SEVEN

The precinct station house was crowded that night and it was early morning before James Batchelor found himself face to face with the inspector.

‘You see,’ Haynes said, yawning after countless hours beyond the end of his shift, ‘what bothers me is that twice now in the past few days, you seem to be at the centre of trouble. And you a foreigner and all.’

‘Well, that’s what he said,’ Batchelor spread his arms, all innocence. ‘Almost word for word.’

‘Who?’

‘Er … the gentleman I spoke to at Madam Wilton’s.’

‘Yes, and that’s another funny thing,’ Haynes nodded. ‘Most people I know who go to Madam Wilton’s don’t go for the male conversation. Tell me, Mr Batchelor, is the Division part of your sightseeing in our fair city?’

‘Well, you know,’ Batchelor bluffed. ‘Men of the world as we are … Should you ever venture to London, Inspector, I would readily take you on a tour of the dives of the Haymarket.’

‘I’ll take you up on that offer,’ Haynes smiled genially at the Englishman, ‘if ever I get enough time off to make a journey like that. I assume you know what Madam Wilton’s is.’

‘Well, I guessed,’ Batchelor said.

Haynes got up and crossed to a wall map of Washington. ‘Here,’ he jabbed his finger into the complex criss-cross of streets, ‘is Hooker’s Division. As a sightseer you’ll appreciate this. In the late war, General Hooker – Fighting Joe, as we knew him – had the daunting task of defending Washington; gun emplacements on Arlington Heights and so on. Most of his boys were whiling away their spare time – and their Yankee dollars – with various ladies of the night, so Joe decided, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.’

‘He visited brothels?’

‘No, Mr Batchelor, he had all the street girls in the city rounded up and he dumped ’em in Murder Bay – not literally, of course. That way, if the Rebs tried to cross the Potomac, he’d know pretty much where his boys were.’

‘Sounds logical,’ Batchelor nodded.

Haynes went back to his seat. ‘Does, doesn’t it? Now, I guess the law in your country is pretty much the same as here. We can arrest the girls at Madam Wilton’s for solicitation, but the clients … well, Democrat or Republican, it’s all the same to me.’

‘I believe – and this is hearsay, you understand – that most clients go free in my country, even after police raids like yours.’

Haynes laughed. ‘Tell me it ain’t so!’

‘I haven’t been quite honest with you, Inspector.’

‘Oh?’

‘I’m not here as a sightseer. I’m a journalist, writing a piece on espionage during the late war. Naturally, I’m interested in the equally late Brigadier Baker.’

‘Naturally,’ Haynes nodded, his face as blank as the wall behind him.

‘My enquiries took me to Madam Wilton’s because a former colleague of his was there.’

‘Oh? Who was that?’ Haynes asked.

‘A former member of Baker’s National Detective Force, Caleb Tice.’

‘Tice?’ Haynes frowned. ‘You spoke to Tice?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Not a lot, actually, before your boys broke the door down.’

Haynes leaned back in his chair with a frown on his face. He moved a ledger on his desk towards him and flipped it open. He ran his finger down the list of names written there. ‘Would you like to reconsider your statement, Mr Batchelor?’ he asked.

‘Er … no. Why?’

‘Well, this here,’ he tapped the ledger, ‘is a list my boys have compiled of Madam Wilton’s girls and guests from tonight. There’s no Caleb Tice here.’

‘Perhaps he got away,’ Batchelor suggested. ‘Or possibly … and I’m sure you’ve come across this before, Inspector … used an assumed name, an alias.’

‘Hmm, that’s possible,’ Haynes conceded. ‘But I’m afraid there’s a bigger problem.’

‘Oh?’

The inspector leaned forward, looking at his man closely. ‘You see, we fished the body of Caleb Tice out of the Potomac over a year ago. He was as dead as a nit.’

Matthew Grand would have said that he knew Washington like the back of his hand, but he had a little trouble finding the new home of Kathleen Hawks. Jane Baker had implied, when asked, that she had come down in the world when she left her employment, but this wasn’t in fact the case. This was the excuse Grand made to himself when he realized that he had actually walked past the house three times whilst looking for it. Knocking on the door, he had expected to have the door opened to him by the woman he sought – but no; a butler stood there, all white gloves and haughty demeanour.

