The Frightened Man (32 page)

Janet Striker leaned forward. ‘What were the girls like?’

‘Pathetic. Not out of want, I don’t mean pathetic that way, but off to themselves all the time and lonely. You could tell. Like they was dying for company, for conversation. Nice enough girls, mind.’

‘Did you ever hear them talk about Stella Minter?’

Penrose stared at her. ‘
That’s
an odd one. That’s right odd, I mean it.’

‘Why?’

‘How could you know about that?’ He looked at them with sudden suspicion, as if they had revealed some incriminating secret - a tail, or an odour of brimstone. Then he thought better of it. ‘It was a game they played, the two sisters. It was sort of a tea party or something - all in dumb show, mind, except for the odd old cup or a rock they’d picked up. But I’d look down from our window - I’d have put my feet up for a bit - and, there they’d be out in the garden, except there wasn’t no garden then, jabbering to each other and playing at pouring tea - I got that much - and other stuff I couldn’t tell, like talking to people that wasn’t there, and so on. I went down one day, I had something to fix on our back door, and the little one sees me and she says - they was always eager to talk - she says, “We’re playing cellar-minto.” Or that’s what I thought she said. Made no sense , but I thought it was some word they’d made up;
I
don’t know kids’ games. Then later, another day, she said it again and I got it as stellar-minto. Stellar-minto, all right, makes no sense to me either, but so what? Now here you come along and say it again, I haven’t heard it in, what? - four years. And it all comes right back. What’s it mean, then?’

‘It’s a girl’s name - Stella Minter.’

He looked at her, frowned. ‘What’s that mean, then - we’re playing Stella Minter? Playing at somebody else? Making fun?’

‘More like being somebody else.’

Penrose went on frowning, then shook his head; he put his hands on the table as if to push himself up, and Denton hurried to say, ‘What sort of man was Satterlee?’

Penrose grunted, a single scornful sound. ‘Harold Satterlee was the sort you don’t want hanging about. Full of himself. Drove his workmen like billy-o; that’s why the company hired him, I suppose. I had one run-in with him, that was all I needed to see of him.’

‘What happened?’

‘Look, mate, I’ve really got to go. I’ll make this quick.’ But it was clear that Penrose liked the chance to tell the story. ‘Satterlee comes to me and says he wants me to refuse to sell beer to his men in the middle of the day - says it slows them down in the p.m. I said that was bleeding nonsense and I wouldn’t do it. He says if I don’t do it, he’ll go to the company and close me down. Well, I laughed in his face! I said to him, see here, my man, they didn’t build this pub first because they liked the look of it, you know; they built it so the workmen can grab a pint! You go and tell the company to shut it down, and they’ll shut
you
down.
You’ll
be out on the street, not me. Well, he knew I was right, but he got mad as a wet hen. Swore terrible, put his face in mine, said he was going to pound me. So I showed him my friend in need -’ Penrose pulled only the handle of a leather-covered truncheon from his trouser pocket - ‘and said I’d have him level on the ground before he could swing a fist. Well, he knew I’d do it, so he stomps off bellowing and never spoke to me again. Nor could his kids after that - they’d look away if they saw me. I felt that sorry for them. The bigger one, Alice, she could have been pretty, but she had a hard time of it. And a hard time since, I’d wager.’

‘It’s she who’s dead, we think,’ Janet Striker said.

‘Ah, poor tyke. How?’

‘Murdered.’ She glanced at Denton. ‘If it’s the same girl. Look here, Mr Penrose, it’s important that we find the Satterlees. I take it they’re not here any more. Where have they gone?’

Penrose, on his feet now, shook his head. ‘No idea, and good riddance. The company might know - he might’ve gone someplace else to do the same job for them.’ He shook his head again. ‘Murdered! You never know what tomorrow will bring, do you?’

‘What’s the company?’

He looked perplexed, as if everybody knew what the company was. ‘Britannic Improvement. Their name’s all over London.’ He said the name again, as if they might be slow. Then he shook hands with both of them, muttered ‘murdered’, and was gone.

Neither of them had done more than sip the ale, so they left it on the table. Both were silent in the cab, heading back through evening streets towards the Marlborough Road station. It was colder and a few flakes of snow were falling, melting as they touched the pavement. At last he said, ‘I’ve got to find him.’

