The Frightened Man (15 page)

He should have said ‘Where’s my money for the piece on Crane?’ because Harris, given the possibility of its already having been paid, said, ‘Of course you did!’

‘I don’t remember it.’

‘Shock. Loss of blood.’

‘I think you gave me the loose notes from your pocket when I asked for it. I think it was about ten pounds short.’

Harris became magisterial. ‘I don’t think we should bicker over money when Oscar is barely cold.’

‘I’m not bickering - I’m asking—’

‘Crane just died, of course. How about doing a piece on that? We could split the difference.’ Not getting encouragement for that idea, he rushed on to say, ‘Oh, another thought I had.’ Harris smiled, then touched his forehead and frowned. ‘Would it be possible to get a drink, do you think? Something is always welcome at this time of the day.’ It was not yet one o’clock.

There was no bell, and Denton had forgotten the boy’s name. ‘Bellow down the stairs. Tell him what you want.’ What Denton wanted was for Harris to go; he was feeling disoriented, floaty, weak. Not up to the Harris personality. ‘Or you could just go next door to the Lamb.’

‘A public house? Good God! Only an American would suggest it.’ Harris went out and, instead of bellowing, said something in a low voice and then went on down the stairs. He was back in two or three minutes with brandy; Denton was almost asleep, and the smell woke and nauseated him. Harris drank, sighed, massaged his temples. ‘You really need to get away for a day or two, Denton. The boy isn’t to be here at night, he tells me; you’ll be alone.’

‘I’ll think about it, I said.’

‘Of course, I’ll cover your expenses - take up a collection. ’

‘Take up one for the Crane piece, while you’re at it.’

Harris finished his brandy with great briskness and banged the glass down. ‘You disappoint me.’ He paused at the doorway like an actor with an exit line. ‘The Café Royal is counting on you.’

Later, Maude - by then, Denton had remembered the boy’s name - brought up a lunch from the Lamb and more beef tea, of which Denton was getting noticeably weary. Denton asked him if Harris had paid his wages.

‘Oh, no, sir, that’s for you to do.’

Of course it was.

Towards six, Dr Bernat puffed up the stairs, a glass bottle in his hands full of what looked like blood. Denton was ready to shout that by God, he’d gone too far; he’d put up with beef tea, but not blood! But Bernat explained that it was Russian beet soup made especially for Denton by Mrs Bernat. ‘The beet is being full of mineral, which is also the blood. Drink.’

‘Now?’

‘When better?’

Denton had had enough beets in his childhood to last a lifetime, but he didn’t want to offend Bernat. Mentally holding his nose, he drank - and liked it. Borscht, he found, when made by the right cook, was very different from boiled beets. He smiled. Bernat smiled. They both laughed. Bernat said Denton was ‘very game’, an Englishism of which he seemed proud. He had been to see Atkins again. There had been a period of consciousness, he had been told, some indications that Atkins could see, move his limbs and ask questions, or at least say, ‘What the bloody hell?’

‘Now, he will improve, but he is having a nasty wound. Some days yet he must be in hospital.’

‘Can I visit?’

‘Tomorrow, maybe yes, maybe no. But you need rest yourself. Today, absolutely no.’

Denton looked grim. ‘Somebody wants me to go to Paris. A trip to University College Hospital won’t compare.’

‘Paris!’ Bernat frowned. ‘Paris is not a restful place. I trained in Paris. During the—’

Maude was standing in the doorway. ‘Now there’s a gentleman named Munro to see you.’ He looked aggrieved. His work day had ended two minutes earlier, and here he was, announcing yet somebody else. Denton said to show him up, and the boy said that
then
he was leaving the house, sir, and he clattered downstairs.

‘I am going,’ Bernat said.

‘No, no, stay.’ Bernat had a half-finished glass of sherry. He looked uncertain, probably embarrassed. Munro, however, seemed unfazed by either patient or doctor. He was carrying his hat and coat and grinning. ‘Your man flew out of the house before I could give him my things.’

‘My man’s a kid, hardly out of short pants. Sling them on the bed.’ He introduced the two men, said that Bernat was a doctor and Munro a policeman. ‘Two professional visits in one,’ he said. ‘Munro, if you want a drink, you have to get your own. Atkins got his head broken.’

‘So I heard. Nothing for me, anyway.’ He looked at Bernat. ‘Well, how is he?’

‘Our host? Generally in excellent health, his wounds stable, still weak and I think a little shocked. But promising. ’

Munro looked at Denton. ‘I’d like to hear your tale of what happened. Guillam’s keeping his own counsel - his prerogative; he’s being a good cop. Tell me what happened.’

