Sally Spencer - Blackstone and the New World

‘Tell me about Jenny’s arc,’ Meade said, starting to get interested.

‘Certainly,’ Blackstone agreed. ‘The last thing she said to me before she died was that she had betrayed O’Brien and got him killed. But what she didn’t say was how she’d betrayed him, or who she’d betrayed him to. And now I think I have the answers to both those questions.’

‘Go on.’

‘I wanted to know just how much freedom Jenny actually had. Now, we know she went to church on Sundays, but the O’Briens dropped her off at the door and picked her up at the door, so that’s really no kind of freedom at all.’

‘Agreed,’ Meade said.

‘But she was much freer when she saw this girl Nancy, so if she betrayed O’Brien to anyone, it had to be to her.’

‘But Nancy, according to Mary O’Brien, is just an orphan girl — like Jenny herself.’

‘What is it that makes all of us important, if only for the briefest of moments?’ Blackstone asked.

‘I don’t know.’

‘It’s who we’re connected to, and what we can extract from that connection. Caesar’s wife had power because she was Caesar’s wife. The attitude of the desk sergeant in Mulberry Street changed towards me when it began to occur to him that maybe I’d got Commissioner Comstock’s ear.’

‘But what’s all that got to do with Jenny?’ Meade wondered.

‘Jenny wasn’t just a maid, she was the maid of a crusading New York police inspector, and. .’

‘And Nancy, whatever her official position is in society, could also be connected to someone important,’ Meade said excitedly.

‘Exactly,’ Blackstone agreed. ‘Nancy may be working in the house of another policeman. .’

‘That’s highly unlikely, Sam, given that the house in question is on Fifth Avenue.’

‘Or the house of a politician. Or she may even have a lover with a criminal background.’

‘And whoever this person is — let’s call him Mr X — he wanted to know what Patrick O’Brien was getting up to?’

‘Yes. But how would he find out about that? And, more importantly, how could Jenny help him?’

‘Patrick brought files home and kept them in his unlocked office, next to Jenny’s bedroom!’

‘And Jenny either copied them, or memorized them, and passed the information on to her friend Nancy.’

‘Who herself then quickly passed on that information on to Mr X,’ Meade said.

‘I imagine Jenny was doing it as a favour for a friend, or to earn a few dollars,’ Blackstone said. ‘She knew what she was doing was wrong, but she didn’t think that it was terribly wrong. And why would she? Once she’d passed the information on, nothing world-shaking ever happened. Life went on much as before. And if Inspector O’Brien was ever puzzled over how the people he was investigating seem to know so much about that actual investigation, he never said anything about it to Jenny.’

‘But then she passed on something which showed Mr X just how much danger Patrick’s investigation was actually putting him in,’ Meade said.

‘In fact, he was in so much danger that he decided the only way out of the situation was to have O’Brien killed,’ Blackstone added.

‘And Jenny must have finally understood the chain of events — must have realized that it was the information that she’d passed on which had caused his death?’

‘“He’s dead because of me”,’ Blackstone said, bleakly quoting the dying girl’s words. ‘“He’s dead because I betrayed him. It wasn’t a bullet that killed him. It was me”.’

‘Brilliant!’ Meade said. ‘ Absolutely brilliant! You must be pleased as punch with yourself, Sam.’

And under normal circumstances he would have been. But Blackstone knew these were not normal circumstances — and now there was no room in him for any emotion but anger.

He remembered leaving the orphanage himself, and how big, confusing — and frightening — the outside world had seemed to him. But then the army had taken him under its wing, and he had slowly learned how to handle freedom and accept responsibility.

Jenny had been taken under a wing as well — under the well-meaning wing of the O’Brien family. But it hadn’t been anything like as big and all-encompassing as the army’s wing, and others had been able to slip under it too. And once they had done that, they had exploited her.

Jenny was blameless, in both O’Brien’s death and her own. It was the man who had used her who was responsible for both.

‘Are you all right?’ Meade said worriedly.

‘I’m fine,’ Blackstone replied, unconvincingly.

He looked down at the table. His two arcs had dried into sticky smudges, so he drew them afresh.

‘To add to the left-hand arc — to be able to join it to the right one — we need to know the address that Mrs de Courcey gave to O’Brien,’ he said.

‘True, but the woman refuses to even admit that Patrick had been to the brothel,’ Meade pointed out, ‘and yesterday you said-’

‘What I said yesterday is neither here nor there,’ Blackstone told him. ‘Yesterday I hadn’t watched Jenny die, and I was too willing to give up easily. But I’m not willing any longer. The bitch will talk. I’ll make her talk!’

‘How?’

‘You believe that everything that happens in New York City is lubricated by money, don’t you?’ Blackstone asked.

‘Absolutely,’ Meade agreed.

‘So let’s see how Mrs de Courcey feels when the money starts to dry up,’ Blackstone suggested.

Precinct Captain Michael O’Shaugnessy liked to think of himself as a plain straightforward man who would always rather use his fists than his brain, and, having clubbed his way up through the ranks, he had long ago lost count of the number of heads he had broken.

Now he was sitting pretty, with a country estate and an ever-expanding bank account, but he was not one of those men who repudiated the past which had made him the man he was, and whenever he heard one of the officers serving under him refer to him as ‘Bull’, he took it as a compliment.

In general terms, he could best be described as a man who travelled life’s highway in a state of brutish happiness. But he was not feeling happy that morning. In fact, he found the two men sitting opposite him, on the other side of his desk, distinctly unsettling.

They unsettled him because he was not meeting them through any choice of his own, but because he had been ordered to meet them by that damned Commissioner Comstock. And since he hadn’t been able to contact any of the other three commissioners — who worked maybe one day a week between them — he had felt compelled to obey the order.

They unsettled him because one of them was Detective Sergeant Alexander Meade, a far-too educated man whose father had very good political connections, and who was well known to regard straight-down-the-middle honesty as something of a virtue.

And they unsettled him because the other man — the Limey cop in the shabby suit — had a determination and intensity about him which would have unsettled anybody .

‘I’m a busy man,’ said O’Shaugnessy, who firmly believed that, when in doubt, you should always take the offensive. ‘So say what you gotta say, an’ then leave me to do my work.’

Meade nodded. ‘Of course, sir,’ he replied, deferentially. ‘And may I just say that we really appreciate the fact, as busy as you are, you’ve still managed to find the time to-’

‘You’ve already wasted thirty seconds,’ O’Shaugnessy told him. ‘Get to the goddam point!’

Meade swallowed. ‘As you probably already know, sir, we — that is, Inspector Blackstone and I — have been asked by Commissioner Comstock to investigate Inspector O’Brien’s murder and-’