The Unwelcome Guests: A Colonel Bainbridge Mystery (The Gentleman Detective Mysteries Book 3) by Evelyn James

Author:Evelyn James [James, Evelyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Red Raven Publications
Published: 2021-11-10T22:00:00+00:00

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They travelled to an address in a side street, where the houses were back-to-backs and people lived atop one another. Victoria was still getting used to the idea of homes not having a back garden, or even a yard to call their own. The more she spent time with her uncle, the more her eyes were being opened to the strange ways of the world. Poverty was no longer a vague concept she read about in magazines or books, and quietly tutted to herself over. Now it was something she could see for herself, something she could taste and feel. She was not sure what to make of it, other than to know she was very glad it was not her who was enduring it.

They left the car a couple of roads back; not sure it would manage the cobbles of the streets they had to venture into. Victoria hated cobbles with a vengeance. They were impossible to walk on comfortably, at least in the shoes she wore, and seemed to want to trip her up and twist her ankle at any moment. Bainbridge huffed and puffed his away over them, losing his stick occasionally in gaps between them.

“Whoever invented cobblestones needs flogging,” Victoria snapped when she heard a sinister wrenching sound that suggested she had nearly lost the heel of her shoe to a particularly large gulley between two stretches of cobbles.

“They are good for carriages and drainage,” Bainbridge replied. “They allow the rain and therefore mud to sink between them and not require people to soil their shoes.”

“I am not convinced that makes up for their inconvenience,” Victoria snorted.

They had reached a shabby little home that looked about ready to fall to pieces. A well-fed, but ratty-coated cat perched on a windowsill and scowled at them in that way cats do that makes a person feel they are somehow of less worth than a beetle – and not even a very large, or pretty beetle.

Bainbridge lifted his fist to knock on the door, then reconsidered and used the knob of his walking stick.

“They say crime does not pay,” Victoria observed, eyeing the house with a suspicious look, as if its decay might be somehow catching.

“They do say that,” Bainbridge agreed. “Though, respectability does not always pay either.”

He was looking at the nearby homes where most of the residents were law-abiding souls trying to get on with their lives as best they could, and not interested in doing harm to anyone. Bainbridge did not go much in for sayings, especially ones that were meant as platitudes for those who had suffered an injustice. Poverty and misfortune did not merely strike at the scoundrel.

“I am not sure anyone is going to answer,” Victoria declared after they had waited some time outside.

“He will be up in his bed.”

They turned around to see who had stated this. It proved to be an old woman of indeterminate age wearing a thick shawl that went over her head. She was tiny, barely reaching to Bainbridge’s chest.

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