Grand was glad he had come and not Batchelor. The ex-journalist had been known to be more than a little cowed by butlers; they hadn’t featured very much in his life thus far. The enquiry agent smiled his best Washington Quality smile.

‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘Could I speak with Mrs Hawks?’

The butler looked him up and down. ‘No,’ he said, and made to close the door.

Grand whipped out his card and handed it to the man. ‘I am here—’

‘We don’t buy at the door,’ the butler said, in fruity tones. ‘Go round back and Cook will see you then.’ The man’s face was impassive.

‘No,’ Grand said, stepping forward, ‘I want—’

‘I know what you want,’ the butler said, ‘you want to see Kathleen Hawks and I’m telling you, if you go round back, Cook will see you.’ He leaned forward and spoke distinctly but much more quietly. ‘Get what I mean, fella?’

Grand stepped back, the penny dropping with an almost deafening clang. ‘Oh, I see. If I go round back … yes, I believe I will.’

The butler shut the door and the last thing Grand saw was the man shaking his head, eyes cast up for heavenly guidance.

Going round the back was not as easy these days, Grand found almost at once. Houses were going up all over the city and this one had been built squeezed in between two others, leaving a space which would have challenged a piece of paper. Grand was not an enquiry agent for nothing – he walked along, took a left, then another left, and counted the steps back to the other side of where he had begun and there, sure enough, was a woman who was so clearly a cook she might as well have worn a placard, waiting for him in the yard.

He opened the gate in the picket fence and called out, ‘Mrs Hawks?’

She stepped forward, her finger to her lips. ‘Hush, sir,’ she said. ‘The missus is a rare one for gentlemen callers.’

This sounded a tad ambiguous, but Grand decided to let it pass. The cook was not badly preserved but, even so, would not be his first choice had he the time to come calling in that guise. He smiled and touched his hat. ‘I won’t keep you long, Mrs Hawks. No doubt you have meals to prepare, things of that nature.’ Despite eating most meals in his kitchen back in Alsatia, Grand was still essentially ignorant of how food stopped being a selection of raw ingredients and ended up on his plate.

‘Midday meal is on the hob,’ she said, complacently. ‘Dinner tonight is all prepared. Just the broiling to do – this is a simple house.’

It might be simple, but it was big. Much bigger than any establishment the Bakers would have kept. The question must have shown in Grand’s eyes.

‘I was lucky to get this place, sir,’ the woman said. ‘I have always been a good, plain cook but I wouldn’t have dreamed I would ever have this position. But the missus … that’s the missus now, you understand … used to visit the missus … that’s Mrs Baker … and one day I had made some hush puppies … well, Mrs Baker was that low … and …’

‘Yes, I see.’ Grand could see he would have to keep this conversation on somewhat of a short leash. ‘Everyone loves a good hush puppy.’ He was surprised they had ventured as far north as Washington, however, being more at home in the bayous than the banks of the Potomac. ‘I would like to talk to you about the Baker household, if I may, Mrs Hawks.’

‘Oooh,’ she pursed her lips and shook her head, her cap strings flying like whips. ‘I don’t like to talk about the missus …’

‘More the master, really,’ Grand suggested.

The woman’s eyes filled with tears. ‘A saint,’ she said.

Grand was surprised. He had heard Lafayette Baker called many things, but saint was the phrase used only by Dr Rickards – and surely, that didn’t count. He cocked his head in an attitude of attention and waited.

‘I know people do say that Mr Baker had lost his mind, but he was as sane as you and me,’ she said, folding her arms and leaning back to add emphasis to the statement.

‘Really? I understood he thought someone was trying to kill him,’ Grand ventured.

‘They were,’ she said, nodding. ‘I saw them with my own eyes. One time, someone tried to shoot him. Through the front window, it was. I’d opened the casement, though it was but February, to air the room. I was beating the rugs and the dust did make Mr Baker sneeze so.’ The memory flooded her eyes and she wiped them on the corner of her apron. ‘He started to feel the cold, and stood up to close the window when, suddenly, a bullet whizzed past him …’

‘You heard the bullet?’

