The Frightened Man (29 page)

Atkins was asleep in the armchair when Denton came into the sitting room; the sergeant’s swathed head glowed in the gaslight. As Denton closed the door, Atkins jerked awake and said, ‘Been thinking.’

‘Congratulations.’

‘Stella Minter. Why’d she call herself that?’

‘I thought you were fed up with all that.’

Atkins was helping him with his overcoat. ‘You gave me a bit of an idea about the vacuum broom; thought I’d return the compliment. Why’d she call herself Stella Minter if her name was Ruth?’

‘She had to call herself something.’

‘Yes, but why that? Plucked it out of the air? Saw it on a hoarding? Name of somebody she knew?’

‘Spill it, Sergeant.’

Atkins shook out the coat. ‘What do blokes do when they want to be somebody else? Had a pal, had something going with a woman he’d met - never told her his real name so’s she wouldn’t come after him when it was over. What name’d he use? Mother’s maiden! What name does everybody what had a ma and pa have in the back of his head? Mother’s maiden. Bet you can tell me right now what your mother’s maiden name was, Captain.’

‘Burrell.’

‘See? Mine’s was Orping. Just for a test, I asked the Infant Phenomenon. His’s was Smithers. So.’

‘So?’

‘So when you haven’t got a certainty, you go for a likelihood. The likelihood is your tart’s mother’s name was Minter. Forget the Stella; that could of come from anywhere - sort of trashy-classy name a young girl might wish to give herself airs with. But Minter - that could be her mother.’

‘So all we have to do is locate all the women whose maiden name is Minter, and ask them if they had a daughter named Ruth. Shall we start a house-to-house canvass? Perhaps you could ask the new matrons as you peddle the boat pump.’

‘The registry, General, the registry! You know how old the girl was - about sixteen, correct? She was the oldest kid, right?’

‘So far as I know.’

‘So what’s the likelihood? That ma and pa were married seventeen, eighteen years ago. You could try to locate the marriage, but lots of marriages don’t get into the registry; they’re in the parish records or they’re nowhere at all. So what’s the likelihood? That the birth
was
registered, and I know for a great, bleeding fact that the mother’s maiden name
and
the child’s name go on the registry,
as does
pa’s name. So there you got them!’

‘All I have to do is search the thousands of babies born over two or three years.’

‘Work of a day for a smart chap.’

‘And then what? Go through the directories again with the father’s name? You know how many R. Mulcahys they found? Suppose it’s a name like Smith or Jones or Wright or, or—’

Atkins stared at him. ‘You’re giving up, aren’t you?’

‘It’s what you’ve been asking me to do, isn’t it?’

‘I’ve been asking you to make some money,
which
I thought Mulcahy was in the way of, but if you just give up Mulcahy altogether without a fight, you’ll sigh and moan and hang about here making life miserable for me, and what’s the good of that? Have a little backbone, Major! It’s only one more day’s work!’

‘You going to do it for me?’

Atkins apparently had already thought it through. ‘The Infant Phenomenon’s capable of handling the house for one day. I’ll read him the manual of arms and the courts-martial act before I go. All right? Does that nod mean yes? Yes?’

Denton sighed, grunted.

‘Good! Wonderful! Your enthusiasm is like cool drink to a dying man.’ Atkins turned away, then swung back, dropped his voice as if there might be somebody else in the house who could overhear. ‘By the way, young Maude’s wages are due, if you’ve got some loose coins about you—’

Chapter Eighteen

Friday morning.

He was awake before Atkins and went downstairs to make his own tea in the alcove, the spirit stove giving off a blue light, the space otherwise dark with the sun not yet up. The window had been replaced at the bottom of the stairs, but the curtains hadn’t yet been put up; now he wanted sunlight to spill through, to tell him that the world was alive, life was good. Instead, he stared at the blue flame, smelled the burning alcohol, thought of the man who had lunged out of this place to attack him. He rubbed his arm. Where was Stella Minter’s murderer now? Awake, walking the streets in fear? Sleeping the sleep of the just? More likely the latter, Denton thought, a man without conscience, reckless, clever. He’d have seen the newspaper stories about Mulcahy’s body, have been watching for them, sure that when the body and the note were found, he’d be safe.

