‘You’re not weak,’ Blackstone told her. ‘And this is no small difficulty you have to deal with.’
‘Patrick would be ashamed of me,’ Mary said bitterly.
‘I’m sure he would un-’
‘And rightly so. I’ll find Nancy’s address for you, Mr Blackstone, and then you must both return to your investigation.’
‘We can’t just leave you alone like this,’ Meade said.
‘I won’t be alone. I have very good neighbours who will help me if I ask them to.’
‘You said they were rather old and-’ Meade began.
‘But even if I hadn’t,’ Mary interrupted him, ‘it is not your job, Alex, to cosset me — it is your job to find my husband’s killer.’
The barman in Murphy’s Saloon had suggested that they order shots of whiskey to accompany their beers, but they had already been forced to drink some whiskey at Mary O’Brien’s house — and even without that, after their previous evening of excess, they had decided that their livers deserved a break.
As Blackstone sipped at his beer, he made a concerted effort to assess his own mental state.
He was sure that the defeatism of the previous evening — the defeatism he had woken up with that morning — had been quite vanquished.
But what had replaced it? What was it that was now driving him so hard that he felt he was once again charging on all cylinders?
It was anger, he decided — pure, unadulterated anger!
‘Do you want to tell me now why you were asking Mary about the times when Jenny left the house?’ Alex Meade asked, after they’d been sitting in silence for some time.
‘All right,’ Blackstone said.
‘And while you’re about it, would you mind explaining why you were so interested in whether or not Patrick took work connected with his investigations home with him?’
‘The two things are closely connected,’ Blackstone said. ‘Some investigations run along dead straight lines, but this one is circular — and Jenny’s a big part of one of the arcs.’
‘Well, thank you for explaining that to me,’ Meade said. ‘Everything is so much clearer now.’
Blackstone dipped his finger in his beer, and drew two arcs on the table. ‘These are two parts of the same circle,’ he said.
‘That’s obvious enough,’ Meade agreed.
‘The one on the left is what O’Brien did on the last day of his life, and the one on the right is the reason that Jenny killed herself. Neither of them mean much on their own, but if we can find some way to join them up, they’ll make a sense which is so obvious that we’ll be surprised we didn’t see it right away.’
‘Tell me about Jenny’s arc,’ Meade said, starting to get interested.
‘Certainly,’ Blackstone agreed. ‘The last thing she said to me before she died was that she had betrayed O’Brien and got him killed. But what she didn’t say was how she’d betrayed him, or who she’d betrayed him to. And now I think I have the answers to both those questions.’
‘Go on.’
‘I wanted to know just how much freedom Jenny actually had. Now, we know she went to church on Sundays, but the O’Briens dropped her off at the door and picked her up at the door, so that’s really no kind of freedom at all.’
‘Agreed,’ Meade said.
‘But she was much freer when she saw this girl Nancy, so if she betrayed O’Brien to anyone, it had to be to her.’
‘But Nancy, according to Mary O’Brien, is just an orphan girl — like Jenny herself.’
‘What is it that makes all of us important, if only for the briefest of moments?’ Blackstone asked.
‘I don’t know.’
‘It’s who we’re connected to, and what we can extract from that connection. Caesar’s wife had power because she was Caesar’s wife. The attitude of the desk sergeant in Mulberry Street changed towards me when it began to occur to him that maybe I’d got Commissioner Comstock’s ear.’
‘But what’s all that got to do with Jenny?’ Meade wondered.
‘Jenny wasn’t just a maid, she was the maid of a crusading New York police inspector, and. .’
‘And Nancy, whatever her official position is in society, could also be connected to someone important,’ Meade said excitedly.
‘Exactly,’ Blackstone agreed. ‘Nancy may be working in the house of another policeman. .’
‘That’s highly unlikely, Sam, given that the house in question is on Fifth Avenue.’
‘Or the house of a politician. Or she may even have a lover with a criminal background.’
‘And whoever this person is — let’s call him Mr X — he wanted to know what Patrick O’Brien was getting up to?’
‘Yes. But how would he find out about that? And, more importantly, how could Jenny help him?’
‘Patrick brought files home and kept them in his unlocked office, next to Jenny’s bedroom!’
‘And Jenny either copied them, or memorized them, and passed the information on to her friend Nancy.’
‘Who herself then quickly passed on that information on to Mr X,’ Meade said.
‘I imagine Jenny was doing it as a favour for a friend, or to earn a few dollars,’ Blackstone said. ‘She knew what she was doing was wrong, but she didn’t think that it was terribly wrong. And why would she? Once she’d passed the information on, nothing world-shaking ever happened. Life went on much as before. And if Inspector O’Brien was ever puzzled over how the people he was investigating seem to know so much about that actual investigation, he never said anything about it to Jenny.’
‘But then she passed on something which showed Mr X just how much danger Patrick’s investigation was actually putting him in,’ Meade said.
‘In fact, he was in so much danger that he decided the only way out of the situation was to have O’Brien killed,’ Blackstone added.
‘And Jenny must have finally understood the chain of events — must have realized that it was the information that she’d passed on which had caused his death?’
‘“He’s dead because of me”,’ Blackstone said, bleakly quoting the dying girl’s words. ‘“He’s dead because I betrayed him. It wasn’t a bullet that killed him. It was me”.’
‘Brilliant!’ Meade said. ‘Absolutely brilliant! You must be pleased as punch with yourself, Sam.’
And under normal circumstances he would have been. But Blackstone knew these were not normal circumstances — and now there was no room in him for any emotion but anger.
He remembered leaving the orphanage himself, and how big, confusing — and frightening — the outside world had seemed to him. But then the army had taken him under its wing, and he had slowly learned how to handle freedom and accept responsibility.
Jenny had been taken under a wing as well — under the well-meaning wing of the O’Brien family. But it hadn’t been anything like as big and all-encompassing as the army’s wing, and others had been able to slip under it too. And once they had done that, they had exploited her.
Jenny was blameless, in both O’Brien’s death and her own. It was the man who had used her who was responsible for both.
‘Are you all right?’ Meade said worriedly.
‘I’m fine,’ Blackstone replied, unconvincingly.
He looked down at the table. His two arcs had dried into sticky smudges, so he drew them afresh.
‘To add to the left-hand arc — to be able to join it to the right one — we need to know the address that Mrs de Courcey gave to O’Brien,’ he said.
‘True, but the woman refuses to even admit that Patrick had been to the brothel,’ Meade pointed out, ‘and yesterday you said-’