The Frightened Man tds-1

by Kenneth Cameron

  He was still standing. There was no offer of a chair. There were no chairs, in fact, except in the outer room, where they were lined up around the walls like those in a clinic for the poor. He said, ‘I’m hoping you could help me.’

  ‘We’re not here to help men, I’m afraid.’ She put his card down towards him as if giving it back.

  ‘It’s about your, uh, particular area.’

  ‘This is an office that tries to help women find their way out of prostitution. As men are the reason they get into it, I doubt I can help you.’

  ‘I’d have said women get into prostitution for the money.’

  ‘Yes — and men have the money. When you’re starving, you sell what you can.’

  It wasn’t an argument he wanted to get into. The view that marriage itself was a kind of prostitution had once shocked him, now seemed fairly sensible — dramatized by Shaw but hardly original. ‘I’m sorry. I’m not here to argue.’

  ‘We’re busy here, Mr — Denton; please don’t take up our time.’

  He felt himself flush. ‘It’s about a girl who was murdered, ’ he said too quickly.

  ‘That’s a police matter. Are you with the police?’

  ‘I-’ He fought his irritation. ‘May I sit down and explain this to you?’

  ‘Do you mean will somebody fetch you a chair? No. There’s nobody to do that here. We don’t have time, sir.’

  So, standing like a schoolboy at the teacher’s desk, he ran through the high points of the story of Mulcahy and Stella Minter. He wasn’t going to go into the attack in his house because she didn’t need to know that to understand, but she said, pointing at his sling with a pencil, ‘What happened to your arm?’

  He sighed. ‘Somebody attacked me in my house. The man who killed her, I think.’

  ‘What’s this to do with us?’

  ‘I was told you might be able to put me into contact with some of the girls who knew Stella Minter. The other young ones on the street. Somebody must know her story.’

  ‘Surely that’s a police matter.’

  ‘The police are slow.’

  ‘You’re very foolish to take matters into your own hands. Is this some male idea of revenge for the arm? You’d do better to go to bed.’ She started to look at something on her desk and then looked up again. ‘Who told you I might be able to put you into contact with street girls?’

  ‘Do you know Mrs Castle?’

  It was the first time she had smiled. ‘Mrs Castle of Westerley Street? Of course, you must be one of her clients, then. How I do loathe your sort.’ She said it quite casually.

  ‘Stella Minter was murdered in a horrible, ugly-’

  ‘I know how she was murdered.’

  ‘Aren’t your — clients — frightened?’

  ‘Of course they are.’

  ‘Then why don’t you want to help get her murderer off the street?’

  ‘The morning newspapers say that the police have her murderer and he’s confessed.’

  ‘Do you know how easy it is to get a confession from somebody who’s alone and terrified and probably brutalized, Mrs Striker?’

  She raised her eyebrows, pursed her lips, not looking at him, and he had the sense of her looking inward, for the first time affected by something he’d said. He leaned a few inches towards her over the desk. ‘The police don’t believe me about Mulcahy. The City Police aren’t exactly bowled over by Stella Minter’s death. It isn’t that they don’t care; they’ve got other fish to fry. I’m willing to take the time to pursue it. I’m paying a number of women to look for Mulcahy in the directories. I’d like to look for Stella Minter, too — who she was, why her killer chose her. I’m not trying to pick up young prostitutes, if that’s what you think, Mrs Striker!’

  She toyed with the pencil, then looked up at him. ‘What is it you want from us?’

  ‘Ask the — your clients — if they knew Stella Minter. If they did, ask if they’ll meet with me — and you or somebody else or a policeman, if you like — and tell me what they remember about her. That’s all. I swear, that’s all.’

  She retrieved his card, looked at it, and put it down in front of him with the pencil. ‘Put her name and the other man’s name on it. You’ll hear from me if I learn anything.’

  That was that. When he was done writing, he found himself looking at the straight parting in her dark hair, her attention entirely on something she was reading. There were no goodbyes.

  He visited Atkins in the hospital on his way to the Paris boat train. The sergeant’s head was wrapped in cotton, most of it on the top and back but one wrap coming around the forehead as if to hold things together. His face looked small, rat-like, rather old.

