Chapter 3
Three
brODIE
He made a telephone call to Inspector Dooley and met him at a coffeehouse away from the Yard.
They had shared what both had learned following Burke’s murder outside the Old Bell.
“Our people questioned those we brought in. As to be expected, a good many of them didn’t see the attack, only after it, when Burke was down. But there was something one person saw, a bystander in the crowd. A man who seemed particularly interested when Lady Forsythe arrived.”
Brodie’s attention sharpened.
“He said the man approached where she bent down beside Burke, in a manner that seemed curious at the time.”
“How so?”
“Said it was almost as if the man knew her from the look on his face. The witness said it ‘could have turned water to ice,’ as he put it,” Dooley replied.
“Knew her?” Brodie suggested.
Dooley nodded. “It’s something to keep in mind.”
“The man who saw him, what is his name?”
“Fitch. He works on road construction nearby where repairs are being made. He had stopped by the Old Bell end of day, as he usually does before going on home to the wife. Lives in a walk-up in Burley.” He gave Brodie a meaningful look.
“Not that I shared this with you. Keep it to yerself.”
He appreciated it. “What more was he able to tell ye about the man he saw?”
“Said he was built like someone who just stepped off of the boxing stage. No lightweight, experienced, and not the sort you would want to come up on in a dark alleyway.”
“Or a tavern?”
Mr. Dooley nodded. “Burke’s misfortune to cross the man’s path. Most likely a typical robbery after a game of dice. A pity, although the man had a poor reputation about London, with the scandals and bribes he wrote about.”
It was easy enough to assume that it might have been robbery. It happened often enough. But Burke was the sort who was wise to the ways of the street. His pursuit of that next story about a scandal could take him into the worst corners of London.
Burke boasted that he carried just enough coin to acquire information from his ‘sources.’ It was rumored that some of those sources came from inside the MET, a constable eager to make extra money in exchange for information. Dooley was aware of the rumors.
“Could it have been someone within?” Brodie saw the way Dooley’s expression shifted. “If certain information became known in one of the man’s articles?”
If caught, the constable or inspector was immediately released and could be brought up on charges. But it was a situation where passing information or the outside ‘job’ was lucrative enough to cover the possibility.
“Before you ask, there’s no one at the Yard fits that description,” Dooley had replied. “That doesn’t account for others though, particularly any who might have been passed over for promotion or demoted in the outlying areas,” Dooley added.
“I’ve got two of my people discreetly making inquiries.”
Brodie nodded. If the man who had attacked Burke was from the ‘inside,’ he would eventually be found out, exposed, and the matter settled.
If the man were from the streets, it would be that much harder to find him. Unless he was the sort who needed to make certain the job that he’d been hired to do was, in fact, finished.
“The man disappeared quickly enough according to wot ye told me,” Brodie commented.
Dooley nodded. “Like his tail was afire, according to the man, Fitch.”
“And there’s been no word put out by the MET or the newspapers yet about Burke’s murder,” he pointed out.
“If the man was scared off, there might be some doubt that Burke is dead. Where was the body taken?”
“I had it brought to the Yard under a John Doe. I thought it best until we have a lead on the murderer. I doubt that Burke is in any condition to protest. What about yourself?”
“I have inquiries I want to make on the street, then I’m for the Old Bell and perhaps a conversation with Mr. Fitch when he arrives.”
“I’ll send along a couple of the lads in their street clothes.”
Brodie shook his head. “I thank ye just the same.”
Dooley frowned. “I suppose there’s no need to say it.” Then he did.
“Be careful out there. You have a few that would like to even the score from the old days. I’d not want to have to explain to Lady Forsythe that she’s just been made a widow. She has a bit of a temper.”
“Aye, that she does.”
“Do ye still carry the revolver and that knife in yer boot?” Dooley asked.
After his meeting with Dooley, he slipped back out onto the street filled with the usual sounds and smells from the river with its refuse, garbage, and its secrets as he left the Yard. Along with the cold that had a way of burrowing under a man’s coat, leaving that hollow feeling deep inside.
It was always there, waiting to pull him back...to places that he’d left behind not once, but twice.
Edinburgh, with a different cold that could freeze the flesh on a young lad who had gone hungry until he stole his next crust of bread or picked that next pocket.
