Murder At Deviation Junction

Chapter One

'Cut you in half, it will!' shouted the bloke.

He was talking about the wind coming in from the river.

He called to me again: 'Step over here, lad,' and I walked into the lee of the five great blast furnaces. They were as big as railway tunnels set on end, and joined by gantries at the top along which ironstone tubs ran. In between stood banks of coke, which made the sound of the wind different on this side, but just as loud. Men worked at the hearths set into the bottom of the furnaces - on this freezing day, men without shirts.

'I'm looking for a bloke!' I shouted to the bloke. He grinned and looked up; there came a fast upwards roaring, and the sky above the furnaces turned red. The redness held - like a man-made sunset - and when I looked down again, the bloke was closer to me.

'Name?' he shouted.

I couldn't bring to mind the name of my quarry, although it was set down on the arrest warrant in my pocket, and I carried a photograph of the bloke there too. I knew him as 'Number Nine'; and I knew his place of work.

'Hudson Ironworks!' I bawled at the bloke, and he pointed with his right hand, an action that came easily to him, for he had only one finger attached there. He began to smile, letting me see he had no teeth either. Eighty feet above our heads, I could feel the heat descending, and the wind rising again. I looked at that lonely finger, and the bloke shook it, as if to unfasten my gaze, and get it fixed where it ought to have been: upon the roaring Ironopolis of Middlesbrough.

I began crossing the railway lines half-buried in hot cinders, making towards the centre of this city of blast furnaces. Strange trains criss-crossed in front of me, like black curtains being drawn and redrawn, all towed by short tank engines that looked as though they'd been run hard into a wall and made taller than they were long by the smash.

Some of the lines were operated by the company that employed me - the North Eastern Railway Company, I mean - and some were not. Over towards the black River Tees, I watched a line of small hopper wagons move forward, and then it was taken up, a little mineral train rising through the sky towards the top of a line of furnaces, brought by the turning of the endless iron rope. The inclined line was mounted on steel struts, and they were shaking in the wind, but the little train kept on. The tops of the blast furnaces were fifty feet high, and the track was - what? one in fifteen for five hundred yards? Men waited for it on the high gantry.

And then I saw giant Hs painted on a row of three. That would have to be Hudson's furnaces. I moved across the ashfield with my coat wrapped round me blanket-wise. I had entered the iron district directly from the Whitby train, without having fastened the buttons, and now my hands were too cold to do them up. I was in want of a decent pair of leather gloves.

As I made towards the Hs, I opened my coat to reach in for my pocket book, and the wind came at me. That's pneumonia right there in that single stab, I thought. I fished out the arrest warrant, and my warrant card. The arrest warrant was inside an envelope, and my hands wouldn't work to open it. I thought again of the bloke's name, but no, it wouldn't come.

I was supposed to lay my hands on Number Nine - orders from Detective Sergeant Shillito, the bastard who breathed beer fumes at me all day long across the floor of the Railway Police office in the station at York. Number Nine was evidently inclined to rowdiness, and Shillito had promised there'd be a Middlesbrough constable to help with the arrest. But no man could be spared, as Shillito had told me with satisfaction just before I'd set off.

Number Nine was a centre forward; turned out for Middlesbrough Vulcan Athletic (Vulcan being the name of the road that skirted the west side of the iron district). At a game played at York on Saturday last he'd crowned Shillito in a football rush. As well as being my governor, Shillito was captain of Holgate United. But I wasn't being sent after Number Nine on account of that first assault. No, I was to arrest him because he'd then laid out the Holgate United goalie during an argument over a penalty kick. The goalie was called Crowder, and his skull had been split. He was at death's door in the York Infirmary, if Shillito was to be believed.

I walked on with head down, thinking again that the affair was not, rightly speaking, a railway police matter at all. Yes, Holgate was the railway ground, but neither of the teams had been Company teams. It was Shillito's personal war that I'd been sent to fight.

I was now directly before the Hudson furnaces. Red molten iron was flowing away from their bases, just as if they were bleeding. Men wearing undershirts or no shirts at all attended the streams with long steel poles as they flowed away into a great building near by.

I began trying to work my hands. I took the warrant from its envelope. Clegg - that was the footballer's name: Donald Clegg. Nickname 'Cruncher'. I felt in my pocket for the photograph Shillito had given me. Middlesbrough Vulcan Athletic played in a strip that made them look like a pack of playing cards: shirts dark- coloured on one side, light on the other, and a crest over the heart. Clegg, the biggest of the lot, stood in the centre of the back row.

'You there!' one of the blokes was calling to me from the bank.

I looked up.

'Step away!' he shouted.

'I'm looking for Clegg!' I called up, but he didn't hear. I held up the photograph and my warrants.

The bloke was striding down the bank now, stepping over the flowing iron channels as he came crosswise towards me.

