The Frightened Man (7 page)

One thousand, one hundred and thirty-six pages in the 1899 Kelly’s. And shelves of suburban volumes beyond. Denton sat, cold enough to have left the unfortunate coat on, turning pages, glancing at streets, as if the name Mulcahy might leap from the dense eight-point type.

It would take days. No, weeks.

And no hangover.

He sighed, put the directories back and carried his fragile head out to Museum Street. The Tavern beckoned, but he ignored it; he walked down to Holborn, then zigzagged west and south and headed again for the Metropolitan Police Annexe.

He announced himself to the porter and went up, put his head into Hench-Rose’s room and was told that Hector was ‘in a meeting of the Examinations Resolution Committee’, whatever that was, and turned instead and went along the corridor to what he hoped was Detective Sergeant Munro’s office. He got the wrong room, of course; an ascetic civil servant who seemed to be preparing for life in a Himalayan monastery - thin, bald, placid - put him right.

Munro was not delighted to see him. His expression was disapproving. ‘We’re being run ragged here just now.’

‘I’ll come back.’

‘We’re always run ragged.’ They were standing in the outer room where the three clerks were bending over red-tied files. ‘We don’t really have time for gentleman detectives.’

‘I’m not a detective, don’t pretend to be.’ He thought of Emma. ‘And I’m not a gentleman.’

Munro’s expression changed; was he amused? ‘Five minutes.’ He led the way, limping, to his inner office. ‘You here about the murder again?’ he said when they were seated.

‘I went to the post-mortem. I told you, Mulcahy, the man who came to see me, had described a murder—’

‘Yes, yes—’

‘It was very similar.’

Munro shrugged. He was tying and untying the red tape on a file. ‘Lots of murders are similar. No sign of your Mulcahy that I’ve heard of. City Police might have something - you did tell them, right? Have to ask them.’

Denton shifted his body, trying to find a position that didn’t make his muscles ache. His head was pounding. ‘I’d like to see her room. Where she was killed.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Mulcahy, Mulcahy.’

Munro fiddled with the tape, then joined his fingers and looked at Denton. ‘This the western sheriff in you coming out?’ Before Denton could answer, he said, ‘Read a bit about you - a pal downstairs keeps a scrapbook, had a newspaper piece about you.’ He was nodding. ‘Funny, you were down in Nebraska the same time I was in Alberta. Mounties.’

Denton felt stupid, couldn’t puzzle it out. A Brit in the Mounties?

‘My dad emigrated from Scotland in 1847. I was born in Flodden, Quebec, tiny little place. I joined the Mounties in the second intake. Heard of the Sweet Grass Hills? Old Man River? Fort MacLeod?’ He grinned. ‘You weren’t a whiskey trader, were you?’

‘That’s one thing I never tried.’

Munro grunted. ‘Bunch of lowlifes selling flavored raw alcohol to the Indians on the Assiniboine. I put in twice my three years and came here - better job, better pay.’

‘I went on west.’

‘It was a rough place back then.’ Munro leaned away from him. ‘You really kill four men?’

He never talked about it. ‘Two,’ he said. He waited for Munro to see that it was a poor subject. Munro, however, had the look of a man who could wait him out. ‘The other two died later.’

‘Six-gun?’ Said with a grin.

‘Shotgun.’ Said with a scowl.

Munro raised his eyebrows and shook his head. ‘Always wonder how I’d have done, that kind of situation. But the Mounties were very big on not being like Americans.’

‘Violent people.’ Denton had thought about it. ‘But we had slavery.’ Slavery, as he had worked it out, made the slaver violent.

‘Maybe the killer’s an American.’ Munro said it with another smile.

‘My five minutes are up.’

Munro made a face as if to say it didn’t matter. ‘I might be able to get you into the scene of the crime and I might not. Bit difficult because it’s City Police.’

‘Plus Sergeant Willey more or less took against me.’

‘Yeah, well—The truth is, Willey’s probably so overworked he’s forgotten you. No offence. But they’ve got a big thing going on bank fraud over there; a dead prostitute isn’t going to distract them for long. Let me see what I can do through the Yard.’

‘You’ve changed your mind about me.’

