“Hello, Detective Inspector Caldwell. You look well,” said Maisie. She sized up Caldwell, who seemed to have developed something of a paunch since she last saw him—perhaps too many liquid lunches at the pub, compounded by late dinners due to his working hours. His jawline was less taut, and he had lost some hair, leaving his widow’s peak more pronounced. However, his blue eyes seemed to sparkle as he grasped the opportunity to offer a quip or two.
“Not the very best time to be in our trade, is it? Give me another day or two, and I might not be so full of joy. It’s too hot, there’s too many people coming into the country, there’s too many people getting themselves into a spot of bother, and now you turn up—come on, let’s repair to what you could loosely call my office. You can tell me all about what’s brought you to my door.” He turned to his assistant. “Able, do you think you might be able to ably make a cuppa for the good lady and myself? You know how I take mine, and milk, no sugar, for the lady, oh ablest of Ables.”
“Right you are, sir.”
Once seated with the half-paned door closed, Maisie removed her white summer gloves. “I suppose poor Sergeant Able would have the rise taken out of him wherever he worked—the constabulary is probably no worse than a bank or a factory.”
“Wait until he gets into the army. Mind you, I’m going to try to keep him—protected job, and all that—but we’re bound to lose some to the war. Then he’ll be Private Able, and heaven help him. Those lads will have him up a tree before he knows it. Now then, what can I do for you? I don’t need to tell you, I haven’t got all day.”
Maisie explained her connection to Dr. Francesca Thomas, though she did not mention her by name, instead referring to her “client.”
Caldwell pinched the top of his nose and blew out his cheeks. “I could have laid money on it being the Belgian you were here about. I know it sounds very dodgy—bullet to the back of the head, obviously made to kneel down—but we’ve come to the conclusion that the man who murdered Addens was just your more theatrical sort of thief. Addens had just picked up his pay packet—his mates had seen him put it in his back pocket—so all the villain of the piece had to do was come up behind him, stick a gun in the back of his head, get him to kneel down, take the money out of his pocket, pull the trigger, and run.”
Maisie nodded. “Hmmm. I knew there was a suspicion of theft, but I didn’t have details about the amount of money he had with him.”
“Now you do. And if you haven’t—”
“But something doesn’t sit well. Why on earth would someone then kill Addens? I mean, get him to kneel down, take the money—but all he had to do, the man with the gun, was tell Addens to stay where he was and not move. He didn’t have to kill him.”
“Times are hard, Miss Dobbs—well, for some of us they are—”
“Oh dear. Just when I thought you’d changed, you go sarcastic on me.”
“Sorry about that—slip of the tongue.” Caldwell leaned forward. “But just imagine it, Maisie—I can call you Maisie, can’t I? Just imagine it—this Frederick Addens works blooming hard down in the pit of the railway platform, he gets his wages on a Friday afternoon, just before knocking-off time, and the next thing you know a tyke is taking the hard-earned cash—money he probably needed to keep a roof over the family’s head and food on the table. And Addens was a big bloke. As a young lad he’d come over here on a boat in the war and made a life for himself through nothing but hard work. I wouldn’t have banked on him staying put for one minute—he would have got up and tackled that thief down, gun and all.” He sighed. “To top it all, no one saw the perpetrator, no one heard a shot—well, you wouldn’t, with the racket around St. Pancras. No one knows who might have killed him. We lost anything we could get our teeth into before it even happened.”
“What do you think about the killer?” asked Maisie.
He shrugged. “I’d put money on another foreigner. Someone willing to take a chance, who hasn’t any feeling for killing a person—someone who’s had it a bit rough. Having said that, he could come from Hackney, for all I know—there’s people who’ve been starving on our own streets, these past few years. At least this war is going to give a few more people jobs. I mean, put them in the army, put food in their bellies, and give them something to do. Give them guns for good reason, and perhaps they’ll stop making the policeman’s life a misery—with a bit of luck.”
“May I see the postmortem report? And how about statements from the men Addens worked with, or people he knew around World’s End?”
Caldwell sighed. He leaned back in his chair and reached into a cabinet to leaf through a series of files. Pulling out one thick buff-colored folder, he placed it on his desk.