Eric Speen tilted back the peak of his stationmaster's cap, sniffed, sighed and leant on his broom. Both creaked. It was Tuesday, closed-day, so the car park gates were locked and the breeze rolled lazy, billowing dust across the empty forecourt. Nonetheless, at seventy, Eric was beginning to find his days of rest were leaving him tireder than the busiest summer weekends.

He tried to smile and admire his handiwork: Meadowbrook Junction, a meticulously restored nineteen-thirties rural railway station, picturesque and pristine. What was it he'd told Maureen, that sunny day they took possession some twenty, twenty five years before? Sometimes, steam buffs got to heaven before they died.

The smile failed to flourish. Spit, polish and elbow grease were failing to keep even the white-boarded, flower-dressed station frontage attractive. First impressions counted more than ever with holiday-makers; if they didn't come in, they were gone.

The sun left the west flared with pinks and vermilions, promising to return with blue skies in the morning. As night edged in behind it, Eric yawned, looking on at the deepening twilight with ambivalence. Sunny days would always fill the main road with tourists, but too sunny, and every other car had a luminous bucket and spade on the back shelf or windsurfs and wetsuits strapped to the roof.

He looked up at the station clock, a wrought iron, brass-featured original, polished and proud above the door marked "To TRAINS." Someone had offered him several hundred pounds for it back in the seventies. He wouldn't have dreamed of parting with it then, but wondered what he would get for it now, should the need arise.

He sighed again – how times had changed – and checked his wristwatch for the right hour. Maybe pawning that again would postpone the sleepless nights.

Eric crossed the forecourt to check the gates. The white iron railings had last had a lick of paint sixteen, seventeen months before, just before the Easter break. The Easter holiday was the best-earning single weekend of the calendar. The mix of locals and holiday-makers was generous then, kids always anxious to get spring air into their lungs after long grey months cooped indoors.

The railings were still more than passable, but the white-emulsioned boarding on the front of the main building was really pining for the paintbrush. Decades' summers had blistered it badly, flaking it down to the original coat, a ghastly, vivid lime dirtied with the soot of the age of industry. The years had patterned the woodwork like the skin of an exotic lizard.

Even the flowers looked weary. He would have to rise earlier in the morning, get them watered and perked up before opening the ticket office. He stood for a moment until the first nip of dark traced over his bare arms, then rolled down his sleeves and crossed the forecourt, heading home.

Maureen and Eric Speen had made their home on-site, in an old Pullman carriage converted to a modest but serviceable dwelling. It sat alone at the edge of their land with a proper front door to the street. Eric had done the converting alone, bar Maureen's curtain-making and endless rivers of tea. Back then he had prided himself; plumbing, electrics, bottle gas stove and eventually oil-fired central heating, all installed without the assistance of expensively apprenticed and certificated tradesmen. Doing it himself had often beaten debt, and what self-respecting, hands-on railway buff could not turn his hand to anything in the soldering, wiring or decorating line?

A fuel bill lay on the mat. He picked it up and carried it through to the narrow lounge, sliding it between the others behind the pewter frame they'd received on their fortieth anniversary. Maureen smiled out at him as she always did, standing with her arm with that of a man with dark hair, a man a lot younger than he now felt.

All the original carriage furniture was long gone. Eric lowered himself into his easy chair, twonging aching springs and injecting the air fine dust. He wouldn't turn the radio on, he'd just sit and soak up the evening awhile.

Maureen's chair needed dusting. Eric gave himself a reproachful smile. They had found a lovely place to spend their final years together; worth keeping spick and span.

Darkness seeped in and as ever, he recalled their final moments. Maureen had died in that chair, right in front of his eyes. Her last thoughts concerned the price of baker's yeast. She'd stopped in mid sentence, exhaled rather strangely, then slumped her shoulders and plopped her chin on her chest.

Eric had known at once that she was dead. He remembered saying "Oh," and feeling little more shock than being rudely snubbed in conversation. He didn't cry for days. Then he did.

