from our marriage. One thing I could take comfort from: the wife would not follow me into the parlour bar of the Blue Boar. Even Lydia would not do that.
Miles Hopkins did step into that small crowded parlour bar though, and just a moment later.
'Sorry, mates,' he said with a grin, 'my train was late.'
He swirled Sampson and myself into a tight circle of three and, saying nothing more, produced from his coat a fine pocketbook stuffed with folded banknotes. The three of us stood there breathing beer fumes onto this money, and there was not only the smell of beer, but the smell of sweat and of greed. One word was uttered as we broke, and it was Sampson who spoke it.
'Good-o,' he said.
I looked across the bar top, where gas jets burned for cigar smokers and saw, at the foot of the back wall, that the low double doors giving on to the cellar were open. I could see into the pit of the cellar, but not to the bottom of it, and I had a picture in my mind of this tiny pub perched on top of a great hole. It was a smarter place than the Garden Gate though. A cut above. More drinks were bought, with whiskys to go with the ales, and Valentine Sampson led us over to a table. Here, the pair produced their own stolen or somehow purloined goods yard passes. They matched mine in all particulars except for the name.
'It's well minded is that place,' said Sampson, meaning the goods yard. We all nodded for a while. Then Sampson said: 'It was hardly likely we could fix all the guards on the gate.'
'… So we fixed the bloke who prints the passes,' said Miles, who had become not so watchful, but quite larky after his triumph at the station.
'Fixed him? How much?' I said.
'Two guineas, I think… That right, Miles?'
'Two quid is what he was promised,' said Miles. 'What he got was a different matter.'
'What did he get?' I asked.
'He got what was coming to him,' said Sampson, putting his glass up for more beer. The fellow drank like a pond. 'See, Allan,' he continued, 'once you've fixed a bloke…' 'Once you've tickled him out of the narrow path of rectitude…' put in Miles Hopkins, who was tossing and catching a coaster. 'Once you've done that, then you have him,' said Sampson. 'You have him because you can rat on him,' I said, regretting it directly because once again Valentine Sampson put his eyes on me with no accompanying smile. 'Not so much rat on him, mate,' Miles Hopkins said quietly, 'as let on you might do.' 'You see, Allan,' said Sampson, 'if you rat on the Company blokes, who are you ratting on 'em to? Some toff, that's who. Because when it comes to it… who benefits? Top brass. You know who the top man on the railway is, don't you? Fellow name of Lord Grey.' 'It was him,' I said, 'but now he's chucked it in.' Hopkins was looking at me; Sampson was frowning. 'Why has he chucked it in, Allan?' he asked. 'Gone off to be Chancellor of the Exchequer in the government.' 'Bloody typical is that,' said Sampson, sitting back. Silence for a space, then Hopkins said: 'Most blokes of your stripe wouldn't be expected to know that, Allan.' 'Aye,' I said, colouring up,'… daresay.' 'Most blokes of your stripe wouldn't be expected to know anything at all, Allan,' said Sampson, 'and don't take that amiss, brother.' 'I'm a great one for reading,' I said. 'If I take a pint, I'll usually read a paper at the same time. Drinking beer somehow doesn't quite seem enough in itself if you know what I mean.' Sampson was frowning at me again.
Hopkins, leaning forwards and grinning at me, said: 'So the more you drink, the more you read?'
'Well… up to a point,' I said.
'Point is, Allan,' said Sampson, 'you put the fix on a bloke, you buy his silence at the very same time, and very little further action needs to be taken as regards that.'
'Except in the odd case,' said Hopkins, with a distant look.
We talked on, and I was half pleased, half worried that I seemed to be getting along well with Sampson in particular who, come nine o'clock, rose to his feet saying, 'Hadn't we better be off, mates?'
I half expected the wife to be still standing outside the door of the Blue Boar. She wasn't of course, and I didn't like to think of the moment at which she must have turned away to go home.