'Put your boot in one of these and you'll know about it,' he said when he was level with me. He wore a coat over his bare chest, as if he couldn't decide whether it was hot or cold: and the queer thing was that, this close to the furnaces, it was both.

'I'm looking for Clegg,' I said, showing him the photograph.

'Works here; turns out for this lot Saturday afternoons. There's been a complaint of assault made against him ...'

'Clegg's a bloody good player; marvellous at dribbling.'

'What?' I said.

'Dribbling. He's brilliant at it.'

I just looked at the bloke; I did not follow football.

'I know Clegg,' the bloke continued. 'He's a good lad.'

'Well, there's a man lying half-dead in the York Infirmary.'

'Shamming, I expect,' said the bloke.

'Twenty bloody stitches,' I said, 'and you call that shamming.'

'An artist, is young Clegg,' said the bloke. 'An artist and a poet.''

'"Cruncher" Clegg, I believe they call him,' I said.

The bloke kept silence.

'Where does he work, mate?' I asked, and the bloke craned his head up towards the over-world at the top of the furnaces, where tiny men moved silently along gantries amid the snow. What was put into blast furnaces to make iron? I tried to think. Ironstone, coke and ... something else. Limestone.

I joined the bloke in looking again at the high gantries. Had this been Shillito's programme all along? To get me sent up there? But the bloke tipped his head down again, his gaze now roving between the roaring sheds behind us.

'You'll find him over yonder,' he said.

I nodded thanks and turned on my heel.

In the heart of the shed, four men were pacing about in front of a strange and mighty vessel. It looked like a forty-foot-high brick head that pivoted on its own ears, these being formed of two mighty steel wheels held in place by giant iron stays. As I approached, the head tipped upwards, as if to say, 'Who is this come to visit?' And the men stepped back from it.

A bloke came at me from the darkness. 'Look out, mister,' he said, indicating behind. I turned around and a huge ladle of molten iron was rattling towards me, suspended from a moving crane. I tore my eyes away directly, for the sight burnt them. I stood aside as the ladle passed. It was like a piece of the sun put into a bucket, and it was approaching the great swivelling head, which was turning again, ready to receive its drink of hot iron. This was steelmaking.

The roof had been cut away above the thing's head, and some snowflakes that fell through the gap escaped melting, and swirled towards the watching blokes. I fixed my eye on a particular one of the four: the tallest. His right hand was bandaged. He was Clegg, I was sure of it, but the only light I had to go on was that from the iron in the ladle, which had now stopped short of the blokes. It swung in the cold wind that came through the open roof, making weird shadows.

I turned to the bloke who'd warned me of its coming.

'Is that fellow Clegg?' I said, pointing to the one I'd been eyeing.

The man's glance travelled from my warrant card to the four blokes. He said nothing, but I could tell I'd hit the mark. I stepped over towards the blokes and the head somersaulted so rapidly that I thought it might leave its moorings. At that moment, the one behind called:

'Look out, Don - he's a copper!'

I turned about to see the man sprinting to the mouth of the shed. I started after him, running hard over the hot cinders. At the shed mouth, the bloke turned left. I did the same, and one of the red iron streams was right before me. I leapt it and, in the middle of the air, saw another just where I was about to land. I tried to make my leap into a dive, and cleared the second stream with inches to spare. I rolled away from it and lay still for a moment, feeling its warmth all along my left side. I stood up and looked across the territory of Ironopolis. The men who worked in it were made tiny by the size of the blast furnaces; and Clegg could have been any one of the hundreds of tiny blokes in view. I stood up, and tried to brush the red dust off me. One false move in this bloody place, and you were done for. I had no chance of running in an ironworker in the ironmen's own stronghold. If Shillito wanted the job done, he could bloody well ride the train north and do it himself.

I walked back towards the bloke who'd warned Clegg.

'What's your game?' I asked him.

'You could have been anyone, walking to him. He'd have jumped out of his skin if he'd turned round to see you - and that's not safe in a spot like this.'

He looked me up and down

'...big fellow like you.'

I was half his size, and getting on for a quarter of his thickness.

'It's obstructing a police officer that's what.'

'I don't think so.'

'Look, I'm telling you. Don't make an argument of it or I'll run you in as well.'

'As well as what?' he said, and a slow grin spread across his blackened face.

Mastering myself for the cold, I headed back towards the mouth of the mill, where snowflakes were swooping about in confusion. I picked my way back through the towers and smoking ore rivers of the iron district, presently hitting Vulcan Road where once again things were human-sized: snow floating down on motor cars, carts and traps; people pushing on grimly, heads down. This was the town that iron had made. I saw a woman at some factory gates over opposite. She was all folded in on herself, quite motionless under accumulating snow. She looked like Lot's wife, and I thought: this party is frozen solid, I must do something - but as I approached, she lifted up her head and smiled, as though it was quite a lark to be snow-coated.