Eric never sat in Maureen's chair any more. Not that it was any kind of morbid shrine, though. Simply, he took pleasure from a cloudy theory that her imprint might somehow remain in the air above it. Like the way the upholstery held her impression for three weeks after the cremation. Smiling, he thought back to the starless night he'd brushed and patted the twin dents away, deciding in a fit of grief that he was staring at a death mask of her arse.

His eyes wandered back to their photograph and a few minutes later he levered himself stiffly to his feet and scooped the frame from the mantel. Postage-paid manilla envelopes slid consecutively to the carpet.

"Bloody statements!" he groaned aloud, as he did whenever that happened. The last balance not typed in crimson ink was the month he painted the railings.

He stepped over the payment demands. If only he'd had the blessed cash in the first place, he would happily let them have the lot if it meant they would leave him alone. It was getting chilly so he shuffled around, closing the windows. He had sat for too long though, and shivered. The ones who sent bills weren't the worst.

Once the lights were on, Eric prepared his evening meal, the same quick, simple fry-up that sufficed most evenings. He filled the silence beyond the spitting pan with memories of Maureen, when she stood there chatting, busied baking bread.

"If you'd put a shelf in your Rocket's furnace, we could go into business with these." Her echo rang so clearly that Eric wished again for belief in ghosts. Maureen always called the locomotive his Rocket, although Eric often doubted she had ever heard of George Stephenson.

It used to irritate him, now and then, that she hadn't shared his passion for steam. Many a time she had told him it was his life she had chosen to join, not his obsession. The irony of it was that actually, legally, it had never been his Rocket at all. Technically, the train, the station, the whole concern had always belonged to Maureen.

All of which made things more difficult still, explaining. Always the same old jokes about marrying her for her money. Why would a woman, whose only outdoor purpose in life was the perpetual retention of the Women's Institute cake making championship, lay out most of a large inheritance to indulge her husband's play?

"Come on, Eric!" they would tease him in The Bullock, chummy sarcasm almost masking hints of jealousy. "Kid's toys, aren't they, steam trains?"

Often they would follow with enquiries about his past. They usually assumed that he'd worked on the "real" railway, then either ask him where he had been based or complain about the rail companies, "nowadays". And wasn't he rather young to be retired?

Eric would just smile and soon became practised at changing subjects. They were right though: he had been rather young, back then.

Eric slid his plate into the draining rack, neatly folded the dishcloth and draped it over the single, long-necked tap.

He had never been quite sure if Maureen had really intended to bake bread, or even if she considered it possible. She'd first had the idea only a month or so before passing away, and bless her, she could have been right. Moments earlier, talk had taken its nightly turn toward money and economy, and at first his wife was very down. She had just likened Mark Crandle to a dribbling ulcer. She always had her own way with words, did Maureen.

The old man closed his eyes. Mark Crandle: son of Arthur Crandle, one of Eric's associates, as Arthur like to call them. Arthur had been a pretty close friend for a few years, but then he'd gone away. They had a lot in common. Both men had the railway in their past, their blood, and both were happily married. A nice man. Gentle. Mark Crandle was a different matter though. Birth in wedlock notwithstanding, to Eric, the child was a sure-fire bastard. He had decided that Crandle Jr. must have been bottle-fed sour milk.

Poor old Arthur, he never got out toward the end. A tumour got him eventually, Eric had gleaned from the grapevine. They said Arthur wanted "nothing serious" for cause of death on his certificate. Despite the shock on hearing the news, Eric had smiled at that. It fitted.

"No, not an ulcer!" Maureen hastily reassessed, leaving the frying pan momentarily unattended and leaning both hands on the precision-laid, foldaway dining table. "He's a greedy, poxy vampire! If he wasn't the image of his father at that age, I would swear his poor mother had been raped!"

Her breath caught slightly and she dropped her voice. "He said he'd be phoning again tonight." When she reached for her oven-gloves, her hand was trembling. "Eric, whatever are we going to do?"

Eric looked around the empty room, eyes settling on the telephone. Something below his breastbone tightened but the handset slept on in its cradle and the faux-psychic moment never came. Just to be sure, Eric rose, unplugged the phone, then settled back to his dusk-dreams.

