How to find Joe was the next question, but Holmes said, “Always ask at the pub, Miss Jekyll. Elementary investigation—the pub always knows. And there I see The Black Dog, so we shall step inside. . . .”
“That she will not,” said Mrs. Poole. “You may go where you like, Mr. Holmes, but I will not have her setting foot in a place where men are drinking and ogling, like as not.”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” said Mary. Diana was right, it was better to dress as a man. She had never before found being a woman confining, but then she had never attempted to investigate a series of murders before either. She had never attempted much of anything. And now she was finding that as soon as one began moving around in the world, doing things, one ran up against a regular list of You Shan’ts.
“Then I shall return in a moment,” said Holmes, and disappeared into the dark maw of The Black Dog. It was closer to a half hour before he returned, and Mary and Mrs. Poole had walked around the central square of Purfleet, looking into all the shop windows—at the hams on display at the butcher’s, the buns at the baker’s, the ribbons and gloves at a shop for ladies’ accoutrements.
“Joe lives with his mother in one of the cottages recently built for workingmen, on a road called Peaceful Row,” he told them. “I suppose the builders thought that name might avert strikes among the quarry workers! Miss Jekyll, should you ever find yourself in a pub, despite Mrs. Poole’s care, never ask a question directly, for you will never get an answer. I bought a pint and said I had come from the asylum, where I was thinking of confining a relative. But I didn’t know if I wanted him in an institution, and might look for a man to care for him privately. I wondered if any employees of the asylum might prefer a private situation and was told that several had lost their positions, including Joe. They were almost pressing his address on me, and I promised that I would go see him as soon as possible.”
“How clever of you, sir,” said Mrs. Poole.
Well! thought Mary. I would have been just as clever, if I’d been allowed into the pub. I could have told them that I had a poor mad father, or that my brother was in the asylum and Joe had been caring for him. I could have told them any number of things. . . . What was the use of propriety when it kept one from getting things done?
They had to pass the asylum gates again, taking care not to be seen—but no one was watching. Peaceful Row was just off the main road, a paved street with modern cottages arranged neatly on either side, each with its own small garden. Joe Abernathy’s cottage was at the end of the street, before the pavement turned into a path and wandered across fields filled with clover and buttercups. Several cows looked at them curiously, then went back to tearing up mouthfuls of grass. The cottage was surrounded by a garden in which vegetables grew among the flowers. Several hens scratched in the dirt. To one side of the cottage, a woman was hanging laundry on a line.
“Pardon me,” said Holmes. “Mrs. Abernathy?”
“Aye, I’m she,” said the woman, wiping her hands on her apron and approaching the fence. “And who might you be, sir?” She looked at him warily, as though he might be selling some sort of patented medicine or mechanical broom.
“I’m Sherlock Holmes, and I’ve come to talk to Joe,” said the detective. He waited, but if he expected her to recognize the name, he was disappointed. She merely nodded and said, “I’ll see if he’s in.” She walked through the side door, then came out again a moment later.
“Aye, he says to go on in. You’ll forgive me, sir. What with this lunatic escaping, and then losing his position over it, he’s not wanting to see many people just now. Especially not newspaper men, and you have that look about you.”
“I’ll stay out here, I think,” said Mrs. Poole. “You have a way with the linen, ma’am. I’ve never seen pillowcases so white. What do you bleach them in?”
“Oh, well, I make my own washing powder, but it’s the lavender as does it. I lay them out on lavender to dry . . . ,” said Mrs. Abernathy, visibly pleased.
“There goes my vanity, Miss Jekyll,” said Holmes as they walked through the garden, avoiding the hens, which did not move out of their way. “The look of a newspaper man indeed! But our Mrs. Poole is proving invaluable. She is a mistress of the art of distraction.”
The side door led directly into the kitchen, which was spotlessly clean. Joe was sitting at the table, reading a newspaper. When they entered, he looked up.
“Well, if it isn’t you, miss! Mother told me Mr. Holmes had some ladies with him, but I didn’t expect one of them to be you. What a pleasure to see you again. I’m just reading about old Renfield’s escape. You know I lost my position over this affair? Although how they expected me to prevent it, when the man can escape from a police wagon, I don’t know. He must be a magician!”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” said Holmes. “He may have been helped. That’s what we’ve come to talk to you about, to see if Renfield had any associates.”
“Associates? I don’t know what kind of associates you would be meaning. He was mostly locked up in the asylum. But when he run away, which he did regular, he could have formed associates that helped him escape.”
“Dr. Seward said he was a businessman before he became mad,” said Mary. “Could he have had business associates, perhaps? Anyone he knew from his life before? Did he ever receive visitors?”
“No, never a visitor. I didn’t know he was a businessman. That must be why he kept writing numbers down, as though keeping accounts. Of the flies he was eating, you know, and how much life they were giving him. Although he called them his experiments. He would go on about those experiments of his, how each fly gave him so much life and no more. He wanted to know how much life he could get out of them, and then how much if he fed them to spiders and ate the spiders, and then how much if the spiders were eaten by birds—but we never let it get past spiders, which he could catch himself. ‘I’ll show them,’ he would say to me. ‘Someday, Joe, I’ll show them my notebooks, and then they’ll have to take me back. They can’t deny me the secret of life.’ But when I asked him who would take him back, and who was denying him the secret of life, whatever that might be, he would cringe and whine, saying they would kill him straight away if he told anyone. But that was all part of his madness, miss.”
“Yes, although there is often a method in madness,” said Mary. “Do you remember anything else he used to say?”
“No, that was about all. Just the flies, and the spiders eating the flies, and then the birds, and he wanted a cat. That’s what he wanted most, a cat to eat the birds, and he would eat the cat, I presume. And get life from it.”