“Moved in different circles did he? Try.” So far Humpty Dumpty was not getting a penny.
“Unassuming, undemonstrative – unless he was stinko …”
“How d’you know if you didn’t socialize?”
“We bumped into each other on the doorstep a few times. You hear everything down here.” He glanced at the ceiling. “The more beer he’d had, the heavier his tread.”
“Very well. What was the other adjective you were going to use before I so rudely interrupted?”
His interviewee watched him waiting, pencil poised.
“Unintelligent.” He smirked. “A bathetic climax. Sorry.”
“So am I. Nice oxymoron though.” Humpty was playing with him, trying to distract him. What was he hiding?
The kettle lid rattled as the water reached boiling point. Johnny’s blood was not far behind.
“And the other tenants? Did Wally socialize with them?”
“Not so far as I know. The Sproats on the ground-floor have a six-month-old baby. The wailing never stops.”
“Seems pretty quiet now.”
“He works at the Royal Mint. She’s a cleaner. Leaves the brat with her mother in Shoreditch during the day.”
“Do the people above them complain about the noise as well?”
“Mr Tull is deaf as a post. Lucky old sod. You won’t get anything out of him.” He blew a stream of smoke towards the range. “The tea won’t make itself, you know.”
“So who completes this happy household?”
“Rebecca. Beautiful Becky Taylor.” He sighed. “She knows what Wally was like – inside and out, if you get my drift. She’s some sort of secretary at Grocers’ Hall. Talk to her.”
“I will.” Johnny slipped his notebook into a pocket. “Thanks for your time. Shouldn’t you be at work as well?”
“I am.” He hauled himself to his feet. “Looking after this place is an endless job. There’s no clocking off here.”
He rinsed out the teapot and spooned in four heaps of Lipton’s. It seemed there was no clocking on either.
“Who owns the house?”
“I do.”
Johnny, while Yaxley’s back was turned, slipped out of the kitchen. He was halfway up the stairs before the landlord noticed.
“Oi! Steadman! What about the money?”
“Send me an invoice.”
Even if the sluggard were to submit one he would see that it was never paid. Instinct told him Yaxley had concealed more than he’d revealed.
The first body had been found on Monday in Gun Square, actually a gloomy triangle off Houndsditch. Jimmy Bromet, nineteen, was a waiter at the Three Nuns Hotel next door to Aldgate Station. He, too, had been tied to his bed and emasculated, but not castrated. No one in the lodging house had a heard a sound.
On his way back to the office Johnny made the cabbie take a detour. Although entirely surrounded by banks, Grocers’ Hall, off Prince’s Street, had its own courtyard. Two covered entrances allowed vehicles to drive in and out without the irksome task of reversing. A polite but obdurate doorkeeper informed him that Miss Taylor had arrived late for work. Consequently she would not be available until this evening. And livery companies were supposed to be charitable institutions.
“Undemonstrative? Fifteen letters.” Tanfield, a junior reporter, had a strange knack of determining the length of a word no matter how long.
“We’ll never know how long Chittleborough was though, will we?” said Dimeo. The deputy sports editor was obsessed with physical attributes. “What d’you think the killer does with the trophies?”
“I loathe to think,” said Johnny.
“Yet you must find out, Steadman, post haste. It is what you are paid to do.”
Gustav Patsel’s wire-rimmed spectacles glinted in the milky midday sun. Tanfield and Dimeo returned to their desks. “Pencil”, as the news editor was ironically known, had never been popular but, since the invasion of Czechoslovakia, anti-German feeling was at an all-time high. The ever-hungry Hun’s waist had its own policy of expansionism.
“Perhaps they’re turned into sausages,” said Johnny. “You’d know more about that than me. Frankfurters, bratwurst, knackwurst …” Dimeo disguised a cackle with a cough.
“I want a thousand words on the two murders by four o’clock,” said Patsel. “They are obviously the work of the same degenerate.” He was about to say more when Quarles, his long-suffering deputy, handed him a sheet of yellow paper. The bulletin did not contain good news.
Johnny watched Patsel resume his throne in the centre of the newsroom and pick up a phone.
“What’s so important?”
“Goya and El Greco are following in the footsteps of Rembrandt and Rubens,” said Quarles.
The central rooms of the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square had been closed for more than a month. Rumour had it the priceless paintings were being stored somewhere in Wales.
“They and their curators clearly don’t have much faith in old Neville,” said Johnny. “I wish Pencil would pack up and leave.”
“He’d rather be interned than return to the Fatherland – and who can blame him? Pressmen are even less popular over there. At least we try to tell the truth.”
“Are we interested in birching? There’s another demonstration planned for this afternoon. It might be lively.”
“No. Given the whole country is in danger of losing their skins, you’d think they’d have something better to do. Concentrate on the murders. See if you can find anything that connects the two men.”
Peter Quarles was the main reason why Johnny was still at the Daily News: without his frequent, good-natured interventions, Patsel and his star reporter would have come to blows. The editor was not blessed with a sense of humour. He found Johnny’s wit and disregard for authority difficult to take. Quarles, though, had learned to handle – and respect – Johnny’s wayward talent.
Johnny, keen to hear more, rang Matt but was told D. C. Turner was still out of the office. The press bureau at Old Jewry, headquarters of the City of London police, promised to relay any developments in the double murder case. He wouldn’t hold his breath.
Apart from the manner of their deaths, there appeared to be nothing to link the cases. Bromet had lived on the first floor; Chittleborough on the third. Had the two bachelors known each other? Bromet had no criminal convictions. Did Chittleborough have a clean record too?
Matt would have no difficulty in answering the second question. He was invariably quick to acknowledge the part Johnny had played in his promotion. Although unofficial, their collaboration in several headline-hitting cases had boosted both their careers. The lifelong friends made a good team. That didn’t mean they always saw eye to eye.
Lizzie jerked awake. The glowing coals shifted in the grate. Lila Mae, Johnny’s god-daughter, slumbered on in her arms. It was natural for the child to fall asleep after being fed, but not for her. Still, in more ways than one, breast-feeding took it out of her.
She’d been dreaming again. The same silly dream. Walking down the aisle, carrying her bouquet of lilies of the valley – she could smell them now – and coming to a stop beside the man who, instead of being