“There’s four or five Michael O’Flynns in this town I can think of off the top of my head,” Lassiter said.
“Any way to narrow it down?”
“We want the one who went to New Liverpool to picket at the governor’s mansion the night The Two Georges got stolen.”
Lassiter thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Yeah, of course you do. I’m stupid this morning - sue me. I can dig that out. You’re at the Ribblesdale, I think you said? Somebody will ring you tonight. We got a lot of McGaffigans, too, but not a lot of Percys, I bet. The other one was Rothrock?
Come on in the back room with me. We’ll see what we find.”
The back room was a miniature and rather disorganized version of the records room at the New Liverpool RAM station. Chief Lassiter seemed to know where the bodies were buried, though. He shoved aside two boxes of files to get at the bottom drawer of a cabinet.
“McGaffigan, Fred; McGaffigan, Liam, McGaffigan, Percy - here we go.” He pulled out the file folder.
“Last address we have for him is 39 Lantern Way.” The curl of his lip said what he thought of that address. He flipped through the reports in the file. “Drunk and disorderly five years ago, public drunkenness year before that, drunk and disorderly last year - paid a twenty-quid fine for that one. Sounds like a miner, in other words.”
Bushell scribbled the address into a notebook. “What about Rothrock?”
“Name rings a bell,” Lassiter said. “Let’s have us a look.” The folder in question was in one of the boxes he’d move to get to McGaffigan’s. “Here we go. Anthony Aurelius Rothrock, last address 2 Coker Drive.” From his face, that was a worse place to live than Lantern Way. “Drunk and disorderly; wife beating, but his old woman wouldn’t press the charge; D and D again ... ah, here’s why I remember him. Assault with intent to maim: he went after a fellow with a broken bottle in a tavern brawl a couple of years ago. Carved him up proper, too.”
“Why isn’t he in gaol, then?” Bushell and Stanley asked in the same breath.
“A pack of his mates were in the place with him, and they all swore up and down it was self-defense.”
By the way Lassiter’s eyebrows climbed toward his hairline, he was less than convinced. He shrugged a constable’s shrug, as if to say, What can you do?
“Have you got a town plan, so we can find these places?” Bushell asked.
“Come back to my office with me, and I’ll get you one,” the local chief said. While rummaging through his desk, he looked up toward Kathleen Flannery for a moment. “These places you’re going, they might not be the sort where you’d want to take a lady.”
Bushell didn’t answer. He’d figured that out for himself. On the other hand, he didn’t want to leave Kathleen by herself, either - no telling what sort of mischief she might get into. It was a poser. Kathleen solved it for him, saying indignantly, “If these gentlemen” - she freighted the word with meaning it was not altogether intended to bear - “can make their visits, I think I shall be able to accompany them.”
Chief Lassiter’s eyebrows rose again, this time in a slightly different way. “However you like, then,” he said, and ran one hand over the other in a gesture of which Pontius Pilate would have approved. “Ah, here we are,” he added with a grunt of triumph, and presented Bushell a much-folded map.
“Can you find out whether McGaffigan and Rothrock are on day shift or nights?” Bushell said. Lassiter nodded. “No point going to see ‘em if you won’t find ‘em home, is there?” He plucked at his beard. “Let me call the colliery for you.” He picked up the telephone, dialed a number without having to look it up. “Stephen? John here, down at the station. Need a bit of information from you - “ He asked a couple of questions, scribbled, asked again, scribbled some more, said, “Thanks,” and hung up. Turning to Bushell, he said. “They’re both on days. Day shift lets off at five. If you get there at half past or a bit later, you’ll catch them at home, probably before they’ve started supper. You’d not want to get them then, I shouldn’t think.”
“Too right,” Bushell said. “They don’t have to say a thing to us. If we get them angry, they won’t want to talk.”
“Don’t know that they will anyhow,” Lassiter said, “but that’s your lookout. I’ll start beating the bushes about Kilbride, and I’ll track down which O’Flynn was gone from the mine when The Two Georges got nicked. Stephen should know, or be able to find out. I’ll ring you when I have what you need.”
“Why don’t you give us the address of the Hastings Arms?” Samuel Stanley said. “If it’s not too far, we can check it ourselves - give us something useful to do the rest of this morning.”
“That makes sense,” Lassiter agreed. “The Hastings is at 137 Royal Street - that’s two streets north of here, down close to the river.”
By the time they left the constabulary station, summer heat and stickiness were out in full force. They made Bushell’s shirt cling greasily to his torso; he took off his hat and fanned his head with it. The smoke and the harsh, sulfurous tang of the air left his lungs stinging from every breath. At the end of the ten-minute walk, he felt more worn than he had during the hike to Buckley Bay. In front of the Hastings Arms, he paused a moment to look out at the Monongahela. The river was wide and swift and should have been beautiful, but no river full of coal barges and stained with the effluents of factories uncounted could look anything but grim.
Sam Stanley’s gaze followed his. “That’s the water that comes out of the taps at the hotel,” he said, sounding unhappy at the notion.
Bushell considered. “Best argument I’ve heard yet for drinking whiskey.”
“Let’s go inside,” Kathleen said, dabbing at her forehead with a linen handkerchief. “Maybe they’ll have ceiling fans working.”
“And you’re from Victoria,” Stanley said. “In New Liverpool, they don’t have this kind of muggy heat. You can stick a fork in me, because I’m baked.”
No ceiling fans spun inside the lobby of the Hastings Arms. The place was almost as shabby as the supercilious clerk back at the Ribblesdale had said it would be. The potted plant that had been set up as an ornament was now brown and dead, but nobody had bothered taking it away. To Bushell’s mind, two even more unlovely growths had sprouted in the lobby: Michael Shaughnessy and Jerry Doyle. The reporters from Common Sense moved to cut Bushell off as he walked toward the front desk.
“What took you so long to get here, Colonel?” Shaughnessy asked, as Doyle readied pad and pen to record Bushell’s reply for posterity. “We’ve been waiting half an hour, maybe longer.”
“So very sorry to inconvenience you,” Bushell replied. “Had I but known you were here, I would have dropped everything else I was doing and rushed right over. I’m sure you understand that.”
Jerry Doyle smiled for a moment. Shaughnessy turned an angry red. Bushell strode past both of them. He hoped they hadn’t worked on the desk clerk.
Shaughnessy said, “Dr. Flannery, what are you doing coursing with the hunting dogs of the filthy, corrupt Crown?”
Bushell stiffened. So they knew who she was, did they? They might have found out from the register at the Ribblesdale, or ... “Help you, sir?” the desk clerk asked, distracting him. He showed the fellow his badge. “Do you have a Joseph Kilbride registered here?” he asked; since he’d left Kilbride’s photograph with Chief Lassiter, he had to use a verbal description. Behind him, Kathleen Flannery was answering Shaughnessy’s question. Since he was talking himself, he couldn’t hear what she said.