The Frightened Man tds-1

by Kenneth Cameron

  He chewed his lower lip. He breathed out — he, too, was a little out of breath. ‘All right.’ He put his hand into the pocket where the Colt rode. ‘You lead.’

  Her hand was still on his arm. She passed in front of him very close, and she said, ‘He isn’t your father.’

  She led them more slowly over the hard earth, her skirts lifted a little in her hands. Behind her, shortening his stride, he held the bulge of the heavy pistol against his hip with a forearm. When they reached the back of the removal van, they found a kerb and a pavement; the smell of horse surrounded them, straw-filled dung on the ground.

  ‘The Satterlees?’ she said to one of the removal men, who was coming out of the house with a small armchair held against his chest. He jerked his head back. ‘Inside!’ He was sweating.

  She stood aside for the other man, also coming out; she was right at the front doorway then, turned back to Denton, giving him a look as if to say, Now, mind your manners. When she turned back to go in, a young girl was standing in the doorway.

  Denton knew it was the right Satterlee because of her. Later, he would be able to anatomize her and explain why he knew, but at that moment he knew only that he could see the dead young woman in her face and his sister in the entirety of her — pose, smile, clothes — which told him all he needed to know about her and about her relationship with her father. A terrible realization struck him: This was how Josie looked. I didn’t remember, but I do — it was this, this look of — of not being a child.

  ‘We’re looking for Mr and Mrs Satterlee,’ Janet Striker said.

  ‘Looking’s free,’ the girl said. She laughed.

  Mrs Striker glanced at Denton and said, ‘May we come in?’

  The girl looked not at her but at Denton. She gave him a smile, cocked her head, gave another smile. Flirting. Denton said, ‘You’re Edna, aren’t you.’

  ‘I might be.’ She made a movement with her whole body, swaying forward and dropping her right shoulder and then straightening, never taking her eyes from him, the finish of the movement leaving her partly in profile so that if she’d had breasts they’d have been shown well. ‘What’ll you give me if I am?’

  ‘Is your mother here?’ Janet Striker said.

  The girl laughed. ‘She is for as long as the gin lasts.’ She laughed again and looked at Denton. ‘She’s here, but she’s not all there, if you know what I mean!’

  The removal men pushed past them then; the girl flattened herself against the open door, but as the younger of the two went past she moved forward so that he brushed against her and she looked up into his face, smiling. The man looked at Denton and Janet Striker and muttered something and went on inside, down a narrow hall to stairs at the back, and up.

  ‘We’ll come in,’ Janet Striker said.

  The girl shrugged. ‘Suit yourself.’ She gave Denton her smile again.

  The hall ran right through the house to another door at the back, now standing partway open. Two doors on the left led to a parlour and, at the back, he supposed, to a kitchen. The hall was small, barely big enough for two people, he thought; the walls, papered in a small pattern in shades of grey-green, were nondescript, probably depressing after a little time; the woodwork was dark but dull.

  Janet Striker looked back from the first door, nodded at him, and he followed her, feeling the girl close behind him.

  The parlour had been emptied of furniture except for one armchair, in which a woman in a dark coat and a small black hat was sitting. She looked at them with dull eyes, said nothing.

  ‘Mrs Satterlee?’ Denton said.

  ‘Oh, she won’t say nothing; she never does.’ The girl giggled.

  Denton went closer to the woman, bent down to see her face. Under a layer of powder, it was lined and blotchy. The eyelids quivered.

  ‘Mrs Satterlee, we’re looking for your daughter — Alice.’

  ‘I told you, she won’t say nothing! She don’t know nothing! ’ The girl danced into his line of vision. ‘Ask me; I know lots of things.’

  He felt real physical revulsion, wanted to slap her. In a hard voice, he said, ‘Where’s your sister Alice?’

  ‘She went away.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘How should I know? She went away and she didn’t come back, now my story is all told.’ She gave him the smile, then bent her torso forward and put her right hand into the small of her back as if to deepen the curve of her spine. The posture was that from a cheap postcard — a woman offering herself, the pose designed to reveal the breasts, cleavage if she had had such a thing. Denton felt his attention lurch, saw his sister at thirteen, and in an angry, pained voice, he cried, ‘Don’t! You stupid little-’ He’d have said bitch, but a louder voice from the stairs stopped him, stopped them all, and their eyes, even the seated woman’s, went to the door, hers open with fright.

