a point—but what caused you to speak in that tone? The man came here for help, not to be addressed in such a manner.”
Billy shrugged and slid down in the chair. Maisie thought he resembled a recalcitrant schoolboy.
He shook his head. “I dunno, Miss. He just sort of started to get on my nerves—all this business about her being some sort of fairy godmother. All mysterious. I just didn’t believe him, that’s all.”
“Go on—that’s not enough.”
Billy looked at Maisie. “There’s something not right about all of this. I’m not like you, Miss—not your sort that gets lots of feelings about things. I take it all as I see it, as a rule. But I just started to feel like I was listening to someone stringing me along.”
Maisie nodded.
“What do you think, Miss?”
“Again, I think you have a point, but I think there’s more to it than that. I think—and we may all be well off the mark here—I think he’s floundering. I think there might have been some serious discord in his dealings with his sister, even at a great distance. We can’t prove that, but we can find out more.”
“Aw gawd, Miss, I can’t understand half of what them people say—I can’t go out there and talk to Indians.”
“Don’t worry. I have the names of the boys now—that’s your job. Find out all you can about the boys who discovered the body.”
Billy took a sheet of paper from Maisie. “I feel like the Pied Piper, what with that other boy on the loose.”
Maisie looked up. Billy had returned to work following a serious injury while investigating the death of another man earlier in the year, and she felt he needed some sort of encouragement to inspire him. So to underscore her confidence in him, she had handed him the most recent case to supervise. The opportunity was presented when a man named Jesmond Martin came to see Maisie with a view to retaining her services in the search for his missing son. Fourteen-year-old Robert had walked away from his school—Dulwich College—in early July and had not been seen since. Asked about the delay in contacting Maisie and his reason for not previously alerting the police, Martin explained that the son was well able to look after himself, that he did not want his son to fall afoul of the police, and that he had also wanted to give the boy a chance to come home on his own. To deter the school from approaching the police, Martin had informed them that the son was now at home and he had withdrawn him from the school’s roster of pupils.
After the meeting, Maisie decided that it would be good for Billy to be in charge of an investigation—especially as he was the father of boys. Now she wondered if it was such a good idea.
“When we’re done with this, let’s talk about that case, shall we? See where we are with it.”
Sandra returned to the office. She placed the tea tray with clean crockery on top of a filing cabinet, and when Maisie beckoned to her, joined them at the table.
“What about the issue of prejudice?” asked Maisie.
“You never know what people will do, do you?” said Sandra. “I mean, when there are lines of men looking for work, people marching on London from up north, thinking we’ve got it easy down here—and they soon find out Londoners are in the same boat, don’t they?—well, it makes it difficult when you find out there’s paying work going to people who don’t even come from here.”
Billy made a sound that drew the attention of both Maisie and Sandra, an exhalation of breath demonstrating his disdain. “Prejudice? Let me tell you, if people here can be prejudiced against their own, you can bet your life they can be prejudiced against someone else.” He leaned forward. “My mate told me what it was like, after the war—he came home at the beginning of 1919. And just because the war had ended, it didn’t mean it was suddenly all cushy over there in France. No, a lot of them men were still covered in mud, blood, and rats’ you-know-what by the time they stepped off a train at Waterloo.” He shook his head, his eyes narrowing. “Because I’d been wounded in Messines, I was sent back here to Blighty in 1917. But one of my mates was over there until a good three months after the Armistice. He told me that they got off the