Bleeding Heart Square Read Online Free

bonnet of a motor car at the other end of the square. They looked up and whistled at her. She ignored them and hurried past a decaying pump on the corner by the Crozier and into the alley to Charleston Street. Opposite the pub was a public library, with a queue of bedraggled people waiting patiently outside the doors. The pavements on both sides of the road were crammed with hurrying men and women in cheap clothes. Clerks, Lydia supposed, or people like that, on their way to work.
    She allowed herself to be swept like a twig in a current into Hatton Garden. A flock of young women, chattering as incomprehensibly as starlings, carried her across the road and into the street on the other side. More by luck than good judgment, she found herself in a curving lane called Fetter Passage. Among the row of shops it contained was a small cafe called the Blue Dahlia. The windows were steamed up but the smell of fried food drew her inside.
    Nobody took any notice of her. An enormously fat woman in a stained apron was standing behind a counter. After a quick glance at what other people were eating, she joined the huddle waiting to be served. When her turn came, she ordered tea and a bacon roll. The woman was surly to the point of rudeness with her, though she seemed happy to talk to her other customers, sometimes breaking out into cackles of laughter. The tea came in a chipped white mug. It was milky and sweet. The bacon tasted strong and was mainly fat and rind. Afterward, she wondered whether one left a tip. She wasn't sure how these things were managed, if they were managed at all, in an establishment like this. In the end she pushed a penny under the rim of her plate and hurried out of the cafe.
    One of the neighboring shops sold her a toothbrush, toothpaste, a face flannel and soap. She had at least remembered to pack a towel. The food and exercise had warmed her. She walked south down Fetter Passage into Holborn, where she turned left by the vast Prudential building. She crossed the southern end of Hatton Garden and immediately came to the mouth of a cul-de-sac.
    She paused to get her bearings. The cul-de-sac was guarded by two sets of railings separated by a tiny lodge with a disproportionately tall chimney sprouting from its roof. A man in a brown top hat and frock coat was standing by the railings with a pipe in his mouth. His mouth was almost entirely concealed by a nicotine-stained moustache in need of a trim. He saw Lydia and touched his hat.
    A small white dog pattered round the corner of the lodge and sniffed Lydia's ankles. She bent down to scratch his head.
    "Nipper! Come here!" the man said. "Sorry about that, Miss. He's got an eye for the ladies."
    "That's all right--I don't mind."
    "The trouble is, you have to watch him. He can be a bit funny with strangers. And his bite's worse than his bark."
    The dog sat down and scratched his ear with a hind leg. Lydia looked through the railings at the terraced street beyond. Though still respectable, the houses were clearly past their best. At the end was a chapel or small church. The line of its roof looked familiar.
    "Is Bleeding Heart Square over there?" she asked. "On the other side of the church?"
    "Yes, Miss. All part of my beat."
    "Your beat?"
    He waved his hand at the cul-de-sac behind him. "I'm the Beadle for what they call the Rosington Liberty. Chief of police and head porter all rolled into one, at your service."
    A car pulled up at the lodge, and the man hurried to swing open one of the roadway gates. Lydia walked on toward a busy crossroads with Smithfield market on the far side. The dark, sour smell of blood and raw meat mingled with the fumes of the gasoline. That, she realized, was the source of the tang in the air as she had come out of the house that morning. Bleeding Heart Square smelled, quite literally, of blood.
    Quickening her pace, she turned left into Farringdon Road. A little later she turned left again and discovered that she was back in Charleston