The Haunted Martyr

by Kenneth Cameron

  ‘How many of us did you plan to feed?’

  ‘I thought this chat we’re having would take a while. And there’s Rupert.’ Rupert was the dog.

  Atkins cracked open a linen serviette, dropped it with a flourish on Denton’s lap, then got one for himself and sat. ‘Tuck in, General, tuck in, you’ve been a soldier—you never know when your next chance to eat will come. All right, back to your murder that wasn’t a murder—who else?’

  Denton told him about Scuttini and the Camorra; Atkins’ view was that they’d have strangled him and thrown him into the tunnels under the house and nobody would have been the wiser.

  ‘The boys, then. E and M—the choirboys who tried to kill him, at least according to the ledger.’

  ‘For buggering their bums? Well, yes, if he said they tried to kill him once, I suppose they might try again. But that was when—back in the age of Napoleon?’ He gave Rupert a triangle of shortbread.

  ‘Eighteen sixty or thereabouts.’

  ‘Pardon my untutored maths, Major, but I make that to be forty-four years. They’ve waited all this time?’

  ‘They had to mature. They had to let their hatred grow. It fermented in their minds, soured, exploded.’

  ‘Sounds like cheap champagne. The mind goes all fizzy, then pop! I thought you were the one read all the psychology, not me. I’d say from my layman’s point of view that’s rubbish, but then I haven’t read the latest by Herr Doktor Poop-Fartlebee.’ Atkins was eating large pieces of smoked trout on buttered bread. ‘Anyway, you said that “M” was a drunkard who could hardly put one foot in front of the other.’

  ‘He could have been temporarily sober.’

  ‘And he said, “Oh, I’ll get my old pal ‘E’ and have another go at murdering old Geraldo.” Where’s “E” been all these years, by the way?’

  ‘Maybe he emigrated and came back, and it was he got in touch with Michele, fed him full of the old grievances, got him sober.’

  ‘Just happened to be able to creep into the old man’s palazzo, pretend to be ghosts by imitating kids having their backsides split.’

  ‘Might have had a key. He and Michele had lived there, you know. Could have stolen a key then and kept it.’

  ‘For forty-four years? Love a duck, you’ve a high opinion of the human capacity for devilment! Though I’ll grant you one point: somebody that had been that mistreated as a kid and had made himself some money and become somebody might just want to get back at his persecutor. Put the seal on his being a man, eh? Show he can’t be buggered any more? Think about it.’

  ‘I have thought about it. Was the smoked trout good?’

  ‘Capital. I offered you some. Try the cockles. All right, I’ll concede a lurid possibility for “E” and “M”, but I think it’s far-fetched. And there goes your argument for the photograph and the young lord—if it’s “E” and “M” grown middle-aged, where’s Lord Boyishness?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Meaning that you admit that idea is thinner than Irish soup.’

  Denton was eating a devilled egg and feeling better. How he wished he’d had Atkins back when Fra Geraldo had died! He said, ‘Then there’s that spirit message about the policeman.’

  ‘You mean a spook voice from a so-called medium you wouldn’t trust to give you a correct message from the telephone, much less the great beyond? Come off it. The spirit voice is a fiddle, nothing but a deliberately mysterious sentence that came out of a medium’s mouth; she might as well have said, The dressmaker is playing cricket.’

  ‘“The cop is doing a play.” Meaning the cop is acting a part.’

  ‘Which cop?’

  Denton shrugged and ladled custard over pound cake. ‘Then there’s the old man’s money. Everybody wants money, Sergeant.’

  ‘Was there money? You’re sure of that? Thought you told me somebody said the family had run through the money.’

  ‘He didn’t know for sure. Anyway, there’s the title. People would kill for a title, a lot of them.’ He thought of Mrs Newcombe, who would have destroyed her daughter’s life for a title.

  ‘They say they would, maybe. Hard to believe when you come to it. Try the Eccles cake—rather good.’ He woke Rupert to give him a piece.

  ‘And that would explain the photograph—that the face in the picture is the young lord, and the blurry one is the detective, who’s “acting a play”.’