She nodded fiercely. ‘Indeed I did, sir. It went through the rug I was shaking. Fair made me jump, it did.’ She looked at him with big eyes. ‘I could have been killed. Master too. He hung out of the window and shouted, but the man ran off. Master wasn’t well enough to chase him, sir, so we had to let him go.’

‘Did anyone else see this?’ Grand seemed to have hit on a different side to Baker’s story.

‘No, sir, just me and the master.’

‘What did you do then?’

‘I just carried on with the rugs, sir. Otherwise, the rats would get in them, you see.’

‘Rats?’ Grand knew there were such things in all houses near a river, but living under the rugs was bold, even for city rodents.

‘Yes, sir,’ she said. ‘You have to watch them. Anyways, the master told me that there were men wanted him dead, because of the papers he had.’

‘Papers? What did they say, do you know?’

‘No, sir. Only that they would send the people to prison, the people who wanted the master dead.’

‘I see. Did he say who they were, the people?’ Grand was dropping into Kathleen Hawks’s speech patterns and was finding the whole experience strangely calming.

‘Only one as I saw sometimes, sir. A Mr Cobb, who would come sometimes, of an evening usually, after the master and missus had had their dinner.’

‘Can you describe him?’ Grand wished he had Batchelor’s habit of jotting down notes.

The cook shrugged. ‘Just a man, sir. Middling high. Middling wide.’

‘Hair?’ Grand was leaning forward in his excitement and the cook took a step backwards.

‘Not too close, sir. The missus doesn’t like gentlemen callers, don’t forget.’

Grand put a few paces between them and held up an apologetic hand. ‘What colour was his hair?’ he asked again.

‘Middling.’

He decided to leave descriptions of nose, mouth, eyes … he thought he probably knew the answers anyway. ‘Did you hear him speak? Did he have an accent at all?’

She shook her head, her mouth set in a line. ‘I wouldn’t know about that, sir,’ she said. ‘But I did hear him, once, as he left. I was on the stairs, on my way to bed, and he was at the door. He turned to the master and he said …’ She screwed up her eyes and tilted her chin, ‘“Our patience is running short, Baker. You haven’t much time.”’

Grand was dumbfounded. He had set off to interview this woman having drawn straws with Batchelor. Batchelor had drawn the nurse – surely a better source of information than a simple maid? And yet, Grand seemed to have hit the mother lode. He hardly dare ask, but he did, nevertheless. ‘Is there anything else?’

‘Oh, yes, sir. The master had a fortune in gold in the attic. It was in a strongbox, with gold chains and all sorts wrapped around it. Stolen Cherokee gold, it was.’ She leaned nearer, worries over, followers forgotten. ‘That’s another reason why people wanted him dead, I expect. Sometimes you could hardly move in their garden for scalps, left there to frighten him into handing it over.’ She gave a knowing nod and again folded her arms and leaned back, the attitude of a woman whose work here is done.

Grand took a deep breath and conjured up a smile. ‘Well, thank you, Mrs Hawks,’ he said. ‘You’ve been most helpful. I’ll let you return to your duties. Thank you again.’ And he doffed his hat and turned to go.

The cook held on to his arm. ‘You’re welcome,’ she said, foraging in her bodice with her free hand. Finding what she was looking for, she held it out to him with a friendly smile. ‘Hush puppy?’

James Batchelor didn’t know Washington at all, but he didn’t let that faze him. He set out for Bridget McBane’s new place of employment and found it easily – not that it was that hard, as all he had to do was walk down Pennsylvania Avenue and push open the doors of the Naval Hospital. The porter in his booth just inside the door stopped him with a laconic arm.

‘Help yuh?’ he muttered.

‘I’m here to see Bridget McBane,’ Batchelor said, through the grille. ‘She is a nurse here.’

‘Sailor, are yuh?’ the porter said, spitting tobacco juice into what Batchelor could only hope was a hidden spittoon.

‘Um … no,’ Batchelor said. He fell back on the old story. ‘I’m a journalist. For the London Telegraph.’

‘London, Tennessee?’

‘No, London, England.’ Batchelor had forgotten to add the vital word.

‘Only, you ain’t from round here.’ The porter was nothing if not tenacious.

