Carrie’s sob stopped Marc’s comment, and she ran crying uncontrollably into the other wing of the house.
“I’m sorry,” Marc said.
“You better go after her, Frieda, luv,” Mrs. Burgess said, pointedly ignoring Marc and his seemingly gratuitous brutality. Frieda, about to emulate Carrie, stumbled out of the room. Her mistress then turned a baleful eye on the investigators, and said, seething, “The man was drunk. Drunks do unexplainable things. It is not up to me to account for his motives. I found him with Sarah’s dagger in his right hand and my darling’s throat cut and her lifeblood drained away.”
“I suppose somebody could’ve taken the knife outta Sarah’s neck and put it in the gentleman’s hand,” Cobb said in an offhand tone.
“They’d’ve been covered in blood and left their footprints in it.” Mrs. Burgess had braced herself to recall the details: her hands gripped the arms of her chair and there was a restrained tremor in her throat.
“But I managed to edge my way around the other side between the bed and the wall,” Cobb said, “and reached the gentleman without any trouble. There wasn’t no blood over there.”
Mrs. Burgess thought before responding to Cobb. “Yes, a person could do that, even a portly person like yourself. But could you reach across Jocko and pull the dagger out of Sarah’s neck or stick it in the fellow’s right hand without touching the blood on him or the bed?”
Cobb was taken aback. “I suppose not,” he said at last.
“And if I had stabbed the girl I treated like my own daughter and then reached over to plant the dagger on Jocko, would I not be covered in blood?”
“I see what you’re saying,” Marc said.
“And the chief constable himself and the doctor took lanterns and searched high and low for any signs of blood in here, in our bedrooms, or anywhere else in the house.”
“That’s true,” Cobb said. “And when I went back into the other side of the house with Carrie a minute ago, I looked again, and Carrie helped me search the drawers and hampers for bloody clothes. And it ain’t easy to scrub bloodstains outta softwood floors.”
“Good work, Cobb. I’ll do the same just to be absolutely sure.” Marc turned back to Mrs. Burgess. “Let’s move now to your sleeping arrangements. You told Mr. Cobb that you and Molly slept in one room and Carrie and Frieda in another. Was this usual?”
“The girls sleep together in pairs, as they please on a given night. I have my own room, but Sarah often sleeps in her, ah, workplace, as she did last night, and if I think she might be doing that, I crawl in with Molly-”
“I get nightmares if I sleep alone,” Molly said, “don’t I, Mum?”
“I understand,” Marc said, smiling at Molly. “But you must see that if all four of you were fast asleep shortly after one-thirty when Mrs. Burgess decided Sarah was all right on her own, then in theory, any one of you could have feigned sleep, waited her chance, slipped into that room, and stabbed her.”
Mrs. Burgess gave Marc a grim smile. “But such a person must have left the dagger there in her neck or else be covered in blood-which she would have no chance to clean off or disguise. Molly woke up well before two o’clock, raised the alarm, and Constable Cobb was here fifteen minutes after that. When could the killer have hidden her clothes and washed the blood off in the dark without leaving a speck anywhere outside that dreadful room? And then crawled back into bed with one of us?”
That stopped the flow of conversation for half a minute. Cobb coughed. Carrie and Frieda, red-eyed, came back and sat beside the woman they called Mum.
“What does the pale gentleman have to say for himself?” Mrs. Burgess said.
“He’s too upset and confused to say much.”
“Maybe he hasn’t got much to say.”
“We don’t need any opinions from the likes of you,” Cobb said.
Marc gave Cobb a reproving glance. He leaned back and said conversationally, “Could you tell me about Sarah, Mrs. Burgess? Perhaps knowing more about her might help us get to the truth, whatever it is.”
Mrs. Burgess softened visibly. “The truth is, Mr. Edwards, whatever you think of the business I’m in, Madame Renée’s is a special kind of pleasure place for gentlemen. I took my life’s savings and had this house built exactly as you now see it. I even have a deed for an acre of property around it, so many of the houses you see about are squatting on my land, with my blessing. I decided from the outset that I would hand-pick three girls and train them in my own way. Only respectable customers are allowed in. We have codes of entry, as you now know, and our own trackers. We have strict rules of conduct, which I enforce.”
“With yer poker?” Cobb asked, mainly to stanch this flow of self-justifying drivel.
“Our gentlemen callers know that their identities are safe with me. They also know my girls are healthy and free from disease. They get checked over by Dr. Pogue twice a month. They’ve got their own accounts at the Commercial Bank in the city.”
“All this is quite admirable,” Marc said, “but where does Sarah fit in? She makes four girls.”
“Sarah was found by a tracker one night last November up on Lot Street. She had been thrown out of her family’s home for being pregnant. We learned she had been a servant for a few weeks in some fancy home in town-she never would say where-and there’s little doubt her employer or one of his sons got her in the family way and then gave her the sack. But I can’t understand how her own flesh and blood could turn on such a sweet-natured and innocent girl. But they did. She was brought here that night-I found her on the doorstep-and I took her in. What else could I do?”
“Mum has a soft heart,” Molly said.
“But surely if she were with child, she would not be suitable for your enterprise,” Marc said tactfully.
“That is correct. I took Sarah in out of charity. She was grateful, and she carried her weight here by cleaning, doing the girls’ laundry, and helping me.”
“We loved her, didn’t we, Carrie?” Frieda said.
“She was like a cuddly pet, she was,” Molly said.
“I can’t believe she’s gone,” Carrie said.
“Well, girls,” Mrs. Burgess said, “she’s gonna have a proper funeral. And I ain’t having her buried up in Potter’s Field. We’re all going to Gunther the undertaker this afternoon and make the arrangements.”
This remark seemed to cheer the girls a little, as it was meant to. Cobb began to feel that they were going around in circles. He yawned conspicuously.
“When did Sarah have her baby?” Marc asked.
“Now that’s a sad story in itself,” Mrs. Burgess said. “She wasn’t due till this month, but in April she was doing an errand for me in town when her cramps started coming. Someone ran for the midwife. The babe was born dead, in a barn somewhere. The midwife took it away. Some kindly folks looked after her for three days. Then she came back to us, looking just awful.”
“We was frantic, sir,” Molly said. “We tried to ask about her in town, but most folks refuse to talk to us.”
“And we have to be careful who we talk to,” Frieda said.
“I figured she’d tried to go back home to her parents near Streetsville,” Mrs. Burgess added. “Thank goodness she come back to us.”
“That was in April?” Marc queried. “So when did Sarah become part of the, uh, business?”
“As soon as she recovered her strength, which wasn’t long. She’d begged to be part of it soon after she got here, but I said no and that was it. But she had nowhere to go after she lost the baby, and by then she was part of the family.”
“Just like a sister,” Frieda added, beginning to sniffle again.
“She fitted right in, didn’t she, Molly?” Carrie said.
“Some of the gentlemen asked specially fer her,” Molly said, as if that was a feat to boast about.
Marc looked at Sarah’s benefactress: “Could she not have tried to work at something else?”
“Something respectable, Mr. Edwards?”
“I was thinking of something less hazardous, Mrs. Burgess,” Marc said.