Chapter 12 #2
He asked our driver to wait in the carriage park across from the hospital. Rupert remained there as well.
I waited in the room that had been set aside for visitors and families as Mr. Dooley made inquiries regarding the physician who had attended Blackwood when he was brought to hospital.
He eventually returned.
“The man we’re to see is Dr. Metcalf. He was the physician on duty the morning Blackwood was brought in. The nurse will take us to his office.”
It was located in the ward adjacent to the main hall, a substantial walk, then a climb to the second floor of the ward.
We waited in a small office until Dr. Metcalf joined us, a scholarly man with greying hair and that calm manner one would hope for in a physician. He greeted us, then took the chair behind a desk.
Mr. Dooley explained the reason we were there. Dr. Metcalf shook his head.
“A highly regrettable situation for a prisoner to escape. Has he been returned?”
“Not as yet,” Mr. Dooley replied, after introducing me as a ‘consultant’ with the Metropolitan Police. “That is the reason we are here, in the hope that you might be able to provide information that could be useful.”
“I will try, although there is very little I can tell you about the man. He was here briefly, examined and treated, then gone.”
“Can you tell us the reason he was brought here?” I inquired.
“He had apparently been suffering for some time with symptoms that were quite severe and had grown worse, together with a constant fever. There was a concern it was something that could be contagious and might spread.”
“What was it?”
“A cancer and quite advanced. Not contagious as first feared, but eventually fatal.”
“Was he treated?” I inquired.
He nodded. “In such cases, the treatment is more for the comfort of the patient, if possible. We treated him for the pain. As for the fever, there is little that could be done. Pneumonia will eventually occur.”
“And treatment for the pain?”
“The options are limited; however, he was given a strong measure of medicinal morphine. It can provide relief when carefully administered, as it can become habit-forming. Though, I suppose that is of little concern to the person who is dying from the disease.”
It did explain the morphine stain Brodie had found on the chief inspector’s clothes, apparently from the attack when he was murdered.
“How long might he live?” Mr. Dooley asked.
“That is unknown and depends very much on the patient. However, the cancer will progress, and the prisoner’s condition was already substantially deteriorated. The treatment for pain is only a temporary solution. He would, however, undoubtedly seek out more of the drug, if possible, to control it.”
He was thoughtful. “A very sad outcome in spite of the man’s situation. The length of time he may have is unknown.”
Unknown. Yet Blackwood had managed to carry out his revenge on those he believed had wronged him.
Mr. Dooley thanked the doctor for the information, and we returned to the carriage park where our driver waited, along with Rupert.
It was late in the day as Mr. Dooley escorted me back to the office.
“Not to worry,” he assured me. “With the man’s condition, alone on the street, with no money or persons he can rely upon, it is possible Blackwood is already dead.”
I was well aware what he was attempting to do.
“You are not very good at it, you know.”
“What is that?”
“Telling lies.”
He winced as if he had been struck. “My dear wife has said the same. Still, I know Mr. Brodie. He is like a cat with nine lives, as the saying goes, also according to my Maeve.”
Nine lives. I did wonder how many of those he had already used. And now, he faced a man who was dying and nothing more to lose, out for revenge?
Mr. Cavendish was there as Mr. Dooley’s coach departed. He looked up at me from his platform as I didn’t immediately go to the stairs.
I took out my notebook and pen.
“I need to send word to Mr. Brodie. It’s important,” I explained as I opened my notebook, and there in the shelter of the alcove, penned a brief note about what Mr. Dooley and I had learned.
A man desperate for morphine to dull the pain, and without resources, might not be difficult to find with assistance from someone like Mr. Brown, who was known to have certain ‘enterprises’ in such things.
The note was brief. I signed it with, ‘Please be careful. M.B.’ and handed it to Mr. Cavendish.
He nodded. “I’ll get it to the man who will get it to Mr. Brown. Not to worry, Miss Mikaela.”
He tucked the note into his jacket.
I watched as he set off in the rain, a wake of icy water following him as he expertly traversed the Strand in spite of the flooded thoroughfare.
He was the second person in as many hours to remind me of that. Not that I was worried for Brodie.
He knew the streets and a good many people in them. I was confident that he would find Sir Blackwood, or perhaps his body.
It was undoubtedly a sin to hope for that, for those who believed in such things. I never had. As I climbed the stairs to the office, I preferred to believe in the lives of a cat.
I apologized to Rupert for that as I opened the door and stepped into the office.
It was cold inside, the fire in the stove having burned low after I left. But I had experienced that before.
The light from the electric cast shadows at the edge of the room. I had also experienced that several times before.
It was no different now, and yet it was because he wasn’t there.
Bloody hell, I silently swore.
