Sandra shook her head. “I’ve had enough of this already—I forget my gas mask half the time, and when you walk down the road there’s those big barrage balloons overhead, and you feel as if it’s the end of the world. Oh, and since the announcement yesterday, they’re adding to the sandbags around the Tube stations too. And they’ve been sandbagged for months now, all ready for this.”
“Those balloons certainly block out the sun,” said Maisie. She looked at Sandra and Billy in turn. “Get yourselves some tea”—she nodded towards a tray set upon a low table close to the windows overlooking Fitzroy Square—“and then join me in my office. I want to go over work in hand, and we’ve a new case. An important one too.”
“A murder, by any chance?” asked Billy.
Maisie nodded as she stepped across the threshold into her office. “Oh yes, Billy—it’s a murder.”
“Good—something to take my mind off all this war business.”
When Maisie Dobbs, psychologist and investigator, moved into the first-floor office in Fitzroy Square almost ten years earlier, it had comprised one large room, entered via a door situated to the right at the top of the broad staircase that swept up from the main entrance. The Georgian mansion had originally been home to a family of some wealth, but the conversion of the property to offices on the ground and first floors, with flats above, had taken place some decades earlier, as industry boomed during the reign of Queen Victoria. Billy’s desk had been situated to the right upon entering the office, with Maisie’s alongside the ornate fireplace—though a temperamental gas fire had long since replaced coals. When Sandra began her employment with Maisie to assist with administration of the business, another desk had been squeezed in close to the door.
A series of events and a crisis of confidence had led Maisie to relinquish her business in 1933. Billy and Sandra had found alternative employment, and Maisie traveled overseas. When she returned to England in late 1937, it was as a widow, a woman who had lost the child she was carrying on the very day her husband was killed in a flying accident in Canada. That he was testing a new fighter aircraft was known by only a few—as far as the press was concerned, Viscount James Compton was an aviator, a wealthy but boyish man indulging his love of flight, looking down at the earth.
Drawn back to her work as an investigator, Maisie discovered the former office in Fitzroy Square was once more available for lease—but it was not quite the same office. In the intervening years a considerable amount of renovation had been carried out on the instructions of the interim tenant. There were now two rooms—a concertina door dividing the front room from an adjacent room had been installed, so when a visitor entered, Billy’s desk was still to the right of the door, and Sandra’s situated where Maisie’s desk had once been positioned. But to the left, a second spacious room—the office of a solicitor during her first tenancy—was now Maisie’s domain, with the doors drawn back unless privacy was required. Today the doors were wide open. Maisie’s desk was placed to the left of the room, with a long trestle-type table alongside the back window, overlooking a yard where someone—a ground-floor tenant, perhaps—had cleared away a mound of rubbish and was endeavoring to grow all manner of plants in a variety of terra-cotta pots.
As they stepped into Maisie’s office, Billy took a roll of plain wallpaper from a basket in the corner—a housepainter friend of Billy’s passed on end-of-roll remnants—and pinned a length of about four feet onto the table. Maisie pulled a jar of colored crayons towards her and placed a folder on the table in front of her chair, opening it to a page of notes.
“‘Frederick Addens, age thirty-eight, a refugee from Belgium during the war.’” She sighed. “The last war, I suppose I should say.” She paused. “He was found dead in a position indicating some sort of ritual assassination—though according to information given to our client by the police, they suspect the murder is a random killing motivated by theft.” She pushed a sheet of paper towards Billy, who leaned in so that Sandra could read at the same time. “As you can see, he was a railway engineer, working at St. Pancras Station.”
“One of them blokes you see diving onto the lines when the train comes in,” said Billy, his finger on a line of typing. “Blimey, I’ve always thought that was a rotten job, down there where the rats run, all that oil, and that loco must be blimmin’ hot when it’s just reached the buffers. I tell you, I always wondered what would happen if the train started rolling and they hadn’t given the engineer time to get back onto the platform.” He shook his head.
“I think the guard checks, Billy,” said Sandra.
“What about our friends at Scotland Yard, miss?” asked Billy. “What have they been doing about the case?”
“They’ve pretty full hands at the moment—and though our client does not say as much, I suspect she believes there is an attitude of ‘victim not born here, so investigation can wait’ on the part of the police. That might not have been my conclusion, but the fact remains that any investigation is not moving at a pace considered satisfactory by the client, so she has turned to me.”