The Regency Detective by David Lassman

prestigious shopping street in the whole of the South West.
    The cross-sweepers were already out in force, clearing pathways through the mounds of droppings from the multitude of livestock driven through the city earlier that morning, on their way to slaughterhouses located near the river. The smell of the manure hung palpably in the air as Swann made his way through the crowd of early morning shoppers, who consisted almost exclusively of young ladies. He turned left into Quiet Street and then Wood Street and into Queen Square, emerging into it by the south-east corner.
    Queen Square had been the architect John Wood’s first great achievement in Bath and was to have been his inaugural pronouncement of the grand design he envisaged for the city. He had sited it to the north-west of the city’s old medieval boundaries, midway between what would later become the upper and lower towns, on land leased to him by its owner, Robert Gay. Excavation work had begun in December 1728 and the first stone was laid the following month at the corner of Wood Street, where Swann now stood. It took seven years to complete the Square and much of his original plan had been changed. Wood had initially envisaged three sides of the Square – the north, east and west – to collectively form a palace forecourt, this splendid view to be appreciated each morning by the architect himself, from the windows of his house within the south range of buildings. While the east side remained basically as he had primarily imagined, the buildings on the west became that of a large mansion.
    The magnificently designed north expanse of houses, seven in all, had also remained for the most part intact. Dominating the Square, as it was intended to do, the differing sized buildings nevertheless formed a symmetrical composition which resembled a Palladian palace façade.
    In the middle of the Square was a garden and at its centre was an obelisk. The Square stood on sloping land that was going to be levelled but to save money, which at the time had been estimated to be about four thousand pounds, Wood had instead built the houses to the natural contours of the land. The prestige of an address in the Square had been lowered in the preceding years, but even from the brief encounters Swann had already shared with Fitzpatrick, he would not have imagined the magistrate considering even for a moment moving his offices elsewhere. Swann now entered the Square proper, made his way up the east side and then went inside the address he had been given at the Guildhall.
    Meanwhile, inside the four-storey building, Fitzpatrick was in discussion with Evans, the local shopkeepers’ representative and the man who had attempted to have Tyler prosecuted earlier that week.
    ‘I understand exactly what you are saying, Mr Evans,’ said Fitzpatrick, as he sat behind his office desk, ‘but I do not know how I can help at the present.’
    ‘That is where you are wrong, Mr Fitzpatrick,’ said Evans. ‘To start with, you could agree to address our shopkeepers’ meeting tonight. As their representative, if you were to attend at my request, it would show credibility on my side and for your own standing would show that the local magistracies are concerned about the problem of rising crime and its affect on trade in the city.’
    ‘I am only too aware of the problems that exist in relation to crime and trade,’ replied Fitzpatrick, sounding as sympathetic as he could.
    ‘We are already into the season, Mr Fitzpatrick, and the city should be thriving. Yet visitor numbers are down and those that have come here are under constant threat of violence or being robbed by thieves. And we shopkeepers have not fared much better either; Richardson, the watchmaker, had his entire stock of timepieces stolen from outside his shop only two days ago.’
    Fitzpatrick could not restrain himself as he heard this age-old problem again.
    ‘But to be fair, some of this is brought on by yourselves,’ he replied.