On snowy days, the smell of horse manure becomes more pungent. The public security and sanitary conditions in the middle and lower class neighborhoods such as Noel Street are the same. When Shad turned into this neighborhood, the winter street scene he saw near Regent Park disappeared immediately. What he saw before him seemed to be a quagmire in a winter sewer, but this is the current situation of ordinary civilians in the city.
The houses on Noel Street are closely packed together, and the pipes on the peeling walls are tangled like long snakes. The population density here is extremely high. On Wednesday, even though most men go out to work, the children running around, or the women carrying their youngest son on their backs, holding their second son by the hand, and following their eldest son, still make this place full of the breath of life.
Generally speaking, it is best to go to a nearby pub to inquire about something. However, Shade still considered the possibility that this was a trap set by MI6, so he did not go directly to inquire, but instead walked around Noel Street to find out the nearby terrain and the direction of the alley intersection.
At 10:20 am, Xia De was walking on the street when his wallet suddenly fell into the snow. He immediately picked up the wallet and put the coins scattered on the snow back into the wallet. Then he continued walking forward and turned into the unnamed Garbage Alley not far away.
After Xia De entered the alley, two young men who were squatting on the side of the street, wearing gray flat hats and looking like they hadn't washed their faces for several days, looked at each other, and followed him into the alley with a smile.
Even though the snow had covered the dirt in the alley, the fermented garbage still made the smell here particularly unpleasant. The steam pipes close to the edge of the low wall were hissing and emitting white steam, blowing away the half-remaining wanted poster on the wall. The warm and humid water vapor combined with the stench in the alley made even exposed skin feel uncomfortable.
The two young men walked several dozen steps in the alley, but did not see Xia De who had just walked in. They looked at each other and were about to move forward when Xia De, holding a revolver, came out from behind a garbage dump not far ahead.
The alley was filled with sunlight. The sunlight was not enough to melt the snow, but at least it allowed the two men to see the gun in Shade's hand clearly:
"I just wanted to ask a few questions."
Shade said, and then added:
"I will kill anyone who dares to leave."
He certainly wouldn't shoot.
The two young men subconsciously raised their hands:
"Excuse me, sir."
It is not uncommon to see idle young people in this era. If such people do not enter factories and use their flesh and blood to create wealth for factory owners, they will most likely join local vibrant social groups.
They are what Shade needs:
"You live around here?"
"Yes."
The slightly taller young man said, desperately trying to lean behind his companion:
“We’ve lived in this neighborhood since we were little.”
"You don't have to be afraid of me. I'm actually a private investigator. Yes, the kind with a gun license. I'm looking for a woman."
Xia De looked at the two young men he was pointing at one by one. Their body language and expressions were not fake. They were indeed people living nearby:
"He's probably in his thirties, and about the same height as you."
He pointed at the short man:
"Flannel-haired, curly hair, no glasses, probably moved here between 1851 and 1853."
The reason why the time is set within two years is that Shad does not believe that the other party has returned to Tobesk for many years without being discovered by MI6:
"She has a not-particularly typical appearance of a Carsenrick person. The woman has lived in Carsenrick for a period of time, but she is also fluent in Tobesk."
The royal family of Carsenric would not employ a maid whose appearance was obviously that of a northerner.
"She had worn a brown buttoned lady's coat, which did not look particularly old."
This is what the person who looked like a maid was wearing when Princess Margaret saw her.
The tall young man and the short young man looked at each other, and finally it was the tall young man who spoke:
"You mean Mrs. Ragson, Miss Brown, Mrs. Wood, Miss Lena."
He rattled off four names, then hesitantly offered two more.
After all, there are too many residents here. Even though the neighborhood relationship in this era is closer than that in the era of outsiders, Xia De cannot expect to get an answer right away from two idle young men.
But the six names and information he got were also clues. These six ladies all lived on this street. Shad planned to check them one by one before lunch. If he found nothing, he would go to Miss Carina's manor for lunch.
The first person he found was Mrs. Ragson, who, although only thirty years old, was already the mother of five children.
Mr. Lagson was a miner in the west mine and was away from home all year round. When Shad saw Mrs. Lagson, she was helping someone wash clothes. She thought Shad was also here to do laundry, so she rocked the cradle of her baby next to the basin and enthusiastically asked Shad if he was a neighbor living nearby.
This woman was not Shad's target.
The second person Xia De found was Ms. Laina, who had a rather unhappy marriage and lived with her female friend in the neighborhood after the divorce. Together, they opened an accounting firm on the street, specializing in helping the poor people living nearby calculate taxes or helping small shop owners deal with annual accounts.
Of course, this lady was not Shad's target.
The third person that Shade planned to look for was Miss Bella Brown, who rented a house above Brown's Bookstore at 15 Noel Street. The owner of the bookstore was her uncle, Mr. Brown, and although the lady was unmarried, she was engaged and might move away from this street soon.
