“Still on sick leave, sir.”
“Still?” Maddox had been on leave from the day that Frobisher had started at Bow Street. Frobisher was convinced that the canker at the heart of the station, the most rotten of all the apples in the barrel, was Arthur Maddox. “What in God’s name is wrong with the man? Is he a malingerer?”
“He has a bad back, I believe, sir.”
A bad back didn’t stop a man doing his job, Frobisher thought irritably. “Well, if by any chance he comes in this morning, tell him that I’m looking for him.”
Maddox, promoted to inspector after the war, was thought to be in the pay of the very people he should be pursuing. He lived above his salary—a large semi-detached house in Crouch End, a wife, five children. (Five! Frobisher couldn’t imagine having even one.) A car, too, a Wolseley Open Tourer, the kind of car a well-off man owned, the kind of car a man negotiating for an Austin Seven felt envious of. Not to mention a summer holiday for the whole family in Bournemouth or Broadstairs, not in cheap boarding houses but in good hotels. Frobisher was certain that Maddox was in collusion with Nellie Coker, that he protected her from the law, but what else did he benefit from? Maddox was as sly as a fox and Nellie kept a henhouse, the queen of the coop. Did she also give Maddox free access to her chickens? (Yes, prone to extended metaphors.)
At the mention of Maddox’s name, the desk sergeant inhaled and stood up straighter, actions that caught Frobisher’s attention. He had become interested lately in what could be referred to as body language or “sub-vocal thinking,” whereby a man betrays himself with the slightest of indications. Of course, he was willing to concede, the desk sergeant may just have been straightening out a twinge in his back. He would concede the occasional twinge, but not a whole week off work, for heaven’s sake.
Frobisher sniffed the air. The ambrosial scent of frying bacon wafted towards him from somewhere. His stomach growled with envy. He frowned. Did they eat when he wasn’t here? Bacon sandwiches? What else did they get up to in his absence? He experienced an odd sense of disappointment, as he had done when he was younger and had been left out of the other boys’ pursuits. He had been an awkward, reticent child. Now he was an awkward, reticent man, but better at disguising it with a stiff carapace.
He frowned at the desk sergeant and the desk sergeant, sensing that his bacon was at risk, saved it literally with a swift change of subject, saying, “I heard Ma Coker got out this morning.” The desk sergeant was only too well aware—the whole station was—of Frobisher’s fixation on the Cokers, particularly Nellie.
“She did,” Frobisher said.
“Did you go, sir?”
“I did.”
Frobisher didn’t elaborate and the desk sergeant didn’t push his luck by asking him to. Frobisher had no small talk, he never had done. It meant that he was a much misunderstood man, presumed to be standoffish, arrogant even. He had tried, God help him, to chat and prattle about the weather or horse-racing, even films, but he ended up sounding like a poor amateur actor. (Well, Constable, how’s that allotment of yours coming on?) His real passions were esoteric, of little interest to the common man or his colleagues in Bow Street, certainly not to his wife—the Berlin Treaty between Germany and the Soviets (how could that end well?) or a demonstration of a “televisor” to the Royal Society by a chap called Baird (like something from an H. G. Wells novel). He had an enquiring mind. It was a curse. Even sometimes for a detective.
At home in Ealing, he was saved from the rigours of small talk by mutual incomprehension. His wife was called Charlotte—Lottie—although she had no birth certificate to prove that and Frobisher had his doubts. The detective in him would like to have investigated further, the husband in him thought it wise to leave the subject alone. She was French, or Belgian, she seemed unsure, certainly borderline, plucked from the blighted remains of Ypres at the end of the war with nothing but a bulb of garlic in her pocket, and had no papers to elucidate, and did not care to remember on account of what the doctors called “hysterical amnesia.”
When younger, Frobisher had imagined many qualities in his future wife, but he had not anticipated hysterical amnesia. Lottie’s story was tragic and complicated—again, something he had not predicted in his future wife.
A woman, screeching her innocence, was hauled in through the door by two constables, saving Frobisher from further thought.
“Dolly Pargeter, accused of pickpocketing on the Strand,” one of the uniformed constables who was trying to control her said to the desk sergeant.
“You’re out and about early, Dolly,” the desk sergeant said amiably. “Let’s get you checked into the Ritz, shall we?” His nose twitched, he was being kept from his bacon, but to tend to it would be admitting its existence to Frobisher.
“I’ll be off, then,” Frobisher said reluctantly. He preferred the police station to his Ealing terrace, which said much about the Ealing terrace. As he turned to go, the desk sergeant said, “Sir, I forgot—a girl washed up, fished out from the pier at Tower Bridge. She’s probably still in the Dead Man’s Hole. Thought you’d want to know.” Frobisher took an almost unhealthy interest in dead girls, in the opinion of Bow Street.
“Thank you, Sergeant,” Frobisher said, grateful to be reprieved from Ealing. “I’ll take a look.”
“It’s your day off, sir,” the desk sergeant reminded him.
“Crime never sleeps,” Frobisher said testily. He sounded priggish, he knew. “By the way, Sergeant—”
“Yes, sir?”
“I think your bacon’s burning.”
Frobisher couldn’t help smiling to himself as he made his way out of the station. That would serve them right for not including him, he thought.
As he crossed the road, he was forced to do a neat quickstep to avoid an approaching motorcycle. An Enfield, the rider anonymous behind goggles and leather helmet. How easy it would be to be killed on the streets of London. By accident or design.
An Awkward Age
Even before the Cokers were piling into their Bentleys outside Holloway, fourteen-year-old Freda was awake, roused by the shouts and tuneless singing of the night porters in Covent Garden market as they unloaded the lorries that started rumbling in at midnight from all over the country—apples from Evesham, mushrooms from Suffolk, exotica from all over the world.
Since running away from home, Freda—Alfreda Murgatroyd—had been renting an attic room in a dingy boarding house in Henrietta Street, so close to the market that she could swear she could smell the rotting cabbage leaves trodden underfoot. Freda had come to London to find her fortune, to become a star of the West End stage. She had not yet been discovered, but her courage had held and this Saturday she was to have an audition. Her life, she was sure, was about to change.