"Yes, a vampire! And at this rate, Eric Speen, he'll suck you dry."

Before he could answer she bent to open the oven. Eric grinned. She still had a fine arse on her, for a pensioner. She revelled in the rich, humid rush of hot air. That was probably why the memory had colour; his last snapshot of a dear wife truly happy.

"Speen and Speen, Master Bakers!" she announced, turning. Her grin spread to her eyes as they opened. "We could reopen the tea shop!" Eric remembered her voice falling when she added, "That would meet the payments." And six weeks ago, six months after Maureen's funeral, Eric had resolved to find out.

The midsummer evenings meant several hours' daylight after closing time. Some weeks before, Eric had dragged his welding kit out of aestivation, wondering as he worked exactly why he was indulging in such folly, never mind interfering with the innards of a rolling-stock classic.

Killing time, easing himself into widowerhood? Perhaps, he would acknowledge, it was just a vaguely quixotical, lovingly tongue-in-cheek gesture to Maureen's memory. She would have loved it, the crinkles around her eyes fanning outward as a disbelieving glow crept over her face. She always had a sense of humour, Maureen. Sometimes Eric wondered if she might be watching on, laughing at his antics then sighing and folding her arms.

But she might have been willing him on, and that idea kept him going. The Rocket's furnace really did glow on for hours, but he hadn't felt right even thinking about that in the weeks immediately following her cremation. He felt deep pangs of guilt when he caught himself, one night, wondering which could burn hotter, Rocket-kiln or crem? He chided himself before deciding the two would run close enough.

As did every working railway yard over decades, Meadowbrook Junction had accrued plenty of redundant ironwork in various sheds and the niches and rat-runs between. Considering Eric's force-learnt adeptness at d-i-y and mechanical cannibalisation, there was probably scrap of far greater variety than the largest conventional yard. He had come across a sturdy metal grill, laths two inches across and spaced in a frame the size of his own single bed, origins lost somewhere in the seventies.

Bolts and spot welding had secured the rack along the centre of the furnace just above the height of coal when the Rocket was fully stoked. As the embers died at the end of the day, the dough would sit much higher above them. Perhaps he could try to control the temperature by opening the door.

"Oh, come on Speen!" Eric would goad himself whenever the task made him doubt his sanity. "It's just a bit of fun, and what if it really does work?"

It was weeks since he'd stowed away the welding kit again though, and he was still putting off his first attempt at baking. Eric put it down to the summer rush, although he knew he was fooling himself. Maureen's scheme was crazy, but to Eric, flat on his back spot-welding in the furnace, it was something she had left. Other than the photograph on the mantel, it almost the only thing remaining that was tangible. He didn't want it to disappear up the funnel in smoke.

Acclimatising to worry falling with every dusk, Eric had slept relatively well. There was so much sun in the sky that some had leaked into his mood, prompting him to whistle something from a sixties summer as he rolled back the engine shed doors.

"Well, you're no Flying Scotsman, old girl," he said to the Rocket as he did most mornings when the sun caught the imperfections in her polished flanks. Eric regarded them a wrinkles. His Rocket, too, was getting on in years. "Big day today, though." Anything else he left unspoken, slapping her paintwork as though she were a carthorse, then clambering into the cabin.

Trains were built like tanks in the Rocket's day, and Eric was comforted in the knowledge that she would outlast him. Eric treated the engine like treasure. When she trundled from her shed, there was never a speck of dust in any of her four carriages, nor single kamikaze insect left smeared across her buffers.

The Rocket edged into the platform, having barely passed strolling pace getting there. Eric leant from the cab. "Morning, Gordon!"

Gordon Jenkinson was a now-and-then drinking partner, nice enough to pass the time with but strictly a three-halves-a-night-limit man, and all but the decadent first of those topped with lemonade. He used to run the village Post Office, until Post Office Central remembered it was there and shut it down. He had plenty of time on his hands and often helped out, sitting in the ticket office and occasionally bringing his own wife along in high season when the crowds were thickest.

"Morning, Eric," Gordon called back. "Old girl still running well, is she?"

