Whatever Happenened to Molly Bloom? (8 page)

‘Stuffed her with a teapot.’ Arthur Flanagan snickered. ‘Puts a whole new slant on having one up the spout, eh?’

‘I just don’t find it funny,’ Jack Delaney declared.

‘No more do I,’ said Jim Kinsella who, for the past couple of minutes, had been eavesdropping from a niche by the doorway. ‘I’ve never found the sight of a mutilated corpse in the least amusing.’

The somnolent air stirred as the reporters pushed back their chairs and eagerly welcomed the inspector to the fold.

‘What’ll it be?’ Hearty Mr Randall was first to offer.

‘No, no, allow me to do the honours,’ Mr Palfry insisted.

‘All right,’ Jim Kinsella said, ‘I’ll have a mineral water.’

‘One mineral water, Meg,’ said Mr Palfry and, cornered by his own generosity, was forced to add, ‘and a top up for those in need.’

Jack Delaney rolled round the rim of the bar. ‘Are you not an afternoon drinker, Inspector Kinsella, or are you still on duty?’

‘On duty,’ Kinsella said, ‘I’m looking for Boylan.’

‘
Still
looking for Boylan,’ Delaney said. ‘Has he not returned to his office yet?’

‘No,’ Kinsella said. ‘Have any of you gentlemen seen him?’

‘Meg,’ said Palfry, ‘has Hugh Boylan been in at all today?’

The barmaid poured mineral water into a slender glass and placed the glass on the counter. ‘Haven’t seen him and I’ve been on since ten.’

‘Perhaps he’s jogged off to Foxrock to feed his horse,’ Flanagan said. ‘Did you know he’d bought a half share in a filly?’

‘Which half?’ said Mr Randall.

‘For sure it’ll be back half, given Blazes’ partiality for rumps,’ said Flanagan. ‘That’s where he’ll likely be, Inspector, at the stables in Foxrock.’

‘Now we’ve solved your problem, Mr Kinsella,’ Robbie Randall said, ‘do you not have a tit bit or two for us?’

The Inspector studied the bubbles in his glass then, putting the glass to his lips, drank the contents in three swallows, barely pausing for breath. He put down the empty glass and said, ‘My thanks for the refreshment, gentlemen. If Boylan does show up tell him I want a word with him. I’ll be at the Castle offices until six or thereabouts.’

‘Nothing,’ Flanagan cried plaintively. ‘Not a hint even?’

‘It’s a cruel world, Arthur,’ Kinsella said, ‘a very cruel world, indeed,’ and headed for the door.

He’d gone no more than a few steps along the street before Delaney caught up with him. He wasn’t in the least surprised to find the
Star
reporter hot on his heels. Blue eyes, fair curly hair, a broad grin: Delaney’s trick was to disguise a conniving intelligence behind boyish candour. ‘I know you’re pressed for time, Inspector, so I won’t beat about the bush,’ he said. ‘I’ve a fair idea where Boylan might be found and it certainly isn’t Foxrock.’

‘I didn’t think it would be somehow,’ Kinsella said.

‘I’m not after money.’

‘No, you’re after – how do you lot put it? – the inside track.’

Delaney took his arm and steered him around the corner out of sight of the hotel’s side door. ‘If you’ll answer me a couple questions, Inspector, I’ll give you more than you think you need right now.’

‘What questions?’

‘Was the woman really murdered with a teapot?’

‘Go on,’ Kinsella said.

‘Is Bloom the only suspect?’

‘What do I get in exchange?’

‘I can tell you where Hugh Boylan was last night and where he might be right now.’

Kinsella hesitated. ‘Yes, it was a teapot,’ he said at length, ‘and Bloom is currently our only suspect. He’ll appear before the stipendiary tomorrow morning. Now it’s your turn.’

‘Boylan was down in the Monto until close to midnight.’

‘How do you know this?’

‘Because I saw him there.’

‘Where precisely?’

‘In the street outside Nancy O’Rourke’s,’ Delaney said. ‘What’s more he wasn’t alone.’

‘Really? Who was with him?’

‘Leopold Bloom.’

‘Really?’ Kinsella said, sharply this time. ‘What were Bloom and Boylan doing together?’

‘Arguing, by the look of it.’

‘Were blows exchanged?’

‘Not that I saw. I had no reason to linger,’ Delaney said. ‘I bumped into him again by chance this morning.’

‘Boylan?’

‘Yes, Boylan. He was on the way to his office.’

‘What were you doing across the river in D’Olier Street?’

