The Devil's Ribbon (22 page)

‘The chef? You are still on the trail of the chef? You think he’s still alive?’

‘He’s not officially dead. For that, I need a body and an autopsy from you, Hatton. I thought perhaps the body would be displayed for us somewhere on the anniversary of Drogheda, but it seems the Fenians had other things planned. Bigger things.’ He looked at his arm. ‘But I haven’t given up on him, if that’s what you’re asking.’

The carriage having arrived, Hatton opened the door to help the Inspector in as he continued, ‘And I’ve learnt a great deal about Gustave Pomeroy while I’ve been lounging round in bed. Like Mr Hecker, his fame was based on philanthropy. He was in Ireland, Donegal specifically, and advised a couple of the work committees with a particular type of workhouse soup. Here …’ Grey wrestled in his pocket. ‘Seems it
wasn’t a great success but at least the man tried, which is more than many others did.’ Hatton looked at the recipe which suggested a little mutton, two carrots, a lump of lard, two tablespoons of dripping, one dessert spoon of corn, a handful of barley, some salt, and thirty pints of water. Boil then serve. Hatton was no gourmand, but this looked utterly disgusting, and at the bottom of the page was the suggestion, signed again by Pomeroy, that this was enough to keep a family of ten going for a month. A month? It was barely enough to keep a fly alive, never mind malnourished children whose hungry stomachs would be distended, their bones as brittle as ice, riddled with disease like the flux, lice, typhus. They needed butter, bread, milk, eggs. They needed proper nourishment, not this muck.

‘Seems when he got back to England, the ladies of London went berserk, thinking what a wonderful, noble man he was to help the Papist babies and off his own back, so to speak. He got invited to talk about his experience of the famine at all manner of places and it did his reputation – and his number of customers – no end of good. So how can a man like that disappear? Unless he wanted to? Or unless the person who abducted him he already knew, trusted even.’

‘Go on, Inspector.’

Grey’s face looked odd in the carriage light. Unnatural, ratlike, as he continued, ‘His wife died last year, and by all accounts he’d become lonely, a little melancholy, and talked to friends of having mystical visions. They thought he was hitting the absinthe again. Let me tell you, Hatton, I know a little about addiction and I suspect he’d become reliant on someone. Addicts reach out, take whatever they can get. Perhaps he leant on a friend or even a woman?’

The inspector grimaced in pain.

‘You will tire yourself out, Inspector. You must do as the surgeons tell you and rest.’

Grey shut the door and pulled down the window. ‘If only the damned itching would stop, for all the time I feel that my hand has pins and needles and a throbbing ache, but there’s nothing to scratch or rub. It’s strange, isn’t it, how the mind plays tricks on one?’

Despite their previous antagonism, Hatton felt sorry for the man and so tried to sound encouraging, as he said, ‘Your phantom limb, Inspector. All amputees have one, and it will serve you well when the prosthetic is added. Have you decided on what you would like?’

The inspector cheered a little at the question, thinking of a tropical hardwood and an ornate filigree hook. ‘My business with the McCarthys is far from finished.’ Grey slammed the door to his elegant barouche and the carriage took off.

Hatton made his way back to the hospital. The same thought had run through his own mind. But Sorcha could have nothing to do with such an outrage, surely? And she’d been horribly injured herself. No word had yet come as to who had committed the crime, but as the days had passed, rumours had circulated that there was little doubt.
Fenians. Ribbonmen
. But was this the crescendo the Inspector had feared or was there more to come? During the famine, three of the victims had sat on a works committee with McCarthy at the helm. They’d tried to build roads, feed the starving, help the hungry to a better world, she’d said. But they must have done something else that someone didn’t like. But what? And could there be other victims to come?

Since the bomb blast two weeks ago, Damien McCarthy had been questioned on the work committees at length, but simply answered that Ireland was in chaos at that time – Donegal being no exception. According to his witness statement, he thought there might have been fifty men or more on the committees, so half of them were surely dead by now, the others scattered to the wind, and that no one scribed the conversations anyway, that decisions were made on the hoof. And he made mention that the committees had nothing to do with land sold to Mr Hecker, which was well known to be bog. He went on record that he thought the British police to be ‘Peculiarly stupid, for sure, didn’t you know that? We couldn’t even bury our own people in it, such were the sodden turf and the rocks.’ And that Hecker had probably bought the land for that peculiar English quality which Damien called ‘Colonial vanity. His little piece of Ireland which is so much cheaper and nearer than India. It’s rape of the land, nothing more.’ He then, apparently, folded his arms, sat back in his chair, and flatly refused to cooperate with The Yard any more, mentioning he had alibis at the time of all the victims’ murders, had friends in high places and, his lawyer pointed out, was entirely free to go.

