Free When the Devil Drives by Caro Peacock

returned to his usual seat in the corner. I glimpsed him through the half open door, sitting very straight and writing as imperturbably as a country clergyman preparing his sermon, although his hand was moving at a speed nearer diabolic than reverend. As I watched, I was nearly bowled over by a copy boy rushing out of the door with a sheaf of papers in Jimmy’s fine italic hand. Another boy was standing at Jimmy’s shoulder, waiting to grab the pages away as he wrote them. After twenty minutes or so, that boy came rushing out with another sheaf of papers, followed at a more leisurely pace by Jimmy himself. He wished me good evening in his fine sonorous voice that might have brought him a career on the stage, except that he hardly came up to my shoulder and walked with a limp because of a club foot. He was one of the most learned people I knew and never seemed to resent the fact that he scraped a living reporting from the coroners’ courts when lesser men held comfortable fellowships at universities. I asked if his day had gone well.
    â€˜Yes indeed. Three different papers and probably a half column in all of them.’
    â€˜The Monument inquest?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    We walked companionably into Fleet Street, then up another side street to the back of a coffee house. Again, women weren’t welcome at the front of it, but Jimmy was friendly with the head waiter, who kept a more welcoming salon at the back. We took off our hats and coats and chose a settle by the fire. I waited until our coffee was brought to put to him the case of Miss Tilbury. He sipped and shook his head.
    â€˜Nobody of anything like that description in the past eight days, neither accident nor suicide. I should certainly have known. Young women invariably attract attention.’
    That seemed to close another line of investigation. I came back to the question of the Monument suicide.
    â€˜Did they identify the young woman at the inquest?’
    â€˜Yes. She was a Miss Janet Priest. Her father kept a stationery and print shop in the City Road.’
    â€˜How did they find out who she was?’
    â€˜Yesterday evening a distraught young woman went to St Magnus, saying that she thought the deceased girl might be her younger sister, who had been missing from home for the past week. They let her view the body and she fainted away. The poor woman had to give evidence of identification to the inquest this afternoon.’
    Although it had nothing to do with my case now, I couldn’t help being interested.
    â€˜It’s odd that she was missing for a week before she killed herself. Or had she gone missing before?’
    There were girls who slipped in and out of respectability as financial need demanded.
    â€˜Nothing like that. According to the sister’s evidence and an older woman’s who was a family friend, she was a model daughter – helped her father in the shop and had few friends and interests outside it.’
    â€˜No gentlemen followers?’
    â€˜No. And the surgeon who examined the body made it clear that she was not in a certain condition.’
    Of course, with a young female suicide, pregnancy or otherwise would be one of the first things he checked.
    â€˜Had she been depressed in spirits?’
    â€˜The sister said not.’
    â€˜Did anybody have any idea where she went in the week she was missing?’
    â€˜No.’
    I began to worry again about Miss Tilbury. There was a resemblance in that they both seemed to be two young women whose characters were a blank. Admittedly Miss Priest, doing useful work in East London, had lived a less sheltered life than Miss Tilbury, but both of them sounded too good and docile to be true. Miss Tilbury had been missing now for eight days. Miss Priest had been gone from home for a week before her body was discovered at the foot of the Monument.
    â€˜How did she get up the Monument without anybody knowing?’ I said.
    â€˜The assumption was that