Whatever Happenened to Molly Bloom? (4 page)

The prisoner, in turn, faced directly into the light from the tall south-facing window, a sergeant or duty inspector behind him and, on this particular day, Superintendent John George Driscoll seated across the table, smiling encouragement.

Neither Superintendent Driscoll nor Inspector Machin said much, just a word now and then when it seemed as if Mr Bloom’s soliloquy, as halting as Hamlet’s, might dry up completely.

If the prisoner’s story had been rehearsed it had not been well rehearsed or – the thought crossed Constable Quinn’s mind – so well rehearsed that it made a nonsense of denial and became instead a lesson in the art of obfuscation.

It said much for Mr Driscoll’s patience, or his guile, that he allowed the chap to drone on about the domestic habits of the Blooms, living and dead, and the sorrows that had been visited upon them since he’d met Molly playing charades – or was it musical chairs? – in the year of the short corn and how Mrs Bloom’s father had served in the garrison on Gibraltar, a Major, no less, in the Dublin Fusiliers and had collected postage stamps as a hobby.

‘Yes,’ said Superintendent Driscoll at length. ‘Quite!’

Mr Bloom, eyes downcast, paused, then, to Constable Quinn’s surprise, said, ‘Do you know, I once had a terrible dream …’

‘I don’t think dreams are relevant,’ Inspector Machin said, ‘unless you’re pleading insanity.’

‘No,’ Bloom said. ‘Really, I did. I dreamt I was on trial and all my friends and enemies turned up to bear witness against me. I shouldn’t have been there in the first place, I suppose.’

‘Been where?’ said Inspector Machin.

‘I went with a friend, a young friend. He got himself into a spot of bother with the drink. It’s not a place I’m in the habit of …’

‘You mean the Monto?’ the Superintendent put in.

Bloom nodded. ‘I have, on occasions, in the way of business, passed through the Monto.’

‘This young friend …’

‘He’s gone now, gone abroad.’

‘As a matter of interest what was his name?’

‘Dedalus.’

‘Simon Dedalus’s boy?’ the Superintendent asked.

‘Yes,’ Bloom answered. ‘Do you know him?’

Constable Quinn’s pen hovered over the foolscap. He had only a vague notion how to spell Dedalus but it had already dawned on him that three pages covered with Bloom’s self-indulgent musings were about to be scrapped.

‘When did this … this incident take place?’ Mr Driscoll asked. ‘I don’t mean the dream, I mean your visit to the Monto.’

‘Last summer,’ Bloom answered and then, as if he had given too much away, instead of nothing at all, added, ‘I don’t suppose it matters now.’ His shoulders heaved. ‘Perhaps I should begin again.’

‘Perhaps you should,’ Superintendent Driscoll agreed.

Daguerreotypes of lean, severe-looking men with pointed beards did not seem an appropriate decoration for the walls of a young woman’s bedroom. Kinsella assumed they were ancestral portraits foisted upon her by her father to remind her that she had exotic and possibly wealthy forebears hidden in the family tree. Until he’d opened the door of the room on the right of the hall, it hadn’t occurred to him that the Blooms might have a family and Bloom, for some reason, had said nothing about children.

The narrow bed was battened down by a tightly tucked spread that released a cloud of dust motes when Kinsella patted it. The water jug on the wash stand was bone dry. There was no soap in the bowl or hairs in the brush on the ledge. The wardrobe had a few clothes in it but they, as far as he could make out, were just dainty little dresses that no one had had the heart to sell. Two pairs of shoes, very small and dainty too, rested against the fender of the tiled fireplace as if to tempt the child, like a changeling, to return. It required no great cerebral effort to deduce that Miss Bloom was no longer a permanent resident in the household.

He returned to the hall and went upstairs. What was Bloom doing living in such a large house? Why hadn’t he rented out the upstairs rooms? There wasn’t a stick of furniture in any of them, nothing save a flea-bitten mattress rolled up in a corner, a hideous oval mirror, cracked and fly-blown, and in the room to the front of the house, a weather-stained brown mackintosh hanging forlornly from a hook behind the door.

Outside, beyond the grimy window panes, the good folk of Dublin were going about their weekday business. He could make out the clatter of hoofs on cobbles, the yawping of seagulls, the croon of pigeons on the roof, a dog, a small dog by the sound of it, barking, and the shrill whistle of a locomotive from the Liffey branch line a half a mile away.

The click-clack of the door plate in the hall startled him.

