The Blackpool Highflyer

Chapter Thirty-five

The clock was striking seven as I half ran down Horton Street, against the waves of excursionists that were rolling up towards me. The next day, Sunday, I had a six o'clock go on with Clive. We were to collect from Southport twice over, and the turn would be a bugger: a ten-hour touch at least.

As I ran, I didn't know exactly why I was running. I wasn't really trying to catch a train; I was trying to catch the station, more like.

Seven o'clock had gone, so I had missed the chance to see whether George had kept his engagement with his mother at 54 New Clarence Road, Bradford. He wasn't a great one for keeping his word, and he'd had a lot on, what with being hounded by Don and Max. I wondered why he had given the address of his mother as being the address of the cream biscuit-machine factory when I'd first gone up to the cigar factory with him. Most likely because he didn't write off for replacements, as he'd said, but stole the deliveries as they came in. There was a biscuit scheme as well as a ticket scheme, but the ticket scheme was the bigger one. Then again, it wasn't railway tickets that had made George Ogden a killer.

If George had been at 54 New Clarence Road in Bradford, he might be lying dead at this very moment, or be a hospital case at least. Why did Don and Max want him?

They were in on the ticket scheme with him.

It wasn't so hard to tease it all out. Don, the little, clever fellow, the angelic-looking one who was a tough nonetheless… He was a ticket collector at Blackpool, although he hated the work. His job would be to put his hands on as many as possible of the stolen Blackpool singles that had been sold on illegally by George at the Joint. Those, when collected, would be put out of sight of the ticket brass, or the auditors, or whoever it was checked over spent tickets.

Max, the big-headed fellow, the mate of Don's… Well, I wasn't quite sure where he came in.

As I sped on past the empty warehouse in Horton Street, I saw that a new bill had been pasted over 'condy's bath fluid', which had in turn replaced 'a meeting to discuss questions'. I caught a glimpse of the new one as I went flashing past: 'a dirigible flight', I read and, underneath, 'Balloon v. Motor Car'.

Down at the Joint, the trains were coming in at a great rate, and the excursionists were climbing out, looking red in the face and morngy. There were stacks of bags and boxes like little mountains here and there on the platform. All the porters' faces were shining with sweat in the white and green gaslight. I dashed about without a ticket, and then I heard a shout go up from one of the deputy stationmasters. The shout was 'Preston train!' and my plan was made. I ran along to it and climbed up, bumping into a ticket inspector immediately. He was miserable all right, just like all that sort, but he let me buy a ticket off him. It was not a ticket for Preston, though. I was only going to change there. The ticket I bought was for a place a couple of stops beyond: Kirkham.

The stone had stopped the Highflyer between Salwick and Kirkham, the two villages in the fields before Blackpool. If George had been the wrecker, he would have needed to get the stone to the line. He would have needed a turn-out of some sort. In my last visit to the wife's office at Hind's Mill, I had looked in the 'Trades' part of the Kelly's directory for East Lanes, searching for fly proprietors, jobmasters or livery-stable keepers at Salwick or Kirkham, and had turned one up at Kirkham. I'd made a note of the address in my pocket book, but the name was easy enough to remember: The Wrong Way Inn.

‹o›--

There wasn't much to Kirkham: shadowy, empty cattle pens near the station, and the place had one mill to its name. The Wrong Way Inn was at the end of Wrong Way Lane: a dusty track between tall hedges that were fairly seething with life in the darkness. Big red berries glowed in the hot night; moths and small mysterious flying things swooped about before me.

The Wrong Way Inn looked like a mansion given over to the hoi polloi. There were fires blazing in all the rooms. There was an arch going clean through the front of the inn, and this led to a courtyard with stables and a hot, sweet, hay smell and all kinds of carts and carriages about the place. The horses were just dark movements inside the stalls. A fat man was standing in the middle of all. He wore a leather apron and had a very red nose – the colour of something that by rights should have been part of his insides not his outsides. I knew right away that he was a horseman or jobmaster, happier to be out with his nags than inside the inn.

I stood before him for a second, trying not to look at his nose, while he looked at my bandage.

'What are you after then mate?' he said.

'I'm not quite certain,' I said.

'I see. Want the whole stable trotted out, do you?' He smiled, which came as a relief. I think it went in my favour that I was not canned, for sobriety must have been at a premium during Saturday nights at the Wrong Way Inn.

'I'm a fireman on the Lanky,' I began; 'the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway, I mean.'

His smile fell a little at that. Horsemen did not as a rule like railways any more than railwaymen liked motorcars.

'Railway business is it, then?'

I nodded. 'I wondered if you might be able to say whether somebody had hired a dog cart or something of that kind on Whit Sunday last.'

'Oh aye?'

'I have a notion of who it might have been,' I went on. 'He would've been a youngish fellow, quite well turned out, with a very particular sort of waistcoat. He was also quite…'

I looked at the horseman. He wasn't half fat.

'He was quite, ah… well, quite a chubby sort,' I said.

The jobmaster grinned. 'Well, you know what they say,' he chuckled, 'fat and happy!'

'He tried to wreck the engine I was firing along the stretch just near here.'

That checked the horseman's good humour.

'He did it by placing a grindstone on the line.'

'Jesus Christ, did he?' said the jobmaster, and he turned about in a circle as though looking for somebody or something. When he was facing me again, he said: 'A fellow we had here a few weeks back… I don't say it was Whit because I don't recall, and I wasn't the one looking after him… He was seen to by a lad who's not here presently. Now this character took a pony and cart for the day, and he had a grindstone off us 'n' all. The bloody thing was lying about in the yard here. Too bloody smooth, you see? No use to man nor beast, but the lad as works here let this fellow have it for a bob, helped him load it up too.'

'Well then,' I said.

'You make out the bloody thing was used to wreck a train?'

'It was an attempt,' I said. 'It didn't come off, but we had to clap the brakes on so hard that a lass on the train tumbled over in a carriage and was killed. Have you not had the coppers here, asking questions?'

'We have not.'

'And would the lad remember this grindstone fellow? Would he make a witness, I mean, if it came to it?'

'I'm bloody certain he would. He was full of it afterwards. Acted like a lord, the bloke did. Then off he went, with his little pony and worn-out grindstone.'

I nodded.

'Where's this bloke now?' asked the jobmaster.

'That's just it,' I said. 'I've no notion.'