Marc tried not to let his disappointment show. And he hoped “that evil woman” had not told the pastor any of the sordid, politically sensitive details. He nodded in the direction of the kitchen, where all was silent.
“I was gonna tell her,” McConkey said with a guilty start. Then, with fierce accusation, “I guess I don’t need ta, now.”
“I am sorry,” Marc said, “but I must ask you some questions about Sarah as part of my murder investigation, painful though they may be.”
“Why’re ya botherin’ to look fer her killer: she was a whore.”
“Now see here, McConkey-”
“ ‘Wherefore if thy hand or foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast them from thee!’ ”
Marc held his temper with great difficulty: there were higher stakes at play. “You may have disowned your daughter, sir, but that is of no importance to me here and now. I’m going to ask you a series of questions about Sarah, and I want full and truthful answers from you. If not, then I shall return with the sheriff and a magistrate’s warrant.”
“All right, then,” McConkey said with a show of petulance. He wasn’t accustomed to being bullied in his own home, but he sat down. Marc pulled up a chair opposite. The kitchen curtain swayed and went still.
Slowly and systematically, Marc took McConkey through what he assumed to be the relevant details of Sarah McConkey’s aborted life. Yes, there had been a suitor for her hand who had been willfully rejected. The ensuing confrontation had caused the “wayward witch” to pack a valise and strike out on her own for the city. Yes, the Reverend Finney was known in Streetsville, having been a circuit rider here in the past, and Sarah had headed straight there looking for work. Finney had immediately sent word to the McConkeys but was told to keep her if he so wished. He did, but three weeks later, in early October, a letter arrived from Finney informing them that Sarah had been found to have committed “abominations” and had been summarily dismissed with a stern warning to head straight home and beg her father’s forgiveness. While certainly not inclined to forgive her, the McConkeys had nonetheless been willing to take back the prodigal. But she didn’t come home. Worried now, they asked their own pastor, the Reverend Solomon Good, to try to locate her. He was able to learn only that she had vanished into Irishtown, whose iniquities dwarfed those of Sodom and Gomorrah. Then to their shock and consternation, Sarah arrived on their doorstep in mid-November, thin, pale, and pregnant. The malignant source of the pregnancy was not in doubt: Sarah had fallen as far as a Christian woman could. Despite her tearful pleading, McConkey had done his duty: he threw her out and publicly disowned her. Neither he nor his wife had seen or heard of her since.
Marc thanked McConkey and stood up. “The funeral is tomorrow morning at the old Mechanics’ Institute building on John Street at-”
“We won’t be there,” McConkey said.
Marc glanced at the kitchen curtain.
“Mrs. McConkey feels exactly as I do,” her husband said.
He followed Marc out as far as the gate, then turned without saying a word and trudged solemnly towards his bawling cows.
Just as Marc was untying his horse, Hilda McConkey emerged from the front door, peered anxiously about, then trotted out to Marc. The struggle to suppress her tears and the feelings they might assuage had made her small round face a constricted death mask.
“You goin’ to the funeral?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Say a prayer fer my Sarah, will ya?”
It was a long ride home in the waning day. Marc wasn’t sure what he had hoped to find in Streetsville. Perhaps a thwarted lover who had somehow contrived to take out his rage on the beloved? With a desperate Michael Badger happy to sell him a key to the hatch? Or perhaps some aspect of Sarah’s tragic story not yet known and somehow relevant to her death? Instead, McConkey’s account supported in every respect that of Mrs. Burgess and her girls, as well as that of Madame Charlotte. There were no missing weeks in the narrative, no further revelations to be made. He would have to work with what he now knew. Perhaps Finney or his young son was the father of Sarah’s child. If so, then why would a Methodist minister arrange the demise of his mistress after the child was stillborn? Maybe the child had not died at birth! But where would Sarah hide it? Could she have been blackmailing Finney? Despite the risks, Marc knew he would have to interrogate Finney tomorrow, and interrogate him hard.
Still, in his heart of hearts, Marc clung to the notion that the primary target had been Handford Ellice. It was Sarah who was the random factor, not Ellice. The timing and circumstances were just too pat: Lord Durham and his mission had to be the efficient cause of the string of events culminating in that squalid death scene. But so far he had failed to find any real evidence implicating any of the whist players. And unless Badger were caught, such evidence was unlikely to turn up.
It was eight o’clock when he left Sir George Arthur’s mount at the stables and plodded up to the verandah of Government House. An orderly led Marc not into the governor’s office, nor the adjacent meeting room, but straight through to Sir George’s living quarters and a comfortable drawing room. Lord Durham was seated in an armchair, smoking a pipe. One look at his face told Marc that Badger had not been found, and Marc himself was unable to disguise his own disappointment at the day’s efforts on the earl’s behalf.
“Sit down, Marc,” Durham said wearily. His face was drawn.
“I’ve just spent three hours with the most tiresome, small-minded, and mean-spirited men imaginable.” Then he smiled. “Reminded me of home.”
“How is your nephew doing?” Marc asked, recalling that Beth was to visit him in the afternoon and wanting to delay his report as long as he could.
Durham brightened immediately. “Mrs. Edwards came to see Handford after luncheon, and according to Lady Durham’s account of their meeting, she succeeded in bringing him out of the delirious reverie he’s been in since they brought him here yesterday. Once he saw that she was alive, his nightmare of having stabbed her vanished. She stayed long enough to get him talking and feeling a bit more normal. Then Lady Durham spent the rest of the day convincing him that he did not murder anyone, that he was a victim of circumstance only. She has planted in his mind the notion that Sarah was murdered by someone else for reasons to do with the inmates of the brothel. Still, the horror of waking up covered in a girl’s blood remains with him, and always will.”
“I hope she emphasized that the knife was placed in his hand with malicious intent,” Marc said.
“She did.”
Though how anyone could have placed it there without himself wallowing in Sarah’s blood was still a prickly question.
“I don’t have to tell you that we have not found Badger,” Durham said, “but I need to hear whatever you’ve discovered today, however dispiriting it may be.”
Marc proceeded to describe the visits he and Cobb had made to the homes of the four whist players, and the fruitless results. Alluding to Cobb’s interrogation of Madame Charlotte and Mrs. Burgess and to his own trip to the McConkey farm, Marc sketched out Sarah’s saga and the slim pickings to be inferred from it.
Durham sucked his pipe back into life. “Finney looks like our best bet, doesn’t he? It’s possible he may have had a double motive: to embarrass me and to get rid of a woman who might prove his ruin. Still, unless we can tie him to Badger, we don’t stand much of a chance of proving anything.”
Into the brief silence that followed this unsettling remark, Marc said, “When you mentioned the lost snuffbox to the whist players this afternoon, did you discover anything we didn’t already know?”
“Alas, no. In fact, they were not only forthcoming about the two hours or so they spent with Handford, but positively voluble. They freely admitted escorting him to the bar-man to man, as it were-and were complimentary about his whist-playing skills. They said he simply excused himself shortly before midnight and headed, they assumed, to his private quarters. No monogrammed box was left anywhere within their sight. They all wished Handford a speedy recovery.”