Straight ahead of him across the thirty-foot-wide space was a heavy door — the door with the two padlocks on it, he thought, the door to the corridor and the stairway. The camera and the dais were to his left as he faced the door; to his right, a counter or work table ran towards him and disappeared behind the dormer wall.
He walked on still-trembling knees out of the dormer’s enclosure into the room proper and found it large, almost airy, the feeling of space increased by the enormous paned window that took up most of the wall to his left, the rear of the building. This was the source of the photographer’s light, which poured through even on this gloomy day. The dais he had glimpsed was set at an angle to this window, undoubtedly movable, because the wooden floor was scarred with long marks. As he moved farther into the room, he found that the dais was backed with some sort of framed canvas, over which, on the photographer’s side, a piece of black velour like a theatrical curtain was hung; in front of it, a carved armchair crouched. The camera, as big as a small trunk, looked like some resting animal.
The work table on his right ran from the wall in which the locked door stood to within five or six feet of the facing wall, its far side tight against a wall that ran almost the width of the room, leaving only a narrow corridor between it and the outer wall. It was neither the corridor nor the work table itself that caught Denton’s attention, however, but a shrine-like arrangement of dying flowers on the table’s far end. He went close and examined it — two pink roses in a cracked vase, dropped petals on the tabletop; a water glass of once-green weeds, drooping now; a brown bottle, perhaps originally meant for chemicals, with a nosegay of the sort girls sold at the theatres stuck into its mouth. These were in a triangle, the roses at the apex. In front of them and resting against the vase was a cabinet photograph of Stella Minter, the face recognizable as that of the waxen, bruised girl of the post-mortem.
She was sitting in the ornate chair that now stood on the dais, her body turned away from the camera but her face in profile. Her back was almost bare, as was her near shoulder; one lacy strip rose from the froth of clothing at her shoulder blade and crossed her upper arm almost at the elbow; the arm, pulled back, revealed one breast just to the top of the nipple. Her lips were open, as if she were speaking — as if, still a child, she were asking, ‘Am I doing it right?’
In front of the photograph and flat on the table was a sheet of business letterhead, with ‘The Photographic Inventorium’ and the address at the top, and ‘Under New Management’. On the white sheet was written in a large scrawl, ‘I love her but I cant have her so I killed her. I got nothing to live for.’ It was signed ‘Regis F. Mulcahy’.
Denton bent close to the paper, as if smelling out its secrets. He was in fact looking at the writing, which was very slightly shaky, the result perhaps of excitement or even a fit of weeping. The paper had no blots or bulges from tears, however, and no smudges or stains.
He went to the chair and made sure that it was the chair in the photograph. There was no mistaking its hideous griffin’s heads on the arms, the overdone curlicues on the upper back that would have made sitting in it torture. Denton looked it all over, back and front, bringing his eyes as close to it as he had to the paper. The upholstered seat had a faint smell — urine? Excrement? Using his handkerchief, he tipped the chair back — it was as heavy as a library table — and then forward. He took particular interest in the joints where the back legs met the seat, where, by looking very close, he could see a few red threads caught. Seen from one angle, several of the threads glinted — silk or satin, he thought. He looked then at the arms but found nothing, then at the back and, in one of the many piercings that made the thing notably ugly, two more of the red threads.
Denton stood back by the camera and looked at the dais. Black curtain, chair. Light from the photographer’s right.
He walked to the work table and looked again at Stella Minter. The light had come from the photographer’s right, yes, but not at all harshly. There were the chair and the velour curtain. But on the left side of the photo, the velour curtain curved down and towards the right, caught back by a rope, revealing what seemed to be a pastoral scene with a waterfall and some sort of tree.
He went to the left side of the curtain and raised it with the back of his right hand. There were the waterfall and the tree and, in fact, a painted landscape that must fill the entire space. This was the explanation for the canvas-covered frame — a sort of theatrical flat; and indeed the scene might once have been some sort of drop curtain.
