The Murders in Praed Street

Part I

The Crimes

I

The Street

Praed Street is not at any time one of London’s brighter thoroughfares. Certainly it ends upon a note of hope, terminating as it does on the fringe of the unquestioned respectability of Bayswater, but for the rest of its course it is frankly lamentable. Narrow, bordered by small and often furtive shops, above which the squalid looking upper parts are particularly uninviting, it can never have been designed as more than a humble annex of its more prosperous parent, the Edgware Road. And then, for no apparent reason, the Great Western Railway planted its terminus upon it, and Praed Street found itself called upon to become a main artery of traffic.

It seems to have done very little to adapt itself to its new role. Beyond an occasional grudging widening, it has left the unending streams of buses, of heavy railway lorries, of hurrying foot passengers, to shift for themselves as best they can. It almost seems as though Praed Street regarded Paddington Station as an intrusion, and those who throng to and from it as unwelcome strangers. It had its own interests long before the railway came—one of the termini of the Grand Junction Canal lies within a few yards of its sombre limits. Praed Street watches with indifference the thronging crowds which pass along, and they in turn take little heed of the uninviting thoroughfare through which their journey leads them.

Not that these philosophic reflections occupied the mind of Mr. James Tovey, which was far too full of an acute sense of annoyance and discomfort to find room for any other sensations. Mr. Tovey was not an inhabitant of Praed Street, although he lived in its neighbourhood. There was nothing secretive about Mr. Tovey, you could see his name and occupation painted in bold letters over a shop in Lisson Grove; James Tovey, Fruit and Vegetable Merchant. He was, in fact, a greengrocer, and, years ago, when Mr. Tovey had originally employed a small legacy in the purchase of the business, the sign had read: Tovey, Greengrocer, etc. But it was Mr. Tovey’s proud boast that he always moved with the times, and since his neighbours, the butcher and the grocer, had respectively converted themselves into Meat Purveyors and Provision Dealers, he had abandoned the vulgar term of greengrocer for the more high-sounding appellation.

Sunday was a day of strict observance with Mr. Tovey, its presiding deity his own comfort. One can hardly blame him for this indulgence, since the rest of the week left him little leisure for repose. His habit was to rise before six, in order to drive the van to Covent Garden. The van, a secondhand Ford, was the subject of the ribald mirth of his acquaintances. Every nonessential part had long since fallen off, as an aged elm sheds its branches, and the essentials were held together by odd pieces of rope. But to any suggestion of the van’s imperfections, Mr. Tovey merely shrugged his shoulders. “ ’Tisn’t ’er looks as matters,” he would reply. “So long as she does ’er job she’ll do for me.” And perhaps this phrase, applied to things at large, was a complete summing up of Mr. Tovey’s philosophy.

He opened the shop as soon as he returned from Covent Garden, and kept it open, winter and summer, till a late hour. Lisson Grove shops late, and it was usually ten o’clock before Mr. Tovey could reckon to get his bit of supper. It was therefore natural that so strenuous a week should be rewarded by a relaxation on Sunday. It was his invariable habit to stay in bed till noon, inhaling the savoury smell of the Sunday joint roasting in the kitchen, and only to rise and put on his best suit when the clock struck that hour. The afternoon was usually devoted to the peaceful somnolence of repletion, or sometimes in summer, if Mrs. Tovey’s legs felt equal to accompanying him, to a walk in the park. And in the evening there were always the thrilling columns of the Sunday paper.

Mr. Tovey hated to be disturbed in the evening of this day of rest. Especially on such an evening as the present. The day had been an eminently satisfactory one, from his point of view. The sirloin of beef, carefully selected by Mrs. Tovey from the stock of her friend the Meat Purveyor, over the way, had been of uncommon succulence; the Yorkshire pudding crisped to that exact degree of golden delicacy that Mr. Tovey’s heart desired. True, he had had a slight difference of opinion with Mrs. Tovey, but that had merely given a zest to a day which might otherwise have been uneventful. Mr. and Mrs. Tovey never really quarrelled. For one thing they were neither of them of a quarrelsome disposition, and for another they were both too fond of their own comfort to risk its disturbance by domestic rancour. But sometimes they did not see eye to eye, as in the present case.

