Snow Hill Read Free Page A

been on other things. It was during a visit to his dying mother that he had been surreptitiously offered cheap morphine by a member of the medical staff. He would have accepted, except that the drug was useless when, as in this case, the patient had bone cancer.
    Johnny used his rage at his mother’s imminent death to work tirelessly—with Bill’s help—to expose the racket. The finished piece had raised questions in Parliament and renewed demands for the establishment of a National Health Service. However, apart from a few more prison cells being filled, nothing came of it all.
    Johnny’s reward had been promotion from office junior to fully-fledged reporter. Unfortunately, thanks to Patsel, that had translated into the dubious distinction of reporting from the Old Bailey.
    Court reporters—not to be confused with those that dealt with the affairs of the once German residents of Buckingham Palace—were afforded little respect because their authors were spoon-fed the copy. They did not have to sniff out stories, follow up leads or track down witnesses. They only had to get off their backsides when the judge stood up. Trials dealt with the aftermath of crime in a calm and clinical fashion. There was none of the excitement of the hunt, no vying to get ahead of the pack in pursuit of your quarry.
    To make matters worse, Simkins—who was not confined to the courtrooms of the Old Bailey—had just landed a scoop that had eclipsed Johnny’s drug-ring effort, being simpler and juicier.
    On the very morning that the police released details of the murder of Margaret Murray, a nineteen-year-old girl who worked for a firm of solicitors, the Chronicle had run an interview with the killer’s wife. It was an excellent piece of reporting—except, in Johnny’s indignant opinion, it should never have been written at all. Simkins had come by his exclusive using dubious means.
    The moment the tip-off came in from his source inside the Metropolitan Police, Simkins had got on the phone to Scotland Yard. Realising that no information would be forthcoming if he identified himself as a reporter, he’d passed himself off as the concerned spouse of the man in custody. Though his normal speaking voice was tainted with the trademark drawl of an Old Harrovian, Simkins was a master of verbal disguise. Shortly after their first meeting, he had taken to calling Johnny at the crime desk with bogus complaints about his latest report or cock-and-bull tip-offs delivered in a variety of accents ranging from a thick Irish brogue, Welsh lilt or stage Cockney. His ability to mimic women’s voices as well as men’s was uncanny. Nevertheless, Johnny, who was not that wet behind the ears, soon caught on. The pranks had, however, taught him a valuable lesson: it was always advisable to meet informants face-to-face. In the flesh it was easier to be certain that someone waswho they said they were, and he could watch for the tell-tale clues that revealed when they were lying.
    Unfortunately the dozy detective Simkins spoke to at the Yard had fallen for the ruse and told him everything he needed to corroborate the story. Having winkled out the address of the arrested man—“He’s told you where we live, has he, officer?”—Simkins had gone straight round there.
    Turning up on the poor woman’s doorstep ahead of the local constabulary, he’d given her the impression that he was a plain-clothes detective, and then delivered the news of her dear husband’s arrest.
    Until that moment, Mrs Shaw had believed her Arthur, a travelling salesman for a toy company, was away on business in Newcastle. Within minutes she had learned that he’d been unfaithful to her, that he’d got a young secretary not even half his age in the family way and, in the heat of a furious post-coital row about a backstreet abortion, had strangled the poor girl to death. Mrs Shaw had thought the worst she had to fear was a visit from the tallyman. That was before Simkins came along