Against the Light Page 10

  ‘A bit of jealousy there, maybe?’

  ‘Jealousy? Lord, no! She wouldn’t be jealous of Mrs Martens. She’d try to get the top brick off the chimney for her if the mistress asked for it.’ She paused. ‘Leastways, I don’t think she was jealous of a bit of flirting, but you’d never know. She’s deep, that one.’

  Could she have been resentful enough to have taken the baby? Not unless she’d arranged for someone else to do it for her. She herself had undoubtedly been prostrate with a headache that afternoon. Mrs Lowther had sympathetically taken her a cup of tea and one of her own headache powders at the time Lucy had been abducted.

  The band had changed its selection to The Merry Widow. The mellow trombone notes of ‘Vilia’s Song’ floated across the golden afternoon to where they were sitting. When he reached out and took hold of Emma’s hand she didn’t pull away, or not for a few minutes. ‘Vilia, oh Vilia, the witch of the wood …’ Inskip, who couldn’t even hum in tune, tapped the rhythm of the music out on his knee and even Emma attempted a small smile.

  That night, Gaines did in fact get an undisturbed night’s sleep but the terrible news that erupted on that Monday morning was nothing to do with ‘Baby Lucy’, nor of another murder. The story that was destined to banish the kidnapped child from the front page was a catastrophe no one would ever have predicted in a million years. Newsboys on the street corners were already shouting out the sensational news as he made his way to Scotland Yard.

  Throughout that night, the telegraph lines between the United States and Great Britain had become red hot, with newsrooms and printing presses going mad in the headlong rush to be first with this tremendous scoop, and the world had awakened to learn of the sinking of that modern marvel, the passenger liner Titanic. The enormity of the tragedy was more than enough to dominate every newspaper in the land, to which even the high-profile kidnapping of a child in London took second place.

  Nine

  Prosser Street, Inskip saw as he viewed the terrace of tall houses, had once in its life been several steps up from the place where his Auntie Orla lived although, in the way of London, where working-class respectability could live just around the corner from abject poverty, it was only a few streets away, almost cheek by jowl, with Catesby Street. Once handsome, the houses had obviously started to go downhill several decades ago, even before the hideous municipal baths building taking up the length of one side, its yellow London brick now streaked and smoke-grimed, had completed the process. However, although every house showed signs of multiple occupancy, the street hadn’t yet entirely degenerated into a slum. It was quiet, compared with those surrounding it, and its very silence, the absence of any noisy street life going on outside its closed doors, made it slightly forbidding. The prospect wasn’t improved much today by the rain which had begun to come down hard and was failing to escape down the rubbish-clogged gutters and leaving puddles on the broken-flagged pavement.

  The wind was blowing rain into his face but as he drew near the house he was heading for, he saw that two young women, one with dark curls escaping from under her hat, the other a flamboyant redhead of the type he didn’t care for, had paused on the muddy pavement. They were laughing and trying to dodge the rain as they struggled to put up a recalcitrant half-open umbrella, and they shared the joke of it with him as he reached the foot of the steps.

  ‘Allow me,’ he said, reaching out for the umbrella, but at that moment the spring that controlled it decided to work and up it went. ‘And all without my assistance.’ He smiled, sketched a half salute, then took the steps to the front door in a couple of strides and pressed the bell.

  ‘No use ringing, it doesn’t work, and anyway, there’s no one at home,’ called a voice behind him. He turned round and saw it was the dark-haired girl who had spoken. She was pretty, with a white skin, blue eyes and a lovely smile.

  ‘Unless you’re looking for one of us,’ said the redhead pertly.

  Inskip glanced at her but he had no time for that sort of fooling around. He addressed her friend. ‘The man I’m looking for is Paddy Tooley.’

  ‘Oh, you won’t find him in, he went out about half an hour ago. You’ve had a wasted journey.’ About to turn away, she hesitated. ‘If it’s important, you might try the Nag – if you should happen to know it.’