It had begun when Mr. Tovey had come down to the kitchen, and noticed that only two places had been laid at the table. He had raised his eyebrows and glanced towards the massive form of Mrs. Tovey, bending over the glowing range.

“Hullo! Where’s Ivy, then?” he asked, in an almost querulous tone.

“Gone out with Ted,” replied Mrs. Tovey quietly, from among the saucepans. “He’s taken her home to dinner, and they’re going on to the pictures afterwards.”

Mr. Tovey clicked his tongue, his favourite expression of annoyance. Of course, Ted and Ivy had known one another since they were children. Old Sam Copperdock, Ted’s father, was Mr. Tovey’s oldest friend, and they had been near neighbours ever since the latter, as a newly married man, had bought the greengrocery business. Still, Mr. Tovey didn’t altogether like it. Ivy was twenty now, and young Ted Copperdock only three years older. Just the sort of age when young folks get the bit between their teeth and go and get married without a thought of the future. Old Sam was a thorough good chap, and his son was a very nice lad; Mr. Tovey would not have denied either of these facts for a moment. But Ted’s only prospects lay in his father’s shop in Praed Street, and Mr. Tovey had very different views of his only child’s future, very different.

Yet he had never put these views into words. Perhaps he would have found it very difficult to do so, for Mr. Tovey’s vocabulary was strictly limited. But they were there, just the same—had been ever since Ivy’s prowess at school had discovered her to be a “scholar.” From that moment Mr. Tovey had been at great pains to educate his daughter to an entirely different state of life from that which it had pleased God to call her. That she was by now tall, distinctly pretty, and extraordinarily self-possessed was not, one supposes, due to the efforts of Mr. Tovey. But she certainly owed the fact that she was an extremely competent shorthand typist to the pains he had devoted to her education.

Mr. Tovey, though naturally he would have been justifiably annoyed at such a suggestion, had an incurably romantic core to his plodding and material mind. Of course, in common with most of his class, he firmly believed that human happiness varied exactly with the social scale. “As happy as a king” was to him no mere catchword. He was convinced—and, to do him justice, he drew considerable satisfaction from the conviction—that the members of the Royal Family were the happiest persons in the land, and that this happiness descended in regular gradation through the ranks of the nobility and gentlefolk until it reached acute misery somewhere in the lower strata of those who dwelt in slums. From this outlook on life it necessarily followed that the more he could enable Ivy to better herself, the happier she must ultimately be.

How this betterment was to take place, Mr. Tovey never explained. But sometimes he had a vague intangible dream of Ivy, his Ivy, captivating the heart of some susceptible employer, preferably of the upper classes. His eye, diverted for the moment from the business of wrapping up a parcel of leeks, often caught sight of the pictures in the newspaper which he was using for the purpose. “Lady Mary Mayfair (right) and the Countess of Piccadilly (left) on the lawn at Ascot.” Suppose that one day he should proudly open the paper to find Ivy with a smile like that, gracefully posing under the heading “A leader of Society in the paddock at Goodwood”? After all, why not?

But it was not until after the second helping of roast beef and Yorkshire that he made any further remark about his daughter to Mrs. Tovey. “I wouldn’t encourage young Ted to hang around Ivy too much, if I was you,” he said, as he pushed aside his plate.

“Encourage? He don’t want no encouraging,” replied Mrs. Tovey briskly. “He just comes in, cheerful like, nods to me, asks after you, says a word or two to Ivy, and away they goes together. Things ain’t the same now as they was when we was their age, Jim.”

“No, it’s a fact they ain’t,” agreed Mr. Tovey darkly.

“But let ’em alone,” continued Mrs. Tovey. “Ivy’s not the girl to make a fool of herself, you ought to know that by this time. Now you can go and sit in your chair by the fire. It’s not the sort of day for the likes of us to be going out.”

Mr. Tovey shook his head, as though unconvinced by his wife’s words, and looked out of the window. Much as he might disagree with her on the subject of their daughter, there was no doubt that she was right about the weather. It was the beginning of November, and the month was doing its best to live up to its reputation. A thin mist, precursor of the fog that must surely follow, filled the narrow streets, and through it filtered a cold raw drizzle, through which a few passing pedestrians hurried, muffled up to their ears.

