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What’s-her-name.’ Her landlady didn’t know it. She was a waitress working nobody knew where. If she had died I couldn’t have certified her. I called her Miss Smith—had to put some sort of name on the books. What does Mrs. Weston do for a living?”
    Mr. Elk made a little grimace.
    “Well, you know, she’s…well, she goes West every night all dolled up.”
    The doctor nodded.
    “There are lots of ‘em—a whole colony. Why do they live in this hell shoot? I suppose it’s cheap. And their earnings are not what they were. One girl told me—but you can’t believe ‘em.”
    He sighed heavily and sighed again.
    “You can’t believe anybody.”
    Elk got up, drained his glass and reached for his hat.
    “She wanted to know if you were an easy man to get on with. I got an idea she’s a dope-getter. I don’t know why, but I’ve just got that idea. There was a doctor in Silvertown who made a fortune out of it: he spent over a thousand on his defence when I got him to the Old Bailey…”
    The doctor went out with him, and they arrived at the street door at an opportune moment.
    The earlier sound of the battle had come to them in a confused hubbub of sound as they passed through the disinfected passage. As Marford opened the door he saw two men fighting, surrounded by a crowd. It was a fair fight, both men being well matched in point of physique and equally drunk. But they were too close to the granite kerb of the sidewalk. One of the combatants went down suddenly, and the grey, dusty kerbstone went red.
    “Here—you!”
    Elk made a grab at the victor and swung him round. The policemen came running and plunged through the crowd.
    “Take this man.”
    Elk handed over his dazed prisoner and shouldered his way through the tightly packed knot of people that surrounded the man on the kerb.
    “Get him inside the doctor’s shop. Lift him…”
    They carried the limp thing into the surgery and Dr. Marford made a brief examination whilst Mr. Elk bustled the bearers into the street.
    “Well?” he asked when he came back. “Hospital case, isn’t it?”
    Marford was fixing an enormous pad of gauze and cottonwool to the head of the white-faced man.
    “Yes. Do you mind ringing the ambulance? Two shillings’ worth of surgical dressings and I don’t get a cent for it. You can’t sue their relations—they need the money for a swell funeral. Everybody has to go into black, and that costs money.”
    Elk screwed up his lips painfully.
    “Is he booked?” he asked, looking at the figure with the awed curiosity which the living have for the dead.
    “I should think so: compound fracture of the occiput. Get him to the London and they may do something. It costs me ten shillings a week just for surgical dressings. I’ll tell you something, and you can arrest me. If I get ‘em alone, I go through their pockets and take the cost of the dressing. But usually they’ve got some howling women with ‘em who won’t leave ‘em. ‘When pain and anguish wring the brow,’ eh?”
    The ambulance came noisily and the patient was taken away.
    It was an incident not worth remembering—except for two shillings’ worth of dressing that would never be liquidated.
    The doctor closed the door upon Mr. Elk, and went back to his books and his thoughts. Two inconvenient new lives were coming to Tidal Basin. The district nurses would call him in good time. Inconvenient…the children of an unemployable labourer and a father who was resting in one of His Majesty’s prisons.
    As to this Lorna Weston…
    He knew her, of course. She often passed the surgery on her way to the provisions store next door, and once or twice she had come in to see him. A pretty woman, though her mouth was a trifle hard and straight. He never confessed to Elk that he knew anybody. Elk was a detective and respected no confidences.
    There was a phone call from Elk. The fighter had died on admission to hospital. The doctor was not surprised. An inquest, of