Free The Frightened Man by Kenneth Cameron Page B

joints where the stone flags met the walls. All the buildings but one appeared to be commercial, and of no very successful kind.
    A religious house had once covered the area of the Minories, its stones still incorporated into some of the buildings roundabout. Those in the court had nothing medieval about them, however, but were rather of some indeterminate style of the first half of the eighteenth century. Of different widths and heights, the four buildings, two on each side, all seemed to drop straight to the pavement from their eaves without setbacks or such luxuries as front steps; two were of blackened grey stone, two of brick so dark that only the pattern of the mortar made it possible to see what they were made of. The far end of the little court was closed by a wall seven or eight feet high, with beyond it an open space and then the upper storeys of a house that must face on the Minories.
    Denton looked up and saw an even narrower slice of sky than over Jewry Street. The sun, he decided, would move more or less parallel to the court’s long axis; if it actually shone here, it would light perhaps only the top two or three storeys on his left.
    On his right were two buildings, one very narrow. The wider one stood a little advanced, as if shouldering the other aside. It had been, he thought, in one of its lives a warehouse, perhaps a combined warehouse and residence: high up under the eaves a beam thrust out from the façade, supported by a diagonal like a gallows; below it, a bricked-up rectangle suggested a former opening. Farther down were windows, several broken and pasted over with paper; farther down yet, a dead plant on a window ledge, a crockery dish on another, the window open a couple of inches. At ground level, the building had a central door reached by a single horizontal slab of blackened stone that was paler and concave in the middle from many feet. To the left of that door was another, smaller one where a window might have been expected, as if somebody had once decided to make a shop of the space behind it. This doorway was blocked by a sign on a wooden standard that said ‘No Admittance POLICE’.
    Guillam had an iron ring in his right hand with several keys hanging from it. He applied one to a new-looking padlock on the smaller door and turned back to them.
    ‘Smell it out here,’ he said. He moved the sign to his left and pushed the door open. ‘We haven’t let them clean up yet.’

Chapter Six
    ‘Judas Priest,’ Munro muttered.
    The smell burst out to meet them as if under pressure. Denton recognized blood and decay; memories of battle-fields flitted down his mind, then an image of a short man he had shotgunned who had bled seemingly everywhere.
    ‘You were at the post-mortem,’ Guillam said. ‘You know what to expect.’
    Stella Minter had died in a room only big enough to hold her bed, a rickety chair, a stand that held a chamber pot, and a curtained area no wider than her shoulders, where her few clothes hung. High in the wall opposite the bed, in that part of the house that jutted forward beyond its neighbour, was an oval window, the long axis vertical, a piece of cloth pinned over it for a curtain. Guillam now tried to pull it aside and managed to pull it down.
    ‘Touch nothing,’ Guillam said.
    ‘Anything been removed?’ Munro muttered.
    ‘Not supposed to’ve been.’ Guillam pulled several folded sheets of paper from some inner pocket and handed it over without looking. Munro opened them and Denton, coming behind him, moved closer and waited for somebody to object. Nobody did. He saw at the top of the paper in a neat hand, ‘ Inventory, No. 7-A, Priory Close Alley .’ He ran his eyes down the paper - ‘ 1 dresses, 1 petticoat, 1 wrapper on floor, 1 nightgown on hook ’, (indeed, there it was, next to the bed) ‘ undergarments, on chair; 1 pr. shoes; 1 reticule containing 2s 5d, 1 handkerchief, 1 Mason’s toffee in paper … ’
    Guillam was lighting the only gas lamp, in