‘The family has a nice house in the city, a mansion on Long Island, a small army of servants and three or four carriages,’ Meade said seriously. ‘But that’s not rich by New York standards.’
‘No?’
‘Certainly not! New York rich is when you maintain a large ocean-going yacht. New York rich is when you throw a large party and all the men who attend it are offered cigars rolled in hundred dollar bills.’
‘New York rich is when you’re trapped somewhere between the vulgar and the obscene,’ Blackstone said sourly.
‘Now you’re getting the picture,’ Meade said. ‘Of course, Mary’s family want to be rich — they’ve made that perfectly plain.’
‘How?’
‘By the way they’ve gone about expanding their empire. Mary’s father is a cigar manufacturer, and her two elder sisters made what I’m sure he would call “good” marriages, which is to say they married not only within their class but also within the cigar industry.’
‘Conquest by marriage.’
‘Exactly.’
‘But I take it that Mary wasn’t prepared to follow in her older sisters’ footsteps?’
‘No, she wasn’t. She was a rebel right from the start — someone who wanted to make her own mark on the world. So she told her father she was going to train to be an actress, and he told her if she did, he’d cut her off without a penny. That was meant to bring her to heel, but it didn’t. Knowing her as I do, I expect it made her even more determined to follow her dream.’
‘So she trained to be an actress, and ended up playing Lady Macbeth on Broadway,’ Blackstone said, remembering the poster on the wall of Inspector O’Brien’s office.
‘How did you know that?’ Meade asked, astonished.
Blackstone grinned. ‘I’m a detective, remember,’ he said. ‘A famous Scotland Yard detective.’
‘I still don’t see how you could have. .’
‘So was Mary any good as an actress?’ Blackstone asked.
‘I’m too young to have ever seen her on the stage myself, but Patrick — who was very proud of her — kept some of her reviews.’
‘And what did these reviews say?’
‘The only one I remember clearly was on her Lady Macbeth — which I still haven’t worked out how you could possibly have known about,’ Meade said, studying the other man’s face for clues.
Blackstone grinned again. ‘A magician never reveals how he does his tricks,’ he said. ‘So what did the reviewer say about her?’
‘He said that despite the fact she was actually far too young to play the role, she was stunning in it. And I think she must have been, because even though she’s not exactly beautiful — as you’ll soon see for yourself — she had scores of admirers, and dozens of marriage proposals, several of them from millionaires.’
‘And yet she chose to marry Patrick O’Brien, an honest — and therefore relatively impoverished — policeman.’
‘Yes, she did. And you’d have understood the reason for that if you’d ever met him,’ Meade said, with a sudden passion. ‘Patrick wasn’t particularly imposing physically, and you certainly wouldn’t have called him handsome, but there was an honesty and integrity about him which could be quite overwhelming at times. It was almost like. .’ He struggled to find the right words. ‘It was almost like being in the presence of a column of pure white light.’ Meade looked down at his hands, as if he thought he’d embarrassed himself. ‘I think I must sound rather foolish to you,’ he mumbled.
‘Not at all,’ Blackstone assured him. ‘There’s nothing wrong with-’
‘We’re here,’ Meade interrupted, as if eager to leave further discussion on the subject behind him.
He rang the doorbell and it was answered by a woman in her mid-thirties who had a prettiness about her which owed more to character than to anything purely physical.
It could only be Mary O’Brien herself, Blackstone thought.
The woman favoured Meade with a weak smile. ‘It was good of you to come, Alex,’ she said.
‘It was the least I could do, Mary,’ Meade replied awkwardly. ‘This is Sam Blackstone,’ he continued, gesturing towards his companion. ‘He’s a policeman from England. He just arrived today.’
‘I am pleased to meet you, Mr Blackstone,’ Mary O’Brien said formally. ‘Welcome to America.’
She held out her hand, and Blackstone took it. Her palm felt cold, and though there was some strength to her grip, it was obviously costing her a considerable effort to maintain it.
