Ann Granger by The Companion Read Free Book Online

and then, when he spotted me, apprehensive again.
    ‘Biddle,’ Morris informed me. ‘He’s a good lad but he’s not been long in the force.’
    I thought privately that Biddle scarcely looked the minimum age to enrol, eighteen. Moreover, he was wearing one of the tall helmets which had recently replaced the familiar glazed top hats such as I had worn when I had first entered the police force. The new headgear still attracted much comment. To be honest, the helmet perched atop Biddle’s round skull in a way which I was afraid would make it a natural target for small boys with catapults.
    Morris, too, seemed struck by the sight. ‘I don’t know about these helmets, sir,’ he murmured to me. ‘I know the old hats were always likely to fall off at the first bit of action and they made your head like a furnace when the weather was hot. But they at least lent a man a bit of dignity.’ More loudly, he enquired, ‘Where’s Jenkins, Biddle?’
    ‘Round the back, Sergeant, arguing with that foreman. I think the gentleman from the railway company has come back, too. They’re not happy that the work hasn’t restarted in this area now the dead woman’s been taken away.’
    ‘Are they not, indeed?’ I allowed myself to say sarcastically, and then added, making the effort to sound more matter-of-fact, ‘So, this is the scene of the crime, eh?’
    It wasn’t the wretched Biddle’s fault any more than it was Morris’s. Biddle, pink and sweating in his high-buttoned uniform and with the helmet looking even more insecure, said earnestly, ‘There’s no one gone in, sir. I’ve been here, or Jenkins has, all the time.’
    The other houses in the row had been pulled down but these three at the end still stood, leaning against one another like a trio of drunken men. If one moved, they’d all fall. The body had been found by workmen entering the first of them to make preparations for the demolition.
    They were narrow houses, cheaply and shoddily constructed of inferior materials, deemed fit for the poor and designed chiefly in
order to make a quick fortune for the builder. I had just seen how they crumbled before the blows of the sledgehammers like a child’s castle built of wooden bricks. This was – or had been – Agar Town, notorious even in a city with more than its fair share of slums. Here a whole family had lived in one room and, in the worst cases, shared the room with other tenants. All the residents had shared the communal privies in the yards at the back where some also kept pigs. Sewage would have overflowed from the latrines and the pigs devoured the waste. A pig will eat anything. It’s a useful beast. Nearby the pump from which they all drew their water still stood. I hoped the navvies were not tempted to drink from it. Cholera had paid regular visits to Agar Town. The newspapers were saying Mr Bazalgette’s ingenious sewer system would deliver London from that plague, although those same journals reported numerous new cases in the East End at that very moment.
    In any case, there were other plagues: typhoid, diphtheria, consumption and those maladies which affect the poor alone and spring from despair. No one lives long in such conditions. Men are lucky to live forty years, women often less. Children die like flies and those who survive emerge from the hovels of their homes deformed and pale as ghosts, little old men and women themselves by ten years of age. I know such places and I knew Agar Town. When a man, or woman, is starving and has nothing to lose, what is there to stop either of them turning to crime? Perhaps the sweeping away of Agar Town to make way for the new railway terminus and yards might even be argued a blessing in disguise. Were it not for the fact that I suspected it had simply served to move the area’s problems elsewhere.
    ‘Mind how you go, sir,’ advised Morris, leading the way. ‘That outer wall is unsafe. Don’t go leaning on anything, will you? The whole lot could come