  ‘You bloody stupid bastards, I told you to be careful! Now look what you’ve done to the plaster, you stupid bastards! God, man, lift it-!’ Something heavy bumped against the wall; there was a thump, a different voice swore, and a third male voice said, ‘You talk to us like that any more, guv, I’ll drop this bloody thing on your toes.’

  More sound — bumps, a dragging along the floor, men’s heavy breathing — and the first voice shouting, ‘Have a care — you shouldn’t be allowed to move stones, you bloody imbeciles-’ and a man backed down the hall past the doorway, one side of a chest of drawers in his arms, then another man at the other end.

  And then the third man came, his eyes on the two who were carrying the dresser.

  Satterlee was tall, very solid but with a heavy gut; his hair was dark, almost black, his face red from shouting, sun-and wind-burned. He looked into the parlour as he was passing; his eyes took in the four of them, and he recognized Denton just as Denton recognized him. Neither had any doubt. Denton didn’t need to see more than the eyes and the forehead.

  Satterlee reached into the right rear pocket of his trouser; Denton was putting his hand into the overcoat, then closing it on the Colt and feeling the pistol catch in the fabric as he tried to draw it out. Satterlee by then had his hand out, a dark shape in it that, with a flick, became a heavy-bladed knife.

  The girl screamed. She ran towards her father. She shouted. ‘Papa, don’t!’

  Denton, wrestling with the pistol, trying to tear it loose from the pocket, still had part of his brain respond to the words: Of course, that’s what Mulcahy heard the other girl say — Don’t, Papa — Oh, Christ-

  Whatever Satterlee had intended — to kill Denton, probably, to eliminate the only one who could connect him with the attack — he was momentarily frustrated by his daughter. She reached with both hands for the hand that held the knife (knowing? having reason to fear it?), managing to catch his arm; she was saying, almost crooning, ‘Please, Papa, no-’ over and over, as if with this voice she was able to quiet him.

  Satterlee shoved her with his forearm, then wrenched himself free of her and tried to turn; she tried again to grab him. Denton, trying to tear the pistol out of his coat, missed what happened next but saw only the result, a spurt of red that spattered the floor and the wall as the girl spun away; then he heard her scream and, behind him, the screams, all alike and repeated as if by a machine, from the woman in the chair.

  Satterlee looked at him. His eyes were manic, enraged. He might have come at Denton then, but the Colt was at last coming free, the curve of the handle visible above the pocket, Denton’s thumb cocking the single-action hammer. Satterlee in one grab pulled Janet Striker to him; the shoulder of her coat and dress ripped with the violence of the movement, and then he was dragging her out of the room and she was screaming at Denton. Satterlee shouted at somebody in the corridor; there was a crash and a male scream.

  Denton had the pistol out and crossed the parlour in two strides, saw down the hall the two workmen, one on the floor, blood on the wall, Janet Striker being pushed out of the back door. He tried to run down the hall, jumped over the fallen man, canno
ned off the narrow doorframe at the back and fell to one knee as he failed to see the step down from the house to the rubble outside. When he was up again, Satterlee was forty feet away, dragging Janet Striker, who was struggling with him, trying to punch and kick him and failing.

  ‘Satterlee!’

  Denton put himself into a sprint. There was no way Satterlee could outrun him if he held on to the woman. Denton ran wide of their path, meaning to swing around him and come in at an angle where he could have a shot, but Satterlee looked back and in one move — the man was powerful and fast — swung Mrs Striker against him and held her there as a shield. He had the fingers of his left hand wound in her hair and her head pulled cruelly back; the knife was against her throat, and already a thin ribbon of blood was trickling down.

  ‘Get off!’ Satterlee shouted at him. ‘Back off or I’ll kill her!’

  Denton stopped. He raised the pistol.

  Satterlee ducked his head behind Mrs Striker’s. His voice came, heavy and dangerous, ‘Throw down that pistol, or I’ll kill her now!’

