It was hard to say what was greyest about him: his hair, his beard, his eyes, his skin. He was like the old sailors in Bay- town, only they had light in their eyes. I reckoned he must've been with the Company a good half-century, all the while being pushed further and further towards the edge of the show.

'I'm missing a quantity of Railway Magazines,' I said to this dead-ender, 'bundled into dozens, and stowed in a blue portmanteau.'

'Date of loss?' said the old man, with hardly energy enough to make a question of it. He had a telegraph instrument at his elbow, and a ledger set in front of him; beside this was a copy of the Press. Otherwise the counter was empty. The kid in the shadows at the back had only the stool he was sitting on. I told the bloke the date, and the man started turning the pages of the ledger back towards it: 7 January, that stormy Sunday when the wife and me had had our first tiff, a real set-to on the platforms of Halifax Joint station as we took our leave of the town for good. There was the wife, angry and in the family way – not a good combination – and there was I, still mourning the job I'd lost, and all around us the four bags we'd not entrusted to the guard's van.

When we'd got to York, I'd attempted to carry those four but, looking back, I only picked up three. When we discovered the loss, the wife had said: 'We'd have had no bother if you'd not been too mean to fetch a porter', and it hadn't sounded like the wife speaking at all but like something read from a book called Familiar Sayings of Long-Married Women.

'No,' the old clerk said after a while. 'I can turn nothing up in that line.'

'All right then,' I said. 'I'm much obliged to you.'

I turned towards the door, and I heard a scrape of boots from the shelves. The kid in the shadows was standing up.

He called out: 'They were marked down as "Books: miscellaneous", Mr Parkinson. I have 'em just here.'