Honour & Obey
Page 24
Laughing, Hyacinth shakes her head.
“I doubt it.”
“You never know,” Portia says, looking wise. “Meanwhile we will take good care of your house for you while you are gone. If anything needs mending, Traffy is handy with a hammer and nails, and I shall keep it as spick and span as it is now.”
“Oh, I would not entrust the care of my house to anyone else,” Hyacinth says earnestly.
My house, she thinks, savouring the words. My lodgers. My future. And she realises that she regrets nothing, and has nothing to regret. For the first time in her life, Hyacinth Clout is utterly and blissfully content.
****
The great heart of London beats in its giant breast. Draw a circle above the clustering rooftops and you will have within its space everything with its opposite extreme and contradiction. Vice and virtue, wealth and beggary, surfeit and starvation, all treading on each other and crowding together.
Look more closely. Here is Jack Cully, proceeding (as they say in police parlance) along Regent Street. He wears a purposeful expression, redolent of a man on a mission. But he is not wearing his customary work suit, and he has just bought a bunch of violets from the small flower-seller outside the tobacconist’s shop, so it is a fair deduction that whatever enterprise he is engaged upon, it is not of a criminal nature.
And here, in his cramped paperwork-strewn office at Scotland Yard, is Detective Inspector Stride, composing the finishing sentences to his report on ‘The Slasher’. His men have staked out the lodging house and the medical school for weeks, but there have been no further sightings.
But nor have there been any further murders. Stride has therefore decided that the man must have either left London, or given up his nocturnal prowlings. Thus, Stride has decided to close the case. Now he signs his name to the report, blots it, and places it in a folder ready to be filed.
In twenty-seven years’ time, London will be threatened by an even more deadly killer – somebody whose nickname will become the stuff of fear and legend. By then Stride and Cully will have both left the detective division of the Metropolitan Police, and the investigation will be in the hands of others.
But all this is yet to be. For now, why not stand in the shadow of this awning, and watch as Jack Cully and Emily Benet approach. See how she slips her hand inside his arm and how he leans protectively towards her.
They go quietly along the roaring streets, past the noisy and the eager, the arrogant and vain, the simple and avaricious, until they pass you by without registering your presence, and turn the corner, disappearing forever into their own future.
Finis
Thank you for reading this novel. If you have enjoyed it, why not leave a review and recommend it to other readers? Any review, however long or short, helps me to continue doing what I do.