✥
AN ELDERLY WOMAN was sitting bent over on the top step when our cab deposited us outside our front door. She was clad in ragged mourning, her clothes unevenly dyed black and her veil so heavy that I doubted she could see through it. A bouquet rested on her lap, no more than a big bunch of wilted weeds.
‘Clear off,’ Sidney Grice poked at her stomach with his cane.
‘She is not a piece of rubbish,’ I objected.
‘She smells like one,’ my guardian retorted, with no attempt to lower his voice.
The woman started as from a deep sleep. She looked up but I could still see nothing of her. She grasped her bouquet in a gloved hand and struggled to rise.
‘Let her rest,’ I said. ‘She is not doing any harm.’
The woman wheezed with the effort of getting to her feet.
‘If I let her stay she will frighten off clients,’ Mr G reasoned, ‘and the next thing you know, she will have invited her family and friends to join her and be letting out the top step to lodgers.’
The woman was swaying now, though she did not appear to be intoxicated. The odour of sewage about her almost made me retch.
‘Was that you under the tarpaulin the—’ I began, but the woman stumbled and fell forward.
Sidney Grice stepped aside, but she snatched at his coat with her left hand and her right swung up, crushing the flowers against his breast. Sidney Grice grunted and pushed her away. The woman pulled at her bouquet but for some reason it stayed stuck to my guardian’s coat. She let out a small cry and released her weeds, but still they stayed suspended.
Mr G put his hand to the greenery and it flew into the woman’s face. She squealed and pushed him and he, taken off balance, toppled back against the railings that separated him from the moat.
‘Stop her,’ my guardian gasped, but I was transfixed by the sight of a carving knife sticking out of his coat.
The woman ran. She dodged behind a milk cart and round a furniture van.
‘Mein Gott!’ Sidney Grice surveyed the end of the blade projecting from his chest and the worn wooden handle. ‘She has stabbed me through the heart –’ he coughed three times in rapid succession – ‘of my notebook.’
He jumped down the steps and looked about, just in time to see his attacker dropping under a brewer’s dray twenty yards up Gower Street and disappearing from sight.
‘What the hell—’ I began.
‘Language.’ My guardian put a hand to his chest to hold his book and heaved the knife out. ‘Though hell may very well be from where she came.’
And as he rang the bell I bent to pick something up – a tiny silver locket that she must have dropped. Perhaps it had a name inside.
‘Stop dawdling,’ Sidney Grice said as I stuffed it away.