Joe the Q.C. has given me the name of a law firm specialising in children’s work. Partington, Pilkington, Purblind and Hush, in Bridge Street. Straight out of Charles Dickens, but she assures me that there are heaps of Dickensian-sounding law firms, it’s a part of legal tradition and most of the partners listed in a firm’s title have been dead for a thousand years if they ever existed at all. My pick is Mr. Purblind, but I’m to see Mr. Hush next Monday at four o’clock.
I still can’t get any sense out of the Child Welfare, who keep on refusing to tell me where Flo is. She’s well, she’s happy, she’s this and she’s that, but if she’s in Yasmar they won’t admit it. The inquest on Harold and Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz has been set for Wednesday of next week, so I’ll have to think of a brilliant reason why I might need the whole day off. All of us in The House are obliged to attend and answer questions if we’re called, though Norm tells me that the Boys in Blue haven’t found hide nor hair of Chikker and Marge from the front ground floor flat. Fled interstate is the theory, which means that they might not have been on the game, but they were up to something. Trouble is that without fingerprints, no one knows exactly who they are. Possibly bank robbers. I think they are just seedy people who don’t trust The Law.
Something very strange happened last night at about ten past three. We were all in, and all asleep. I was woken by the sound of heavy footsteps thumping down the hall from upstairs, for all the world like Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz doing a small hours patrol. No one else walks like that! Even The House, a stout old Victorian terrace, used to shake when she walked. But Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz is dead, I saw her dead, and I know that right now the poor creature is lying in a morgue drawer. Yet she was walking upstairs! Then came the rumble of her laugh, not the hur-hur-hur, the ha-ha-ha. My hair went straight for the first time in its life.
The next thing they were all clustered at my door. Klaus was beside himself, weeping and moaning, so was Bob. Jim was trying to brave it out, and Toby’s face was white. So was mine, not easy for people with dark-tan skin.
I brought them inside and tried to settle them in my chairs, but they twitched, jumped, shivered. So did I.
Only Pappy wasn’t scared witless. “She’s here with us,” she said, eyes shining. “I knew she’d never desert The House.”
“Rubbish!” Toby snapped.
“No, whatever it is, it’s real,” I said. “We were all sound asleep, and it woke us up.”
I put the kettle on, made some tea, and put a stiff dollop of brandy in every mug. Vows never to touch the stuff again are not proof against Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz.
Then Pappy dropped her bombshell. Our night experience had filled her with a joy I hadn’t seen in her since the halcyon days of Ezra. She was sparkling.
“I’m not going to Stockton,” she said.
We all stared at her.
“After Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz passed over,” she whispered, “she appeared to me. Not in a dream—while I was reading. She told me that I couldn’t desert The House. So I went to see the Sisters at Vinnie’s, and asked if I could train there as a nurse but live here. Nuns are so kind, so understanding! They decided that at my age and with my experience of hospitals, I would make a better nurse if I lived out than in. I start at Vinnie’s with the next batch of probationers later this month.”
This was the first bit of good news since New Year’s Eve, and we all needed it desperately. Pappy is strange, very mystical. Yet even after hearing what she had to say, I refuse to believe that it was the real Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz I heard upstairs. I would rather think that emanations from my lost angel stole into our minds and deluded us.
Where are you, Flo? Are you all right? Do they understand? No, of course you’re not all right, and of course they don’t understand. With your mother gone, you belong to me, and I’ll shift heaven and earth before I’ll see you sent to an orphanage. If I can’t get you home, you’ll die. Your fate is in my hands because your mother put it there. Which is the greatest mystery of all.