The Frightened Man tds-1

by Kenneth Cameron

  Denton took the tea back up the stairs, sipping as he went, feeling it scald his upper lip; he went on past the bedroom floor and up to the attic, stumbling in the darkness. Was the murderer up here, waiting? No, he’d finished with Denton; he’d realized days ago that if Denton had learned anything from Mulcahy, something would have happened. Now, he thought he was safe. Or all but safe. One day, one fact, one sliver of investigative hope lay between him and complete escape. And it depended not on Denton but on five women making lists and, perhaps, a soldier-servant with an idea.

  Not much.

  He began to row on the contraption. The attic was cold and silent; the rowlocks groaned. He hadn’t slept well — dreams, long waking periods, tormenting himself with old failures, old humiliations, back to childhood: failure begat failure. His mind turned, twisted, raced, as it had done all night, reviewing everything about the killings, about Mulcahy, the attack, the girl. On and on, over and over. Nothing new, nothing helpful.

  He lifted the hundredweight dumb-bell, then lighter weights for each hand. Nothing, nothing, nothing. He fired the parlour pistols, then stood with the old percussion Colt held at arm’s length. Two minutes, three minutes, four, the sights never wavering from the target. He would have liked to shoot the killer right then. Wonderful if he had loomed out of the shadows — a bullet in the eye.

  But the killer, he thought, was laughing at him, sitting at his breakfast by now, devouring sausage and potatoes and laughing around the half-chewed food.

  Nothing, nothing, nothing.

  Atkins was full of himself and his mission, so was particularly hard on Maude that morning, bustling and hectoring, outfitting himself with pads of paper and pencils from Denton’s desk, appropriating a never-used leather dispatch case given him by Emma Gosden (‘You’re never going to use this, right? Shame to waste it’), then swaggering off like a diplomatic courier in mufti. He left behind him an already exhausted Maude who was, as well, terrified of Rupert and who armed himself with biscuits to be produced whenever the dog looked his way.

  ‘I think I’d like to give notice, sir,’ Maude said as he was taking away Denton’s breakfast dishes.

  Mindful that he hadn’t paid him, Denton produced a half-crown he’d got from Harris and said, ‘Could it wait until Monday? It’s rather a bad time.’

  ‘Oh — yes, sir — it’s only Mr Atkins is so-He’s very particular.’

  ‘One of his finest qualities.’

  ‘And then there’s the dog, sir.’

  ‘Just keep feeding him biscuits, Maude; he’ll follow you around like a, mmm, dog.’

  Maude picked up the coin. ‘Is this in addition to my wages, sir?’

  Denton sighed, muttered that it must be.

  Maude went down the room with the tray; behind him, Rupert kept pace, anticipating a feed before they reached the bottom of the stairs.

  Denton could do nothing until other people brought him information. It was no good to say that he should have done the work himself; in fact, he had neither the knowledge nor the patience to do what Mrs Johnson’s five women were doing. Nor could he cause them to work faster, although he now tried to do just that: he walked over to Mrs Johnson’s and asked how the work was coming, then muttered that today was their last day.

  ‘They’re entirely aware of the day, Mr Denton!’ Mrs Johnson, although she depended on him for work, was not going to suffer him gladly. ‘It does no good to try to hurry them along.’

  ‘I wasn’t trying to, mmm, hurry … Only thinking, maybe something had, you know, uh-’ He held out a ten-pound note. ‘This is for the earlier, um, bonus.’ She seemed relieved to get it but didn’t encourage him. He said, ‘If you hear anything-’

  ‘Mr Denton, I will send you a message by hand the instant I know something! Until then-’ She stood in her doorway like a guard, her chin out.

  ‘Yes, mmm, of course — you’re right, yes-But the instant, the moment — as soon as you know something-Time really is of the-’

  She thanked him for the money and closed the door.

  So Denton walked. He thought he walked aimlessly but found himself outside the building that housed Mulcahy’s Inventorium. No policeman was visible, so he crossed the street, at first merely pacing along the building’s front, then going in and retracing his steps of days before. The massive locks were gone from Mulcahy’s door, replaced by two smaller ones and a sign that said ‘Metropolitan Police Premises — Keep Away’. The broken lock to the roof had been replaced, as well, the new one sealed with a police tag. Nobody was about, however, and nobody approached him either coming in or going out: the press had lost any little interest it might once have had in R. Mulcahy.

