The Blackpool Highflyer

Chapter Twenty

It was only a little way across town from the Crossley Porter Orphanage to the other frightening mansion: the Infirmary. I walked from the one to the other across Savile Park, stopping at a drinking fountain on the way. All around me were children playing, jumping about in funny boots like little comedians. The killer had taken all that away from Dyson; the killer and me, working together. And now he was cut off from the world by a beautiful garden.

The garden in front of the Infirmary was not quite up to the same mark, although there were little clusters of people in bathchairs admiring it. I walked through the lodge and found myself in a wide, high room with lilac walls, and white, empty fireplaces. The nurses were in lilac and white too, criss-crossing underneath a sign reading 'accident cases' with an arrow beneath. I watched them for a while, liking the sound of their skirts – and there wasn't one not beautiful.

There were two bearded doctors laughing, and when they moved aside I saw a small woman, neither a doctor nor a nurse, standing behind a high desk and smiling across at me: 'Can I help you, sir?'

I pulled off my cap and walked towards her in noisy boots. 'I would like to see a Mr Martin Lowther. He would have come in on Saturday, I think, with two broken legs.'

'Ward Seven,' she said, without so much as a glance at a ledger or paper. 'Follow the signs.'I walked along many bright, empty corridors with tall windows. A lot of glaziers had been here, and the windows gave on to gardens that could compare to the ones at the orphanage, with wide lawns and many strange-shaped hedges, like chess pieces. You might come round from breathing ether and, looking at these, not be quite sure which world you were in. It didn't look like any part of Halifax, and that was the fact.

I came to double doors that had the sign 'ward 7' above them, and then the words, 'mrs bailey, matron'. I walked through the doors and there was a desk with a woman sitting at it: half nurse, half lady-clerk, and I did not like her face. You could have put over what it was like by just drawing a cross. She seemed to be signing, or making some kind of mark, on slips of paper.

'Excuse me,' I said, 'but I've come to see Mr Martin Lowther.'

'Well, you've come at visiting time,' she said, adding, as she glanced up at me,'… by accident or design.'

'It was by design,' I said.

'Mr Lowther is not at all well,' she said, 'and I don't think he'll see you.'

'Oh, but if you just once asked him…'

She sighed. 'What's the name?'

'Stringer,' I said. 'Jim Stringer, fireman of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway.'

'Is it necessary for him to know that last part?'

'It wouldn't hurt,' I said.

'But are you a friend of his, or family, or… what? I'll not have him disturbed over a work matter.'

I was about done with pretending to smile, so I gave it up, saying: 'You'll find that he'll see me.'

She stood up and went off into the ward, but not for long, and she came back grinning, so I knew it was a bad look-out. 'He'll not see you,' she said, 'I knew he wouldn't. Two gents came along not twenty minutes since; they gave me their names, just as you've done; I went in to ask and he turned them away as well. Taken very bad, he was, just at hearing they'd turned up.'

'What were the names?' I asked, and she answered before thinking about it: 'Mr Crocker and Mr Kilmartin.' She bit her lip directly after the words were out.

'Well, I shouldn't wonder he was taken poorly,' I said. 'Do you honestly think they're real names? Because if so, think on… What did the two of them look like?'

'I don't know, I'm sure,' she said, for she'd clammed up now.

'But you saw them, so you do know.'

The woman looked at me and said in a loud voice: 'Doctor Laing!'… Then, quieter, to me, 'I'm having you sent away from the hospital.'

The doors moved and Dr Laing was there. It was like shuffling a deck of cards. He was small and he was smiling. 'You would like to see Mr Lowther?'

'I would,' I said.

He turned to the nurse-clerk. 'What is the gentleman's name?' he asked.

'I don't recall,' she said, and I wondered whether she'd tried it on Lowther in the first place – not that it would have cut much ice.

Laing turned back to me, still smiling. 'You see, Mr Lowther has just got nicely off to sleep after being very upset.' And I could see now that this smile of his was more of a brick wall. 'Who shall I say has called?' he said.

I thought of the names given by the two earlier fellows. 'Say that a friend came by,' I said, and, by doing that, I meant to set Lowther's mind at ease, but as I walked back out of the Infirmary it struck me that I'd likely done nothing of the sort, for, as far as I knew, Martin Lowther didn't have any friends.