unreality. She scanned the Situations Vacant columns and wished she were a man. A stretch of the Thames in its upper reaches had turned a rusty colour and thousands of fish had been found dead. The Women’s Appeal Fund for German Jewish Women and Children had held a luncheon at the Savoy Hotel yesterday. The Welsh coalfields were in crisis again, and the Prince of Wales had made a gramophone record in aid of Poppy Day. According to the weather forecast London would have local morning fog and probably occasional rain later, though in Fetter Passage there was no later about it.
Her breakfast arrived. Lydia folded the newspaper open at the crossword. ‘Not shown by game birds (two words) (5, 7).’ She ate quickly, alert to her surroundings like a cat in a strange place.
Two men came in and took a table near the door. One was in his fifties, a skinny fellow who threw off his shabby tweed overcoat to reveal a greasy suit. He wore a hard collar but no tie. All his clothes were a little too large for him, as though he had recently shrunk. He hadn’t shaved, and his hair needed cutting.
His companion was much younger. His suit was obviously off the peg and his flat cap was frankly awful, the sort of thing a chauffeur might have worn on his day off. But she liked his long face, which seemed crowded with overlarge and irregularly distributed features. It looked unfinished, as though its maker had been tempted away by a more interesting job, which gave it a sort of vulnerability. For an instant he glanced in her direction. His eyes were striking, a vivid blue that was out of place among the muddy browns and shades of grey around him. He looked away.
It was the flat cap that jogged her memory. She was almost sure this was the man she had seen yesterday afternoon, standing outside the Crozier and staring at Bleeding Heart Square.
The door closed behind the elegant young woman who had been sitting by herself with
‘That girl you’ve been staring at,’ Sergeant Narton said. ‘You’ll know her again, eh?’
‘What? Oh — that one? The one who just left?’
‘You’ve been looking at her all the time we’ve been in here.’
‘Not really,’ Rory said stiffly. ‘It’s just that she — she stood out. One noticed her in here, somehow. Not like the other customers. I was naturally curious.’
‘Have you seen her before?’
‘No.’
‘Sure?’
‘Of course I am. I’d remember.’
‘She knows someone at number seven. I think she spent the night there.’
Rory shrugged. ‘That’s nothing to do with me, Sergeant.’
‘All right.’ Narton leant forward and lowered his voice. ‘First, I’m grateful you agreed to meet me this morning.’
‘I don’t understand why-’
‘Now look here, sir, from what you said yesterday, you’ve never met Mr Serridge?’
‘That’s correct.’
‘So he’s never met you?’
‘He doesn’t even know I exist.’
‘Well there’s a thing. I’ve thought it over and discussed it with my superiors. And now I’ve got a little proposition for you. Could kill two birds with one stone. But it’s confidential. Police business, see? You mustn’t mention it to a soul, even your young lady.’
Lydia unlocked the front door of 7 Bleeding Heart Square with her father’s spare latchkey. The hall no longer smelled of rotten meat, only of old cabbage and the bedroom slops. As she was closing the door behind her, she heard footsteps at the back of the hall. It was the plump man who had let her in when she had first arrived at the house.
‘Hello, hello,’ he said, smiling broadly. ‘It’s Miss Ingleby-Lewis, isn’t it?’ He had a high-pitched, breathless voice, cockney with a veneer of education spread thinly over the vowels. ‘I hear you’re staying with us for a few days.’
‘It’s Mrs Langstone, actually.’
‘Beg pardon?’
‘My name,’ Lydia said, and tried to slip past him.
But the man had contrived to pin her into the angle between the table and the wall. He smiled at her and his face twitched. ‘I don’t think we’ve been properly introduced. I’m Malcolm Fimberry.’
‘How do you do,’ Lydia said without enthusiasm. ‘Now I must really-’
‘I’m so glad to have run into you. Seeing as we’re going to be neighbours, I understand, in a manner of speaking. It’s a friendly house, and that’s good because it’s much nicer if everyone gets on well together, I always think.’ He gave her arm a little squeeze for emphasis. ‘Anything you want to know, you can always come and ask me. I’m on the ground floor, that door there.’
Lydia tried to push past him but his arm, surprisingly solid, was suddenly in the way.
‘Will you please let me pass?’ she said. ‘I’m going upstairs.’
At that moment the door opened behind her.
‘Mr Fimberry?’
The plump man jumped away from Lydia as though she had poked him with a stick. Mrs Renton was standing in the doorway of the room to the right of the front door. She had a needle in one hand and what looked like a woman’s blouse in the other. ‘If you want your sheets mended, Mr Fimberry, you’ll have to pay in advance this time, if you please.’
‘Of course, Mrs Renton. Can’t make bricks without straw, can we?’ He produced a leather purse and shook a handful of change into the palm of his hand.
‘Three shillings will cover it.’
He handed her a florin and a couple of sixpences. ‘Much obliged, I’m sure. Now I really must be off.’ He aimed a smile midway between the two women. ‘Father Bertram will be wondering where I’ve got to. No peace for the wicked, eh?’
As the front door closed behind him, Mrs Renton stared calmly at Lydia. ‘You have to watch that one,’ she said. ‘Mind you, his bark’s worse than his bite.’
‘Unlike Nipper,’ Lydia said.
‘What?’
‘A dog I met the other day.’
‘Oh, that one.’ Mrs Renton peered at Lydia. ‘Nasty little thing. So you’re having the little room next to the Captain’s for the time being?’
‘Yes. My father thinks it will be all right. But I–I’m not quite sure how things are managed here. In all sorts of ways.’
‘I dare say the Captain isn’t much help on that front.’
‘I don’t know how things are run, you see.’ Lydia felt absurdly foolish, like a child again. ‘How the cooking and cleaning are done. That sort of thing.’
‘A char comes in to do the stairs and the hall and so on,’ Mrs Renton said. ‘And the bathroom and the WCs. It’s meant to be once a week. All the flats and rooms share the same bathroom — you know that? She obliges some of the tenants too, including Mr Fimberry, but not your father. He manages for himself, most of the time.’
‘What about cooking?’
‘There’s a kitchen on each floor except the attic. The flats share. But I don’t think the Captain has much use for kitchens. Well, that’s natural. Nor does Mr Serridge, come to that. Mr Serridge has got the other two rooms on your landing.’
‘I wonder if you would be able to advise me about what to do,’ Lydia said. ‘I haven’t done much of … of this sort of thing. And I’m afraid my father’s rather an old bachelor.’
Mrs Renton looked up at her and pursed her lips. Lydia thought how unnatural it was, that someone like herself should be practically begging this old woman for help.
There was a knock on the front door. Mrs Renton marched in an unhurried way down the hall and opened it.
