The Unaccompanied Widow

by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  “Books,” she breathed.

  “Hundreds of thousands of them,” Torin Slane said in agreement.

  “What is this place? I mean, I know it is a library…but I have never seen anything like this one.”

  “This is the Long Room in the Old Library,” Slane told her, his voice hushed. “It is over two hundred feet long. The Brian Boru harp is kept here.”

  “The what?”

  “One of three surviving medieval Gaelic harps—the symbol of Ireland.”

  “Oh yes, I see. And one is here…” She turned her head. “May I…?” She waved along the gallery.

  They began to walk. Slowly, for Adele continued to turn her head, taking in as much as she could.

  She paused at a bust of a man with a great nose and downturned mouth.

  “Jonathan Swift,” Slane said, his mouth turning up at the corners.

  “Ah.”

  They moved on.

  “Why are you here, Lady Adelaide?” Slane said.

  “You brought me here.”

  “I mean—”

  She lifted her hand. “It is about your brother.”

  “What about him?”

  Adele glanced at him. His face had clouded over, and his forehead was furrowed. There was pain there, too. After all, she reminded herself, the men had been brothers, no matter how different they were in nature.

  She looked away. “Can you think of a reason why someone would want to kill your brother, Mr. Slane? I mean, other than it being the Irish because he was a monarchist and the English because he was not?”

  “You read today’s Times,” Slane said heavily.

  Adele kept her gaze averted.

  “And would ye be telling me why ‘tis any business of yours?” he added, the brogue suddenly thicker.

  “If I could, Mr. Slane, I would.”

  “The Garda say ‘twas a robbery. McDermott himself assured me.”

  “I read that in the paper, too. Can you tell me, then, Mr. Slane, why any self-respecting robber would leave five hundred pounds sitting in a drawer?”

  She had walked another three slow steps before she realized that Slane was no longer by her side. She turned back.

  He stood in the middle of the hall, his expression thunderstruck.

  Adele moved back to him.

  “How much was there?” His voice was hoarse.

  “Five hundred pounds. I saw it myself.”

  “In the drawer.” He stirred, almost shaking himself. “Tisn’t likely to be elsewhere. He could hardly walk around with that much…”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Slane, but I feel as though the money is far more significant to you than it was to me.”

  He moved on a step or two, then turned and walked back. He was pacing, whether he knew it or not. He repeated the circuit and came back to her. “Why d’ye want to know about this, then?”

  “You mean beyond getting to a truth that Pureton and McDermott are covering up?”

  “You’re something to do with that Pureton mucky-muck,” Slane said. “He was too familiar with you last night.”

  “You mean he was rude.”

  “Aye, that, too. Pureton’s the King’s man. ‘tis him who was the anonymous source the paper quoted, I lay my life upon it. So why are ye not falling in with the official story like a good little woman?”

  “Because I am neither particularly good nor particularly short, Mr. Slane.”

  He grinned, devilment dancing in his eyes.

  “Because, in a way I cannot explain, it is my responsibility to investigate such things,” Adele added. “Until I know that the matter really is a simple robbery gone wrong, I must continue to search for the truth. And because, Mr. Slane, you no more believe it was a robbery than me. The five hundred pounds means something to you. Something more than an exorbitant amount of money left lying in a drawer.”

  Slane nodded. “Ye’ve got me there. It does.” Again, caution seemed to fall over him like a curtain. “You’re not a flighty woman…”

  “I stared at a dead body and a great deal of blood with more calm than you, Mr. Slane.”

  “Aye.” He pulled out his watch and consulted it. “Would ye take a little ride with me? I promise ye an answer of sorts at the end of it.” He hesitated. “I can ask an assistant to come with us, if you feel the necessity.”

  “Hardly, Mr. Slane. I am a widow, and you are far from the type of man whom I would permit any indelicacies.”

  “And you are far and away removed from the type of lass I’d consider fit for the receivin’ of such. Step this way, Lady Adelaide.” He moved down the long room in swift steps and Adele hurried to catch up with him.

