The Mermaid in the Basement (32 page)

“Who are you, sir?”

“My name’s Tremayne.”

“’E bought us eel pies, six of ’em!” Paco cried with excitement. “Can I ’ave one now, Mr. Tremayne?”

“You surely can.”

Callie drew a battered chair, one of three, up to the table. “You sit there,” she said. Dylan grinned at her commanding tone but sat down. While Callie removed the pies, he said, “I’m sorry to find you ill, ma’am. Have you been sick long?”

“I’ll be all right.” The woman had traces of early beauty. He guessed that she was pure Spanish, and she spoke better than most people in the Rookery. “I haven’t been able to work for a week now. Too sick.”

“Who takes care of you?”

“I takes care of her,” Callie said promptly. She had come over with one of the pies and helped her mother sit up. “Here, Mum, you eat this. It’ll make you well.”

Paco had already started on his pie with a vengeance.When Callie saw that her mother was eating, she came and said, “’Ere’s one for you, mister.”

“I’m not very hungry.Why don’t you keep that for later.”He watched Callie eat, and though she was very hungry, there was something almost delicate about the way she ate. She was going to be a beauty one day, though now the marks of poverty and want marked her strongly, as they did her brother and certainly her mother.

“Have you seen a doctor, ma’am?”

“No money for that.”

“No doctor would come ’ere,” Callie said.

“I know one who would. Why don’t you eat up, and I’ll go fetch him.”

Callie did not answer, but her eyes followed Dylan as he left.

“This is Dr. Carpenter, Mrs. Montevado.”

Carpenter was a thin, lithe man of thirty with piercing grey eyes. He went over to the bed and said, “Let me see now how you are.”

While the doctor examined the woman, Dylan sat down and began to ask Callie and Paco about their lives, about how they made it. He discovered that their mother worked in a sweatshop, and Callie and Paco went to the streets to pick up what they could.

The Rookery was filled with tragic stories like this, but Dylan found himself touched by their plight. As always, when faced with a difficult situation, he prayed that God would give him wisdom. Finally the doctor turned from the woman, came over, and said,“You taking care of her, missy?”

“Yus, I am.”

Carpenter took out two bottles and said, “Give her a big spoonful of this once a day, and this one twice.”

“Is she going to be all right?” Paco asked.

“I think so. She’ll need some good food. Eel pie is good for anybody.”

“Thanks for coming by, Carpenter.” Dylan reached in his pocket and pulled out some money and offered it. Carpenter shook his head. “Buy some groceries for the family. Take care of yourself, Dylan.”

The doctor left, and Dylan laid the money on the table. “There, Callie, use this to buy food for your mother and for yourselves.”

Callie was staring at him. Her glance was a mixture of suspicion and awe.“Why you ’elping us, spending your money on us? We don’t know you.”

“Why, Callie, a man needs to help a woman when he can.Maybe you can help me.”

Immediately she was suspicious. “Doing wot?” she demanded.

“I’m looking for a man. I don’t know his name, but you might have seen him.”

“Wot’s ’e look like?”

“He’s a big man, and you’ll know him by the fact that he wouldn’t have a right hand. He wears a steel hook.”

“Don’t know no man wif no hooks.”

“Ask around. If you find him, there’ll be a sovereign in it for you.”

“A sovereign! Wot you want him for?”

“I need his help with something.Mind you, if you do see him, don’t talk to him. Just get word to me.”

“Where will you be?”

“I’ll be at the Old Vic Theatre every night. I’m in a play there.Wait until the play’s over and you’ll see me coming out.”

“You’re a play actor?”

“A piece of one,” Dylan said. He smiled and got up, then he reached out and tousled Paco’s black hair. “You take care of your sister, Paco.”

Paco swallowed hard. “Yes, sir. Thank you for the pies and for the doctor.”

“Glad to do it.”

Dylan left, and the young girl stared at the door. “Never saw no man like ’im,” she whispered softly, then turned to go back to her mother.

Matthew Grant was not a man to waste time nor to think a great deal about matters beyond his control, but for some reason during the past few days he had been lost in some sort of haze. He was in the office of Superintendent Winters and was startled to hear Winters say abruptly, “You haven’t heard a word I’ve said, have you, Grant?”

Grant shook himself as if he had come out of sleep. He was embarrassed, and mumbled, “Sorry, sir, I guess my mind’s on a case.”

“You haven’t been yourself the last few days.What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, sir.”

“Well, maybe you don’t have enough work to do.”

“Probably right.”

Winters was studying Grant. He liked the young man immensely. As far as he knew, Grant had no life outside of his work, and he wondered if the man had a woman or had lost one.“You haven’t had a love affair that’s gone sour, have you?”

Grant’s lips tightened. “No, sir, nothing like that.”

“Well, shake it off.We’ve got a lot to do.”

Grant said, “What about the Kate Fairfield murder?”

“What about it?”Winters was surprised. “We’ve got our man.”

“He still claims he’s innocent.”

Winters laughed. He lifted his hand to smooth his hair, and the large diamond on his finger caught the light and glistened. “Haven’t you noticed we don’t ever have any guilty men? They’re all innocent—or so they say.We’ve got our killer. Leave that alone. I want you to look into this matter.” He handed Grant a sheet of paper. “It’s a burglary, but see what you can do with it.”