  ‘Kill her, and I’ll kill you.’

  Satterlee pulled her head back still farther. Mrs Striker had hooked her left hand inside the arm of the hand that held the knife, but there wasn’t a hope that she could keep the knife from slashing her throat. Denton’s mind raced through possibilities — shoot one of Satterlee’s feet, his shoulder — but none would stop him from killing her.

  ‘Throw the gun down or I’ll do it!’

  The cleared field stretched behind Satterlee to the line of trees, still white with frost despite the low morning sun. Not another figure was in sight.

  He had been holding the gun at arm’s length since Satterlee had swung around to face him. The front sight was steady on the point where some part of his head might appear. Denton thought that he needed only a fraction of a second, two inches of skull. He waited. His own breathing quieted. If somebody could go around Satterlee from behind-

  But nobody would. Denton knew what Satterlee would do next, and he wouldn’t wait much longer. He’d slash her throat and run, risking the bullet. And she’d be dead.

  ‘Janet-’ he called.

  Her head was pulled back again. Satterlee shouted, ‘I’m going to bloody kill her!’

  Denton thought about risking a shot close enough to graze her and hit Satterlee, but he couldn’t. And Satterlee would react automatically; the knife would do its work no matter what. He kept the pistol level, aimed, ready.

  The sound that Janet Striker made was like an animal growl that rose to a scream, like some big cat that went from menace to hysteria in a single cry. The scream was purely the triumph of the body over pain: she had moved her left hand from Satterlee’s arm to the razor-sharp blade of the knife, which she grasped as if it were a lifeline, at the same time twisting her head down and away into the blade against Satterlee’s hold so that Denton heard hair rip from her scalp.

  Blood covered her fingers. Satterlee roared and pulled the knife, through her fingers and down, and then blood flowed from her face and her throat, but she had given Denton his fraction of a second and his two inches of skull.

  He pulled the trigger.

  Chapter Twenty

  ‘They’ve put off the inquest on Mulcahy.’

  ‘I’d have kept my promise to be there, Munro. If this hadn’t happened.’

  It was past one in the afternoon. They were sitting in a room in the East Ham police station, overcoats on against the dead, damp chill of the place. Munro was sitting by a scarred wood table, from time to time rapping his knuckles on it in either frustration or impatience.

  ‘You might have told us,’ he said.

  ‘There wasn’t time.’

  ‘You ought to have told us.’ Munro rapped with his knuckles. ‘More tea?’ When Denton shook his head, Munro looked at the third man in the room, an aristocratic face above an impeccable suit and a fur-collared overcoat. ‘Sir?’

  ‘Thank you, no.’ He was, as Denton had to keep reminding himself, Denton’s lawyer — sent out by his publisher as soon as they could gear themselves up to action.

  ‘I don’t like being treated like the criminal in the thing,’ Denton said.

  ‘You are the criminal in the thing. Until we prove otherwise. ’

  The solicitor cleared his throat. Munro looked at him, shrugged. The man of law said, ‘I think you would be wise, Sergeant, not to slander Mr Denton.’

  ‘I’m here as a friend, Sir Francis, not as a copper.’

  The long, lawyerly face — similarities to some horses in the nose and upper lip — smiled, and he said, ‘Once a copper, always a copper. You must be careful what you say.’

  Munro shrugged again. He hugged himself, poured some now cold tea from the brown earthenware pot that sat on the unpainted table. He sipped and made a face, then rapped on the wood. ‘Guillam had a fit when he heard.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘He’s raving about prosecution, or was when I saw him at the Yard. Georgie wants to make super, I told you.’

  The lawyer shifted his long, elegantly trousered legs. ‘Any policeman who prosecutes the man who shot a brute who had just stabbed his own daughter and a workman and was holding an innocent woman at knife-point is likelier to find himself a constable on a beat than a superintendent. There isn’t a jury in England who would convict. And not a judge who’d be patient with the prosecutor who brought such a case.’

  Munro frowned. ‘You may know that, Sir Francis, and let’s say for the sake of argument that I may know that, but George Guillam has decided that he despises Denton, and he’s a man who can let his rages run away with him.’

