‘Not as good as a night-watchman’s brazier,’ the fat man apologized, holding out a match. ‘But enough to melt an inch or two off the icicles.’

What was that accent? It had a hint of America, a hint of the Antipodes, and a fair slice each of Cockney and Birmingham. Some words even sounded faintly Scottish. Obviously half a century of roaming the world. Could it be show business of some kind? The train had started; they would reach Stotwell in five minutes, and, no doubt, separate and never see each other again. Why not ask straight out? It was months since he had burst out of the strait-jacket of his upbringing—here was a chance to benefit by that escape, if only in a small matter.

‘I know it’s a bit thick to rob you of a cheroot and then grill you with personal questions into the bargain,’ he began. The fat man’s face creased into a vast grin, and he interrupted with a bellow of laughter.

‘Easy to see you’re not used to being free-and-easy with strangers,’ he husked powerfully. ‘You can’t make me out, and you want to know what I make me living at, that’s right, isn’t it?’ Charles nodded, his incipient embarrassment puffed away in the gale of bonhomie.

‘All right, but I make one condition. I like a bargain, always did. You tell me about yourself first.’

‘I’m an export delivery driver. I take cars from the factories to the docks.’

The fat man assumed an expression of bewilderment theatrically overdone.

‘Dear, dear, oh dear, the world’s moving too fast for poor old Arthur. Here was I trying to size you up, and failing because you didn’t fit into any type I knew, and now it turns out you’ve got a job I’d never even heard of. And what kind of a job might that be? One of these new kind of jobs, I dare say, where you couldn’t rightly say whether a fella was a workman or an office stool percher or a manager. It’s all upside-down these days.’

‘Well, at least you do know it’s upside-down,’ said Charles reassuringly. ‘Most people of your generation—er—if you don’t mind me making you sound very old, I didn’t really mean to—anyway, most of them haven’t cottoned on to these changes.’

‘Ah, but I’m in a job that’s changing all the time,’ said the fat man, sitting back proudly with one powerful square hand on each knee. ‘In my job, when you stop being one jump ahead of the changes, you get it straight where the bottle got the stopper.’ Holding his cheroot in his mouth, he devoted all ten fingers to searching his waistcoat pockets and finally producing a card which he handed across.

It said, ‘ARTHUR BLEARNEY ENTERTAINMENTS’.