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found the report of the post mortem, as well as reports from various men on the beat who had been drafted on to the case. Sutcliffe stewed for some time over the post mortem. The pathologist was clearly not entirely happy.Deceased had drowned, and the body contained only a small amount of alcohol. He had apparently eaten lunch and afternoon tea, the latter a few hours before he died. There were bruises on the body that could be consonant with violence having been used, but there was nothing that could not have been caused by his hitting a boat, or the pillars of the bridge, when he first fell into the river. All in all, the pathologist had found nothing specific on which to pin his unease. One of the detective-constables had reported that a night watchman in one of the large office blocks on either side of the Tate Gallery end of the Vauxhall Bridge had reported a loud cry around 10:30 on Thursday night, followed by a splash. He had been out on the embankment wall, having a quiet can of beer, the constable thought. He had peered into the water, seen nothing, then gone back inside.
    All in all, there seemed nothing to do but go for an open verdict. But Sutcliffe expressed his unhappiness to the Assistant Deputy Commissioner.
    â€œI’m going to wait,” he said. “I’ve got a feeling in my bones that things are not quite right. And I’ve also got a feeling that something will turn up.”
    â€œMicawber,” said the Assistant Deputy Commissioner. “But you’re probably right. In politics, something or other usually does turn up.”
    In this case, it took its time. Christmas, that inconvenient Christmas, intervened, and it was well into January before the little man in Battersea saw the picture in the paper, and came along to see Sutcliffe with his worries.

Chapter 3
A Process Of Selection
    The town of Bootham was situated in South Yorkshire, not very far from the Nottinghamshire border, and about as near to Sheffield as anyone would want to be. Its history stretched back to the Middle Ages, when it had been an important market town, but local historians who tried to make their fellow-townsmen aware of this medieval heritage gave every appearance of making bricks without straw, for the Bootham of today was essentially the creation of the Industrial Revolution, and that demanding, devouring movement had swept away all trace of earlier, quieter times. Bootham’s nineteenth-century prosperity was built on steel, and on the coal seams nearby, on the manufacturing industries which sprang up in the form of innumerable small factories and workshops. “Where there’s muck there’s brass,” said the Victorians, convinced they were uttering an eternal verity.
    Nowadays, where there was muck, there was just muck. The prospect seen from the train of decayingsuburbs, disused factories, worked-out mines was only an extreme statement of what was to be seen everywhere in the town. As work had become rare, the whole physical structure of the town seemed to have collapsed, and the whole social structure with it. Though the denizens of the South were convinced that the unemployed were living off the fat of the land, in Bootham one saw shoddily clad women wheeling dirty babies in decrepit prams, men standing idly round on street corners, and a general air of a working people coming to terms with a future of idleness, of a hearty people wondering where their next french fry sandwich was coming from. In the commercial centre, small shops were boarded up, slogans disfigured the walls and litter lined the streets, and the air was thick with the smells of cheap take-away foods.
    There were, to be sure, parts of Bootham less overpoweringly dismal. The town was not large, and around it stretched long fields of barley and of rape, which last crop in the spring made a display of bilious brilliance which relieved the eye after all the greys and browns. In James Partridge’s old constituency,