In Fossgate, Miles Hopkins hung slightly behind – watchful again – and I fell in with Sampson, who walked just as fast as before despite all the beer he'd taken, and looked just as spruce and kingly in his salt and pepper suit. The only thing that let him down was the sharp and sour smell coming off him, and an over-eager look to his walk. He was like a fine steamer that was shipping sea secretly, out of sight, far below the water line. He led us along Pavement, through Parliament Street, through Davygate, our boots clinking on the cobbles. It was cold, and the streets were mainly empty, except for the buried noise coming from pubs along the way. I could feel the Police Gazette in my coat pocket, burning away there, as it seemed to me. As we pushed on, the Minster bells struck nine, sounding soft and yet loud, filling the whole city, and when they'd finished, a new sound took their place: an echoing rattling and clanking. We were in Leeman Road; the passenger station was to our left, and the goods station stood directly before us with light blazing at all their windows.
Chapter Fourteen
The goods offices were at the front, and the goods station stretched out behind under a glass roof. From here, half a dozen lines reached out, soon multiplying to dozens and curving away to merge with the lines from the passenger station. An aeronaut flying over the whole mass of tracks might have understood it in a moment; anybody else would have taken years.
The booking office stood guard before the main building on its own island, under a great four-sided clock. Wagons approached the station from either side of it, and we came in behind a load of timber under a tarpaulin with our passes in our hands. Inside the main door was a wide, cold, white- tiled room. There was a long table and some blokes in long coats milling about it. Any one of them might be a goods yard guard; any one or none. Their main purpose seemed to be keeping warm. Valentine Sampson walked past them at a lick, holding out his pass, and Miles and myself fell in behind, our passes also held out in a grudging, take-it-or- leave-it sort of way.
In ten seconds we were through the offices and into the station, at the buffer end of the platforms. Valentine Sampson stood before us, breathing it all in, nodding to himself and giving Miles and me not a glance. He was a different man on a job: sober-sided all of a sudden and the more frightening for it. I realised that he was scouting about for somebody or something, and I looked out into the station with him.
The place just seemed too small for all the clutter within. Lines of tall vans stood in each of the stalls, and the platforms, backed in by engines out of sight. The platforms were clarted with spilt paint and flour, half- cabbages, and the remnants of long-gone cargoes; all about the place stood goods lately taken down from the vans, goods about to go up, or goods just simply forgotten about: casks of grease, sacks of slag chippings, a children's merry-go-round in pieces, a big crate with the word 'Furniture' branded on the side, another stamped 'Clocks', half a dozen ladders stacked together and held by wire, a dozen new bicycles held upright by nothing but themselves. There was a weighing machine to each of the platforms, sometimes more than one, and a few of them crocked. On the platform before us were two high desks, one abandoned together with all the papers piled on top of it; at the second sat a clerk under a swinging gas bracket. With steam coming from his mouth, he was talking to a workman, saying: 'You've no bloody forwarding orders…'
Just then one rake of vans jerked into life, and began to be withdrawn from the station; they moved slowly, like a dozen convicts manacled together, and as they went, Valentine Sampson took a step forward. A fellow in a bowler and a paper collar – a clerk of some description -was coming along the platform as the train departed; he was a small man with a small moustache. He and Sampson closed, Sampson saying, 'All set?'
The man nodded, turned about, and we set off along the platform after him. Above each of the platforms were metal signs hanging from chains, and I spied 'Peterborough', 'Birm- ingham Curzon Street', 'Glasgow General Terminus', 'Liverpool Great Howard Street'. These were other goods stations, and this was the shadow railway, the ones that your average Joe Soap, taking his railways to work or holidays knew nothing of. But I knew it from my days on the North Eastern and my time on the Lanky, and as we walked forwards, it was as though I was walking back into my own past.
We walked through the goods station, and out into the tracks beyond, where the business of loading and unloading continued without benefit of a roof. On the longest, straight- est road were more wagons covered right
