The Haunted Martyr

by Kenneth Cameron

  ‘The boy died. He was alive when they got him to hospital, but the medicos couldn’t save him. Sorry.’

  Denton, slumped in a hard chair with his hands in his trousers pockets, tried to shrug. ‘He said his life was ruined. Kids are damned stupid.’ He had been two hours at Division, explaining over and over what had happened.

  ‘He’d have got at most a year or two. Get him a good barrister—he’d inherited some money, hadn’t he?—he’d have been all right.’

  ‘At seventeen, you don’t see it that way. “Life” means the next six months.’

  Munro made a sound that might have been agreement. He put the paper aside. ‘You’re satisfied this “Cherry” is one of the kids who sang in Naples?’

  ‘Edouardo diToledano.’

  Munro nodded. ‘I got on to Birmingham by phone and gave them that name. Waiting to hear from them.’

  ‘Anything new on Maltby?’

  Munro was looking at a pencilled sheet somebody had brought him. ‘As right as you or me. A .22 up high, they took the slug out like you’d pick a gooseberry—it was right there against the bone. Cracked the bone, of course.’

  ‘We knew that much at three o’clock.’

  ‘Well, nobody’s shot him again since. He’ll be fine. Sort of thing looks good on the police application—“Victim of shooting while trying to prevent a crime”. We may have to give him a medal.’

  ‘I’ll go see him. It could be argued that he saved my life.’

  ‘You mean you could have done it better without him.’

  Denton shook his head. ‘I mean I’d rather have taken that chance myself. He’s just a kid.’ He eyed Munro from under his brows. ‘Make a good cop, Munro.’

  Munro folded his arms and sighed. ‘I’d be home now if this hadn’t happened. It’d been a quiet day until I was told there’d been a shooting at the Albany. Then I find it’s three shootings. Then I find it’s you.’ He swivelled his neck and arched his back to stretch it. ‘I suppose I’ll get stuck with telling the Naples coppers about it. Lot of fun that’ll be, trying to explain it to a crowd of Dagos.’

  ‘Just the same fun it’ll be for them, trying to understand you.’ Denton looked moodily into the nearly empty room; his thoughts were turning again to Janet and his anger. ‘That boy’s room looked like the last act of Hamlet. At least nobody wanted to charge me with the shootings.’

  ‘Actually, they thought about it. It was your derringer, after all. And you admitted to having the .22 in your pocket when the coppers arrived. However, you seem to have weaselled your way out of it.’

  ‘I didn’t even have to call my solicitor this time. The law is a wondrous thing.’

  They sat in silence for a long minute. Munro said, ‘You interested in supper? It’s going to be a long evening.’

  ‘I think I’d best go home. There are some things that—’

  A telephone rang at the far end of the room. Both men waited. Somebody shouted Munro’s name and he got up, saying in a satisfied tone, ‘About time.’ He went off. Denton stared at his own boots. He would go home, he thought, and, painful as it would be, confront Janet. She had to be made to understand that she had wronged him. Humiliated him, although that was the least of it. She done him wrong. They had been going wrong for months; he had fooled himself into believing that they hadn’t. The fault was his as well as hers, but what had happened at the church was unforgivable; if it meant the end of their relationship, then—

  ‘The boys in Brum.’ Munro was falling back into his chair. ‘They actually got off their arses and did something. Sent a detective, an actual detective and not a bluecoat, out to see the real J. Cherry. Turns out Cherry collared an Edward diToledano twenty-two years ago for assault and robbery. DiToledano had almost killed a householder with a bludgeon. Brum jury took that seriously. Twenty years’ hard labour, reduced to seventeen and a bit for being a good lad. Maybe explains how Cherry speaks English with a Brum accent.’

  ‘How’d he get to Birmingham?’

  ‘No idea. Coppers are checking. Maybe we’ll find out from the man himself—he’s got a hole in his side, but it isn’t mortal. All doped with morphine at the moment.’

  ‘He’ll hang.’

