‘Perhaps it might be a good idea if you sat down for a while,’ Meade suggested.
‘There’s no time to sit down,’ Mary said, collecting up the bedding in her arms. ‘There’s still far too much to do.’ She looked down at the mattress, and saw that the bloodstains had left their mark there, too. ‘The mattress is beyond saving,’ she decided. ‘It will just have to be burned. Could you gentlemen. . could you take it down the basement for me, and ask the janitor if he wouldn’t mind putting it in the furnace?’
‘Of course,’ Meade said.
‘Be glad to,’ Blackstone told her.
When Blackstone and Meade returned from the basement, they found Mary pacing back and forth across the living-room floor.
‘There’s a bottle of whiskey on the table,’ she said. ‘Will you please pour us all a drink, Alex?’
‘I’m not sure that’s. .’ Meade began.
‘We must drink to Jenny’s memory,’ Mary said firmly. ‘We at least owe her that.’
Meade poured the three drinks, and handed one to Mary.
‘Patrick always said that it was an insult to good whiskey to drink it standing up, so do please sit down,’ Mary said.
But she did not sit down herself. With her own glass of whiskey held tightly in her hand, she continued to pace the floor.
‘There is so much to do,’ she said, not for the first time, and in a voice which kept oscillating between the despairing and the frantic. ‘So very, very much to do. The orphanage where Jenny was brought up was run by Presbyterians, you know, and once she came to live with us, we went to great pains to see that she continued to follow her chosen religion.’
Or, at any rate, the religion that had been chosen for her, Blackstone thought, because in that — as in so many other aspects of her life — she had been able to make very few choices of her own.
Do you think the fact that she killed herself means she can’t be buried in consecrated ground, Alex?’ Mary asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Meade replied.
‘It shouldn’t. It’s not fair that it should. But perhaps, even if it does, I can persuade her pastor — who is also the orphanage pastor — that she never intended to kill herself.’ She looked at Blackstone, perhaps hoping for some sort of support, but the inspector could think of nothing to say. ‘Or perhaps I can tell him that she was just punishing her body in the same way as the flagellants punish theirs.’
‘I don’t think Presbyterians do that,’ Blackstone told her.
‘No, I don’t suppose they do,’ Mary said. ‘Or that she did intend to kill herself, but changed her mind at the last moment.’ she continued, as if searching for something — anything — that they could agree on.
‘Perhaps that’s just what she did do,’ Blackstone said, feeling as if the words were being torn from him.
But he didn’t believe it. Not for a second.
Jenny had known what she was doing. Weighed down with her guilt over O’Brien’s death, she had sought the only escape she thought was open to her — and had taken her own life.
‘But even if the church won’t bury her with all the trappings of religious ritual, she still has to be buried,’ Mary said. ‘Can she still have a funeral service, even if the grave is not consecrated?’
‘I don’t know,’ Meade said for the second time.
‘I must find out,’ Mary said. ‘I must arrange for the burial. I must send out the notices.’ She stopped pacing, as if a new, terrible thought had suddenly struck her. ‘There is no one to send notices to,’ she wailed. ‘She was an orphan. She had no family of her own. She had no friends. .’
‘No friends at all?’ Blackstone asked.
‘There was one,’ Mary remembered. ‘A girl called Nancy — Nancy Greene — who she was in the orphanage with. This Nancy went into service at a big house on Fifth Avenue, and Jenny used to go and see her once a month.’
‘Do you have an exact address for the girl?’ Blackstone asked.
Meade shot him a questioning look, as if to say, why would you want the girl’s address?
And Blackstone replied with a look of his own, which said, it’s too complicated to explain now, but I’ll tell you all about it later.
‘Nancy’s address?’ Mary said. ‘Yes, I must have it somewhere. We would never have allowed Jenny to leave the house without knowing exactly where she was going.’
‘Well, if you give me the address, I’ll go and see her myself, and break the sad news to her,’ Blackstone promised. ‘And while I’m there, I’ll ask her to attend the funeral.’
‘You’re very kind,’ Mary said. ‘And you will come to the funeral yourself, won’t you?’ she added imploringly.
‘Of course,’ Blackstone agreed.
‘I’ll come too,’ Meade said. ‘And I’d be grateful if you’d allow me to pay for it.’
‘Why?’ Mary asked. ‘You hardly knew the girl.’
Meade shrugged awkwardly, as he always did when he found himself in this sort of situation.
‘It doesn’t matter that I didn’t really know her,’ he said. ‘I’d still like to pay for her funeral.’
‘The reason you’re making the offer is to save me bearing the expense myself, isn’t it?’ Mary asked.
‘Partly,’ Meade conceded.
Mary took a deep breath. ‘I still have a little money left. Not much — but enough to see Jenny buried decently.’
‘But you have all your other expenses to consider,’ Meade protested. ‘Your children. .’
‘Jenny lived in this house,’ Mary said. ‘It would be hypocritical of me to say I regarded her as fully a part of the family — but I was fond of her, and I want to do the right thing. Do you understand that? I want to do the right thing!’
‘I understand,’ Meade said.
‘Did Jenny ever leave the house alone, apart from going to see Nancy?’ Blackstone asked.
‘No.’
‘Didn’t she go to church?’
‘Of course she did. Patrick insisted on that. He wasn’t one of those Catholics who believe that anyone outside the True Faith is damned. Rather, he believed that when Jenny prayed, she prayed to the same God as we do.’
‘But, surely, if she went to a different church, that meant she went out alone every Sunday,’ Blackstone said.
Meade was growing more and more perplexed and even Mary was looking a little puzzled.
‘We always take. . we always took. . a cab to church,’ Mary said. ‘We’d drop Jenny off at her church on the way to ours, and pick her up on the return journey home.’
‘Can I ask you something else?’ Blackstone asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Did your husband ever bring any of the work connected with his investigations home with him?’
‘What?’ Mary said, as if she had absolutely no idea what he was talking about — as if this latest tragedy had blanked out all memory of anything that had gone before it.
‘Did he bring home any files?’ Blackstone persisted. ‘Or notebooks? Or anything else that might be tied in with the cases he was working on?’
Again, Meade gave Blackstone a quizzical look, and again Blackstone signalled that all would be explained later.
‘Yes, he did sometimes bring files home,’ Mary said. ‘But he always took them away again in the morning.’
‘So they were here overnight.’
‘Yes.’
‘Where did he keep them?’
‘He had an office. A room next to Jenny’s bedroom. Hardly a room at all in fact. More of a cupboard.’
‘And did he keep it locked?’
Mary thought about it. ‘The door does lock,’ she said finally. ‘But I don’t think he ever locked it himself. Why should he have? This was his home.’ She frowned. ‘Why are you asking all these questions, Mr Blackstone?’
‘Because-’
‘Because, even though I seem to have forgotten it, you are still investigating my husband’s murder?’ Mary interrupted.
‘Yes,’ Blackstone agreed.
‘And I’m keeping you away from pursuing that investigation,’ Mary said, sounding angry — though only with herself. ‘I’m keeping you away from it because I’m a poor weak woman who can’t cope with even the smallest difficulty without having a man to lean on.’