Delaney grinned. ‘Looking for Boylan. There, I’ll admit it.’

‘Time?’

‘Coming up for eleven,’ Delaney said. ‘I wanted to ask him if he knew Mrs Bloom had been found dead. He said he didn’t.’

‘How did he react to the news?’

‘He gave every appearance of being shocked, more so when I told him Bloom had been charged with her murder. He turned white as a sheet and put a hand against the wall to stop himself falling down. Then he said, “I’d better go and fetch Milly,” and, looking flustered, hurried off. Milly’s Bloom’s daughter, isn’t she?’

Kinsella nodded.

‘Flanagan says she has a job in Mullingar. Is that true?’

Kinsella nodded again.

‘Then that’s where you’ll find Boylan,’ Delaney said. ‘I’ll lay odds he’s on his way to Mullingar to fetch the girl.’ He cocked his head and squinted up at the G-man. ‘Now why do you think he would do such a thing?’

‘Search me,’ Kinsella said.

Even late on a weekday afternoon the trains that ran through the junction at Mullingar were crowded. They were loading cattle into wagons in one siding and a squad of militia, weary and travel-stained, were crammed into the carriages of the eighteen minutes past four train to Dublin.

Blazes had had the foresight to spring for first-class tickets for himself and Milly and they shared a compartment with a prosperous-looking old farmer and a young, whey-faced woman who, by her sober garb, might well be on her way to or from a convent and who, after a swift disapproving glance at Blazes, went back to reading her Testament.

Blazes put Milly’s suitcase on the rack and settled the girl into a corner seat. She seemed dazed, numbed perhaps by the stuff the quack had ladled into her while peeking down the front of her blouse, for which breach of Hippocratic etiquette Blazes could hardly blame him. If there was one thing you could say about Milly Bloom – and there were many things you could say about Milly Bloom – she was very much her mother’s daughter in face and figure if not, thank God, in temperament.

He hadn’t known Molly back in her Gibraltar days but he didn’t doubt that she’d driven the garrison’s subalterns mad. In one fit of post-coital nostalgia she’d told him how she’d once shaken the peg of a bashful young naval lieutenant and pulled him off into her handkerchief. It didn’t take much imagination to envisage Molly at Milly’s age in the heat of a Mediterranean summer tugging away on the tools of blushing adolescents in white ducks or, for that matter, pressing her bubs against any man she wanted to take a rise out of. Why she’d ever fallen for a man like Bloom was beyond him, and beyond her too if her reticence was anything to go by.

When he’d asked her what she’d ever seen in Bloom she’d thrown a tantrum, had kicked him out of bed and told him he was only half the man her husband was. But when he’d turned up at her door four days later with a shilling’s worth of roses and a tray of chocolates, she’d given him a slap and told him he’d better come in before someone took a photograph for the
Chronicle
and, five minutes later, had been riding him as furiously as Hardy bringing Sceptre home down the straight at Doncaster.

Molly was dark, of course, all over dark, while Milly was fair, all gilded curls and eyes as mauve as his silk handkerchief; an inheritance from ancestors back down the line, probably. She already had a chest on her, without the sag that had marred poor Molly’s udders latterly.

He looked over Milly’s head at fields stabbed by spears of crimson light. They were travelling east, the sun dipping behind them, which was why he couldn’t see the shadow of the train or the smoke from the locomotive billowing over bridges and hedges. Sad light: sad time. He glanced at Milly who was looking from the window too. He couldn’t imagine, not for the life of him, what was on her mind right now. She was no longer a silly Milly, filled with pep and childish gaiety. She might never be his silly Milly again, he thought despondently.

The old farmer had fallen asleep, chin on chest, and the would-be nun, if that’s what she was, was deliberately ignoring him. He drew Milly closer, tidied the folds of her coat to keep her warm and put an arm about her shoulder.

‘He will get out, Blazes, won’t he?’ she murmured.

It was the first time she’d ever called him Blazes to his face, a sign not only that she was growing up but that she wasn’t afraid of him, which, for his purposes, was all to the good.

‘Of course he will, sweetheart.’

‘You’ll get him out, won’t you?’

‘I will, Milly. If I have to move heaven and earth to do it, I will.’

Mercifully, she seemed to believe him and, resting her head on his shoulder, sighed and, soon after, fell asleep.

SEVEN

S
uperintendent Smout approved his report, the duty inspector signed him off and, buttoning his overcoat and tugging on his hat, Kinsella stepped out into Lower Castle Yard.

