“Aye, he’s about,” she replied with a nod. “Most likely sleepin’ it off. It was late when he returned last night. Ye’ll need to pound extra hard on the door.”
And then, taking her advice...
“Wot the devil! Are ye trying to raise the dead?”
When the door eventually opened, his friend from those days with the MET glowered at him from the doorway. Brodie stepped past him into the small flat that was what former Constable Jimmy Conner could afford on his police pension. Along with money he made on the side that provided ale in any one of a half dozen pubs across London, a place he knew well from thirty years in service, retired now for a handful more.
The cap of white hair and glaring blue gaze shot through with red matched the belligerent greeting. Jimmy Conner didn’t wait for him to explain.
“The answer isno! I’m retired. I want nothing to do with the MET or...!” Conner jabbed a finger at his shoulder to make the point.
Brodie ignored the jab and the curses. “What about Theodolphus Burke?”
The rant stopped midway through a new round of curses.
“Burke?”
The history between the two men—Burke and his friend—was filled with accusations of police brutality and wrongdoing, then demotion with an article that named names on a crime sheet.
It was one of Burke’s early campaigns to elevate his own importance by accusing the constable who made the arrest.
It cost his friend a promotion that he was up for at the time, and verra nearly his job.
As Brodie knew only too well, it was not a matter that was easily forgotten. He heard it again in the way Conner said the man’s name.
“Bratach salach!” his friend spat out in Gaelic. “What is he up to now? Causing another good man to lose his reputation over lies just so he can promote himself?”
“He’s dead.”
That stopped Jimmy Conner midstream of more curses. His eyes narrowed with suspicion.
“Dead? The world could not be that fortunate!”
Brodie nodded.
“Dead?” Conner made a sound of approval. “It seems there is some justice in the world.”
He motioned for Brodie to join him at a small table, where he offered him a drink.
“Coffee,” Brodie replied. He wanted his friend sober.
“I won’t say that it’s a shame about Burke,” Conner commented after several cups of coffee.
“To my way of thinkin’, he had it comin’. But now there’s a woman involved, ye say? It would seem there is more to this.”
Brodie nodded. “Burke frequented the Old Bell. I’ll be there this evening to learn what I can from a man who apparently saw the murderer.
“Inspector Dooley has Burke with a John Doe at the Yard, to keep everything quiet until we can learn wot this has to do with the woman that he seemed to think was important enough to give Mikaela that note.”
He had told Conner the rest of it—what they had found at that residence at St. John’s Wood where the woman apparently ‘entertained’ a handful of men regularly, the condition of the manor when they arrived, and the woman’s disappearance.
“And herself?” Conner inquired, no doubt meaning Mikaela, his expression softening. “In the middle of it as usual?”
Brodie nodded. “She was to go to Burke’s office this morning to see if there was anything to be learned there.”
“I can see you will be needing assistance, with Munro off to Edinburgh.”
“Aye, from someone I can trust. With that note of Burke’s, there’s a connection to the woman. I need to find her. And I want the name of the man who killed Burke. By the description Inspector Dooley had, the man was the sort who works for someone else.”
