Meade grinned. ‘Yeah, I was getting kinda maudlin just then, wasn’t I?’
‘Yeah, you kinda were,’ Blackstone agreed, smiling as he imitated the young detective sergeant.
Meade squared his shoulders and turned his attention to the stack of plain white paper which was on the desk in front of him. He peeled off the top sheet and wrote ‘1’ on it in pencil.
‘Send in the first of the informants,’ he called out to Officer Turcotte, who was waiting in the corridor.
Turcotte shepherded the potential informant into the room. It was a man somewhere in his late thirties. He was unshaven, had bad teeth, and emitted an essence of eau de vie de sewer, even from a distance.
‘Name?’ Meade said.
‘Dickie Thomas.’
Meade wrote it down.
‘Occupation?’
‘Well. . you know, Sergeant.’
‘No, as a matter of fact, I don’t,’ Meade replied sharply.
‘I do a bit o’ this, an’ I do a bit o’ that.’
‘Address?’
‘I’m kinda between addresses at the moment.’
‘No fixed abode,’ Meade wrote down. ‘So what have you got to tell me, Mr Thomas?’
‘I seen him.’
‘Inspector O’Brien?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Where?’
‘O’Malley’s Saloon.’
‘When?’
‘Tuesday night.’
‘Give me all the details.’
‘O’Malley was standin’ behind the counter, and this cop walks up to him, bold as brass, and asks for his bribe money. Well, O’Malley says business is bad, an’ he can’t afford to pay this week, and this inspector says in that case he’ll be closing the place down.’ Thomas paused for a second. ‘I just had a thought,’ he continued unconvincingly.
‘Well, that must be a novelty,’ Meade said.
‘You what?’
‘Tell me about this thought you’ve just had.’
‘Ain’t it obvious?’
‘Not to me.’
‘It was O’Malley what killed him.’
‘And why should he have done that?’
‘To stop him from closin’ the place down, o’ course.’ Thomas held out a dirty hand, palm up. ‘Can I have my money now?’
‘I don’t think the inspector was ever in O’Malley’s Saloon,’ Meade said. ‘I think you made all that up.’
‘I didn’t,’ Thomas told him. ‘I swear I didn’t.’
‘And the reason I think you made it all up was because I know for a fact that, when Inspector O’Brien went out collecting bribes, he always wore his lucky green hat.’
‘What?’
‘He always wore his lucky green hat when he was collecting his bribes. And you never mentioned that.’
‘Didn’t I?’ Thomas asked. ‘I thought I did.’
‘No.’
‘Then I must just have forgotten to.’
‘So he was wearing the hat?’
‘Yes, he was. He definitely was.’
‘With the pink feather in the hatband?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘And with the small wooden duck, sewn on to the crown?’
‘I. . er. . don’t think I saw that,’ Thomas said uncertainly. ‘Maybe it had fallen off before he went into the saloon.’
Meade screwed up the sheet of paper, and threw it into the bin.
‘Officer Turcotte, please show this man out, and then bring me the next one,’ he said.
‘O’ course, the little wooden duck!’ Thomas said wildly. ‘Painted yellow, wasn’t it? I didn’t notice it at first, because the lightin’ in O’Malley’s Saloon is very poor. .’
‘No, it isn’t.’
‘An’ besides, my eyesight ain’t what it was.’
But despite his protest, Thomas knew as well as Meade did that the game was up, and when the officer grabbed hold of his arm and hauled him to his feet, he did not resist.
Meade did not seem in the least discouraged by the way that the interview had gone.
‘When you’re panning for gold, you have to sift a lot of silt before you get to the nugget,’ he said.
‘True,’ Blackstone agreed.
But he was thinking that sometimes there wasn’t even a nugget there for you to find.
FOURTEEN
Meade wrote ‘27’ at the top of the clean white sheet of paper and then looked up at the girl.
She was perhaps nineteen or twenty, but she was wearing as much powder and rouge as a woman with sixty years of ravages to hide. Her dress was of good quality material, and had been cut not-so-much to show off her figure to its best advantage as to put her merchandise on display. She could, perhaps, have been called a lady, but only if the words ‘of the night’ were added as a qualification.
‘Name?’ Meade said.
‘Trixie,’ the girl supplied.
‘Full name?’
‘I’d rather not say.’
‘Occupation?’
‘Entertainer.’
‘Address?’
The girl hesitated. ‘I’ll give my address, and I’ll give you all the information you want, but you have to keep my name out of it, because if Mad. . if my employer ever finds out I’ve been talking to you, I’ll be out on the street before I’ve had time to turn round.’
‘We’ll keep your name out of it,’ Meade promised.
The girl gave him the address.
‘And that’s a brothel, is it?’ Meade asked.
‘No, of course not!’
‘Then what is it?’
‘Well, I suppose you’d call it an exclusive club for discriminating gentlemen,’ Trixie said primly.
‘If you can’t be honest with me, then I’m not interested in talking to you,’ Meade said impatiently. ‘Is it a brothel or isn’t it?’
‘It’s sort of a brothel,’ Trixie said reluctantly.
‘So where exactly did you see Inspector O’Brien on Tuesday?’ the sergeant asked.
‘In the club,’ Trixie said. Then, when Meade glared at her, she looked down at the floor and murmured, ‘In the brothel.’
‘When?’
‘Around half past five on Tuesday afternoon.’
‘Describe him to me,’ Meade said.
Trixie shrugged. ‘What can I say? He looked exactly like the man in the picture.’
Meade shook his head. ‘That’s not good enough. You have to convince me that you really saw him.’
‘He was wearing a brown suit and a straw boater, but he took the boater off once he came through the door, which not every gentleman who visits us does.’ Trixie giggled. ‘Sometimes they even keep their hats on when they’ve taken everything else off.’
Meade laid down his pencil, and scrunched up the piece of paper he’d been writing on.
‘Thank you for your time,’ he said.
‘Don’t you want me to tell you what this inspector did?’
Meade shook his head again. ‘There’s no point in hearing any more, unless you convince me that it really was Inspector O’Brien you saw. And I really don’t think you can do that.’
‘But I still get the reward, don’t I?’ Trixie said anxiously.
‘I’m afraid not,’ Meade said. ‘Officer Turcotte will show you out.’
‘Hold your horses,’ Trixie told him, starting to sound desperate. She closed her eyes for a second, and when she opened them again, she said, ‘I remember now — he was wearing a ring on his index finger.’
‘How did you happen to notice that?’
‘It was jewellery, wasn’t it?’
‘So?’
‘So I always notice jewellery.’
‘Describe the ring to me.’
‘The band was gold. .’
‘Yes?’
‘It had a red stone in it. I think that the stone might well have been a ruby.’
‘Go on,’ Meade said, both encouraged and encouraging.
‘And it had something carved into it.’
‘What kind of something?’
‘Some kind of animal.’
‘What kind of animal?’ Meade asked sceptically. ‘An elephant? An elk? A duck-billed platypus?’
Trixie giggled. ‘I don’t even know what a duck-billed thingy looks like,’ she said. ‘But it wasn’t an elephant or an elk. It was some kind of big cat. I think it might have been a lion.’
Meade reached for a fresh sheet of paper, rapidly scribbled a few words on it, then slid it across to Blackstone.