Andrew Martin: The Blackpool Highflyer

Clive, as usual, was looking the very glass of form, and I wondered again about what he'd been up to in Scarborough, and whether he was making love to the stationmaster's wife, but if my notions about George were right, it hardly mattered.

As we booked off at Sowerby Bridge, Clive said: 'See you tomorrow at six,' for that was the time of our go-on. I nodded back, but I knew he'd be booking on alone.

The next morning I walked to Hind's Mill with the wife.

The whole of the town was going back to work and the mood was black. We fell in with the Hind's lot inside the tunnel that runs under the Joint. It was filled with the sound of clanging clogs, but no voices. Before clocking on, there was Halifax's steepest hill to be climbed in roasting heat, for the sun didn't know the holidays had ended.

Cicely Braithwaite's was the first happy face I saw. She was sitting on the wall by the mill pond waiting for the buzzer to go, and when she spotted the wife, she called, 'Clog on, Lydia! I've so much to tell you about goings-on at Blackpool!'

But when she saw me, her face turned puzzled.

The wife said: 'Cicely, my husband would like to ask you something.'

Not 'Jim' but 'my husband'. It was the kind of talk you come out with when there's been a death. Well, there had been a death – three, all told.

I knew the wife would have worked out the wording beforehand. It was her way of saying: I have nothing to do with this myself, her way of trying to keep up a friendship that my questions were well-nigh certain to end.

I said, 'Cicely, was a fellow called George Ogden courting you?' I looked up at the mill chimney: the smoke was already racing out of it and Cicely was going from white to red. I felt bad about the effect the question had on her, then glad about it, then bad again.

'He did,' she said, standing up. 'He was, I mean. How do you know him?' It was a new, sharper Cicely: the weaver- turned-clerk. It's not so easy to make that jump after all.

'He was our lodger,' I said.

The wife was standing by the water in the background.

'Only he's flitted,' I went on.

Cicely looked at me straight, then the buzzer went. It was as if all the steam available at that moment had been put through the one tiny whistle. The doors were rolled open and Hind's Mill began to suck in its people.

I waited. Cicely and the wife waited too.

'Well, I flitted from him,' said Cicely when the racket had stopped and the people were all inside.

'Did you go to Blackpool with him?'

'Oh, he didn't hold with Blackpool. Too common by a long way. But yes, we went, and it was one of the best days we had.'

'Did you take a picture of him on the flying boats?'

'You've turned it up, have you?'

'It was left behind in this room.'

'I wouldn't go on myself. He went up. George had pluck, and he could be the most charming fellow, you know. Afterwards, we drunk Champagne in the Winter Gardens.' She gave me a look that said: bet you've not done that.

'I think he put the stone on the line' I said.

'Now you fuck off' said Cicely Braithwaite.

The wife came up but Cicely put her arm up: just one movement, like a signal. The three of us were alone by the mill pond now, with Halifax working beneath us in the heat.

'You don't believe he did, then?' I said.

And there it ended. Cicely turned, the wife took her into the mill, and I set off back down towards Halifax.

But when I was no more than half a minute down the hill, I looked back at the front doors of the mill. Cicely was standing before them, just as though the mill was her own home. She was looking at me, and as I walked back up towards her, she walked down to meet me. She took off her bonnet and said: 'I'd finished with George. He was up to something crooked at the station and that's what brought it on. He accepted that we were finished, but he said I was not to go to Blackpool without him. I said he was nuts. He is nuts, you know.'

'I know.'

'But he loved me.'

That knocked me; I hadn't expected it to be said.

'That's perhaps why he did,' said Cicely, and tears and laughter nearly came together in an instant. But instead she said, 'George told me he would stop the excursion.'

'You're a witness to that, you know' I said.

'I am,' said Cicely. 'I've thought about it and I will say what must be said. He's written to me since,' she said. 'Threats. I will not have that. But I still don't believe he tried to cause a train smash, you know.'

'Where's he now?'

'Well,' she said, 'is he not at work down there?'

She pointed at the Joint.

This I had not considered. He'd flitted from Back Hill Street and was being chased for brass by Don and Max. But what harm could come to him in the booking office?

'I'm off to look' I said.

At the Joint, Dick and Bob were both at the window. Two clerks for the price of one, arguing over a ledger.

'Is George in?' I asked Bob. 'I want to see him most particularly.'

'George!' said Bob. 'We're out with that idle so-and-so. He's not turned up, left us short-handed on one of the busiest days… but hold on a moment, he lives with you. Have you not seen him? What's going off?'

All these questions, like a little summer fly going round and round my head. But Dick was looking at me with a steady eye. We'd had our chat at the Evening Star, and I knew he had an inkling.

'He's flitted,' I said to Bob. 'Owes back rent.'

I turned to Dick. 'Where's he gone, mate? Any ideas?'

'I'll tell you what,' said Dick, 'wherever it is, he wouldn't buy his ticket here, now, would he?'

This was a joint station, and my eyes went over towards the next-door ticket window, the one operated by the Great Northern.

Dick shook his head. 'They know him there 'n' all,' he said.

'Everyone knows George,' said Bob.

'He may have bought it at the next stop along' said Dick.

I nodded. Sowerby Bridge.

'Let's have a ticket for Sowerby Bridge then, Dick' I said.

Half a minute later I had in my hand a third-class single to Sowerby Bridge. I looked at the ticket and I looked at Dick. It was number 6521. A nothing number in a run of ten thousand.

Trains from the Joint to Sowerby Bridge are ten a penny. I was aboard one in no time, and climbed off it dead opposite the little booking office at Sowerby Bridge station. I could see the shed in the distance, smoking away in the sun.I'd thought that Dick and Bob were your regulation booking-office types, but this fellow before me took the bun: hair all moved over to one side with Brilliantine; titchy, thick, scientific-looking specs.

'How do,' I said.

The Sowerby Bridge booking-office clerk said nothing. I'd never struck this fellow before because I usually just relied on folk knowing me on my runs between Sowerby Bridge and the Joint. And if it came to it, there was always the footplate pass in my pocket.

'Have you sold a ticket lately to a big fellow in a fancy waistcoat?' I asked him.

'If I had done,' he said, 'it would be my business, wouldn't it?'

'It's just that he might have done a murder.'

'Police matter then,' he said.

There were two layers of glass between us: the clerk's specs and the ticket-office window.

'What do you reckon?' I said.

Still nothing.

I took out my pocket book.

'I have an interesting sort of railway ticket here,' I said.

'What's interesting about it?' he said.

And I knew I had him.

'The number,' I said.

'Four zeroes, I suppose it is' said the ticket clerk. 'I buy them for myself when they come up, if they're not too pricey.'

I held up at the window the third-class single to Todmorden that George had given me.

'One, two, three, four,' said the ticket clerk, reading the number. 'Third class…'