Denton took the tea back up the stairs, sipping as he went, feeling it scald his upper lip; he went on past the bedroom floor and up to the attic, stumbling in the darkness. Was the murderer up here, waiting? No, he’d finished with Denton; he’d realized days ago that if Denton had learned anything from Mulcahy, something would have happened. Now, he thought he was safe. Or all but safe. One day, one fact, one sliver of investigative hope lay between him and complete escape. And it depended not on Denton but on five women making lists and, perhaps, a soldier-servant with an idea.

Not much.

He began to row on the contraption. The attic was cold and silent; the rowlocks groaned. He hadn’t slept well - dreams, long waking periods, tormenting himself with old failures, old humiliations, back to childhood: failure begat failure. His mind turned, twisted, raced, as it had done all night, reviewing everything about the killings, about Mulcahy, the attack, the girl. On and on, over and over. Nothing new, nothing helpful.

He lifted the hundredweight dumb-bell, then lighter weights for each hand. Nothing, nothing, nothing. He fired the parlour pistols, then stood with the old percussion Colt held at arm’s length. Two minutes, three minutes, four, the sights never wavering from the target. He would have liked to shoot the killer right then. Wonderful if he had loomed out of the shadows - a bullet in the eye.

But the killer, he thought, was laughing at him, sitting at his breakfast by now, devouring sausage and potatoes and laughing around the half-chewed food.

Nothing, nothing, nothing.

Atkins was full of himself and his mission, so was particularly hard on Maude that morning, bustling and hectoring, outfitting himself with pads of paper and pencils from Denton’s desk, appropriating a never-used leather dispatch case given him by Emma Gosden (‘You’re never going to use this, right? Shame to waste it’), then swaggering off like a diplomatic courier in mufti. He left behind him an already exhausted Maude who was, as well, terrified of Rupert and who armed himself with biscuits to be produced whenever the dog looked his way.

‘I think I’d like to give notice, sir,’ Maude said as he was taking away Denton’s breakfast dishes.

Mindful that he hadn’t paid him, Denton produced a half-crown he’d got from Harris and said, ‘Could it wait until Monday? It’s rather a bad time.’

‘Oh - yes, sir - it’s only Mr Atkins is so—He’s very particular.’

‘One of his finest qualities.’

‘And then there’s the dog, sir.’

‘Just keep feeding him biscuits, Maude; he’ll follow you around like a, mmm, dog.’

Maude picked up the coin. ‘Is this in addition to my wages, sir?’

Denton sighed, muttered that it must be.

Maude went down the room with the tray; behind him, Rupert kept pace, anticipating a feed before they reached the bottom of the stairs.

Denton could do nothing until other people brought him information. It was no good to say that he should have done the work himself; in fact, he had neither the knowledge nor the patience to do what Mrs Johnson’s five women were doing. Nor could he cause them to work faster, although he now tried to do just that: he walked over to Mrs Johnson’s and asked how the work was coming, then muttered that today was their last day.

‘They’re entirely aware of the day, Mr Denton!’ Mrs Johnson, although she depended on him for work, was not going to suffer him gladly. ‘It does no good to try to hurry them along.’

‘I wasn’t trying to, mmm, hurry … Only thinking, maybe something had, you know, uh—’ He held out a ten-pound note. ‘This is for the earlier, um, bonus.’ She seemed relieved to get it but didn’t encourage him. He said, ‘If you hear anything—’

‘Mr Denton, I will send you a message by hand the
instant
I know something! Until then—’ She stood in her doorway like a guard, her chin out.

‘Yes, mmm, of course - you’re right, yes—But the instant, the moment - as soon as you know something—Time really is of the—’

She thanked him for the money and closed the door.

So Denton walked. He thought he walked aimlessly but found himself outside the building that housed Mulcahy’s Inventorium. No policeman was visible, so he crossed the street, at first merely pacing along the building’s front, then going in and retracing his steps of days before. The massive locks were gone from Mulcahy’s door, replaced by two smaller ones and a sign that said ‘Metropolitan Police Premises - Keep Away’. The broken lock to the roof had been replaced, as well, the new one sealed with a police tag. Nobody was about, however, and nobody approached him either coming in or going out: the press had lost any little interest it might once have had in R. Mulcahy.

