Andrew Martin_Jim Stringer 02 by The Blackpool Highflyer

Author:The Blackpool Highflyer [Highflyer, The Blackpool]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Mystery, Blackpool (England), Historical, Historical Fiction, Mystery & Detective, Employees, Railroads, Fiction, Railroads - Great Britain - Employees, Great Britain, Suspense, Railroad Stories, Stringer; Jim (Fictitious Character), Blackpool (England) - History - 1800-1950, Mystery Fiction, General, Suspense Fiction
ISBN: 9780156030694
Publisher: Mariner Books
Published: 2004-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

'What?'

'No, I shan't mention it. You'll only go flying off.'

'No’ I said. 'You must.'

'If it comes to it’ said the wife, 'when they stopped making the light suiting they laid off two hundred weavers. But half of them were taken on a week later at that show.'

She was pointing at the letters spelling 'Dean Clough' standing up on the roof of the building just beyond the North Bridge. Each letter was taller than three men, and although the North Bridge was high enough to fit the goods station underneath, those letters towered above it. The Dean Clough Mill seemed to have been built by men who'd never seen another mill, and so had no notion of the correct size, but what they did have was an endless supply of bricks. You could fit twenty mills of the common run inside it. It was built by the Crossleys, who'd also - along with a certain Porter - put up the brass for the orphanage where young Arnold Dyson now lived.

As we watched, the buzzer at Dean Clough went off, and it was loud even to the two of us, half a mile across town and halfway up a hill. After a minute, the workers came out, like oil spilling from an engine casing. As they poured forwards, crossing through the shadow of the great chimney, the wife said: 'Eight thousand carpet designs possible . . . Four thousand colours possible . . . Six thousand two hundred folk employed.'

'Wage slavery,' I said, thoughtful, like.

A motorcar was coming up the hill towards us. We stood back on either side of the road to let it pass, and the wife looked after it in a dreamy way. When it had gone she said, 'That's a bobby dazzler!' Then she laughed at me from across the road, because this was one of her new Yorkshire sayings.

We walked on a little way, and there was a trap stopped in the road, with a man standing up in it. There was something else in the trap: it was a small scrumpled-up something, and, as we got closer, we saw that it was a person, and that it was dead, with the little eyes in the little head closed and quite sealed up for ever.

I got in before the wife. 'Hind Senior,' I said.

Hind Senior didn't look as though he'd ever been a great talker, and nor did his gentleman's gentleman, but this fellow had to call out, for otherwise he would have been in league with the dead body at his side.

'Hi!' he yelled. 'Are you two down from Hind's?'

'I work there,' called the wife. 'Drive up there, and ask for Cicely. She'll let you telephone from the office.'

'What happened?' I called out.

'He was ninety-nine, Jim,' the wife whispered.

'Motorcar,' the man in the trap was saying, 'it was the bloody motorcar finished him off.'

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