  ‘He will if we can lay the steam underground death to his account, but unless he admits it—which he won’t—I doubt we’ll even go to court with it. I’ve got somebody checking to see if he was one of the witnesses, maybe used a different name. He must have been right there if he pushed the chap off the platform. From what you say, he has the ballocks to’ve given information that it was an accident and he saw the whole thing.’

  ‘He’ll hang in Italy if not here.’

  ‘Let’s hope so. But it’s a God-awful process, them being foreigners. You sure you have him dead to rights on the old man’s death?’

  Denton nodded.

  ‘It’s one thing to be sure, and another to have proof.’

  ‘I saw the two of them the night they did it. It was dark; and defence counsel would make hash of it, maybe, but it’s a point. Second, there’s Spina, the photographer; he’ll remember Cherry. Third, there’s the cock-and-bull story of him being a detective and showing us his chemical, which was a complete swindle. Then there’s the morgue doctor, who would testify that the old man’s neck was broken with a twisting motion, and the lack of blood that points to him being dead when he went down the stairs. And finally, there’s me and Maltby, who heard Cherry as much as admit he and the boy murdered the old man.’

  ‘“As much as”.’

  Denton dismissed the scepticism with an angry hand. ‘Once they’ve searched Easleigh’s flat, they’ll come up with more. I think there’ll be a photo showing Cherry and the boy in Naples—in the photo I had, it looks as if Cherry is pointing towards the photographer. I think he was dragging Easleigh along to have their picture taken together. He wanted it as proof they’d been there. More power over the kid.’

  ‘Self-incrimination?’

  ‘I don’t think he cared about that. He cared about making the boy helpless. The way he’d been helpless. It’s all about revenge, Munro. It’s Naples—when you’re helpless, the only justice you believe in is revenge. My guess is that if he could have, he’d have cut the old man’s cock and balls off and stuffed them into his mouth after he killed him, but they weren’t there to be cut off.’

  ‘Forty-five years is a long time to bear a grudge.’

  ‘As the old man wrote in his diary—his diary of his sins and his penitence—“It is a carnal sin to take childhood away from a child”. That’s what he’d done to diToledano. And to that poor drunken bastard Michele, who was also killed by diToledano, I suppose, but they’ll never prove it. Or give a damn.’

  He uncoiled himself from the chair and stood, moving as if his weight had doubled, as perhaps it had: he was heavy with anger and hurt and the anticipation of what would happen with Janet. ‘I’m heading home.’

  ‘Lucky man.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  Denton’s house felt cold and alien. His suitcase waited inside the front door, as if the house wanted him gone; over it, Atkins had draped an overcoat and placed a hat that he judged, Denton supposed, proper for travelling.

  Denton called to Atkins. The cold house’s silence announced its emptiness. He looked at his watch. If he was to catch his train for Paris, he should leave.

  He went upstairs and, still wearing his overcoat, went to his bedroom; there, as he expected, were fresh clothes laid out for the journey. Denton looked at them, touched them as if they were objects he didn’t understand, perhaps gifts from the so far hidden residents of the house. He looked at his watch again. He went down to Atkins’ floor, where Rupert, taking up most of the little sitting room by lying on his side, raised his head, looked at him and dropped his head again with an audible thud. Denton stepped over him and went out into the back garden, then across it to the door in the garden wall. The door was locked. He had no key: that had been their arrangement.

/>   His rage flared again and he raced through his house and, hatless, out to the pavement and around and up her street, took her front steps two at a time and pounded on the door. Only a dim light was burning inside, something from an inner room. He leaned back and looked up, could see no lights on the floors above. He pounded on the door again.

  ‘Nobody home,’ a voice said from below. Denton looked over the railing. A one-eyed face looked up at him, light flooding from a door behind him.

  ‘Cohan!’ It was the former boxer who lived down there with his wife.