"Good as gold as always." The platform ahead was a surging mass of six-year-olds, a coach-load from the primary school over in town, all tiptoes to the white safety line two yards from the edge. "I see they got here early then."

Gordon's shock of white hair nodded happily. Nice day for it, Eric mouthed, smiling to himself.

"Well, nice day for it!" Gordon obliged, as Eric rolled the Rocket on toward the sea of waving arms.

Ever reliable, Gordon had taken care of both guard and platform duties and within minutes The Rocket was set to go again, a cacophony of schoolkids leaning from every available window.

Eric checked the track ahead and sighed open the throttle. The Rocket drew a deep breath and began to take the strain, carriage-couplings clunking in diminuendo sequence behind. Like Maureen with her cooking smells, Eric closed his eyes and revelled in the sound.

The Rocket was sparkling, as always. For Eric, the funnel's rhythmic coughing only added to the calm of the perfect rural morning. The sun emerged fully from patchy, dissipating cloud and the last of the early chill burned away. Children's laughter and cash register alike would jingle into early afternoon.

Ahead of them, the Meadowbrook line traced a particularly pleasant route, an uneven oval circuit running over and amongst broadleaf and pine-capped hills. After looping the dam-end of the reservoir, with panoramic views of old quarry, the line came to the last hill, which it ran straight through. Children young and old would thrill to fifteen seconds of tunnel darkness before the track emerged into daylight and the home straight. Assorted small and vibrant blooms had replaced the springtime rush of daffodils, and the embankments were littered with scatters of colour as though discarded on departure by the golden crowds of silently nodding spectators.

Steam in the air always prodded Eric's appetite, and his thoughts flitted quickly ahead to the sandwiches he'd made for lunch, then sideways to the smell of baking bread. It always felt like wasting heat, opening the furnace door unnecessarily, but he decided to risk a quick peek at his handiwork.

The iron door swung open and The Rocket's heart flared angry gold. Eric closed his eyes and stopped his throat to let her exhalation bathe him. The Devil's Belch, he thought of it as: all the good expelled by Hell, one hot blast with only a trace of brimstone.

Rocking back on his heels, Eric squinted through molten air. Although he'd had little doubt his fixings would hold, he was pleased to see Maureen's bread-rack secure and indifferent to the flames. Come to think of it, maybe he would try it out later, after all.

"Best get on," he said aloud as he got to his feet and children's excitement filled the air again. It would be a while before they really felt the wind in their hair though, as the Rocket had a short but taxing incline ahead of her. When she was pulling kids-to-capacity she would barely top ten miles per hour until cresting the fir-lined ridge and trundling into acceleration. As her tip of her polished chromium cow-catcher reached the first of the verdant pines, Eric reached up and pulled the whistle-cord twice. Youngsters' cheers peaked in response, trailing away in the Rocket's evanescent cotton-wool slipstream.

Eric smiled and reached for the whistle again.

He had been waiting in the undergrowth.On the edge of Eric's vision a dark shape crossed the fringe of pale stones supporting the sleepers. A boot clanged on the footplate and Eric dropped his free hand toward the brake. Pain lanced through his forearm as the other boot kicked it away.

"Don't stop on my account, old man. Room for one more inside, yeah?"

Eric pulled his sore arm to his chest, heart hammering fit to shake free of its arteries. "M-Mark... Crandle," he gasped, panting. "I thought you... might come calling."

"You know why I'm here, Speen." Maureen had been right. There was no question that Mark was Arthur's son; or, not until he breathed or moved.

Eric fought for his composure. "Lovely day for a ride in the mountains? It'll do wonders for your mood."

Crandle glared at him, labouring his way through Eric's sarcasm. He and his father may have been doubles on leaving their teens, but Mark had obviously been better fed. He stood several inches taller than his father, with a substantially more brawny build.

Steroids, probably, Eric assessed. That would account for the mood. Crandle Jr had the texture of a Victorian floorboard, dark and rough-polished, streaked with worn-down scars of all lengths and ages. He had Arthur's nose, too, the long, honest profile still visible despite the past efforts of one or more fists.

