‘No,’ the girl said firmly.
‘Why not?’
‘Because if they find out that I’ve still got it, they’ll think I didn’t do what they told me to.’
The door swung open, and the desk sergeant entered the room.
‘Sergeant Meade’s called again,’ he said.
‘Is he feeling any better?’ Blackstone asked.
‘Wouldn’t know about that. He didn’t say. But what he did say was that you should get yourself over to the New York Hospital, which is on 15th Street, as quick as you can.’
‘As quick as I can?’ Blackstone repeated.
‘Yeah,’ the desk sergeant agreed. ‘He seems to think that somebody you want to talk to is dying.’
The building was five storeys high and had a sloping slate roof. There were small mock-turrets at each end of the roof and a larger one over the principal entrance. It could easily have been part of a prestigious university, or perhaps the home office of a successful insurance company. But it was neither of these things. It was, instead, the New York Hospital, and when Blackstone finally burst through the front door, he had been running so hard that it felt as if his lungs were on fire.
‘Meade!’ he gasped at the nurse behind the reception desk. ‘Detective Sergeant Meade. He sent me a message to come here.’
The nurse — who had seen so many dramas from behind her desk that they now scarcely seemed like dramas at all — merely nodded.
‘He’s waiting for you on the third floor,’ she said and pointed. ‘Use those stairs.’
Who was it that was dying? Blackstone asked himself, as he took the stairs three at a time.
Not the sergeant himself, obviously.
But whoever it was, it had to be somehow connected to the investigation, or Meade would never have called him.
He passed the second floor, his heart beating out a furious tattoo, his head pounding.
Could it be Mrs de Courcey? he wondered.
Or Senator Plunkitt?
Was he about to hear a deathbed declaration from one of them which would crack the Inspector O’Brien murder case wide open?
He had reached the third floor and paused to catch his breath.
Ahead of him was a long corridor which smelled strongly of both carbolic soap and desperation.
And halfway along the corridor, shrouded in their own misery, sat a man and a woman.
As they saw him approaching them, Alex Meade and Mary O’Brien stood up.
‘What happened?’ Blackstone asked.
‘It’s Jenny!’ Mary O’Brien moaned. ‘Poor little Jenny. She’s slashed her own wrists.’
Blackstone felt his stomach knot.
‘But she’s not dead, is she?’ he asked.
And even as he was speaking the words, he was thinking to himself, of course she’s not dead, you bloody fool! If she was dead, there’d be no reason for us to be here.
‘No, she’s not dead — but she is in a pretty bad way,’ Alex Meade said grimly.
‘How did it happen?’ Blackstone demanded.
‘I–I took the children out to Central Park this morning,’ Mary O’Brien sobbed. ‘I thought it might cheer them up a little. I thought that the fresh air would be good for them. I asked Jenny if she wanted to come, too, but she said that she didn’t.’
‘You mustn’t blame yourself, Mary,’ Meade said soothingly.
‘I should have made her come with us, shouldn’t I?’ Mary said, ignoring him. ‘I’m the mistress of the house and she’s the servant. I should have insisted that she came.’
‘You weren’t to know what would happen,’ Meade told her.
‘Wasn’t I?’ Mary asked fiercely.
‘No, you’ve-’
‘When I told her that because of Patrick’s death I was going to have to let her go, I saw how depressed she was. So I should have known then. I should have damn-well known!’
‘Who found her?’ asked Blackstone, as the policeman who never entirely left him took control of his head again.
‘Mrs. . Mrs Kenton. She’s the part-time cleaner who helps Jenny with the heavy work. She. . she wasn’t due to arrive until eleven o’clock, but for some reason she got there at about half-past ten.’ Mary shuddered. ‘The doctor said that if she’d arrived even a few minutes later than that, poor little Jenny would already have been dead.’
She bowed her head and seemed unable to go on.
‘As I understand it, this Mrs Kenton behaved truly admirably,’ Meade said, trying his best to sound cool and efficient. ‘The first thing she did was to apply tourniquets to the girl’s arms to stop the bleeding, then she bandaged her wrists. And having taken things as far she could herself, she stuck her head out of the window and shouted to a passer-by that he should summon an ambulance.’
There was one question that almost seemed too crass to ask, but Blackstone knew that he had to ask it anyway. He gestured to Meade that they should move a little distance away from Mrs O’Brien.
‘It’s a terrible thing to have happened,’ he said, as the knot in his stomach continued to tighten up. ‘A truly ghastly thing. But what I don’t really see is why we’re here.’
‘We’re here because Jenny wants to see us,’ Meade said. ‘Or, to be accurate, she wants to see you.’
‘What?’
‘She keeps losing consciousness, but every time she comes round, the first thing she wants to know is why you’re not here.’
She was the second girl in an hour who’d asked to see him, Blackstone thought, as he felt the heavy weight of responsibility pressing firmly down on his shoulders.
He already knew why Trixie had asked for him. She’d thought he’d have a better — and more sympathetic — understanding of her situation than Alex Meade would have done.
But what possible reason could the servant girl — who had only met him once — have for being so desperate to talk to him?
The girl was unconscious, and was dressed in a white surgical shift which was only slightly paler than her own complexion.
The bed she had been laid on was no more than the standard size, yet it seemed far too big for her. She looked lost in it, Blackstone thought. She looked as if she was drowning in it.
‘What are her chances?’ he asked the doctor, a youngish man who looked as if he had not slept for days.
‘Not good at all,’ the doctor replied. ‘She doesn’t appear to have had a particularly robust constitution to begin with, and she’s lost a great deal of blood. We’ve no idea what state her vital organs are in — they could be failing even now, for all we know — but she’s so weak that we daren’t risk trying any explorations.’
‘Tell me something — anything — that I can pin a little hope to,’ Blackstone demanded.
The doctor thought about it. ‘If she manages to live through the day, I might start being a little more optimistic of a recovery,’ he said finally.
‘Well, that’s something, isn’t it?’ Blackstone asked.
‘But if she died without ever recovering consciousness again,’ the doctor continued, ‘I wouldn’t be in the least surprised.’
Blackstone thought back to the dream he had had, only two nights earlier. Not a dream of Hannah or of Agnes, or even of Ellie Carr, but of Jenny. It had puzzled him at the time that she should have a key to his sleeping world, and it puzzled him even more now.
The girl groaned.
‘She seems to be coming round,’ the doctor whispered. ‘Go and stand by the bed, where she can see you.’
Blackstone did as he’d been instructed, and arrived there just as Jenny opened her eyes.
She smiled weakly at him. ‘Hello,’ she said.
‘Hello, Jenny,’ Blackstone replied.
‘I’m an orphan,’ the girl told him.
‘I know.’
‘I don’t ever remember having a papa of my very own, but I saw this picture of a gentleman in a magazine once, and he looked so nice and kind that I cut it out and kept it.’
‘Did you?’ Blackstone asked, feeling as if his heart would break.