Number Nineteen: Ben’s Last Case
Ben the tramp’s uncanny knack of running into trouble is unsurpassed in the final crime thriller written for him by J. Jefferson Farjeon.On a grey afternoon he was destined never to forget, Ben sat down on a park seat and proceeded to think, not of cabbages and kings, but of numbers, lucky and unlucky. But it wasn’t Ben’s lucky day, or that of the nondescript-looking stranger sitting at the other end of the bench – murdered before his very eyes! That was the prelude to the most uncomfortable and eventful twenty-four hours Ben had ever spent in an uncomfortable and eventful life.J. Jefferson Farjeon’s famous Cockney character Ben, who first appeared in No.17 and six other novels, was never so richly humorous or so absurdly heroic as in this, his last hair-raising adventure taking place at No.19, Billiter Road.
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J. JEFFERSON FARJEON
Number Nineteen
COLLINS CRIME CLUB
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain for Crime Club by W. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1952
Copyright © Estate of J. Jefferson Farjeon 1952
Cover design by Mike Topping © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016
Cover background images © shutterstock.com
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008156060
Ebook Edition © August 2016 ISBN: 9780008156077
Version: 2016-06-28
Table of Contents
Chapter 2: More Trouble on a Bed
Chapter 3: Mr Smith v. Mr Jones
Chapter 4: Transformation Scene
Chapter 5: Behind the Locked Door
Chapter 7: Conversation on a Doorstep
Chapter 10: Conference on the Stairs
Chapter 11: Discoveries in the Dawn
Chapter 12: Ben Receives Instructions
Chapter 19: Exchange of Information
Chapter 20: The Enemy Closes in
Chapter 26: Conference at Top Level
On a certain grey afternoon he was destined never to forget—he had a packet of them, and he called them his Album of ’Orrers—Ben paused before a park seat, wondered whether to sit down on the unoccupied end or to move on to the next, decided to move on to the next, changed his mind, sat down where he was, and thereby sealed his doom.
It was a pity there was somebody else at the other end of the seat. Ben liked to be alone, because when you’re alone no one can bother you, can they? But the man at the other end did not look the bothering kind, and as he was busy with a notebook and it was nice and quiet here, Ben could go on thinking. You could just hear the London traffic in the far distance, but only just, and with all this grass and trees about, well, you might almost be in country, mightn’t you?
What was Ben thinking about? If the man at the other end had glanced up from his notebook and made a guess, it was a thousand-to-one chance he would have guessed right, although it so happened this man was good at guessing. When Ben was passing through emotion, and he very frequently was, his thoughts were as plain as the Egyptian Pyramids, but during his contemplative periods there was no knowing what lay behind his glazed, expressionless eyes, which concealed their treasure as the surface of a mine conceals its wealth.
The safest guess was cheese. Ben loved to think of cheese. Though, of course, that came a long way behind eating it. Another possibility was corpses. These he never thought of from choice, but they had a habit of slipping into his mind from that lavish Album of ’Orrers, and—queer, this—there was a sort of fascination about them! You couldn’t get away from it. You know—once you’d done with them. For instance, take that one he’d found in the cellar in Norgate Road, or the one he’d spoken to on the Embankment, or the one he’d tumbled on in the attic of No. 17—only, of course, that hadn’t kep’ bein’ a corpse, ’ad it? You didn’t need a war for Ben to find ’em!
But Ben was not thinking of either corpses or cheese as he sat now on the park seat. He was thinking of numbers, separating the lucky ones from the unlucky ones in the light of his own experience. Seventeen you might call the plum! He wouldn’t live in a house numbered seventeen not if you paid him a couple of quid! He always gave the number a miss when he counted. You couldn’t call fifteen nice, either. That cellar at Norgate Road had been in Number Fifteen. Thirteen—well, of course, you couldn’t ever expect Thirteen to behave itself. He’d known a couple of shockers. And the day he’d found fourteen fag-ends he’d bust his braces, so fourteen was no good, either. Bending dahn fer the last one, that was. Funny how all the ’teens seemed to be against you!