"Shut your mouth, Speen." Crandle leaned and grabbed the old man's overall in one hand, gripping tight enough to pinch hair and limp skin on the side of Eric's chest.

Eric winced but instinctively reached up and grabbed Crandle's forearm in response. His sleeve rolled back a few inches, exposing an old lag's bluebird tattoo, one just like his father's before him. Mark Crandle's was already faded. "You'll not get it," Eric said defiantly, "whatever you think you'll find here."

"I've come for my father's cut." Crandle flicked and rolled a wrist, making complex clicks of metal on metal.

For the first time Eric's eyes left his assailant's, drawn by a slice of summer glinting from blade of an unwrapping butterfly knife. Eric hoped he meant a cut of the financial kind, but knew already that, worryingly, it was virtually certain he did. "Of course you do, son," he said as calmly as he could, "whatever you say."

He hadn't intended sarcasm but Crandle took offence. He shoved Eric once without releasing his overall, then dragged him back and pushed harder, letting go. Eric's heel caught on the dimpled iron flooring and he toppled back, twisting to avoid falling to the tracks but colliding his head painfully with the T-shaped handle of the coal-shovel propped behind him. The shovel and Eric clattered to the floor. Both lay equally lifeless.

Had Eric's life flashed before his eyes, the flickering newsreel would have had for its headline The Blackford Tunnel Rail Heist.

The Greatest Train Robbery, they'd called it for a while, until doubts over the insurance claims demoted the case from the headlines. Twenty Nine Million! the leaders had screamed, the haul the gang was supposed to have made. Then there were the killings, the shootings of two security guards who valued their pay cheques higher than their lives, which had also weakened the story's pop-news appeal. Had they caught the killer, the public may have taken more to desperados on the run with millions.

Yes, there had been a train on no timetable and a gang that knew but shouldn't have. They knew of the diamonds aboard and took the train on a fogbound November night, and they all got away with a substantial haul and the blood of two men on their hands. They fled with coin of the realm and krugerrand alike, but the diamonds stayed secure in their impregnable safe.

The driver for the gang was Arthur Crandle and amongst the persuasion was the muscular, younger Eric Coomber.

Their cuts averaged less than half a million each. Far less. Mr Plod was unusually nimble and straight on their tails, and soon had half of the gang and most of the money safely under lock and key. By the end of the month only four men remained at large. Two years later, Micky Cronin had died of alcohol and Val Boone had been jostled to an ironic death on the rails of the London underground.

After that, the chase seemed to slacken. When the fraudulently claimed-for diamonds had been recovered from an unrelated customs raid on a black-market ice dealer in Zeebrugge, and the fraudster company was seen to have a governmental backside on a boardroom chair, resources and manpower were suddenly and mysteriously diverted elsewhere.

Eric couldn't even remember the outcome of the fraud case. Happily ensconced with childhood sweetheart Maureen Speen, fallen on his feet with a girl with a mysterious inheritance, what concern of his was it? Eric had loved Maureen before, but the way she came up with the idea, invented Great Aunt Violet (deceased), and made him love her all the more. She had even given her name to help hide her new husband. And loved her more so yet, that she cared so little for the money itself she let him waste it on his passion.

They had almost fulfilled their dream of living life out together when the first phone call came from Mark Crandle.

Eric knew Arthur had died, and in prison. The two been good friends before and had kept in hushed touch for a decade or more after pulling the Blackford job. But as their lives drifted the letters shortened and the gaps connecting occasional phone calls stretched until one broke.

Then after sixteen years of silence, Arthur Crandle turned up on Eric's doorstep, splashed across the front page of the regional weekly paper. "Blackford Robber Turns Self In," the headline announced above a snap of a bald and liver-spotted Arthur wearing Plod's bracelets, the picture of contrition but with a trace of unfathomable amusement.

Why give himself up? Why does a man make any choice? So long out of contact, Eric never had a clue until Crandle Jr phoned, when he realised Arthur had probably preferred prison for his dotage to his own son's poisonous company.

There were visits though, Mark had made that perfectly clear.