  ‘And where did that photograph come from, I ask you. You say it came from some seaside artiste, but in fact he was brought to you by this Dago who forced himself on you from the very beginning—eh? Eh?’ Atkins was waving a cockle pick at him.

  ‘Don’t say “Dago”. DiNapoli didn’t force himself on me. Anyway, that was before I ever heard of Fra Geraldo. No, wait—it was just after the old man came to the pension to ask me for help.’

  ‘Aha! So the Dago had followed the old man to your place; like everybody in Italy, he knows Texas Jack and his doings, so he follows you and attaches himself to you like a limpet. Then when he’s done the old fellow in, he’s in a perfect position to influence your every move. He translates for you! You don’t know what people are really saying; he could be feeding you the whole Munchausen line! He’s in with the Camorra fellow—you said so yourself. He’s the one brings you the photographer. He’s your evil genius, Colonel. Playing Dago Svengali to your Trilby.’

  ‘I should never encourage you to go to the theatre.’

  ‘Have some jam cake.’

  ‘Mrs Striker thinks that DiNapoli is one of the world’s innocents.’

  ‘No offence to the lady, and I concede she has a wide knowledge of the world, but I think she missed a beat with this one. He sounds a thoroughly tricky sort. A man can smile and smile and be et cetera. Criminal past, into all manner of skulduggery, lives by his wits—at best shifty, Colonel, and could be lots worse.’

  ‘Why in the world would he murder Fra Geraldo?’

  ‘He was one of the choirboys. Or he’s working for that Camorra. Or…some reason we haven’t even thought of. I’ll get the cheese.’

  Denton looked around at the ruin of their tea. He shouted towards the stairs, ‘And more of those Scottish biscuits, while you’re at it.’ Rupert looked startled.

  He slept deeply, woke with an idea in his head and no memory of dreams: I was a fool to come to London.

  It was as if he’d thought it through overnight and now the idea was clear and entirely decided. Fra Geraldo, the photograph, the theatrical policeman, Cherry—it was all nonsense. What had he been thinking of?

  He faced an obvious truth: he’d come back to see Janet. The rest was self-deception.

  He pulled on a long robe, in which he felt like somebody in a bad play but which he needed because the house was infernally cold. He washed in cold water, finding no hot in the pipe; downstairs, he prowled his sitting room, looking for heat, finally started a fire in the grate and then boiled water on his spirit stove and made tea. He thought how quickly habits changed—in Naples, he would have been walking to his café—and wondered if thinking, the mind, changed in parallel, as they said in the electrical sciences: did he now think differently about the old man’s death because he was in London? It was true, Fra Geraldo seemed distant; the Palazzo Minerva was somewhat hard to visualise; the chapel seemed to have diminished. Was Naples a play, London reality? Or was Naples play, London work?

  It was not yet seven. Atkins seemed still to be asleep. The first mail had come through the slot before he heard Atkins letting Rupert out into the back garden. Denton got the mail, was coming up the stairs with it, not looking where he was going but reading the envelopes instead, when he almost ran into Atkins in the upper doorway.

  ‘Watchwhereyergoan!’ Atkins growled, swaying back into the sitting room. ‘Cripes, it’s you, Major, what’re you doing out of bed?’

  ‘Full of pep. The house is like an ice cave—what happened to our Dresden stove?’ The enormous porcelain thing filled an alcove near the stairs; it had been suppos
ed to be the heater for all the upper floors.

  ‘Oh, cripes.’ Atkins looked chagrined. He had not shaved yet, was wearing a robe so old the nap of the velour had been worn down to woof and warp. ‘With you not here, I got out of the habit of lighting it. I’m heated from the furnace.’ Denton had tried having a furnace put in, a disaster for the house except for Atkins’ quarters and the draper’s shop in the ground-floor front.

  ‘And no hot water.’

  ‘Well, I said I forgot, didn’t I? I’ll do it, I’ll do it—’ He scuttled up the room towards the stove.

  Denton had hoped for something from Janet. Even one of her telegrams would have given solace, but there was nothing. Among the bills, however, was an envelope with writing he didn’t recognise; on the back it said ‘F. Maltby’ and the address in Maida Vale Denton had got from Scotland Yard’s Recruitment Division.