‘Jarvis?’ he called out.

‘Ay, sir, it’s me.’

There being nothing upstairs to keep him, he was on the point of turning away when something skittered over the dusty floorboards like a tiny white mouse.

Hunkering, he picked up a ball of cotton wool, clean, fresh and white as a snowdrop, and, for no good reason that he could think of, sniffed it.

‘Are you there, sir?’

‘Yes, in a minute,’ Kinsella said.

Scented, perfumed, not a medical smell; he sniffed again.

Lavender toilet water maybe? It smelled stronger than lavender but not oily or heavy. There were no smears on the cotton wool to suggest that it might be a simple lip salve. He was no expert in female fragrances but fortunately he knew someone who was. He opened a pocket in his waistcoat, dropped the ball of cotton wool into it and, as he’d done with the broken tooth, patted it into place before he went downstairs.

Jarvis was waiting in the hall.

‘Did you find Mrs Fleming?’ Kinsella asked.

‘I did, sir. She resides on the second landing in the middle of the three isolated tenements in Union Court.’

‘I know it,’ Kinsella said. ‘Between the back of the prison and the long wall of the engineering works. Did you speak with her?’

‘No, sir. I did not engage the lady in conversation. I found out from a neighbour that’s where she lives.’

‘You must be tired, Constable Jarvis.’

‘Well, I could do with a bite of breakfast, sir.’

‘Can you hold out just a little longer, do you think?’

‘Whatever’s right for you, Inspector.’

‘I’d like you to walk at an even pace from the front door to Dlugacz, the pork butcher’s shop. Make careful note by your watch how long it takes and record the exact time in your book. Don’t gallop but don’t dawdle either. Understood?’

‘Ay, sir. Understood.’

‘After that, you may report to Store Street to sign off. Before you do, though, will you ask Inspector Machin to fetch up evidence bags and labels for the remains of the teapot, also both bolsters from the bed and the jug and sugar basin I’ve left on the kitchen table. Have you got all that?’

‘I have, sir.’

‘Tell Inspector Machin I’ll drop by the station around one o’clock,’ Kinsella said. ‘Enjoy your breakfast, Constable Jarvis. I reckon you’ve earned it.’

‘Ay, sir.’ The young man grinned. ‘I reckon I have at that.’

FOUR

M
r Henry Coghlan, known to all and sundry as Harry, was, by his own estimate, the best retoucher of photographic negatives not just in Mullingar or Westmeath but in the length and breadth of Ireland.

Buried in the darkroom at the rear of his Castle Street studio he could work miracles on the least likely subjects by skilled manipulation of matt varnish, finely powdered black lead, alcohol, ammonia and a penknife. If Mr Coghlan’s wife, Biddy, ever harboured suspicions that photographic negatives weren’t the only thing Mr Coghlan touched up in the dark behind the curtain she kept them to herself. He had certainly never laid a finger on any part of his young assistant’s anatomy and Milly Bloom, the young assistant, considered her employer to be a perfect gentleman in all respects.

As a penniless young man on the doorstep of his career Mr Coghlan had manufactured a series of postcards depicting martyrs of the Republican Brotherhood, cards that had sold under the counter like hot cakes but would have meant a spell in prison if he’d been traced as the source. The stuff that boosted profits these days was a deal less treasonable and, though Mrs C still huffed and puffed, Harry Coghlan’s sideline in prints of pretty little girls in fairy costume was well within the boundaries of the law.

Reverend Stephens, minister of the Presbyterian church next door to the shop, had had one of Harry’s artistic prints bought for him by his scamp of a daughter. Going along with the joke, he’d hung it in the vestry until a posse of prune-faced elders had insisted he take it down and destroy it, an act of vandalism with which Reverend Stephens had refused to comply. Instead he’d put the picture up for auction at the annual church fete and had watched it knocked down, after a frantic bidding war, at three pounds, eighteen shillings, which was more than three pounds over the price his daughter had paid for it, not including the frame.

‘All in a good cause, Mr Coghlan,’ the Reverend chortled. ‘All in a good cause. I take it you’re equally charitable to the poor mites who pose for you?’

‘Certainly, I am,’ Harry Coghlan said. ‘They’re mainly servant girls who slip down from Athlone on their day off. It suits them to have a florin in their pockets and a free photograph of self done up as May or July or … do you remember Peaseblossom?’

‘A dream she was, indeed,’ the Reverend said wistfully, ‘with her little wings sticking out.’

