‘Really?’ Meade said, sounding surprised. He looked around the office. ‘Well, if you “do well enough”, there’s certainly not much evidence of it in this place. To tell you the truth, it looks like a real dump to me.’
‘If you are going to be rude about my office, then you can-’ Dr Muller began.
‘If I’m going to be rude about your office, then I can what?’ Meade interrupted.
‘I. .’
‘And before you answer that question, please remember that your naturalization papers are still being processed, and that it only requires one black mark against your name for them to be rejected.’ Meade paused for a second. ‘Now remind me, doctor, what were you going to do if I was rude?’
‘Nothing,’ Dr Muller said.
‘That’s good,’ Meade told her. ‘That’s very good.’ He stood up and walked around the cramped room, stopping in front of a framed medical certificate. ‘The University of Berne,’ he said, admiringly. ‘My, but ain’t you a real powerhouse, though?’
‘It is an excellent school of medicine,’ Doctor Muller said.
‘I’m sure it is,’ Meade agreed. ‘Do you know what I would do if I was in your place, doctor?’
The silence which followed lasted for perhaps twenty seconds, and then Dr Muller reluctantly said, ‘No. What would you do?
‘I’d get myself a better practice in a classier neighbourhood. I mean, why should a woman with a medical degree from the University of Berne work in a hole like this?’
‘Why?’ the doctor responded angrily. ‘I will tell you why. It is because this is not the land of the free. It is not the land of opportunity. It is the land of money. And so it does not matter how good a doctor you are — it matters only that you can afford to buy yourself a nice office.’
Meade nodded. ‘Very interesting,’ he said. ‘Well, it seems to me, Dr Muller, that one way out of the trap that you’ve found yourself in would be to work for some richer clients who, for one reason or another, can’t take their problems to their regular doctor.’
‘What do you mean?’ Muller asked.
But Meade already seemed bored with the topic, and was now focusing his attention on another certificate hanging on the wall.
‘I see you did additional studies in something called obstetrics,’ he said. ‘What does that mean, exactly?’
‘It is the branch of medicine which is related to childbirth and women’s problems.’
‘Is that right?’ Meade asked. He suddenly wheeled round to face the doctor. ‘Well, that must have come in very useful when you started your little abortion business.’
‘I. . I don’t know what you mean,’ Muller said.
‘Of course you do,’ Meade said. ‘If a girl working in a low-class brothel gets pregnant, she gets kicked out on to the street to fend for herself. But if she works for one of the better establishments — and especially if she’s particularly popular with the clients — then her madam will come to you for help.’
‘It’s not true,’ the doctor protested.
Meade slammed his hand down on the desk. ‘Two things can happen,’ he said. ‘The first is that we can arrest you here and now. The second is that you can tell us what we want to know, and we’ll leave you in peace. Which is it to be?’
‘I’ll tell you what you want to know,’ the doctor said.
‘That’s good,’ Meade told her. ‘Now, on Tuesday a man called Patrick O’Brien came to see you. Do you remember that?’
‘He did not give me his name. I only learned it when I read about his death in the newspaper.’
Meade tut-tutted. ‘Now, you see, that’s not good, because you’ve started lying to me already.’
‘Lying? How have I been lying?’
‘You said he didn’t give you his name.’
‘He didn’t.’
‘He was a police inspector, involved in an investigation in which you probably played no more than a small part. But even if your part was only small, he was bound to have identified himself before he started questioning you.’
‘But. . but he did not come here because of any investigation,’ Muller protested.
‘Then why did he come here?’
‘To ask me to perform an abortion.’
Meade looked horrified. ‘I. . I. .’ he gasped.
‘Who did he say he wanted this abortion for?’ Blackstone asked.
‘For his mistress.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ Meade said, sounding as if he were almost choking.
But I do, Blackstone thought — because suddenly it was all starting to make sense.
O’Brien’s mistress becomes pregnant and after some soul-searching he finally accepts that she must have an abortion. But because he sees himself as an honourable, decent man, he doesn’t want to take her to some seedy backstreet establishment where she might well die in the process. He wants to give her the best that is available — but he has no idea where to find it.
He needs some kind of fixer, and arranges a meeting with that arch-fixer, Senator Plunkitt. But the moment the meeting begins, he realizes he has made a mistake. Because if he tells Plunkitt what his problem is, he will be giving the man power over him — and once Plunkitt has that power, his days as a reforming policeman will be over.
What was it Plunkitt had said?
‘I spent half an hour with the man, and if he had a point to make, or a question he wanted to ask, he never got around to it.’
Of course he didn’t — because once he had decided not to tell Plunkitt his problem, he had nothing to say to the man!
He has to come up with another solution, he realizes. He will ask a madam for advice. And the madam he asks is Mrs de Courcey.
‘I knew it would be safe to give the address to Inspector O’Brien,’ the madam had said.
And she’d been right — because, unlike Blackstone, he’d not been asking for the address as a policeman, he’d been asking for it as a man with a problem.
Meade had handled things perfectly up to that point, but now, what he had learned had knocked the wind quite out of his sails, and he was just standing there — slack-mouthed and staring at the wall.
‘Did you agree to perform the abortion, Dr Muller?’ Blackstone asked.
The doctor merely nodded.
‘And what arrangements did you make with Inspector O’Brien? Were you going to do the abortion here?’
Muller shook her head. ‘No, I told him that would be too dangerous for me, and he said that he would arrange for it to take place somewhere else.’
‘Where?’
‘I don’t know. He didn’t say. We were to meet in the Bayern Biergarten on the same night — the night he died — and he would take me there.’
‘But you never turned up,’ Blackstone said, remembering what the witness had said about O’Brien looking nervously at the door of the saloon, before finally stepping out through it to his death.
‘No, I did not go there,’ Dr Muller agreed.
‘Why not?’ demanded Meade, who had somewhat recovered himself. ‘Was it because you were paid not to go there? Paid by the assassin?’
‘No, no, of course not.’
‘Then why? What other reason could there possibly have been?’
‘I did not keep the appointment because she said there was no need to,’ the doctor told Meade.
‘She?’ Blackstone said. ‘Who is she?’
‘The mistress, of course. The one who was to have the abortion.’
‘Describe her to me.’
‘She was a young woman with long red hair, probably in her middle twenties.’ Dr Muller’s lip curled in disgust. ‘Much younger than him, and probably much younger than his wife. Men like him always choose mistresses who are younger than their wives.’
‘And what did she say?’
‘She said the abortion was no longer necessary, because she had miscarried. She said it had happened several days earlier.’