The Blackpool Highflyer by Andrew Martin

Author:Andrew Martin [Martin, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9780156030694
Publisher: Harcourt
Published: 2007-07-14T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

Cicely Braithwaite was waiting for us outside the front of the Joint, with all the cab drivers eyeing her. She kissed the wife, saying: 'It was you sent him up to the mill, wasn't it dear?'

'It was,' said the wife.

'Of course, you know what did for the old man?' she said to us both. 'His heart.'

'Go on,' I said.

'Well,' said Cicely, 'it stopped.'

'And it was on account of a motorcar, wasn't it?' I asked her.

Cicely nodded. 'Frightened the life out of the old man,' she said, and then she coloured up. 'You know, it's the first time I've said that when it's actually been true.'

'Did the motorcar do anything?' I asked.

Cicely shook her head. 'Barley, that's the old man's man ... He said it just came too close as it passed by . . . and it was going at a fair rate of course, as they all do.'

I could hear Knowles, the stationmaster, shouting at a porter: something about an out-of-date auction poster and how it wanted taking down sharpish. I looked at the clock over the station. 'If I nip up fast for our tickets,' I said, 'we should be in time for the one thirty-two - stopping train for Blackpool. Hebden's first stop.'

'Does he have Bradshaw off by heart?' Cicely said to the wife, as I climbed the steps to the ticket office.

As I waited at the ticket window, I thought about motor­cars. The one that had run alongside us before the smash had looked like a giant baby-carriage, and so had the one on Beacon Hill. And so did they all, except for a certain other kind that looked like boats. I'd asked the wife, and she'd said that her Mr Robinson owned a motorcar.

The Courier was always going on about how they were the terrors of the countryside, I knew that much, and it was said they should be taxed. I didn't believe the Socialist Mission could run to one, even though old Hind might have been in their sights as an operator of wage slavery.

Dick served me at the ticket window. I could see Bob in the office behind him. I tried to remember the difference between them. Dick was the one who could write with two hands; Bob was the one that couldn't.

'George about?' I asked.

He was not; day off.

'I can't understand Bradshaw's,' Cicely was saying, as I returned. 'Whenever I find the train I need, I look down the page and there's a note saying "Only on Weekdays", and it never is a weekday that I want to take a train.'

'There's worse than that,' said the wife. 'Only go on Thurs­day afternoons, half of them.'

The train came in on time, pulled by one of Mr Aspinall's 060s, but that was lost on the ladies. We found an empty com­partment in Third. I sat next to the wife on one side, Cicely sat on the other. As the whistle was blown, Cicely said, 'I sup­pose Mr Hind will have to break off his sailing holiday.

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