There was a short, awkward silence, then Meade said stiffly, ‘Though the main reason for our call was to offer you our condolences, there is also a secondary purpose.’
Mary nodded, as if she’d been quite expecting him to say something of that nature.
‘You’re the one who’ll be investigating Patrick’s murder, aren’t you?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ Meade confirmed.
Mary nodded again. ‘I could not have asked for anyone better,’ she said. ‘Do you wish to ask me some questions?’
‘If you can bear it.’
‘I can bear anything that needs to be borne,’ Mary said firmly. ‘But we can’t talk on the doorstep. You must come inside.’
‘It’s not necessary.’
‘You must come inside,’ Mary repeated. ‘But since I haven’t yet told the children of Patrick’s tragic death, I’d be grateful if you did not mention it in their presence.’
She led the two detectives down a pleasant (though modest) hallway into a modest (though pleasant) living room. Then she walked over to the door at the far end of the room and called out, ‘Where are you, children? We have visitors who would like to meet you.’
The three children — a boy and two girls — appeared almost immediately. The boy was probably around eight or nine, the younger girl eleven, and the elder thirteen. They were all dressed neatly — if not expensively — and carried themselves with an air of children who had been taught how to behave.
‘You already know Mr Meade, but the other gentleman is Mr Blackstone, who is visiting us from England,’ Mary O’Brien said. She turned to Blackstone. ‘And these are my children, Isobel, my elder daughter, Emily, her sister, and Benjamin, my son.’
The two girls curtsied prettily, but Benjamin (as if he had already sensed that he was now the man of the house) boldly stepped forward and held out his hand to Blackstone.
‘Very nicely done, children,’ Mary said approvingly.
‘Thank you, Mama,’ the three said in quiet unison.
‘And now,’ Mary continued, ‘since we grown-ups wish to talk amongst ourselves, I would be grateful if you would go to your own rooms for a little while.’
‘Of course, Mama,’ the children said, and dutifully left the room.
‘Please be seated,’ Mary said, indicating two armchairs, and when Blackstone and Meade had sat down, she continued. ‘This is normally a coffee-drinking house, but in honour of Mr Blackstone, we will have tea today.’
‘There’s no need. .’ Meade began.
But Mary, who had sat down herself, had already picked up the small brass bell which lay on the occasional table and was ringing it.
A girl, dressed in a simple maid’s uniform, appeared almost immediately at the door.
‘We would like a pot of tea, Jenny,’ Mary said. ‘You remember how I taught you to make tea, don’t you?’
The maid looked down at the floor. ‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘Good, then see you follow the procedure extremely carefully, because this gentleman — being an Englishman — is something of an expert when it comes to the question of tea.’
She had said it lightly, almost as a joke to put the girl at ease, but Jenny took it deathly seriously.
‘I’ll do my best, ma’am,’ she said. ‘I always do my best.’
‘I know you do,’ Mary said, kindly.
The girl couldn’t have been more than two or three years older than Isobel O’Brien, Blackstone thought, as he watched
the maid leave, but there was a world of difference between them. Isobel, while she clearly knew her place in the order of things, was open and confident. Jenny, on the other hand, had a pinched, haunted face and wore her insecurity like a thick, suffocating blanket.
‘You’re quite right, Mr Blackstone, she is a frightened little thing,’ Mary O’Brien said.
‘I never meant to. .’ Blackstone began.
‘Other people we are acquainted with hire their maids through agencies,’ Mary said. ‘We take ours from the orphanage, and because my husband is the man he is, he invariably chooses the girls that, for one reason or another, no one else wants to take. They are always difficult at first, but I persevere with them, and train them until they are first-class housemaids. And then Patrick finds them a position in a much grander establishment, and we begin the process all over again.’ She gulped. ‘I’m talking about him as if he were still alive, aren’t I?’
‘That’s understandable,’ Blackstone said.
