The Frightened Man tds-1

by Kenneth Cameron

  ‘Like The Nightmare?’ Denton said.

  ‘Oh-h-h-’ Lang twisted in his chair in disappointment. ‘Look here, I’ll talk to Gwen — ’ Gwen was Wilfred Gweneth, the publisher — ‘about your, ah, financial crise, and I think I can get his approval to offer you expenses plus your usual for a travel book about Transylvania. The Land of Horrors. We’d make up an itinerary to take you to the sites of legends and great tales — Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, for example; now you’ll say that’s Switzerland, I know, but-’

  In fact Denton didn’t know; he’d never read Frankenstein.

  ‘ — you could start there, poetic licence, and move through Bavaria — isn’t that Monk Lewis territory? — and so on, and then concentrate on Transylvania. You apply your great powers of description, that relentless honesty that makes your work so-’

  ‘Lang, I don’t give a hoot about legends and lore.’

  ‘You’re so very vexing sometimes. You Realist! Have you had lunch? We could walk to my club and have a late lunch and talk this over-’

  ‘I have to meet with some women about a girl who may have left school to get herself murdered. One of the desirable horrors of everyday life in London.’ He boosted his hat and coat back to his lap. ‘A travel book — me?’

  Lang gave him a suddenly shrewd look. ‘Money, my dear — you need money.’

  ‘You told me once never to write for money.’

  ‘I am an idealist. But you are a Realist. And your creditors are literalists — they want twenty shillings in the pound. Come now, Denton — I’m sure I can get you the money for the right sort of book. A nice journey down the Rhine, some pleasant miles by train — Continental railways are perfectly acceptable, I believe — then, to be sure, a somewhat less luxurious mode of travel in Transylvania itself — colourful local carts, an ancient post-chaise, even a sledge-’

  Denton was both angry and amused. He got up slowly and then went behind his chair and leaned his forearms on the back. Grinning none too pleasantly, he said, ‘A motor car to Whatsylvania.’

  ‘That’s an appalling idea.’

  ‘I’ll do it that way — but that’s the only way I’ll do it!’ Denton didn’t really mean it; it was simply something to say to vent his sense of outrage. ‘By Motor Car to the Land of Vampires.’

  ‘A motor car! That would ruin everything! It’s so — so disgustingly modern.’

  ‘All the more reason. Combine the new with the old, progress with legend and lore.’ He was improvising, atypically manic. ‘Start from Paris — I could pick up a car there; they’ve got thousands of them — and head east. Outrunning the werewolves in a Panhard Twelve! Flying over the steppe on a fuel of garlic and potato spirits!’

  Lang was shaking his head and saying that Denton was being too bad, simply too bad. ‘You’re ragging me; I see what you’re doing. This is your little joke. Well, laugh. Surely you don’t think we’d buy you a motor car. Gwen doesn’t mind taking a flyer, but he’s not an outright idiot. Motor Car to the Land of Vampires, indeed!’

  ‘Buy the machine, keep ownership while I do the trip, sell it after. Famous motor car, used in Mr Denton’s best-selling new book. You’d make a fortune, Lang.’

  Lang sniffed. ‘I despise commerce and everything it stands for.’

  ‘But you want me to write a book about horrors because it will sell.’

  Lang waved a hand. He put the left side of his jaw on the thumb and three fingers of his left hand, the index finger resting on his leathery cheek, and he said in a dry voice, ‘What I had envisioned was some colourful narrative of native carts toiling up the Alps.’

  ‘It might come to that. Motor cars aren’t much in mountains — you did say there were mountains?’

  ‘The Transylvanian Alps, which are always represented as the teeth of a saw.’

  ‘Motor-car enthusiasts would love it — conquering the mountains. Breakdowns while the werewolves howl. Tyre punctures in the dead of night. We run out of petrol and are pulled across the snow by a team of vampires!’

  ‘Yes, make a joke of it. You’re the one who needs money, not I.’

  Denton hunched farther towards him over the chair back. ‘So I am.’ He’d forgotten. He shrugged. ‘Actually, it doesn’t seem such a bad idea, Lang.’

  ‘My dear Denton, motor cars-! They’re simply — vulgar.’

  Denton heaved himself up, laughing. He saw Lang’s confusion and guffawed again. ‘So am I! So am I!’

