Crewe soon discovered, through overhearing a loud quarrel between his
landlady and her daughter, that Mrs. Leaver's husband was alive, though
dead to his wife for all practical purposes, inasmuch as he was serving a
life's imprisonment for manslaughter. A fortnight after he had taken up
his temporary quarters above the shop the woman was removed to the
hospital suffering from the effects of a hard drinking bout, and died
there. The girl disappeared, and the boy would have been turned out on
the streets but for Crewe, who had taken a liking to him. Joe was
self-reliant, alert, and precocious, like most London street boys, but in
addition to these qualities he had a vein of imagination unusual in a lad
of his upbringing and environment. He devoured the exciting feuilleton
stories in the evening papers he vended, and spent his spare pennies at
the cinema theatres in the vicinity of his poor home. His appreciation of
the crude mysteries of the filmed detective drama amused the famous
expert in the finer art of actual crime detection, until he discovered
that the boy possessed natural gifts of intuition and observation,
combined with penetration.
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