The Frightened Man (11 page)

‘I need for somebody to go through the London directories to look for a man who came to visit me. He left no address, but it’s important that I find him. It would take several people to do it.’

‘I can’t take time away from my typing machine, I’m afraid.’ She had a shawl clutched tight at her throat with one hand, the other on the door as if she wanted to be sure she could close it on him.

‘I thought you might know other people, other women, who could use the work. It would be several days’ work. I’d pay them for a week - let’s say three people - even if they finished before that.’ He didn’t confess that his bank account was running down towards zero; paying several women would probably get it there.

She looked out at the cab, which she seemed to see for the first time. The cabman was holding a water bag under the animal’s mouth. ‘I’m keeping you,’ she said.

‘No, I’m keeping you from your, um, meal.’ Did you say ‘supper’ in this situation? Perhaps ‘tea’. What the hell. ‘I really need this to be done, Mrs Johnson.’

‘Well - I know a few other typewriters from the agency—They don’t get the work that I do.’ Said with pride. She was good, and very fast.

Denton wrote ‘R. Mulcahy’ on a card and held it out. ‘That’s the name. And of course, I’d pay you for getting things organized.’

She stared at the card, which she’d taken with the hand that had been holding the shawl. ‘I don’t have any time open—’ She clutched the shawl again, the card close to her chin. ‘Still, because it’s you—Can you pay them five shillings a day? They have to be assured it’s worth passing up typewriting jobs for.’

He said that yes, of course, that would be fine, although he was thinking that twenty-five shillings for a week’s work was more than working-men made. Still, he was in no position to bargain. ‘And a bonus of a shilling for each R. Mulcahy they find.’ He hesitated. ‘There may be more than one.’ If there were a lot of them, however, he’d done something stupid. But how many could there be?

She muttered a good night, and the door closed. Denton felt as he had with Guillam, suspected of something nasty and not exonerated.

Well, of course, he was male.

At home, Atkins had been grumpy because he was trying to recover from an uncomfortable hour with two detectives while Denton had been with Munro and Guillam. He had started complaining about it at the front door and had continued all the way through Denton’s stepping into the hot bath he thought he’d earned. In turn, while he dressed again, Denton had told Atkins about the visit to the dead woman’s room.

‘What do you make of it?’ Denton said now.

‘Nothing.’ Atkins jiggled the coat he was waiting for Denton to put on - the same brown suit he had worn earlier, now found déclassé by Atkins for evening wear but just right for Denton’s Bohemian mood. ‘They also serve who only stand and answer coppers’ questions about their employer, leaving out the difficult bits like where you was going at eleven o’clock that night, the which I kept to myself.’

‘And grateful I am to you for it. But I don’t want to talk about that; I want to talk about the girl’s death.’ He sat on the bed and began to pull on a shoe. ‘I’ll tell you how I see it.’ He looked up to see if Atkins was going to pout. ‘Do you want to know how I see it?’

‘Of course I do; it’ll be better than Charlie O’Malley.’ Charles Lever’s
Charles O’Malley, the Irish Dragoon
was Atkins’s favourite book, said by him to have been read twenty times. Apparently hearing his own tone, Atkins became apologetic. ‘No, truly, Colonel, I don’t have your gift for making a story out of a bunch of facts. Tell me how you see it.’

Denton paused with the other shoe in his hands. He moved the shoe up and down as if he were weighing it. ‘All right—’ He looked at nothing, the scene before his eyes like a play. ‘Stella Minter opens the door. Maybe it’s somebody she knows, although that’s just a possibility. Anyway, he comes in - maybe pushes his way in, maybe doesn’t. He hits her - twice, I don’t know why. He undresses. Or maybe he doesn’t. She either takes off her wrapper or he pulls it off her - interesting to know if there’re any rips in it. I suppose the police won’t tell me things like that. She lies down or he pushes her down. He has the clasp knife open in his hand but he’s hiding it. He enters her.

‘Mulcahy is watching through the peephole. I think that this is possible only if he has an arrangement with Stella Minter - he’s put up the reverse-painted picture with the scraped-out place, also the reflector on the gas lamp. So he’s watching. He doesn’t see the knife until it’s actually in her throat and the blood spurts. The killer stands up and starts to stab the woman in the bosom. Maybe she tries to roll out of the way, or maybe he moves her; anyway, blood actually spurts as high as the picture, so now Mulcahy sees it all through red.