‘Them,’ she said. ‘It’s the whole family, Denton - and they may be the wrong ones.’

They rode along. He said, ‘How do we find them?’

‘The company, I suppose. If they’ll tell us. Tomorrow’s Saturday; the company offices will be open, but if the important people aren’t there, it might be hard to get them to tell us. “Oh, you must wait for Mr Smith to return on Monday.” Does it really matter, Denton, whether it’s tomorrow or Monday?’

‘It matters to me.’

They waited on the cold platform, then sat silently side by side like a long-established couple who’d been having an argument. At Baker Street, they changed to the Metropolitan Line and went on, silent, swaying, until he said abruptly, ‘We’ll get out at King’s Cross and walk.’

‘I don’t want you to walk me home.’

‘We’re going to my typewriter’s on Lloyd Baker Street. I think I know how to find the Satterlees.’

‘But it’s impossible, Mr Denton!’ Mrs Johnson was less scandalized than usual because Denton had a woman with him; she had even let them both inside the front door. ‘It’s after seven o’clock, Mr Denton - they’ve worked all day and they’re not going to work all night!’

‘I’ll pay double! Triple! They won’t have to work all night - it’s one name, one name!’

‘Mr Denton, they’ve been three days, looking for Ruths and Rebeccas; now you want them to look for Alices and Ednas. I’m sure they’ll be happy to try again on Monday.’

Janet Striker said in her most severe voice, ‘The Metropolitan Schools Board building is open until nine o’clock. I know, because I’ve had to go to meetings there. We have two hours - more, Denton, if you’re not averse to bribing people.’

Mrs Johnson sucked in her breath, as harsh a rebuke as she ever allowed herself.

‘It will also cost something to prise the records out at this hour. Mrs Johnson, do you know what records they were looking at and in what office?’

Mrs Johnson wilted under Janet Striker’s tone. She didn’t know, she murmured; she hadn’t been doing the work, only organizing it; Frederica Tilley had been the one actually there and running things.

‘Where is she now?’ Janet Striker demanded.

‘Home, I suppose, slaving all day as she’s been doing. Several streets away. No, of course I don’t have a telephone - nor she - it’s ten minutes’ walk—’

They made it in six, to find Frederica Tilley relaxing with sherry and sausages in a room above an upholsterer’s. Once she’d got over the surprise of the visit, she told them quite lucidly where the records were in the Schools Board building, and precisely which volumes would hold the most recent reports. ‘But it’s way down Blackfriars Road and a frightful walk from the tube station! You’ll never—’

Then they were in a motorized cab speeding through freezing streets to the south bank. The city was dark but peopled, everybody hugging himself, shoulders hunched, hands at throats to hold collars closed against a wind that seemed to be blowing from the Arctic. Overhead, clouds scudded in the reflected light of London, low and fast and spitting a snowflake now and then. Paying the cab fare, Denton counted his money and wondered if it would last.

Janet Striker, he found to his surprise, knew all about bribing people. When she saw his hesitation, she held her hand out for money and said crisply, ‘I’ll do it.’ She got them into the building - a shilling for the night porter - and into the records room - half a crown for the clerk, half a crown for the watchman - and down at a table near the records themselves. It cost them another crown when the building closed at nine, and then they sat in a big, cold room, the brass Aladdin lamp on the table the only light, bound books of handwritten school reports piled around them.

‘Have you any more money?’ Mrs Striker said at ten-thirty.

He blushed. ‘Coins.’

‘We never had supper.’ She disappeared and came back after ten minutes. ‘The night porter’s gone for food. And drink. I’m afraid we’re entertaining two watchmen, the porter and somebody he calls “Old Geoff ”.’ She smiled into the island of light. ‘If any of “the upper staff ” find we’re here, it’ll cost a good deal more.’ She sat down. ‘Your money ran out. We’re on my shilling now.’

‘I can’t let you.’

‘You can’t stop me.’ She opened a book with a bang. ‘What bad fists people have! My eyes are crossing from the handwriting.’

At half past midnight, she suddenly slapped her worn hand down on the ledger. ‘I have them!’ She raised her voice. ‘Satterlee, Edna, aged 12, East Ham Progressive Central School.’ She looked up at him, her face weary, ironic, smiling. ‘Don’t,’ she said, ‘don’t do it, Denton,’ because apparently she knew he wanted to kiss her.

