If Philippa Penhow hadn’t gone to Bleeding Heart Square on that January day, you and perhaps everyone else might have lived happily ever after, for ever and ever amen. Even Joe Serridge.
The air was cold and damp and the horsehair mattress on the truckle bed was filled with lumps of what felt like rock. In the early part of the night there had been a good deal of shouting and, a little after midnight, what had sounded like an inconclusive fight. Lorries rumbled in the distance, their engines mingling with the ebb and flow of the snores next door. In the early hours came the rattling of the early trams, barrows jolting across the cobbles, the whistling of the milkman and the chink of his bottles.
Lydia’s room was next to her father’s bedroom and at one time perhaps had been used as a dressing room or a closet. It was furnished with a bed, a chest of drawers covered with chipped green paint, and a rickety washstand with a cracked marble top. There were two hooks on the back of the door and also a chair with a broken wicker seat, which she had wedged under the door handle when she went to bed. The fireplace was choked with soot. The only gas fire in her father’s flat was in the sitting room.
‘You’re lucky the room is empty,’ he had told her. ‘The last lodger left the week before last.’
She left the warmth of the bed a little before eight o’clock and washed unsatisfactorily in the handbasin of the freezing little lavatory at the end of the landing. One of the first of her jobs today would be to rectify the inadequacies of her packing. She had brought Virginia Woolf’s
The house was still quiet around her, apart from the faint rasp of her father’s snoring. The smell on the landing was worse than it had been the previous evening. A piece of fish that had gone off? A rat under a floorboard? Someone really should investigate.
She went into the kitchen opposite the sitting room. Little more than a cupboard, it contained a gas ring, a sink, an Ascot water heater, a meat safe and, below the sink and draining board, a cutlery drawer and a dank cupboard. The only window was a small, cracked skylight. An unwashed saucepan and two mismatched bowls were standing in the sink; they had dined last night on powdered soup, which she had made with her father’s guidance. She rummaged in the cupboard but found no sign of tea or milk.
Her mind filled with a vision of the dining room at Frogmore Place with the kidneys and the bacon sizzling on the hotplate, the coffee pot and the teapot on the table. Her mouth watered. Hunger clawed at her stomach. There was nothing for it. She would have to venture into the strange world outside this house.
Her father had given her a latchkey last night when he went out for what he referred to as a business meeting. Lydia left a pencilled note for him on his sitting-room mantelpiece. She met no one on her way out of the house.
Outside, the cold, raw air made her gasp. It had a strange, almost metallic tang to it. Two men in brown overalls were looking under the bonnet of a motor car at the other end of the square. They looked up and whistled at her. She ignored them and hurried past a decaying pump on the corner by the Crozier and into the alley to Charleston Street. Opposite the pub was a public library, with a queue of bedraggled people waiting patiently outside the doors. The pavements on both sides of the road were crammed with hurrying men and women in cheap clothes. Clerks, Lydia supposed, or people like that, on their way to work.
She allowed herself to be swept like a twig in a current into Hatton Garden. A flock of young women, chattering as incomprehensibly as starlings, carried her across the road and into the street on the other side. More by luck than good judgement, she found herself in a curving lane called Fetter Passage. Among the row of shops it contained was a small cafe called the Blue Dahlia. The windows were steamed up but the smell of fried food drew her inside.
Nobody took any notice of her. An enormously fat woman in a stained apron was standing behind a counter. After a quick glance at what other people were eating, she joined the huddle waiting to be served. When her turn came, she ordered tea and a bacon roll. The woman was surly to the point of rudeness with her, though she seemed happy to talk to her other customers, sometimes breaking out into cackles of laughter. The tea came in a chipped white mug. It was milky and sweet. The bacon tasted strong and was mainly fat and rind. Afterwards, she wondered whether one left a tip. She wasn’t sure how these things were managed, if they were managed at all, in an establishment like this. In the end she pushed a penny under the rim of her plate and hurried out of the cafe.
One of the neighbouring shops sold her a toothbrush, toothpaste, a face flannel and soap. She had at least remembered to pack a towel. The food and exercise had warmed her. She walked south down Fetter Passage into Holborn, where she turned left by the vast Prudential building. She crossed the southern end of Hatton Garden and immediately came to the mouth of a cul-de-sac.
She paused to get her bearings. The cul-de-sac was guarded by two sets of railings separated by a tiny lodge with a disproportionately tall chimney sprouting from its roof. A man in a brown top hat and frock coat was standing by the railings with a pipe in his mouth. His mouth was almost entirely concealed by a nicotine-stained moustache in need of a trim. He saw Lydia and touched his hat.
A small white dog pattered round the corner of the lodge and sniffed Lydia’s ankles. She bent down to scratch his head.
‘Nipper! Come here!’ the man said. ‘Sorry about that, Miss. He’s got an eye for the ladies.’
‘That’s all right — I don’t mind.’
‘The trouble is, you have to watch him. He can be a bit funny with strangers. And his bite’s worse than his bark.’
The dog sat down and scratched his ear with a hind leg. Lydia looked through the railings at the terraced street beyond. Though still respectable, the houses were clearly past their best. At the end was a chapel or small church. The line of its roof looked familiar.
‘Is Bleeding Heart Square over there?’ she asked. ‘On the other side of the church?’
‘Yes, Miss. All part of my beat.’
‘Your beat?’
He waved his hand at the cul-de-sac behind him. ‘I’m the Beadle for what they call the Rosington Liberty. Chief of police and head porter all rolled into one, at your service.’
A car pulled up at the lodge, and the man hurried to swing open one of the roadway gates. Lydia walked on towards a busy crossroads with Smithfield market on the far side. The dark, sour smell of blood and raw meat mingled with the fumes of the gasoline. That, she realized, was the source of the tang in the air as she had come out of the house that morning. Bleeding Heart Square smelled, quite literally, of blood.
Quickening her pace, she turned left into Farringdon Road. A little later she turned left again and discovered that she was back in Charleston Street. A few hundred yards ahead was the sign of the Crozier, the public house guarding the approach to Bleeding Heart Square.
Hugging herself against the cold, she walked back to number seven. The mechanics whistled at her again. As she was unlocking the front door, she heard footsteps behind her. She glanced back. An old woman in a grey overcoat was walking rapidly towards her. The key turned and Lydia opened the door. The woman was now on the steps behind her. Wispy hair escaped from under the brim of a hat like a squashed currant.
‘Hello. Are you looking for somebody here?’
‘I live here,’ the woman mumbled. ‘What are you doing?’
‘My name’s Lydia Langstone. My father’s Captain Ingleby-Lewis.’
‘Didn’t know he had a daughter.’
Lydia had no reply to that so she went into the house. The smell in the hall was even worse. She swallowed, trying not to retch.
‘Dead cat?’ the woman said, making it sound like an accusation.
‘I don’t know what it is.’
She pushed past Lydia and sniffed the air. ‘It’s over there.’
She nodded towards the back of the hall, where a table stood near the foot of the stairs. Lydia walked