Then afterward, London with a different kind of cold. The kind that reminded ye that ye were just another lost soul among others, with no importance except to yerself.
There had been another, like himself. They had watched each other’s back, scraped, clawed, and bled for survival. Someone he trusted—Munro.
He was in Edinburgh, yet if he were there now, he would go to people he knew from the whisky trade he handled for Mikaela’s great aunt for a name of someone who might know someone.
Brodie had his own sources. Faces with names they’d invented. He kept them at a distance with the work he did now—private inquiries—and for other reasons that had everything to do with her. Those who frequented the taverns and pubs, but had once walked the streets as he had.
He caught a ride on a tram with a route toward Holborn. Once there, he found a carter who provided a ride in the back of his cart for two pence. The address was familiar, along with the woman who swept the steps.
“Aye, he’s about,” she replied with a nod. “Most likely sleepin’ it off. It was late when he returned last night. Ye’ll need to pound extra hard on the door.”
And then, taking her advice...
“Wot the devil! Are ye trying to raise the dead?”
When the door eventually opened, his friend from those days with the MET glowered at him from the doorway.
Brodie stepped past him into the small flat that was what former Constable Jimmy Conner could afford on his police pension.
Along with money he made on the side that provided ale in any one of a half dozen pubs across London, a place he knew well from thirty years in service, retired now for a handful more.
The cap of white hair and glaring blue gaze shot through with red matched the belligerent greeting. Jimmy Conner didn’t wait for him to explain.
“The answer is no! I’m retired. I want nothing to do with the MET or...!” Conner jabbed a finger at his shoulder to make the point.
Brodie ignored the jab and the curses. “What about Theodolphus Burke?”
The rant stopped midway through a new round of curses.
“Burke?”
The history between the two men—Burke and his friend—was filled with accusations of police brutality and wrongdoing, then demotion with an article that named names on a crime sheet.
It was one of Burke’s early campaigns to elevate his own importance by accusing the constable who made the arrest.
It cost his friend a promotion that he was up for at the time, and verra nearly his job.
As Brodie knew only too well, it was not a matter that was easily forgotten. He heard it again in the way Conner said the man’s name.
“Bratach salach!” his friend spat out in Gaelic. “What is he up to now? Causing another good man to lose his reputation over lies just so he can promote himself?”
“He’s dead.”
That stopped Jimmy Conner midstream of more curses. His eyes narrowed with suspicion.
“Dead? The world could not be that fortunate!”
Brodie nodded.
“Dead?” Conner made a sound of approval. “It seems there is some justice in the world.”
He motioned for Brodie to join him at a small table, where he offered him a drink.
“Coffee,” Brodie replied. He wanted his friend sober.
“I won’t say that it’s a shame about Burke,” Conner commented after several cups of coffee.
“To my way of thinkin’, he had it comin’. But now there’s a woman involved, ye say? It would seem there is more to this.”
Brodie nodded. “Burke frequented the Old Bell. I’ll be there this evening to learn what I can from a man who apparently saw the murderer.
“Inspector Dooley has Burke with a John Doe at the Yard, to keep everything quiet until we can learn wot this has to do with the woman that he seemed to think was important enough to give Mikaela that note.”
He had told Conner the rest of it—what they had found at that residence at St. John’s Wood where the woman apparently ‘entertained’ a handful of men regularly, the condition of the manor when they arrived, and the woman’s disappearance.
“And herself?” Conner inquired, no doubt meaning Mikaela, his expression softening. “In the middle of it as usual?”
Brodie nodded. “She was to go to Burke’s office this morning to see if there was anything to be learned there.”
“I can see you will be needing assistance, with Munro off to Edinburgh.”
“Aye, from someone I can trust. With that note of Burke’s, there’s a connection to the woman. I need to find her. And I want the name of the man who killed Burke. By the description Inspector Dooley had, the man was the sort who works for someone else.”
Conner nodded. “There might be something to be learned in one of the other fine establishments nearby.
Brodie nodded. “Mr. Dooley has put the word out about the attack, but made certain it’s known that Burke survived.”
Jimmy Conner nodded. “The man will want to know more and be askin’ about.”
The plan was set. “Watch yer back, lad.”
Lad.
Brodie shook his head as he left Holborn and turned toward the Strand.