Page 61

The carriage stopped for a moment at a crossroads and I looked out to see a lone boy clutching the metal railings beside us. His clothes were worn and his face was slack with the weight of boredom and a strain of hunger that I’d known well for so many years.

A memory suddenly came back to me, sharp as a stitch: standing at this very crossroads, clinging on to that very same railing. Mum was at home working and I couldn’t find Dad in any of the pubs; it was hours until the soup kitchen or the cleansing station opened. All I could do was stand at the crossroads and watch carriages roll past, wishing that one of them would stop and take me somewhere else, but of course none of them did. I went home when I was too hungry to bear it any more, and Mum beat ten bells out of me for it. It was my eighth birthday.

The traffic cleared and I came back to myself. I was sat in a fine carriage beside a lady of standing. Barely thirteen years stood between me and that boy at the crossroads, but it felt like a chasm. I thought of the bowler hat that I’d spent days fretting about – the livery that I’d coveted – and I felt nothing but shame.

The carriage finally pulled to a stop at Myring’s Place. It was more or less as I remembered it: a pocket of houses clustered around a rough courtyard, badly cobbled and dotted with coal sheds. Grey washing hung from anywhere that would take a line. A crowd of stunned, gossiping neighbours were already gathered outside.

‘Well, well,’ said Miss Decima, leaning out of the window. ‘What do you notice, Stephen?’

I gazed around the courtyard. ‘There’s no police, Miss Decima.’

‘Correct. Given that Cartwright said he sent officers ahead of him, and the neighbours are all astir, I suspect that they’ve already drawn a dead end and moved on. A disappointment … but one which makes the next step a touch easier for us at least.’ She waved a hand imperiously out of the window. ‘You there! Which one of these buildings is a lodging house?’

I winced. I hated it when Miss Decima barked at strangers like this, but it was the only way she knew. The crowd gazed back in silence, until a sullen child pointed at a door.

‘Much obliged,’ said Miss Decima. ‘Stephen, the chair.’

I wrestled the bath chair off the carriage and helped Miss Decima into it, then wheeled her to the door. The windows all around were starting to fill with faces now. Children were leaving their houses to peer at us from behind the washing. ‘We’re drawing a lot of attention, Miss Decima,’ I said.

‘Let them stare, Stephen,’ she said. ‘We have far more important matters to concern ourselves with. If in doubt, just be rude. It always works.’

She rapped on the door. There was a series of slams from inside, then footsteps, and then the door inched open and a worn face glared out at us from the dark. ‘Yes?’

The landlady was not happy to see us. Her voice sounded like a door already shutting in our faces.

‘Good day,’ said Miss Decima haughtily. ‘I gather this is a lodging house?’

‘No,’ the landlady snapped. ‘It’s a monastery.’

The neighbours laughed. I had a horrible feeling about how this was going to go. To run a lodging house like this, you had to be hard as macadam. Miss Decima carried on nonetheless. ‘Am I right in believing that you have a woman lodging here by the name of Éimhear Ó Ceallaigh?’

The landlady scowled – proper angry now. ‘She’s not here, all right? The police have been and gone and turned everything over. It’s going to cost me a fortune to fix what they’ve done, so you can –’

‘How inconvenient,’ said Miss Decima, reaching into her handbag and pulling out a couple of crisp notes. ‘I trust that this should cover the damages.’

The crowd behind us muttered. The landlady’s eyes hardened with outrage. ‘You can’t just –’

‘Perhaps this would be more suitable,’ said Miss Decima, casually doubling the amount. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, we’d like to see the bedroom in question.’

And there it was: no matter how much pride or fight you have, no matter how much you want to spit in the face of the gentry, at the end of the day you can’t turn down money like that. But it only made you hate them all the more. The landlady snatched the notes and quickly counted them, out of habit rather than anything else, then opened the door. ‘Fine. Come inside, for all the good it’ll do you.’

There was Irish in her accent, I noticed. She turned down the corridor, and I followed.

It was dark and dingy. All the doors were shut; any windows were presumably kept for the bedrooms. I followed the landlady down the narrow corridor, cluttered with furniture; at one point, I had to manhandle the bath chair around a massive wardrobe that had been inexplicably placed in a tight corner. It was only when I’d managed it, and was gazing down at the floor and puffing with effort, that I noticed what was lying on the floorboards at my feet.

A single hatpin.

‘Here,’ said the landlady, opening the door at the very end of the corridor. ‘It’s the only room that the WSPU would pay for.’

It was a small, dismal room. The window was strung with a tatty curtain and stained with soot; it did nothing for the darkness. What few items of furniture had been here – a bed, a chair, a wardrobe – had been torn apart by police. They’d even lifted up some of the floorboards, leaving holes right there in the floor.

‘Can you not see?’ said the landlady, flapping her hands in despair. ‘How am I supposed to run a business when –’

‘If you don’t mind,’ said Miss Decima, cutting her off coldly, ‘we have a number of questions to ask. Perhaps we should begin with your name.’

The landlady scowled. I could tell that she loathed Miss Decima, even more than she loathed being interrupted. ‘Cath.’

Miss Decima’s eyes ran around the room. ‘Cath, when did you last see Éimhear Ó Ceallaigh?’