  Then Mr Frewn padded in with Denton’s cheque, which was for seven pounds, five and ninepence. Denton, having expected ten times as much, swore and rushed out.

  The women whom Mrs Johnson had assembled in her meagre parlour were both sceptical and respectful — he had paid up, after all — and in their way not so different from the young whores he had met with Janet Striker. A similar embarrassment and distrust were plain. Denton tried to outline what he wanted, tried to guess what the Schools Board’s bureaucracy would be, but one of the women had worked there and could tell the others all about it, ignoring him.

  ‘The lists are handwritten, a lot of them in an appalling fist, and not at all up to date. The school heads aren’t held to the fire; they’ve too much else to do.’

  When it was clear that he wanted them to search the lists for all of Greater London for the previous school year, one of them laughed outright. When he had difficulty explaining what he wanted, another muttered, ‘A local habitation and a name,’ and told the rest that what he meant was that they were to search for a girl named Ruth, who’d left school and who had a sister named Rebecca, who hadn’t.

  ‘And if we find them?’

  ‘Then you’ll find their last name.’

  ‘And then? We’ll have only their school. Only their town or village or ward.’

  ‘Then you’ll look for the family in the post office directories. ’

  He suggested the census, but they pointed out that the last census had been taken in 1891. He went home and told Atkins not to talk to him. Using pantomime, Atkins pointed him to the mail, then took himself downstairs with his nose in the air, like a music-hall comedian playing a duke.

  Among the bills was a note from Janet Striker. They could visit the Humphrey the next afternoon; she suggested that he bring a letter attesting to his character.

  Tomorrow would be Thursday. It would leave him only one day to find the man who had now killed both the girl named Ruth and the man named Mulcahy. On Saturday, if he found nothing, they would rule that Mulcahy had killed himself while insane, and they would close the case. He could go on looking after that, but he sensed that he would not. He was about out of threads to wind on his spool.

  And why did it matter? Mulcahy was nothing to him, nor the girl, either. Yet he thought of that thin body laid out on the table at Bart’s, the murderer’s crude gashes and the surgeon’s neat cuts, the men in rows around her watching, watching — and he cared.

  Lang wanted horrors. This would be horror, indeed — meaningless, dehumanizing death, and his own failure to do anything about it.

  He went out again to Hector Hench-Rose to ask for a character letter. Hench-Rose surprised him by being abject, ashamed of his behaviour of the other day and pathetically ready to do anything Denton wanted. Denton thought it odd — Hench-Rose was now wealthy, presumably powerful or about to be, with a parliamentary seat at his bidding, an estate, tenants, forelock-tugging ghillies, as Denton imagined them — but Hench-Rose seemed desperate for Denton’s approval. Odd, very odd — a need to have the world without exception approve of him? Or something special about Denton? Or was he, as Denton was with Atkins, caught in some snare of pride? Denton, at any rate, liked him better for his discomfort; the truth was, he had felt more comfortable with Hench-Rose the modestly poor ex-officer than Hench-Rose the wealthy baronet.

  ‘My distinct pleasure, old man,’ Hench-Rose said as he scrawled a note under the letterhead of the Metropolitan Police. ‘Want me to order the populace to cooperate or ask them? Asking’s probably
better — flies and vinegar, and so on. Hmm?’ Hench-Rose proposed supper, promised no jokes, but Denton said he couldn’t, had too much to do. A drink at the club? Would Denton consider an expedition for salmon in February? Denton’s thought had been that the one thing he needed, money, and the one thing Hench-Rose had, money, was the one thing he couldn’t ask Hench-Rose for, although he suspected that Hector would have started flinging notes on the desk if he had asked for them. But Denton couldn’t ask.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Humphrey Institution for the Betterment of Unwanted Children was in Hackney Wick, the Lea running almost at its back, although Denton wasn’t to realize that the river was there until almost the end of his visit. It was a wet, raw day, a fine drizzle boring down like somebody’s bad intentions, drenching and chill. It smudged distance as if a fog, and as Denton and Mrs Striker jogged through unfamiliar streets in a mouldy cab, he thought that this might be one idea of hell, going on endlessly towards a dimly glimpsed nowhere in the damp discomfort of the grave.

