The Frightened Man tds-1

by Kenneth Cameron

  ‘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 w
ent 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.

  ‘Well, sir, it’s you,’ a big man said as he opened the door to Denton.

  ‘Hello, Bull.’ Fred Oldaston had fought bare-knuckled as the Lancashire Bulldog for fourteen years and had been the first Englishman to take Denton into a public house. He had also — same evening — taught Denton how to put a thumb into a man’s eye while punching him. Now fifty and two stone heavier than when he had fought, he was Mrs Castle’s conscience: ‘I keep them honest,’ he had said, meaning the clients. Now, he murmured, ‘Hurt your arm?’ as he closed the door behind Denton.

  ‘Somebody stabbed me, in fact.’

  ‘Fighting with knives, bad business, best stay out of it.’

  ‘I didn’t have much choice.’

  Oldaston took his coat and pointed through a fringed and swagged doorway. ‘You know the route. Something to drink?’

  ‘I’d pass out.’ He went through the drapes and into a large parlour that was a couple of decades out of date, too much furniture and too much darkness, and that smelled of cigars and good perfume and coal fires. A man in evening dress was sitting in a corner with two women, one of whom looked expectantly at Denton; he passed on to a room beyond where a large table lamp with a globe painted with cherubs cast a glow the colour of a sunset. Mrs Castle was sitting where she always sat, in a large armchair surrounded with cushions, so that it was not possible to stand right next to her; the walls, surprisingly after the décor in the other rooms, were covered with a William Morris paper, but the rest was like the parlour — velvet and lace, a bulbous piano with paisley hanging from it like melting icicles, a sideboard big enough to have served as a back bar.

  ‘Well, here you are, then,’ she said. She held out a hand. ‘I ’eard you’d been ’urt. They say ’e tried to kill you, that true? The black silk thing is ever so elegant.’

  Denton squeezed her hand and sat down. She was probably in her forties but looked both older and younger, her face well preserved but weary, her abundant hair her own, her voice firm, her figure overstated but good. He thought her attractive but had never got any encouragement from her. ‘A bad cut is all,’ he said.

  ‘But in your own house, my dear.’ She had firmer control of the H that time.

  ‘You seem to know all about it.’

  ‘Well, friends of friends in the press, you know.’ She sipped champagne. She was one of those drinkers who are always one or two drinks gone but who never seem drunk; one day, he supposed, it would all crash down on her. ‘Can I call somebody for you?’ she said.

  ‘It’s you I came to see.’

  ‘Oh, I’m flattered. Poor old me.’

  She started to tell him some long story about HRH, whom she actually did know, although not absolutely recently. A lot of it was about horses, and Denton’s mind wandered. He watched, through the doorway, two or three more men in evening dress come in, then several women from another direction. The sound of male voices rose, then a woman’s, singing. Denton realized that one of the men was Hector Hench-Rose. When he sensed that Mrs Castle’s voice had changed tone, he knew that her story was over, and he smiled and nodded. When she stopped to pour herself more champagne, he said, ‘Maybe you can help me.’

  ‘My dear, I’d be delighted. Anything.’

  ‘I’d like to talk to somebody who knows the girls who work the street around the Minories.’

  ‘You’re ’urtin’ my feelin’s, my dear. Not going to be loyal to Westerley Street?’

  ‘Business. Writer’s business.’

  ‘What then, somethin’ about that killing? Is this about your arm?’

  ‘I’d like to find somebody who might help me talk to some of the girls.’

  Mrs Castle smoothed her gown. ‘I don’t know anybody in that end of town, I’m sure. Bit of a ragtag and bobtail there, little of everythin’. I never hire from there, you know, they don’t ’ave the style.’ She looked hurt. ‘Cow-girls and goose-girls.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it that way.’

  ‘Surprised you’d think it of me.’

  ‘I didn’t. I only thought you might know somebody who did. Know that area, I mean.’

  He had to apologize again, then wheedle her out of her mood, if it was genuine. She became roguish, then suddenly confiding. She really did know, or know of, all sorts of people, all sorts of stories. She seemed to be coming to some point, perhaps even a name, when Hector Hench-Rose came in with a very young woman, laughing and red-faced and rather tipsy for that early in the night.