Bernat said he shouldn’t listen to private police business; no matter how much both men insisted, he drank off his sherry and left. He had seemed at ease with Denton, clearly was not with Munro, or perhaps only with two other people instead of one. ‘Shy,’ Denton said. ‘Been through the pogroms; maybe it’s because you’re a policeman.’

‘Coppers have that effect. Part of the job.’

Then Denton told him the story of the two attacks, ending with Guillam’s visit and Guillam’s disdain for the Mulcahy story. ‘Guillam hates my guts,’ he finished.

‘That’s just Georgie. He wants to be a superintendent, at least; always on the make. To him, you’re a rival. I know, it’s stupid, but he’s like that. He doesn’t want anybody else to have an idea. Down on me because I had your observation about the peephole before he did.’

‘He wants me to “get away”.’

‘Yeah, that would suit him. Plus you must admit, he has a job to do.’

‘Which I don’t prevent him doing.’

‘Yeah, you do, if you get in the newspapers and spout ideas that the coppers then have to deal with - which he’s afraid you will if a reporter ever gets hold of you. It’s really hard enough being a London copper without civilians saying it should be this way or that way. As if you had to listen to Guillam tell you how to write books.’

Denton grunted. ‘Somebody else wants me to go to Paris.’

‘Happy to go in your place. You’ll buy the ticket?’

Denton laughed. His visitors had made him feel better. ‘How about you go next door to the Lamb and get yourself some beer and a couple of plates of beef? The boy servant seems to have forgotten that I eat in the evening.’

Munro stood. ‘I’ll get beer for me and beef for you. Mrs Munro expects me at home, and she expects me to eat what’s put before me. If you’re eating to help that arm, you should have liver.’

‘Beef. The redder the better.’

Munro was whistling when he came back. The whistling got breathy as he struggled up the last flight of stairs with the tray, but he made it - a little red-faced, a little winded - and laid out the beer pitcher and a glass, roast beef (not very red), mash with sprouts, a bottle of some sort of sauce. ‘Barman at the Lamb sends his best. Shocking you’re hurt. Crime is a scandal, and the police should all be sacked.’

‘You didn’t tell him you’re a copper.’

‘Didn’t seem friendly to disabuse him.’ Munro took a long pull at the beer and sighed happily and began to cut up Denton’s meat for him. ‘So - you think it was
him
?’

‘The attack? Yes, I think it was him.’

‘Well, you’ve seen his face now. He’ll either come again or go to ground.’

‘I saw half his face.’

Munro glanced at the Colt. ‘You expect him back, I see.’ He put the plate on Denton’s legs. ‘Constables going to be kept at your door?’

‘A few days.’ He ate some of the roast beef. ‘I might as well go to Paris.’

‘And give up on Mulcahy?’

‘Mulcahy’s dead by now.’

‘You surprise me. Why?’

‘There’s no point in attacking me unless he’s already got rid of Mulcahy. I think he was afraid that Mulcahy had told me something.’

‘What?’

‘I wish I knew.’

Munro drank his beer and frowned at the wall and said, ‘Willey’s got a solid case on the Cape Coloured he grabbed. They kept a lot of it out of the papers, but the long and the short of it is that the poor bastard was covered with blood and drunk as a lord when they found him, plus he gave them a confession. Willey laid charges a couple of hours ago.’

‘What’s that to me?’

‘Willey’s got the girl’s killer. Whatever your Mulcahy and the man who attacked you do or don’t have to do with the great scheme of things, they didn’t murder the Minter girl.’

‘Because Willey has a South African sailor who’s too frightened to know what’s happened to him? Munro, you know either of us could get a confession from a man in his situation even if we knew for a fact he was innocent - black man in a white country, found drunk and bloody, probably can’t remember what the hell he did that night, afraid they’ll hang him and so willing to say anything. And who made the peephole - the black man?’

‘The peephole’s neither here nor there. Denton, there’s no evidence that it had any connection with the murder at all! Or with your Mulcahy, for the matter of that. Fact, Willey’s people tracked down the landlord of the house in Priory Close Alley - lives out in Staines, never goes near his property, has an agent to do all the dirty work. The agent rented the closet to a man who gave the name Smithers, can’t remember anything of what he looked like. Paid six months in advance. Smithers may have been Mulcahy, but it’s wasted time to Willey.’

‘It means he probably has a witness.’

