But my mind was going back to Grosmont, and the start of it all. The muttering in the ticket office, the growling of T. T. Crystal, and the smoothness of Smith's voice. Crystal would have been apologising for the delay in selling Smith his ticket and would have been blaming me, damning me with half curses, calling me a layabout and a blockhead. If so, Smith could have been sure that I would not be any great hand at detecting. Maybe I was a blockhead, and maybe I had still not got the Necropolis mysteries quite straight, even now, but I would put salt on those fellows who wanted to turn beautiful land into houses for little men.
We had now arrived at the bamboo bridge where Smith and the Governor had been standing. 'Smith dropped something into the water' I said again. 'And there it is' said my landlady.
The stream was no stream at all, just something to keep the bridge from looking lonely. It was a trench with a rubber mat at the bottom and a foot of water that did not flow. The red lantern on the bridge cast a broken picture of itself into the water, and there in the middle of the redness floated a scrap of paper. I moved to the bank, bent down and scooped it up. As I did so it wrapped itself about my finger, and I peeled it away by degrees, reading aloud as I did so. 'It's touching on railways,' I said, for the first thing I saw were the words 'London amp; North Western Railway'. 'He's with this show now,' I said. But the next words I read out were 'Received with Gratitude'. 'It's a receipt!' I exclaimed, and carried on reading: 'Received with Gratitude, the sum of twelve shillings and…' 'Oh, do come on,' said my landlady.
'It's for twelve and sixpence ha'penny,' I said, when I had finally made out the words, which were handwritten in ink that had run.
'It's for a ticket,' said my landlady. 'But does it show his name? My receipts, on the few occasions I have cause to write them, carry the names of both parties.'
'It is not commonly done like that on the railways,' I said, still examining the paper. 'I might have known it would not be,' said my landlady.
'Twelve and six, it says, in respect of… first-class single… Euston to Manchester.' The thing was now stretched out in the palm of my hand. 'This will help put the fixments on him,' I said, 'although it will not be easy. There's so little evidence.'
'Evidence,' said my landlady. 'That was the word in the letter from Stanley to Smith.'
'Stanley had the evidence; Stanley was the evidence, but he's dead.'
"Then you must get what you can from his papers,' said my landlady. 'They will be a start. And finding a no-name in Manchester will be a lot easier than finding one down here.'
'The Necropolis Board will help,' I said. 'I'm sure they would love to see him brought to book.'
'And you will have the police force to provide such little assistance to you as they are able,' said my landlady.
I laughed. 'It is crazy to think I will do the job on my own,' I said. But my landlady looked quite grave as she said, 'Oh, I don't know, you seem to have got everything else you wanted.'
We both looked up at the Great Wheel, with all its cabins lit up against the dark-blue sky, thinking our own thoughts for a moment before turning back to face each other, ready to kiss.