When had everything changed? Quite some time ago, that inner voice whispered, on the island off the coast of Greece when a dark-eyed man had refused to give in to my curses, threats, and excuses. A man who was there whether I wanted it or not…until I did. And a bloody Scot for all that.
There was nothing more to be accomplished here tonight. I could add what I’d learned today to my notes, yet I could do that at the townhouse. And my latest publishing endeavor was there, half finished, in the typewriter on my desk.
Mrs. Ryan would be there…
I wrote a note for Brodie, telling him that I was returning to Mayfair for the night, then looked down at a sound the hound made as he lay patiently at my feet, large eyes fixed on me, waiting.
“You are quite fond of Mrs. Ryan’s suppers,” I commented.
He immediately rose to his feet, head cocked, tail wagging.
“I thought as much,” I replied to his obvious enthusiasm. I could almost see Brodie roll his eyes as I talked to Rupert.
“You will need to be particularly nice to Mrs. Ryan and mind your manners.”
He was already waiting at the door as I laid the note on Brodie’s desk where he would easily find it.
“Come along then,” I told Rupert as I turned off the electric, closed the door, then set the lock.
At the street, I waved down a driver, no small task as more people sought the shelter of a cab or coach when the weather set in.
A familiar driver pulled his rig to the curb, water washing up onto the sidewalk from the wheels of the coach
“It’s not a day to be out and about.” Mr. Jarvis squinted out from under his billed cap through the downpour.
“I did attempt to arrange otherwise with the weather, however…” I replied, as I climbed aboard his coach. And Rupert was there as well. He grinned at me, as he settled himself on the floor of the coach.
Mr. Jarvis nodded. He was quite familiar with the hound’s traveling about with me.
“Where will it be this fine end of day?”
“Mayfair,” I replied.
“Number ten, Hanover Square it is then, Miss Mikaela,” he replied and spoke to his team.
So much for any criticism about my conversations with Rupert, I thought, as the coach lurched away from the curb.
He watched from the darkened entrance of the tobacco shop beside the stairs to that office on the second-floor landing as the coach departed.
A surprise, he thought, having discovered the office of former inspector Angus Brodie. And an additional surprise in the scene he just witnessed—a woman.
Not the usual sort he would have expected of a former police inspector, now private inquiry agent, or the man who had tracked him through clubs and brothels and found him. But a lady by the way she spoke and her manner that he knew from his life…before.
It was gone now: his wife and son, his own father now dead these many years, friends or those he thought were friends.
They were all gone, including three of those who had taken it all from him. Now there was just one more, he thought, as the pain that he’d kept at bay reminded him of what the physician had told him at the hospital.
Time. It was slipping away as the pain tightened inside him. But there was still enough left to finish what he swore he would do.
He would take from Angus Brodie what the man had taken from him.
Mikaela, not a name heard often, but obviously someone important to Brodie. He had discovered that in that office on the second floor.
Slow, patient work on the lock, just the way a man in the next bunk over had showed him, a skill that would serve him well after he had served his sentence.
Thievery it was called, but time was against him with the cancer that grew inside him.
The disease that ate away at him was also the means for his freedom, brief though it might be. He would finish what he had vowed twelve years before as his sentence was handed down. She would help him do it. And then he would disappear for whatever time was left.
He gathered the coat tightly about him. He’d taken it from a table outside a seconds shop when he first left the hospital.
The knife in the waist of the pants, also taken from the seconds shop, would see it done.
The money in his pocket, taken from Chief Inspector Dawes, wasn’t much—no doubt part of the man’s retirement pension—but it was enough to finish this.
And then he would disappear for whatever time was left. Perhaps someplace warm, as the pain twisted like a knife.
He retrieved the vial of that sweet syrup from inside the coat, his only relief from the pain, temporary as it was.
He had wandered after escaping the hospital, hiding until he was able to find the clothes to replace his prison clothes.
That first night was spent in a vacant room in a crumbling tenement as far from the hospital as he could get. It was cold and miserable, but better than the prison block, where he had a pallet and blanket but nothing more.
In spite of his education and the position he’d once had in London society, he was not allowed in the “master’s side” of Newgate, where the wealthy were housed. The ward where he had lived the past twelve years was crowded, damp, infested with lice and vermin, and disease-ridden.
No longer, he thought bitterly. No longer would he be forced to eat the never-ending daily ration of stale bread, gruel, and rotten potatoes. When the cancer set in, it was fish and milk, until that came back up and it was decided that he needed to go to the hospital.
It was his salvation, even as the physician grimly explained what was slowly killing him.
But there was still enough time to finish what he had begun, the one thing that had given him purpose in prison and the will to survive. And the means to carry it out was at Number Ten Hanover Square.