  ‘Still, you’re alive,’ Denton said.

  ‘Take more than that to kill me.’ The voice was small. He had had concussion and his eyes looked strange. ‘Bastard hit me from behind.’

  ‘Dr Bernat says you’re on the mend.’

  ‘Old biddy wants to keep me in here a week.’

  ‘It’s necessary, Atkins. You’ve been wounded.’

  ‘Most soldiers die in hospital, not the battlefield — ever hear that?’

  ‘This isn’t a soldier’s hospital. It’s where you need to be.’

  ‘Feels like a soldier’s hospital to me.’ It was a ward, with a long range of beds down both sides and an aisle up the middle. Coughs, sighs, the sounds of other visitors swept up and down the big room.

  ‘The soldier’s hospitals I saw,’ Denton said, ‘they laid them on the ground. In the rain.’

  ‘Yes, well, that was a war.’ Atkins sighed. The short visit was tiring him out. ‘And he almost killed you. What a bastard.’

  ‘I’d better go.’

  ‘Paris, eh?’ Denton had already told him about Wilde’s funeral. ‘Funny how things turn out. Five years ago he was king of the hill; now he’s got you going to his funeral.’

  ‘That’s a come-down, I admit.’ Denton was smiling. ‘Do what the doctor tells you.’

  ‘Yes, yes — ’course-’ Atkins was drifting into sleep. Denton asked a nurse if that was a sign of anything, and she said it was a sign he’d stayed too long.

  Paris at the beginning of that December was wet with a cold downpour. During the night, a wind had come up, and Denton’s ship had rolled and tossed, and between the rolling and his arm he got little sleep. He went to the Hôtel des Anglais, where he had stayed before with Emma Gosden; it was her hotel when she was in Paris. Had he chosen it because of her, or had it been simple laziness? Or had he really come to Paris hoping to see her? To make it up? He had a delicious, partly sexual moment of dreaming of meeting her, finding her glad to see him, and their going off somewhere together — the south, maybe Italy, and the hell with Mulcahy and Stella Minter and-

  He slept for an hour and then had the French idea of a breakfast and read a London newspaper and looked at the rain. The funeral was across Paris, the interment miles out in the suburbs somewhere; he would have to make an early start. Still there were hours to fill. He was not one for museums or shops. He wondered what he was one for. Work, probably. Except his work had come to a halt, something deeply wrong with the book he was writing — the woman, he had to admit it was the woman; she was all wrong. He was all wrong, that meant.

  He sat in an armchair with the newspaper over his lap and watched the Parisian rain and thought off and on about Emma Gosden. Hell of a day for a funeral. His mind kept swinging back to Mulcahy and Stella Minter. He was sure that the man who had attacked him and the man who had killed Stella Minter were the same; why wouldn’t the police see it, too? Guillam did see it, he thought, but wouldn’t admit it out of orneriness — no, out of pragmatism, a black sailor on remand being better than an unknown on the loose. Anyway, Guillam wasn’t really part of the Minter investigation.

  He thought about Emma Gosden and getting together — would she do that-?

  He’d have to see Sergeant Willey when he got back, try to make the City Police get going on f
inding Mulcahy or Mulcahy’s corpse. He’d have to-

  He’d have to start minding his own business, he thought. Drop it. Rewrite your novel and make some money. He’d have Bernat’s bill to pay now, Atkins’s hospital bill, plus the household bills he hadn’t yet paid-

  He went up to dress and found that Maude hadn’t packed black gloves, and the hat was the wrong one but would do. The concierge supplied gloves, although they were too small, but there was no time to buy others because with one thing and another, Denton was late by then and had to hurry out and ask for a cab. To his surprise, the rain had stopped. The streets were still wet and shining, very noisy, nervous. Out on the boulevard, the number of motor cars astonished him; he had never seen so many, never a third so many, in London. When the boy came back with a horse-drawn cab for him, he was sorry he hadn’t told him to get a motorized one; it would have been a spot of interest in a gloomy day.

  He had paid the boy and was standing there, reaching up with his good hand to grasp the rail beside the cab door, when another drew up behind his and a female foot appeared, then the edge of a skirt, then an elegant woman in, he thought, the latest Parisian fashion. It was only when she was on the pavement that he realized she was Emma Gosden.