  ‘Dear Mr Denton,’ the note inside said, ‘It was very good of you to write to me. I am well. Your friend Inspector Munro helped me and I think I will be joining the police force come September. May I call on you this afternoon? I have something to tell you. I am taking a course in criminal law and will be in your neighbourhood. Very sincerely yours, Frederick A. Maltby.’

  A visit that afternoon? That was unwelcome. Ruth Castle’s funeral would be this morning; he wanted time with Janet—of course, she would be grieving, he’d have to be available to her—and then, in a day or two, they’d head back to Naples. It was important to him to get her back there. They’d been happy there. Hadn’t they?

  ‘I think that the truth is I came back to London out of homesickness,’ he said to Atkins, who seemed to have got flames going in the porcelain stove and was huddling over the open door with his ratty robe pulled tight around his throat.

  ‘Better than some daft murder,’ Atkins said. ‘No offence intended.’

  ‘I wanted to see Mrs Striker, is the truth.’

  ‘Funeral today. So then it’s off to Italy again, is it?’

  Denton had come down to the alcove where he kept the spirit stove. ‘I certainly hope so. Tea?’ he offered.

  Atkins looked exasperated. ‘That’s my function, General!’

  Denton heard a muffled bark. Atkins headed for his stairs. ‘Cripes, I forgot Rupert. Everybody’s up too bleeding early today!’ He stamped down the stairs, and a few seconds later Denton heard the back door being opened. When, half an hour later, Atkins appeared, he was shaved and dressed in a clean high collar and shirt, black alpaca jacket and waistcoat and cinder-grey trousers; the Dresden stove was putting out more heat than a chameleon; and hot water flowed from Denton’s tap. He spent a while looking out his rear window into Janet’s garden and the blank windows of her house, then dressed in the black clothes that Atkins had laid out and went down to the sitting room to find a black silk hat, black gloves, ebony walking stick and black overcoat waiting.

  ‘I’ll be back by one. I’m not going to the graveside.’

  ‘Hope you’re not the only one there, if you don’t mind me saying. The line she was in, people fall off easily.’

  ‘Nonsense, there’ll be huge crowds. Ruth Castle was an institution.’ He held up Maltby’s note. ‘A young man may come by. Maltby. If he’s here before I am, stick him up here and give him something to read. He’s all right.’

  ‘Did I say he wasn’t? Never so much as set eyes on him.’

  ‘He gives the wrong impression sometimes.’ Denton pulled on the overcoat and put the top hat on his head. He detested top hats. ‘I look like a suburban undertaker.’

  ‘You look exactly the way you ought to look. Very respectable, if I may say so.’

  Denton studied the man in the mirror—the dangling grey moustache, the lined face, the peculiar hat that seemed to rest on the tops of his ears, the too-correct overcoat and gloves. ‘Texas Jack,’ he said with some sarcasm.

  Old St Pancras Church was an easy walk away, only across Euston Road and along Pancras Road. Denton took it quickly, his long legs eating up the pavement as the ebony stick rapped in tempo. Pancras Road was a thoroughfare for wagons and lorries delivering and picking up goods at the freight stations, and it was noisy with hooves and motors; it seemed hostile, as if not made for human beings, yet Old St Pancras Church, even from a distance, looked like something in a village, its grey stones soft among the greens of elms and the old churchyard—a watercolour in a surround of steel engraving. Nearing it, Denton saw that a sizeable crowd was milling about the door; closer still, he saw that most of the crowd were women. Turning in at the gate, he realised that he was in fact the only man.

  Some of the women turned to look at him. Their talk, which had been low, murmurous, fell off to a few voices nearest the church. All in blacks and purples and whites, they seemed to fit with the old stones. Many had their faces veiled. Of the faces he could see, Denton recognised none. These were not the ‘girls’ of Ruth Castle’s most recent crew; they would have moved to other houses as soon as she closed hers, perhaps had been sent by her while she could still manage as part of an informal rotation that kept new faces in the good houses of the big cities. The women he saw now were all older, some with grey hair, many looking middle-class and comfortably heavy.