  ‘Denton!’ he shouted, in case anybody in that part of London had missed his name. ‘Saw you when I came in! How’s that arm? I thought you had one foot in the grave, the way the papers went on. This is Yvonne, who’s a charmer, ain’t you? Ah, Mrs C, handsomer every time I see you.’ He kissed Mrs Castle’s hand and accepted a glass of champagne and proceeded to tell her all about a lot of police business that was almost certainly confidential. Yvonne stared into space, laughing when she thought she was supposed to, pulling at her clothes as if she had dressed too fast. Other people wandered in and out; an organ started to play a waltz a couple of rooms away. When Hench-Rose had finished his gossip, Mrs Castle looked at an ormolu clock and said, ‘Supper room’s open.’

  ‘Aha!’ Hench-Rose stood. He winked at Denton. ‘Join us? Little sustenance? I’ve a mind to visit the last act at the Palace of Varieties in Greenwich — care to join me?’ He didn’t wait for an answer, but in the doorway he called back over his shoulder with another shout of laughter, ‘Making rather a night of it!’ He was married, with several children; his wife was said to be shy.

  ‘Janet Striker,’ Mrs Castle said. ‘Mrs Janet Striker.’

  Denton let his expression ask the question.

  ‘The person you want, my dear. ’Ench-Rose can be an exhausting soul, can’t he. Thought he’d never come to the point. Gave me a chance to think, though. Mrs Janet Striker. The Society for the Improvement of Wayward Women.’

  ‘Sounds awful.’

  ‘It is awful. But she ain’t. Tough as tripe, but a lady, and not your mealy-mouthed do-gooder. She understands the lives the girls live. She tries to find other work for them, get them off the street, which is like tryin’ to bail the Serpentine with a fish fork, but she means well. I wouldn’t send you to most of the hypocrites in that line, but Janet Striker’s a woman who-’ She smiled, cat-like, disingenuous. ‘You’ll have to meet her to see what she is.’ She rested her chin on the fingers of one hand and stared at him. ‘I’m not sure she’ll take to you, Denton.’

  ‘That’s flattering.’

  ‘She doesn’t think much of men.’

  ‘And she’s a Mrs?’

  ‘All the more reason.’

  ‘What’s her husband like?’

  ‘He isn’t like anything — he’s dead.’ She raised the champagne bottle out of the bucket and found it empty. ‘Tell them to send in another as you go out, will you, my dear?’ she said. She was tired of him.

  This time, when he got
home to bed he stayed there. A pleasant languor had overcome him in the cab. He took one of Dr Bernat’s powders and crawled between the sheets and fell off the edge of the world.

  The Society for the Improvement of Wayward Women had an address in Aldersgate. The street was commercial but not prepossessing; the building was grim but not impressive; the office was as squalid as a land company in the Dakotas in mud season. Generations of heads had left hair oil in a smear above the chair rail; thousands of hands had left dirt on the doorjambs; God knows what had chipped the grey-green paint that covered the walls. It was not a setting where he expected to find women, but everybody there was female — a rather sullen, plain woman who guarded the outer office; a younger, morose woman behind a typing machine inside; and, in the far corner between two windows, Janet Striker.

  Her look of weariness reminded him of Mrs Castle’s, although it had been earned in another school, he thought. She had a face that had once been unmarked perhaps, was now frankly guarded, any stock of pity or sentimentality expended. Her hair, very dark, was pulled tight back over the top of her head and wound in flat circles that hid her ears like some peculiar helmet. She wore greys and browns, both dark, not so much nun-like, however, as business-like, the dress years out of fashion and mended down near the hem. If a man, she’d have been a manufacturer, he thought, of something entirely practical, shovels or water closets. Or perhaps a policeman; there was, in her steady, appraising look, something of Guillam.

  She had his card between her fingers. Denton was watching her eyes but taking in the fact that she had a telephone on the wall, wondering whatever for and then thinking it might be for calling the police. He didn’t know why he thought that — something fortress-like about the office, he thought. Warrior women.

  ‘What is it you want, Mr Denton?’ Her voice was soft, surprisingly low, genteel.