Sally Spencer: Blackstone and the New World

He took the report out of the envelope and read about the organ failure which had resulted from the dramatic loss of blood.

But it was what was written at the bottom of the report — almost as an afterthought — which shook him.

‘I have to go,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Stay here until I get back. Or, if you feel capable of moving, leave a message so I’ll know where you’ve gone.’

‘Is this. .?’ Meade asked, struggling for the words. ‘Is this about something in the report?’

‘Yes, it is,’ Blackstone said, already heading for the door.

‘But what. .?’

‘I’ll tell you later,’ Blackstone promised.

Nancy Greene and Eddie Toscanini lived on the first floor of a dilapidated house about halfway down Little Water Street, and when Blackstone hammered on the door, the whole building seemed to quake.

It was Nancy who opened the door, just wide enough for Blackstone to see the muscular young man with jet black hair who was lying lazily on the bed.

‘You again!’ Nancy said.

Her other eye had been blackened since the last time that he’d seen her, Blackstone saw.

And that was probably his fault. He had forced Nancy to stop and talk to him, which meant that Eddie had been kept waiting for his beer — and Eddie had punished her for that.

‘What do you want?’ Nancy asked.

‘We need to go somewhere we can talk again. And this time, when it’s over, I won’t be bringing you back here,’ Blackstone said.

‘I don’t understand,’ Nancy said.

‘I thought you were the one who’d got Jenny into trouble,’ Blackstone explained. ‘That’s why I didn’t care much about what happened to you. But now I know that you tried to help her as much as it was in your power to.’

‘I did,’ Nancy said, almost crying. ‘I really did.’

‘So I’m going to help you ,’ Blackstone promised. ‘And I’m going to start by getting you out of this place.’

Eddie Toscanini had got off the bed and padded lithely across the room. Now he grabbed Nancy by the hair, jerked her roughly away, and took her place in the doorway.

‘What’s this all about?’ he demanded.

He was a big man, Blackstone noted — a big man with a flat stomach and bulging biceps.

‘Well?’ Eddie said.

‘I’m taking Nancy away,’ Blackstone told him. ‘And she won’t be coming back.’

‘She doesn’t go anywhere without my say-so,’ Eddie growled.

‘She is this time,’ Blackstone said firmly. ‘And if I were you, I wouldn’t try to stop her.’

Eddie glanced quickly up and down the corridor. ‘You’re on your own!’ he said incredulously.

‘That’s right, I am,’ Blackstone agreed.

‘You’re on your own, an’ you’re still threatenin ’ me?’

‘No, I’m warning you,’ Blackstone told him. ‘This doesn’t have to end in violence, you know.’

Eddie sneered. ‘Oh, but it does,’ he said. ‘See, I like hurtin’ people. It makes me feel good — even when the people I’m hurtin’ are old men like you, with no real fight left in them.’

And as he spoke, he put his right hand into his pocket, where people like him always kept their brass knuckledusters.

Blackstone watched Eddie’s pants’ pocket bulge and undulate, as the young thug’s fingers first located the holes in the knuckleduster, and then slipped quickly into them.

‘I’ve got a pistol,’ the inspector said.

‘That won’t do you no good at all,’ Eddie said. ‘If you was goin’ to use your pistol, you should have drawn it while you had the chance. Now I’ll have you on the ground before you even reach the holster.’

‘You’re missing the point,’ Blackstone replied. ‘I didn’t draw it earlier because I didn’t need to. I can handle you without it.’

The young bruiser chuckled. ‘So you’ve got a bit of spirit after all,’ he said. ‘Oh, I am goin’ to enjoy workin’ you over. It’s goin’ to be a real pleasure.’

Eddie feinted with his left fist, and Blackstone sidestepped, putting himself in just the right spot for the real attack, which would come from the knuckleduster on Eddie’s right hand.

Oh, this was really too easy, Eddie thought, in the split second before he realized that his knuckledustered right hand was travelling though empty air, and that his nose felt as if it was exploding.

‘First law of street fighting, Eddie,’ Blackstone said, as he grabbed the other man’s arm and bent it right up around his back. ‘If you don’t get control in the first two seconds, you’ll never get it.’

‘You son-of-a-bitch!’ Eddie mumbled, as he tried to breathe through his broken nose.

‘Collect up anything you want, and we’ll take it with us,’ Blackstone told Nancy.

Eddie was starting to struggle again.

‘If you keep doing that, I’ll have to break your arm,’ Blackstone warned the young thug.

‘Break it anyway!’ Nancy said.

‘Anything to oblige,’ Blackstone told her.

And he did just that.

Blackstone booked Nancy into a modest but pleasant boarding house near the Mulberry Street police headquarters, and then took her to the equally modest restaurant across the street for lunch.

‘An’ what happens to me now?’ Nancy asked, after she had wolfed down her food.

‘That’s up to you,’ Blackstone told her. ‘As I told you before, you can’t go back to the van Horne mansion, but I’m sure Mr Boone can find you a position in another house, if that’s what you want.’

Nancy smiled. ‘He’s a nice man, that Mr Boone,’ she said. ‘A good, kind, helpful man. And so are you.’

‘Could we talk about Jenny, now?’ Blackstone asked.

Nancy nodded. ‘Yes. What do you want to know?’

‘Tell me about when you first began to suspect that something was wrong,’ Blackstone suggested.

‘It’s hard to put a finger on it,’ Nancy told him. ‘A couple of months after she’d left the orphanage to work for the O’Briens, Jenny began to talk about a boyfriend. But she did it in a shy, teasing way — like she was proud of it, but worried about it all at the same time, if you know what I mean.’

‘I know what you mean.’

‘To be honest, I thought she was making him up at first. Some girls do that. But when she kept on about him, I started to believe he was real. And that’s when she told me he wasn’t a boy at all — he was a man.’

‘Inspector O’Brien?’

‘Yes.’

‘And that’s why you would never go to the O’Briens’ house yourself? Because you knew what he was doing to her?’

‘If I’d seen him in the flesh, I wouldn’t have been able to stop myself scratching his eyes out.’

Blackstone laughed. ‘I believe you’d have done just that,’ he said admiringly. ‘What advice did you give her?’ he continued, more seriously.

‘I told her to tell her mistress, Mrs O’Brien, that the master was interfering with her.’

‘But she wouldn’t do that?’

‘No. She said that they were in love, and that soon they were going to run away together.’

‘But you didn’t believe that?’

‘Of course I didn’t believe it. I knew exactly what was going to happen to her.’

‘And what was that?’

‘Jenny was thirteen when she got the job with the O’Briens. The maid she took over from was sixteen, but she’d been working for the O’Briens since she was thirteen. I asked Jenny to see if she could find out about the maid before the one she replaced, and it turned out that she joined the household at thirteen and left at sixteen, as well. Do you see what I’m getting at?’

Blackstone nodded. ‘When they reached a certain age, he no longer wanted them.’