‘A bit of a guess then, sir.’
He laughed.
‘It’s always a guess, Barnett. Until confirmed. Anyway, we must watch out for those two. They’re hiding something.’
I smiled to myself as we walked. Though it would irk him to hear me say it, he was sometimes more like Sherlock Holmes than he realized. He put the last chocolate star in his mouth and dropped the empty punnet on the street.
‘What d’you think of the case?’ I asked.
‘It could be nothing, but if I were the parent I’d be worried. A weak-minded young woman being prevented seeing her family. A violent husband.’ He licked his fingers and wiped them on his britches. ‘Poor Birdie might be in a lot of trouble. The problem is, I’m not sure what we can do about it.’
Next morning we took the train from London Bridge. It rattled slow as an ox above the sooty terraces and warehouses of Bermondsey, then out through Deptford, New Cross and Lewisham. The further we got, the more the fog thinned until, just before Ladywell, it wasn’t there no more.
The guvnor put down his paper, opened the document case he’d brought, and pulled out the Barclays’ photograph. It was a picture of five women in summer bonnets standing in a park. Birdie was the shortest of them by some way. She stood open-mouthed between her mother and a young woman whose hand she held. She wore a drab cotton dress, her head tilting to the side as she looked at the young lady next to her. Birdie seemed lost in a pleasant dream.
‘I’m not familiar with the feeble-minded, Barnett,’ he said. He wheezed a little as he talked, his side whiskers spurling from his cheeks like woollen clouds. ‘I’m not sure I’ll know if she’s being coerced. Are they harder to read, d’you think?’
‘There was one lived below when I was growing up,’ I told him. ‘He used to get right cross with things. Don’t think he ever left his old ma.’
‘Little Albert’s the only one I know,’ he said, staring at the photograph. ‘I must say I’ve never felt I understood quite what’s going on in his head. Isabel had a soft spot for him.’
‘Did you hear from her over Christmas?’
The guvnor’s wife, Isabel, had left him a year or so ago and now lived with a lawyer in Cambridge. Recently she’d asked him to petition for a divorce, using her infidelity as grounds. He hadn’t done it.
‘She sent a card,’ he answered with a wave. ‘I think she’s beginning to see through that little swindler.’
‘What did she say?’
‘She asked when the building work would be finished.’
I nodded slowly, holding his gaze.
‘I’m reading between the lines, Barnett!’ he said, a little irritation in his voice. ‘If she’s wondering when our rooms are going to be finished it means she’s thinking about coming back to London. It was always him pushing her into it anyway.’
‘Don’t get your hopes up, sir,’ I said. ‘Remember what happened last time.’
He fell silent. The train stopped between stations and we waited.
‘What did you bring that briefcase for?’ I asked him.
‘I’m going to try something. But I forgot to ask about your Christmas, Barnett. Did you enjoy it?’
I nodded. I’d spent it alone getting hammered in a pub on Bankside where nobody knew me. I couldn’t tell him that, just as I couldn’t tell him why. It had been more than six months, and still I couldn’t tell him.
‘My sister cooked a bird,’ he said. ‘Lewis doesn’t celebrate, of course, although he did eat more than his share. Ettie was off delivering sugar mice to the street children for half the day. Then Lewis was abed with cramps. What a glutton he is, and don’t ask me about my sister. Lord, how that woman can eat. And she’s the cheek to urge me to take purgatives. Ah, that reminds me.’
He reached inside his coat and held out a knitted thing to me.
‘It’s a Christmas gift, Barnett. A muffler. That thing you’re wearing’s in tatters.’
He’d never given me a gift before, and I was touched. I opened it out, a red and grey scarf of thick wool. I wrapped it around my neck.
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Remember that next Christmas.’ He patted me on the knee and picked up his newspaper again. The train started to move.
‘More on the Swaffam Prior murder,’ he said. ‘They’re calling for the Police Inspector’s dismissal. Look here, a whole column on the poor chap. Damned editor doesn’t understand the nature of evidence. God forbid they ever get hold of one of our cases. And this campaign! The Sheriff of Ely, the Bishop. All sorts of do-gooders. How can they know? I mean really. They assume a fourteen-year-old boy can’t remove an old woman’s head. Tripe! A fourteen-year-old can do anything a man can do.’
He turned the page.
‘Oh Lord,’ he groaned. ‘What’s happened to this paper? That charlatan’s never out of it.’
‘Sherlock Homes again, sir?’
‘He’s been asked to investigate the disappearance of some young Lord from his school. Son of the blooming Duke of Holdernesse. Well, he’ll be right at home there.’ He read on a bit, his purple lips hanging open among the tangle of his whiskers. ‘What? No! Oh, Lord. Oh no, no.’ He was blinking convulsively, confusion writ upon his brow. ‘There’s a six-thousand-pound reward, Barnett. Six thousand pounds! I could solve five hundred cases and not earn half that amount!’
‘They’re an important family, sir,’ I said. ‘Isn’t the Duke a Knight of the Garter?’
He snorted. ‘Holmes used to be more discreet.’
‘You don’t know it was Holmes told the press.’
‘You’re right. It was no doubt Watson, trying to sell a few more books.’
There were no cabs at Catford Bridge station so we walked down past a row of almshouses towards the green. It was a frosty day, the sky low and dark over the buildings. Though it wasn’t bright, it was some relief to be out of the murky air of the city. I felt my steps grow lighter, my head clear.
Catford was an old farming village being eaten by London. There was building work going on everywhere: a tramway to Greenwich was being laid; bricklayers were putting up the walls of a bank next to the pump; foundations were being dug out for a grand new pub. Off the main street, past the small houses near the station, big villas for merchants and city workers were rising. Poorer areas were hidden here and there, in the shadows of the tram depot and the forge, where the families of farm workers lived in rickety sheds and damp basements, crammed into wretched houses with boarded windows and broken gutters.
The Plough and Harrow was just the sort of place you found outside town – a stone floor that could have done with a broom for the mud, walls panelled in dark wood, a half door that served as a counter. A glum grandma sat with a blank-faced younger fellow on the benches at one side of the fire, while three old blokes with veined cheeks and pipes in their mouths played dominoes on the other. An ancient dog with matted hair chewed a stick by their feet.
‘Any cabs around here, madam?’ the guvnor asked the landlady after we’d got a couple of pints.
‘The lad may take you in the cart if it’s local,’ she answered. She wore a cowboy hat like you see in the Buffalo Bill shows.