It was not strange to have a bookstore in a neighborhood like Noel Street where the lower-middle class lived. Detective Sparrow had marked this second-hand bookstore on his map, and with a special password, he could buy illegally assembled guns from the owner of the second-hand bookstore, Mr. Brown.
The map left by Detective Sparrow only marked the gun black market. After all, it was normal for a private detective to know such a place. But when Shade stepped into the bookstore, he guessed that maybe there were more than just guns on sale here.
The second-hand bookstore was filled with shelves, and the counter was right at the door to ensure that no one would steal any books. The store was warm, but probably because there was not much ventilation in winter, there was a smell of rotting paper between the shelves.
Miss Bella Brown was not in the bookstore at the moment, it was the gray-haired Mr. Brown who was watching the store. But Shad had just inquired when he was buying a scarf in the hat shop next door, and Miss Brown was just going out to pick up a book someone else had borrowed, and would be back in twenty minutes at most, so he planned to wait in the second-hand bookstore.
Just as he had bought a scarf that looked nice, he thought he might be able to buy some books from the used bookstore to fill out his bookshelf.
When Shad entered, Mr. Brown took a look at his attire and did not ask any questions, allowing him to wander around the bookstore. Shad walked between the rows of bookshelves, scanning the book ridges and occasionally pulling out a book to check.
He soon fell in love with a book called "The Secret of Tobesk", which was an illegally printed book about the urban legend of Tobesk. When he took it out and opened it, he found that it was indeed an illegally printed book, but it had nothing to do with the cover, and it was an illegal color book.
This made Xia De think that this place had other business functions besides selling guns. Fortunately, after pulling out a few other books, the contents inside were all normal. It seemed that he was unlucky and took the wrong book just now.
In addition to Xia De, there were several other customers in the second-hand bookstore. Xia De continued walking along the aisle between the bookshelves, thinking about preparing year-end gifts for his friends.
Turning the corner of the bookshelf, he looked up and saw a familiar person. For a moment, Shad even found it hard to believe that he met Sir Kings Prisher here.
This middle-aged nobleman from the South always wore a hat even when indoors and leather gloves on his hands, flipping through an old book with yellowed pages among the bookshelves.
He heard footsteps and looked up to see Shade:
"Mr. Hamilton?"
The two had established a good relationship at the reading salon and when Princess Margaret visited the college, and when they unexpectedly met in the city, they exchanged pleasantries.
Of course, Shad came here for a detective mission, while Sir Priss claimed that he really enjoyed buying books in this kind of second-hand bookstore.
Sir Prissy had definitely never seen Miss Bella Brown, whom Shad was looking for. After all, he was only a distant relative of the royal family, so Shad was not worried that the other party came here for the same purpose as him. However, the unexpected encounter today made him interested in talking to the lord:
"Sir, you like books?"
"Of course, at my home in Willendal, I even deliberately broke through the wall between the guest room and the study and built myself a very large library."
Sir Prisha introduced with a smile, then looked at the old books around him:
"Knowledge is fascinating. Even if it is a boring book, as long as you take it in your hands and open the first page, you will definitely find fun in it."
"Yes, I also like reading. Although reading can't teach me how to make money, it can at least remind me how to avoid being cheated of my savings."
Compared to the "lofty" words of the Jazz, what Shade talked about was relatively vulgar, but the Jazz still smiled and nodded:
"That's true, so I always encourage people to read more books. Knowledge is power, and wisdom is wealth. Only by reading more books can you change your destiny."
He said with emotion:
"Knight, I have heard what you said at the banquet at Lakeview Manor. I agree with your ideas on popularizing education and improving the quality of the population. I really hope that more people can know this truth. After all, isn't this our greatest advantage as human beings?"
He nodded his head, then said goodbye to Shade with the book in his hand and left the second-hand bookstore.
“It looks like this is a nice guy.”
Shad muttered to himself, but he did not forget what the devil had said about the Jazz's unknown past.
"At least not someone like Darkness... Library search."
Using "the book that Laikins Prisha was just reading" as the search target, three books flew into Shade's hands. One was on the bookshelf next to him, and the other two flew from a little further away.
The titles of the three books are the essay collection "The Moon of Tobesk", an astronomy notebook left by someone unknown with terms that Shad doesn't understand, and the "Catalogue of Tobesk's Collection" which looks like an auction house brochure.
"He is also looking for the yellow moon that the bard wants?"
Xia De muttered to himself, flipping through three books casually, and then found that some pages in all three books were torn off.
It is normal for books in second-hand bookstores to be missing pages, but after checking, Xia De found that the tear marks of the missing pages were quite recent, and it could even be said that it happened within a few minutes:
"Isn't this... not good?"
Shade frowned and looked in the direction where Sir Prisha left:
"Everyone has their quirks, but..."
He put the three books back and tried to give a new image to Lykins Prisher in his mind:
"We still need to continue investigating. Humans are still too complicated after all."