Mr. Tovey grunted, and drew his chair up closer towards the fire. The weather could do what it liked, as long as it cleared up before the next morning. He certainly was not going out into it. He composed himself for his afternoon nap, from which he arose refreshed and eager for the lurid pages of his favourite Sunday paper. He studied this intently for some minutes, then turned animatedly to Mrs. Tovey.

“That brute what cut up the young woman he was walking out with is committed for trial at the Old Bailey,” he said.

“I reckoned he would be, the dirty brute,” replied Mrs. Tovey, who was almost as keen a criminologist as her husband. “And I’d see he didn’t get off, neither, if I was on the jury.”

Mr. Tovey turned and looked at her gravely. “ ’Tis all very well for you to talk like that,” he said reprovingly. “It’s a terrible thing to be on a jury when a man’s life depends on what you says. Nobody knows that better than I do, I’m sure.”

“Yes, I remember the state you was in that time,” replied Mrs. Tovey. “Dear, dear, best part of a week you was at it, and Ivy just born and all. What was the chap’s name? I remember he was a doctor who’d killed one of his patients by giving him a dose of something.”

“Morlandson, Dr. Morlandson,” said Mr. Tovey. “Lord, whenever I eats anything as disagrees with me I dreams of his face a-looking at us from the dock. Fair gave me the creeps, it did, for a long time after. We found him guilty, and I couldn’t help looking at him when the judge put on his black cap and sentenced him. Ugh!”

“But they didn’t ’ang ’im after all,” remarked Mrs. Tovey.

“No, he was reprieved, I don’t rightly know why. Because he’d been a big pot in his way, I suppose. Twenty years hard he got, though, and serve ’im right. This bloke I’m telling you about won’t get off so easy, though.”

Mr. Tovey returned to the perusal of his paper, and the evening wore on, the silence of the cosy kitchen broken only at intervals by the voice of Mr. Tovey, reading in a halting voice some more than usually spicy extract to his wife. Teatime came and went, and still Ivy made no appearance. It was nearly nine o’clock when Mr. Tovey referred to her absence. “I can’t think where that girl’s got to,” he said irritably. “She’s no call to be out all this time.”

“Ted’ll have taken her home to have a bite of supper,” returned Mrs. Tovey equably. “His father likes to have her round there, cheers him up, she does. She’ll be back before long, never you worry.”

The reply which sprang to Mr. Tovey’s lips was checked by the urgent ringing of the telephone bell in the shop, separated from the kitchen by a door kept locked on Sundays.

“Hullo! What’s that?” he enquired in a startled tone. Mrs. Tovey had already moved towards the door. “I’ll go and see,” she replied shortly. Her husband, listening intently, could hear her steps on the bare boards, the sudden cessation of the ringing as she took up the receiver, her voice as she answered, then a pause.

Then he heard her call him from the other room. “Somebody wants to speak to you, Jim.”

With a muttered objurgation he dragged himself from his chair and went into the shop. His wife handed him the instrument. “Hullo!” he said and for a moment stood listening.

“Yes, I’m James Tovey.” A long pause, while Mrs. Tovey vainly tried to make sense of the faint sounds which reached her ears. “What’s that? Oh! a man, you say, thank the Lord for that! I thought for the moment it might be my daughter, she’s out a bit late tonight. Yes! I’ll be along at once.”

He put back the receiver and turned to his wife. “That’s a rum show!” he exclaimed, not without a tremor of excitement in his voice. “St. Martha’s Hospital, that was. There’s a fellow been run over, and they can’t find out who he is. The only thing in his pocket is a bit of paper with my name an’ address on. Now, who the dickens can it be?”

“Why, young Alf, as likely as not,” replied Mrs. Tovey unemotionally. “Why ’e ’asn’t been run over afore, goin’ about as he does with his ’ead in the air, is more than I can make out.”

Alf was the youth employed by Mr. Tovey to deliver the purchases of such of his customers as did not prefer to carry them home wrapped up in newspaper. But Mr. Tovey shook his head at the suggestion.

“Not it! Young Alf lives down Camberwell way, and he’s not likely to be up this way of a Sunday. Give us my coat, missus, and I’ll go along and see who it is.”

