Elegy for Eddie Read Online Free PDF Page B

tell her—he might’ve been worried about the money it would cost to see the doctor.”
    “He could’ve gone to Dr. Blanche’s clinic.”
    “Of course he could, but even though there’s a sign outside the clinic informing people that services are without charge, they’re still often worried in case they’ll be asked for money they don’t have. Fear of illness putting them in the workhouse stops many a sick person from seeking help, especially someone like Eddie, who knew very well that his mother was born in the workhouse and was lucky to get out. Billy, did anyone give any idea what might have been bothering Eddie?”
    “No. They knew he’d been doing a lot of work for some quite well-to-do people recently—that little stint at the Palace Mews helped word get around about him, and apparently he’d been traveling a bit farther afield to sort out difficult horses.”
    “Again, his mother indicated as much, and she said that at first she was worried about him traveling on the bus or the underground, but she said he’d memorized the stations across the whole railway and probably knew every single bus on the route as well as the conductors. And of course, there’s that new map of the underground railway; it’s made it easier to know where you’re going, even though the lines on the map look nothing like what’s really down there. Eddie had a good memory for the little details—I remember that about him, despite what anyone said about there not being much in his head. He just had a different way of thinking and seeing the world, I think.” She made a note on the case map. “The interesting thing is that his mother doesn’t know the names of some of these people he worked for.”
    “I suppose he wasn’t the sort to keep a record of who he was seeing and when.”
    “That’s something else, apparently he had started a little book with his customers’ names, but it wasn’t there when they gave Mrs. Pettit the sack of personal effects at the mortuary.”
    “Could it have dropped out?”
    “Or it might have been taken.” Maisie looked at Billy. “Look, here are the notes I made after I visited Eddie’s mother. I’ve circled the items that need to go on the map, so if you can do that, I just want a minute to look over what Sandra’s left for me.”
    Maisie sat at her own desk and began to read through observations written in Sandra’s neat, precise handwriting. For speed she had used pencil, but Maisie noticed that in her work at the office she generally used a marbled fountain pen, a gift from her late husband’s parents when they learned she planned to attend night classes. Sandra had indented each new note with a tiny star, and she had underlined any point she believed to be of particular interest. One of those points in turn piqued Maisie’s interest: No union membership had been allowed at Bookhams since the company was bought by John Otterburn. Otterburn was the owner of daily and weekly newspapers throughout Britain, in particular the London Daily Messenger , a newspaper that had garnered a wide readership in the past three decades. The newspaper owner’s opposition to union membership was well known, along with his belief that Bolshevism would “buckle commerce and lead to the downfall of the British Empire.” Despite powerful unions in the print and allied trades, Otterburn had kept organization of workers out of Bookhams—and men who needed work didn’t argue.
    From Sandra’s meticulous notations, she learned that Otterburn had visited Bookhams himself following the accident, promising a full inquiry and an investigation into safety procedures at all Otterburn factories and offices.
    In one newspaper report, it was said that Eddie’s presence was “tolerated” by staff, who felt sympathy for his condition; a manager was quoted as saying, “Luckily for him, on account of his impaired mind, he wouldn’t have felt anything when that roll hit him.”
    “What a callous thing to