George blinked a few times. 'Can't just remember,' he said. 'Gosh! I'll be forgetting me own name next!'
'Did you hear about what happened to Lowther, the ticket inspector?' 'Fell off one rock and smashed his legs on another, didn't he? Out at Hebden Bridge? In the mountains they've got there! Well, I expect the fellow was canned.'
'What makes you think so?'
'The poor fellow's famous for it. How do you think he got to be so glum? It always takes you like that in the end, you know.'
The 'A's were pushed over towards us. George took one of the cigars out of its box, and rolled it under his nose.
'Do you have a light?' he asked the little cigar man.
'No,' replied the cigar man, rather angrily, 'and I don't have the bob you owe me for those smokes either.'
George began fishing in his waistcoat.
'I was at Hebden Bridge with the wife and a friend of the wife,' I said. 'I had sight of what happened, and I thought he was pushed. I chased the fellow I thought did it all the way to Manchester. I couldn't see his face, but I'm sure he must have been connected with tickets in some way. Do you have any notion who it might have been?'
This was the facer.
But George simply turned to the cigar man, saying: 'Two shillings. I'm paying for this gentleman's half dozen as well.' He paid over the money and turned to me: 'You chased him to Manchester!' he exclaimed.
And now I felt he was joshing, or wanting to seem to be. 'I chased him to Hebden station and got on the same train. But I lost him at Manchester Victoria.'
We'd walked back out into the loading bay by now. 'Well,' said George, 'ain't you the dark horse?'
'Who do you think might have wanted to crown Lowther?' I asked him.
George stopped in the loading bay and his eyes went wide: 'There's absolutely hundreds that would,' he said. 'The fellow was a regular bastard.'
'He was on the train when the stone was found on the line,' 1 said. 'I wondered whether that might have been somebody's first crack at him.'
He was on the point at once. 'As to that, nobody knew Lowther's movements beforehand. So no wrecker could have guessed he was going to be on that train, and it'd be a damned queer way of trying to kill him, wouldn't it? I mean, talk about going round the houses.'
I knew the first part of this to be true, and the second part seemed the soundest of good sense. 'You know'I said, 'every time I look at the Wakes Outlook, I expect to read, "It is pleasing to report that no grindstones have been found on the lines going into the resort."
'I'd say you were becoming rather overwrought about the matter,' said George, who had the cigar in his mouth. 'Anyway,' he went on, 'as I've already mentioned to you, chances are they were going for the train that came along after – the regular Blackpool service. Cheerio, old chap.'
I watched him walk away across the empty, sunlit yard that lay behind the cigar factory. I'd not yet mentioned to him about the Socialist Mission telegram to the Courier. It came to me that George had described himself as a socialist, but I couldn't see him being in with that show. Besides, I was a socialist myself, of sorts.
Come to that (and this was a new thought), from all that the wife said, Robinson, late of Hind's Mill, might even be counted a socialist, of a toffy kind.
'I'm obliged to you for the cigars!' I called to George, and he raised his hand in a backwards wave.
His going off like that quite took the fun away from having bought the 'A's. Maybe he was just tired after his day's work. He did look jiggered, and seemed to be dragging his large shadow across the wide, dusty yard.
I'd meant to take him along to the Evening Star for a pint, and I decided to head in that direction anyway. On reaching Horton Street, I looked on the old warehouse wall for the Socialist Mission poster advertising the 'meeting to discuss questions'.
It was gone.
Chapter Twenty-two
'Scarborough', I read in the Courier the following midday, is 'delightfully sunny. The town is to be seen in its best summer garb, the variegated blossoms making it a veritable garden city.'
Well, I would be seeing for myself in three hours' time, train wreckers permitting. For I could no longer think of a train line stretching away clear, especially not for the length of time involved in a life of firing and driving. That was a forty-year touch, and nobody's luck holds out that long. I was beginning to wonder whether I had the pluck for the job.
But today I was on show, so I ought to look the part at least.
The engine was number 1008, the very first of Mr Aspinall's radial tank engines, which ought to make a talking point for the Robinson boy. It was lately in from Bradford, and now waited alongside the reserve platform at the Joint, having just come over from York with six carriages. I would talk over a few points about the engine with the boy, and then it would be time for Scarborough. Clive was about, but kept coming and going, 'seeing to bits of business'. He had on brand new boots, laced up at the side, which he couldn't walk without looking at.
Departure time for Scarborough was 10.32, and Robinson and his young son came walking down the spare platform towards 1008 at 9.45, as arranged by the wife over the telephone from the Mill.
Peter Robinson was younger than I'd expected – might not have been more than about fifty. He wore round glasses and had a schoolboy look. The other Robinson had the schoolboy look in spades, for he was a schoolboy, although on a day off. He was small and also wore glasses, and a loose green suit made from what I took to be the famous light cloth. He looked very free in the get up, and ready to lift off, like a greenfly. It was queer that Robinson should have kitted out his boy in the stuff that had caused his own downfall. His own suit was of the common run: black and heavy.
'Good morning… Mr Stringer, is it?' Robinson called up.
He was a little la-di-da. Not an out-and-out toff, though. I gave the lad a hand up onto the footplate; his father introduced him to me as Lance.
'Now what do we have here?' said young Lance Robinson, which rather knocked me. He was a very confident lad, as different from Arnold Dyson as could be.
'It's one, zero, zero, eight,' I said, 'a tank engine with the two-four-two wheel formation, built by Mr Aspinall – who I'm sure you've heard of – at the company's works at Horwich. You might like a trip to Horwich one day. It's beautifully laid out, with a little narrow-gauge railway running alongside the full-sized ones, to fetch and carry all the parts.'
I was yammering on, being a little nervous with the boy's father on hand.
'You're not the driver, are you?' said the boy.
I shook my head. 'Fireman,' I said.
'But I suppose you know all the controls just as well as the driver?'
'It would be a poor show if I didn't,' I said.
The boy looked down on the spare platform at the Joint, where he'd just been standing. His father grinned up at him. The boy turned to me. 'Would you say that "alighting" was getting on a thing or getting off?' he asked.
'Lance,' his father called up, 'you know very well which it is.' Then Robinson called to me, saying, 'I'm much obliged to you for doing this, Mr Stringer. Can I leave you at the boy's mercy for ten minutes?'
'That'll be quite all right, sir,' I said, and Peter Robinson walked away towards the station buildings.
Watching him go, the boy seemed worried. Not about himself, but about his father. 'He'll be all right,' he said. 'I expect he'll have a seltzer on the station and read his paper. Father takes the Manchester Guardian, you know. It's best for business. The Times is hardly circulated where we live in St Anne's. What paper do you read?'
'The Halifax Courier,' I said.
'My father was in business here in Halifax,' said the boy. 'He was a partner.'