  His hand froze on the handrail. It was the unexpectedness of it, of actually seeing her in Paris, the fantasy of a few hours before made flesh. She looked wonderful, probably in a new gown, something of the real — that is, the expensive — Paris, where funerals and knife wounds didn’t enter. It was he who didn’t belong, not she; she was of the place. As he looked at her, his heart announcing itself with great thumps, she turned her head and saw him. Her entire body gave something like a quiver, a start; he thought she might have been ready to take a step away from him or even a step towards him. Her right hand, her free hand, the hand not holding her purse, moved upwards; if it had continued, the gesture would have been a greeting.

  Even a welcome.

  Then the hand stopped, then dropped the few inches to where it had been. Inches. But the gesture told him everything: more than anything she had said that last evening, more than her anger or his, more than the return of his hat and coat, more than her silence since, the few inches of movement told him that it was definitively over. Like something written by that silly old woman Henry James — so much subtlety you think you’ve died. The end of a love affair in a motion.

  Then a man came out of the hotel and she turned to him with a smile. They walked away, she on the man’s arm. Denton thought he might be younger than she, impressively good-looking. I’ve found somebody else. Be a man.

  The church service for Wilde was grotesque. Denton counted fourteen people, including himself. He wouldn’t have recognized Wilde’s old lover, Alfred Douglas, except that he was apparently the head mourner and so greeted the others, who slipped into St-Germain-des-Prés like fugitives. The fourteen, all men, seemed to Denton to be a collection of odds and ends from anywhere, dressed for a funeral but gathered there apparently by coincidence. Nothing connected them to the Wilde of legend — no green carnations, no hint of aestheticism, no witty remarks. The church itself was cold and damp, puddles collecting on the floor from their coats and umbrellas; in another chapel, a better-attended funeral mass was punctuated by tears and a female voice that moaned like a hurt dog. The sounds of their grief threw the silence of Wilde’s mass into relief, only the voice of the young Irish priest audible. Denton, depressed by what he was taking part in, tried to think about Emma Gosden and found only a sense of emptiness.

  The flowers he had ordered through the Hôtel des Anglais looked showy and vulgar, and the card, which should have said they were from the Café Royal writers and artists, said, ‘Form the writters and artistes du Café Royale.’

  After the service, the others got into four carriages that were nominally the official vehicles and followed the hearse; Denton, wanting to be by himself, came after in a cab, clopping miles into the wet suburbs. If the mass had been grotesque, the graveside service was ludicrous: the rain pelted down, its noise blurring the spoken words; umbrellas hid every face; the priest’s hands shook from the cold. Finally, it was over; what was left of a great and sometimes awful man went into the ground, Denton thinking at the last, as he dropped wet clods on the coffin, that Wilde had been the emblematic man of the century’s last years — brilliant, duplicitous, too arrogant to survive.

  He would say later that, although it had had a month to run, the nineteenth century had ended on the day of Wilde’s funeral. Privately, he would think that it had ended for him with Emma Gosden’s gesture.

  Chapter Ten

  Back in London, he climbed his stairs like an old man. The funeral had been hellish. It had all been a kind of comedy, but he found it sordid and humiliating for the dead man. We all end up in a box, but it doesn’t have to be a Jack-in-the-box.

  At the top of his stairs, he opened the door to his sitting room. He had expected nobody — Maude hadn’t come to the door, so Denton figured he’d decamped — but at the far end of the long room, just in front of the window through which his attacker had vanished three nights before, a mysterious figure could be made out, crouched, indecipherable, as if caught in some dubious act. The hair on the back of Denton’s head prickled, and he reached for his pistol, slow as he was to recognize the figure’s necromantic gown as Atkins’s tattered Indian robe, then to recognize Atkins’s face above the collar, and finally to understand that the seemingly disembodied helmet above the face was a black bowler resting on a swathing of bandage.

  ‘You gave me a start,’ Denton said.

  ‘Nothing to what you gave me, Colonel. I might of shot you.’ Atkins was coming forward, now holding up a hand with the derringer in it. ‘Copper brought this by.’