‘Mulcahy throws up. Maybe he makes noise doing it - people do, a coughing, strangling noise - or maybe he screams. And he opens the closet door and runs for his life.

‘The killer hears the sound that Mulcahy made. He looks up, and he sees the light from the open closet door shining through the hole in the wall and the glass of the picture. He knows somebody has seen him.

‘He panics. Or he doesn’t panic. This is a clever man and a fast thinker, so maybe he doesn’t panic. He wipes the blood off his naked body with the wrapper and drops it into the blood on the floor and puts his clothes back on.’ Denton was seeing it as if it were a scene he was writing. ‘He’s still smeared with blood under his clothes, but there isn’t enough of it to soak through. In the darkness outdoors, he’ll be all right.

‘He goes out. Now, he’s almost certainly already mutilated her abdomen and cut out her female parts, because he’s not going to go out and come back and do that - or is he? Is he that clever? That cold-blooded? Whenever he did it, he may have done it out of - what is it? rage? - or maybe that’s where his cleverness comes in; maybe he’s planned it that way to make it look like rage. Or insanity. Or maybe he thinks of it after he’s dressed and has gone out, and he goes back in to do it. But, by the way, if he’s planned all that out, then he’s planned to kill her, and then I think he knew her and there’s a personal reason for killing her - he’s a rejected lover, maybe. Or, if it’s just something he did, then he’s a maniac. But a damned clever one.

‘So he goes out, and he goes
in
the main door of the house, and he sees the closet door at once - open. Think of it, Sergeant - he was in that house, maybe somebody in the kitchen or the WC, and nobody saw him. He’s clever and he’s brave, or audacious, anyway. So he steps into the closet and he sees the hole and the lath, and this is where his cleverness comes in - he
pushes the lath back into place
, because he doesn’t want the police to find it. He doesn’t want them to have any clues to Mulcahy’s existence, at least not before he’s found Mulcahy first.

‘Or that’s the way I see it, because I think Mulcahy was so terrified that he wouldn’t have stopped to push the piece of lath down. Nor to lock the closet door, by the way - the reason we found it unlocked. And the killer didn’t lock it because he didn’t have a key - it was in Mulcahy’s pocket.

‘So the killer’s mind is racing. He knows he has to get out at once, but he knows he has to find whoever was in the closet. It’s too late to try to follow him. What does he do?’

He looked up at Atkins. The sergeant let himself be looked at, shrugged, stood there. ‘Runs like H, I suppose.’

‘Well, yes. But suppose he finds something that Mulcahy has left in the closet in his terror - and that has his name on it.’

He was still looking at Atkins, who said, ‘Well, it ain’t his hat, because we had that, at least until the coppers took it away for evidence this afternoon. His coat? Unlikely to have his address in it, any more than his hat. All right, I’ll bite - what did he take away that had Mulcahy’s name on it?’

Denton shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Maybe nothing.’ He saw Atkins’s frown. ‘I think that Mulcahy’s a voyeur. He saw the crime. He was
there
, Sergeant - that’s why he told us all those lies. He didn’t want to confess what he was, but he wanted help.’

‘No reason to want help unless he looked back and saw the murderer, covered with blood and gore, running at him with an axe, is there?’ Atkins was being distinctly sarcastic. ‘What I mean is - if he was so scared he come to you, he had a reason for thinking the murderer was on to him. Right?’

Denton was fastening his cuffs. He made an equivocal sound, like a small machine starting up.

‘If you ask me, General, he’s a damned lucky voyeur if he isn’t dead by now. The man who butchered the Minter bitch wouldn’t rest until he’d got Mulcahy, too, if he knew where to find him.’

Denton stood still to have his coat put on. ‘That’s what’s got me worried. And there isn’t a damned thing I can do about it. Except - I put Mrs Johnson on getting some women to search the directories for him.’ He saw Atkins frown - more money going out - but he ignored him and pulled his shirt cuffs down inside the coat sleeves. ‘You going out?’

‘It’s one of my nights, isn’t it?’ Atkins had two nights a week off, part of the generous deal he had made for himself with Denton. There was much to be said, from his point of view, in serving a man who felt guilty about being served. ‘Yes, I’m going out!’