Denton looked for the rope by which the curtain had been caught back in Stella Minter’s photograph. He didn’t find it, but he did find the hook to which it had been tied, and, in the thin gap between the hook’s backplate and the wooden frame, several red threads. So, a red rope with a decorative knot and a fringe, to judge from the photograph. Of which some threads had also been caught in the hideous armchair.
He spent an hour in the Inventorium, walking up and down, looking into things, trying to understand Mulcahy’s life. And his death. Along the corridor behind the work table were a door to the photographic darkroom, where Mulcahy also kept a grubby cot and an extra shirt. The cot, its single sheet wrinkled in long lines, had a smell, and, his nose almost down among the soiled folds, he recognized the smell as that of the man who had tried to kill him with the knife. It brought that night back; unconsciously, he grabbed his left arm where he had been cut. He was here. He slept here and waited for Mulcahy. Beyond the darkroom was a newer, narrower door with a patent Excelsior water closet behind it, filthy but fairly new. It was a long walk down to the privy in the foundry yard.
On the far end of the work table from Stella Minter’s shrine were rolled-up papers that proved to be mechanical drawings, all apparently by Mulcahy and all competently done. Several showed stages in the development of the Mulcahy Moving Picture Machine, parts of which (in wood) lay on the work table with the drawings. The machine, Denton guessed, had never worked, certainly had never reached manufacture. Edison’s patent was safe.
Drawers in the work table held glass negatives and prints, one drawer devoted to girls like Stella Minter. A few had been photographed against the background of the curtain and the pastoral scene, but most were against a cheaper-looking background of two-dimensional pillars and a balustrade — Mulcahy’s lesser resources before he moved to the Inventorium, Denton supposed. The photos themselves were much the same, neither quite art nor quite French postcards, the girls always young, partly undressed, seemingly passive.
The poor sonofabitch, Denton thought.
He looked everywhere for the red cord. When he was satisfied that it was not in the Inventorium, he leaned out of the dormer window again and looked down at the body. He ignored the imp. Denton didn’t think that what was left of Mulcahy had a red rope around his neck — and who would hang himself by jumping out of a window? And if he had done such a daft thing, why was there no sign of the cord’s having been tied off up here? No, Mulcahy hadn’t hanged himself.
Where, then, was the red cord?
Denton stood in the window for some minutes trying to work it out. Then he stood there for several more, thinking about how he would go back up the roof to the trapdoor.
When he was ready to go, he was shaking.
Chapter Thirteen
‘You’re late,’ Mrs Striker said. She was rushing towards him from her scarred door, thrusting a hatpin through a flat black hat that did nothing to flatter her. In the outer room, Denton was waiting with half a dozen women who, if they were prostitutes, gave him none of the smiles he might have expected.
‘I was working late,’ he said. In fact, he’d been to a cheap tailor on Whitechapel Road whose sign he had remembered — ‘We Press, You Wait.’ An ascetic-looking Eastern European had shaken his head over Denton’s suit and tut-tutted while he brushed off moss and sewed up tears; Denton had waited, trouserless and jacketless, in a sort of booth with a swinging door, until the tailor appeared and, helping him on with t
he jacket, had said, ‘A shame — a shame — such good cloth-’ But Denton had walked out looking more or less respectable again, the damage of the roof muted. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said now.
‘I’ve another appointment at eight.’ She made it sound as if he had already made her late, although it wasn’t quite five.
‘Which are the ones I’m supposed to meet?’ He looked around at the unsmiling women.
‘Oh, they wouldn’t meet you here!’ She gave him a little push towards the door. ‘We’re going up Aldgate High Street.’ When they were out on the pavement, she said, ‘We’ll walk,’ and strode away. Denton caught up, did a sort of dance to get on her left, and found her laughing at him.
‘Quite gentlemanly,’ she said.
‘Do you mind?’
‘It’s nothing to me either way.’They walked a few strides and she said more soberly, ‘These girls won’t go near my office. They think I’ll send for the police — as if I’d do such a thing! We’re meeting them in a public house, not a very nice one — they feel safe there.’ Another stride, and she had changed the subject — a habit he would eventually get used to. ‘I asked some of my nicer acquaintances about you. They said you were “entirely respectable”. Otherwise, I’d not have let you meet these girls.’ She smiled. ‘Did you ask about me?’
