Benny Price finished his Christmas shopping, faced bloody death and met an Amazon warrior all on the same day. Since he worked in local government, this was possibly the most interesting day of his life.
It was also the day of the first significant snowfall. Apparently it was the wrong kind of snow, because the machine that should have removed it from the railway lines gave up in disgust somewhere between Birmingham and Norbold. So, in consequence, did the Norbold train.
Benny sighed, took his copy of Birdwatching Magazine out of his shopping bag and settled down to wait. He imagined that sooner or later the train operators would either dig out the track or provide buses to take their customers home, and in the meantime there was nothing to be gained by getting angry.
Some of his fellow travellers were equally philosophical, some were not. Behind him, the mother of two under-tens tried to engage them in a game of I-Spy. It might have been more successful if the watery sun hadn’t set two hours earlier, limiting the view from the carriage windows to a pale, glowing panorama of snowy fields. When S and F had been used, the game ground to a halt much as the train had done.
Across the aisle, a young woman with fair hair and ear-muffs took a tablet out of her briefcase and keyed up some document Benny could see but – he was too polite to crane – not read. He got the impression that its contents displeased her. She pursed her lips and her fair brows drew together in a faint critical frown.
At the front of the carriage, two men in expensive coats traded anecdotes of Great Train Delays of Our Time in an increasingly competitive way. Taking seven hours to get from Coventry to Kidderminster beat five hours in the tunnel under Clover Hill, but was itself trumped by a derailment on the slow curve approaching Norbold. Apparently the driver had come in hot, jumped the tracks and attempted to enter the station sideways. The men in the expensive coats chuckled, and didn’t understand why Benny – who remembered the incident, and remembered that eight people were injured, two of them seriously – was eyeing them with disapproval.
Behind Benny, someone was getting irritable. Voices were raised – at least, one voice was raised, and another was joining in, not with much enthusiasm but in a kind of placatory whine. ‘Yeah, Trucker, it’s a bummer. Don’t see what we can do about it though, do you?’
‘It’s our mam’s birthday,’ snarled the first voice. ‘You know how many of them she has every year? I promised I’d be there for tea. She’s going to think I forgot. That really pisses me off. Like I’d forget our mam’s birthday!’
‘She’ll know that, Trucker,’ the second voice assured him. ‘It’ll be on the News.’
‘Our mam’s birthday?’
‘The snow. It’ll be all over the telly. She’ll know the train’s snowed in.’
‘Snowed in!’ snorted the voice called Trucker. ‘That’s what’s wrong with this footling country. Two inches of footling snow, and the whole footling transport system grinds to a footling halt.’ He did not say Footling.
Benny scowled into his magazine. He deplored bad language.
There was the sound of movement behind him, and someone pushed roughly past his shoulder, creasing his magazine. It was a large young man in dirty jeans and an anorak patched with gaffer tape, an incongruously seasonal bobble hat pulled low over his brow. ‘Who’s driving this footling thing anyway? I’m going to tell the footling cupcake what he can do with his footling train.’ He did not say Cupcake.
There are times when a man has to do what a man has to do if he’s going to respect the face he sees in his shaving mirror the next morning. Benny Price rolled up his battered Birdwatching and said firmly, ‘Kindly moderate your language, young man. There are women and children in this carriage.’
For a spell that might have been only seconds but felt much longer, time stood still. Benny wondered if he hadn’t been heard and was going to have to repeat himself. But it was more that Trucker – was that even a name? – didn’t know how to respond to something he didn’t believe he’d heard. People didn’t speak to him like that. Fat middle-aged men reading magazines didn’t even think about speaking to him like that. Not if they didn’t want people in white coats retrieving their reading glasses with forceps.
Finally he managed, ‘What did you say?’ in a kind of strangled shout.
Benny rose slowly to his feet. ‘I believe you heard me the first time. If you want to complain to the train company, write them a letter. But the people in this carriage are not responsible for your frustration, so don’t take it out on them.’
Trucker turned to his much smaller companion like a mastiff consulting with a terrier. ‘He wants me to write them a letter,’ he jeered. ‘He wants me to write a footling letter to the cupcakes who run the footling train!’
A kind of recklessness overcame Benny Price. He travelled a lot by train. He’d been in this kind of situation before. He’d always done the sensible thing. Not got involved; not provoked someone who was clearly unpredictable; waited for the trouble-maker to become bored with him and go off to jeer at someone else instead. And all the way home he’d tormented himself with what he would have said if only he’d thought of it just a little bit quicker.