Mr. Tovey struggled into his coat, and turned the collar well up over his ears. It was a most unpleasant evening to be out in, but, after all, it was worth it. His mind had been steeped in sensation all the afternoon, and now he was himself about to take a leading part in some thrilling tragedy. In imagination he could see the account in the next issue of the Paddington Clarion and Marylebone Recorder. Headlines first: “Fatal Accident. Man crushed to death by Motor Bus.” Then his own name: “The body was identified by Mr. Tovey, the well-known Fruit and Vegetable Merchant of Lisson Grove.” This was fame indeed!

He stood at the corner of Lisson Grove for a moment, eyeing the buses as they passed him. Through their streaming window panes he could see that they were all full, a row of dejected looking passengers standing in each one of them. There was nothing for it, he would have to walk. It wasn’t very far, anyhow, not more than half a mile at most.

Mr. Tovey stepped out smartly along Chapel Street, across the Edgware Road, and entered Praed Street. Despite the depressing weather, the pavements seemed to be full of people, groups of whom overflowed into the roadway, only to be driven back helterskelter by the menacing onrush of the motorbuses. Mr. Tovey picked his way through the crowd with the consciousness of the importance of his mission. So intent was he upon reaching his goal, and, having played his part, upon regaining the comfort of his own fireside, that he scarcely spared a glance for the lighted window above Sam Copperdock’s shop. Ivy was behind that drawn curtain, no doubt. He might drop in and pick her up on his way home. He certainly could not stop now.

With a due sense of dignity he climbed the steps of the main entrance of St. Martha’s, and nodded familiarly to the porter in the hall. “My name’s Tovey,” he said, “you rang me up just now to come and identify an accident case.”

The porter looked at him incredulously. “Rang you up? ’Oo rang you up? First I’ve ’eard of it.”

Mr. Tovey clicked his tongue impatiently. “Why, not more than a quarter of an hour ago,” he replied. “Man been run over, and you couldn’t find out who he was.”

“We ain’t ’ad no accidents brought in the ’ole blessed day,” returned the porter stolidly. “You’ve made a bloomer, you ’ave. Wait ’ere a moment while I goes and sees if anybody knows anything about it. Tobey, did you say your name was?”

“Tovey!” replied that individual angrily. The porter turned his back upon him and disappeared, his boots clattering noisily upon the tiled floor. Mr. Tovey, with a sudden reaction from his excited imaginings, stood cold and miserable in the centre of a puddle formed by the drops from his overcoat.

After what seemed an interminable time the porter returned. “Somebody’s bin pulling your leg,” he said, with a malicious grin. “We ain’t ’ad no accidents, and nobody ’ere ain’t ever ’eard of you. Didn’t get the name of the ’orspital wrong, did you? Wasn’t St. George’s, was it, or maybe St. Thomas’s?”

Mr. Tovey shook his head. “No, it was St. Martha’s, right enough,” he replied. A sudden wave of anger at the hoax which had been played upon him surged through his brain, and without another word he turned and strode out of the hall. It was monstrous that he, a citizen and a ratepayer, should be dragged out into the streets on a fool’s errand like this. With his grievance rankling to the exclusion of every other thought, he pushed his way along Praed Street, his head down, his hands crammed into his overcoat pockets. The drizzle had turned to sleet, and the sting of it on his face added to his ill-humour.

Ahead of him was the Express Train, a public-house which had presumably been built and named at the time of the coming of the railway. It was closing time by now, and a stream of gesticulating figures was being disgorged upon the crowded pavement. Mr. Tovey looked up as he heard the turmoil. The cold air and comparative darkness, after the warmth and light of the bar, seemed to have had an unsteadying effect upon the ejected guests. They lurched about the pavement singing snatches of ribald songs, arguing heatedly in loud voices.

Mr. Tovey frowned. Nice way to spend a Sunday evening! Thank God, he didn’t live in Praed Street, anyhow. He wasn’t going to be barged off the pavement by a lot of drunken hooligans, not he. Putting his head a trifle further down, like a bull about to charge, he strode straight ahead in an undeviating line. One man lurched into him, another jostled him from behind, and a menacing voice, its effect somewhat marred by a loud hiccup, called out, “ ’ere, ’oo the ’ell d’yer think you’re pushin’?”

And then Mr. Tovey, with a queer strangled cry, suddenly collapsed in a heap upon the muddy pavement.