The murders in Praed Street

John Rhode
Praed Street is not at any time one of London’s brighter thoroughfares. Certainly it ends upon a note of hope, terminating as it does on the fringe of the unquestioned respectability of Bayswater, but for the rest of its course it is frankly lamentable. Narrow, bordered by small and often furtive shops, above which the squalid looking upper parts are particularly uninviting, it can never have been designed as more than a humble annexe of its more prosperous parent, the Edgware Road. And then, for no apparent reason, the Great Western Railway planted its terminus upon it, and Praed Street found itself called upon to become a main artery of traffic.
It seems to have done very little to adapt itself to its new rôle. Beyond an occasional grudging widening, it has left the unending streams of buses, of heavy railway lorries, of hurrying foot passengers, to shift for themselves as best they can. It almost seems as though Praed Street regarded Paddington Station as an intrusion, and those who throng to and from it as unwelcome strangers. It had its own interests long before the railway came—one of the termini of the Grand Junction Canal lies within a few yards of its sombre limits. Praed Street watches with indifference the thronging crowds which pass along, and they in turn take little heed of the uninviting thoroughfare through which their journey leads them.
Not that these philosophic reflections occupied the mind of Mr. James Tovey, which was far too full of an acute sense of annoyance and discomfort to find room for any other sensations. Mr. Tovey was not an inhabitant of Praed Street, although he lived in its neighbourhood. There was nothing secretive about Mr. Tovey, you could see his name and occupation painted in bold letters over a shop in Lisson Grove; James Tovey, Fruit and Vegetable Merchant. He was, in fact, a greengrocer, and, years ago, when Mr. Tovey had originally employed a small legacy in the purchase of the business, the sign had read: Tovey, Greengrocer, etc. But it was Mr. Tovey’s proud boast that he always moved with the times, and since his neighbours, the butcher and the grocer, had respectively converted themselves into Meat Purveyors and Provision Dealers, he had abandoned the vulgar term of greengrocer for the more high-sounding appellation.