The Bohemian Girl tds-2

by Kenneth Cameron

  ‘Do you read German?’

  ‘Good God, no.’

  ‘There’s a new book, Die Traumdeutung — Dream. . mmm. . Inquiry, no, Analysis. It implies that dreams have meanings.’

  ‘What’s the good of meanings if we forget them as soon as we wake up?’

  ‘Well, you didn’t, obviously.’

  ‘You said yourself they’re the product of fever and morphine.’

  ‘But not necessarily invalid for that.’

  ‘So I was talking to myself?’

  ‘Mmmmm — no, I prefer to think of it — this is all speculation — as working.’

  ‘It certainly seemed like work. What I remember.’

  ‘Working something through.’

  ‘Counting women’s hats? What’s that got to do with me?’

  ‘Were you counting them? That’s new.’

  ‘I was-God, I don’t know. No. Yes. There was some sort of list. It was just something I had to do over and over. There was no end to it.’ He gave a graveside chuckle. ‘There’s a cliché — “wearing two hats”. When you do two things at once.’

  ‘Why was there no end to it?’

  ‘Oh, good Judas Priest, how would I know? It was a dream.’

  ‘For four weeks. What in your usual life do you do over and over again?’

  He thought, Try to hold on to Janet Striker, but he wouldn’t say so. He wouldn’t violate her that way, display her for this man. He partly liked Gallichan now, let himself be interested by Gallichan’s interest in him, but she was out of it. He said, ‘For a long time, I — well, call it going around and around — over my wife after she died. But I thought that was over.’ He told him about the dream he’d had after his first night with Janet Striker, although he didn’t include her — the dream about the running horses and the bleached and beautiful horse bones.

  ‘You astonish me, Denton — you’ve believed in the potency of dreams all along.’

  ‘Dreams are like jokes. I do believe that. This one — “Stop beating a dead horse.”’

  ‘Why a horse?’

  ‘It’s a saying.’ He chewed his lip. ‘I gave her a horse. After we were married. A little mare, because she thought she wanted to ride, but it got to be more like a dog. She fed it sugar and petted it and it followed her around. After she died, I sold everything. All I had was debts. I sold her horse. It was too small for me; I couldn’t keep it. It started following me-I sold it to a dealer at auction. A lot of his horses wound up in the mines. There was a horse in my dreams.’ He was weeping.

  He had a pair of crutches, and he could make his way down the corridor, dragging the dead leg with him, a sister at his side to keep him from falling. He’d lost thirty pounds. When he looked down at his body, he was aware of how vain he’d been about it, hard and muscled despite his age. Now the skin sagged around his knees and his belly, and his muscles were slack and his ribs showed. He thought of the horse in his dreams.

  ‘It was old. Terrible-looking beast. Horrible gait.’

  ‘What had it to do with the boxes?’

  ‘Nothing. It simply got me to where the boxes were. And the — figure — with the shotgun. And the girl who laughed at me.’ He’d remembered her a few days before. ‘There’s an American saying — “to get taken for a ride”. To get fooled. The horse took me for a ride, I suppose.’

  ‘Was the girl your wife?’

  ‘No, good God.’ Denton could almost laugh at the absurdity of that. ‘She was more like Mary Thomason. But she wasn’t Mary Thomason; she was-’ He told Gallichan about Mary Thomason and her brother and the drawing. When he was done, he said, ‘When Struther Jarrold shot me he shouted, “I did it, I did it!” He was pointing the revolver at me and looking deliriously happy and he said, “I did it, Astoreth.” Maybe the girl was this mad creation of his, Astoreth.’ He tried to pull himself up. ‘I need to talk to a detective named Munro at New Scotland Yard.’

  ‘When Jarrold shot you with your own gun, you mean.’

  ‘It wasn’t my own gun; I’d never shot it. It was just a gun I’d paid a couple of shillings for and kept in a drawer.’ He looked at Gallichan. ‘All right, it was my gun, in the legal sense. What are you trying to make of it?’

  ‘I’m only wondering what you make of it.’

  ‘I want to talk to Detective Munro.’

  Gallichan got up and looked out of the window and made a face at what he saw of the day. He struggled into an overcoat and picked up his hat. ‘I don’t want you to become agitated.’

