A Commonplace Killing Read Online Free PDF

in an Austin 7, he’d secured a thousand pounds’ worth of chocolate bars; a week before that it had been ladies’ shoes, yet neither of these successes had kept the super off his back for more than a day or two. And then there was the blasted paperwork. He was always behind with his paperwork. This is not to mention the unedifying meditation upon the greed and the numerous lusts and jealousies of others; the welter of human despair that confronted him; the hour upon hour of tooth-combing though evidence – most of it spurious; the hour after hour spent interviewing cocky spivs who were better dressed, better fed, and in every way more gratified than he was. He could have measured out his life in the cups of cold, grey tea he had shared with weasel-featured informants, or in the ten-bob notes he could ill afford, shelled out to the same. A couple of days ago one of his narks had told him that he had it all wrong: “It ain’t the crooks you oughter be watchin’ out for, Mr Cooper,” he’d said; “it’s the general public what’s the real villains. If they didn’t want things they can’t ’ave there’d be no black market. It’s all down to them, see. Them and the government.”
    He had to admit that there was something in that. Looking for a little bit extra from under the counter or off the back of a lorry had become a national pastime. Counterfeiting, swindling , short-changing, stealing: the desperate pursuit of nylons, tea, whisky, sausages and cigarettes had made criminals of everyone. Except, that is, Jim Cooper. For in these morally etiolated times, when most people would have happily sold their own mothers for twenty Players, DDI Cooper would have nothing whatsoever to do with blacketeering. He sensed that to relent on this one point of principle would have made a mockery of everything: and there was more than enough bathos to his life already.
    Done with eviscerating his face, he wiped off the residual soap on a tea-towel and (styptic pencils having gone the way of button boots and tinned salmon) dabbed a little bit of tooth powder on the more painful of the grazes. He supposed that the red weals did, at least, assure onlookers that he had shaved, since there was precious little other evidence of the same elsewhere on his raspy chin. What he would give for a packet of safety blades.
    He went into the kitchen and refixed yesterday’s collar to yesterday’s shirt and looped yesterday’s still-knotted tie over his head. Then he collected his jacket from its home on the back of the kitchen chair, patting it for his pipe and tobacco pouch. The Welsh rarebit he had attempted to make for his supper the night before was mocking him from the dresser table, and as he watched it slide off the plate into the scraps pail, he made a mental note never again to grill Canadian powdered cheese. He had been driven to such drastic action by extreme want: he had been hungry ever since the day war broke out.
    The parp of a motor horn from the street below was his cue to collect his ancient Homburg and crumpled mackintosh from the coat-stand in the hall; and as he closed the front door and ran down the stairs he entertained thoughts of a nice little café he knew on the Seven Sisters Road, wondering if there would be time to stop off for a cheese roll and a quick cup of tea on his way to the murder site. But then he remembered that it was Sunday and the café, along with everything else, would be shut.

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    I t got on her nerves, the way Walter peered at the mirror as he cut his ridiculous little ’tache with such exaggerated care; the way he stood in front of the fireplace in his collarless and cuffless shirt, his braces dangling either side of his legs. He’d always been vain, but he was no longer a good-looking man, and it irritated her that he still behaved as though he was. She could not abide the way his chin, never strong, had by now almost completely vanished; his straw-coloured hair was thinning; his icy