She regarded them warily, uncertain if it was truly old shoes that had brought the police around. “There’s nothing else you wanted to know about her things?”

“Only if she’d pinched any of them,” Wilkerson answered.

That silenced Mrs. Rollings. Anything nice enough to have been stolen had already found its way to the next owner or a shop dealing in secondhand goods, no questions asked.

She saw them out with poor grace, and shut the door on their heels.

Sergeant Wilkerson laughed. “She’s a right old besom, but there are any number on the street like her.” He gestured in either direction at houses no better kept than hers, their paint peeling and roofs showing stains from years of damp. “But they serve a purpose. Many a pretty girl who went out to seek her fame and fortune would be lucky to wind up here, and not selling herself in the stews. There’s not been a lot of work for this lot, what with the War and all, but they’ve managed to survive. Somehow they always do. This Iris Kenneth would have had an eye for the main chance.”

“And yet she ended her life in the river.”

Rutledge compared the street here with Osterley, where prosperity had slipped away but dignity and resourcefulness had kept up appearances.

“Well,” Sergeant Wilkerson added as he turned to walk back to Rutledge’s motorcar, “it wasn’t much to go on, but you never know.”

The epitaph of police work, Rutledge thought.

“Yes,” he answered. “But I’d give much to know if Iris Kenneth was pushed, or was desperate enough to throw herself into the water.”

“You think that man Walsh might have wanted to be rid of her?”

“It’s possible. If she helped him rob the priest’s house. Or she may have been working for someone else with a better reason to kill her than Walsh had. The Iris Kenneths of this world seldom live to old age.” Although Mrs. Rollings had. It depended, he thought, whether the woman was clever or naive. Whether she could protect herself or was destined to be a victim.

He started the motorcar and stepped up behind the wheel. “I’ll be going back to Norfolk,” he told Wilkerson. “Will you pass that message to Chief Superintendent Bowles? And if there’s any more information about this Iris Kenneth or her death, I want to know about it.”

“Aye, I’ll see to that,” the Sergeant promised. He sighed. “I never fancied drowning, myself. I’d look to a quicker way of dying.”

“My first Inspector told me that women preferred drowning because it didn’t hurt and it didn’t mar the face. When I saw my first corpse from the river, I knew he was wrong. We never identified her. No one could have.”