Hatton didn’t know any more than this, but perhaps this priest, Father O’Brian, did, he thought, as he took his little detour which, since the bomb, Hatton had made each morning, twice in the afternoon and once in the evening, sitting at her bedside till the sun set. And if for any reason he was delayed a little, Patrice had nobly stepped to the fore and volunteered to run any errands required, to be at the widow’s beck and call. But only on the Professor’s say-so.
A little fund had bought flowers, chocolates, French cologne, a fan, a silk coverlet, lace doilies for her side table and, a couple of days ago, this encounter –

‘What have you got there, Patrice?’

‘The prayer book we found at the scene of the blast, monsieur. Madam requested a Catholic one. I took it from the morgue and …’

‘No, no,’ said Hatton, rifling in his pocket and handing over some money. ‘You can’t give her that one, Patrice, because it’s evidence. Here’s a few shillings, go buy her another one. I’m on my way to the ward right now. I’ll explain to her.’

Patrice had tipped his forelock, slipping back into the shadows of the hospital.

And two weeks ago, on the morning of the blast, as the injured were rushed to the surgical room, the poor lad, ashen, had asked in a whisper, ‘Her face, Professor? Will it mend, do you think?’

Hatton was ashen himself, sick to the stomach. ‘I’m not sure. The idea of a skin graft is experimental. We shall just have to wait.’

They were standing a hairbreadth from the hospital chapel. Patrice looked towards St Bart’s The Lesser and asked almost of the church, ‘And pray, Professor?’

Hatton nodded. ‘We’re not out of the woods, but Mrs McCarthy is young, strong, and yet, yes, we must pray. Pray very hard, Patrice.’

And that very evening, as a pink sky melted into red, Hatton had caught a glimpse of Patrice bent in prayer, his rosary beads to hand, thinking later that someone, somewhere must have listened to that boy.

For here she was today, sitting up, her dark hair across a pillow, able to speak but only a little. Her face wrapped in bandages, but under the dressing, a myriad of stitches running gridlike across the skin graft that had been used to cover the sheared-off muscle. But considering all that she had been through, to Hatton’s mind at least, Sorcha McCarthy was still beautiful.

‘And how’s my delightful patient today?’ Hatton asked, sitting himself down at the side of her bed and pouring her a glass of cordial. He had a little paper straw in his pocket and, making sure it was absolutely spotless, pressed it lightly into her mouth.

‘Try, Sorcha. Just a little?’ She leant forward with a faint smile as he whispered in her ear,
my darling
.

She struggled to speak, but finding it too painful, pressed his hand. Hatton turned to the ward sister. ‘Has Mrs McCarthy’s dressing been changed today?’ The nurse arched a brow at him. It was the second time he’d asked and she had given this unwanted visitor short shrift earlier. ‘Please do what your eminent Miss Nightingale bids, and open the window, sister. Mrs McCarthy needs air.’ The nurse scowled, but Patrice who was also hovering near the bedside rushed forward, climbed up a tottering ladder, did the job himself, came down, doffed his cap, and with an embarrassed smile, excused himself.

Alone at last, Hatton turned to Sorcha. ‘And your brother-in-law? Is he coming today?’

Her eyes said yes. She pressed his hand again,
forgive me
. He tried to smile, overwhelmed by her. ‘So, I hear from Dr Buchanan it won’t be so long before they let you go home to Highgate? It will do you a world of good, and if you will allow it, I shall take you myself. As your very dedicated doctor.’