‘It means there’s an
outside chance
of a witness, but Willey has a confession, and if the coloured boy’s lawyer wants to go hunting for Smithers-Mulcahy, he’s welcome to do so, but Willey can’t spare the resources!’

Denton swigged borscht and chewed beef and shifted his position in the bed. ‘The girl,’ he said. ‘We have to learn more about the girl.’

Munro grinned and shook his head and, finishing his beer, clumped down the stairs and let himself out.

Chapter Nine

After night fell, he lit the gas in his room and on the stairs, and then, the loaded Colt in his hand, he went down and lit a lamp in the long room. He felt only a little dizzy, still weak but clearer in his mind. After sitting for a few minutes in his chair, he went down to the ground floor and lit the gas there and opened the front door. A different constable was standing out by the street but came hurrying when he saw Denton.

‘Something wrong, sir?’

‘Only putting my head out for air.’The evening was cold, hazy with vapour that was condensing on the stones and starting to drip from the eave. ‘Still somebody in the back?’

‘Yes, sir. Bit dark back there, I expect.’

Denton went through the corridor that ran along Atkins’s part of the house, lighting the gas, speaking a few words with the constable out there before going upstairs again. He tried sitting to read, found his eyes not focusing on the page, got himself water, then thought about a drink of some sort and rejected it. The arm hurt, but not unbearably; Bernat had brought him a black silk bandanna for a sling, and it eased the pain.

He got a lantern from the old kitchen, climbed back to the bedroom, legs a little rubbery, got the Colt and then went on up to the next floor and then the attic. ‘Getting back on the horse,’ he muttered to himself. The attic was deeply shadowed. He shone the feeble light around, feeling unsteady, hating his own nerves. The skylight had been re-glazed and nailed shut. The Flobert pistols were put away. The dumb-bell and the rowing machine looked like grotesque animals, casting huge shadows. He shivered.

Back on the floor below, he locked the attic door and went down to his bedroom and undressed and got into his bed and tried to go to sleep. Fifteen minutes of racing brain later - worry about Atkins, a new awareness of his arm, visions of the attacker’s mad eyes, his smell - he was dressing to go out. The after-effect of the laudanum, he supposed, was an insomniac tenseness and sense of hurry. And, perhaps, dreams. The idea of repeating the nightmare about his wife decided him that he wouldn’t sleep yet.

Doing buttons one-handed was difficult, and he was tempted not to put his left arm through his coat sleeve, but he made himself do it, hearing his grandmother’s voice, ‘If it hurts bad, it must be good for you.’ He put the arm through Bernat’s black sling. A necktie gave him far more trouble and he finally abandoned it, pulling the tie through itself and letting it bulge above his waistcoat like a stiff ascot.

‘The glass of fashion,’ he muttered, aware for once of where the quotation had come from. He put his right arm into the sleeve of an overcoat, drew the left side over his sling and buttoned a button to hold it, then pushed the Colt revolver into the right-hand pocket. It made a mighty bulge, but he wasn’t going without it. He might be getting back on the horse, but he was nonetheless afraid that his attacker would come back.

‘Going out, sir?’ the constable said again, exactly like the first time. He was an older man than the first, heavily jowled and pretty well girthed. He sounded parental, as if Denton was to account to him for his movements.

‘Tired of being cooped up.’

‘Wet, sir.’ The damp air had by then produced a fine drizzle. He moved past the constable, waiting to be stopped - the idea was absurd, but Denton felt as if he were doing something underhanded - and moved away as quickly as his still-wobbly legs would allow. Walking lasted only as far as the corner; he knew he couldn’t make it much farther.

He went by cab to Mrs Castle’s famous house, commended to him by Harris, the house otherwise known simply as Westerley Street. Other houses stood in Westerley Street, but only the one was known by the street’s name; more than one of her clients, drunk or sober, had said that it must be awkward actually to
live
in that street. But all the cabs knew the way, and they all knew what a man meant if he said ‘Westerley Street’. Denton had no idea what they thought if a woman said it.

As higher-class houses went, it was a little shabby, but that seemed to be a sign of its authenticity. Mrs Castle herself was always soberly and tastefully dressed, if not in fact sober and tasteful; she always had champagne at hand and loved to talk politics or racing or what she called ‘sosigh-tih’. A certain shabbiness of speech, as well - the odd dropped H, the even odder dropped final G - went with the patchily worn carpet or faded chair. It was said that she had been the mistress of a personage, had chosen to be a madam rather than a milliner afterwards, knew that the best houses were sometimes the worst kept and kept hers accordingly.