The Rooms Above The Pawnshop
Brunswick Street ran north from the eastern edge of Bloomsbury Square, between a brewer's warehouse on one side and a row of tall, narrow houses on the other that had been handsome in the reign of the Fourth George and were now divided, subdivided, and subdivided again. The pawnshop occupied the ground floor of the seventh house from the corner. Its three brass balls had been painted over in black some years earlier, and the paint was peeling off in patches so that the balls looked piebald and diseased, like the coat of an old spaniel.
The proprietor's name, on the lintel, was Hoskyn. Inside, at half past two on a Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Hoskyn himself sat behind a counter of polished mahogany so scarred with the small cuts of a thousand ticketed parcels that it resembled, in certain lights, the rind of an old cheese. He was a man of perhaps sixty years, narrow-shouldered, with a pair of pince-nez on a black cord, and the kind of mouth that gives nothing away because it has, over a lifetime, contracted into the habit.
"Latham," he said, when Wren had introduced himself and asked his business. "Yes. Second floor back. Paid up to Lady Day, which is this coming Friday."
"You let the room to her?"
"I let the floor to Mrs. Pell. Mrs. Pell lets the rooms."
"How long had Miss Latham been with her?"
Mr. Hoskyn consulted, with the air of a man being asked to produce an answer he