‘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 that. 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.