Chapter 17 The Lamb and Flag #3
To keep Veronica from boredom, Flynn taught her to play German Whist. She turned out to be a very aggressive player and found it difficult to understand the concept of trump cards, shouting “Trump!” whenever she put a card of any suit down.
It was almost a relief when there was a rather diffident knock at the door.
Mr. Rakowski. He was worried, he said to Flynn, that Leonora had still not returned home after her arrest the other evening.
“Disappeared,” he said mournfully. (God, not another one, Flynn thought.
Where were all these women disappearing to?) Flynn reassured the little tailor—instead of imposing the fine and releasing Leonora, as she had expected, the Bow Street Court magistrates had probably sentenced her to a few days in Holloway.
It had happened before. Mr. Rakowski, however, was not to be put off, and Flynn, against his better judgement, volunteered to accompany him to Bow Street to see if they could find out where she was.
“You stay here,” he said to Veronica. “And you too,” he said to Mrs. Betty, who had got up and was following him to the door.
—
In Bow Street, at the charge desk, Mr. Rakowski pushed Flynn forward to speak to the desk sergeant.
He would fare better, was the implication, as an Englishman.
The police were not naturally inclined to favour small Jewish tailors.
Was there a Leonora Kane still in custody here?
Flynn asked. The desk sergeant opened his charge book and ran his finger down the list of entries.
“She was arrested a couple of nights ago for soliciting,” Flynn said. “In Romilly Street. Brought along here by two police constables.”
“A whore?” the desk sergeant said, raising a matter-of-fact eyebrow. He ran his finger down the list again. “No,” he said. “No one arrested in Romilly Street for soliciting on the date in question.”
Perhaps, Flynn suggested, she might have fallen through the cracks and been handed on to the magistrates’ court without being registered here?
“Are you questioning my paperwork, sir?” the desk sergeant said. He was unruffled by the accusation, and with the long-suffering sigh of someone who encountered fools daily, if not hourly, he turned to another ledger.
No again. No Kane. She was arrested on a regular basis, Flynn protested to the desk sergeant—he must know her, must have encountered her a hundred times.
“She said you were nice, and that you give her tea and biscuits. Garibaldis.” Did the desk sergeant’s eye give a little twitch at “Garibaldis”?
“Not me, sir,” he said. “This is a police station, not a Lyons Corner House.”
“She can’t just have disappeared into thin air,” Flynn persisted. (Why not? Others did.) Was she lost somewhere in the judicial system? The victim of a bureaucratic hitch that had misaccounted for her? Or something more sinister?
A door opened behind the charge desk and the last person Flynn wanted to encounter entered the small space. Tapper.
“I’m expecting someone,” Tapper said to the desk sergeant. “Let me know when they arrive.”
“Mr. Flynn!” a surprised Tapper said when he saw him. “Back so soon, sir? We can’t keep you away from this place, can we?”
“These gentlemen,” the desk sergeant said to Tapper, “are looking for a whore who goes by the name of Kane.”
“And have they found her?”
“No, sir.”
“You seem to know a lot of missing women, Mr. Flynn,” Tapper said.
Just three, Flynn thought. Three was plenty, of course. Three too many, some might say. Delphine, Maud Ogilvie, Leonora Kane.
Tapper disappeared back into his hole and the desk sergeant said to Flynn, “The police have better things to do with their time than search for some misplaced whore. Run along now, sir. And take your little Hebrew friend with you.”
—
Once outside, Flynn encouraged Mr. Rakowski to have a cigarette.
“Calm your nerves,” he said. There was a whiff of lavender in the air.
From the Flower Market across the way, perhaps.
A hearse pulled up outside the station in front of them.
It felt like an unlucky omen. An undertaker climbed out of the driving seat, but from the passenger side there emerged a man dressed in a dinner jacket.
He looked as though he might have been pulled out of his club for whatever unsavoury task he had been called upon for.
He looked familiar, and it took Flynn a few moments to place him.
He was the man who had been sitting at Lydia’s table in the Rose and Crown the other night—the one who had left so peremptorily when Flynn had arrived. He didn’t seem to see Flynn.
Tapper came out from the police station and said, “Still here?” to Flynn.
“Just going,” Flynn said, grinding his cigarette out beneath his shoe.
The undertaker said to Tapper, “We’ve got a gent to collect,” and the man in the dinner jacket said sharply to Tapper, “Not here. Round the back.”
Flynn’s eye was caught by someone moving swiftly away—a small figure flying along the street, their funereal gaberdine flapping like bat wings. They disappeared round the corner into Floral Street. Maud Ogilvie. So much for toothache.