  ‘Oh, it’s you. Thought you’d gone off to Italy.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Gone.’ The eye looked up at him. As if grudging the information, Cohan said, ‘She didn’t say where. Not sure she knew where. She was here for maybe an hour, but she went away.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Late in the afternoon.’

  Denton swore and screwed his body around to put his watch in the light. She had been gone for several hours. He said, ‘Let me in.’ The eye looked at him, thought about it, disappeared. A full minute later, the front door opened. He went through her house in a kind of frenzy, found everything there except, he thought, her most severe clothes, the clothes she wore for business, for the university. The gaudy dresses she wore at home were still in her closet. Nothing that she might have cared for—books, music, mementoes—was missing. If she were truly gone, she had taken nothing of herself, of the self that he knew. As if, perhaps, leaving him, she had left part of herself as well.

  He ran out of the house and got a horse cab to Westerley Street. The house there was locked, the curtains drawn. Black crape hung on the door. In a downstairs window was a sign: To Let. He knocked and knocked.

  Nothing.

  He found another cab and went back to her house and wandered through it and thought he was going to do something terrible and stupid, throw something down the stairs or put a fist through a window or a wall. His earlier rage had rotted into something softer and self-pitying. He tried to play a few notes on her piano, walked again, stopped at a window with his face in his hands. Scenarios of the future without her careened through his mind: back to casual affairs or the whorehouse, long bouts of loneliness and inertia, back to heavy drinking. He would sell his house, maybe go back to America. Or he would go looking for her. Or he would give up writing and lose himself in exhausting work. Farming again.

  He looked at his watch. He had missed the boat train.

  His mood changed again, still black but now angry again.

  It was all a way of saying, How could she do this to me? He said it to himself in each of the rooms, and at last he heard the me. It made him croak out a laugh. The great me. It made him groan; it made him ashamed; it made him feel weak in the knees. If this was all about me, what was all that shit about love? He wasn’t nineteen: love wasn’t a search for a mirror.

  It was as if the end of love affected only one of two. Yet she must be feeling something, too: relief, misery, joy, along with the grief over Ruth Castle, which must be entirely real and perhaps all-encompassing. He had to face the likelihood—no, the fact; he had been confronted with it for days—that she loved Ruth Castle. Perhaps her great me was being entirely spent on grief. Perhaps she felt nothing for him yet. And when she did?

  He sat at her desk, surrounded with the neatly arranged residue of her university life—books, papers, pens, her inkwell. One pen lay at an angle, as if it had been thrown aside. The cover of the inkwell was open. One pigeonhole in the rank above the writing surface looked untidy, writing paper from which a sheet or sheets had been pulled, drawing out others an inch. He looked to see what she had been doing, found nothing, and looked in the wastebasket on the floor. A crumpled paper, balled small as if in anger, lay there.

  He opened the paper on the desk’s green leather surface.

  It was a letter—to him.

  ‘I am leaving you—when you read this, I shall be gone. I can’t bear the weight of what you call your love for me any more. I do not want to be loved. I want to be somewhere by myself and look at a different world.

  ‘I know you will be hurt by this—and this is part of the burden of being loved. I don’t want to be able to hurt you. You or anybody.

  ‘For God’s sake find yourself some woman who wants your love. Barring that, find yourself a whore who is a better liar than I am.’

  She hadn’t signed her name. Nor had she sent it, of course. Because she had thought better of it? Or because she had thought worse?

  The bitterness of her last sentence made him sick. Then he saw that it could be read two ways: find yourself a whore who will lie about what she feels and thinks; or find yourself a whore who can hide her own crippled self. Read either way, it was terrible.

  He walked into the little parlour, white and pale grey with bits of her bright colours, and went to the front window, sightless, heedless.

  A cab was standing at the kerb. She was just stepping down from it.

  He ran to the door and wrenched it open. She was looking in her handbag to pay the driver, but when she heard Denton she looked up and, seeing him, squared her shoulders and stared at him. What was it she was expecting? His rage? His violence? Certainly he shouldn’t have been standing on her doorstep. The cab driver looked from one of them to the other, his expression saying that he understood that something was up and he wanted to leave before it overflowed on him. On his great me.