  One day, he was able to make the muscles in his right thigh twitch. He found that he could make them twitch in a kind of order, going clockwise around the leg. He could move the toes and he could tilt the foot back about an inch when he was lying down. Then one morning he woke up with a partial erection. It was February. He announced to the doctor that he was feeling better. It was time to move things along. ‘I want to talk to Detective Munro!’

  ‘I’ve sent him a message.’

  ‘And I want to see Heseltine.’ In fact, he was hurt that Heseltine hadn’t tried to see him. ‘Have you been in touch with Heseltine?’

  The doctor hesitated. ‘I’ll have a talk with Mrs Striker.’

  When Janet Striker came next day, she told him that Heseltine was dead. ‘He killed himself a day or two after you were shot. I’m sorry, Denton.’

  ‘All this time-!’

  ‘The doctors didn’t want you to be upset. You weren’t rational that first month. Then I thought, what difference does it make now, and I did what they asked and kept quiet about it.’

  ‘But-’ The trip with Heseltine to Normandy was recent to him, the most recent thing he remembered except for being shot. His feeling was that he had seen Heseltine only a day or two ago, and suddenly the man was dead. Had been dead for months. ‘Suicide?’

  ‘Talk to Munro about it. I don’t know what happened.’

  After she had gone, he lay in the bed and stared at the ceiling. Mary Thomason, the brother, Himple — all of that paradoxically seemed to him from some long-ago time. But Heseltine? He remembered the young man’s pleasure in the French countryside, his good humour about the bedbugs. His look of vitality when they had separated at Waterloo.

  ‘Heseltine wouldn’t kill himself,’ he said aloud.

  Apparently she agreed. The next time she came, she confessed that she, Atkins and Cohan had been taking turns sitting at his door since he had been moved to the nursing home, and she’d warned the staff against letting anyone else in. ‘I thought somebody might try again.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You and Heseltine — I was afraid it wasn’t coincidence.’

  ‘What about yourself? You were in all that with me.’

  ‘I’ve changed hotels several times.’

  He laughed. ‘You should talk to Dr Gallichan. You’re as crazy as I am.’

  He wrote a letter to Heseltine’s father. The handwriting didn’t look like his own. He apologized for its being so late and explained that he’d been ill. He said that Heseltine had been a fine man. A few days later, the father wrote to thank him and to say that Heseltine had spoken of him and seemed to take strength from knowing him; was there anything of his son’s that Denton would like to have as a memento? Denton wrote back and said that he’d like to buy the little Dutch painting of the lion that had hung on his son’s wall. The father replied that no such painting had been found among his son’s effects. Would Denton like something else?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Munro and Sergeant Markson came and were solicitous and gentle, but he knew that Munro thought he was behaving badly. Munro, at least, should have been allowed to see him.

  ‘I’ve said I’m sorry. At first they wouldn’t let me see you, and then I didn’t want to see you. Why didn’t you insist? You’re the coppers.’

  ‘Well, no harm done, I suppose.’

  ‘I still feel like hell.’

  ‘Two.450s, I’m not surprised.’ Munro sat in the metal chair, Markson i
n a Thonet that had been dragged in from the corridor. Outside his door, sounds that Denton had become used to — the clink of glass and metal, the clack of feet, voices — were distorted and funnelled by the tile-walled corridor. Every day now, he was pushed up and down this corridor in a wheelchair, then made to try to walk on his new crutches.

  Markson cleared his throat. ‘We’d like to ask you a few questions, if we might, sir.’

  Munro grunted. ‘Just get on with it, Fred, he knows where we stand.’ He frowned at Denton. ‘And we know where he stands.’

  Denton frowned back. He felt as if he were going to jump out of himself somehow. He didn’t sleep at night now without chemicals, and the days were like this.

  ‘Well, sir-’ Markson cleared his throat again. ‘We’d like to ask you a few questions about the shooting.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘What do you remember, sir?’

  ‘I don’t remember actually being shot. I have a kind of picture of looking up and seeing Jarrold. He looked beside himself with joy.’

  ‘He had a gun, sir?’

  ‘Of course he did. That old Galland.’

