“Don’t be. I want to include your rhubarb shed photograph.”

“Really?” He leaned forward as if waiting for me to pin a medal on his chest. “I’d love that.”

“I’ll need the negative.”

This was going too far. If I didn’t interest a magazine in this article, that was becoming both real and surreal, I should have to publish it myself and bear the cost. If I didn’t solve this case for Scotland Yard, I could see myself having to wave a wand over my bank balance.

“When do you want the photograph?”

“No great rush. We can meet when it’s convenient. This is a busy time for you.”

“Not now we’re into March. Things are quietening down.”

If this was quietening down, I’d hate to see the place when they were busy.

He called to the woman at the table. “Mam, are you all right without me?”

I offered to get stuck in alongside them, but his mother called back that they were nearly done.

“Mam, this is Kate Shackleton, the photographer I told you about.”

“Well as long as she doesn’t want to take a snap of me she’s welcome.”

He and I sat on stools at the side of the shed. We chatted about the photographs I had taken, and he suggested other views that I might include.

I turned the conversation.

“Josh, what’s all this business about a body on the rhubarb express?”

“It’s bizarre.” He waved at the boxes of rhubarb. “Rhubarb is delicate, perishable. A grower wouldn’t risk damaging his crop by adding a sack of potatoes, much less a body.” He listened for a moment, heard the noise of an engine, and jumped up. “That’s the railway van. Give me a minute.”

Men wheeled the carts to the door, and when Josh saw he wasn’t needed, he came back.

“What you were asking me about, that body, it just wouldn’t happen. It’s got to be a fairy story. Some cockney porter knocked off his worst enemy and pretended he fell out of a rhubarb truck.”

He explained how the vans would now take the rhubarb to Ardsley station. The produce would be booked in and packed on railway trucks. The trucks would be shunted into the siding at Ardsley station—trucks from Ardsley, Carlton, Stanley, Morley and all the other places in the district where rhubarb was grown. The man on duty would telephone the full list of rhubarb van numbers to Leeds Central, and the Leeds rhubarb trucks would start from there, behind the engine that would continue on to Ardsley to link up with the rest. By quarter to nine, all the trucks would be marshalled and ready to be coupled to the engine.

This must be information that Alec Taylor had recorded in his missing notebook.