A Commonplace Killing by Siân Busby Read Free Book Online

understand what motivates them?”
    “Not really. To be curious about a thing you have to find something surprising in it, and I’m afraid that nothing surprises me any more.”
    “I see.” She appeared to be pondering this. “So you don’t think that there’s anything about the current situation…”
    “There’s certainly a good deal of crime at the moment, if that’s what you mean,” he said, “but most of it is of the humdrum sort. To my mind very little is fundamentally different from what went before; there’s just more of it. People break the law in the first place because they want to; and in the second, because they can. War-time. Peace-time. That’s really all there is to it.” She seemed dubious. “There certainly are a lot of young men who have been thrown out of the services and are unable to find a situation. They’ve spent all the money they received selling their demob suits and they think they might as well turn to crime. But the sort of crime which the majority of them turn to has nothing to do with murdering schoolgirls, or strangling good-time girls, or chopping up their wives and burying them in the cellar. For the most part, it simply has to do with one racket or another. The dibs, the gelt, the mazuma, the moolah: that’s the only motive any of them require. The war – rationing, shortages and so forth – has supplied a capital opportunity. You might say that the current crop of villains are merely supplying a demand.”
    They were passing the dreary expanse of Finsbury Park, where every blade of grass had been turned brown by the hot summer sun; or maybe by the war, which had limned the whole world in a sepia wash. Everything had looked just as drab when he had come back from France in 1918. He was young then, of course; a boy who could still recall the sharp colours of childhood , and the contrast had hit him with the force of a blow. Perhaps the colour had never returned in all that time and he simply hadn’t noticed, becoming gradually accustomed to the dun, muted tones.
    The desolate railway arches of Finsbury Park Station were looming before them, and he was thinking tormenting thoughts of fried egg and bacon when he spied a familiar figure a short distance away, making its limping progress towards the Astoria picture-house. Cooper did not believe in a criminal type, not as such; but he could always tell a villain by the way he dressed. The fellow he had just spotted was wearing a suit of profligate cut and a ten-guinea hat set at such a cheap angle it looked no better on him than a costermonger’s cheese-cutter cap would have done. He knew precisely who it was by the unbalanced gait, a legacy of the Ardennes offensive.
    “Hello,” he murmured. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about.”
    “Do you know him, sir?”
    “Know him? I’ve known him since he was six years old with his backside hanging out of his trousers and his father’s old boots tied on to his feet. He used to stuff the toes with newspaper so they wouldn’t fall off when he was running away from the police.” Cooper smiled at the recollection. “He grew up over there in the Bunk, on one of the worst streets in London.”
    The crime-ridden area adjacent to Finsbury Park Station had almost been bombed clean away, but its traces were still apparent in every villain in north London, and no doubt would be for generations to come.
    “Pull over, will you?”
    She stopped the car in front of the Clarence Hotel, and Cooper wound down the window.
    “On your way to church are you, Johnny?”
    Johnny Bristow, one-time juvenile delinquent turned spiv, stopped in his tracks. He wasn’t the sort who stood around on street corners trying to sell half a pound of black-market butter; Bristow planned big jobs and made contact with big buyers, and every detective in the Metropolitan Police Force was after him. Cooper automatically checked for a blackjack that might well have been protruding from the waistband of the