He had been up at an unearthly hour to go to Holloway and his empty stomach felt sour. It needed to be lined with a good breakfast. Frobisher’s thoughts turned to porridge, with honey carved from the comb and cream straight from the cow, and perhaps an egg fresh from beneath a fat-feathered hen. Unlikely on all fronts. Frobisher had enjoyed a rural childhood. He was into his forties now but he had never exorcized Shropshire from his soul. They had had chickens when he was young, free to roam, and it had been his job when he came home from school at the end of the day to search out the eggs, each discovery a small triumph, the pleasure of which had never palled. No egg had ever tasted as good since.
“What’s the night’s tally, Sergeant?” he asked.
“Full house, sir. It’ll take all day for the Magistrates’ Court to get through them.”
“The usual?”
“？’Fraid so. Run-of-the-mill stuff—solicitation, thieving, intoxication, assaults. A full tank of drunks stewing in their own misery. A murder in Greek Street—”
“Oh?” There had been a spate of baffling murders across London over the past few months. Unexplained random attacks on innocent passers-by. Of course, there were some superstitious fools, encouraged by the scandal sheets, who blamed the curse of Tutankhamun. Frobisher had been working with the murder squad in Scotland Yard and knew at firsthand how vexing these killings were, as there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to them. He could only conclude that they were the work of a madman.
“Nothing special, sir,” the sergeant said. “Just a pair of intoxicated gentlemen trying to batter the living daylights out of each other. The Laughing Policeman’s on it.”
“Sergeant Oakes? I wish people would use his real name.” God, how Frobisher hated that stupid Charles Penrose song.
“Yes, sir. Oakes is a cheerful sod though, you have to admit. Always sees the funny side of things.”
Oakes was experienced and, if nothing else, he seemed to Frobisher to be a safe pair of hands, although his constant jocundity was already beginning to grate. “Is Inspector Maddox on duty today?” he asked.
“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.