Hot Night

As Londoners went home, that evening-in buses, tube, trains and private cars which jammed the main arteries until it was a miracle that traffic moved at all — it was almost too hot to move, too hot to breathe. The sultry stillness intensified; the stench of exhaust fumes made it far, far worse. Tens of thousands, the men in shirt-sleeves, the women in summer dresses, walked part of the way through the parks — London’s ‘lungs’ — but the air was little better even there. Nearly everyone, regardless of age, was listless and tired and could easily have become bad-tempered. The traffic police had special permission to discard their tunics and in their pale, grey-blue shirts and elbow-length white cuffs, patiently directed traffic so badly-congested that one feared it could never move.

It did move, although with agonising slowness, and sooner or later the weary Londoners managed to get home. Some to tiny apartments; some to luxurious flats; some to mean little houses whose front doors opened direct on to the pavements of narrow streets; some to the nearer suburbs, with their smooth, green lawns and gardens of flowers at the front and of vegetables at the back. Beyond these, in the dormitory suburbs, the bigger houses stood in spacious, well-kept grounds and parkland. There were many new estates of expensively priced houses as well as the high-rise apartment blocks overlooking parkland or commons. All of these were as near to the truly rural as one could hope to get, while still being virtually ‘in’ a city of near nine million human beings.

Not unnaturally, by far the greater majority of those home-going Londoners were honest. But as the law of averages would lead one to expect, some made their living by crime.

One of these, who was much more thorough, much more efficient, much more wealthy than her closest intimates dreamed or even the police suspected, was Martha ‘Aunty’ Triggett. And Martha Triggett thrived on crowds and sporting events.