  He walked some more, now down City Road to the warren of old streets around Finsbury, then found himself standing in the Minories and going on to look again at the door behind which Stella Minter had been killed. The constable and the police sign were gone; the room, he was sure, was as yet untenanted by anybody else. Might never be, in fact, its legend now too grim.

  He turned away and walked through the new terraces south of Victoria Park, the great bustle of the city nowhere more visible than in these places where building was going on — carts moving in and out, carpenters on scaffolding, a monstrous machine driving piles somewhere with a sound like that from the forge behind Mulcahy’s building — a sense of impending event, of something coming for which great hurry and noise were necessary. The event being, he supposed, the building of the next London terrace, and the next, and the next.

  Then he walked back to Mrs Johnson’s (‘I haven’t been home; I thought you might have-No? I’m so sorry-’) then west, then north on York Road along the cattle market and into Kentish Town and another plain where new houses would soon stand. At the moment, it was a field of rubble, devastation as if after a war, with, near the centre, a raw, new building rising alone — a pub. This one was faced with green tile that shone in the white winter light. As he watched, two wagons, looking like centipedes, crawled in from the farthest corner, and men the size of ants began to unload iron pipe, the rattle and clink of the pipes reaching him long after he had seen them dropped. Then he headed south again, paralleling the Great Northern and Midland lines, the trains pounding along the tracks towards the depots in Camden and Somers Towns, their whistles like screams. He wondered how anybody in the new houses that would rise could tolerate the noise, then realized that they could and would: this was London, where there must be always more noise, more houses, more workers — cram them in, stuff them in, subject them to noise and dirt — they will accept it and then love it. He thought of Harris’s We need a revolution and thought, No, he’s wrong; this is what we want, this world, this noise, this bustle. This is the revolution.

  In the midst of which a murderer, eating his morning sausage, laughs.

  I could do with a revolution that took him with it, Denton thought, heading homeward. But perhaps, then, the murderer was the revolution Harris wanted, an eruption of violence from within. It would be a grim revolution, then. Harris, he thought, had something more dramatic and final in mind.

  He stopped again at his own house to ask Maude if any messages had come, learned none had, went off to Privatelli’s to eat Italian food he didn’t taste; then he walked on, down into the City, across the river (looking north, trying to see where Mulcahy’s roof must be), crossing back over Waterloo Bridge, his legs tiring now, grateful for clocks that told him that the day was looking towards its end: grateful because it would be over soon, failure looked in the face, something else waiting up ahead.

  And so he came back to his own house about four. He let himself in, took off his coat and hung it, walked up and down the long room, put water on for tea. Only then was there a sound from below — slow footsteps on the stairs (he whirled around, startled despite himself), then the door opening. It was Atkins, much chastened.

  ‘My very own Isandhlwana,’ he said. ‘Disaster.’

  Denton watched his last hope die but smiled to re
assure him. ‘Well — you tried.’

  ‘Oh, yes, the saddest words of voice or pen, “I tried.”’ Atkins looked under Denton’s arm. ‘You making tea? Maude’s got tea downstairs. Want some?’

  ‘No, the water’s hot; I’ll make fresh.’

  ‘Well, then. Pour me a half cup, if you will. My confidence in myself is shaken.’

  They sat by the cold fireplace, Denton in his armchair. Atkins had dragged the hassock to the hearth and sat with his chin on his fists, staring into the cold grate. ‘Bloody hell,’ he said.

  ‘No Stella Minter, then?’

  ‘If you wanted grown women, maiden name of Minter, Stella, I could provide you with two! But neither had a girl child between 1883 and 1886, did they? I could provide you with several dozen ladies, maiden name Minter, who had girl children between 1883 and 1886, but none of them by name Ruth! And none of them match to any woman, maiden name of Minter, what had a baby girl she named Rebecca between 1885 and 1888. Now, I can give you two Rebeccas born to women whose maiden names were Minter, born in the right years, but they don’t have older sisters, do they? Oh, brothers, oh, yes! They got brothers enough to relieve the siege of Ladysmith, but they don’t have sisters! You follow me, General? My idea about the maiden names was bleeding stupid!’

