Fear to Tread Read Online Free

a fuss. Fortnight ago they come along and find a dead beetle in my ravioli. In my ravioli. Who would be likely to put such filth in, I ask you, them or me? They throw it in my face. A whole plateful—”
    “Who—?” began Mr. Wetherall.
    “Do not ask who. Ask why. I’m tell you. I used to take food from them. There’s no secret. Bacon and sugar. All took it, you understand. I wasn’t the only one. If we couldn’t get it other place, we had to get it from them. Then I wanted to stop, you understand?”
    “I don’t—”
    “They asked too much. Bacon and sugar and butter and tinned meat are good, but they are not good at five and six, six and seven shillings a pound. You can reckon it up for yourself, Mr. Wetherall, you know what I charge. In the West End, perhaps. That’s West End prices. Not here. So I said I must stop. Then they warned me—”
    Luigi suddenly cut off the torrent of his speech, and Mr. Wetherall at last got the chance to say: “Who are these people you’re talking about, Luigi?”
    Luigi was not listening. He had his head half turned, and in the silence that followed they both heard, beyond the service door, the outer door of the kitchen open and shut softly.
    Luigi jumped to his feet and went out through the serving door.
    At that moment Mrs. Wetherall arrived, five minutes late and full of insincere apologies.
    They had, as Luigi had promised, an excellent dinner, but Mr. Wetherall did not find himself enjoying it.

 
     
2
SOUTH OF THE RIVER. THE USES OF LITHOGRAPHY
     
    Next morning Mr. Wetherall asked Miss Donovan for her elder brother’s address.
    “Patsy?” said Miss Donovan. “Why, he lives home now, Mr. Wetherall.”
    He was on the point of expressing his surprise when his experience of the South Bank and its problems checked him. There could be reasons why Patsy Donovan and his young wife would have given up their house and gone back to live with one or other of their families; but Peggy might not want to discuss them.
    Patsy was a detective-sergeant, attached for C.I.D. duties to Borough Police Station. Mr. Wetherall had known him, as a boy, in the mid ‘thirties, at the Battersea School at which he had been teaching. Battersea had been Mr. Wetherall’s first impact with the light-hearted, tough-minded, precocious young male who hangs out south of the river. When the wheels of circumstance had brought Mr. Wetherall to the South Borough Secondary School and Sergeant Donovan to the Borough Police Station they had improved this acquaintanceship. More than once they had been able to be useful to one another. It was nearly a year since they had last had occasion to meet.
    “Will he be off duty now?”
    “He’ll be asleep right now,” said Peggy. “He’ll be up by eleven. Should I ask him to come round—?”
    “No. I’m off until lunch. I’ll go and see him.”
    As Peggy was on her way out she stopped for a moment at the door and said: “It’s some time since you seen Patsy last, isn’t it?”
    “Yes.”
    “You’ll find him changed a bit.”
    “We are none of us static,” said Mr. Wetherall.
    “I suppose that’s right.”
    “A doctor once told me that you change your blood and your character completely every seven years.”
    “There now!” said Miss Donovan. “I’d better fetch you those milk returns and you can sign them up before you go.”
    The Donovan house was one in a row of the oldest houses in the district, a miracle of eroded brick, decaying wood and blackened stone, a sepulchre, whitened daily by the power of Mrs. Donovan’s arm. Mr. Wetherall went round to the back and found the sergeant at breakfast in the kitchen. He was alone in the house, for his mother, though over sixty, still went out to do a morning’s work at a block of offices near the Elephant, and Mr. Donovan had long ago drunk himself into an expensive grave.
    “Why, come in.”
    Mr. Wetherall got his first shock when Sergeant Donovan spoke, and another when he got up and the light