Bleeding Heart Square

by Andrew Taylor

  The taxi driver made no move to help her as she got out. He hadn’t driven into the square or offered to carry the suitcase. Not that it mattered. It was simply that it meant something. She was no longer the mistress of a house in Frogmore Place and another house in Gloucestershire. She was a woman in a plain coat and hat, carrying a small suitcase, who had asked to be taken to Bleeding Heart Square.

  She paid the cabby, giving him a smaller tip than she would usually have done. He grunted, peering impertinently into her face, and drove off. Lydia crossed the road, trying to walk like someone who knew where she was going, and marched up the entry. It led to an ill-lit open space, much darker than the street she had left behind. A man passed her, walking quickly, his face no more than a white blur above his upturned collar.

  Lydia glanced from side to side, fighting panic. Smudges of smoke drifted across a grey sky. Buildings reared up on every side, some with lighted windows, none matching its neighbour. In front and to the right was the jagged outline of what might have been a small church. From somewhere on the left came the sound of hammering. There were too many shadows for comfort and it was all too easy to imagine the presence of invisible watchers.

  Her eyes adjusted slowly to the lack of light. No one seemed to be about. The so-called square was an irregular quadrilateral, with the pub and the church on the two longer sides. She picked her way across greasy cobbles towards an uneven row of houses on the right. The houses were built of smoke-blackened brick, and the ground-floor windows, a mixture of modern and Georgian sashes, were protected with vertical bars. At the far end of the row was a short flight of steps leading up to a panelled door with a grimy fanlight above and a tarnished brass 7 above the letter box. There was a card in the window on the right of the door, bisected by one of the bars.

  M. RENTON – DRESSMAKER LATEST FASHIONS – ALTERATIONS CUFFS AND COLLARS TURNED APPLY WITHIN

  At least the address really existed. Lydia rang the bell and waited. Nobody answered the door. She tried again, ringing the bell and giving a double rap with the knocker.

  Almost immediately the door opened, as though someone had been standing just inside waiting for her to use the knocker. A small, plump man stared at her with intense curiosity. He had fair, curly hair and wore gold-rimmed pince-nez attached to his lapel with a black ribbon. His tweed suit looked as if he had slept in it. He smiled at Lydia and rubbed his right hand up and down his trouser leg.

  ‘Yes?’ he said.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ Lydia said. ‘I’m looking for Captain Ingleby-Lewis.’

  ‘First floor,’ the man said, standing back and holding the door open with an expansive gesture. ‘Second door on the left.’

  He stood back to allow her to pass. But the hall was not wide and his arm brushed hers as she passed. She caught a whiff of his sweat, too, overlaying other smells which had something to do with old cooking and inadequate drains and rotten fish. Breathing through her mouth, she walked upstairs, her shoes tapping on the bare boards. She knew he was watching her.

  On the landing she paused. The smell was really rather beastly, even up here. She tapped on the second door on the left. The plump man was now climbing the stairs.

  ‘He may be dozing,’ he called up to her. ‘Try the door. It won’t be locked.’

  Lydia knocked again. She waited a few seconds, turned the handle and went in, partly to escape the man behind her.

  The room beyond was at the front of the house. There were two tall windows. At one end was an unlit gas fire. At the other stood a heavy dining table, its top scarred with cloudy rings and dark burns. An old man in a shabby black overcoat slumbered in an armchair near the fireplace.

  Lydia glanced from side to side, taking in unwashed plates, empty bottles, a pile of broken glass beside a table leg, a patched hearthrug and a pair of shoes, lying on their side at the old man’s feet. The uppers were well polished but the heels were worn down and there was a hole in one of the soles. She touched the top of the table with her gloved finger. It felt tacky, like drying paint, and left a grey oval smudge on her glove.

  A change in the man’s breathing alerted her. She glanced at his face, which was dominated by a blunt, swollen nose and a neatly trimmed moustache. His eyes were open.

  ‘Who on earth are you?’ he asked, and yawned.