Denton thought of lying, didn’t. ‘One friend,’ he muttered.
‘A man? What did he tell you? That I’d killed my husband? ’
Startled, Denton jerked his head and made a sort of grunt.
‘It’s what they usually say,’ she murmured. Pointing ahead, she again shifted ground. ‘There’s the place where we’re meeting them. Let me speak for you, please. They’re like wild kittens.’ She walked faster and led him to the saloon door of a large pub with an electric-lighted front and several entrances. With her hand ready to push the door open, she said, a rather sly smile turning up her lips, ‘I didn’t kill my husband, in fact, no matter what your friend said.’ The smile turned wry. ‘Did he say I’d spent four and a half years in an institution for the criminally insane? Well, I did.’ And she pushed her way in.
The pub was huge, pounding with human noise, most of it coming from the other side of a wall to their right. The interior managed to be both muted and garish, dark green walls punctuated with the white, glaring electric globes. Part of a mahogany bar that must have served the whole house in a shape like a racetrack jutted from the wall in front of them, disappeared in a wall at their left; in that same wall, a door with frosted glass and ‘Private Rooms’ stood just beyond the bar’s curving end. Above the bar, coloured glass panes made a screen. The overall air was of activity and seediness, false elegance blurred by a fug of pipe smoke and coal.
‘In there,’ Mrs Striker said, again shoving him, this time towards the private rooms. ‘I’ll find the girls.’
Denton stopped. ‘I don’t really like to be pushed,’ he said.
‘Oh.’ She frowned. ‘I didn’t know I’d done it. Oh, I’m sorry.’ She muttered something about bad habits and, flustered, disappeared through a door marked ‘Ladies’ Bar’.
Denton waited. His suit smelled of the pressing — hot cloth, his own sweat. The memory of the roof made him sweat again. He was still rattled by it, not really able to focus well. He wished he could go home, have a hot bath, sit in the green armchair with a drink.
‘One, anyway,’ Mrs Striker said, coming through the door. She was pushing a thin girl in front of her with jabs between the shoulder blades. ‘Move along, Sticks.’
The girl whined something about a shilling; Mrs Striker explained that the only way she’d been able to get the girl to come was to promise her a shilling. ‘After,’ she said to her and gave her another jab.
‘Leave off!’
Mrs Striker rolled her eyes and indicated the private rooms, and Denton hurried to open the door. Inside was a row of half a dozen swinging doors, theirs the third one along. Denton pushed through, found a space a little bigger than a coffin with a narrow banquette on each side covered in greasy, almost napless brown velour. At the far end was the same coloured glass that stood above the long bar, and a hatch that he guessed was for service.
The child — eleven, Denton thought, emaciated, not pretty — fell into one of the banquettes and stuck her feet out. Mrs Striker said she was off to find the others; she turned back before she went out and said to the girl, ‘Mind your manners, Sticks. You know what I mean.’
When she was gone, the child said in the door’s direction, ‘Cow.’ She looked at Denton and said, as if on a dare, ‘Stupid old cow.’
‘Don’t say that.’
‘Hate her.’ It was like trying to understand another language; he had got ‘cow’ all right, but she ran her words together, and she had an accent he couldn’t follow. He sat down next to the door, finding himself embarrassed, not sure why.
‘JerwantaFrenchwye?’ the girl said.
‘What?’
‘Frenchwye, French wye! Yer deaf? French, I does’t betternor’ny. Ask any gemmun. Quick, I am. Bring yer off in lessnor minute.’
Denton stared at her. What struck him most was how entirely sexless she seemed. Yet he supposed that ‘French way’ meant the same as Harris’s à la bouche. ‘How old are you?’ he said.
‘Fourteen, wot bus’ness’t to you? Yeserno, you wannit ’fore the cow comes back? Shilling.’