Today, he knew exactly what to say, and he was damned if he was going to go home without saying it. ‘If you need help with some of the longer words,’ he offered, ‘I can lend you a dictionary.’
The large young man – and he was much larger than Benny; he might have been larger than Benny’s coal-shed – leaned forward, enveloping him in a miasma of half-digested beer. Benny doubted if he was drunk, at least by his own standards, but he wasn’t sober either. In a face approximately the same shape, texture and colour as a breeze block, the piggy eyes were hot with fury. Under one of them a small muscle was ticcing busily.
‘Do you think I can’t write a letter?’ he hissed, offended and vicious. ‘He thinks I can’t write a letter, Rat. P’raps I’d better show him what I can write. Put your hand out, smart-arse, and I’ll write my name on it real small and neat.’ Steel winked in the carriage lights as a blade appeared like magic between his fingers.
Benny drew a deep breath and his chest swelled to meet the knife. A distant part of him thought: So this is how it ends … as foolish, as meaningless as this. Because he’d stood up to a thug on a train while everyone else pretended not to notice.
‘Come on, lads,’ said a clear voice behind Trucker’s shoulder, ‘it’s Friday night and I’m supposed to be off duty. If I have to arrest you now, I’m still going to be filling in the paperwork come Monday.’
‘And who the footling hell …?’ demanded Trucker; and as he turned, Benny Price saw the girl with the fair hair, on her feet now, the tablet set aside and the ear-muffs round her neck.
She saw Trucker and Trucker saw her at the same moment. The young man gave a just audible groan, and the knife vanished as quickly as it had appeared. The girl – no, thought Benny, she was a woman, older than Trucker though younger than himself – let her face spread in a surprisingly amiable grin.
‘Trucker! I should have known it was you. I haven’t seen you for ages. Where’ve you been hiding?’ And then, remembering: ‘Oh – yes. When did you get out?’
‘Three weeks ago,’ mumbled the thug, like a schoolboy cornered by a cheery teacher.
‘Then it’s a bit soon to be trying to get back in again, isn’t it?’ She held out her hand, palm up. ‘Knife, please.’
‘Ain’t got no knife,’ muttered Trucker, shoving his fists deep into his pockets.
‘And Admiral Nelson saw no ships,’ retorted the young woman, leaving her hand where it was. ‘Knife.’
‘Aw, miss …!’
‘How’s this for a deal?’ she proposed. ‘I’ll take the knife for safe-keeping, to give Winson Green a chance to paint your cell before you need it again. Ask me for it sometime when you’re sober and you just might get it back. Then you and I can write a really rude letter to the train operators, listing all the places where railways manage to operate in real snow, not just a light dusting of Father Christmas’s dandruff. And this gentleman here’ – Benny Price, hanging on her every word – ‘can buy a round in his local and boast about the time he cheeked Trucker Watts and lived.’
All the tension had gone out of the situation. Stabbing anyone now would have seemed churlish, somehow, even to Trucker. He gave up the blade.
Unexpectedly the train started to move. They all staggered a little; then Trucker shouldered ostentatiously past Benny and went to find a seat where he didn’t have to look at the woman who’d disarmed him. As he went, though, his companion hurrying in his wake, he growled over his shoulder, ‘Happy Christmas, Miss Best.’
Benny Price drew a normal breath for the first time in a couple of minutes. When he felt his heartbeat beginning to slow he said, ‘Is that your name? Miss Best?’
‘Hm?’ She’d been watching to see where Trucker went; but it seemed he’d had enough fun for one day. He made the men in the expensive coats shuffle up to make room for him.
Looking back at Benny she smiled. ‘Yes. Constable Best, of Meadowvale Police Station in Norbold. Trucker and me are old … friends.’ It wasn’t entirely honest, but it was the best she could do.
‘My name’s Benny Price,’ he said seriously, ‘I’m with Norbold council works department. I hope you’ll consider me a new friend. If you ever need a new wheelie-bin, or a bulk refuse collection, just say the word.’
She gave an appreciative chuckle. ‘A girl can never have too many friends at the council works department, Mr Price.’
‘Benny,’ he insisted. ‘Please.’
‘Benny.’