  Uneasy with their stares, Denton took a turn in the churchyard, pretended to study a few of the stones. When he turned back, he saw another male figure entering the gate; he felt an impulse to rush to him but tamped it down because it was nobody he knew. The man was old, small, bent. Less than a minute later, another man came in behind three more women. Denton recognised him.

  ‘Fred,’ he said as he hurried closer. They shook hands. Fred Oldaston had been her muscle, always a fixture at the door in a dinner suit; now, he looked uncomfortable in black serge and a black bowler, a mourning band on his arm. He said, ‘Damned glad to see you. I thought I was going to be the only one with danglers here.’

  Denton nodded at the old man. ‘Who’s he?’

  Oldaston squinted where Denton had indicated with his chin. ‘I think he used to come in to do the drains. Fancy him coming to her funeral.’

  ‘I thought the place would be full of her old clients.’

  Oldaston laughed. ‘It’s one thing to go to her house, another to tip your hat to her on the street. They won’t come.’

  Denton looked at the women, who were beginning to straggle into the church. ‘I don’t feel very welcome.’

  ‘I wasn’t sure, m’self. May not be, in fact. Mrs Striker sent me packing the day she arrived. Nothing personal, her and me always got along, but she said she didn’t want any men in the house. We’ll see if that goes for the church as well.’ Oldaston moved towards the church door. Several women hurried in, as if to get away from him, and, even though two of them spoke to him—they must all have known him, Denton supposed—they didn’t smile or drop back to talk with him.

  Oldaston stopped just short of the door, apparently to let all the women go in first. He turned with a chastened smile and said to Denton, ‘Thought I’d let them all get up front, slip into a back pew.’ He nodded at somebody behind Denton; Denton turned and saw the old man. He nodded; the old man nodded back and said, ‘Nice day. Sad time. Always good to me, she was. Paid on time, unlike some as thought they was better.’

  The last of the women disappeared through the door. Oldaston said, ‘Well,’ and shrugged himself into his clothes but didn’t move forward. Denton, annoyed at the notion that he should hang back and creep in like a poor relation, stepped around him and, planting the cane firmly as if to claim the ground under it, strode through the door.

  Janet was standing a few feet inside, her back to the sanctuary doors as if she were guarding them. She looked, he thought, dreadful, as drawn and hollow eyed as when she had had typhus. Her dress looked too big for her, perhaps was borrowed; her hair had been caught up any old how, with strands escaping down her neck. Never attractive in hats, she wore one that perched too far back on her head and looked as if it might fall off.

  ‘Janet,�
� he said. He was smiling, happy at last to see her. He moved forward to say something conventional about Ruth Castle’s death.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Her voice was like an angry man’s.

  Behind him, he heard Fred Oldaston suck in his breath. Denton said, ‘I’ve come because of Ruth—Janet, she was—’

  ‘Go away. Go away!’

  At that moment, he knew, she hated him. He felt his face go hot, then his neck and shoulders, and anger surged up through his body with the blood. At that moment, too, he hated her.

  He turned, knocking into Fred Oldaston, who was already backing out the door; behind him, the old man was standing on tiptoe, trying to see in. Denton stumbled, gave Oldaston a shove to the side and brushed past the old man as he rushed from the church. The old man said something; Oldaston muttered a curse, but Denton was already almost to the gate. He hurtled through, his face flaming, and turned and almost ran along the pavement towards Euston Road.

  The bitch! he thought. Those bitches! They could have told us. They could have let us know it was a twat party! They have telephones, some of them; Janet sends telegrams like they’re confetti, she could have done that. A whore’s trick, a fucking bloody whore’s trick on the men! Fucking congregation of cunts—!

  He could feel the snarl that was on his lips. The cane reached out as if he were trying to stab something, and it hit the pavement with a harsh crack. On Euston Road, people got out of his way; one woman, clearly frightened, cowered against a lamp-post with an arm raised to protect herself. On and on he went, cursing, infuriated, muttering to himself, devouring the small streets below Euston Road and racing at last along Coram Gardens and across Guilford Road and into Lamb’s Conduit Street.