tiny box of hot air, with dusty pictures of soldiers all around the walls. I bought a glass of beer, handing over what I realised, too late, was my last shilling. Then I bought another because the damage was done. Besides the barman, there was one other fellow in the pub. He was smoking a clay pipe. He was one of those old men with eyes that are frightening because too young and lively: the kind that haven't done enough in life.
'I saw you,' he said, 'sleeping in a coal yard.'
'Was not,' I said. I might have been five years old.
'Hard on, you were. You're barely awake now.'
'It's not a crime is it?' I said.
'So you admit it? You'd better watch him,' he said to the barman; 'turn your back for a minute, he'll be out like a light.'
He turned to me again as I tried to tuck my hand bandage back into place. 'What are you up to?' he said.
'Looking out for a murderer,' I said.
The old boy just muttered something very quietly to himself at that, and went back to his pipe, disgusted that there was somebody even stranger than himself about the place.
I came out of the pub and immediately saw a very promising sign reading 'ice station'. But then a tram moved and it was 'police station'. I thought about walking in and saying I believed a man who had done a murder at Hebden Bridge was now at large in Manchester. It would be like saying that I believed him to be 'in the world'.
I decided to do it, though.
As I walked into the copper shop, it was hot, but in a different way again, which turned my head. I realised that my bandage was dangling down from my wrist like a dog lead with no dog on the end.
I started to tell my story at the long desk, and a man who was something between a policeman and a clerk said the smart thing would be for me to sit down on a bench. He talked to somebody else about me, and the only words I heard were 'no effects', which he said with a laugh. But it was all songs and whistling in the copper shop because a man was fitting an electrical fan into the ceiling.
I sat still for a while, working on my breathing. The trouble was that I was unable to take in as much air as I was breathing out. Other people who were waiting to be seen, I noticed, were taken off to special rooms, and I couldn't work out whether it was good or bad that I was kept on the bench. I told at least three policemen that I wanted to make a statement in connection with a crime, and nothing was done, but glasses of water kept coming for me, and I would watch the scenes at the desk. Mostly it was people with complaints that came in, and mostly the complaints were about horses.