“If there had been a failure and one of his contacts had fallen down on the job of picking them up? Possibly. No way of telling.” He was disinterested. “In that service anybody can get orders to do anything; I thought perhaps he was just fetching the cat home. He runs a chronic barney with some other barmy old chap who tries to entice it away to annoy him, and they go chasing all over the shop after it. It’s a real old ‘queen’s quadrille’ by all accounts. I hear this from the old girls in Cribb Street. A neighborhood like that is as gossipy as a village, and he was one of the sights. Now he’s gone and let himself be taken! That’ll annoy the Odsbods. They’ve used his ‘post office’ for years. He was there when I came in.”
“Your employers, the . . . er . . . Odsbods got the flat for your lad
