Wright stood up, pitched the Press across his desk and quit the office, leaving the door open behind him, having no doubt thought of another way of avoiding doing any work. I read the heading now uppermost on the Press: ‘The German Move in Morocco’.

It was holiday time, but all the papers were full of war talk.

I was now alone in the police office, and I watched through the door as the saddle-tank engine moved away. I then looked around the green walls — at the Chief’s half-a-dozen shields won for shooting that rested on the mantel-shelf. (There was no railway police team as such, so the Chief shot for the Wagon Works.) I glanced at the photograph of Constables Whittaker and Ward competing in the tug-of-war at the North Eastern Railway Police Southern Division Athletics, which had been held at Doncaster racecourse in pelting rain two years since. The picture showed them in the process of losing at tug-of-war, but nobody was to know that since the other team was cut out of the picture.

Then there was the photograph by the armoury cupboard, which showed some big men in shorts making a pyramid by standing on each other’s shoulders and supporting, at the very pinnacle, a slightly smaller man. These men were soldiers, and this pyramid was an achievement of the Chief’s days in the York and Lancashire Regiment, which was not named after York, the city in whose railway station I presently sat, but after the Duke of York, whose lands were somewhere else altogether — although still within Yorkshire, of course. The Chief had been a sergeant major, and mad keen on fitness.

I looked at the dead dust of the fireplace: a poker lay in it, left over from the last time the fire had been stirred. That was three months since. It was said that the temperature had lately touched 99 degrees in the shade in London, and an artist at the Press had taken to drawing a fat, sweating face in the middle of the flaming sun that appeared above the weather bulletin.