  ‘You recognized it, sir?’

  ‘You couldn’t mistake that contraption under the barrel.’

  ‘Could you swear it was your gun, sir?’

  ‘Well, of course it was-It looked like my gun, all right?’

  ‘But you can’t swear-’

  ‘It didn’t have my name on it, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘Something like that, yes, sir.’

  Munro leaned forward. Like everybody else who came, he had put his hat on the bed next to Denton’s dead leg. ‘Do you remember anything that Jarrold said?’

  ‘He said, “I did it, I did it, Astoreth.”’

  ‘You’re sure of that.’

  ‘I am now. I wasn’t at first. He sounded like a kid who’d caught his first trout. I can’t tell you how — pleased — he looked. What’s happened to him?’

  Munro shifted his bulk, glanced at Markson, said, ‘He’s in a prison for the criminally insane.’

  ‘There’s been a trial?’

  ‘Not yet. Maybe never. Prosecutor wanted to hear what you’d have to say, and then he may not go to trial. Charge of attempted murder was laid, of course, but in fact Jarrold’s been committed on the earlier business with Mrs Striker’s rooms, and violation of the terms of house arrest. Either road, he isn’t coming out again.’

  Denton, sitting up on a pile of pillows, his emaciated chest partly revealed by an unbuttoned nightshirt, stared at Munro. His interest in Jarrold now was rather theoretical, not at all a desire for justice or revenge. ‘Before he shot me, you told Janet Striker he was getting better.’

  ‘I didn’t; his bleeding doctors did. Any doctor who pretends to know what’s going on in another man’s mind is a bleeding quack. They had him on chloral, so he breaks out and when we arrest him he’s been drinking, and now the doctors tell us the combination of chloral and alcohol’s the sure way to lunacy. Well, they’re right.’

  Denton stared at him some more. Not fully aware of his own state, his own motives, Denton sensed he was coming out of the anger and melancholy of the past weeks. He knew that he wanted to show himself to Munro — the gaunt face, the apparently haunted eyes — because he knew that his body was an accusation. Finally, when he could see that Munro was embarrassed and annoyed, he said, ‘Tell me what happened to Heseltine.’

  ‘Oh, that poor sod.’

  ‘Yes, that poor sod.’

  ‘Wasn’t our case; Division handled it. Still, Fred followed it once he found you’d had some connection with him.’

  ‘How did you find that?’

  ‘His man. Said Heseltine had been travelling with you.’

  Markson was going through a notebook, licking a finger every two or three pages to turn them. ‘Man named Jenks,’ he said when he found the page.

  ‘I know Jenks.’

  ‘He found the body. Coroner’s jury ruled suicide, that was it.’ Markson looked up. ‘He was despondent.’

  ‘Like hell he was.’

  Both detectives jerked; Munro looked offended. Markson said, ‘Division reported the man Jenks said his employer had been despondent. Just got chucked out of the army. Confirmed by interview with the victim’s father conducted by — mmm, local constabulary in-’

  ‘Jenks is a drunkard.’

  ‘Well, still-’

  ‘Heseltine wasn’t despondent!’

  ‘Leave it, Denton. It’s history now.’

  ‘He wasn’t despondent! I’d just spent three days with him. He was talking about going to Jamaica to take a job. When I left him at Waterloo, he was happy.’

  Munro picked up his hat and leaned his forearms on his knees. ‘Leave it.’

  ‘How did he kill himself?’

  Munro looked at Markson. The young detective looked at his notes, clearly marking time, and then said, ‘Slashed his wrists with his razor.’

  ‘It’s done,’ Munro said. He stood. ‘The coroner’s jury got the evidence, Denton; there was no doubt in anybody’s mind. He got in the bath with his razor and did it. I’m sorry, especially as you have to hear it in your condition, but it’s what happened.’

  Denton tried to picture Heseltine’s cutting his veins with a razor. Lying in his own blood? He said, ‘Dressed or naked?’

  ‘Unh — I don’t have that, sir.’

  ‘With the water running? A man like Heseltine doesn’t make messes. He’d have known he’d be found by Jenks, who was incompetent; he’d have done everything to avoid leaving a mess. Find out.’

