“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.
Although small, Freda looked older than her years. For a pretty girl, she was surprisingly lacking in vanity about her looks, which she considered to be more a matter of chance than anything else. Or God-given, if you believed that God gave beauty as a gift, which seemed unlikely. It was more like the kind of trick that the Greek gods played on people—a curse rather than a gift. One of the few books Freda had read was an illustrated anthology of Greek myths （A Child’s Guide） that she had found abandoned on the seat in a train carriage when she was ten years old. It was hardly a helpful primer for life.