  ‘You’re supposed to be in hospital.’

  ‘Couldn’t lump it another day.’ Atkins took off the hat, revealed a kind of turban. ‘Shaved my head. I look like a bleeding fakir. So I had to wrap it in something, didn’t I? Old scarf of yours, hope you don’t mind.’ He put the hat on again. It sat about two inches above his forehead. ‘Reckon if I’d been wearing this hat when the bastard hit me, I’d never have had to go to the hospital in the first place.’

  ‘You’re a sight for sore eyes, Atkins.’ Denton found himself smiling. He touched Atkins’s shoulder. ‘Glad you’re back. Where’s the boy servant — what’s his name? — Maude?’

  ‘Sent him packing. Wet behind the ears. Did you know the only experience he’d had was as a footman in some jumped-up manufacturer’s manse? Family hopped off to the Continent for a year, gave him his marching orders. Too young to be out alone. All right if I sit?’

  ‘Well, of course-’

  ‘Bit wobbly still.’ Atkins fell into the armchair and put the derringer on the table, which still showed the damage from the bullet Denton had fired, the flash mark a burn like a black teardrop. ‘I’ll stagger back downstairs presently.’

  ‘Like hell. You’ll take it easy until you’re fit. In the meantime-’ Denton, still standing, reacted away from more movement down the room. Atkins’s door had swung open and an indeterminate shape had appeared. Denton snatched at the Colt pistol. ‘What the hell’s that?’

  ‘Oh-’ Atkins turned, looked down the room. ‘I was getting to that.’

  Denton stared into the gloom. Something that might have been a recently sheared sheep seemed to be standing there. ‘What the hell?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, well — he’s a comfort to me. Frankly, General, I’m jumpy. No point in denying it. Old soldiers know better than to fake the courageous. I still jump at shadows. Can’t stand for anybody to be behind me; I think that chap’s going to brain me again with the doorstop. So, see, I was glad to have Rupert’s company.’

  ‘Rupert.’

  ‘Prince Rupert. Loan of a friend who’s in the dog trade. Racing, and so on.’

  Rupert didn’t look as if he did much racing. He was in fact, one of the fattest dogs Denton had ever seen. He was also big, ugly
and enthusiastic. He had almost no tail, but the rump around the stump vibrated with what might have been joy. He was mostly black but with a white face, and mostly rounded, except for a head and muzzle that were oddly angular. His eyes were more like those of a pig than a dog, slightly slanted, rather smaller than you’d want if you were designing a dog, and pale blue. He went straight to Atkins and tried to hoist his bulk into Atkins’s lap. Atkins managed to push him down; he sat, staring at Atkins, his stump whisking the carpet. ‘Bull terrier in that head,’ Atkins said. ‘Intelligent breed.’

  ‘I see some Rottweiler in the rear end, myself. The middle looks like whale. But, if he’s a comfort-’ Atkins’s confession of fear had reminded him of his own nerves when alone in the house, the loading of the revolver. He shoved the revolver back into the overcoat pocket.

  ‘Pardon me saying it, Colonel, but it looks like you’re carrying an anvil in that overcoat.’

  ‘My revolver.’

  ‘So I saw. Your tailor would have a fit.’

  ‘It isn’t really a pocket pistol. But I’d as soon not get stabbed again.’

  ‘Hand over that coat and I’ll do something to fix it. Open the bottom of the pocket, is my notion — run the barrel down there, maybe sew something like a holster into the pocket to hold it upright. You’ll look like you’re carrying the blacksmith’s hammer instead of his anvil.’

  ‘The real way to carry it is on its own belt around your waist.’

  ‘Yes, well, that ain’t the fashion in London these days. Take what you can get, I say — hand over that coat.’

  Denton, grateful, put the overcoat in Atkins’s lap and said, wanting to make some gesture, ‘You’d like the dog to keep you company for a while?’

  ‘Well — to stand watch, as it were, Colonel. Only until-’ He pointed at the layers above his scalp.

  ‘Dogs have to be fed, watered, walked, cleaned up after-’

  ‘I’ve done latrine duty before, General. He eases my mind, if you know what I mean.’