‘Hello?’ I bawled down the line to the man at the Scarborough Grand. ‘Could you just hold on a tick?’

Wright was pacing about the office, shaking his head.

The kid on the footplate had finally left off shovelling and was climbing carefully down from the engine looking guiltily to left and right as he did so. I thought for a minute he was going to run away from it, for it was bad practice to make an engine blow off, what with all the wastage of water and steam and the horrible racket.

‘Hello there?’ I yelled again into the receiver.

I motioned to Wright to shut the police office door, but before he could do so, the stream of din ended, at which precise moment I heard the click of the line to Scarborough going dead.

‘What happened?’ said Wright as I replaced the receiver.

‘Bloke hung up,’ I said.

‘Pity is that,’ said Wright, who was pulling at his collar to ventilate his scrawny self.

I glanced down at the black steel box that supported the receiver and its cradle — it always put me in mind of a little tomb, somehow.

‘You should try again,’ said Wright, from behind the pages of the Yorkshire Evening Press, for he was now back at his desk and looking over the pages of that paper. ‘Every room at the Grand boasts a sea view, you know. Why have you left it so late, any road?’

‘Just… forgot,’ I said.

‘You’ll be in lumber with your missus over that,’ he said from behind the paper. ‘Likes flower gardens, doesn’t she, your missus?’

The heading on the back page of Wright’s paper was ‘The Crisis At Hand’.

Wright put down the paper.

‘The blooms in the Valley Gardens’ll be absolutely glorious at this time of year — absolutely bloody glorious.’