'You in the York workhouse?' he said, in a kindly sort of tone, with folded arms.
'No,' I said, and I saw the specs on the floor beside me, good as new. The want of glass in them might not have been noticed after all. I picked them up, and put them back on my nose.
I was all right really, refreshed somehow by the thought that the worst had passed for the moment. My eye was swollen. I could force it open, but it wanted to be closed so I left it be. As the water from the stinging smoke rose within it, I wiped it away with my coat sleeve.
'I'm in a lull just at present,' I said, 'but I'll turn me hand to outdoor portering… handyman… spot of cow walloping now and again on market days. You can get half a crown a day at that lark.'
'Who maintains you in between times?' asked the Brains.
I looked at the fire, where the magazine number was one big cinder under the flowing smoke.
'Me old man has a bob or two put by. It's him I lodge with… over Holgate way.'
'You'll take a pint?' said the Brains, and he stepped back and nodded at the Blocker, who stood up and walked around the bar, to draw the pints himself. Of the landlord there was now no sign. The fossil at the bar had pushed off, too. The Brains jabbed at the fire, reached into the chimney and moved the flue, and an orange glow was revealed in the grate.
He pulled two more chairs from the far side of the room over to the hearthside, and we all sat down as the Blocker came back with the beer.
'What's your game then, mate?' said the Blocker, after necking most of his ale.
'Well, I've seen you operating up the station,' I said, 'and I liked the look of it. You know, steal from folks before they get on a train then don't get on yoursen… And I was wondering whether I could lend a hand.'
'Put 'em up,' said the Blocker suddenly, and I made two fists thinking: is he going to lam me again?
Then the Brains was shaking his head.
'Fingers held out straight, like,' he said, and I did as he said. The Brains looked at my fingers, looked away.
'You've the right-shaped hands for a hoister,' he said, staring into the fire. He turned to me once again, saying: 'Ever done the work?'
Before I could tell another tale, the Blocker was reaching out towards my glasses.
'Let's have a skeg through those gogglers, mate,' he said, and I swayed back away from him.
'Leave off' I said. 'I don't like other folk… looking through 'em.'
The Brains laughed.
'Well, we're all cranky some way' he said.
He stood up; the Blocker stood too.
'Finish up,' said the Brains, looking down at my beer.
'What's the programme, lads?' I said.
'Little stroll,' said the Brains,'… maybe look out for a soft mark while we're at it. Look slippy now.'
I downed the beer, picked up my bag, and followed them out into the street. I was very glad to be out into the cold and rainy air… and my bad eye was now giving less trouble. It had simply gone to sleep. Directly we turned the first corner, the Blocker said, 'Bears.'
As Chief Inspector Weatherill had told me, there were two of them – two coppers, thin men in capes, walking fast with their dark lanterns in their hands. They passed us by without a glance. I was next to the Brains. The Blocker had fallen in behind – he was the owl, keeping eyes skinned to protect the Brains. As we walked, the Brains put his long hand out to me. 'Miles Hopkins,' he said. 'Glad to meet you, Allan.' He had a good grip, and shook my hand hard as I hazarded his age (he was perhaps thirty-five, a good ten years older than me at any rate).
We came to a rare gas lamp. It illuminated a curved wall covered with posters – a great, glowing bay of advertisement, with nobody about to read the words: 'Aladdin at the New Theatre Royal', 'The Yorkshire Gazette – for the Farmer, the Sportsman, the Fireside', 'Turn Right For Capstan's Cigarettes.'
But we turned left, striking a row of pubs – a good hundred- yard run of pubs or jug and bottle shops before the cobbled road rose, becoming a little bridge over the River Foss. Some light leaked from the pubs, which were mostly ordinary terraced houses that had a different life at night. The front windows were low, and Miles stooped to look through some of them as the wind and rain picked up. He looked with an expert eye into those parlour bars. The first few were silent, but desperate shouts came at intervals from the fourth or fifth one, as if orders were being passed among the crew of a ship. Some of the houses had names: the Full Moon, the Ebor Vaults, the Greyhound. Others didn't run to names.
I thought my nerves would either get set or get shattered, but they did neither, and all I could do was wait, trying to disguise fast breathing in the meantime. On the little bridge, Miles Hopkins and the Blocker stopped for a conference. I looked down at the river. The Foss was not more than five foot wide, compressed by factories, and darker than the night. I thought of my bike, waiting in High Ousegate to carry me back to Thorpe-on-Ouse and the wife. It was a breakaway I could not easily imagine making.
The conference was over. Miles Hopkins touched my arm, and we crossed the bridge to see a stubby little street of crumbling bricks blocked at the far end by a high wall, as if somebody had tried to cross it out, a mistake having been made. In the street stood one house, one shop – 'Todd for Meat' – and three pubs, all bigger than the earlier ones. Going by their names, these pubs did not seem to know they were in Layerthorpe: the Cricketer, the Fortune of War, the Castle Howard.
With Miles Hopkins leading the way, we made directly for the Castle Howard. It was one wide, low room, half full, and with a wooden framework in the middle that made it look like a barn loft. Just inside the door, a man stood drinking slowly, with his glass held horizontally at his face as he turned back and forth, like Admiral bloody Nelson with his telescope. He broke off from this performance as we entered, grabbing the Blocker's sleeve and pulling him away into a corner. I heard one word from the two of them before Hopkins pushed me gently towards the bar: the word was 'Cameron', and I was running again through the engine shed at Sowerby Bridge, riding a locomotive with no brakes.
On a trestle behind the bar sat a row of big barrels, like cannon. Three men crossed back and forth, working the taps. A dozen men stood at the bar, and one sat on a high chair. Hopkins was pointing towards this fellow, but my mind was on the Camerons.
'Who's whatsisname talking to?' I asked Hopkins.
He looked quickly backwards.
'Never mind him,' he said, and he gave a grin, adding: 'He's alius boozed.'
Whether he meant the man with the glass or the Blocker I couldn't have said. Hopkins was nodding now towards the one man sitting at the bar, and I too looked at the fellow with my remaining usable eye. The fellow was all wrong for this pub: youngish, fresh-looking, cap neatly doubled over by his pint glass – not a working man but a clerkly sort, I guessed. He was the soft mark, at any rate.
'That cove there,' Miles Hopkins was saying, 'has a box of choice cigars in his left-hand coat pocket. Let's 'ave 'em, shall we?'
'You want me to lift 'em?' I said, wondering, If you commit crime to prevent crime is that a crime? I did not believe the answer to that lay in my Police Manual.
'It's not really my game, you know,' I said to Miles Hopkins. 'I'm bound to make a bloomer, and then we'll have a scrap on our hands.'
'Got the collywobbles, have you?'
It was the Blocker; he was right behind me.
I was thinking of the Camerons, but I was supposed to be concerned with a different matter. I spoke up again: