by David Field
‘Timpson. John Timpson.’
‘Now what?’ Jack asked as they walked outside, where it had grown dark, but where a light was still shining from the window of the office across the road.
‘Remember what I said, Jack? Never believe the first answer you’re given? By the same token, never believe a name you’re given so glibly by someone who has cause to be suspicious of police officers.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘That man we were speaking to — what name did he give?’
‘Timpson.’
‘Take a look back at the sign above the pub. What brand of beer do they sell?’
‘Timpsons,’ Jack repeated with a smile. ‘But his story sounded credible.’
‘So did Mr Jenston’s,’ Percy reminded him. ‘Remember him? The one with the chrome dome? Time we went back in there and shook him warmly by the throat.’
Jenston looked up with a terrified expression as Percy kicked the door open in a dramatic gesture, slammed his police badge down on the shop counter and glared across at him.
‘You’re moments away from going down to the local cells on a charge of wasting police time, Mr Jenston. So don’t waste any more of it — where will we find Mr Freeman?’
‘I’ve no idea, ’onest! Never even met the man.’
‘But you had sufficient confidence in his workmanship to leave him to supervise the work in Lamb Street?’
‘That weren’t my choice, honest it weren’t. I wer just told ter direct the men ter ’Emmingsworth Properties in ’Oxton, where there were a new foreman waitin’ ter supervise the job.’
‘And who selected Mr Freeman for that job, exactly?’
‘No idea — but it weren’t the first time.’
‘How do you mean?’
Jenston looked carefully round the office briefly, then lowered his voice.
‘It’s the union, yer understand? All the men are members an’ the bloke what controls the union calls the shots regarding who we employ an’ when. My boss, Mr Goldman, instructs me never to fall out wi’ the union, else I’ll be out of a job. An’ occasionally we get a call from the union that so an’ so will be allocated ter this job or the other an’ no questions asked. So I don’t.’
‘And you got a call from the union to tell you that Mr Freeman would be supervising that job?’
‘Not exactly in them terms, no. I got a telephone call — or rather, Mr Goldman did — from the union, to tell ’im to expect a call from ’Emmingsworth Properties about a job in Lamb Street, Spitalfields. Sure enough we did an’ I took the call. It sounded too good to be true, since our normal foreman were off sick, like I told yer earlier, an’ this job didn’t need us ter supply one. I was to send the men up ter ’Emmingsworths, where they’d be getting a new foreman approved by them. An’ that were it, honest.’
‘If I find that you’ve left out anything important this time,’ Percy said in a menacing tone, ‘I’ll be back here to stuff my fist down your throat and punch your arse out from the inside. Understood?’
Jenston nodded palely and Percy indicated with a jerk of his head in Jack’s direction that it was time to take their leave.
As they stood outside on the pavement, Percy looked to Jack.
‘May I take it that Hemmingsworth Properties was the lot that bought the building from Esther?’
‘Yes, the name sounds familiar. Sounds as if they could tell us where Mr Freeman can be found.’
‘They probably could, young Jack, but whether or not they will is a matter we can discover for ourselves tomorrow. It’s all too convenient, don’t you think? The joinery firm gets its orders from some sort of union and Helen Trenchard is trying to establish a women’s trade union of sorts. I know enough about these new unions to appreciate that somebody somewhere may have a very good reason for doing very bad things. Not only do potential members of Helen’s “Alliance”, as I seem to remember it’s called, get very unpleasant visits from a man who in some cases pays close attention to their underwear, but the alterations ordered by Helen were supervised by a man supplied by her landlords. A man, what’s more, who was seemingly planted in there by a rival union. Not only that, but if we believe the noses of some of the victims then the same man who posed as a joinery foreman was also given the task of frightening off potential members of the Alliance.’
‘And we’re no nearer to finding out his real identity,’ Jack observed glumly.
‘Perhaps we aren’t, but there are certain new leads we can follow up.’
‘Such as?’
‘And here was I fondly imagining that my nephew had turned into a detective. Number One — could you have supervised the alterations inside the Alliance office?’
‘Of course not — I’m not a joiner.’
‘There you are, then — lead Number One. At some stage in his miserable life, our Mr Freeman was trained as a joiner. Number Two — he’s addicted to taking snuff.’
‘And Number Three?’
‘He probably already has a criminal record.’
‘But not as “Bert Freeman”?’
‘Perhaps — who knows? Where would you start looking next?’
‘The Hemmingsworth office, obviously.’
‘And alert them immediately to the fact that we’ve made the connection, enabling them to hide Mr Freeman a long way from our investigations? Try again.’
Jack thought for a moment, then gave a big smile.
‘Criminal Records!’
‘The gods be praised, there’s hope for the boy yet. That’s your job, first thing in the morning.’
‘What about Hemmingsworths?’
‘That’s my job first thing in the morning.’
‘Wouldn’t it be less suspicious if we sent Helen or Esther in there on the pretence of making some innocent enquiry?’
‘During the course of which they just happen to make reference to Bert Freeman? They aren’t experienced in investigative techniques, remember, and all the indications are that someone inside Hemmingsworths has a close connection with some very dangerous people.’
‘As dangerous as nicking knickers?’ Jack joked.
Percy shook his head.
‘My brother, and your father, was right all along when he asked me to keep a watchful eye on you. You aren’t fit to be let out alone.’
‘That’s a bit harsh.
‘Also a bit accurate. Remember, when minimising in your own mind the actions of the elusive Mr Freeman that he also put the frighteners on quite a few women. Also, remember the convenient fate of Mr Broadhurst, the regular foreman at the joinery firm employed inside the Lamb Street building?’
‘How do you mean?’
Percy tutted. ‘Well you don’t imagine that he accidentally fell off that ladder, do you?’
‘I see,’ Jack conceded. ‘So now where?’
Percy looked back at the joinery office window.
‘I think we’ve spent long enough standing here to ensure that Mr Jenston needs to change his underwear. The light in there’s been off ever since we left, but men with chrome domes shouldn’t stand where their shininess attracts a glare from a street lamp. Come on, Jack, let’s go and visit your fiancée with the depressing news.’
‘I hope you aren’t here for an early supper,’ Esther said, smiling, as she leaned forward to kiss Jack after opening the door to them. ‘But come in anyway and tell me how your investigations are going.’
‘South,’ Percy announced as he stepped inside behind Jack.
‘I’m sorry?’ Esther enquired in search of an explanation of Percy’s cryptic answer.
‘South,’ he repeated. ‘Our investigations are going south at considerable speed. Put in less vernacular terms, we haven’t been able to locate, or even identify, your Mr Freeman.’
‘He’s not my Mr Freeman.’ Esther shuddered slightly as she led the way upstairs. ‘I can give you tea and toasted muffins, if you don’t mind the absence of butter.’
‘Not if you’ve got jam, or even honey.’ Percy smiled.
‘But that’s not why we’re here.’
‘Certainly not in my case.’ Jack grinned as he acquired another kiss once they reached the kitchen.
‘Have you found a wedding dress yet, Esther?’ Percy asked.
Esther and Jack exchanged guilty looks before Esther replied, ‘Let’s just say I’m working on it.’
‘And Jack tells me that you’ve bought a house.’
‘A set of second floor rooms in Clerkenwell, actually. They need a lot of work done on them, so we got them for a good price, but we’ll have to devote a lot of time in the next few months to decorating, before we buy any new furniture.’
‘You’ll also need to find a new bridesmaid,’ Percy advised them both. ‘Lucy thinks she may be expecting, in which case she’ll be looking like a walking airship by the date of the wedding.’
‘How do you know?’ Jack asked.
‘She confided in me while I was round there last week. When I was in Holborn the first time, interviewing Lillian Beckwith, I took a slight diversion in order to take a sneaky gander at where she and Teddy have set up home. He’s got this very impressive set of ground floor rooms from which he conducts his architectural practice and they’ve converted the upper two floors into a residence. I was only there briefly the first time, but she invited me for afternoon tea last week and it was then that she told me she thinks she might be pregnant.’
‘I really must call on her,’ Esther said. ‘I’ve not been able to have a real conversation with her for ages, given that all the talk around the Sunday dinner tables in Barking are dominated by Lady Enright. The last time Lucy and I had a decent chat was just before we waved them off on their honeymoon.’
‘Paris,’ Jack reminded them grumpily. ‘She went to Paris and we get to go to Southend.’
‘This conversation is heading in quite the wrong direction,’ Esther interrupted. ‘I presume that you’re here to report on the southbound direction of your enquiries?’
‘Partly, and partly to enlist your assistance.’
‘Tell me the first “partly” first,’ Esther requested as her eyes lit up. ‘Save the good bit for later, since I’m getting pretty bored here, day after day, watching the Alliance go what you would presumably call “south”.’
Percy’s face took on a more serious tone as he explained what they had discovered earlier that day.
‘It will probably come as no great surprise to you to learn that Mr Freeman was not a regular member of the workforce at the joinery firm that did the alterations in here. He was what we call in the trade a “plant” — a “cuckoo in the nest”, to use the more general expression. He was introduced by your landlords, Hemmingsworth Properties, and I can only assume that his real role was to spy on the activities of the Alliance and report back to whoever was paying him handsomely for his services. His services as both a joinery foreman and a burglar, that is.’
‘I remembered something the other day that may be helpful,’ Esther chipped in. ‘While the men were here, my temporary membership list went missing for the best part of two days. It had all the names and addresses of the Alliance members on it and now that you tell me that the man calling himself “Freeman” was an imposter, that explains how he knew which of the members to pay a visit to.’
‘Yes,’ Percy agreed, ‘but it doesn’t explain how he knew about the ones he visited before that list went missing, or how he knew which ones were of particular importance to Helen and her Alliance. Do you happen to know if anything was stolen from Helen’s house when she suffered her own break-in?’
‘No idea, but I could ask her. You’d have to hope so, because otherwise it means that someone very close to her is in cahoots with Mr Freeman.’
Percy turned to Jack.
‘When you marry this lady, get her to give you lessons in logical deduction. As a seamstress turned accounts manager she makes a very good detective.’
Esther smiled proudly.
‘So what did the joinery people tell you about Bert Freeman?’
‘Slightly less than nothing, directly. But it left me in no doubt that a trade union of some sort may be behind all this. It was some sort of woodworker’s union that instructed the joinery firm to allow Freeman to pose as the foreman on the job in here and he was supplied by Hemmingsworths.’
‘So the real people behind this are our own landlords?’ Esther queried.
Percy nodded. ‘Probably, but behind them is this shadowy union whose name we don’t even know yet, even less where it can be found.’
‘Again, Helen may be able to help with that,’ Esther suggested. ‘Now, what is it you want me to do?’
‘You have the names and addresses of all your current Alliance members?’ Percy asked.
Esther nodded. ‘Of course — that’s my job.’
‘Well, I want you to pay a visit to as many of them as you can. Not just the ones who lost an item of underwear and not even just the ones who only got a warning that you know about. There’s a distinct possibility that more of your members also got a warning, but chose to ignore it. What we’re looking for is anyone among them who can give us a closer lead to the man calling himself Bert Freeman. I’d be surprised if he wasn’t already known to at least one of them, probably somewhere in the East End. Your job is to find that one.’
‘You realise that we still have over seven hundred members and that not all of them live in the East End, or even London?’ Esther objected.
‘Did I say it would be easy?’ Percy smiled sympathetically. ‘Jack and I could obviously call on them all, but we each have other lines of enquiry to pursue and the women are more likely to talk more freely to you. Added to which, we don’t want to scare away from membership any women who haven’t yet had a visit, so it’s a delicate matter.’
‘And you trust me with it?’
‘Of course,’ Percy replied. ‘I’ve never forgotten how you charmed Pearly Poll into admitting that she carried out abortions.’
‘And nearly got herself killed in the process!’ Jack objected. ‘I can’t let you do this, Esther.’
Esther smiled back with sweet sarcasm.
‘You forget that you’re talking to a lady associated with a women’s union. If I’ve learned anything from Helen, it’s that women are not simply on this earth to be told by men what they can and cannot do. Your concern is noted, Jack, but stick it up your waistcoat.’
‘I don’t like what Esther’s turning into,’ Jack muttered darkly to Percy as they walked towards the bus stop half an hour later.
‘I do.’ Percy grinned. ‘Before much longer she’ll even be a worthy opponent for your mother.’
Chapter Fifteen
The following morning, well before nine o’clock, Percy had already been given a polite brush off by two people on the staff of Hemmingsworth Properties. The first was Samuel Hemmingsworth himself, who assured him that the rental side of the business was entirely the province of his fellow director Timothy Bowden, but that if he cared to take a seat in the outer office, Mr Bowden would no doubt be able to deal with his enquiry. Back in the outer office, an early middle-aged lady who had probably missed her true calling as a bricklayer’s labourer advised him bluntly that “Mr Timothy” was not in the habit of attending the office until at least ten o’clock in the morning, but that if he’d care to take a seat…
Percy sat twiddling the rim of his pork pie hat in his hands as he watched the daily ritual begin in the outer office. The bricklaying lady made a big fuss of ensuring that all the brochures were properly displayed on the front counter before retreating behind a desk that looked even smaller with her impressive bulk behind it, removed the cover from a typewriter that looked more like an offensive weapon in her hands and began attacking it with enough manual force to make the table underneath it shake with foreboding.
The lady then rose to her feet when a younger woman scuttled in with a sad saga regarding a collision between a cab and a milk float at Ludgate Circus, to which she responded with a long homily on the v
irtues of leaving for work early ‘just in case’. Her manner was noticeably more friendly when a dapper little man sporting what must have been the only winged collar visible in Hoxton at that early hour, if at all, slipped through the front door as if anxious to avoid being seen by the lady committing cruel and unnatural offences against the typewriter. But he was apprehended just before he made it to the door of the inner office.
‘A gentleman here to see you, Mr Bowden. He wouldn’t specify the nature of his business,’ she added, making it sound like a matter for grave suspicion.
‘Do come in,’ Bowden invited Percy and he dodged past the eyebrow artillery of the office turnkey and stepped inside, where he took the proffered seat in front of the large desk almost completely covered in brochures of various kinds.
‘What can I do for you, Mr —?’
‘Enright. Percy Enright. The business premises at 27 Lamb Street, Spitalfields?’
The man’s eyes glassed over as he pretended to think for a moment.
‘Ah yes — the ones that used to be a tailor’s workshop? I’m afraid they’re currently under lease.’
‘By a lady called Helen Trenchard, who’s in the process of forming an Alliance of female workers,’ Percy reminded him, watching the sudden undulations of the man’s larynx with satisfaction.
‘What she’s using the premises for precisely is none of our business,’ Bowden replied evasively and Percy mentally celebrated his second hit. ‘Assuming it’s legal, of course.’
‘Of course,’ Percy agreed. ‘But I was wondering if you could supply me with further information regarding the workmen who recently carried out internal alterations in there.’
If the larynx moved much faster it could be used to power a textile mill, Percy concluded as he watched Bowden compose his first evasive answer.
‘It’s a firm we use regularly for work of that kind,’ Bowden assured him. ‘I can give you their office address, if you’re seeking to engage them on some work of your own. They’re based in Bow, from memory.’
‘I know,’ Percy took mild delight in advising him, ‘I was there yesterday.’