He then stood back with folded arms to watch.

‘Is that Scarborough Grand?’ I said into the receiver.

‘I’ve just told you it is,’ said a man.

‘It’s a different person speaking now,’ I said.

‘Must I repeat everything I’ve already said?’ asked the man in a peevish tone.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘since I didn’t hear it.’

Some muttering from down the line, which I broke in on with: ‘This is Detective Sergeant Stringer of the York Railway Police,’ for that would put some folk on their mettle. But this fellow just gave a sigh.

I asked him: ‘Do you have any rooms for over the week-end?’

‘For how many people?’

‘Two.’

‘Double bed?’

‘Aye.’

The line went half-dead. It was like suddenly going deaf. Looking through the door I could see clear across Platform Four to where a little saddle-tank engine had rolled into view.

‘What’s going off?’ asked Wright, who was forever nosing into other blokes’ business in a way that would have been somehow more tolerable if he’d been a younger man.

‘Fellow’s hunting up a double room for me,’ I said.

I knew very well that the man at the Grand would only be looking in a ledger, but I pictured him (a small, bald man in my mind’s eye) wiping the sweat off his brow as he climbed the mighty staircases of the great hotel in search of an unoccupied room. He’d be a little bloke in a stand-up cellulose collar that chafed at his neck, and all the well-spoken chatter and swanky clothes of the guests would make him furious.

Cradling the receiver between neck and chin, I took off my suit coat and hung it over the back of the chair. Then I looked again through the door. On the footplate of the tank engine there was no driver but just a pawky-looking kid, going ten-to-the-dozen with his coal shovel. I thought: What’s that daft little bugger about? He’s over-stoking; the engine’ll blow off in a minute if he doesn’t look out. Of course it just would happen that, at the very instant the man at the Scarborough Grand came back to the telephone, the safety valves on the tank engine lifted and the excess steam began screaming through them.