Ann Granger by The Companion Read Free Book Online Page A

down around our ears. Fact is, it’s one of the reasons the foreman gave for moving her out. “Don’t blame me,” he said, “if by the time your inspector gets here, the whole
lot has tumbled and your dead woman is buried good and proper!” Only his language wasn’t near as decent as that. But he had a point, sir, as I could see. Best be quick, sir.’
    ‘All right, all right!’ I said testily. I could see for myself how shaky the whole structure was. ‘You’ve spoken to the men who found her?’
    ‘Yes, sir, I took statements and they made their marks to them. Irish fellers, the pair of them, crossing themselves and hoping as the poor woman would rest in peace.’
    We had made our way down a narrow hallway stinking of mould and generations of unwashed bodies. There was another insidious miasma seeping from the walls: poverty. It has its own smell; despair an odour all its own. I felt it now creep into my nostrils and pulled out my handkerchief again to press to my nose.
    ‘Whiffs a bit, don’t it?’ observed Morris kindly, observing my distress.
    I was ashamed of my weakness and put the handkerchief away.
    We had reached a back room. Here there was a new smell, the sweetly rotten stench of death. She had been taken away but nothing would remove the foulness until the whole place came down. I looked around, trying to envisage the room as a home. Someone, probably in an attempt to keep the draughts out, had lined the walls with old newspapers. Advertisments for exhibitions of watercolours by ‘a lady’, good-quality imported French soap and antiquarian books formed an incongruous background to a life in which any of those things would have been totally meaningless. The floorboards were bare, rotten in parts, and all furniture had been removed but for a broken bedstead against a wall.
    ‘She was under there,’ said Morris, pointing at it. ‘Half pushed underneath but not hidden although whoever put her there had thrown a bit of old carpet over her. Her feet stuck out. You could have seen what it was straight off, the minute you came in here, even if you hadn’t smelled her first. The men who found her knew
it at once for a corpse and yelled for the foreman to come. Then, according to the foreman, they all downed tools. None of ’em would touch a brick, not anywhere on the site, not while she stayed. He panicked because the railway company would blame him for the delay. He would have she must be moved. I told him regulations said, the inspector must see her for himself, but he sent off someone to fetch the gentleman from the railway company and he sent off somewhere else. In the end, word come down from the superintendent, we could move her out to the nearest mortuary. But I got a bit of chalk and drew round the spot, see?’
    Morris pointed proudly to a roughly scrawled shape on the floorboards half under the old bedstead.
    ‘I took a good look round, Biddle and Jenkins too. We went upstairs and everything. We didn’t find anything of interest.’
    Morris had done his best to prevent removal of the body but, in the end, the railway company had called on friends in higher places. As the men pulling down the houses to clear the whole area for the building of the new railway terminus would not work while the body lay in situ , ergo the body had been removed. It now lay in the mortuary which is where we would go when I’d seen what was left to be seen here. You see I have learned my Latin phrases. I am an ambitious man and I’ve worked hard. I’ve spent long hours by candlelight making good the shortcomings in my education and now I’m an inspector of the Metropolitan Police Force based at Scotland Yard. But when I look in the shaving mirror of a morning I often observe aloud, ‘You fool nobody, Ben Ross. A collier’s son you were and a collier’s son you remain.’
    I looked down at the dusty floor and Morris’s effort to preserve the evidence and sighed. The workmen who had found the body had