Whatever Happenened to Molly Bloom? (9 page)

Jim uncorked the bottle and carefully measured out a thumb’s length of the golden liquid into the glasses.

‘Don’t break the bank,’ his father said sarcastically. ‘Here, what the devil are you doing?’

‘Joining you.’

He gave a glass to his father, corked the bottle and locked it away in the cabinet, then, picking up his own glass, held it out between finger and thumb.

‘The road to ruin, Pa,’ he said.

‘The road to ruin, it is,’ his father said.

The glasses clinked rims lightly. Marigold, giggling, improvised a snatch of the ‘Sailor’s Hornpipe’ and Violet, in mock horror, called out, ‘Mother, he’s at it again.’

He waited until they were all seated at the long table in the dining room and Edith was dishing out broth from the big tureen before he brought the little ball of cotton wool from his vest pocket.

He didn’t want to tempt the girls into asking questions about the grisly murder in Eccles Street, though Edith said they were much more savvy about the nasty side of his profession than he gave them credit for. He squeezed the cotton ball gently between finger and thumb and waited for someone to notice what he was up to, which, naturally, didn’t take long.

‘Have you been bleeding?’ Violet asked.

‘What? No.’

‘I thought you’d missed your chin with the razor again,’ his oldest said, nodding at the pinch of cotton wool. ‘What is it then?’

‘I know,’ said Marigold. ‘It’s a clue, isn’t it, Dad?’

He tried to laugh it off. ‘What makes you think it’s a clue?’

‘Because of the way you’re holding it,’ said Marigold. ‘Shall I fetch your magnifying glass?’

‘I don’t think that will be necessary,’ Jim Kinsella said. ‘However, before you go mad with the pepper pot, Vi, I wonder if I might borrow your nose for a moment?’

‘My nose?’ Violet self-consciously prodded her snoot. ‘What’s wrong with my nose?’

‘Not a thing,’ Jim said. ‘It’s a very fine nose, a very sensitive nose, in fact, which is why I’d like to borrow it.’

‘Huh!’ said Violet, not sure whether she’d been complimented or insulted. ‘Oh, very well. Borrow away.’

He rose from the chair and, leaning across the plates, offered the little white ball to his daughter without releasing it.

She drew back. ‘It doesn’t have blood on it, does it?’

‘No, no blood. Can you identify the fragrance?’

Edith stood at the head of the table, ladle in hand, watching intently. Noreen, by the door, watched too. Even Grandpa, who was usually too occupied with his food to notice anything much, scowled across the table as Violet brought her nose to the cotton ball and inhaled. She sniffed again, then sat back and shook her head.

‘Don’t tell me you don’t know what it is?’ she said.

‘Should I?’ Jim Kinsella said.

‘It’s
my
perfume. I wear it every time we go out.’

‘You’ve been found out, Daddy,’ said Daisy, chin on hand. ‘You gave Vi a bottle last Christmas.’

‘Does it have a name?’ the inspector asked.

‘Halcyon Days
,
’ said Violet. ‘Oh, do stop blushing. Don’t think I don’t know Mama bought it for you.’

‘Where?’ The inspector glanced at his wife. ‘Smely’s?’

‘Winterbottom’s,’ Edith said. ‘On Sandymount Road.’

‘Why there?’

‘It’s the scent Violet wanted. Winterbottom’s was the only shop in Dublin that had it in stock.’

‘Why is it so difficult to find?’

‘It’s imported from America,’ Violet informed him.

‘Is it now?’ Daddy Kinsella said, ‘Is it, really?’ and, tucking the cotton ball safely into his vest pocket, passed his plate down the table to claim his share of the broth.

It was still daylight when they arrived in Broadstone railway station. They made their way down the platform, across the shallow forecourt and out through the lofty colonnades. Blazes carried her suitcase in one hand and gripped her arm with the other as if to protect her from the buffeting wind. Even after Blazes had bundled her into a cab and they were clipping down Constitution Hill she nursed an irrational fear that Papli would come looking for her and that she should be back at the station waiting for him.

Broadstone station was the last place she’d seen Papli. He’d walked her up from Eccles Street at the end of the Christmas holiday under a leaden winter sky that, like a cauldron lid, had trapped the din and stink of the railway yards. He’d kissed her on the brow as if he was saying goodbye for ever. He’d pressed two half crowns into her gloved hand in spite of her protests and had waited until she’d found a seat in a third-class carriage and the locomotive was making steam before he’d turned away; another hat and overcoat vanishing into the crowd.

