Excerpt from Elephant and Castle: A ReconstructionBoard of Trade and he let me in (which cost Shagan two quid). On the whole I wished he hadn't. Anyone who wants to study the interior architecture of Mickett Lane can do so without fear of being jostled by me. The Scene of the Crime was a bedroom upstairs. They had drawn the curtains, and there was one electric bulb burning over the bed, but the curtains let in quite a lot of daylight, giving the room the neither-the-one-damned-thing-nor-the-other appearance which you get in an empty theatre with the stage set and the curtain up. There was a smell of disuse and disinfectants, with a lingering stink of face-powder. At my age I am not, I hope, sensitive to what the half-baked call atmosphere but I. Found the cheapness of the whole set-up quite disagreeable. There were two or three seedy little men in smart three guinea suits doing exactly what they do in whodunits, taking photo graphs with micro-cameras and making measurements, one fellow with a cigarette stuck to his lip was calling out the figures just as a tailor does. N 0 one took any notice of me, and I had the impression that if I'd started to intone the burial service in a high, childish treble or to unleash a brace of bloodhounds from my brief-case they still wouldn't have taken any notice. It was that sort of scene, by Tchehov out of Madame Tussaud. There was a rheumy-eyed old man who I suppose was the police doctor examining the body. So feeling that I ought to give Shagan his money's worth I examined it too. The medical was kind enough to point out the wounds in the throat, which I could per fectly well have seen for myself. A wheezy old bore in love with footling technicalities.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.