Chapter ThirteenFrank Abbott had had a very busy week. A corn-chandler’s wife in Wapping went missing after a violent quarrel with her husband and had to be traced. Husbands in the most peaceable professions have been known to murder quarrelsome wives, and Wapping is convenient to the river. After a number of voluble neighbours had been interviewed, some dark suspicions hinted at, and a false trail which finished up at a mortuary at Gravesend investigated, it transpired that Mrs. Wilkins was visiting a friend in Hammersmith with the possibly illusory hope that her husband’s heart was being rendered fonder by her absence.
A good deal of energy having been wasted and a good deal of time taken up, Sergeant Abbott would have been in a fair way to forgetting his brief encounter with William Sm
