Chapter 25
UP APRON STREETThe two buildings, the undertaker’s shop and the bank, divided only by the entrance to the mews, were silent and black in the rain. The downpour had increased. It had cleared most of the streets and made moonlit lakes of the woodblocks round every lamp-post. Even the wide Barrow Road was deserted save for an occasional late bus, and in the ill-lit streets there was no one, not a policeman, not a lover, not a cat.
The crowd before Portminster Lodge had shrunk like a flannel patch in the wet, but the nucleus of it remained and pressed forward in new excitement. Five minutes earlier Dice had opened the front door and invited the gentlemen of the Press inside for what he was pleased to call ‘a bit of a chat with Inspector Bowden’, and as the last soaked overcoat pa