‘Milly sewed the wings out of muslin. Clever with a needle for a Dubliner. I’ll use the wings again when I find the right Cobweb.’

‘Fair and slender and shining like the dew?’

‘Exactly, Mr Stephens. Exactly.’

‘Milly, I take it, is a trifle too – ah – robust for a Cobweb?’

‘A little too down to earth. I can’t see her as a fairy somehow.’

‘As many things, Mr Coghlan, but as a fairy: no.’

Chaperoning the girls who offered themselves up to Mr Coghlan’s lens was one of Milly Bloom’s less arduous tasks. She never failed to be impressed by how well her employer treated his youthful subjects, how patient he was with their shyness, which, as a rule, disappeared as soon as they were in costume. For the half hour or so it took to dress them, position them against the painted backcloth, adjust the lamps and take the photograph they were no longer unloved drudges but became the irresistible charmers they’d always imagined themselves to be.

Milly was sure, even if Mrs Coghlan was not, that Mr Harry Coghlan did not lust after young flesh or, for that matter, any flesh that hadn’t been hung on a butcher’s hook. He saw the girls as they saw themselves and was as delighted as they were by their transformation.

He was less delighted by the fat wives and glowering sons and daughters of the family groups that made up his bread and butter, or by the couples who posed, bride seated, groom standing, in the studio and who, Mr Coghlan said, usually looked as if they were about to face a firing squad and not a life of bliss together. No, Mr Coghlan said, only half in jest, when it came to inspiring subjects he’d far rather have Archie Montiford’s prize-winning bull, Zeus, or Lady Garrard’s fox-hunter, Morning Meadow, which latter he’d tried not very successfully to photograph in motion using a giraffe tripod and a rapid rectilinear lens on full exposure.

Milly had no notion what the bull or the horse was thinking when the shutter clicked but she certainly knew how the girls felt. She’d been in front of Mr Coghlan’s camera more than once and especially last September, when Mummy and Hugh Boylan had come down to visit the morning after Mr Boylan’s concert party had performed in the Father Mathew Hall up the road in Athlone.

Mr Boylan had been very impressed by Mr Coghlan’s work. He was on the verge of commissioning Mr Coghlan to ‘do’ her, Milly, as Titania or, better yet, Queen Mab, when Mummy had jumped in to remind Blazes that she was no longer his silly Milly but a grown woman and if he wanted a likeness it had better not be too revealing.

Consequently, she’d put on her tam, her short red jacket and long scarf and had gone outside into the autumn sunlight and posed before Mr Owen’s cycle shop and Mr Coghlan had done a lovely composition with her seated astride a man’s two-wheeler.

Hugh Boylan had said he would pay for three prints to be sent to his Dublin office and present one each to Papli and Mummy but Mummy had said, no, two would be enough, no point in wasting money. Mr Boylan had laughed and said ‘Game ball, Molly,’ whatever that meant, and had promised he would drop by the shop next time he was down in Westmeath, which would be in April for the Kilbeggan Handicap Cup in which he hoped to have a horse – half a horse, he said – running.

She’d seen Hugh Boylan once since then, up in Dublin in December. Mummy had been singing ‘There is a Flower that Bloometh’, from
Maritana,
at the Traders’ Association Christmas concert in the Belleville Halls. Half way through the song Papli, for no reason, had burst into tears. On the steps outside, after the show, Mr Boylan had patted Papli on the shoulder and had said something that had caused her father to leave hurriedly without waiting for Mummy or her.

She might have paid more attention to what was going on between Blazes and her father – who had never liked each other anyway – but she was still seething about the thing that had happened two nights before when her beau of the past year, Alec Bannon, and his so-called
bon ami
, Buck Mulligan, both drunk as lords, had tried to take liberties with her in a cab after a party at Kitty Loughlin’s house, a party she shouldn’t have gone to in the first place.

Mulligan had held her against the leather with his forearm while Alec had put his hand up her skirts and touched the front of her bottom and had said now was the time to see if she really had hair on it, saying, ‘Stop bloody wriggling, Milly, and open your legs.’ He would have stuck his finger inside her, too, if she hadn’t screamed at the top of her voice and the jarvey hadn’t stopped the cab, leaned down and asked if everything was all right down there. Mulligan, coarse brute though he was, had pulled Alec off and bundled him out of the cab and had paid the cabman to take her home, while Alec had staggered about on the pavement and called her filthy names, still shouting filthy names even as the cab had rolled off.