  He did know it, and where it was. The once glorious but now disreputable hostelry just around the corner had been built after the battle of Waterloo and named the Copenhagen in honour of the Duke of Wellington’s favourite horse. It had inevitably become known as the Nag, words of more than one syllable being more than most of its regular patrons could cope with. Inskip considered. If these young women knew the people at this house, as they seemed to, or possibly if they lived here, he could probably find out straight away if this was where O’Rourke had been staying, but he was reluctant to question them. It was Paddy Tooley he wanted to see and from what he knew of him, the young woman had certainly been right: if the Nag had been his destination half an hour ago, he’d still be there, you could bet on that.

  He thanked them and they parted company. The redhead was holding the umbrella, and it was the dark girl who looked back over her shoulder before they turned the corner. She dipped her head in a nod and he went the opposite way.

  There were no more than a dozen men in the pub and they were immersed in the racing pages of the Sporting Life, possibly the only people in London that day who weren’t discussing the Titanic disaster. In the normal manner of occupants of the Nag, most of them looked as though they were up to no good, and Paddy Tooley wasn’t the exception that proved the rule. He was a huge man who combined the general appearance of an Irish navvy with the coarse, battered features of a semi-professional boxer, both of which he was. He had reddish fair hair, a red face and his small, hot brown eyes were set too close together. He stood leaning on the bar with his big fist around a pint of Guinness.

  ‘Paddy.’

  ‘If it isn’t Joseph Inskip, by all that’s wonderful. What brings you here? It’s not often,’ he said with patent exaggeration, ‘the peelers honour us with a visit.’

  ‘Not unless they have some purpose.’

  ‘Oh, a purpose, is it? And what could that be?’ The man might have lived half his life in England but his accent was as thick as an Irish bog. That wasn’t unusual. A rich brogue was always useful if you wanted to be thought a stupid Mick – though Tooley didn’t need to assume an accent for that.

  ‘O’Rourke’s what brings me here, Tooley. I’m looking for him. And never mind why.’

  ‘Which O’Rourke would that be? Seamus, Michael— Oh, Danny? Then you’re looking in the wrong place. You should be setting your sights across the sea. Nobody’s heard from him since he left for the old country.’

  ‘And when was that?’

  ‘A week, two weeks since, I couldn’t rightly remember.’

  ‘You’re lying, Tooley.’

  He didn’t take offence, but he looked pained. ‘Ask anyone you like, eh, Maureen?’ He waved expansively around and the overblown barmaid behind the counter leaned on her elbows and said don’t ask her. It was only two minutes since Inskip had entered but the bar was a lot less crowded now. The Nag’s clientele smelled policemen as mice smelled cats. In fact only two or three remained.

  ‘He’s been seen around. So where’s he holed up?’

  ‘I don’t have the least idea in my head.’

  Inskip smiled. ‘That’s not to be wondered at. You’ve been in too many fights, Paddy. Your brain’s turned to mush.’

  Tooley stood, feet apart, his manner not so easy now. He sized Inskip up, but evidently thought better of what he had thought to do. He deliberately drank up, then left.

  ‘They seek him here, they seek him there, the peelers seek him everywhere.’

  The sudden quip came from the landlord, who’d kept out of things so far. He was a man called Corrigan, who’d run this bar for years. A man of small stature, a smiling man who liked to think of himself as a quick w
it, a bit of a rogue sometimes but well-meaning on the whole, Inskip thought. He didn’t put him down. He thought he might be useful. ‘Well then, have you seen O’Rourke lately, Corrigan?’

  Corrigan picked up a pewter pot and began polishing it assiduously. ‘That O’Rourke,’ he said, ‘he’d get himself and everyone who knows him into trouble at the drop of a hat. He can’t help himself, that bloody one.’

  ‘Does that mean you know where he is?’

  ‘If he’s around, wouldn’t Tooley have told you?’ Inskip thought that was a warning. O’Rourke’s whereabouts were known but no one was going to talk.

  ‘Paddy Tooley wouldn’t tell me the time of day – if ever his mother had taught him how to read a clock. But you would, Corrigan, you’d let me know if you heard where O’Rourke was, wouldn’t you?’ He allowed his gaze to stray to the whiskey bottles behind the bar, a barrel of the stronger stuff alongside. He’d had a taste or two of it himself, without letting on that he knew it had reached here without the benefit of customs duty.