‘Where have they taken her?’ Milly asked.

‘Who?’ said Blazes. ‘Oh, you mean … well, to the mortuary.’

‘May I see her?’

‘No,’ he said softly. ‘No, sweetheart. She’ll be kept there safe and sound until we can arrange the funeral.’

‘My father will do that.’

‘If he can’t,’ and Blazes, ‘then we’ll do it between us.’

‘Where is Papli now?’

Blazes rubbed his blunt chin. ‘They’ll be holding him in Store Street or possibly the Castle until a magistrate hears his case.’

‘When will that happen?’

‘Tomorrow probably.’

‘And then he’ll be released.’

‘I don’t doubt it,’ said Blazes dubiously.

Milly slumped against the cab’s musty upholstery. It had finally dawned on her that she would never be able to go back to the home she’d left ten months ago, for it was her mother’s strident presence that had given the house life, just as it had enlivened all the other houses they’d stayed in after her baby brother had died.

Familiar streets yielded to those less familiar. The cab crossed the O’Connell Street Bridge. She glimpsed the Liffey, like a ribbon of steel, and the smoke of the barges crawling upon it.

The cab veered left and, a few minutes later, drew up outside a building with huge wooden letters pinned high up on the facade. Before she could take her bearings, Blazes had her out on the pavement and tripping up three shallow steps and through an open door into a hallway as dark and echoing as a mausoleum.

‘Hughie,’ said a female voice from out of the gloom, ‘where on earth have you been?’ A second female voice piped in, ‘Who’s this you’ve brought home? Another of your fallen women?’

The gas light in the long hallway was so dim that it took Milly a moment to make out the figures who stood, like basalt pillars, one on each side of a wide staircase that soared up into inky blackness.

‘No, Maude,’ Blazes said. ‘This is Milly Bloom, Marion Bloom’s daughter. In case you haven’t heard the news …’

‘We have,’ said Maude. ‘Very sad.’

‘Very sad,’ echoed the other sister, Daphne, and stepping out of the shadows, placed a hand on Milly’s sleeve. ‘Come, child, let me show you to your room.’

The wooden letters half way up the face of the building had been stripped of gilt by wind and weather. Three letters swung from their pegs and two more were missing, which gave the sign –
Ancient Order of Rechabites
– an inappropriately tipsy appearance that suggested that the Rechabites had moved their tents to a more salubrious location. The printed card posted in the pavement-level window,
Rooms Let to Distressed Gentlewomen,
seemed more the ticket, though why any gentlewoman, distressed or otherwise, would wish to sleep under the same roof as Hugh Blazes Boylan was more than Kinsella could fathom.

Any notion that stragglers from a Friendly Society might still be lurking behind the weathered door was dispelled when, in response to Kinsella’s tug on the bell-pull, the door swung open to reveal an overbearing woman dressed in a cross-buttoned Norfolk jacket and green pleated skirt so out of date that not even his father would have considered it fashionable.

The Norfolk jacket growled, ‘We’re closed.’

‘I’m not looking for a room,’ Kinsella said.

‘You’re looking for charity, aren’t you?’

‘No, actually …’ Kinsella groped in his pocket for his warrant card and, a split second before the door closed, found it and thrust it up into the woman’s face.

‘Police,’ he said, growling too. ‘Detective Inspector Kinsella.’

The woman reared back, swung round and called out in a voice that reverberated through the catacombs like the whinny of a coalman’s nag, ‘Hughie, what have you been up to now?’

‘Caretakers,’ Hugh Boylan explained as he escorted the inspector along the hallway towards a sliver of light beneath the staircase. ‘My sisters are still associated with the Ancient Order, which isn’t so ancient as all that. When the whole shebang upped and moved to splendid new halls off Sackville Street we – my sisters – volunteered to keep this place in decent trim until the lease expires.’

‘The card in the window?’

‘Lodgers?’ Boylan shrugged. ‘A perquisite, you might say.’

‘How many women are lodging here at present?’

‘Nary a one, as it happens.’

Boylan had betrayed no surprise at Kinsella’s arrival on his doorstep and had personally escorted the inspector into the house. He was clad in flannel trousers, a floral waistcoat and a linen shirt, the sleeves of which were held up by garters. A table napkin was tucked into the vee of his waistcoat but, in spite of his casual attire, he still managed to appear dapper.

