What Happened Up North?

Previously in this series: Just Another Minute, Please, Miss — Hoping That My Suit Might Not Prove Entirely Distasteful To Ye — I make Ninepence A Shilling And I Saw A Dog Once’t.

• Something rather nasty, I believe

• I really couldn’t tell you

• All I know is she paid her rent on time and kept herself to herself — which is more than I can say for some people. Will that be all, then, Mr, ah…?

• Summat

• Nowt

• Something untidy, we were given to understand

• Ah, but the North keeps her secrets as close as her children, now then, doesn’t she, Inspector?

• Trouble of some sort

• Was it some kind of trouble?

• I didn’t think it my place to ask. Come to think of it, I don’t think it your place to ask, either

• Not the sort of thing that happens around here

• The usual sort of thing that happens up there

• Really, I had thought you a man of the world — what usually comes of that sort of thing in that part of the country?

• It was all covered up, wasn’t it?

• Terrible thing, that

• Well, the girl was never the same again, of course

• What ever became of the child?

• I believe in polite circles one refers to it as ‘resigning under a cloud’

• Polite circles don’t have a word for that sort of thing

• He was always rather evasive on that point

• Something less than a scandal and more than an embarrassment

• Why, nothing at all, of course

• The farm burned down the following autumn — birds nested in the chimney, they said. Ask the ashes.

• Finger in the till, I’d always thought

• She had excellent references

• My dear, I’m quite certain that none of us worried for an instant about what our Northern cousins might consider done or not done — what they do, we do not; what they consider not done, we don’t consider at all

• Whatever it was, it followed him down, even here

• Aye, that business

• Aye, you won’t hear folk’ll talk of that any more

• Aye, you won’t hear folk’ll talk of that nae more

• I heard the boy left shortly thereafter, although I never heard where

• Aye, that was a bad business

• Aye, that were bad business

• Aye, that were a bad business, that

• Something that required her to leave it, and in a great hurry too

• A curious business

• The school closed down, I know that much

• Nothing ever came of it

• Should be, o’that

• Well, some said it was like as such, and others were said it t’weren’t

• [Closes door]

• Nobbut

• Wild things —

• Was there talk?

• She left the North — let’s let the North keep whatever stories it might have about her.

• There was talk, now

• People will talk

• I never heard any talk of it

• It was all so very long ago

• Superstitious talk, that; fit only for sheep and them that keep them

• I’ve got to get back — someone’s got to mind the store — let me go —

• But how ridiculous! This is London, not some murrain-raddled grange! Such things just don’t happen now-a-days

• If there war’n talk, I din’auld naen for’t

• Oh, who remembers such things? Mind your step as you go, then.

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