  ‘Now, now-’ Denton made comforting noises that he didn’t feel. He let Atkins sputter and run down, and, as sop to Atkins’s vanity, he said, ‘She lied. Not your fault.’

  ‘Who lied?’

  ‘Stella Minter. I suppose her real name wasn’t Ruth any more than it was Stella — she lied when she used it at the Humphrey, and she lied when she told the other tart it was her name. She was a really frightened girl — not trusting anybody. It isn’t your doing, Sergeant.’

  ‘What, I spent the day looking for Ruth and there ain’t no Ruth?’

  ‘Ain’t no Ruth and ain’t no Rebecca, I suspect, and ain’t no Stella Minter, either.’

  Atkins pushed his chin harder against his fists and growled. ‘Yes, that one there is! A Stella Minter there is.’

  ‘Two, you said. Wrong age — they’re mothers?’

  ‘One yes, one no. A girl, born — I’ve got it written down someplace — it’s in me dispatch case — born in the right years. Named Stella Minter — there she was, plain as currants in a cake. You do all those names, column after column, you forget what you’re looking for. I’d already done the Minter maidens; I was doing baby Ruths, but I got confused or sleepy, God knows, and there’s a Stella baby, father’s name Minter, and I wrote it down. Stupid, I’m just stupid. It’s a wonder you put up with me, Major.’

  Denton stared at the angry servant’s profile. The room was cold; he’d been feeling it for a quarter of an hour, only now realized it. ‘Light the fire,’ he said. He stood. ‘I’m going out.’

  ‘You just came in.’

  ‘I want the information you took down about the infant Stella Minter. Chop-chop.’

  Atkins looked up at him. ‘What for?’

  ‘Maybe we’ve been working on a wrong assumption. Maybe her name really was Stella Minter.’

  Atkins got up slowly. He fetched matches from the mantel, bent over the grate, in which Maude had laid a fire that morning, then straightened. ‘Bloody hell,’ he said again. ‘Now who’s been stupid?’

  ‘I want you to be there,’ Denton said to Janet Striker, ‘in case it really is the one. At best, it’ll be telling somebody their daughter is dead.’

  ‘Surely they’ve seen it in the paper.’

  ‘You’d think. But people are funny — they could be recluses; they could just be people who don’t want to know things. It was a very small notice.’

  Mrs Striker raised her chin. ‘They never reported her missing, if her name really was Stella Minter.’

  ‘We don’t know that.’

  ‘I know that, Mr Denton. I get a list of missing women every month. I looked, the first time you visited me.’ They were in her office, the workday coming to an end. She gestured at a scruffy stack of papers behind her. ‘If it was her real name, you’re dealing with people who never declared their daughter as missing.’

  ‘Anyway, I’d like you to be there.’

  She stared up at him, her face weary, the skin shiny as if she had a fever. ‘You’re going now?’ He nodded. She looked at a watch pinned on her breast, looked around the office as if to see what was left to do. ‘How far is it?’ she said.

  ‘Kilburn — off Kilburn High Road. Twenty-seven Balaclava Gardens. That’s the address on the birth record, at any rate.’

  ‘And they’re still there?’

  Her questions irritated him; he wanted to go, to get it done, even while he knew her doubts were good ones. ‘I’ll find out when I get there,’ he growled.

  She opened a drawer and burrowed under papers and took out a small, fat book. ‘We shall see.’ She turned pages, asked him to read off the address again, ran a finger down a page and up the next one, and said, ‘Balaclava Gardens, number twenty-seven — Alfred Minter, licensed accountant. ’ She closed the book with a snap. ‘Still there last year, at any rate.’ She stood, tall and thin and weary-looking, then raised her voice to almost a shout. ‘Sylvie, I shall be out on business. Answer the telephone, please.’

  A heavy voice came from a surprisingly small woman on the far side of the office. ‘Yes, Mrs Striker.’

