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am glad now we decided to work at the bank. Please apologize to your secretary for trying to take her job away from her.’
    Harry raised his eyebrows. ‘I beg your pardon?’
    ‘I had this mad idea that it might be fun to work for you and I went round to offer my services.’
    ‘Miss Jubbles said nothing of this to me,’ said Harry. ‘I wonder why.’
    ‘Well, she wouldn’t, would she?’ remarked Daisy. A touch of colour had returned to her cheeks.
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘She doesn’t want to lose her job.’
    ‘Miss Jubbles should have known her job is secure.’ Harry’s black eyes studied Rose’s face. ‘I am interested to know why you wanted to work for me. I was under the
impression that you neither liked nor approved of me.’
    ‘Daisy and I were of help to you over that murder at Telby Castle last year. I thought it might be fun to work together again, that is all. Do you have many exciting cases?’
    ‘Not in the slightest. Lost dogs, society scandals that need to be covered up, that sort of thing. But you surely do not intend to work at that bank for very long.’
    ‘Perhaps. But I am doing very well. Now Miss Levine is being wasted there. All she is doing is typing stuff out of ledgers that doesn’t need to be typed. As you were instrumental in
getting us the work, I would be grateful if you could perhaps speak to Mr Drevey and point out to him that Miss Levine is not only an expert typist but that she has mastered Pitman
shorthand.’
    ‘I will see what I can do.’
    After he had escorted Daisy and Rose back to their hostel and impressed on Miss Harringey the respectability of her tenants, Harry decided to go to the office. He found Miss
Jubbles hard at work polishing his desk.
    ‘Miss Jubbles! It is Sunday. What on earth are you doing here?’
    Miss Jubbles blushed painfully. ‘I was just passing and I thought I would do a few chores.’
    ‘This will not do. You work too hard. Please go home.’
    ‘I am sorry, Captain.’
    She looked so upset that Harry said impulsively, ‘I have been out on an odd case. Do you remember I told you I was doing some work for the Earl of Hadshire?’
    ‘Yes, but you did not tell me exactly what was involved.’
    So Harry told her the whole story. Miss Jubbles smiled, exclaimed, and listened intently while inside her brain a small, jealous Miss Jubbles was raging. That girl again. That wretched beautiful girl!
    When he had finished telling her about Rose, Harry smiled and told Miss Jubbles to go home.
    He gave her five shillings and told her to take a hack. Mrs Jubbles tore herself away. How sooty and cold and grim London looked! The hackney horse steamed and stamped as she climbed in and gave
one last longing look up at the office windows.
    The hack eventually dropped her at a thin, narrow brick house in Camden Town. Miss Jubbles lived with her widowed mother. She unlocked the front door and called, ‘Mother!’
    ‘In the sitting-room, dear’ came a cry from upstairs.
    Miss Jubbles mounted the narrow stairs to the first-floor sitting-room. Mrs Jubbles was sitting before a small coal fire which smouldered in the grate. She was a tiny woman dressed entirely in
black. Her black lace cap hung over her withered features. Her black gown was trimmed with jet and her black-lace-mittened hands clutched a teacup.
    When Miss Jubbles entered, she said in a surprisingly robust voice, ‘Ring the bell for more tea, Dora.’
    Miss Dora Jubbles pressed down the bell-push, and after a few minutes a small maid, breathless and with her cap askew, answered its summons. ‘More tea, Elsie,’ ordered Mrs Jubbles.
‘And straighten your cap, girl.’
    Mother and daughter exchanged sympathetic smiles after the girl had left. ‘Servants,’ sighed Mrs Jubbles as if used to a household of them rather than the overworked Elsie and a
cross gin-soaked woman who came in the mornings to do the ‘heavy work’.
    ‘How did it go?’ asked Mrs Jubbles eagerly.
    Dora took off her