adept at setting people at their ease.
“So you think you’ve some information that might be useful to us on the Lyon case,” he said. “Good of you to come along. Sit down. Smoke?”
He waited while they accepted cigarettes and lit up.
“Pretty awful weather outside.”
“It is that, sir.”
“Well, now, then—let’s have it.”
The two men looked at each other, embarrassed now that it came to the difficulties of narration.
“Go ahead, Joe,” said the bigger of the two.
Joe went ahead. “It was like this, see. We ’adn’t got a match.”
“Where was this?”
“Jarman Street—we was working on the road there—gas mains.”
Inspector Parminter nodded. Later he would get down to exact details of time and place. Jarman Street, he knew was in the close vicinity of Culver Street where the tragedy had taken place.
“You hadn’t got a match,” he repeated encouragingly.
“No. Finished my box, I ’ad, and Bill’s lighter wouldn’t work, and so I spoke to a bloke as was passing. ‘Can you give us a match, mister?’ I says. Didn’t think nothing particular, I didn’t, not then. He was just passing—like lots of others—I just ’appened to arsk ’im.”
Again Parminter nodded.
“Well, he give us a match, ’e did. Didn’t say nothing. ‘Cruel cold,’ Bill said to ’im, and he just answered, whispering-like, ‘Yes, it is.’ Got a cold on his chest, I thought. He was all wrapped up, anyway. ‘Thanks mister,’ I says and gives him back his matches, and he moves off quick, so quick that when I sees ’e’d dropped something, it’s almost too late to call ’im back. It was a little notebook as he must ’ave pulled out of ’is pocket when he got the matches out. ‘Hi, mister,’ I calls after ’im, ‘you’ve dropped something.’ But he didn’t seem to hear—he just quickens up and bolts round the corner, didn’t ’e, Bill?”
“That’s right,” agreed Bill. “Like a scurrying rabbit.”
“Into the Harrow Road, that was, and it didn’t seem as we’d catch up with him there, not the rate ’e was going, and, anyway, by then it was a bit late—it was only a little book, not a wallet or anything like that—maybe it wasn’t important. ‘Funny bloke,’ I says. ‘His hat pulled down over his eyes, and all buttoned up—like a crook on the pictures,’ I says to Bill, didn’t I, Bill?”
“That’s what you said,” agreed Bill.
“Funny I should have said that, not that I thought anything at the time. Just in a hurry to get home, that’s what I thought, and I didn’t blame ’im. Not ’arf cold, it was!”
“Not ’arf,” agreed Bill.
“So I says to Bill, ‘Let’s ’ave a look at this little book and see if it’s important.’ Well, sir, I took a look. ‘Only a couple of addresses,’ I says to Bill. Seventy-Four Culver Street and some blinking manor ’ouse.”
“Ritzy,” said Bill with a snort of disapproval.
Joe continued his tale with a certain gusto now that he had got wound up.
“ ‘Seventy-Four Culver Street,’ I says to Bill. ‘That’s just round the corner from ’ere. When we knock off, we’ll take it round’—and then I sees something written across the top of the page. ‘What’s this?’ I says to Bill. And he takes it and reads it out. ‘ “Three blind mice”—must be off ’is knocker,’ he says—and just at that very moment—yes, it was that very moment, sir, we ’ears some woman yelling, ‘Murder!’ a couple of streets away!”
Joe paused at this artistic climax.
“Didn’t half yell, did she?” he resumed. “ ‘Here,’ I says to Bill, ‘you nip along.’ And by and by he comes back and says there’s a big crowd and the police are there and some woman’s had her throat cut or been strangled and that was the landlady who found her, yelling for the police. ‘Where was it?’ I says to him. ‘In Culver Street,’ he says. ‘What number?’ I asks, and he says he didn’t rightly notice.”
Bill