‘And worse than that, I’m talking as if I disapproved of what he did, and I never meant to suggest that. He was right to help the girls to better themselves — he wanted everyone to better themselves.’
‘I’m sure he did,’ Blackstone said soothingly.
‘You really shouldn’t be alone in this apartment, you know, Mary,’ Meade said.
‘But I’m not alone,’ Mary replied. ‘I have my children and my faithful Jenny with me.’
‘But no one whose shoulder you can allow yourself to cry on,’ Meade pointed out.
Mary sighed. ‘I try to convince myself that I’m waiting for the right moment to tell the children about what happened to their father,’ she said. ‘But it isn’t true. What I am really doing is trying to gather up enough strength to tell them. But until I have told them, everything must go on as normal, and if the house was suddenly flooded with sobbing relatives and friends, it wouldn’t take the children long to work out that something was wrong, now would it?’
‘You can’t afford to leave it too long before you tell them,’ Alex Meade said.
‘I know I can’t,’ Mary replied. ‘It’s impossible to keep them imprisoned in this apartment for ever, and the moment they step out in the wider world, they’re bound to hear it from someone else. And so, sometime soon — perhaps as soon as you leave — I will tell them.’
‘I could do it,’ Meade suggested, though it was clear from the expression on his face that it was not a job he would relish.
‘You’re a sweet boy, Alex. .’ Mary said.
‘I meant it!’ Meade protested.
‘I know you did, but it really is my responsibility.’ Mary took a deep breath, and then continued. ‘But this is not what you’re here to talk about. You came to ask me some questions, so please ask them.’
‘Do you know anything about the case your husband was working on when he died?’ Meade asked.
‘The case?’ Mary repeated. ‘Patrick never worked on just one case in his entire career. He saw abuse and corruption everywhere, you see, and he wanted to end it all at once. He did the work of ten men, but, of course, however hard he tried, he could never really hold back the tide.’
Jenny returned, clutching the tea tray so tightly that her knuckles had turned quite white.
‘Shall I. . shall I pour it, ma’am?’ she asked, laying the tray fearfully on the table, as if she thought that — even at this late stage in the process — something was about to go disastrously wrong.
‘No, I’ll serve, thank you,’ Mary said.
But still Jenny lingered, almost — Blackstone thought — as if she was desperate to hear what they were talking about.
‘Is there something else, Jenny?’ Mary asked.
‘I–I was wondering what the master would like for his supper, so I can begin. .’
‘The master will not be dining at home this evening,’ Mary told her.
The news seemed to unnerve the girl. ‘Then what shall I. .? I mean, there’s things. .’
‘One of the virtues that I’ve endeavoured to teach you is the ability to think for yourself,’ Mary said, sounding much more like the mistress of the house now. ‘And I thought I’d been fairly successful in that particular undertaking.’
‘Oh, you have, ma’am.’
‘Then I see no need to break off my conversation with these gentlemen in order to give you specific instructions. Look around the apartment, see what needs to done, and do it.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ Jenny said, then she bobbed down into an awkward curtsy and fled.
‘She’s normally much better than this,’ Mary said. ‘In fact, of all the maids who’ve passed through this apartment, she’s one of my biggest successes.’
‘It’s probably our unexpected visit which has unsettled her,’ Blackstone suggested.
‘It probably is,’ Mary O’Brien agreed. She shook her head sadly from side to side. ‘She’ll have to go, of course — the poor little thing. I simply can’t afford to keep her on now that we won’t be receiving Patrick’s salary any more. I’m not even sure the rest of us will be able to go on living here.’
Meade coughed. ‘I’d. . I’d be more than prepared to loan you some money,’ he said.
‘I couldn’t take it,’ Mary said immediately.
‘Why ever not?’
‘Because I have no means of ever paying you back.’
‘I wouldn’t want you to pay me back.’
Mary O’Brien fixed Meade with a penetrating gaze. ‘You offered to give Patrick that same kind of loan, didn’t you, Alex?’ she asked.