  ‘I’m Lydia,’ she said. ‘Your daughter.’

  Herbert Narton slipped back into Bleeding Heart Square. He was just in time to see the girl who had passed him by the Crozier going into number seven. That fat little man Fimberry had let her in so she probably knew him or someone else in the house.

  The door closed. He glanced around the square. No one was about, though the mechanics at the other end were making one hell of a din in their workshop by the row of garages. He stood back, sheltering in the shallow recess in front of a gate on the other side of the alley from the pub. It wasn’t dark but it was such a gloomy afternoon that there was little risk of his being seen unless someone passed close to where he was standing.

  At number seven, they had already turned on the electric light in several of the rooms – in Mrs Renton’s on one side of the front door, and Fimberry’s on the other. There were also lights in the two windows on the first floor which belonged to the old drunk. Narton had seen him an hour or so earlier, weaving across the square from the saloon bar of the Crozier.

  He waited. His feet and hands were freezing. His left wrist was itching again and he scratched it under the glove. In the end his patience was rewarded by a glimpse of the girl on the first floor. He watched her drawing the curtains across the windows. He was too far away to get a good look at her face. But she wasn’t wearing her coat any more. So her connection was almost certainly with old Ingleby-Lewis.

  Now that was interesting because, of all the people in that house, Ingleby-Lewis was the closest to Serridge. Perhaps the girl was one of his, and he’d sent her here with a message. She looked a bit old for Serridge but the bastard had been known to stretch a point when there was money to be had.

  The doors of the workshop opened, and light and noise spilled onto the cobbles. There were signs of life in the Crozier – it wouldn’t be long before they opened up for the evening. Better to call it a day, Narton thought, get out while the going was good.

  He walked to Liverpool Street to save the bus fare. The exercise warmed him, and so did the sense that the day had not been entirely wasted. At the station he had time before his train to buy a cup of tea at a stall. While the tea cooled at his elbow, he took out his notebook and jotted down the afternoon’s movements.

  Not a bad day, taken all in all. No sign of Serridge, of course, but at least he was building up a detailed picture of the house and its occupants. Also, at three o’clock he had seen the young man again, the one Narton suspected might also be watching the house. The chap didn’t fit the picture, and he had looked shifty in the unpractised way that people had when they were generally honest.

  Finally, just before he had gone off duty, there had been that girl. He had a hunch about her, and he had learned to trust his hunches. She meant something. She was going to be important.

  Around him swirled the crowds hurrying home through the glare, the din and the racket of the station. He didn’t want to go home. There was nothing he wanted there, not now. He wanted to go back to Bleeding Heart Square and wait for Serridge.

  2

  You wake to another day, another entry in the little green book. Enter the devil.

  Monday, 6 January 1930

  Mr Orburn arrived promptly at 10.30 in his motor car and drove me off at great speed to Holborn. On the way he explained that he felt the time had come to modernize the house, and that it would be an investment for the future. In particular, he says we should bite the bullet and install electricity and overhaul the plumbing arrangements. The roof needs work as well. I expect he is right, though I always think electric light is rather harsh and unbecoming and really gas lighting is perfectly adequate.

  I mu
st confess that at first sight Bleeding Heart Square came as rather a disappointment. I suppose the word ‘square’ had made me expect something rather grander, and so had the way my aunt used to speak about the house. In fact the ‘square’ turns out to be a funny little yard. As you go in, you pass a low-looking public house with an old pump (rather picturesque) on the corner. On the left are what look like workshops and garages, and on the right are some higgledy-piggledy houses, one of which is number seven. At the back of the yard is a high blank wall with a big gate and what looks like part of an old chapel.

  Number seven is a gloomy, soot-stained little house at the end of the row. Mr Orburn showed me over some of it and made suggestions about the improvements he thinks necessary. He believes the cost would not be more than £100, and that we should easily recoup this in the long run.

