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wafted freely.
    We found flat number 82, and when we rang, the coroner’s officer unexpectedly opened the door to us. He had already arrived on the job. He ushered us in and we stood looking around us. The flat contained two small rooms and a large cupboard, and was the home of a young widow who worked in a nearby factory and who extended her intimate favors to a commercial traveler who lodged with her whenever he was in London. She was, from all accounts, a lively, happy, easy soul, and now here she was, when we arrived, lying dead on her bed, wearing a particularly shattering magenta velvet frock with lipstick and chipped nail varnish to match. She was plump, dark-haired, with blunt features. She had told a neighbor the previous week that she was four months pregnant and intended doing something about it. There was reason to suppose that the something had now been done, with drastic results.
    She had also told the neighbor, during the conversation, that she had already tried slippery-elm bark (a popular but not very effective working-class abortifacient) and nothing had happened, so she would have to have “a go at something else.” The morning of the day of our visit to her flat, the neighbor said, the young woman had complained of a pain, and about noon she had died.
    Dr. Simpson and the CID officer began looking for a syringe of the sort which is widely used for bringing about abortions, both by small-time abortionists and the pregnant women themselves.
    We all poked about the flat, looking here, there and everywhere. It was a great opportunity for me to discover how a young woman factory worker in Bethnal Green lives, and I fetched out a notebook and began jotting down notes.
    The living room was small, untidy, confused, and by the standards of any select suburban housewife it was pretty squalid and dirty, but judged by the standards of many of the houses and homes we visited it wasn’t too bad. Indeed, when one considered the plumbing facilities—or rather, the complete lack of them—the flat did its occupant credit. Certainly, it was all somewhat of a litter, but then there was really no room for a decent-sized wardrobe, or a chest of drawers. And the air in the flat was stale as old biscuits, and when we tried to open the window we couldn’t, because the window had stuck fast years back and would never open again, unless somebody brought a sledgehammer to it, but that of course was not surprising because in many East London homes fresh air is looked upon as highly dangerous. A nice, warm, smelly, woolly fug is considered essential to good health and high spirits.
    There was a large kitchen-type table in the living room, a rather broken-down sofa and an aged easy chair with boggly springs. There was a gas stove, on which stood a frying pan in which three sausages lay congealed in cold fat. Above the stove was a shelf with saucepans and cooking things. There was a kitchen range, too, but that clearly had not been used for years. Over the range was a mantelpiece, and I amused myself by cataloguing the things on it: an alarm clock, two aspirins in a tiny unopened cellophane package, a box of rouge, a very dirty little powder puff, three bottles of cough mixture, hairpins, a small woolly mat, cotton, needle already-threaded with white cotton, a letter in a stamped envelope, all ready for posting, and a colored photograph of a small child in a turquoise-blue frock.
    On hangers on the wall, strewn over the easy chair, and on pegs on the back of the door were the young woman’s coats and dresses. She had certainly indulged in plenty of clothes. Quite nice clothes, too. Cheap, but smart.
    In her bedroom was a chair arrayed with more clothes. More dresses hung on the bedroom door. There was a shelved holdall with gingham curtains; here we found a pair of downtrodden shoes, a large roll of cotton wool, a box of face powder, a hairbrush, combs, hankies, undies neatly folded, a pattern for a dress and a length of uncut