Death Before Breakfast Read Free Page B

him and let them in. It was as the constable had reported earlier, apparently undisturbed. There was dust about the place and the odds and ends left by the previous tenants – all worthless. The two packing-cases which the bobby had used for exploring the loft were standing where he had left them. They had been abandoned as worthless by the broker’s-men, who had sold-up the last occupants for back rent.
    The case, if there was one, was going to be difficult to organise. On the strength of Mrs. Jump’s statement, it looked as if the police would have to question everybody in the street about whether or not they’d seen or heard strange goings-on about seven o’clock on Wednesday morning. This wouldn’t by any means be an easy job. Some of the occupants were, to put it mildly, not likely to prove co-operative. Several had served stretches in gaol. The end house near the recreation ground was occupied by immigrantsfrom Jamaica, too. At first, two of them had arrived as a sort of vanguard, later to be followed by most of their friends and relations from overseas.
    â€˜They’re living there like peas in a pod,’ Mann told them.
    Mann was a bit supercilious about the whole affair. He’d expressed a private opinion to his colleagues that Mrs. Jump was leading them all up the garden path, and he stuck to it still.
    â€˜Where do we go from here?’ he said as he locked the door of the empty house.
    â€˜Let’s try the houses nearest to the spot where the body was supposed to be lying,’ said Littlejohn. ‘I’ll try number 19, right opposite. You, Mann, take No. 18, and Cromwell No. 22.
    By this, half the street was out watching them. You could tell the ones who’d tangled with the police by their comments. Someone was quick to inform Cromwell that the tenants of No. 22 were out at work and wouldn’t be back until evening. The man was a porter on Willesden station and his wife was a clippie on a ’bus. Cromwell turned in at No. 24, which had a newly-painted light blue door, and strips of metal pasted up and down the windows to make them look like lead-lights. Obviously one owned with the help of Hollows’ Building Society.
    No. 19 was a tidy-looking house, recently painted black outside and with decent curtains up at the windows. There was a bell on the doorpost, too, which Littlejohn pressed. It was far and away the best kept house in July Street.
    A tall woman answered the door. She looked between thirty and forty. In her younger days, she must have been strikingly beautiful. Even now, she was handsome, in a dark aquiline way and had a good figure and pale white skin. She wore a long blue house-coat and red slippers. Her hair was trimmed short and as black as jet. Littlejohn introducedhimself and asked if she were the occupier of the house.
    â€˜The doctor’s only just got up. Won’t it do later?’
    She spoke well, and gave the impression by her speech and movements of being, at some time or other, on the stage.
    Mann subsequently told them that the house was occupied by a retired medical man who had formerly run a practice in a large house nearby. He had spent most of his money on whisky, and had lost most of his patients through neglecting his business. The woman was his sister.
    â€˜Come in, then. This way.’
    She opened the door on the left of the small passage, which was well furnished and carpeted in dark red. The room inside and overlooking July Street was probably the largest in the house. A living-room used as a bedroom, as well. The unmade camp-bed massed with an untidy hump of bedclothes in one corner; one wall covered with books; a large table littered with books and papers and, on one corner on a spot roughly cleared of rubbish, a tray of used breakfast dishes.
    The doctor was sitting in an armchair by the gas-fire, unshaved, unwashed, wrapped in an old dressing-gown. He had evidently been reading the morning paper. A glass of