A Scream in Soho Read Online Free

There’s nothing of the butterfly about Flo. Mascagni. Divil a bit. In his own way he’s about as dirty a tyke as you’d come across in a day’s walk, but there are occasions when he is useful to me, and this is one of them.”
    â€œDangerous game for him, isn’t it?” Haynes questioned.
    â€œNot the healthiest in the world, I’ll admit,” McCarthy answered placidly. “But if a man is a born crook and double-crosser he’s going to sell valuable information to someone, sooner or later, and it might just as well be me as anyone else. But one of these days, Bill, they’ll tumble to him and someone will wipe a chiv across his throat as sure as we’re sitting here. Well, at the worst, it’ll get rid of a damn pest, and at the best, it’ll save the country the expense of trying and hanging him. Which suits me admirably.”
    â€œIt’s a strange thing, Mac, that crime and particularly crimes of violence have dropped to practically nothing since war. Just a few hoodlums rough-housing about in the black-out, but nothing serious. In this infernal gloom you’d have thought that they’d have been at it with a vengeance, particularly at this end of the town.”
    McCarthy’s eyes twinkled. “Most of the younger ones are busy conferring as to the best way to get together and kill the Sergeant Major,” he observed whimsically. “The rest of them are thinking up their spiel for the tribunals, when they appear as Conscientious Objectors to violence of any sort or kind. It’s a queer world, Bill, and there’s some damn funny folk live in it.”
    â€œAnd this particular part of it has its fair share of them.”
    â€œAs one of the denizens of this particular quarter, being born in it and reared in its gutters, I take exception to that remark,” the inspector said with a grin. “It’s no worse, and no better, than any other part of London where you’ve got a mixed population. There are as many entirely respectable people living in Soho as there are in Streatham—though I’m bound to admit,” he emended, “that they don’t take life as seriously there as they do here. And if they’re a bit too inclined to say it with a knife, instead of music, or flowers, you mustn’t forget that’s hereditary, and a strongly-embedded racial characteristic. They can’t be altogether blamed for that. Anyhow,” he concluded dryly, “it keeps the police division operating this district well up on their toes, and that’s something. Just a minute until I read my mail.”
    With a dexterous flip of his fingers which showed how used he was to receiving communications of this kind, and without even glancing at it as he did it, McCarthy opened the tiny slip of paper which had been dropped upon the table by Mascagni. When opened he cast one glance at it, to read, and memorize, a certain name and address. After which he tore the scrap of paper into such tiny fragments that not even the most diligent could ever have put them together again.
    â€œYes,” he observed almost sadly to his friend, “it will be the chiv for our twisty little friend Floriello one of these days. Nothing in the world more certain than that!”
    The inspector stood up, and seemingly, fiddled about in his overcoat pocket from which he eventually withdrew his cigarette case. When again he seated himself there, a couple of treasury notes found their way, as though by sleight of hand, into the overcoat pocket of Mr. Floriello Mascagni.
    It was very nearly midnight when Sir William Haynes and McCarthy made their way out into the black night again; the latter whistled for a cab, but in vain.
    â€œYou won’t get one about here, sir, I’m afraid,” a constable who turned up upon the scene informed him. “It takes them all they know to pick up fares in the main thoroughfares.”
    â€œThen