The wife said that last part with two clothes pegs in her mouth, and she now walked to the laundry basket, which was over by the chicken run.

'This is something to do with Adams versus the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Company, isn't it?' I said.

'It might be,' the wife said, as she dropped the white sheets into the basket. Some of them went in, and some went onto the bit of cinder track that skirted the chicken run.

'Oh heck,' said the wife.

She was no great hand at housework, but she knew more about An Introduction to Railway Law by Harold Andrews – in which the adventures of Mr Buckingham featured – than I did myself, which was a bad look-out, since I was the one about to be tested. She picked up a tea towel that had missed its mark, and tried to brush off the muck.

'I'd say that was reasonably foreseeable,' I said.

'I forgot to mention', said the wife, standing upright again, and turning to me, 'that Mr Buckingham attempted to close the door while the train was in motion, and that there was a sign fixed to the door expressly forbidding opening or closing it while the train is moving.'

'Right,' I said.

'… which Mr Buckingham didn't see.'

'Had he been drinking, by any chance?' The wife glanced anxiously down again at the basket, looked up at me, and brushed her hair behind her ear.

'Come on, Jim,' she said. 'You're supposed to know this.' And her hair fell forward.

Chapter Three

Now York retreated at a great rate, and I was back in the coal cellar, which was now rising bodily at speed. I was not rising in it, for the floorboards remained the same distance from my face. I would be sick at the peak of the rise, I knew; but when the peak was reached and the next fall began, I changed my idea: I will be sick at the lowest point of the fall, I decided, but instead I turned my head, finding once again a kind of coolness on the coals, and an easing of the pain in my head as York came back.