  THE HOUSE THE CAB STOPPED beside was identical to every other house on the long street, except for the color of the front door. Torin Slane actually handed her down from the cab and as Adele examined the unbroken slab of housefronts running down the street, he climbed the three steps to the front door and used the knocker.

  Across the road, she glimpsed green water through a narrow aperture between houses on that side. They were near the harbor, then.

  The door opened. “Mr. Slane!”

  Adele turned and moved up the steps. The middle-aged woman glanced at her, startled. Adele gave her a charming smile.

  Torin smiled at the woman. “Is he in, Mrs. Hyland?”

  “O’Doyle is ill, Mr. Slane. He’d barely let me in his room with tea, t’is morning.”

  “I might be able to help with that,” Torin said. “May we?”

  “Both of ye, then?” The landlady’s gaze slid back to Adele.

  “We’ll leave the door open if it makes you more comfortable, Mrs. Hyland,” Torin replied.

  “Oh, ‘tis not my concern at all. T’e man’s too sick for such business, anyway.” She stepped aside. “Shall I bring tea?”

  “No thank you, Mrs. Hyland!” Slane called over his shoulder as he climbed the steps just inside the door two at a time.

  Adele drew in a breath, lifted her skirt and climbed rapidly, too.

  They wound up to the third floor, which had a low roof and creaking, unadorned floorboards. At one of the three doors coming off the landing, Torin rapped his knuckles sharply. The door frame was barely higher than his head.

  “Étaín!” he called softly. “‘tis Torin. Let me in.” And he lowered his head to listen.

  Then he rapped again. “Étaín O’Doyle, open t’e bloody door, will ye, man?”

  Heavy steps sounded. A key was turned, then the door opened a crack. Through the few inches revealed, Adele saw a man’s shirt, and a single eye peering at them. The eye was red and the flesh around it also inflamed.

  The red-rimmed gaze shifted to Adele. “Cé hí?”

  “An Englisher, so mind your tongue. Let us in, for the love of God. I’ve no intention of discussing Eilish upon the bloody doorstep.” Torin pushed against the door and it eased open.

  The man behind it, Étaín, stepped back. Torin opened the door all the way, revealing a simple room with a bed and a round table by the window, newspapers scattered across a sofa by the fireplace, and a worn rug.

  Étaín moved over to the bed and snatched up a shirt hanging on the end of it, and tucked the shirt into the nearest cupboard. Then he tried to sweep up the newspapers and dropped them. He was a large man in both height and girth, his big hands clumsy. But Adele didn’t think it was simple clumsiness making him so awkward. Both eyes were very red and as she stepped through the doorway, ducking so her hat did not catch on the top of it, the man’s face worked, as if he was fighting great emotion.

  He dropped the newspapers a third time, and simply stood there, his head hanging.

  “I can get those for you,” Adele told him. She put her parasol and reticule on the low bookcase beside the door, moved over to the sofa, picked up the newspapers, swiftly straightened them and folded them. One of them was today’s Irish Times.

  “Come and sit down, man,” Torin said, his own voice gruff. He held out one of the two cha
irs for the man and patted it. “Come along.”

  Adele put the folded newspapers on the mantelshelf and moved across the room to sit upon the second chair, which Slane had also pulled out from the table.

  Étaín dropped into the other chair, put both elbows on the table and rested his forehead against both hands.

  Slane patted the big man’s shoulder.

  Étaín shook his head.

  “This here be Étaín O’Doyle,” Slane told Adele. “For many years, he and my brother were the greatest of friends.”

  O’Doyle sighed.

  “Étaín, this is the Lady Adelaide…um Becket.” He glanced at her, with a hint of apology in his eyes.

  “That will do,” Adele assured him. “You knew Eilish Slane very well, Mr. O’Doyle?”

  A single nod of the man’s head.

  Slane crouched by the table, looking up at O’Doyle. “It might not have been simple robbery, Étaín. Not like the newspapers say. Lady Adelaide is…looking into it. Whoever did this, they left five hundred pounds behind.”

