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temper, tried to strangle her and then pushed her over the parapet.
    The case for the defense was that Peggy Richards had run away from McKinstry, but had then picked up some other, unidentified, man, and it was this unknown warrior who had killed her and not McKinstry—who, said the defense, at the time of her death was in Waterloo station asking for a chit to sleep at the YMCA.
    The jury accepted this defense, and McKinstry was acquitted.
    Like his compatriot McDonald, McKinstry returned to Canada. And like McDonald he met his death there violently soon after his return. McKinstry perished in a fire.

CHAPTER 7
    Portrait of a Merry Widow
    At three o’clock one December afternoon we found ourselves driving around Bethnal Green with a young CID officer, looking for a block of tenements which we will call Berkshire Buildings. (These low-smelling places always have high-sounding names.)
    Round and round the intricate maze of narrow elephant-gray streets we drove; the CID man as lost as we were, for he was new to the area. A melancholy landscape it was, of interminable dirty little brick houses whose little sooty windows stared, achingly bored, at the fog already uncoiling in preparation for the night. The more we searched, the more we became lost, until finally we asked the way of two scruffy little boys who would have made admirable Dead End Kids, and they replied, “They’s Berkshire Buildings, down there.” But they were wrong, and we had to ask the way again, this time of a wizened old lady in rusty clothes, who was hobbling along on bad feet, carrying an unwrapped loaf of bread under her arm. She directed us correctly.
    Berkshire Buildings were built according to the usual style: gray blocks of flats in gray asphalt yards. They were by no means modern; built, I should say, at the end of the last century when they were no doubt considered the ultimate word in working-class accommodation. Probably a lot of people declared them far too luxurious for workers.
    The gray yards were deserted, for the children were not yet home from school, but women’s voices echoed from the doorways, and everywhere babies were wailing thinly. A leaking water pipe discharged a brown unsavory deluge down a wall, splashing into large hideous puddles in the yard below, where paddled and piddled a very hairy, preoccupied-looking poodle. We entered dark doorways, encountered many odors, found flats 1–64, 99–145, but couldn’t find number 82, which was the one we wanted. At last CKS asked a vacuous, slatternly young woman who appeared with a little girl in a dirty pink coat, and she said, pointing, “Through that door there, mate.”
    The tenements were arranged on a system of tiers of corridors connected by staircases open on every landing to small balconies, which no doubt was designed to keep the buildings ventilated but which mainly succeeded in sweeping the place with perishing, dust-whirling drafts. The staircases were dark and their stone steps were worn by many, many weary feet. There was a great smell of rotting plaster, human dirt, latrines, cooking, and dampness. The staircase and corridor walls were adorned with chalk sketches and scrawls of all kinds, from the harmlessly jocular and sentimental to the indecent. The buildings echoed with footsteps, babies crying, dishes clattering, and radios playing. Silence was obviously unknown there.
    The blocks were each four stories high with a kind of penthouse communal laundry under the roof. Here were long stained sinks and fixed clotheslines. On each floor, I discovered, was a lavatory, which served all the flats on that floor, and a washroom with a very dirty sink—there were no bathrooms. For a bath the flat dwellers had to go around to the local public baths. None of the flats had running water; all water had to be fetched from the washrooms.
    The lavatories and washrooms were filthy, stinking places, their doors swinging wide open on to the corridors, up and down which the stinks