  She gave the driver money and came a couple of steps towards Denton. She said, ‘I was going away. I got as far as Victoria.’

  The cab driver went past her with her luggage, only two bags, and stood at the bottom of the steps and raised the bags a few inches to show Denton that it was his turn to take them. Denton went down and took a bag in each hand. Janet flushed. She went past him, pulling her skirt aside so it wouldn’t brush him. This was not the way she had thought her return would go, he guessed.

  He went in behind her and dropped the bags in the peculiar little entry—lozenge-shaped in the rear because of the fireplaces behind the wall on each side—and followed her into the parlour. She hadn’t taken off her awful hat but stood there as if she were meaning to go away again.

  He said, ‘I didn’t mean to…be here when—I didn’t think you’d come back.’ He was babbling. ‘I read the letter. In your wastepaper basket. I shouldn’t have—’

  ‘I sent you a nicer one in the post. You’ll have it tomorrow.’ She had great courage: she looked him in the eye, her back straight, made no apology. ‘The first one was too cruel.’

  ‘Some of it.’

  ‘I meant for you not to follow me. It’s been awful these last weeks. I thought I wanted to get away from you, but at Victoria, I knew it was wrong. I was sitting in the train. All that banging of doors. Like the end of the world. I couldn’t do it.’

  Her eyes were crystalline with tears. Not for him, he thought, but for the implacable situation, from which there was no running away.

  ‘You love Ruth Castle,’ he said.

  Her head went back; there was the same straightening of her spine he had seen at the kerb when she had seen him in the doorway and known she would have to deal with him. ‘I loved Ruth once. She was all I had. My anchor. Then I found she was shallow, and she drank too much, and I had to leave her.’ She winced. He could have said, As you left me, but he didn’t. She gave him time to say it or something worse and then said almost defiantly, ‘When she was dying, I loved her again. I’m sorry, Denton.’ Her face was haggard with, he realised, grief.

  His rage had killed itself on that rock, his great me. Seeing her through the window, he had felt it revive, but it had gone for good now. ‘You’ve told me over and over you didn’t know what love is.’

  ‘I was wrong. Or I lied.’

  ‘I love you.’

  Her face toughened, tightened; he knew the look. ‘Before, with Ruth—we were lovers. Do you understand?’

  ‘Was it all—with me—was that what you meant
by a whore who was a better liar than you?’

  ‘Oh, God! That was stupid; it’s why I tore it up. No, I meant…you deserve better. You shouldn’t have read it.’

  He felt himself flush, embarrassed, humiliated, having to know and humiliated because he had to know and couldn’t find the words.

  She understood without his saying it. ‘Oh, the sex, you mean?’ she said. ‘No, it was real. No. I hadn’t been with anybody since Ruth’s house, and it was like…discovering something impossible, like a lost city or an ocean. I was genuine with you, Denton, but I loved Ruth.’ Her face softened. ‘You can’t change the past. You can’t improve me.’

  ‘I don’t want to improve you. I want you as you are.’

  She came closer to him but stayed more than an arm’s length away. Her eyes were still shiny; so were his, he supposed. She tried to smile, then shook her head.

  ‘I’m going back to Naples,’ he said. ‘I’d be gone now, but I missed the train.’ He added, as if it would explain everything, ‘I have to apologise to DiNapoli.’ He swallowed, found it difficult. His voice was hoarse as he said, ‘Come with me.’

  She smiled, not very happily.

  So they stood, she in travelling clothes and a hat, he with his hair messed from his rage, looking into each other’s tears. They knew what we learn with difficulty: this is an imperfect world and we are imperfect creatures, and the great emotions that bring us our happiest moments always bring pain in their luggage. We are surrounded with the ghosts of our own imperfection.

  He moved towards her.

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  All the characters and events portrayed in this work are fictitious.