Denton said no, and she flounced back against the greasy velvet and folded her thin arms. She had no breasts at all that he could see, nor any hips; if she was fourteen, nature hadn’t brought her any maturity yet.
‘Wantersee my place?’ she said. He felt himself flush. She smiled. ‘No hair on it. Tenpence.’ She reached down to grasp the hem of her skirt; the door pushed open, and Janet Striker came in.
‘What are you doing?’ she said.
‘’E made a nindecent purposition ter me.’
Mrs Striker glanced at Denton and then at the girl. ‘You’re a terrible little liar, Sticks.’ She looked back at Denton. ‘I found the others outside the public bar; they’ll be right along.’ She sat on the same side as Denton, facing the girl, two adults apparently allied against her. ‘I know you better, Sticks. Drop it.’
The girl crossed her arms over her chest again and pouted her lips. ‘Where’s my shilling?’
‘After, I told you.’
‘Five shillings, you said!’
‘That’s if you had anything to tell us about Stella Minter. Well?’
‘Yerfinkiblab everyfink I know?’ She wiggled herself deeper into the banquette. ‘Fer five bloody shillin’? Make me larf.’
Janet Striker’s voice was tired. ‘She doesn’t know anything. I knew it was a mistake to spend time on her, but-Give her a shilling and I’ll send her on her way.’
‘I know wot I knows!’
‘Yes, nothing.’
Denton was trying to find a coin in his pocket, wondering if the tailor had taken his money. No, there it was-
‘I do know somethink, so there! Stella Minter tole me all her secrets!’
Mrs Striker took the coin and held it out. ‘Oh, Sticks — get out.’
The girl grabbed the coin and jumped up. ‘Stella Minter got the clap!’ she shouted and, giggling, ran out. She collided with two other girls, who shouted at her and she at them, and they came in red-faced. Both wore demure blouses and dark skirts and little round hats with brims. They looked at Denton and then at Mrs Striker and everybody seemed deeply embarrassed.
‘Sit down, do,’ Mrs Striker said. ‘That’s Lillian, and that’s Mary Kate.’ Lillian was plump, rather sleepy-looking, perhaps sixteen; Mary Kate was thinner, freckled. ‘This gentleman wants to know about Stella Minter, the girl who was murdered in the Minories. He’ll give you a shilling for being here and five shillings if you know something useful.’
The two girls looked at each other. They seemed still more embarrassed. Denton realized it was because of him — something about its being all right to sell themselves to a
man like him but not all right to discuss their profession in front of him and another woman. Mary Kate put her feet flat on the wood floor and looked at her shoes; Lillian stared around as if she had never been in such a place before and then fanned herself with a hand and looked over Denton’s head. All at once, Mary Kate said, ‘Had a baby.’Three words, and he knew she was Irish.
Mrs Striker looked at Denton and then back at them and said, ‘Stella Minter? When?’
They looked at each other again. Lillian said, her voice so soft he could hardly hear it, ‘Wile ago.’ She glanced aside at Mary Kate and then murmured, ‘Waren’t married or nothin, she waren’t.’
‘What happened to the baby?’ Denton said. All three women turned towards him — they had been talking to each other — and frowned. Mrs Striker gave him a look and said that it was a good question, and did the girls know?
‘’Dopted,’ Lillian said.
‘She gave it up?’
Mary Kate studied her shoes but said, ‘She went to the Humphrey, an’ they kep’ it and all.’
Mrs Striker said aside to Denton, ‘The Humphrey is a home for unwed mothers.’ Then, to the other two, she said, ‘You’re sure? This is important information — you must be sure.’
‘Sure ’n’ I’m sure as sure,’ Mary Kate said, and Lillian giggled and got red.
‘Did she tell you?’
‘Sure, wasn’t she Lillian’s special pal, then? She was allus tellin’ you everthing, wasn’t she, Lil?’
‘Well, not everythin’.’ Lillian blushed deeper. ‘Oney oncet she tole me that when she were feelin’ low. She were a sad girl, she was. A’ways.’ Her face, which didn’t seem to know how to show sadness, got blank. ‘Never had no fun.’
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