Chapter Nineteen

A hard frost had laid a sheen of palest grey over grasses and had left a gloss of black ice on the streets. East Ham beyond the train station was a bleak expanse of seemingly identical streets of identical houses, all joined into two-storeyed rows under shallow-peaked roofs. At intervals, ancient wetland persevered as dun-coloured grass, now almost white, matted into clumps and hummocks and marked here and there by pools of open water whose edges had frozen overnight. Always, beyond any view that opened - inevitably over the marshes - there was a jagged skyline of factories and the rising plumes of smoke and, this bitter morning, steam.

Denton and Mrs Striker, their cab jogging slowly between the rows of houses, were silent. It was only a little after seven; working-men were moving on the street, dinner buckets hanging from one hand; an odour of pipe smoke, coal and food hung on the chilly air. Denton shivered in his overcoat; the revolver, snug in its pocket, was icy to the touch.

East Ham had been a village for centuries, an inhabited place before the Romans, probably; it had seen farms and orchards in the middle ages and later. Now, London had engorged it as a place for the working people needed to stoke the great British engine.
Mean streets
, he thought as they clopped along, but that expression had been used for a place far worse than this, the streets here in fact not mean but simply spiritless, grim, repetitive. The farmer in him disliked the erasure of the farms.

‘There are far worse places,’ Mrs Striker said as if they had been discussing it. He grunted. She said, ‘People don’t leave places like East Ham to go back to the farms, Denton.’

‘That’s because there’s no work on the farms.’ He sighed. ‘They’d pave the whole country, if they could.’

‘And if people needed houses to live in, I’d say it was a good thing.’

He glanced aside at her, thought how unsentimental she was - not always an attractive trait. This morning, she looked ugly to him, pinched, her face closed as if by the cold. He wished he’d come on this part of the journey alone. They jogged on for another several minutes, and he said nothing, and she, probably understanding him, didn’t try to talk.

‘Almost there,’ the driver called down to them.

Denton put his head out to look. Off to their left, a different kind of prospect was opening - no low houses and streets, for a change, but a levelled field of the kind he’d come to recognize. It was big, perhaps ten acres, stretching away as flatly as a bed; on three sides, the streets lined it like walls; on the fourth, he could see open space, a line of trees and, distantly, a steeple: this, for now, was the end of the gobbling-up of East Ham.

‘You sure you want the pub?’ the driver said. He was pointing with his whip. The building was far over towards the outer edge of the field; between them and it was a frosted expanse with sewer pipes and water connections sticking up where macadamized streets would run.

‘Is there another?’ Denton said.

‘This’s the only one where they’re still building. I can’t get you closer than the edge here - can’t do it! Wouldn’t risk the horse on them fillings.’ After another hundred yards, he pulled the horse up. ‘Can’t get no closer.’

They got down. Their breath steamed in the windless air. The driver was pointing again, showing them how they could pick their way among piles of building stone and lumber. Denton had already seen the route, noted how it had been pioneered by other feet.

‘Good enough for the workmen, I guess it’s good enough for us,’ he said to her. ‘You needn’t come, if the walking’s too hard.’

She gave him a look. ‘You can’t get rid of me now, Denton; it’s too late.’

They walked into the field. It was made of fill; nobody had been too choosy about what the fill was or where it came from. Denton saw broken crockery, a rusted gear poking up like a jawbone. There was a thin smell of sewage: it was said that some of the new London was built on the cleanings of the old London’s privies.

‘We can ask there for Satterlee,’ she said, pointing at a cluster of men by a stack of cut stone.

‘We can see the pub,’ he said.

‘If the Satterlees are still there. Let’s ask.’

She irritated him, but he did as she wanted. They turned off the track that others had beaten and crossed the rough ground towards the men. He stumbled once over something hard, almost entirely buried and now frozen in, swore, caught himself, the pistol swinging heavily in the overcoat. When they came to them, none of the men paid any notice but stood as they were, gathered in a semicircle around a well-dressed man who had laid out a piece of paper as big as a tablecloth on the building stone. He was saying something about the water table and hydraulic pressure and cellar walls, but when Denton moved around the men to have a look at him, the man glanced up and said, ‘Yes?’ It was less a greeting than a challenge.