The sandstone and granite parapets of the Castle’s towers were tipped pink by the setting sun but the streets below were already in shadow. He was tempted to leg it along Dame Street to have one last go at tracking down Hugh Boylan but if Delaney’s information was correct and Boylan had gone to Mullingar to fetch Milly Bloom the chances were that he wouldn’t be back yet. He might slip out for an hour after supper, for Boylan lived in Sefton Street not much more than a mile from Kinsella’s home in Escott Place.

On being posted to G Division, Kinsella had been obliged to reside within the ward and his wife’s uncle had put them up in one of his shabby properties near Christ Church Cathedral, rather too close for comfort to the dark and dirty heart of old Dublin. Blood being marginally thicker than water, though, the uncle had charged them a reasonable rent that had remained unchanged even when Jim’s circumstances improved.

From outside, the narrow, three-storey building with its cluster of ornate chimneypots and steep-sloping roof looked quaintly down-at-heel, like an illustration from a child’s fairy book. At one time, it had been the residence of some ecclesiastical dignitary but its glory days were long past. Apart from replacing rotting window frames and painting the rusty railings in front of the postage stamp sized garden, Jim had done nothing to improve the house’s outward appearance for, crowded into the decaying tenements that flanked the narrow alleys nearby, lived the poorest of the poor, not all of them entirely honest, and the Inspector was too downy a bird to advertise his gentility to potential thieves.

Edith had done a marvellous job of furnishing the rooms and, with never more than one servant to help her, ran as tight a ship as a man could wish for. Being married to a policeman was not an easy lot but his wife rarely chided him for his erratic hours or the solemn moods that came upon him when an investigation was going badly. And if that wasn’t enough virtue for one woman, she even put up with his father, Robert, who had lodged with them since his retirement nine years ago.

Jim’s spirits rose when he opened the squeaky iron gate, saw the light in the hallway through the thick triangular glass at the top of the door, heard one of the girls practising her scales on the piano and glimpsed in the window of the dining room Edith helping the maid, Noreen, lay the table for supper.

He used his key to let himself in and, as always, was greeted with savoury smells from the kitchen mingled with floor polish and a faint flowery air he could only put down to his daughters’ fondness for scented soap and toilet water. He removed his overcoat and hat and was on the point of going into the living room when Daisy, the youngest, came clattering downstairs, calling out, ‘Grandpa, he’s home. Daddy’s home,’ and his father thumped his stick on the first-floor landing and shouted, ‘About time, too.’

Edith emerged from the dining room, followed by Noreen.

Oldest daughter, Violet, popped her head round the door of the living room and blew him a kiss while middle daughter, Marigold, abandoned her scales and broke into a grand march that he thought might be from ‘Entry of the Gladiators’, though he couldn’t be sure. Edith kissed his cheek. ‘You’re just in time, dear. Soup will be on the table in five minutes.’

‘Good, that’s good,’ he said, then, ‘I may have to pop out after supper, I’m afraid, but I shouldn’t be much more than an hour.’

‘That’s what they all say,’ his father bawled from half way down the stairs. ‘Next thing you know it’s dawn and the bed’s still empty. Is it this murdered woman in Eccles Street? Blossom, is it?’

‘Bloom,’ Jim Kinsella said. ‘I assume you read it in the evening papers. I’m not quoted, am I?’

‘Who’d want to quote
you
?’ his father said. ‘Where’s the key?’

‘In my pocket, where it always is,’ Kinsella said and watched Edith, throwing up one small exasperated hand, follow the maid along the passage to the kitchen.

His father, impatient as always, gave him a prod with his walking stick to hurry him on and trailed him into the living room.

‘Edith tells me Mrs Bloom was a singer,’ his father said.

‘Yes, she was. Quite well known.’

‘Well, I’ve never heard of her.’

‘Oh, Grandpa,’ said Marigold, glancing up from her music, ‘you’ve never heard of
anyone
.’

‘I have. I’ve heard Lettie Le Mond sing on the stage at Lowry’s, which is more than you’ve ever done.’

‘What did she sing?’ said Violet.

‘Something about the moon.’

‘Are you sure it wasn’t something about Ireland?’

‘Perhaps it was. Ay, perhaps it was.’

Distracted by the sight of his son fitting a key into the lock of the cabinet in which his, Robert Kinsella’s, badges, ribbons and medals were displayed, he conceded the point without argument. Licking his lower lip, he watched Jim remove a quarter bottle of Jameson’s whiskey from among the decorative plates together with two glasses, each of which had a shamrock engraved on the bottom.