Page 62

She folded her arms. ‘I already told the police – last week. Friday night. She went out and never came back. There’s no way she was hiding out here.’

Miss Decima nodded. ‘And how long had she been with you?’

‘Since Christmas. Got sacked and had nowhere else to live, so she came in with one of those WSPU ladies. The Society paid for the first two months up front, then came back every month after. Never saw them, apart from that.’ She looked ready to spit on her own floor. ‘Those WSPU ladies weren’t worth a penny, with all their talk of helping her. Whenever Éimhear came back from prison, who d’you think was looking after her? It wasn’t them, I’ll tell you that much.’

‘Prison?’ Miss Decima repeated.

‘Of course! That’s why the WSPU brought her here in the first place. She’d go get herself locked up for the suffragettes, the stupid girl, and then … You see? That there, right there!’

I’d just stooped to pick up something from the floor – a brooch. I recognized it from the demonstration march.

‘Hunger-strike medal,’ said Cath derisively. ‘That’s what those ladies gave her for it. The guards would force-feed her milk and eggs and brandy and sugar and beef tea all mixed up until she could barely stand, then send her back here. You wouldn’t do it to an animal. It ruined her chest, that did. The laundry only made it worse.’

I knew what working in those laundries did to people. The heat, the fumes, breathing those chemicals in all day long … ‘Did it make her cough?’

Cath nodded. ‘Worst I’ve heard. She was only there a few weeks before she had to leave. I said to her, what good is it working there when you get paid less than half than the men doing the same job?’ She shook her head. ‘She never listened. Kept on working until she near-died.’

‘So you looked after her?’ I asked.

Cath just shrugged. I understood. That’s how things are: when you have nothing. When there’s no safety net, you help each other out. Because one day, you never know when you might be the one who’s falling, and all you have to save you is a single outstretched hand.

‘Did she ever have any visitors?’ asked Miss Decima.

Cath snorted. She had much less patience for Miss Decima than for me. ‘You sound just like the police. Yes, those other two came here, once or twice. I let them in. Why wouldn’t I?’

I glanced at Miss Decima. ‘Which two?’ I asked.

Cath shook her head. ‘The nerve they had. That posh young girl was all mouth, and that older one stuck her nose up at the place. They had a lot of talk about getting arrested, but neither was going to get treated like Éimhear in there, were they? They’d be like that Lady Bulwer-Lytton, with them all bowing and scraping.’

Miss Decima nodded. ‘And her brothers in the Irish Republican Brotherhood? Did Éimhear ever mention them?’

Cath’s face went hard. ‘I told the police that I don’t pry into the lives of my lodgers.’

I wasn’t sure I believed that, but her tone suggested that our time had run out. Miss Decima gave a gracious nod. ‘Very well. Leave us for a moment, please.’

There was some nerve to that, telling a landlady to leave one of her own rooms. Cath almost said something in reply, but instead she held her tongue and marched out, muttering something under her breath that we could more or less hear anyway. Miss Decima turned to me with a sigh.

‘So, Stephen … What do you notice?’

I looked around the barren room where Éimhear Ó Ceallaigh had spent the last five months. Old sheets, two pieces of furniture, tattered clothes, a dented hunger-strike medal on the floor, a single bed where she’d recuperated when work and prison had near-broken her. I looked and I looked and I looked, but it was no use. There was absolutely nothing to say.

44

Wednesday, 21 June, 2.13 p.m.

We left the shadows of the boarding house and stepped out into blazing sunshine. The driver was still waiting for us across the courtyard, trying to shoo away children from his carriage.

‘Come, Stephen,’ said Miss Decima wearily. ‘Let’s head back to Kensington Gore and pick up where we left off. The sooner, the better.’

I understood her tone. She’d hoped coming here would give her a clue to the identity of the killer, or at the very least lead us to the missing suffragettes; instead, it was just another dead end. We knew the names of all three women implicated in this murder: how they knew each other, where they lived, what had led them to attend that demonstration on Saturday … And yet, when it came to the murder, we were none the wiser. All we had were a dozen different threads that led nowhere and were tangled up with one another.

I helped Miss Decima into the carriage and strapped her chair to the roof. I was thinking about the bedroom we’d just looked at. Éimhear Ó Ceallaigh had stayed in that room for five months, and yet it had told us nothing at all about her. No wonder the police had left it so quickly. It didn’t even look like it had been lived in.

I stood for a moment, with one hand on the door and one hand on the roof rack. I was thinking about my own bedroom, back home. The photograph I kept on the windowsill of Nan, beside the cloth and polish. The spot on the side table I saved for my Bible, so it was always close to hand. The hook I’d put on the wall to hang my apron. That’s what happens when you stay in a room – you change it. You make it fit around you.

I jumped off the carriage and marched straight back to the lodging house, hammering on the door.

‘Stephen!’ Miss Decima barked behind me. ‘Get back here!’