He walked some more, now down City Road to the warren of old streets around Finsbury, then found himself standing in the Minories and going on to look again at the door behind which Stella Minter had been killed. The constable and the police sign were gone; the room, he was sure, was as yet untenanted by anybody else. Might never be, in fact, its legend now too grim.

He turned away and walked through the new terraces south of Victoria Park, the great bustle of the city nowhere more visible than in these places where building was going on - carts moving in and out, carpenters on scaffolding, a monstrous machine driving piles somewhere with a sound like that from the forge behind Mulcahy’s building - a sense of impending event, of something coming for which great hurry and noise were necessary. The event being, he supposed, the building of the next London terrace, and the next, and the next.

Then he walked back to Mrs Johnson’s (‘I haven’t been home; I thought you might have—No? I’m so sorry—’) then west, then north on York Road along the cattle market and into Kentish Town and another plain where new houses would soon stand. At the moment, it was a field of rubble, devastation as if after a war, with, near the centre, a raw, new building rising alone - a pub. This one was faced with green tile that shone in the white winter light. As he watched, two wagons, looking like centipedes, crawled in from the farthest corner, and men the size of ants began to unload iron pipe, the rattle and clink of the pipes reaching him long after he had seen them dropped. Then he headed south again, paralleling the Great Northern and Midland lines, the trains pounding along the tracks towards the depots in Camden and Somers Towns, their whistles like screams. He wondered how anybody in the new houses that would rise could tolerate the noise, then realized that they could and would: this was
London
, where there must be always more noise, more houses, more workers - cram them in, stuff them in, subject them to noise and dirt - they will accept it and then love it. He thought of Harris’s
We need a revolution
and thought,
No, he’s wrong; this is what we want, this world, this noise, this bustle.
This
is the revolution
.

In the midst of which a murderer, eating his morning sausage, laughs.

I could do with a revolution that took him with it
, Denton thought, heading homeward. But perhaps, then, the murderer was the revolution Harris wanted, an eruption of violence from within. It would be a grim revolution, then. Harris, he thought, had something more dramatic and final in mind.

He stopped again at his own house to ask Maude if any messages had come, learned none had, went off to Privatelli’s to eat Italian food he didn’t taste; then he walked on, down into the City, across the river (looking north, trying to see where Mulcahy’s roof must be), crossing back over Waterloo Bridge, his legs tiring now, grateful for clocks that told him that the day was looking towards its end: grateful because it would be over soon, failure looked in the face, something else waiting up ahead.

And so he came back to his own house about four. He let himself in, took off his coat and hung it, walked up and down the long room, put water on for tea. Only then was there a sound from below - slow footsteps on the stairs (he whirled around, startled despite himself), then the door opening. It was Atkins, much chastened.

‘My very own Isandhlwana,’ he said. ‘Disaster.’

Denton watched his last hope die but smiled to reassure him. ‘Well - you tried.’

‘Oh, yes, the saddest words of voice or pen, “I tried.”’ Atkins looked under Denton’s arm. ‘You making tea? Maude’s got tea downstairs. Want some?’

‘No, the water’s hot; I’ll make fresh.’

‘Well, then. Pour me a half cup, if you will. My confidence in myself is shaken.’

They sat by the cold fireplace, Denton in his armchair. Atkins had dragged the hassock to the hearth and sat with his chin on his fists, staring into the cold grate. ‘Bloody hell,’ he said.

‘No Stella Minter, then?’

‘If you wanted grown women, maiden name of Minter, Stella, I could provide you with two! But neither had a girl child between 1883 and 1886, did they? I could provide you with several dozen ladies, maiden name Minter, who had girl children between 1883 and 1886, but none of them by name Ruth! And none of them match to any woman, maiden name of Minter, what had a baby girl she named Rebecca between 1885 and 1888. Now, I can give you two Rebeccas born to women whose maiden names were Minter, born in the right years, but they don’t have older sisters, do they? Oh, brothers, oh,
yes
! They got brothers enough to relieve the siege of Ladysmith, but they don’t have sisters! You follow me, General? My idea about the maiden names was bleeding stupid!’