  ‘Jayz, you’re a hard man,’ the landlord said. ‘But it’s serious, isn’t it?’

  ‘When isn’t it, with O’Rourke?’ He was convinced the landlord, and everyone else in the bar besides, knew all about the murder, and why he was here. His gaze drifted to the whiskey bottles once more.

  ‘Oh God,’ said Corrigan, ‘the things I must do for you.’

  Alice was just leaving the Dorcas, wheeling her bicycle out of the front door from the back premises where she kept it, out of temptation to any resourceful urchin who might fancy a free ride (and that was most of them) when she saw one of the policemen who had come to Manessa House after Lucy’s disappearance coming towards her. ‘Why, Sergeant Inskip!’

  ‘Mrs Latimer.’

  The first thing that flew into her mind was that there was some news, but she knew she would have heard from Violet or Ferdie if there had been, that it was pointless to ask. He obviously guessed what she was thinking and shook his head.

  ‘Nothing yet, Doctor, I’m sorry.’

  He said it quite gently, she thought, considering the previous impression he’d made on her, which had been that of a forceful, rather tactless man.

  They stood awkwardly, not knowing what else to say. Her glance sharpened. ‘Goodness, you look a bit worse for wear.’ His mouth was swollen. There was a cut beneath his eye and on his cheekbone a huge swelling.

  ‘It’s nothing. All in a day’s work.’ He grinned, wincing as he did so and cursing the proximity of the Nag to this clinic and the bad luck that had brought her out just as he was passing, when he’d never before encountered her in the neighbourhood.

  ‘You’d better come inside and let me have a look at it.’

  ‘I won’t bother you, Doctor.’ She seemed exhausted, and there were dark circles under her eyes. ‘It looks worse than it feels, I dare say.’

  ‘No, come on, I insist. You look as though you could do with a cup of tea as well.’

  A stiff whiskey was more what he’d had in mind. He was on his way home to his lodgings to get one but he gave in and followed her inside.

  ‘Nothing broken,’ she said when she had examined the swelling and cleaned the cut. ‘But I’m afraid you are going to have one heck of a shiner. You’re lucky it wasn’t worse. Who was it? And don’t tell me you walked into a door.’ She had seen too many women in the same state here at the clinic, beaten up by a drunken husband, to make that mistake.

  He shrugged. ‘Line of duty.’ She didn’t need to know the details, or why. ‘It happens.’ He didn’t want to talk about it because it had been his own fault. After leaving Corrigan polishing pots in his now nearly empty bar, he’d visited the gents in the backyard of the Nag. They were waiting for him, as he might have anticipated had his mind not been full of what he’d just heard, or more truthfully hadn’t heard, from Tooley. Two of them, though nothing like the build of Tooley, and he could have given a better account of himself had he not been taken by surprise. Still, he regarded what had happened to him philosophically. He ought to have known better than to come out into the street via the back alley instead of going out through the front entrance. But he reckoned he’d knocked a few teeth out and blacked an eye or two before passing out. And that one of his assailants was going to have trouble walking for a while after his foot had connected with the place that mattered. He was lucky, as Doctor Latimer had said, but he knew it hadn’t been a serious attempt, it had only been meant to scare him off. Which, if he hadn’t known it before, meant there was definitely something they didn’t want him poking his nose into.

  The tea, brought in by a woman Doctor Latimer addressed as Nurse Peg, was hot, strong and sweet, and though it wasn’t the whiskey he felt he needed, it tasted good and the first few sips began to revive him. ‘My!’ she said when she saw his face.

  ‘You should see the other fella.’ He was recovering fast but not up to sparkling repartee yet.

  She poured another cup of tea, gave it to Doctor Latimer and was about to leave when she was suddenly struck by something. ‘I know you, don’t I?’ she said to Inskip. ‘Aren’t you Mrs Maclusky’s nephew, the policeman?’ She wore a crucifix on a silver chain around her neck. St Bede’s was in the vicinity so there was no mystery about how the acquaintance had arisen. ‘The one that brought her the news? Poor Orla, to have a thing like that happen! She was very fond of her lodger, such a nice young chap he was. Quiet but always pleasant. Have you caught him yet, the one that killed him?’ He sighed. She wasn’t the only one who thought it was that easy. She studied the plasters on his face. ‘It’s Danny O’Rourke you’ve been looking for, isn’t it? You want to be careful, young man. He associates with some funny characters, that one.’