  The effect upon O’Doyle was astonishing. He jerked upright, his red-rimmed eyes wide, and looked from Slane to Adele and back. He gripped the edge of the table. “Five hundred pounds…” he breathed. “Jesus, Mary, Mother of Christ…” He closed his eyes. “Not again.”

  “Again?” Adele said sharply.

  Slane straightened. “Aye, again. T’ing is…well…my brother was a very private man.”

  Adele peered at him. “Are you…blushing, Mr. Slane?”

  Slane sighed and scrubbed at his hair.

  “I loved him,” O’Doyle said, his voice deep with emotion.

  Adele drew in a startled breath.

  Slane sighed.

  She studied O’Doyle, as he sat up in the chair and wiped at his damp eyes. “You and Eilish Slane were…” She wasn’t even sure what the right word was. She had only heard of such things in whispered conversations and rumors. “Together?” she finished delicately.

  “For twenty years,” O’Doyle said. There was a proud grace in his voice and the simple answer.

  “I…see.”

  “Then Eilish was forced to marry,” Slane added.

  “Someone found out,” O’Doyle said. “And Eilish bein’ elected and all, he had to…to…”

  “Refute the claim,” Slane finished.

  “By marrying,” Adele concluded.

  “That was merely the public side of it,” Slane said.

  “Bastard was going to tell the world,” O’Doyle added, his voice rumbling. “We’d’ve ended in jail. Both of us. I said I’d go away. Australia. Eilish would have none of it. He paid the man, instead.”

  Adele sat back. “He paid five hundred pounds.”

  Slane nodded.

  “Who was it?” she demanded of O’Doyle.

  “Doesn’t matter. The man’s dead.”

  “You killed him?”

  O’Doyle’s smile was grim. “Don’t think the t’ought didn’t cross my mind, more than once. The bastard got himself blown to bits in Paris.”

  Adele stared at him blankly. Then, “Oh…anarchists?”

  Slane smiled. “Yes, indeed.”

  “That’s sounds like a fitting end to a man who could stoop to extortion,” she declared.

  O’Doyle sniffed mightily. “I like her,” he declared.

  Slane crouched down once more. “Eilish was seeing someone, wasn’t he?” His voice was very gentle.

  O’Doyle’s smile faded. He nodded.

  “Who?” Slane said, his tone urgent. “Where can we find him?”

  O’Doyle looked at the sofa. “He came to tell me about him. He was…he said he thought he might be in love again. And I was happy for him.”

  “What was his name, Étaín?”

  Étaín looked up at Slane. “Adrian. Adrian Cranston. He lives in a rooming house on Rutland Street in Mountjoy.” He got to his great feet. “I’ll come with you.”

  Slane’s mouth opened, but he didn’t speak.

  “You cannot, Étaín,” Adele said quickly, instead. “If Eilish’s murder is related to this Cranston man, you cannot be seen anywhere near him. It would make the wrong people recall the wrong things. You see that, do you not?” She rose to her feet. “We will take care of it,” she added firmly.

  “You?” Étaín looked her up and down.

  “The two of us will, for no one else cares to,” Slane said. “What is the number of the rooming house, Étaín?”

  SRÁID RUTLAND WAS A NARROW, dirty street with the same blank façade of conjoined houses running the length of it. But these houses were much smaller, and most of the doors looked as though they had not been painted for many years.

  “This one,” Torin Slane said, nodding at the next door along. “Stay here. Let me talk.”

  “Why?” Adele said, her suspicion flaring.

  “Your accent is likely to render mute most who hear it, here.”

  “Oh.” She remained on the pavement at the bottom of the two narrow steps and studied the soot-covered bricks and dirty windows, while Slane hammered on the door.

  The door opened quickly enough, and she heard a quick exchange in Gaelic. Among the words she detected “Cranston.” Then Slane called, “Come up, Mrs. Becket.”

  She climbed the steps to where Slane stood. A man in a dirty shirt and suspenders moved away from the door when he saw her and jerked his thumb up the stairs that also started immediately inside the door, with just enough room between the first and the door to allow it to fully open.