  ‘I’d like a hot drink,’ he said, when neither of them had spoken for several minutes.

  ‘A lap robe would do.’

  He grunted. They were crawling through mean streets where nothing else seemed to move. It was as if the entire city had died. He shrugged himself deeper into his overcoat. ‘Poor people around here,’ he said. ‘Not enough money to buy a louse a wrestling jacket.’

  ‘Your grandmother? Definitely Irish.’

  ‘Scotch and proud of it. Worshipped John Knox, believed a blow was healthy for a child, saw the world as good or bad, white or black, all choices made on principle.’

  ‘Hard to live with?’

  He hesitated. He had been talking for the sake of talking; now he had to think about what to say next. ‘It sounds peculiar, but she wasn’t. Sure, she whacked us now and then, but she was protective.’

  ‘Against the world?’

  ‘Against my father.’ It came out slowly, an intimate admission, painful. ‘She used her hands; he used a piece of firewood.’

  ‘On you?’

  ‘Until I was as big as he was. Then he tried it and-’ He shrugged himself into the coat again, shivered. ‘We fought.’ His shoulders were trembling with cold, perhaps with memory. He wondered what she would do if he moved closer to her for warmth. ‘I joined the army when I was fifteen.’

  ‘I wouldn’t think they’d take you so young.’

  ‘I lied. I was big for my age. My grandmother signed the paper.’ He smiled. ‘She could read and write. That’s Scotch, not Irish.’

  ‘Was that her way of protecting you?’

  He looked out at the wet house fronts, an ironmonger’s shop, a scene of water and soot and lifelessness. He had never told anybody this story. ‘It was for my sister.’ He felt the fine drizzle on his cheek, realized his trousers were getting damp. ‘She was fourteen. She didn’t have a dowry. I got a hundred dollars for enlisting.’

  ‘For her?’

  ‘There was somebody would marry her if she could bring some money. My grandmother told me to do it.’

  Janet Striker was silent, staring, too, at the bleak, blackened bricks. Then she said, ‘Because of your father?’

  The question surprised him, an insight straight to his secret self. He had his hands in his overcoat pockets, his long legs stretched out; he moved, a kind of squirming, acutely uncomfortable. ‘My mother died,’ he said uncertainly, almost stammering, ‘when we were kids. Fever. Josie never had a proper mother. My grandmother-’ The memory was acutely painful.

  ‘Did you understand what was going on?’

  ‘I don’t think anything was really-’ He trailed off. He couldn’t picture his sister as she was at that time; had he erased her? But he had ‘understood’ something about her — and about his father. He mumbled, so low he was never sure she heard him, ‘My father said things to Josie — he started touching her-’ He trailed off. ‘My grandmother said it was best for Josie to get married.’

  She looked at him. ‘You could have been killed in the war.’ As if she distrusted the effect of her eyes, she turned her head towards the street and leaned back. ‘Did it work out for her?’

  ‘She had four kids of her own and raised my two, after-When I couldn’t. She seems content enough.’

  ‘And you? The army suited you?’

  It made him laugh, part of it relief at the changed subject. ‘The army doesn’t give you a chance to say if it suits you. It was war. I went in a private and came out a temporary lieutenant, got shot at and paraded and marched and starved and rained on and thrown into battles like a piece of meat to a hungry dog. No, it didn’t suit me. But I did it, and it took me off the farm. The army showed me another way to survive than trying to grow potatoes out of rocks. The army’s a hard mother and a hard teacher, but there’s worse. Far worse.’

  ‘Were you ever wounded?’

  ‘Twice. A musket ball and a bayonet. Neither fatal. Obviously.’

  They rode along. The horse’s hooves rang on the wet street, now wider, opening out into the newer, less impoverished neighbourhoods beyond Victoria Park. A few living beings appeared — a dog, a shopkeeper in a doorway, two women with a child. Janet Striker said, ‘And your father?’

  ‘He married again. He left the farm to his widow.’ Ahead, he saw a grey building, stone, neoclassical by suggestion but essentially ugly; he guessed it was the Humphrey Institution. ‘I never went back,’ he said.

  ‘And your grandmother?’

  ‘I hated my father. But after I’d knocked around a while-’ He stared at the ugly buildings along the cab’s slow progress. ‘Poverty drove him mad. He worked and worked-’ He made a gesture of futility. ‘My grandmother died while I was away. There was nothing for me to go back to.’ But there had been his sister — why hadn’t he gone back to her?

