I stood in the office doorway with my coat over my shoulder, and watched a London train pull out of the ‘Up’. As it moved, it revealed the platform across the way, the main ‘Down’, which was crowded with sweating excursionists, shortly to depart for points north. In the first fortnight of the war, the station had been full of trippers returning home, breaking off from holidays because of the emergency, but now folk had started going away again, and the ones who’d come back and lost their holidays as a result felt daft. Buffets in brown paper and bottles of lemonade were being passed out among the excursionists – all adults but they looked like a school party, excited at getting their grub. Half of them didn’t know which way to face to look for the train. As I watched them, I saw Old Man Wright, the police office clerk, moving at a lick through their ranks, making for the footbridge and looking like he meant business. I knew then that something was up; that somebody would be in bother, for Wright fed on the misfortunes of others.

I turned aside from the door, closed it, retreated back into the office in spite of the heat (I was trying to banish the image of Wright, I suppose). For some reason, I walked over to the office notice-board. A photographic portrait of Constable Scholes had been pinned there. Why? I had no notion. It was not official; he was not in uniform. Perhaps he thought it flattering, and had put it up for swank. Or had someone put it there as a joke? I looked at the face, considering: moustache went down, eyes went down; hair went across, but Scholes had a very droopy face all told. Next to it was a detail of a York Temperance Society meeting and that I knew for a surety was a joke. Below this was a photograph of the new shooting range at the Railway Institute Sports Ground off Holgate. The targets were marked by signs reading ‘25 Yards’, ‘50 Yards’, ‘100 Yards’. Next to the hundred yards target, a man was lying down – ‘reclining’ as they say in photographs.