again.' Didn't stop him assisting in the taking of pocketbooks from Platform Fourteen, I thought. Was he scared? I didn't like the thought of being on for something that he'd jibbed at. Sampson's face was changing. A smile coming from far away. 'Well, Allan old lad,' he said when it had finally arrived, 'it's a go.' Miles Hopkins was watching me very carefully. 'The great doing?' I said. 'The very thing.' 'You said there were more movables to collect first,' I said in a very peevish little voice, because the rough sort of plan I'd made with the Chief was now destroyed. 'So I did,' said Sampson, 'and they've been collected. You see, mate, we were waiting for a particular circumstance before we could set to.' 'Waiting for the circumstance to stop, that is,' said Hopkins, who then took a drink, one laughing eye watching me over the rim of his glass. 'What?' I said. 'The strike,' said Sampson. 'You'll have read of it in the Press or heard of it somehow.' 'You having such a good knowledge of railways,' put in Hopkins. 'I have heard of it,' I said. 'Unofficial-like, it was,' said Sampson. 'Some blokes in the Associated… Amalgamated Society of summat or other. The tough nuts, the diehards. Some bloke was reduced in position for no good reason, and they stuck by him. Good socialists, those fellows are, and I raise my fucking glass to 'em.'
He did not do that, however. Instead, he sat back in his chair, and said:
'But I'm still going to steal all the silly fuckers' money.'
Miles Hopkins was still watching me as Sampson rose to his feet and, striding across the room, collected his overcoat from the door back. We were done with the Grapes, I realised, although not done with drinking, because there was a bottle of whisky rolling in Sampson's pocket.
Hopkins was rising to his feet too, his coat already on.
I thought: I can stop this. Three words will stop it: Joseph Howard Vincent. Or perhaps only two: Edwin Lund. But I don't say them, and was instead swept along behind Hopkins and Sampson. We were striding through the door and now we were out into York, dark, rain and cold. It could not have been any other way.
'It's coming on to rain,' said Sampson, walking on in his jaunty way. I hurried to keep up, even though I'd rather have put a hundred miles between myself and him.
You could forgive Sampson remarking on the state of the weather – it had evidently been some time since he'd been out of a public house. Inside the Old Station, on the other side of Tanner Row, an engine was in steam, like a memory, moving goods into or out of one of the stores built on top of the long- dead passenger platforms. They were secret, shameful exchanges carried on in the Old Station. Just then, it struck me that Hopkins wasn't with us. I looked back, and he was fifty yards behind, talking to a stranger: youngish and well set-up. Only… I'd a suspicion I'd seen that stranger's face before. As I looked back, so did Samspon, and Hopkins broke away from the stranger, walking fast to catch us up.
'Who's he?' I said, looking back at the well set-up man, who was walking in the opposite direction, hard by the new Company offices.
'Him?' said Sampson. 'That's Five Pounds… He's five pounds' worth of man.'
I nodded; it wouldn't do to enquire further. The man would be a worker for the Company; a key-holder of some sort, repository of trust, and now receiver of the wages of sin.
Hopkins came up to us, and Sampson, nodding back down the hill to indicate the stranger, said, 'What's he want?'
'He's in a funk,' said Hopkins.
'Over what?'
'Nowt in particular.'
'All right, are we?'
Hopkins nodded, and we continued walking up Tanner Row, turning left along Bar Lane… and then we were in Micklegate, the 6oo-year-old Bar – the greatest of the gateways in the City Walls – standing before us like a castle front guarded by gas lamps. The town was quiet, but a man was standing underneath one of the arches, and we didn't stop for him, but rather we collected him, for he was following on behind as we walked on, turning right into Station Road. The City Walls, high on their steep embankment, were to our right. In the darkness, rain fell softly on to them at a slant like a thousand tiny missiles trying to broach the city defences. We crossed Station Road, which was quite empty, and then we were in Queen Street (which was likewise), walking down its slope towards the Institute and the Lost Luggage Office. Were they going to rob that place for the second time? Would Lund step out of the shadows, and join us as the other fellow had?
Now Sampson had stopped under the lantern that jutted out from the front of the Institute; Hopkins joined him there and they began talking. The stranger was at my shoulder now. I turned quite slowly, and looked at him, but he couldn't meet my eye. He wasn't one of the burglar brigade, I knew. He was a railwayman, and a very anxious one at that – a railwayman who'd been fixed.
I watched Sampson and Hopkins. If they were thinking of going into the Institute for a drink then we were going to go in for a drink, and who did they think they were kidding by pretending to talk it over? But then came a second thought: it appeared to me, from a twenty-foot distance, that Sampson wanted to go in, while Hopkins did not.
Sampson at last turned around towards us:
'We're going to take a last drink, boys,' he announced.
So we stepped into the Institute, our silent newcomer removing his cap and smoothing his hair with the look of a man trying hard to master himself. I felt a little in the same way. I'd nerved myself to the business that lay ahead, and now this – further delay. It was already gone eleven.
We didn't go into the snooker hall, but – once Sampson had brought the glasses of Smith's on a tray – just stood in the tiled vestibule of the Institution, loitering beneath a bright gas ring. We were only a couple of feet inside the front door, which was propped open, so it wasn't as though we were even warm. But I had my eye on the other door, the one leading to the snooker hall and bar. The barmaid in there knew me for a detective. Sampson was exchanging a few words with the newcomer, but not much was being said by anyone else. Presently, Sampson took out his watch, looked at it, and he didn't leave off looking at it either. He seemed to be simply observing time passing.
Hopkins was shaking his head. He was in fits, I could tell.
'We should be waiting outside,' he said, and so at last here it was: a set-to between the two leaders.
'Why?' said Sampson, still looking at his watch. 'It's fucking pissing down.'
I watched the snooker hall door.
Sampson was saying: 'We've a night's work ahead of us, and I don't want to be sodden while I'm about it, do you?'
The hallway was a carbolic-smelling limbo. The clash of snooker balls came from the snooker hall – the long roll followed by the crash, like the shunting of engines.
'And the four of us are leaving boot prints everywhere,' Hopkins went on, 'that's evidence, you know.'
'Boot prints?' said Sampson. 'Where?'
'On the fucking floor,' said Hopkins. 'Where do you fucking think?' But he was laughing now and Sampson along with him. Just then, a man walked through the door, and slap into the back of Sampson's flying hand. He went down onto the white tiles.
'Always a friendly welcome with you blokes, en't it?' said the man, picking himself up.
Sampson was holding up both of his hands: 'Sorry, mates, lost my grip there just for a moment,' he said, addressing everyone save the man he'd belted, who was the cocky little clerk – the one who'd guided us about the goods yard eleven days before. He'd come back for second helpings. He was back on his feet now, saying, 'Don't you think you might include me in that apology?'
Sampson was looking at the man.
'I'm thinking on,' he said.
There was no great harm done to the man, but the young bloke was sent off into the bar, and came back with a bit of something in a short glass to help get his nerves set.
'I'll not apologise,' said Sampson, watching the clerk drink. 'You were getting on for ten minutes late, and we're operating to a tight schedule.'
I began to edge towards the front door. I was reckoning out the amount of time it would take me to scarper to the Police Office in the station. But no, that would be shut. I thought of Tower Street, and the constable whose patrol took him past the Institute and the station. The handsome, well set-up copper… It came to me then, with a feeling of falling: he was the man who'd been in the Grapes earlier… Five Pounds, as Sampson had called him.