Sorcha beckoned Hatton to bring a quill and a sheet of paper, as had become their habit. The sentence she wrote was, ‘
I long to leave this place and I dream of
saoirse.
Do you remember?
’

She looked away, perhaps, thought Hatton, thinking of another place, because he’d brought her a picture book of Canada, and as she had grown a little stronger, he’d talked of where he might take her for a little fishing, a picnic, bear hunting. He’d begged her not to laugh at such ideas and she had patted him playfully on the arm, whispering foolish things to him, about how if only her life could be that way. Simple. But not all his encounters were so innocent and charming, because, once in the night, her eyes had fluttered in an uneasy dream. Hatton had pulled his chair up close to her bone-coloured skin, plum silk and Irish lace falling from a turning shoulder, delirious as she’d pulled him towards her and, drenched in sweat, muttered of danger, imminent danger and of a beach on an island, so quiet he had to put his mouth to her lips, a whisper melting into a kiss.

But it was daylight now and he adjusted her bed linen fussily, and promised her he would be back again on the ward as soon as he could. He told her she must get some rest. And thinking, whatever she did or didn’t do, he would make it his business to keep Inspector Grey away from her, as long as he could.

‘Have you finished your ward round, Professor?’

‘I had to see Inspector Grey off the premises, Albert. To make sure he actually left, you understand, and is not still somewhere in the hospital, lurking.’

‘It wasn’t the Inspector I was speaking of. You cannot hide your
ardour from me, Adolphus. I think Mrs McCarthy has your attention, and it’s high time we had a little romance in the morgue. As a Frenchman, I’m all for it.’

‘I don’t know what you are talking about, Albert. My interest is strictly professional.’ Hatton was keen to change the subject. ‘But you seem very well occupied with a new cadaver? Is it of interest?’

‘Not especially. Five witnesses saw her do it and such is the shame on the family, they left the body to float. This woman was an opium smoker. She also used these.’ Roumande held up a rusty metal needle. ‘On her uppers, like so many, it seems. Well, she’s paying for it now, for it’s not so often we get to measure fluid in lungs as big as these. She was an opera singer. Would you like to have a delve and see for yourself the extent of the opiate damage?’

‘No, no. You carry on. I have an appointment with Dr Buchanan. But that needle, Albert, where do these people get them from? And did you test that one I found before the bomb blast? I’m sorry, Albert. I should have done it myself, but I’ve been so preoccupied.’

Roumande nodded, tossing the syringe in a tray with a rattle. ‘In answer to your first question, they pilfer them, Adolphus. Druggists, hospitals – anywhere they can get them. This syringe had never been used, but the Inspector’s has no bearing on the case, does it? You seem a little troubled, Professor? He’s an opium user, too, I suppose, but what of it? Half of London is.’ Roumande’s hands were now deep under the rib cage of the practice cadaver, squelching around the lungs. Hatton shrugged –
What of it, indeed
– and set off again, this time not to the wards, but to Dr Buchanan’s office.

‘Dr Buchanan? A word, please, if this is a convenient moment?’

Professor Hatton was shocked to see how drawn Dr Buchanan seemed, but then he was not young, nearly sixty, and today Buchanan looked every year of it. His skin was sallow and he was coughing. Bizarrely, in the corner of his office, in a little tin bath, was a brownish duck.

‘Damned hay fever, and what with the opening of the fountain, the speech-making didn’t help, but at least the band’s stopped. Are you a sufferer, Professor Hatton? I am, and all my children, especially the girls, though they are all now safely near the South Coast with their mother, which is shortly where this little lady shall go.’

Quack, quack, quack.
The duck ruffled its tawny feathers.

‘Somebody left her for me. Isn’t she delightful? And very rare, you know. A present from an anonymous but very grateful patient, the gift tag said. Although she doesn’t have the best, shall I say, toilette? I have called her Albertine, the duck being so very loyal and intelligent, just like Monsieur Roumande. She’s American, a wigeon, I am told by those that know these things.’

Quack, quack, quack.

‘Give her a piece of toke, Hatton. I think she likes you!’

Buchanan continued, ‘My throat’s on fire and I’m losing my voice, I fear. It’s the damn pollen and the coal dust in the air. The Board of Works really ought to do something. This is the worst summer yet, don’t you think, Professor Hatton?’

‘Your family are in Sussex, then?’ Hatton was happy to make small talk for a while. Dr Buchanan responded by ordering a minion to fetch them both coffee.

‘Or would you prefer tea, Adolphus? I’m in need of something a little kinder today. Mind and body ail, as we get older. I sleep only a little in this feverish heat. But on the positive side, last night I took part
in a most erudite gathering and gave a keynote speech to a room full of cholera experts, including many who hail from the New World. I have the speech here somewhere.’ He rustled in his bag.