Meade squirmed like a bug under a microscope. ‘I’m a rich man,’ he said. ‘And I so admired what your husband was doing that I wanted to free him from the daily concerns of having to-’
‘But Patrick wouldn’t accept that kind of loan from you, would he?’ Mary said, in a voice which would not be denied an honest answer.
‘No, he wouldn’t,’ Meade admitted, like a guilty schoolboy who has realized there is nowhere left to hide.
‘If Patrick wouldn’t accept it, then neither can I.’ Mary lifted the teapot. ‘I’d better pour the tea before it goes cold.’
‘I know you said that your husband always worked on several cases at once,’ Blackstone said, ‘but I was wondering if there was one case that he was giving special attention to.’
‘Patrick never talked about his work at home,’ Mary said. ‘I think he was trying to protect me from the seedier side of life.’ She paused for a moment. ‘Why is it, Mr Blackstone, that all men — even a thoughtful, understanding man like my Patrick — so underestimate the characters of their women that they are forever trying to shield them? Some women don’t want to be shielded.’
‘No,’ Blackstone agreed, thinking of one of his women — Dr Ellie Carr — with whom he had once hoped to make a life. ‘Some women don’t.’
‘I do know, if this is of any help to you, that Patrick has been spending a great deal of his time recently in the Lower East Side,’ Mary O’Brien said. ‘But the person who you should really be talking to about Patrick’s investigations is his partner, Sergeant Saddler.’
There was another moment’s awkward silence, then Alex Meade said, ‘That’s true. But the problem is, you see, no one at police headquarters seems to know where he is.’
‘They wouldn’t,’ Mary O’Brien replied.
‘What makes you say that?’ Blackstone asked.
‘When Sergeant Saddler heard the news about my husband’s murder, he was naturally terrified that exactly the same fate was in store for him, and so he went into hiding.’
‘How do you know that?’ Meade asked.
‘He rang me.’
‘To tell you he’d gone into hiding?’
‘To offer me his condolences. And to tell me that if I needed him, he would come to me — at whatever the risk to himself.’
‘So you know where he is?’ Blackstone asked.
‘No, he thought it would be putting me in too much danger to know th
at. But he did give me a telephone number at which he could be reached.’
‘And may we have that number?’ Meade asked.
‘Of course,’ Mary O’Brien said.
NINE
In his soldiering days, Blackstone had never thought of the platform on an Indian railway station as merely a place to wait for the arrival of a train. Instead, he had seen it as a vast stage, on which the drama of Indian life — with all its colour, diversity and sheer bloody confusion — had been enacted on a daily basis.
The cast — and the action — was almost invariably the same, wherever the stage happened to be located. Hours before the train was due to arrive, the platform would begin to fill up with its actors, and by the time the locomotive actually chugged slowly into the station, there would not be even a square inch of space free. Peasants, with sacks over their shoulders, would jostle for position. Low-level clerks, in sweat-sodden wing collars, would scowl their disapproval of such disorderly manoeuvres, while indulging in those same manoeuvres themselves. Fathers carried small children above their heads to avoid them being crushed, wives held on to their husbands to stop being swept away in a sea of souls. And even before the train had fully come to a halt, the scramble for a seat on it — or simply a place to stand — had begun.
The station platform of the Third Avenue ‘El’ at Chatham Square reminded him of those times. It was true there were no brown faces on this platform, that the men were wearing overalls rather than loose white jackets, and that instead of being poked in the eye with the edge of a bag of rice, he ran the risk of being barked on the shin by a bag of workman’s tools. But for all that, the crush was the same, the jockeying for position was the same, and the smell of sweat — while not exactly the same — was equally unpleasant.
‘We could have taken a cab, but it would probably have been slower,’ Meade said. ‘Anyway, I thought travelling on the “El” was something you should experience at least once.’
‘It was very thoughtful of you to give me the opportunity,’ Blackstone said, as a shift of bodies behind him almost pushed him on to the track.
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