‘No, I’m from London. England. May I see Mrs McBane, please?’

‘We don’t have no women here. Just sailors, see. It’s the Naval Hospital.’

Batchelor sighed. ‘She’s a nurse here,’ he said. ‘I just need to have a word with her.’

The porter had lost interest. ‘You could go find her, I suppose,’ he suggested.

‘Could I?’ Batchelor’s acid tone was lost on the man, who was busily cutting another wedge of tobacco.

‘You do that,’ he said, and began to chew. He gestured up the stairs and Batchelor began his search. Not knowing what the woman looked like was clearly going to be a disadvantage, but after a few false starts – and some grisly sights he would rather not have seen – he found her, in the sluice, washing out porcelain bedpans by the simple expedient of running a cursory cloth around the inside.

‘Mrs McBane?’ he said as he put his head around the door, recoiling slightly from the smell.

‘Yes. Who’re you?’ The woman was stocky without being fat, with arms like a navvy. Batchelor felt it in his bones that it would be important not to cross her.

He introduced himself with a raise of his boater. He hoped she wouldn’t want to shake his hand, but he needn’t have worried.

‘An enquiry agent?’ she asked, her Irish lilt still winning over the American twang. ‘What would you be enquiring into?’

‘I understand you nursed Lafayette Baker in his last illness,’ Batchelor began.

‘I nursed him, yes, but only as you’d nurse a viper in your bosom. At arm’s length and never turning your back. The man was evil, I tell you. And daft as a brush, so he was.’

‘Well,’ Batchelor felt it incumbent on him to put the record straight, ‘he did run an enormous police force …’

‘Ah, that may be so,’ she said, wielding her cloth viciously. ‘But he was obsessed, the man was. Always talking about people wanting to kill him. There was no such thing, although, for the life of me, I don’t know why not. Sure, I was up for killing him meself often enough.’

‘So … you didn’t enjoy working for the Baker family?’ Batchelor wanted confirmation.

‘She was all right. Not that she was there much. And that other trollop, that Laura Duvall; no better than she should be and always sniffing around. Not that we saw much of her once the codicil was signed. Thought she’d have a bit of that hidden fortune he was always on about … hidden fortune, with me still owed two weeks’ pay!’ She spat with the same enthusiasm as the porter on a particularly recalcitrant stain and rubbed it with her cloth.

‘You never saw or heard anyone threaten him?’

‘No. And before you ask, that poisoning thing was years ago and they could never prove it. Them Pettingills was no better than they should be, neither; they ate bad clams and that’s an end to it.’ She looked at him. ‘You don’t know about the Pettingills? Where d’you say you’re from?’

‘London.’ Batchelor was startled by her sudden change of tack. His journalist’s nose was twitching; there was a story here and no mistake. He took out his notebook and pencil to make a note.

She dashed it from his hand and, bearing in mind what task she was employed in, Batchelor decided to let it lie where it landed. ‘No writing,’ she said. ‘I said there was nothing in it.’

‘No, indeed,’ he said. ‘Nothing at all. So …’ There must be another question he could ask her without setting her off. ‘Thank you, Mrs McBane, you’ve been very helpful.’

She took a step or two closer and Batchelor kept a weather eye on her cloth. ‘Did you say London, England?’

‘Yes.’

‘How long you been in Washington?’

‘A while.’ Somehow, the tables had been turned.

‘Were you in London when they hanged Mickeleen?’

‘Who?’

‘Michael Barrett. The sainted man, sent to his doom by that bastard Calcraft, may he rot in Hell.’

Batchelor looked at the brawny arms, at the cloth, and made up his mind in seconds. ‘No. I did hear of it, but … no. I wasn’t there. In London. No, not in London or even near.’

She narrowed her eyes at him. ‘I heard he went to his death like a saint, with the heavenly light around his head and flights of angels to transport his soul.’

‘So I understand, yes. Indeed, I heard he died a martyr’s death.’

She looked at him, eyes sparkling with tears. ‘Oh, he did, he did indeed.’ She took a step towards him, arms wide for a Fenian hug, bursting into song as she did so.

But with a swing of the sluice door, Batchelor had gone, her singing following him down the corridor as he quickened his pace.