Oh Danny Boy (Molly Murphy Mysteries, #5)

They continued to stare at me. “Look,” I said. “I’ve been in a jail cell with a group of prostitutes like this one. They’re not so careful about their personal habits. One thing I noticed was dirty fingernails, some of them bitten. And they mask their body smells with cheap perfumes—ashes of roses or lily of the valley.”


“Maybe this girl comes from a higher-class establishment,” the doctor suggested. “Not all prostitutes live in squalor, as I’m sure you know.”

“In which case, why is she dressed like this? These are clothes you’d expect to see on a streetwalker in the worst part of town. No man going to a high-class brothel would want his young lady to look like this.”

“She’s right, you know,” Mrs. Goodwin agreed. “She is very clean, yet her clothes are a disgrace. Look at them, about to fall apart.”

“Then I’d say she was a good girl fallen on hard times,” the doctor said. “Some of them try to keep up their old standards for as long as they can. I’ve seen it often enough before. The girl gets herself into trouble, has the baby or an abortion, and there’s nowhere left for her to go but on the streets. Tragic really—the number of them who kill themselves in despair.”

The smell had been getting to me. Now suddenly the room started to sway around. I clutched at the edge of the table and everything went black.



Someone was calling to me from the other end of a long, dark tunnel. Then I felt my head shoved forward and recoiled as a sharp smell was placed under my nose. I opened my eyes. I was sitting on a bench in the hallway of the morgue. Mrs. Goodwin was sitting beside me, holding a bottle of smelling salts.

“Don’t worry about it. It happens to the best of us,” she said. “I fainted the first time I saw a dead body. Ashamed of myself afterward, but it’s a natural reaction. And that smell, too.”

I nodded gratefully.

“The doctor is conducting a preliminary autopsy now,” she said. “He’ll let us know his findings.”

“What is there more to find?” I asked. “We know how she died.”

“I expect he’d want to know whether she was pregnant, for one thing,” Mrs. Goodwin said. “Now we’ve seen how well cared for she is, we have to assume she’s new to the game, which means someone might have reported her missing.”

“Yes, I see,” I said. I hugged my arms to me.

“Probably tried to run away from her pimp, poor soul,” she went on. “He might have killed her himself.”

“And left her in full view on the street?” I shook my head. The smelling salts had cleared my head. “No, if he’d killed her, he’d have done the same as the Eastmans. He’d have dumped her quietly in the East River, not left her for the police to find.”

“Then she was just picked up by the wrong man,” Mrs. Goodwin said. “Well, we’ve some chance of finding out who she was. We don’t know what her face looked like, but Quigley and Mclver took Bertillon measurements and we know she has pretty dark hair and fine bones. I just hope we catch this fiend before he gets his hands on any more girls.”

My brain, at least, was now fully recovered. “I wonder if the detectives went to the hospital?” I asked. “If she was still alive, she might have been able to say something that could help us.”

“I doubt it,” Mrs. Goodwin said, “but it’s worth a visit, just as soon as we’re done here.”

“Aren’t we done here?” My heart sank. There was no way I wanted to go back into that room again, especially if the autopsy was being conducted at this moment. I had no wish to add vomiting to my list of embarrassments.

Mrs. Goodwin clearly had no such squeamishness. “Oh, I’d like to know for my own curiosity whether she was in the family way. And maybe what kind of instrument was used to disfigure her. I have a feeling that those two young men really won’t put themselves out too much to solve this. It’s the general consensus among policemen that prostitutes are disposable, that they ask for what they get. I, on the other hand, feel that a society should be judged by the way it treats its most vulnerable members. In fact—” She broke off as the door opened and Dr. Hartman came out. We both rose to our feet.

“The young lady has quite recovered, I see,” he said, smiling genially at me.

“Yes, thank you. I must apologize for my amateurish behavior.”

“Nonsense. Half the first-year medical students faint, and most of them are men, too.”

“Your autopsy is surely not completed?” Mrs. Goodwin asked.

“No, but I’d like you to contact the two detectives who were here this morning. They should come back right away. I’ve found something that completely changes the complexion of this case.”

He looked almost shaken. I found that my own knees were trembling.

“As I said, I have completed the most preliminary of investigations. I was looking for signs of”—he paused and coughed discreetly—“recent sexual activity.”

“And was there?” Mrs. Goodwin asked.

“There was an obvious attempt at it,” he said, still looking most uncomfortable to be discussing such a subject with women, “but the attempt was not wholly successful.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, dear lady, that this young girl was still technically a virgin.”





TWENTY-TWO