  ‘So I’ve been hearing.’ There was nothing secret from these church women, but this was not where he wanted to go. He went back to something else she’d said. ‘It sounds as though you knew Lennie Croxton?’

  ‘I met him once or twice when he came to mass. He’d have been a good-looking chap if it hadn’t been for wearing those awful glasses. Fastened up with sticky tape, they were, but I suppose he couldn’t afford new ones.’

  ‘Yes, we found them, in pretty bad shape.’ Moving Croxton’s body from the cab had unearthed the spectacles, smashed to smithereens, from where they had fallen to one side, where the weight of his body had put the finishing touches to a flimsy, wire-rimmed pair already past its best.

  Doctor Latimer was having difficulty in fitting the cork into the neck of the bottle of iodine she had been using for his cuts. Her normally steady hand had slipped and some of the contents had splashed on to her hand. ‘Someone should find a different stopper for these bottles,’ she remarked, finally managing to rub the yellow stain from her fingers with something sharp-smelling from another, unlabelled bottle. He should ask her what it was – his face was going to look bad enough for the next few days without canary yellow iodine stains adding to the decorations, but she saw him looking and saved him the trouble of asking. ‘Surgical spirit, Sergeant – but soap and water will do the trick if you have patience.’ She put the container down with a decisive click.

  He thanked her and stood up.

  She smiled. ‘Well, I think you’ll do now. You’re going to live.’

  He saw his face reflected in the glass of a picture as he left. The yellow iodine stains he’d have to put up with. A more immediate problem was how he was going to explain it all to Gaines.

  Ten

  After their first meeting, David Moresby had fully expected to come across Mona Reagan again, quite soon. It should not have surprised him when he didn’t: she was, as she had said, employed merely as one of the office workers behind the scenes, not to flit about the corridors of Westminster. But he was mildly surprised, by no means convinced that their first encounter hadn’t been contrived by her, and intrigued to know why she hadn’t made another one in her way. He admitted that his interest had been piqued in her as an attractive young woman he would like to kn
ow better. He had in fact wondered whether he might ask her out to dinner, though he knew he should be cautious about that – about consorting with her at all, in fact, he decided on second thoughts. The village pump had nothing on Westminster when it came to gossip and he had no wish to compromise himself by being seen consorting with – well, with the enemy, as Mona herself had it.

  But all of that had been pushed to the back of his mind by the kidnap of Edmund Latimer’s baby niece, though Latimer himself had shown neither emotion over the child’s disappearance nor concern for her safe return. It was all over Westminster, everyone had heard the story and perhaps he was sick of sympathy, weary of the press who, sensing a big story, with all their persistent chasing after him, had significantly failed to get any comment from him. In that reserved man, it was possible there lurked a deep affection for the baby and distress for his sister, but he was adept at concealing his inner feelings, putting on a poker face, and certainly not one to let a domestic crisis, however traumatic, interfere with his work. David had suspected Alice would be even more affected by what had happened. Himself, he scarcely knew the baby’s parents; he had met them once or twice when the Latimers had given dinner parties to which they’d all been invited. He had sent a note to them when the baby had first gone missing, and also one to Alice, expressing his sympathy and the hope that if there was anything he could do to help in the way of easing pressure on her husband, she must let him know. It was a platitude and he would have liked to have said more, but natural caution held him back, fearing he might reveal more of himself than was wise, for both of them.

  He was actually thinking about her when Mona Reagan appeared. There was no pretence this time of mistaking his office for the tea room, as she had mistaken Latimer’s. A brisk knock and then she was there in answer to his ‘Come in.’ She looked around and breathed what was evidently a sigh of relief at finding him momentarily alone, without a secretary or a colleague working alongside. ‘Miss Reagan. How nice to see you. Please take a seat. What can I do for you?’