He took a short drink, put the glass down hard. 'Our founder calculated,' Stanley went on, resuming his rocking, 'that within the first thirty years of his life, one and a half million corpses had been partly inhumed, partly entombed, within the metropolis. During that time the amount of poisonous gases evolved from putrefaction into the civic atmosphere, beyond that absorbed by the soil, exceeded seventy-five million cubic feet. And further, this system, which whether as regards public health, public morals or public decency, is the most gigantic abuse that has ever -'
'You needn't continue with the full address for my sake,' I said.
Stanley stopped and looked at the blackness beyond the windows for a while; then he took a step towards me. "The address, once begun,' he said, using his ordinary, smaller voice and facing towards the windows, 'has never been abandoned for any reason.' He shifted his head slightly so that he was looking at me from the sides of his eyes, and all of a sudden he looked like a slugger. "The first Mr Gladstone, when he came to hear the Tuesday Address, said that he had never heard the case for extramural inhumation put with such eloquence since the days of our founder.' "That is something,' I said, and I thought: he's off his onion.
'He is reputed to have written a letter to the board,' said Mr Stanley, still not looking at me, 'but they have never seen fit to give it any very wide circulation.'
'Where is the founder today?' I said after a while, as though the fellow had been a great pal of the two of us.
Mr Stanley's eyes flickered and then he put them on mine for the first time. 'He has gone beyond this world.' He continued to stare in a most unnerving way.
'You mean that he is in Surrey, I assume… in Brookwood… that he is dead?' Mr Stanley gave me a sharp nod, then his eyes left mine, and I felt very relieved.
'So they have you to speak up for the Necropolis, and speak this dead man's speeches?' I said after some little while.
With no expression in his voice or face, Mr Stanley, looking now slightly to my left, said, 'At a rate of nine shillings per address, fifteen shillings and travelling expenses for any address that takes place outside London.'
He turned around, and picked up the jug again. He filled the glass with his wide, shaking hands, and drank the water. 'Is there much call for addresses outside London?'
'There is no call for it whatsoever.' And he switched his eyes back onto mine; I did not like it. 'And within this city the interest is not great?'
'Not great.' Still the eyes were upon mine; and he had not put the jug down. 'You are speaking to one who has performed very great service on behalf of this company,' he said. 'You were speaking of all those poisonous gases.' 'Our founder did.'
'But since his time, very shortly after the creation of the Necropolis, I think, there was an act of some sort.' 'There have been many acts.' Still the eyes; his eyes were like fires.
'No, I mean an act – an Act of Parliament allowing the creation of cemeteries inside the city.'
As I spoke, he looked down at the jug. It was a well-made, big thing, but it looked small in his hands. 'That has been one of the acts, yes,' he said, looking up again, 'and yet somehow a hopeful spirit is maintained.'
Still staring at me, he now rapidly stood, and I thought: the death of Sir John Rickerby is where it starts; all else follows from that. With my right hand I felt the heaviness of the brake handle under my sleeve.
'It is by written contract that addresses are supplied,' said Stanley, stepping out from behind his table and beginning to pace before it. 'Do not think that any individual, let alone a barrister of twenty years' call, would be so blind as to get into this sort of work without making stipulations pertaining to, for example, the minimum number of addresses to be given over any given period. Naturally there are to be more in winter than summer. The call for the addresses is greater in winter if only because the rooms in which it is given are -' And here he stopped his pacing. 'The rooms are what?' I said.
'Warm,' said Stanley, and then he was off again, pacing back and forth.
'But you just speak for money,' I said. 'You have no personal interest in any of what you say.'
'Intramural burial is a grievous wrong, and one particular aspect of the company's operations is of special interest.' 'Which is what?'
His eyes were on me again; they were not like fires, I decided, but like flowers. 'Trains.' He took another step towards me.
'Trains?' I said. 'Oh, they're a bit of all right, aren't they? Quite exciting, you know.'
Stanley nodded. 'As a means of conveyance for the dead, yes.' 1 am on the railways myself, on the London and South Western Railway, to be exact. I clean the funeral engines.' 'I know,' he said.
His eyes stopped dancing and went dead. He seemed to be in the grip of a fever; he was sweating freely – and this with the coldness of the night coming through the open window.
'It is written in the minutes of the Necropolis that you sent requests to the directors at their meetings of August, November and December.'
He was looking down at the jug again; he was very intent on the place where the handle joined the body. Then he looked up to me and his eyes were full of orange flame.
'What was your request?' I asked, letting the brake handle slide a little way into my palm. 'I asked for an increase in pay.'
As he swung the water jug, I said, 'You're off your onion,' and the water and the glass exploded against my head as he said in his fast voice: 'I did not receive it on the first occasion, and nor did I receive it on the second or the third, by which time the company's indebtedness to myself for services provided had… oh, it had not decreased, oh, it had most certainly not decreased, and yet I was to be content merely with the restoration of the Tuesday Address as a weekly -'
I had sunk to the ground as Stanley raved, and that wasn't the end of the matter. I was sinking through the floor as my murderer spoke, and the blood in my eyes turned into the red flowers among those that the board of the North Eastern gave 'I. 'I. Crystal for his shows. No, the certificates. They gave him certificates for the flowers that were everywhere. You couldn't see out of the waiting room for them, and you couldn't properly see out of the signal box either – they were dangerous, those gardenias. On the platform you can see very well, though – the hills of Eskdale rising and rising, and here is the bird train coming down from Whitby at half-past eleven on a summer Saturday morning: 137, that silly little dock shunter that would have been better off banging cod waggons about at West Cliff, two waggons full of pigeons, and my old favourite, Mr Saul Whittaker, the pigeon conveyer, who tells no end of yarns, and is semi-drunk at all times.
Number 137 stops, and this time there is a flat-bed truck tagging along behind, with something under a tarp. In the first pigeon waggon, Mr Saul Whittaker rolls open the door and slides down onto the platform like a heap of brown sand. 'Bugger me!' he says – I don't know why, maybe it's the smell of Crystal's blooms hitting him – and then, squatting down against the truck, sweating Old Six and breathing hard, he says, 'Sporting challenge, lad?'
'I'm on for any mortal thing,' I say, while pulling the baskets for Grosmont out of the vans. I set them up in a dead straight line along the platform, having a look onto the footplate as I move towards the 'up' end. All is too dark inside, the firehole door being closed: just two pairs of boots, maybe, one fellow singing a Moody and Sankey hymn in a little voice.
'Ow do,' I say, but nothing comes back, and the singing doesn't even stop.
Behind me the station clock goes clunk, which is twenty-seven past eleven, which is no good because it is Whittaker's watch that counts, and this he is holding high in the air while tipping his head backwards, looking about ready to sneeze. The silence carries on as I watch old Father Whittaker, whose thin red head is tipping ever backwards… 'Go!' he shouts.