Eric could imagine the scene, the son creeping around his father's deathbed, digging for a clue to the size of his upcoming bequest. Maybe even, if ever they were left alone, twisting a rake-thin arm or toying with a pillow at the head of a bed. The mind of the man on the phone was so clouded with greed that Eric believed he probably thought himself due a cut of the eroneous twenty-nine mil. He wouldn't have put it past old Arthur to string the idiot boy along, but for an old mate to give up his name like that, he could only imagine Arthur had been terrorised in the last of his visiting hours.

But Eric Speen's life did not flash before him as he prayed it would when he thought about dying. Slowly, he regained consciousness. Crandle was leaning in close to his face, shaking Eric's collar with one hand and slapping his face with the other. "Come on, wake up old man! We've business to do before this heap of scrap crawls home."

Eric rubbed the back of his skull. It wasn't too painful; his head simply felt like it was filled with cotton wool soaked in chloroform. But the appeal of running a little baker's shop was rapidly increasing. He struggled to his feet, roughly assisted by a markedly more anxious-looking Mark Crandle.

It took Eric long seconds to regain his sight and bearings, both visually and mentally. It was difficult to breathe.

In the distance ahead the mouth of the tunnel through the final hill swung into view, a small cube of void in the summer-lit landscape. Keep him talking, don't antagonise.

"Heap of scrap?" Eric stopped himself shaking his head, wanting to cling on to, hide behind, the genuine confusion induced by the blow. "Used to eat his type for breakfast" around here? "This aint no heap of scrap, you cheeky pup!" Nice one, Eric, he thought, Give him a dose of old dodderer!

"The work I've done on this... this work of art..."

"Shut it, Grandad and let's talk money."

"Polished her from bell to buffer, worked my fingers to the bone, night after night..."

The tunnel was still fifty yards away when Crandle lost patience. He grunted something unintelligible and hit Eric again, a short jab of knuckles to the collarbone that would not send him toppling again.

Eric winced but rambled on with his sentence regardless. "...fixing the furnace... sharpening my shovel."

Mark Crandle began to mouth an irritated What? Eric breathed deeply, filled out his chest and straightened his back. They were closing on the tunnel, and fast. Crandle, half his back facing the direction of travel, showed no signs of noticing.

"Mind your head," said Eric, nodding. Crandle followed his glance and ducked reflexively.

Eric reached out a hand behind him. Don't antagonise?! In Eric's day, he'd have eaten this little slag's type for breakfast!

When shadow had swallowed the Rocket, the tunnel issued steam like smoke from a discharged gun.

The first-year kids were an enthusiastic lot, cheering as loudly as if the whole school had descended upon Meadowbrook Junction. They were well-disciplined too, the exhilarated mob transforming into orderly ranks by class at the clap of the head teacher's hands. Gordon would cope alone, needing only to oversee the methodical decampment and answer a question here and there from the brighter among them.

Pulling the whistle, with a Casey Jones wave back to kids who'd never even heard the name, Eric Speen rounded off the circuit in a way of which he knew he'd never tire. He watched the stragglers toddle out under the protective sweeps of the head teacher arm, made eager for their packed lunches by the rich scents of summer barbecues carried on the soft midday breeze.

And not a hint of trouble from them all morning. All polite as pie. If only all kids went to schools like that, Eric thought. There was little honour in the world any more, not even amongst thieves.

He reached behind for the shovel again, scraping and spreading the coal-dust he had spread on the patterned iron floor of the compartment. The dust was damp and clung to the edges of the shovel, apart from most of the lefthand side, recently shone to a razor edge. The sun would dry out his mopping up, especially when he got the Rocket into the siding and swept the black and crimson mixture around the rails to disperse amongst decades' accretions of oil-stains and soot. To dry the shovel, he hefted a few more pounds of coal into the furnace and warmed his hands on the flames, smiling in the face of a now somehow sourer Devil's Belch.

To be on the safe side, Eric decided he would put off the first attempt at bread-making for a few weeks more. Let the furnace roar. Hygene would an important consideration if Speen's Steam Bakery were to become a reality.