  ‘Happily, then, the decision to lay charges is not your Sergeant Guillam’s. It’s East Ham’s.’

  Munro made a sound, doubtful, equivocal. ‘CID’re in it now.’

  ‘They at least believe in prudence.’

  Munro had surprised Denton by turning up an hour before, explaining not too helpfully that he had ‘picked up a ride with the deputy super’ of CID. Only as the hour wore on did Denton gather that Scotland Yard was in a subdued uproar over the coming together of the Mulcahy and Stella Minter cases, resulting in the postponement of the coroner’s inquest on Mulcahy. Denton himself, held now in the death of Harold Satterlee, had been treated like both a criminal and a hero — two hours of questioning, but no jail cell, and an immediate response to his request to send a message off to his publisher. (He’d thought first of Hench-Rose, but had decided he didn’t want that indebtedness.) He’d thought that Lang would send the legal nonentity who advised the publishing firm on contracts, but, to his astonishment, Lang had sent Sir Francis Brudenell, of whom even Denton had heard; he had introduced himself as ‘your solicitor, not the one who’d represent you in court — that’s a barrister — but we’ll never go to court.’ Now here they were, waiting for Denton didn’t know what — news of the girl or Mrs Striker, perhaps, or the evidence that Sir Francis insisted was all that was needed to send him out a free man.

  ‘Well,’ Denton said, ‘I did shoot a man.’

  Sir Francis made a face. ‘Sergeant Munro will forget he heard that, I hope. Mr Denton, you must stop offering information.’

  ‘But I-’

  ‘Hush, sir! At once!’

  Munro was embarrassed; he jumped up and said, ‘More tea,’ to nobody and everybody and rushed out with the teapot. While he was gone, Sir Francis gave Denton a lecture on saying nothing; in fact, he had already given it, in short form, earlier. When Munro came back with the teapot newly filled and obviously hot — he was carrying it in a not very clean towel — Denton and the lawyer were sitting as they had been, both quiet. Munro tried to bustle, offered tea, poured, produced from a pocket two scones wrapped in baker’s paper, apologized for the lack of a plate, and said, ‘The woman’s going to be all right.’

  ‘Mrs Striker?’

  ‘She’ll have a bad scar.’ Munro shook his head. ‘Pretty much all the way down one side of her face, I’m afr
aid. Terrible for a woman.’

  ‘Not for that woman,’ Denton said. ‘What about her hand?’

  ‘They’re trying to save her fingers.’ Munro offered the scones and, refused, took one for himself and perched with one buttock on the table. ‘Local men didn’t want to deal with it, so they took her off to Bart’s. Word just came back.’

  ‘And the girl?’

  ‘Pierced the intestine, opened her abdomen, but she’ll survive. Or so they say. Lot of problems when you cut into the gut — sepsis, all that.’ He chewed his scone. ‘The workman got it in the shoulder and arm, won’t be doing any lifting for a couple of months, poor devil. They’re trying to get a statement from the mother, but the medico says she’s catatonic, and anyway she’s still drunk and they want to dry her out. We’ll get something from her eventually, I’d say, but — not right away.’ He rubbed his fingers together and brushed crumbs from his partial lap. ‘Bit tricky, what we’ll get from those two.’

  Denton glanced at Sir Francis, then said, ‘You won’t get much from the girl. Not until she admits — what happened to her. And she won’t tell that to a man.’

  ‘You think he molested her, too.’

  ‘Of course he did.’

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  Denton looked at him, hard-eyed. ‘You only had to see her move. To listen to her.’ He put his head in his hands. ‘She’s only a kid. She knows he did something terrible to her, but she also knows she gets a lot of butter with it. She’s the queen of the household. Woman of the house. She may even think she loves him and loves — it.’

  ‘But you can’t know that.’

  Denton looked at him between his fingers. He said nothing. Munro sat at the table again, rapped, shifted position. ‘You’re in a foul mood, I must say,’ he muttered to Denton.

  Denton looked up at him again. ‘Ever kill anybody?’ Munro grunted. Denton put his face in his hands. Munro was embarrassed and made desultory talk with the solicitor. Denton, taking a turn around the room, stopped in front of Munro and said, ‘When can I see Mrs Striker?’