James Book Two Death in Chambers Chapter 11 At seven-thirty on Thursday, 10 October, Harold Naughton left his house in Buckhurst Hill, walked the quarter-mile to Buckhurst Hill Station and caught a train just before seven-forty-five which would take him on the Central Line direct to Chancery Lane. It was a journey he had taken for nearly forty years. His parents had lived in Buckhurst Hill and when he was a boy the suburb had still held some of the self-contained distinctiveness of a small country town. Now that it was just one of the dormitory outposts of the metropolis it still retained, in its leafier streets and lanes of cottage-like houses, a measure of rural peace. He and Margaret had begun their married life in what was then one of the few blocks of modern flats. He had married an Essex girl; Epping Forest was her countryside, Southend Pier her sight and smell of the sea, the Central Line to Liverpool Street and beyond carried her only rarely to the dangerous delights of London, His father had died within a year of retirement and after his mother’s death, three years later, he had inherited the small house where he had been brought up in the claustrophobic, over-protected world of an only child.
