[22] Vertigo 42 by Martha Grimes

Author:Martha Grimes
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2014-06-04T06:00:58+00:00

Hackney, Plaistow Street

Saturday, 7:00 P.M.

30

* * *

Jury hadn’t been in Hackney in some time. It appeared to be going through the process of gentrification that had overtaken other boroughs, only here Jury wondered at its chance for success. Bulldozers were plowing under eyesore council flats; one sat idle in an enormous vacant lot that would soon make way for a high-rise and probably smart little terraced houses to be sold or let to workers from the City.

Hackney was always getting ripped off. There had been many instances of council corruption over the years. It would sell a street of little businesses to a developer or a private party with the assurance that everything would be rebuilt and restored to the owners. That, of course, never happened.

Hackney was skirted by Newham and Tower Hamlets, a triple play in unemployment. To Jury, a London enigma. He lived in Islington, which had its own poor pockets. But he felt surprised by Plaistow Street, and naive in his surprise. He’d lived in London all of his life; he’d been with the Met for thirty years. He was used to the city’s differences. But he’d never felt as if he’d passed out of one century into another as he did turning the corner into Plaistow Street. It was like crossing over an unsealable crack in the city’s surface.

The coming of darkness didn’t help, as it was a street of lamps that didn’t work. No leafy trees, no front gardens. It was a street of small, profitless shops; lock-up garages; gray, Soviet-style council flats; and red brick low-rise ones, narrow houses in a street already almost claustrophobic in its narrowness.

On the corner was a pub whose name he couldn’t make out because the sign had been virtually rubbed out by wind and weather, and the light above it broken. “Three”-something was what he made out. Three globes or three bells, possibly. It must be fairly popular, given the buried laughter that dug its way to the surface whenever a customer went in or out the door. The few people he saw were mostly going in and mostly by themselves. Not a pub for the owners of the condos and flashy flats in Canary Wharf or the other refurbished haunts of Docklands.

On an impulse, Jury walked in, and silence dropped like a blanket of fog. The pub was not overflowing with custom, but it was a comfortable and wieldy crowd of under two dozen. Some looked at him with faces as bland as a custard; others glanced around and looked away. He sensed something other going on than the usual Saturday-night revel; they were here for something that made him, for some reason, uncomfortable.

A lightweight conversation resumed after Jury had made his way to the bar, but he knew from the few words floating past him that it was meaningless. The barman raised his eyebrows in question rather than asking Jury aloud what he’d have. Jury ordered a whiskey, as it would be quicker to drink than a pint, and stopping here longer would make him that much later in seeing Dr.

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