Ginger questions Poppy and obtains Bradley's contact details

Ginger’s questioning of Poppy supplies Mark Easterbrook with the first practical lead to C.R. Bradley, the commission agent who handles the business side of The Pale Horse. The information comes not through a formal investigation but through a carefully staged lunch-time confidence: Ginger presents herself as someone seeking a way to arrange a death, and Poppy responds with the name and address Mark needs to follow the trail.

A confidence built at lunch

Three days after Mark’s preceding conversation, Ginger telephones him with a name and address and tells him to write them down. The abrupt announcement signals that her effort to get information from Poppy has worked. Ginger explains that she had been working on Poppy deliberately, first softening her up and then taking advantage of the ease with which women, in her experience, might share confidences with one another.

The method is social rather than confrontational. Ginger and Poppy lunched together, and Ginger talked about a supposed love affair obstructed by a married man and his Catholic wife. In Ginger’s account to Poppy, the wife was an invalid who suffered continually but was not expected to die for years; Ginger portrayed her own supposed frustration as serious enough to consider having her killed. The invented predicament made Ginger sound like a potential customer rather than an investigator asking questions about a murder network.

The story that opens the door

Ginger made the supposed murder plan concrete by raising the cost. She claimed not to know how to approach The Pale Horse or whether its services would be prohibitively expensive. Poppy had heard that the charge was extremely high, and Ginger answered that she had expectations. The detail drew on a real circumstance—Ginger expected to inherit from a great-uncle whom she cared about and did not want to lose—but she used the prospect of money as part of her cover story, making her fictional request sound financially possible.

The conversation gave Poppy a reason to explain how an actual customer would proceed. She supplied the name and address of the intermediary Ginger had to see first, because the business arrangements had to be settled before anything else. The distinction matters: Poppy did not merely repeat a rumour about The Pale Horse’s prices. She described a point of contact and a first step in the process, information specific enough to let Mark pursue the lead beyond hearsay.

Disclosure and its significance

Mark is incredulous that Poppy disclosed the information so openly and asks whether she seemed frightened. Ginger’s answer is that Poppy did not regard telling her as consequential. She also reasons that a murder service seeking a steady supply of customers would need to be advertised, at least to some degree. In that light, Poppy’s willingness to talk does not disprove the existence of the business; it suggests that its recruitment depends on information circulating among people who can be approached as prospective clients.

Ginger’s success changes the investigation from speculation into a testable inquiry. Mark agrees to go to Birmingham to see Mr Bradley, although he still doubts that the man exists. The address leads to Municipal Square Buildings, an office complex, where the third-floor door numbered 78 bears the name C.R. Bradley, Commission Agent, and invites visitors to enter. Bradley’s existence confirms the lead’s immediate accuracy, while the respectable, businesslike presentation sharpens the contrast between ordinary commercial procedure and the proposed transaction in death. Ginger’s performance has therefore done more than produce a name: it has carried Mark to the threshold of the organization’s practical machinery.