The Blackpool Highflyer

Chapter Eighteen

When I came half stumbling through the door of 21 Back Hill Street, the wife was in the process of walking across the parlour, and my coat was lying on the sofa looking as though it was taking a rest in my place. I put it onto the floor and lay down.

'Are you all right?' she said, but she did not kiss me and continued on her way to the scullery. 'A man of your description was seen flying through Hebden Bridge,' she called out, while moving pots within the scullery, 'then leaping on a train to Manchester… Without a ticket, the booking clerk said.'

'If you knew I was going towards Manchester,' I called back from the sofa, 'why didn't you tell the police? Then they could have had men waiting.'

The movement from the kitchen stopped for a second at this, but soon started up again. The Erasmic Soap and the good towel were laid out for me next to the tub, and the tub was near the open window, which was the summer equivalent of in front of the fire. The first gas lamp of Hill Street gave a glow on the bath when set just there, and it was my favourite place for reading. But I was so tired that it seemed a long way from sofa to tub. There was a letter for George Ogden on the mantelshelf.

'So I knew where you'd gone,' the wife continued, walking back into the parlour, 'but I didn't know how you'd get back without your pocket book.' The wife picked the coat up from the floor and put it on the hook behind the door. Her face was very brown from the sun; her eyes darker, hair lighter.

The wife said cocoa was waiting in the stove cup – the tin cup – and that it 'ought to be just about right', which meant I was to fetch it from the stove because it would be too hot for her hands. When I walked into the kitchen there was food set on the table: a boiled egg, a pork pie, a parkin, a bowl of peach halves in syrup. The wife sat down opposite, watching me start on the egg, which meant she had something to say. Water was steaming in the boiler.

'Do you want to know what happened?' I said, crossly.

'A man suffered an injury at the Crags,' she said, 'and you chased another man to Manchester.'

'The fellow that died,' I said, 'was Martin Lowther, a ticket inspector who was on the excursion when we hit the stone. And I didn't chase "a man", I chased the wrecker.' But I was starting to doubt it once again.

'Well,' the wife said presently, 'did you catch the man?'

'You've asked at last,' I said.

She sighed. 'Are you not going to eat your peach halves?' she said.

'No,' I said. 'No, I did not catch him, and, no, I do not mean to eat my peach halves. I do not care for them. When you've been hard at it, trying to catch a murderer, you don't want fruit.'

'What do you want?'

'A bottle of beer.'

She stood up and took the peach halves away to the sink. She was still wearing the holiday dress, but the holiday was over. She turned around and looked at me for a little while longer.

'I daresay,' I said, 'from your look, that you think when a fellow sees murder done, he should just let the killer stroll off.'

'I do not say that,' said the wife, and she continued to look at me.

I was thinking of railway tickets, and I was thinking of our lodger. 'Where's George?' I asked the wife.

'He was in earlier, then he went out.'

'What time?' 'Just as I got back.'

'Did you tell him what had happened?'

'That you'd gone haring off to Manchester without any money? No I did not.'

'What's that letter for him on the mantel?'

'How should I know?' said the wife, but after a short pause she added, 'It's from the Society for the Diffusion of Knowledge… It is to be hoped they put him straight on questions to do with the payment of rent.'

'Oh go on then,' I said. 'You mean to say something, so let's have it.'

'Well,' she said, moving to the table to clear up the rest of the pots, 'it's just this: he's not dead.'

'Who's not?' I said. 'The man who was killed? Lowther?'

'There was a doctor dancing up at the tea rooms, and he went down to him and said it was two broken legs…'

'But he wasn't moving,' I said.

'Nor would you be if you'd two smashed legs. The ambulance was sent for,' said the wife, 'and while it was coming the doctor talked to the man.'

'To Lowther?' I said.

'Whatever his name is… And he said he'd fallen.'

'Fallen?' I glanced down at the pea soup stain on my shirt; I thought of the chit given to me in the police station – they had never stopped thinking me a loony, and had meant to get me out of their city in double-quick time. The wife thought I was a crackerjack, too. If she could've handed me a one-way ticket to somewhere just then, I'm sure she would have done it.

I thought of myself as seen in the carriage glass: a little man.

A fellow who lived in Hebden Bridge, who happened to have been on a train that somebody had tried to stop, had suffered a fall at the place he lived. And I brought to mind once more that I had seen Lowther at the Joint station on Whit Sunday, at the very moment that he had decided to board our excursion, after waiting for the Leeds train and giving it up. Nobody could have banked on him making that decision; nobody could have known he'd be on our train. But with old Hind it was different: everyone knew he was aboard. It was his first train ride ever: a red letter day.

I was wrong over Lowther, just as I'd been wrong over the correct treatment of concussion cases. I ought to stick to firing engines, but I was filled with anxiety every time I did that.

I felt like somebody lying at the bottom of the sea.

'He tumbled off a rock that he'd been sitting on,' the wife continued.

'Why would Lowther be sitting on a rock?' I said, staring at the table edge.

'That spot is England's Alps, you said, and in the Alps, they climb.'

'But he's a bloody ticket inspector.'

'There's no need to start cursing just because you've been a juggings. Anyway, what's his job got to do with it?'

'Ticket inspectors', I said, 'don't generally go about climbing mountains. They make things hot for them as haven't got railway tickets.'

'The doctor said he'd been drinking wine too.'

'Now that I can credit,' I said.

The kitchen was too hot and too small. I pushed the chair back.

'You're all in,' said the wife. 'You should get in the tub and go to bed.'

'I'm off to go to the pub,' I said.

'Are you?' said the wife. 'Well, I would change that shirt.'

'They're not particular in the Evening Star,' I said.

She was on the edge of laughing, now.

'It is a definite fact,' I said, 'that…'

Something was a definite fact, but I was too tired to remember what.'It is a definite fact,' I went on, 'that the man I chased was moving like greased lightning.' 'Well' said the wife. 'Some people are close to an accident, and they don't like to be pestered to death over what they've seen. Or they think they might catch the blame if they hang about.'

'What rot,' I said.

'For all you know,' said the wife, 'he might have been running to catch his train.'

'Well, that beats all,' I said, and I was laughing now.

'Why does it?' said the wife, who was taking down her hair, letting the door-knocker fall.

'I expect there's a train every half hour going between Hebden Bridge and Manchester. Instead of half killing himself on the hottest day in memory, don't you think he'd stroll to the station for the next one?'

'I really don't know' said the wife.

'No'1 said, 'and nor do I.'

'But it is a fact that he never touched the man found with broken legs.'

I suddenly thought of the Socialist Mission. Anybody could say anything. 'It is a fact,' I said, 'that Lowther said the fellow never touched him.'

The wife gave me a good steady look that I liked. I was back up from the bottom of the sea.

'Will you unhook this dress?' she said. 'I've had enough of it.'

When that was done, and the business that followed was done (after which the wife did not go off to do any family- stopping business), and I was lying in the tub with my Railway Magazine reading of the new goods yards in Dover, with the pages fluttering in the breeze that had finally started to come in through the window, and drinking a bottle of Bass that the wife had produced from the pantry, I said, 'We are not really at all alike, are we? One difference is that you were not on the engine, you know.'

'We have some points in common' said the wife.

'What?'

'We both want to get on.'

I finished the beer, and the wife took the bottle away from me. She didn't mind my having a bath in front of the smart sorts in Hill Street, but would rather they didn't catch a glimpse of me drinking beer.

'When you get married,' I said some time later, but still in the bath, 'you think that's more or less it as far as knowing the other person's concerned… But it isn't really, is it?'

But the wife, in her petticoats, was curled up asleep on the sofa. She was full of surprises.