  I met one of my tenants as we were leaving – a Major Serridge. He struck me as rather a rough diamond, like so many military men, but perhaps one of nature’s gentlemen underneath. Mr Orburn introduced us and we had quite a little conversation about the house and Bleeding Heart Square. Major Serridge said it was a very interesting area and he believed it had a great deal of history. I said I should like to find out more about it, and he said that, in that case, he would see what he could do. There was quite a twinkle in his eye, I thought.

  Unfortunately, Mr Orburn had another appointment so we had to leave.

  If Philippa Penhow hadn’t gone to Bleeding Heart Square on that January day, you and perhaps everyone else might have lived happily ever after, for ever and ever amen. Even Joe Serridge.

  The air was cold and damp and the horsehair mattress on the truckle bed was filled with lumps of what felt like rock. In the early part of the night there had been a good deal of shouting and, a little after midnight, what had sounded like an inconclusive fight. Lorries rumbled in the distance, their engines mingling with the ebb and flow of the snores next door. In the early hours came the rattling of the early trams, barrows jolting across the cobbles, the whistling of the milkman and the chink of his bottles.

  Lydia’s room was next to her father’s bedroom and at one time perhaps had been used as a dressing room or a closet. It was furnished with a bed, a chest of drawers covered with chipped green paint, and a rickety washstand with a cracked marble top. There were two hooks on the back of the door and also a chair with a broken wicker seat, which she had wedged under the door handle when she went to bed. The fireplace was choked with soot. The only gas fire in her father’s flat was in the sitting room.

  ‘You’re lucky the room is empty,’ he had told her. ‘The last lodger left the week before last.’

  She left the warmth of the bed a little before eight o’clock and washed unsatisfactorily in the handbasin of the freezing little lavatory at the end of the landing. One of the first of her jobs today would be to rectify the inadequacies of her packing. She had brought Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own but had forgotten her toothbrush.

  The house was still quiet around her, apart from the faint rasp of her father’s snoring. The smell on the landing was worse than it had been the previous evening. A piece of fish that had gone off? A rat under a floorboard? Someone really should investigate.

  She went into the kitchen opposite the sitting room. Little more than a cupboard, it contained a gas ring, a sink, an Ascot water heater, a meat safe and, below the sink and draining board, a cutlery drawer and a dank cupboard. The only window was a small, cracked skylight. An unwashed saucepan and two mismatched bowls were standing in the sink; they had dined last night on powdered soup, which she had made with her father’s guidance. She rummaged in the cupboard but found no sign of tea or milk.

  Her mind filled with a vision of the dining room at Frogmore Place with the kidneys and the bacon sizzling on the hotplate, the coffee pot and the teapot on the table. Her mouth watered. Hunger clawed at her stomach. There was nothing for it. She would have to venture into the strange world outside this house.

  Her father had given her a latchkey last night when he went out for what he referred to as a business meeting. Lydia left a pencilled note for him on his sitting-room mantelpiece. She met no one on her way out of the house.

  Outside, the cold, raw air made her gasp. It had a strange, almost metallic tang to it. Two men in brown overalls were looking under the bonnet of a motor car at the other end of the square. They looked up and whistled at her. She ignored them and hurried past a decaying pump on the corner by the Crozier and into the alley to Charleston Street. Opposite the pub was a public library, with a queue of bedraggled people waiting patiently outside the doors. The pavements on both sides of the road were crammed with hurrying men and women in cheap clothes. Clerks, Lydia supposed, or people like that, on their way to work.

  She allowed herself to be swept like a twig in a current into Hatton Garden. A flock of young women, chattering as incomprehensibly as starlings, carried her across the road and into the street on the other side. More by luck than good judgement, she found herself in a curving lane called Fetter Passage. Among the row of shops it contained was a small café called the Blue Dahlia. The windows were steamed up but the smell of fried food drew her inside.