  ‘You think they’ll just let us waltz in,’ she said to Denton.

  ‘I brought my police letter. You can tell them what a noble sort I am.’

  ‘And who’s going to tell them how wonderful I am?’

  Balaclava Gardens was a terrace on the west side of Kilburn High Road beyond Shoot Up Hill. Denton recognized it as recent but not new, part of an estate developed long enough ago that the trees were nearing maturity and the front gardens looked obsessively trim and spiritless — the real gardens would be at the back. The cab had come along the edge of a more recent building site to reach the street: the area had been built up in stages, was now, he thought, almost complete.

  Number 27 looked like all the others, was perhaps a touch nattier, its garden a notch more obsessive, but what set it well apart was the Headland Electric Dogcart parked in front, its rear axle attached by a chain to a ring in a concrete block.

  ‘Bloke thinks it’s a blooming horse!’ the cabbie guffawed.

  ‘Or he thinks his neighbours are thieves,’ Denton said. He paid the man but asked him to come back in fifteen minutes ‘just in case’, as he murmured to Janet Striker. ‘We don’t want to get marooned in the wilds of Kilburn.’

  ‘I can’t make a living hanging about,’ the cabbie said.

  Denton gave him one of the coins he’d got from Harris. ‘Find the pub, have one on me, come back.’

  Mrs Striker was looking at the electric motor car. ‘It’s quite unusual,’ she said.

  ‘Small.’

  ‘Look — there’s not another on the street.’

  ‘Maybe accountancy pays.’

  ‘And likes to declare itself. I wonder, does he ever drive it, or does he leave it here to remind the neighbours of how successful he is?’

  They turned to the house, a yellow brick in a terrace of identically built houses, now rather hysterically individualized by touches of paint, the occasional bit of sawn fancy-work under an eave, names like ‘The Cedars’ (next door, though there were no cedars). Denton had already seen the lace curtain in the front window of number 27 twitch; in that house at least — perhaps all up and down the street — an arrival by cab had been noticed.

  ‘You do the talking,’ Denton said.

  ‘In heaven’s name, why?’

  ‘You do it better than me. Anyway, people trust a woman.’

  They went up the short walk between two rows of bricks half-buried on the diagonal, two rows of rigorously trimmed box beyond them, English ivy and a monkey puzzle tree in each ten-by-twelve-foot plot. ‘You expect too much of me,’ she said.

  ‘You can do anything, is what I think.
’

  She gave him a look — amused? annoyed? — and rang the bell. The door opened too quickly; the middle-aged woman behind it had been waiting. She was wearing a nondescript dress, but Mrs Striker seemed to know she was the maid (and would be the only maid in this house, and would live out somewhere) and wasn’t the mistress. Denton wanted to say that this was a perfect example of her abilities, because he’d have got it wrong and thought her the mistress.

  ‘We should like to call on Mr and Mrs Minter, if you please. Will you show us in?’ She held out a calling card.

  The maid frowned. Her face said that she was neither bright nor well paid, so why should she be forced to make a decision in such a matter? Then her face more or less collapsed, as if to say, It’s beyond me, it really is. She said in a whisper, ‘Wait, please.’ And closed the door.

  Janet Striker rolled her eyes. ‘Not done,’ she said softly. ‘Poor frightened soul-!’ A murmur of voices came from inside the house; Janet Striker smiled unpleasantly and said, ‘Now she’s being scolded. Mrs Minter will be saying, “What will the neighbours think? Everybody’s seen them come by cab; we can’t leave them on the doorstep, Alfred! It will cause the most awful gossip! They’ll think, oh, what will they think-!”’ She displayed a talent for mimicry he hadn’t expected, then remembered her contempt for ‘nice’ women. ‘And he’ll be saying, “Can it be the religious canvassers, do you think? At this hour?”’

  With that, the door opened again and the maid, now red-faced, whispered, ‘Come in, please, miss,’ and stood aside. They passed through into a tiny vestibule with a tiled floor, beyond it a narrow hall with oppressively dark but very shiny woodwork and a staircase. At the far end of the hall a man was standing, pulling at the bottom of his waistcoat and looking severe. In the middle of his tea, Denton thought.