  The cab pulled up opposite the building’s entrance, a set of double doors up two stone steps from the street. The doors looked as if they had been closed and locked when the building had gone up, closing in a prison for lifers. They got out and he paid the driver, a hopeless-looking man who neither smiled nor thanked him but wiped his wet nose on his sleeve and passed his whip over the horse’s back as if too tired to lift it higher, and the cab passed away into the drizzle like a phantom. Denton and Mrs Striker were left standing on the narrow pavement, the only living things to be seen in a square of which the Humphrey took up an entire side; inside an iron fence, five leafless trees reached up like blackened hands. There was a smell, familiar but unpleasant, that Denton couldn’t place.

  ‘Hell,’ he said.

  ‘Its entrance, anyway.’ She went up the steps and yanked a bell-pull. After several seconds, she said, ‘Somebody’s coming.’ She looked down at him, seeming to gauge him, to estimate just what he might be. ‘I think you’re a far better man than I first took you for,’ she said. The door opened.

  The smell was laundry. Wet laundry, soap, steam. The Humphrey Institution for the Betterment of Unwanted Children operated a sizeable commercial laundry that took up the entire rear of the stone building and two sheds behind, as well; it was in the laundry that the wayward ones earned their keep.

  ‘Work is their salvation,’ the woman who met them said. ‘They scrub clean their souls.’ The words seemed to be quotations that she had by rote. Mrs Opdyke was a big woman in a black dress a few years out of fashion, the cut emphasizing her bigness, her chest and abdomen, as if she were some male figure of power whose belly was called a ‘corporation’, but within this was a less certain woman. She was tall, made taller by grey hair piled on her head in lustreless clumps like dirty wool, and she stooped as if her tallness was a burden. Keys jingled at her waist, suggested a saintly emblem — the keeper of the keys — that was belied by her wary eyes. Denton wondered if she was afraid for her job. ‘We would do them a disservice to indulge them.’ She meant the women.

  ‘How many live here?’ Mrs Striker said.

  ‘We have close to a hundred at any
particular time.’ She bent her head to look at Mrs Striker; there was a sense of expecting contradiction. ‘But they don’t live here. They are permitted to await the birth of their babies here.’

  ‘And then-?’

  ‘And then they must make their peace with the world, as we hope they have made their peace with Him who sees all transgression.’

  ‘Do they understand transgression, do you think?’

  ‘We always say, show me a young woman who is weeping in her bed, and we will show you a soul yearning for its maker.’ Again, she seemed to be quoting somebody else.

  ‘And the infants?’ Denton said.

  Mrs Opdyke glanced at him. She flinched, as if he had surprised her, perhaps the rarity of his maleness. ‘Forgive me, sir,’ she said. She had a big voice, big like the rest of her, but raspy, as if she had used it too much. ‘I caught your name but not your purpose.’

  ‘I’m looking for a young woman who gave birth here.’

  ‘Are you a relative? Her father?’ She seemed ready to disbelieve him. ‘An uncle?’

  ‘The young woman is dead. I’m trying to find what happened to her.’

  ‘It seems to me you already know what happened to her, if, as you say, she’s dead.’ She dropped her chin and looked at him over the top of silver-rimmed glasses. ‘Are you a policeman?’

  ‘Mr Denton is a famous author,’ Janet Striker said. ‘He is acting philanthropically.’

  They were standing in a lobby that lay immediately behind the front doors, a long, bleak room almost without furniture but overseen by the life-size portraits of two elderly men in the fashions of the seventies. Denton had been wondering which of them was the founding Humphrey, had decided that the more severe and lifeless of the two probably was he, the other being altogether too ruddy and too plump. Now, he smiled at Mrs Opdyke, trying to look philanthropical.

  ‘We encourage good works,’ the woman said, but the idea of philanthropy seemed to worry her, and she frowned. ‘Many gentlemen are able to practise good works through us. Many.’ She turned to stare at the portrait that Denton had not chosen as that of the onlie begetter. ‘We were founded by a man. Men serve on our board and our inspection committee.’ She turned back to stare at Denton. ‘Good works are one route to bliss.’