Munro was playing with the red tapes again. ‘Apparently,’ he said, and he grinned once more. ‘You have the telephone? ’ Denton shook his head. ‘Leave an address where I can get a message to you.’ While Denton was extracting a card from his case with trembling fingers, Munro said, ‘I’d give my right arm to be back in the CID.’ He seemed to mean it as an explanation of why he was willing to help Denton now.

Denton’s mouth tasted like burned metal.

He walked back like a man in a walking race. Always a fast walker, he seemed demented now. His balance was off; his back and head ached; still he plunged on. He had at first made for home, but he detoured into Soho and threw himself into a Chinese noodle shop, where, surrounded by slurping Chinese labourers, he filled himself with noodles and broth and several small dumplings. He had discovered Chinese food in California, had been surprised that the cosmopolitan English looked on it as comical, possibly dangerous, meaning actually that it was lower-class and strange. (‘We must never notice things that are unpleasant,’ he had read in Dickens but not understood until he had lived in London a while.) The food made him feel suddenly better, and he was able to lurch his way up to Oxford Street and then east, turning up Museum Street again because he liked it and at last through rather awful byways to Lamb’s Conduit. Always, the darkening blue was above him and the clouds were racing over as if leaping from the rooftops on one side to those on the other; below, looking up, trying to walk, he was made dizzy.

‘Sergeant!’ he shouted as he let himself in. He wanted to lie down but was damned if he would. He would make himself work, always a panacea, even though the work was no longer physical.

Atkins appeared in his little doorway at the foot of the stairs. ‘You rang, sir?’

Denton tossed him the horrible tweed coat. ‘Get rid of that.’ He put his hat on the newel post. ‘I don’t want tea.’

‘Good, else I’d have had to send to the Lamb. Nothing in the house.’

Denton started up the stairs; his head seemed to pull him backwards.

Atkins shifted the heavy coat to bring it more into view. ‘When you say, “Get rid of it,” you mean put it away or get it out of the house?’

‘Throw it in the trash; give it to General Booth; wear it yourself.’

‘Wouldn’t be caught dead in it.’

He went up to his room. The unfinished novel made a pile of foolscap an inch high, written neatly enough but then scribbled over, crossed out, amended in trickles that fell off the end of the line and ran down the page and sometimes looped around to the other side of the sheet. He sighed and sat down to it. The truth was, as he admitted as he read over the last ten pages, the woman he’d created was a piece of cardboard. A fiction, a convenience. She was another of his attempts to capture his wife - to capture what she had done to him, to his life - in fiction. The scene he was working on had been meant as preparation for the downward spiral that would leave her dead on a frozen pasture in winter, raving and wandering in the snow. (The real Lily had taken poison.) And destroying her husband in the process.

Stella Minter, dead and eviscerated by first her murderer and then the surgeon, was, he saw, more real, even in death, than the woman in his novel. He’d tried to recreate his wife, and he hadn’t even created a corpse. He dropped the scene into the trash, then began to leaf back through the rest of the manuscript, pulling out pages, dropping them into oblivion.
Not the way a writer makes money.

He heard Atkins breathing heavily as he came up the steep stairs.

‘Copper looking for you down below.’

‘I’m working.’

‘Copper wants you.’ Atkins produced a silver salver from behind his back. ‘Message.’

‘For God’s sake—’ Denton took the paper. ‘The plate wasn’t necessary, was it?’

‘Might have touched it with my dirty hands otherwise.’

It was from Munro. ‘
Can you meet me at a public house called the Haymow near the Minories at six o’clock? We can have a look at the scene you were interested in. PC Catesby will tell you the way, as it is difficult. Please reply by the constable.
’

‘I’ll go down.’

PC Catesby had a foolish young face and blushed easily. He drew a map on the back of Munro’s note as laboriously as if he were working out a problem in mathematics. In fact, Denton knew the streets he referred to as soon as he mentioned them, but there was no convincing the policeman. He went on pushing the thick pencil over the paper, printing names, making arrows, turning something easy into something tortuous.

‘I understand; it’s one street north and west of the Minories, right. The Haymow. Got it.’

‘Yes, sir, if you tell the driver the Minories and
then
direct him to—’ It was the third time he’d gone over it. Denton hadn’t told the man he planned to walk, afraid that he’d get the entire route mapped for him on the same small sheet of paper. He kept saying yes, right, thank you, and finally PC Catesby took himself off, turning back in the doorway, then at the gate, to make some further point. Then he actually came back and said to Denton, ‘The Haymow’s rather low, sir.’