  Munro shook his head. ‘It’s over. Don’t tell us how to do our job.’ He fanned a fly away with his hat. ‘Your job is to get well. It hurts me to look at you. I mean it — I want you to focus on getting your old self back; forget all this business. The young man who killed himself-’ He shrugged. ‘These things happen.’

  Denton held his eyes and then, feeling the pain in his back, the discomfort of the sheet under his buttocks, used both hands to shift the position of his right leg. He said, ‘Sit down, Munro.’

  ‘Got a job to do.’

  ‘Not yet. I want to talk to you.’

  Munro looked at Markson as if to ask if Markson should stay, too; Denton nodded. Munro lowered his backside into the chair as if he feared sitting on something. He made a demonstration of taking out his watch and looking at it.

  Denton said, ‘I don’t remember everything that happened when I was shot. More of it comes back to me, but I’m still blank where the shooting itself is concerned. Also just before that. I think I was coming to see you-’

  ‘You’d been at Mrs Castle’s.’

  Denton raised his head. ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Somebody grabbed Jarrold before he could put another bullet into you. Happened to be a private detective.’ Munro glanced at Markson, who seemed engrossed in his notebook, slowly turning the pages from back to front. ‘He was following you.’

  Denton frowned, bewildered. ‘I’d just got back from France.’

  Munro laid his hat on the bed again. His hair was pressed against his scalp where the hat had rested; he stroked the sides with his palms. ‘This is an embarrassment for the Metropolitan Police, Denton. I was going to tell you in good time. It’s, mmm, not something we’re proud of.’

  ‘I remember now — I thought somebody was following me. I think I’d thought so before, but there was never anybody.’

  ‘Lady Emmeline — Jarrold’s mother — was having you followed. She sent copies of their reports to Georgie Guillam.’

  Denton’s brain seemed slow. He had to remind himself who Guillam was. When he remembered, he was enraged. ‘Why?’

  ‘I told you that Georgie’d pulled Jarrold over into his bailiwick. I thought it was just to make the connection — get himself some credit with the upper crust. Maybe that was all there was, to start with. He told the super he’d gone to Lady Emmeline’s house and offered her his hel
p. Because Jarrold was now his responsibility. That could have been just Georgie’s sucking up. But getting the private detectives’ reports from her-He wanted to get something on you. So did Lady Emmeline. She really hates you, you know — a lot worse than Georgie. So they scratched each other’s back.’

  Denton felt out of breath. ‘That’s how Jarrold knew where I’d be when he decided to shoot me.’

  ‘His mother wrote to him at least once a day. Sent him telegrams — one the night before you came back from France.’ Munro rubbed his forehead and blew out his cheeks. ‘One of the detectives had tailed you to the Channel ferry and told Guillam. Guillam cabled the French demanding they tell him when you started back. When he heard from them-’ Munro shook his head. ‘He did what no copper should ever do. He notified Lady Emmeline. After, he said he did it just so’s her detectives could pick you up again. But she telegraphed Jarrold, so what Guillam did meant that Jarrold could find you, too. Jarrold’s mother — and therefore Jarrold — knew where you’d be twelve hours before your boat landed that morning. The dicks picked you up again at Waterloo.’

  ‘And so did Jarrold.’

  ‘That’s my reading of it.’

  ‘But-’ Denton was thinking of the logistics of getting from Lady Emmeline’s Sussex house to London, then to Waterloo. Twelve hours would be plenty of time. Still-‘But why?’

  ‘Why Georgie, or why Jarrold?’

  ‘Jarrold.’

  ‘Loony.’

  ‘Not good enough, Munro. He’s insane, but he’s sane enough to get from Sussex to Waterloo, avoid the detective following me and wait for the opportunity to shoot me.’

  ‘Well, he knew about the detective, so avoiding him wouldn’t take a genius. Anyway, the detectives didn’t know him. The rest-’ Munro shook his massive head. ‘He’s a loony.’

  ‘With all respect, sir-’ Markson had put his notebook away. ‘It’s true it’s never been established why he shot Mr Denton.’

  Munro waved the comment away. ‘He shot him because he was a loony that had been pestering Denton for a long time. He couldn’t get what he wanted from him, so he took his revenge.’