There was silence and Feeney knew he had made a faux pas, but Boney laughed and said, ‘Nosir, improving! We like Sir Harry, veeery good employer, but we plan to build own goblin railway. Quick to get around and easy-no-problem – has found best way to build railway is not build. Digging! Dig underground. Underground goblin-size railway, yess? Will bring all goblins together from every caverns. So many caverns in bowels of world. It’s no fuss. Goblins needed all over. How would nice Miss Adora Belle Dearheart do, if no goblins on clacks? We can be trusted – well, as muches as we trust you stinking humans. Wonderful railways underground, narrow gauge, of course. You see? We even have lingo! No rain and no snow, no bothering donkeys, no frightening old ladies underground. Hang! At last goblins’ own world in tunnels under big-man human world. We goblins up in the light now. No turning back.’

Feeney thought about this on the ride home as his horse trotted gently towards the sunset. He wasn’t a philosopher and couldn’t even spell the word, but the voice of the goblin officer rang in his head. He thought, what would happen if goblins learned everything about humans and did everything the human way because they thought it was better than the goblin way? How long would it be before they were no longer goblins and left behind everything that was goblin, even their pots? The pots were lovely, he’d bought several for his mum. Goblins took pots seriously now, they sparkled, even at night, but what happens next? Will goblins really stop taking an interest in their pots and will humans learn the serious, valuable and difficult and almost magical skill of pot-making? Or will goblins become, well, just another kind of human? And which would be better?

And then he thought, maybe a policeman should stop thinking about all this because, after all, there was no crime, nothing was wrong … and yet in a subtle way, there was. Something was being stolen from the world without anybody noticing or caring. And then he gave up, because he was nearly home and his mum had promised him Man Dog Suck Po with mashed carrots, and it wasn’t even a Sunday.

Building the longest railway the world had yet seen was a matter of daily grind, and nightly grind too, and each week took Moist further away from the city. Visits home to enjoy the fruits of his labour[54] became even rarer.