  Nobody took any notice of her. An enormously fat woman in a stained apron was standing behind a counter. After a quick glance at what other people were eating, she joined the huddle waiting to be served. When her turn came, she ordered tea and a bacon roll. The woman was surly to the point of rudeness with her, though she seemed happy to talk to her other customers, sometimes breaking out into cackles of laughter. The tea came in a chipped white mug. It was milky and sweet. The bacon tasted strong and was mainly fat and rind. Afterwards, she wondered whether one left a tip. She wasn’t sure how these things were managed, if they were managed at all, in an establishment like this. In the end she pushed a penny under the rim of her plate and hurried out of the café.

  One of the neighbouring shops sold her a toothbrush, toothpaste, a face flannel and soap. She had at least remembered to pack a towel. The food and exercise had warmed her. She walked south down Fetter Passage into Holborn, where she turned left by the vast Prudential building. She crossed the southern end of Hatton Garden and immediately came to the mouth of a cul-de-sac.

  She paused to get her bearings. The cul-de-sac was guarded by two sets of railings separated by a tiny lodge with a disproportionately tall chimney sprouting from its roof. A man in a brown top hat and frock coat was standing by the railings with a pipe in his mouth. His mouth was almost entirely concealed by a nicotine-stained moustache in need of a trim. He saw Lydia and touched his hat.

  A small white dog pattered round the corner of the lodge and sniffed Lydia’s ankles. She bent down to scratch his head.

  ‘Nipper! Come here!’ the man said. ‘Sorry about that, Miss. He’s got an eye for the ladies.’

  ‘That’s all right – I don’t mind.’

  ‘The trouble is, you have to watch him. He can be a bit funny with strangers. And his bite’s worse than his bark.’

  The dog sat down and scratched his ear with a hind leg. Lydia looked through the railings at the terraced street beyond. Though still respectable, the houses were clearly past their best. At the end was a chapel or small church. The line of its roof looked familiar.

  ‘Is Bleeding Heart Square over there?’ she asked. ‘On the other side of the church?’

  ‘Yes, Miss. All part of my beat.’

  ‘Your beat?’

  He waved his hand at the cul-de-sac behind him. ‘I’m the Beadle for what they call the Rosington Liberty. Chief of police and head porter all rolled into one, at your service.’

  A car pulled up at the lodge, and the man hurried to swing open one of the roadway gates. Lydia walked on towards a busy crossroads with Smithfield market on the far side. The dark, sour smell of blood and raw meat mingled with the fumes of the gasoline. That, she realized, was the source of the tang in the air as she had come out of the house that morning. Bleeding Heart Sq
uare smelled, quite literally, of blood.

  Quickening her pace, she turned left into Farringdon Road. A little later she turned left again and discovered that she was back in Charleston Street. A few hundred yards ahead was the sign of the Crozier, the public house guarding the approach to Bleeding Heart Square.

  Hugging herself against the cold, she walked back to number seven. The mechanics whistled at her again. As she was unlocking the front door, she heard footsteps behind her. She glanced back. An old woman in a grey overcoat was walking rapidly towards her. The key turned and Lydia opened the door. The woman was now on the steps behind her. Wispy hair escaped from under the brim of a hat like a squashed currant.

  ‘Hello. Are you looking for somebody here?’

  ‘I live here,’ the woman mumbled. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘My name’s Lydia Langstone. My father’s Captain Ingleby-Lewis.’

  ‘Didn’t know he had a daughter.’

  Lydia had no reply to that so she went into the house. The smell in the hall was even worse. She swallowed, trying not to retch.

  ‘Dead cat?’ the woman said, making it sound like an accusation.

  ‘I don’t know what it is.’

  She pushed past Lydia and sniffed the air. ‘It’s over there.’

  She nodded towards the back of the hall, where a table stood near the foot of the stairs. Lydia walked towards it. On the table was a dusty brass gong, in front of which was a tray holding what looked like circulars and a small parcel wrapped in brown paper and tied neatly with string.

  She bent down and sniffed in her turn. She pulled back sharply, putting her hand over her mouth and nose. ‘It’s foul. It – it couldn’t be something in the parcel that’s gone off?’