“Yes, sir.” Grant left the room, moved outside of the building that housed Scotland Yard, and heard a voice call his name.He turned around and saw Sergeant Sandy Kenzie scurrying toward him.“How aboot a bite to eat,Matthew?”

“I’m not too hungry.”

“Well, you can listen to me and watch me eat, then.” Kenzie grinned.

The two men went to a small eatery where the policemen often ate.

The owner knew them and put them at a familiar table. Kenzie ordered pickled tongue and a bowl of suet pudding.

Grant discovered that he was hungry after all and ordered a piece of fried fish with anchovy sauce, spinach, and stewed rhubarb.

Kenzie gave Grant a report of what he had been doing, and finally he saw Grant’s mind was elsewhere. “What’s wrong with you? You act like you’re half asleep.”

“Nothing is wrong with me—”

“You getting along with Superintendent Winters?”

“Well enough. But today he thinks I’m not paying close attention to my work.”

“Well, he’s got his mind on other things. Sometimes he gets short.

You’ve probably noticed. It’s that wife of his.”

Grant looked up. “His wife?”He had seen Winters’s wife. She was an imposing woman with dark eyes. He had heard rumours and knew that she had inherited a fortune from her father. She also had no time for inspectors and Scotland Yard.

“She’s a good-looking woman, and she has plenty of cash, but a man earns it when he marries a woman like that.”

Matthew smiled slightly. “What do you mean by that, Sandy?”

“Well, in effect, Mrs. Winters went out and bought herself a husband. Slavery is illegal in any form except this.”

“You’re saying she dominates the superintendent? I find that hard to believe. He’s a powerful man.”

“Not where his wife is concerned. She makes his life pretty miserable. Sometimes she screams at him like a banshee, and he sits there and takes it.”

Matthew chewed on a piece of fish, swallowed it, then asked curiously, “How do you know all this, Sandy?”

“Ah,Minnie told me.”

“Minnie? Who’s Minnie.”

“She’s the parlor maid for the Winterses. I’ve been taking her walking. I’m thinking of marrying her. Anyhow, she was pretty closemouthed about the family business, but she trusts me now.”

“I didn’t know all this.”

Sandy shrugged and said, “Well, I wouldn’t talk too much about it if I were you.”

“No problem. My mind has been on the Newton case anyway.”

Kenzie was surprised. His thin, intelligent face showed it. “We’ve got our man on that. I thought it was open and shut.”

“I suppose it is.”Matthew Grant pushed the vegetables around on his plate listlessly. “Something doesn’t feel right about young Newton.”

“Oh”—Kenzie grinned broadly—“so you’re going on
feeling
now? That’s not like you, Matthew. You’re the man that always says ‘evidence, evidence, evidence,’ and now you’re running your business by
feeling
. I can’t believe it.”

Grant had no intention of mentioning to anybody the impression that young Dora Newton had made on him. He said instead, “I’ve been trying to find a witness that saw something that night, but it was late. There weren’t many people passing by that time of the night.”

“I know one.”

“One what?”

“One witness.”

Grant stared at the smaller man. “What are you talking about, Sandy?”

“You know Jack Simmons?”

“Sure, I know Simmons. He’s a burglar and a good one.”

“Well, he slipped up this time. He was burgling a house on the night Kate Fairfield was murdered, and guess where the house was.”

A bell went off in Grant’s head. “Where?”

“Right across the street from the murdered woman’s house. You know Jack.He’s got sharp eyes.He’d keep an eye on that street while he’s stealing.”

“Where is he now?”

“He’s in jail. He’ll be tried and found guilty too.”

Grant suddenly smiled. It made him look much younger, almost boyish. Sandy had seen that smile very rarely, and his eyes narrowed. “That means something to you, does it,Matthew?”

“It might, Sandy—it might!”

Grant stared at Jack Simmons, who looked more like a teller in a bank than a burglar. He was a good-looking man of thirty, small and neat, and spoke better English than most. Grant had gone to the jail to see Simmons, and now Simmons was staring back at him. “I don’t know what you’re doing here, Inspector. I’ve already been caught.”

“Maybe we can help each other, Jack.”

Simmons seemed to sense there was some possibility for gain here. “I’m always glad to do anything I can to help you, Inspector Grant.”

“You come from a good home, I think, Simmons.”

“Yes, I did. I didn’t live up to their aspirations for me. I had a good education too. Much good it did me. I was going to be a stockbroker. Instead of that, I became a burglar.”

“Why did you do that?”

“You think I haven’t asked myself that a thousand times? I lost my honour somewhere along the way.” Simmons’s eyes half closed, and he said dreamily, “You know, people don’t lose their honour all at once, at least I didn’t. There wasn’t one day in my life when I suddenly said, ‘Well, I’ve been a respectable man, and now I’m going to become a criminal.’

No, it wasn’t like that.”

“What was it like, Jack?”

“I lost my honour a little morsel at a time. It’s like a mouse comes in and steals just a little bit. Doesn’t take the whole cheese, just a bite, and then he comes back and takes another, then another. So that’s the way I lost my virtue, Inspector, a little bit at a time.”