He paused in the corridor outside the lighted room. ‘We’re just finishing dinner. I assume you know I have Milly Bloom here? If you failed to fish out that titbit of information then you can’t be much of a detective. Which of my loyal friends shopped me?’

‘Delaney of the
Star.
’

‘Hmm,’ Blazes said. ‘Just because I sent my secretary home for the day and closed the office it wasn’t my intention to be – what? – furtive. My first thought was for the child.’

‘How is she?’

‘Stricken and confused,’ Blazes said. ‘On the other hand she did manage to tuck away a decent bite of supper. One of the advantages of being sweet sixteen, I suppose, is a hearty appetite.’

‘How much does she know?’ Kinsella said.

‘No more than I do,’ Blazes said, ‘which, frankly, isn’t much more than I read in the paper.’

‘Does the girl know her father stands accused of murder?’

‘Oh! Has Bloom been formally charged? That’s new.’

‘He’s being held on suspicion.’

‘No other suspects?’

Kinsella refrained from answering. He said, ‘Bloom will appear before a magistrate tomorrow morning. Given the serious nature of the felony the hearing will be closed to the public and I doubt if he’ll be granted bail, but if the girl wishes to see her father afterwards I’ll arrange it.’

‘Kind of you to come all this way to tell her, Inspector,’ Blazes Boylan said. ‘Shall I bring her out or will you …’

‘I’ll have a word with her where she’s most comfortable,’ Kinsella said. ‘Then, Mr Boylan, I’d like a few words with you in private.’

‘By all means. Anything you wish to know – any way in which I can help – I’ve nothing to hide,’ said Blazes, still unfazed, and pushed open the door to the dining room.

EIGHT

M
illy Bloom was three months short of sixteen. She seemed older, though, more of an age with Violet than Daisy, Kinsella thought. She was certainly no skinny child, no whimpering waif crushed by grief. She was seated at an oval table, napkin in hand, with the remains of supper spread before her. The room, unlike the entrance hall, was lit by electricity. A crystal chandelier, adapted to take four glass bulbs, hung directly over the table but there were also lamps on the mantelshelf above the fireplace and, in a corner, a standing lamp placed before a head-high draft screen. There were no pictures on the walls and no additional furnishings. Kinsella suspected that at one time the room had been used as a meeting hall.

The woman who’d opened the front door to him was almost as tall as he was and the old-fashioned outdoor jacket and pleated skirt made her seem even more imposing. She was, he guessed, in her mid forties, eight or ten years older than her brother. The other woman in the room was somewhat younger. She wore a tea-gown decorated with faded lace.

Boylan introduced his sisters: Maude, the taller; Daphne, the younger. He stationed himself behind Milly’s chair and, leaning down, whispered into her ear. It occurred to Kinsella then that however composed Milly Bloom might appear to be she was probably still fragile and that the questions he’d planned to ask her were too leading to put to her here and now.

He took off his hat, pulled out the chair that Boylan had vacated and seated himself.

Milly Bloom stared at him, waiting for him to speak. She tossed down the napkin and touched a hand to her sandy-blonde curls. Her eyes, he noted, were a beautiful shade of blue and not free of tears.

‘Why have you arrested my father?’ she said.

Blazes Boylan and his sisters nodded in unison as if the young woman spoke for all of them.

‘He’s only a suspect, Milly,’ Kinsella said.

‘Miss Bloom, if you please.’

‘My apologies. Your father was found at the scene.’

‘He lives there, don’t you know,’ Milly Bloom said. ‘Of course he was found at the scene. It’s because he’s a Jew, isn’t it?’

Caught off guard, Kinsella glanced at the sister, Daphne, as if hoping that she might provide an answer, but all he received was a flinty glare.

He said cautiously, ‘Isn’t your father a Protestant?’

‘He converted,’ Milly Bloom said, ‘but he’s still a Jew in everyone’s eyes. Is that why you have him in jail?’

‘The law acknowledges no such prejudice, Miss Bloom.’

‘The law is nothing but a collection of prejudices, Mr Kinsella,’ Maude Boylan said, ‘put together by the English ruling class.’

The inspector ignored her. To Milly Bloom, he said, ‘A magistrate will decide if there’s a case to answer.’

‘And is there?’ Hugh Boylan put in.

Kinsella hesitated. ‘There may be, yes.’

The young woman toyed with her hair once more. Clinging on to the last vestiges of her self-control, she displayed an obstinate determination not to give in to emotion.

‘Where was my mother … I mean, where was she found?’