‘It’s a big one, Kale,’ he had said with an air of confidentiality, leaning across the table and breathing garlic at the other man. ‘Big money this time. You could retire. Where you been anyway? The boys was thinking you was maybe dead or something. The word’s been out for over a week.’

Kale had felt uncomfortable there, surrounded by elderly ladies drinking tea from china cups. But Swinton had insisted they should not meet at the usual pub. ‘How much and who’s paying?’

Swinton’s smile widened. ‘Oh, come on, Willy boy. You know me. Even if I knew I wouldn’t tell you who. But truth is, this time I don’t even know myself.’ He paused and sat back as a waitress scurried by with a pile of empty cups and saucers clinking on a tray, and then leaned forward again. ‘It’s not the usual form. You’ll deal direct. I’ll get my commission for finding you, but honest to God I don’t know who’s paying.’

‘How much?’

‘A hundred thousand smackers, Kale. A hundred thousand! Jesus, I’d do it myself for a quarter of that, but I’m not in your class. No one’s in your class, mate.’

Kale toyed with his cup, the undrunk tea cold now, milk solids forming a scum on the surface. He was not happy. If he had not needed the money . . .

‘Tell me.’

*

Nance was relieved when Kale pulled up his collar and pushed back his chair. She watched him out the door then crossed to his table to collect the empty cup and found twenty pence under the saucer. Funny, she thought, how some of them never lose the habit. Maybe he wasn’t as bad as he seemed.

Kale crossed the railway yard, asphalt crunching under his feet, the January rain stinging his face. The locomotive had shunted three coal trucks into a siding and was chugging back towards the depot. Ahead of him this small industrial township rose up the hillside, a jumble of blackened brick terraces. The tall chimneys of the mills belched smoke into a heavily laden sky away to his right, and he could hear children playing somewhere behind a wall that ran alongside the road down to the station. The cobbled street shone in the wet, reflecting the grim poverty of the place. On the station wall a fly-blown poster urged a vote for Labour, its red vivid against the grey, a smile on the candidate’s face above the slogan – FOR A BETTER BRITAIN.