Free The Tiger In the Smoke by Margery Allingham

when I’m talking I know what I mean. A straight, clean fighter.’
    This last was clearly the highest praise he could bestow. He hesitated, glanced at the door and back again, and his very head shone with exasperation.
    â€˜But if he’s
not
flat on his back under a bar table, why the hell doesn’t he ring oop?’ he said.

CHAPTER 3
The Spoor
    â€”
    IT IS NOT easy to tell when enmity first begins, when that force which is part fear, part rivalry, and part the frank urge for survival first springs, but it was on that freezing walk that Charlie Luke caught the first wind of the man who of all his many quarries was to become the chief enemy of his life.
    As Amanda had guessed, at that time he was chiefly angry with himself. He was the best of policemen, which is to say that he never for one moment assumed that he was judge or jury, warder or hangman. He saw himself as the shepherd dog does; until he had rounded him up the malefactor was his private responsibility, to be protected as well as cornered. His job was first to locate him and then to bring him in alive, so the fact that he had ignored the terror which he had seen so plainly in the pale face above the grotesque moustache, and had sent Duds Morrison out alone to die, made him furious. It had been a professional slip of the worst kind and he hated himself for making it.
    Yet behind his self-criticism there was something more. Just then he had presentiment, a warning from some experience-born sixth sense, that he was about to encounter something rare and dangerous. The whiff of tiger crept to him through the fog.
    The walk itself was an experience. Without old Avril, who knew his parish blindfold, they might never have achieved it. The fog was now at its worst, rolling up from the river dense as a featherbed. It hung between street lamp and street lamp in blinding and abominable folds, and since in that area the architecture is all much alike and the streets are arranged in a series of graceful curves in which it is easy to walk in a circle in sunlight, the mile from the rectory to Crumb Street might well have been a maze. However, the Canon plunged into it with complete confidence, walking very fast.
    As he strode behind his uncle, Mr Campion eyed the somewhat picturesque figure with affection. Canon Avril’s coat in particular was remarkable, and even famous in its own small way. It might have been designed by Phil May, for it brushed its wearer’s boots and was fastened by a double row of bone buttons, each as large as a small saucer, which ran down in a double line to well below its owner’s knees. Moreover, since it appeared to be cut from a shepherd’s plaid carpet, it had acquired with the years the complete mould of the old man’s form, even to the bulge in his right-hand jacket pocket where he carried his tobacco tin, and he marched along inside it as if it had been a shell.
    The story about it that Campion knew was that it was often in pawn. Uncle Hubert was notoriously unsafe with money, so Miss Warburton, a pleasant spinster who lived in one of the glebe cottages and devoted herself to the church, had, since his wife’s death, taken complete charge of his private expenditure. She allowed him so much loose change every Saturday, placing the money in the brass box on his study mantelshelf, and she was absolutely adamant. If he overspent in the early part of the week, penniless he remained until pay-day.
    Financially embarrassed parishioners from the poor streets behind the shops knew all this as well as he did, and whenever possible confined their importunities to the week-end, but when, as must sometimes happen, some vital need arose at a moment’s notice, there was still just one other way. On these occasions the Canon’s coat was carried through the square in daylight over the arm of the borrower to the little pop-shop on the corner, and old Mr Hertz paid out forty-three shillings and sixpence on it. It was