‘Thank you.’

He wondered if he should have tipped PC Catesby, decided not. Giving policemen money had a bad reputation.

‘I’ve put out the dark-brown lounge suit,’ Atkins said when Denton came upstairs. ‘You want another of them headache powders?’

‘I’m all right.’

Atkins hesitated. ‘Your coat come back from Mrs Gosden’s. Also hat, gloves, stick. Also the derringer in the pocket.’ He raised his eyebrows - music-hall astonishment.

‘Somebody brought it?’

‘Commissionaire. Coat et cetera in a box. Carried the stick.’

In a box. Everything ends in a box.

‘Put the derringer in the hollow book.’

‘Already have.’

Denton started to ask if there had been any message with the coat, any reply to the apology he had sent Emma, but Atkins would of course have told him if there had been. In fact, the coat and hat
were
the message. They were the full stop at the end of a sentence - the compound sentence that had been his affair with Emma and was never to become a paragraph.

Chapter Five

Denton walked to his meeting with Munro - down to Holborn, along to the Holborn Viaduct, to Newgate Street, Cheapside, Cornhill, Leadenhall Street, Aldgate High Street - almost the whole width of the City. It was nearly evening, but the streets were banging with mechanical life - steam diggers clawing up the earth, steam cranes lifting bundles of wood and stone into the sky. London was a mythical beast that was tearing out its own innards and regrowing them in a new form - new streets, new buildings, new tunnels and railways. It was destroying - or hiding - what was sick or poor or weak or decayed and putting up the new, the vigorous, the aggressive. No wonder the directories couldn’t keep up with people like Mulcahy and Stella Minter: the city itself was flinging people from place to place.

He had spent his years in London walking as much as twenty miles a day, seldom less than eight or ten, Baedeker’s in his pocket. He had walked from his house to Richmond on one side, to the Lea on the other; he had crossed the Thames and walked down to Greenwich and up to Kew, and he had found this mechanical pulse of renewal everywhere. London for Denton, when he pushed Dickens out of his head, was a clatter of modernizing machines surrounded by a sea of mud where new suburbs pushed relentlessly outward, chewing up whole streets, whole towns, each one succeeded by a newer that made the earlier one instantly mature.

He was not afraid of places or people, although if he walked at night he went armed - hence the derringer in the forgotten topcoat. Now, he knew London tolerably well - well enough, at least, that he found, when he got to the Haymow, that he had stopped in it once for a drink when he was walking down to the Tower. The woman at the bar, the few other patrons, hadn’t been welcoming then - gentlemen didn’t go into public houses, weren’t welcome if they did, they had seemed to say. In fact, he’d learned a lesson from that visit to the Haymow. Gentlemen weren’t welcome, but Bohemians were; if he had worn a wider-brimmed American hat (a ‘cowboy hat’, Hench-Rose had once called it, although it in fact had a fairly narrow brim compared with some he’d seen) and no necktie, like the Bohemians at the Café Royal, he’d have been tolerated.

The Haymow was one of the old pubs, small and simple, with a bar that ran almost the length of the far wall but no divisions into saloon bar or public bar or private rooms or any of the other embellishments of the great public houses that had bloomed over the last quarter-century. It was cream-coloured inside, or had been before a layer of smoke had been laid over the paint, then layers of what seemed to be amber shellac over that, so that the walls were shiny where the lights caught them and glazed as brown as a Dutch painting. PC Catesby had said it was low, but Denton saw nothing very low except a few working-men, hats on, smoke in a cloud around them. Munro was sitting on a faded brown banquette against the wall, far around to the right from the door.

‘You found it,’ he said when Denton sat down.

‘PC Catesby gave meticulous directions.’ Catesby, he figured, had been trying to do a good job; no need to speak ill of him.

‘We’re meeting somebody else.’ Munro waved a hand, and a strong-looking woman nearing middle age - the same woman, so far as Denton could tell, who had served him before - came out from behind the bar and took Denton’s order for a pint. They sat in silence until the ale appeared; then Munro leaned closer and lowered his voice. ‘Pal of mine from Metropolitan CID’s going to take us to the girl’s room. The murder scene. He hasn’t seen it yet, either, wants to have a look because the Ripper file is always open. Mind, nobody believes for a moment it’s the Ripper, but you dot every i. You’re along as a favour to me.’