Denton sighed. ‘Enjoy yourself.’ It was more than he expected, in his present mood, to do himself.

Chapter Seven

He walked again, enjoying the night but chewing moodily on the problem of Mulcahy. The streets were quieter, the city now a background roar, the hard sounds of digging and drilling ended for the day. He made his way to Glasshouse Street, looked in the bar of the Café Royal, then went around to the Piccadilly entrance and into the Domino Room. Unlike his visit of the night before, it was still early and the place was half empty.

There was an easy camaraderie to the Domino Room that belied its showy décor - high ceilings, mirrored walls, pillars like great trees in a fanciful forest, an overall colour scheme of peacock blue and gold. Bookies, artists, journalists, tarts, models, the would-bes and the has-beens, all mixed here with people from their own worlds and from that genteel one in which nobody worked but everybody was well off. Generosity, in the form of the casual invitation or the standing of drinks with somebody’s last shilling, was the rule. Denton had learned to love the place. He loved to keep his hat on, to lounge against a banquette. You could do that in the Domino Room, and a good deal more - like last night.

Denton looked around and saw Frank Harris in his usual place; he moved to him and stood until the man looked up with hangover-reddened eyes. Harris groaned.

Denton collapsed beside him, ordered a milky coffee - a house speciality - and choucroute, part of the Royal’s French past. When he said, by way of making conversation, how much he liked the Café, Harris growled, ‘This place is the
boue
in
nostalgie de la boue
. It appeals to the worst in all of us, and we all respond with a joy bordering on indecency.’

‘Like last night.’

Harris groaned again. ‘Did you drink as much as I did?’

‘We stood on a table and bullied people into drinking to Wilde.’

Harris put a hand on his forehead. ‘There’s a stage after you’ve been drunk where you think you’ll kill yourself, and then there’s a stage of absolute euphoria. I think that I’d have been wiser to stop at euphoria and not drunk anything tonight.’ He sighed. ‘Not to mention what I had with lunch and the one or two before.’ He sat back in his chair and clutched his head.

Denton said, ‘I need a bit of advice.’ Harris was supposed to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the darker side of London - indeed, of the darker side of a lot of things. ‘Who can tell me about vice in the East End?’

Harris turned his red eyes on him, looked at him for long seconds as if he’d forgotten who he was. ‘You’re talking to an expert,’ he said.

‘There was a girl murdered there last night. I want to know who she was - where she came from, who her—’

‘East End?’

‘Well, the Minories.’

With his head back, Harris looked at Denton as if he were looking into a too bright light. ‘What’s the allure of a murdered tart? Idea for a book?’

Denton mentioned Mulcahy, said only that the man had told him a wild tale and been terrified - his now-familiar recitation.

Harris wrinkled his nose and stuck out his lips, then rubbed his eyes. ‘You know Ruth Castle?’

‘Mrs Castle?’ She was a famous madam; of course he knew her. ‘We all know Mrs Castle.’

Harris laughed. ‘Could make a comic song of that. “Oh, we all know Mrs Castle here in London—”’ He sang it a bit tunelessly. ‘What the hell rhymes with London?’

‘Done-done. Undone.’ He looked at Harris’s empty glass. ‘Y ’know, you’d do best to go home.’

‘At this hour? My God, what would people say?’

‘Why Mrs Castle?’

‘Why not Mrs Castle? What are we talking about?’

‘Vice in the East End.’

Harris waved a hand. ‘She knows everything. Tell her I sent you. Better yet,
don’t
tell her I sent you; I think she had me thrown out last time. But go and see her. Fount of knowledge.’ Harris ordered himself another brandy and began to lecture about Bohemianism and the decline of art. Denton, finishing his choucroute as fast as he could eat, muttered a goodbye and got up.

He left Harris trying to start an argument about Fabianism with a man he didn’t know and went out. He debated following Harris’s advice to talk to Mrs Castle that night but thought his own advice to Harris was best: early to bed.

Home again, he dropped his hat and coat on a chair, added coal to his living-room fire, stood there looking into the orange heat that was still deep inside the black pile, thinking of the stupidities people, himself included, do.

He poked the fire and put the poker back in its iron stand and heard a sound that might have been the poker hitting another piece of metal but that might have been something else. He stood still, listening. He really believed the sound had come from somewhere else. Outside? Most likely not; it had been too muffled. And closer.