Chapter 6 #2
“What is it? What’s happened?” I asked as he gave the driver instructions and we set off. That gaze found me through the shadows inside the coach.
“The matron of the building was found dead this mornin’ by the police on the watch.”
“How...” I started to ask. But I already knew, as I thought of what Kip had said, that a single crow meant death.
Old Meggy had died the same way as Dory. Her throat was cut, her lifeless body left in the gutter on the street very near the Close. As disagreeable as the woman had been, I wouldn’t have wished it for anyone.
Inspector Landry had contacted Simon at Sir McQuarrie’s office earlier. Munro received the information when he returned.
We returned to Sir McQuarrie’s office. Simon still remained, working late on a legal brief Sir McQuarrie was to present at court the following morning.
“I was just leaving...” he explained, with a look from Munro to me as we entered the office.
“If ye should need anything...?” he started to inquire.
“Go on with ye. We will only be a short while,” Munro replied, as I left the front office and walked back to the library Sir McQuarrie had so generously provided.
“I will make certain the office is secured when we leave.”
I sat in one of the chairs at the table, my thoughts turning over and over.
First Dory was murdered, now old Meggy.
I was aware when Munro entered the library, quiet, making not even a sound as he went to the sideboard and poured a drink into a tumbler from the bottle he found there.
“Dory’s room and the old woman’s flat were both turned out. Someone was looking for something.”
I noticed that he poured a second glass, then handed it to me. My hand shook as I accepted it.
“Her ladyship’s whisky.”
As I hesitated, he nodded. “Ye might be troublesome, more than I would like to admit, but ye are no longer a child. It will steady ye.” He downed the contents of his own glass.
I took a healthy drink and immediately started coughing as the whisky burned down my throat.
“Aye, as I said, troublesome,” he said. “Ye shoulda known better than to empty the glass all at once. Drink this.”
He poured water from a pitcher that also sat at the table and handed it to me.
“I will try to remember that.”
The water did help, as well as the whisky, as it warmed into my belly.
“A woman at the tavern remembered someone who fit the description of a small man at the tavern the night Dory...died. She had worked that night, then went to her room afterward.”
Munro poured himself another dram of Old Lodge. I slowly sipped what was left in my glass.
“And now, the old woman killed the same way. What was he looking for?”
“Something he thought yer friend had, and then the old woman as well. Lookin’ for something of value.”
I shivered, from the cold in the library with no fire at the hearth, and from two senseless deaths.
“There was nothing there, and the few coins Dory had were scattered on the floor.”
“Wot did ye find when ye first went back there?”
“Just the letters I sent her...” I slowly looked up. “And the pendant.”
A child’s pendant, the only possession I had when I arrived at the Foundling Hospital years before. A small trinket with those letters inscribed.
“It’s not worth anything, certainly not the murder of two people.”
“It seems that it is worth somethin’ to someone.”
I sensed there was more.
“I still say this is no place for ye,” he said. “Ye should return to London and let Inspector Landry and his people do their work.”
His manner had changed from our previous conversations, or should I say his orders that I must return to London, along with the temper that went with them.
“Ye should go...” he repeated. “But I know by the look on yer face and the set of yer chin, that ye will not. I will make an agreement with ye.”
I was immediately suspicious. I knew Munro well enough from the past several years at Sussex Square. As Mr. Brodie once said, the only one Munro ever bargained with was the Devil.
It was obviously something from their shared past. There was no explanation at the time.
I was not surprised, as there had been vague comments about things that were done in order to survive when they’d been orphaned on the streets.
“If there is nothin’ new learned by week’s end, then ye will agree to return and leave the matter to Inspector Landry.”
I had not forgotten his earlier threat to simply pack me off back to London like so much baggage, bound and trussed up, then tossed into a trunk. I did not put it past him and grudgingly agreed.
“Were ye able to learn anything about the man who killed her from those ye know?” I inquired.
“He’s not known among those I questioned. But they will put out the word on him. He’ll not go unnoticed.”
It was disappointing, still I was forced to admit we had learned a great deal the past three days.
“The letters ye have might tell us somethin’—the ones ye wrote to her as well as the ones she sent back. There may be somethin’ in them that will tell us what she might have come across, those she spoke with, or intended to meet with.