  The ceiling was very low and the room to the other side of the stairs smelled of ashes and grease. She was glad to climb the stairs and escape the aromas, even though the stairs were so narrow she was in danger of catching her hem upon the bannister railings, and so steep two normal steps could have taken their place and still had room to spare.

  At the top of the stairs was an oddly shaped landing with four doors coming off it, each doorframe nearly touching the next. Directly opposite the stairs, down a passage as narrow as the stairs, was another very small door, and beside it, a window looking out upon the backs of houses along the next street. They were as grimy as this house.

  Adele was too far away from the window to determine what lay between the houses.

  Slane moved over to the first door and hammered on it. “Adrian Cranston!” He hammered again.

  The door beside him opened and a tall man launched himself at Slane. Slane spun, his arms coming up. The two grappled, while Adele inched around the newel post, wondering what to do. Her heart battered at the inside of her chest as she watched the pair.

  Cranston was in his thirties. He had pale golden hair, brown eyes and a square jaw that was currently set with dogged determination as he tried to gouge out Slane’s eyes with the stiff fingers of one hand, while the other gripped Slane’s neck, the tips digging in.

  They grunted and swore, trying to best each other. It was a contest of pure strength, she realized. Strength of body and wills, between two opponents who appeared to be of equal power and determination. They shuffled around as each tried to overcome the other.

  Adele gripped the frame of her reticule in a firm hand, stepped up behind the blond man and swung it hard at the back of his head.

  The impact made his knees sag and his grip to loosen. Slane took advantage of the opportunity by raising his fist and hammering it upon the man’s face.

  Cranston sagged, blood spurting from his nose.

  But before he collapsed completely, he pushed up off his feet. His shoulder rammed into Slane’s chest, knocking him backward into the still open doorway of the room Cranston had emerged from.

  Cranston staggered in the opposite directly, straight toward Adele. He cannoned into her and she tripped backward into the bare yard of upper bannister at the top of the stairs, the newel post ramming into her left arm.

  Cranston leapt down the narrow passageway and scrabbled at the window catch.

  Adele opened her reticule, pulled
out her gun, cocked it and aimed, just as Slane stepped past her.

  “Get out of my way!” she screamed.

  Slane threw himself back into the tiny landing area, clearing her view. Cranston was nearly out of the window.

  She fired. The gun bellowed, in that enclosed space. She saw the back of Cranston’s trousers puff, throwing up threads. The fawn-colored trousers turned red around the new hole.

  Then he was through the window and gone.

  Slane bent and put his hands upon his knees, breathing hard. “That will bring the Garda,” he said, between bellows.

  “Then we have no time to waste.” Adele thrust the gun back into her reticule and shut it with a snap.

  “‘tis little wonder the man folded, with the likes of that against his noggin’,” Slane observed.

  “Serves him right for underestimating me,” Adele replied and moved toward the door which Slane had hammered upon.

  “He came out of this room,” Slane said, pushing back the swinging door.

  “Which he stepped into when he heard you asking for him by name, downstairs,” Adele said. “The landlord told you this was the room, yes?”

  “Yes.” His breath was easing.

  She rattled the handled. “Locked.”

  “Out of the way,” he ordered.

  “You intend to break it down?” she asked, as he eyed the door.

  “You just shot a man. ‘tis a bit late to be crying about the law.”

  She stepped out of the way. She half expected the man to kick the door in, the way characters did in the penny dreadfuls, but instead, he rammed the door with his shoulder, close to the edge.

  With a crack of splintered wood, the door wavered open, and he pushed it all aside.

  Adele moved into the room and looked around. It was small, which she expected. It was very neat, which she had not expected. A bed, a bureau, an old-fashioned washstand, and a window. A narrow wardrobe against the wall beside the door. The whole room was a chopped off wedge shape, with the narrowest section holding the door.

  Adele moved to the bureau and opened the drawer, expecting to see male underthings or other personal items, but the drawer was full of documents.