‘Help you?’ said a voice.
I stepped towards the counter and saw sitting in a low, armless chair with a knitted cover – a nursery chair, I suspected – a small woman in her mid-thirties, but dressed like a grandmother with a piecrust top to her collar and ropes of suspiciously large white pearls hanging down over her boned bodice and pooling amongst her spreading skirts. My first thought was that she was in fancy dress for some reason, but as I noticed the profusion of brooches behind the pearls and the number of mismatched rings on her fingers I realised that she was simply dressed from stock. She was smoothing flat a sheet of brown paper on her lap.
‘First time?’ she said. I nodded. ‘Well, what have you brought me?’ She got to her feet and as she came forward at least the spreading skirts were explained for she walked with the rolling gait of someone with one leg much shorter than the other and I guessed that there was a block-soled boot hidden under her hemline.
‘What have I brought you?’ I said and then hesitated. She regarded me calmly from under a fringe of tight brown curls, slowly winding some string into a figure of eight and stowing it away in a drawer under the counter. I opened my bag, hoping to see something I could press into use to get things started, but it was Miss Rossiter’s bag and was empty except for a handkerchief and a purse of money. I took out a ten-shilling note and put it on the counter. The little woman spread her arms wide, showing off the bounty of golf clubs and perambulators behind me.
‘Take your time,’ she said. ‘Jist whistle if you want a case opened.’ She was turning away when I spoke.
‘I’m not looking for trinkets,’ I said. ‘I need your help with something and I would like to pay you.’
‘Can’t help you there, doll,’ she said. ‘I don’t deal in the sticky stuff. Fifty with a chit or twenty-five, sign on the line.’
I did not understand a word of this and told her so.
‘I don’t have anything to do with stolen goods,’ she said, speaking slowly as though to an idiot. ‘You can get half the value of your item if you have a receipt to prove you own it or a quarter if you just sign your name and leave an address. You’d be better off doon Leith if that’s not to your fancy.’
I took another ten-shilling note out of my purse and put it on the counter.
‘The young woman who was just here,’ I said, ‘the girl in yellow. What did she bring you?’ The little woman shook her head, her small brown eyes quite flat with lack of interest in the banknotes. I thought for a moment. If Phyllis had pawned something of Pip’s I had to know. If she had pawned something of her own, one had to wonder why she suddenly needed money and to ask oneself if it were perhaps because someone had seen her do something and that someone had to be paid to keep quiet about it. Clara was the obvious candidate for the role, for she alone could have witnessed Phyllis leave her room in the night, but Clara hated Pip enough to forgive his murder and besides, she was not a blackmailer, surely. Hot-tempered, perhaps, and inclined to be huffy, but she was not the kind to sneak and threaten.
‘I’ll bet,’ I said to the little woman, ‘that she took twenty-five and signed for it.’ Her face remained inscrutable, so I tried another tack. ‘She is in my employment, you know,’ I said, hoping that my voice would trump Miss Rossiter’s good grey serge, ‘and I suspect her of stealing from me.’
‘That lassie works to Mrs Balfour,’ said the pawnbroker. ‘What are you at?’
I reasoned to myself that since I would be telling Superintendent Hardy about Phyllis’s visit and he would come and get it out of this remarkably stubborn little person in the end anyway, I would be saving him some of his meagre time if I took care of it now.
‘You’ve not heard what happened at the Balfours’ today?’ I said. ‘Phyllis didn’t tell you?’ She shook her head. ‘Mr Balfour is dead,’ I said. ‘He was found this morning with a knife in his throat and nobody knows who did it, but all suspicious behaviour needs to be explained, don’t you see? Now, will you tell me what Phyllis pawned?’
‘Nothing,’ said the woman, who had paled at the news. ‘She was in to redeem today.’
‘You mean to take her belongings out again?’
‘Aye, that’s it,’ said the woman. She had opened another drawer under the counter and lifted out a sheaf of paper labels. ‘She’s a regular here, madam. She has a taste for nice things – well, you can tell that from looking at her – and she’s not good at waiting for them either. Here we are.’ She had found the label she was looking for and turned it towards me. The pencilled writing on it had been rubbed off to let the label be used again but was still faintly visible.
‘One gold ring,’ I said, squinting at it. ‘Ladies? Lace? What does it say here?’
‘One gold ring, large. One gold ring, small. Her ma and pa’s, most likely, or grandma’s maybe. One silver-gilt prayer book. One black coat, one tweed rug, one set silk nightclothes duchesse satin peach, coffee lace,’ said the woman. ‘I’d say the nightie and the rug were maybe lifted from the house, would you no’? But I like to give folks the benefit and say they were passed on.’
‘And can you tell me,’ I said, speaking rather softly as though that meant I were not really asking, ‘how much she paid to redeem them?’
‘I shouldn’t really,’ she said. ‘And if my ma was here she’d take her hand off me…’
‘Well, then,’ I said, ‘before she comes back…’
The little woman gave me a sad smile.
‘Oh, there’s no coming back from where she’s gone, madam,’ she said. ‘It was seventeen pounds Miss McInnes gave me today for redemption.’
‘Gosh,’ I said, thinking that if this were the going rate for a few baubles and old nighties, there had been times in the past when I could have furnished myself with very useful amounts of pocket money if I had had the nerve to shove some of my treasures over a pawnshop counter. There is a set of Sèvres too hideous to display, much less eat off, which is seeing out its days in a crate in an attic; and much of my grandmother’s jewellery is wilfully ugly and just shy of being worth resetting in wearable form. The pawnbroker read my mind and set me straight.
‘That’s got a fair bit of interest on it, mind,’ she said. ‘I’ve had it a good while.’ I looked again at the upper shelves of parcels, where the paper was sun-bleached even in this basement room and the labels were curled up like autumn leaves.
‘Of course,’ I said, hoping that I was not blushing. ‘Well, thank you. I shall try to keep Superintendent Hardy from troubling you.’
‘No odds to me,’ said the woman. ‘I’ve nothing to hide from the coppers.’ She gave me a shrewd look as she sat herself down again, gripping the edge of a shelf and kicking her lame leg out as she fell backwards. I wished I had given her more than a pound, suddenly, and did not like to leave such a good little person, all alone in this frankly quite depressing setting. As I let myself out into the passageway, however, I met a youngish man in his shirtsleeves carrying in his arms a fat toddler with tight brown curls and round brown eyes.
‘Afternoon,’ he said to me, and then to the child, ‘Let’s see if Mammy’s got the kettle on yet, Daisy, eh?’
I put my unneeded sympathy away again and retraced my steps to the kiosk. Inside, seven of the pennies had gone but three were still where I had left them.