Sally Spencer - Blackstone and the New World

‘But even if the church won’t bury her with all the trappings of religious ritual, she still has to be buried,’ Mary said. ‘Can she still have a funeral service, even if the grave is not consecrated?’

‘I don’t know,’ Meade said for the second time.

‘I must find out,’ Mary said. ‘I must arrange for the burial. I must send out the notices.’ She stopped pacing, as if a new, terrible thought had suddenly struck her. ‘There is no one to send notices to,’ she wailed. ‘She was an orphan. She had no family of her own. She had no friends. .’

‘No friends at all?’ Blackstone asked.

‘There was one,’ Mary remembered. ‘A girl called Nancy — Nancy Greene — who she was in the orphanage with. This Nancy went into service at a big house on Fifth Avenue, and Jenny used to go and see her once a month.’

‘Do you have an exact address for the girl?’ Blackstone asked.

Meade shot him a questioning look, as if to say, why would you want the girl’s address?

And Blackstone replied with a look of his own, which said, it’s too complicated to explain now, but I’ll tell you all about it later.

‘Nancy’s address?’ Mary said. ‘Yes, I must have it somewhere. We would never have allowed Jenny to leave the house without knowing exactly where she was going.’

‘Well, if you give me the address, I’ll go and see her myself, and break the sad news to her,’ Blackstone promised. ‘And while I’m there, I’ll ask her to attend the funeral.’

‘You’re very kind,’ Mary said. ‘And you will come to the funeral yourself, won’t you?’ she added imploringly.

‘Of course,’ Blackstone agreed.

‘I’ll come too,’ Meade said. ‘And I’d be grateful if you’d allow me to pay for it.’

‘Why?’ Mary asked. ‘You hardly knew the girl.’

Meade shrugged awkwardly, as he always did when he found himself in this sort of situation.

‘It doesn’t matter that I didn’t really know her,’ he said. ‘I’d still like to pay for her funeral.’

‘The reason you’re making the offer is to save me bearing the expense myself, isn’t it?’ Mary asked.

‘Partly,’ Meade conceded.

Mary took a deep breath. ‘I still have a little money left. Not much — but enough to see Jenny buried decently.’

‘But you have all your other expenses to consider,’ Meade protested. ‘Your children. .’

‘Jenny lived in this house,’ Mary said. ‘It would be hypocritical of me to say I regarded her as fully a part of the family — but I was fond of her, and I want to do the right thing. Do you understand that? I want to do the right thing!’

‘I understand,’ Meade said.

‘Did Jenny ever leave the house alone, apart from going to see Nancy?’ Blackstone asked.

‘No.’

‘Didn’t she go to church?’

‘Of course she did. Patrick insisted on that. He wasn’t one of those Catholics who believe that anyone outside the True Faith is damned. Rather, he believed that when Jenny prayed, she prayed to the same God as we do.’

‘But, surely, if she went to a different church, that meant she went out alone every Sunday,’ Blackstone said.

Meade was growing more and more perplexed and even Mary was looking a little puzzled.

‘We always take. . we always took . . a cab to church,’ Mary said. ‘We’d drop Jenny off at her church on the way to ours, and pick her up on the return journey home.’

‘Can I ask you something else?’ Blackstone asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Did your husband ever bring any of the work connected with his investigations home with him?’

‘What?’ Mary said, as if she had absolutely no idea what he was talking about — as if this latest tragedy had blanked out all memory of anything that had gone before it.

‘Did he bring home any files?’ Blackstone persisted. ‘Or notebooks? Or anything else that might be tied in with the cases he was working on?’

Again, Meade gave Blackstone a quizzical look, and again Blackstone signalled that all would be explained later.

‘Yes, he did sometimes bring files home,’ Mary said. ‘But he always took them away again in the morning.’

‘So they were here overnight.’

‘Yes.’

‘Where did he keep them?’

‘He had an office. A room next to Jenny’s bedroom. Hardly a room at all in fact. More of a cupboard.’

‘And did he keep it locked?’

Mary thought about it. ‘The door does lock,’ she said finally. ‘But I don’t think he ever locked it himself. Why should he have? This was his home.’ She frowned. ‘Why are you asking all these questions, Mr Blackstone?’

‘Because-’

‘Because, even though I seem to have forgotten it, you are still investigating my husband’s murder?’ Mary interrupted.

‘Yes,’ Blackstone agreed.

‘And I’m keeping you away from pursuing that investigation,’ Mary said, sounding angry — though only with herself. ‘I’m keeping you away from it because I’m a poor weak woman who can’t cope with even the smallest difficulty without having a man to lean on.’

‘You’re not weak,’ Blackstone told her. ‘And this is no small difficulty you have to deal with.’

‘Patrick would be ashamed of me,’ Mary said bitterly.

‘I’m sure he would un-’

‘And rightly so. I’ll find Nancy’s address for you, Mr Blackstone, and then you must both return to your investigation.’

‘We can’t just leave you alone like this,’ Meade said.

‘I won’t be alone. I have very good neighbours who will help me if I ask them to.’

‘You said they were rather old and-’ Meade began.

‘But even if I hadn’t,’ Mary interrupted him, ‘it is not your job, Alex, to cosset me — it is your job to find my husband’s killer.’

The barman in Murphy’s Saloon had suggested that they order shots of whiskey to accompany their beers, but they had already been forced to drink some whiskey at Mary O’Brien’s house — and even without that, after their previous evening of excess, they had decided that their livers deserved a break.

As Blackstone sipped at his beer, he made a concerted effort to assess his own mental state.

He was sure that the defeatism of the previous evening — the defeatism he had woken up with that morning — had been quite vanquished.

But what had replaced it? What was it that was now driving him so hard that he felt he was once again charging on all cylinders?

It was anger, he decided — pure, unadulterated anger!

‘Do you want to tell me now why you were asking Mary about the times when Jenny left the house?’ Alex Meade asked, after they’d been sitting in silence for some time.

‘All right,’ Blackstone said.

‘And while you’re about it, would you mind explaining why you were so interested in whether or not Patrick took work connected with his investigations home with him?’

‘The two things are closely connected,’ Blackstone said. ‘Some investigations run along dead straight lines, but this one is circular — and Jenny’s a big part of one of the arcs.’

‘Well, thank you for explaining that to me,’ Meade said. ‘Everything is so much clearer now.’

Blackstone dipped his finger in his beer, and drew two arcs on the table. ‘These are two parts of the same circle,’ he said.

‘That’s obvious enough,’ Meade agreed.

‘The one on the left is what O’Brien did on the last day of his life, and the one on the right is the reason that Jenny killed herself. Neither of them mean much on their own, but if we can find some way to join them up, they’ll make a sense which is so obvious that we’ll be surprised we didn’t see it right away.’