The Frightened Man (30 page)

‘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.

‘Show our guests into the front parlour, Mrs Wick,’ the man said in the voice of a clergyman welcoming somebody to a funeral.

The room was small - twelve feet on a side - with a coal grate, unlit, and the same dark and brutally shiny woodwork, and dark furniture, vaguely Eastlake, that could be dated to the beginning of the Minters’ marriage. Antimacassars everywhere; on the walls calligraphic certificates in which the name Stella Minter could be made out, and on the dark mantel a tinted photograph (not one of Regis Mulcahy’s - wrong pose) of a plump young woman holding a book.

‘I’m afraid I am not cognizant of the reason for your visit,’ the man said. He was short, bald, plump and entirely sure of himself. ‘I am Alfred Minter,’ as if to say,
I
am the reason for all this magnificence.

Janet Striker smiled as brightly as the woodwork and held out her hand. ‘I am Janet Striker of the Society for the Improvement of Women. And
this
,’ indicating Denton as the prize item in the menagerie, ‘is Mr Denton, the famous author.’

Minter touched her hand and inclined his head, moving it in a quarter-circle to take in both of them. ‘And the reason for—?’ he said.

‘The matter is rather delicate.’

He looked at her, then Denton.

‘Your daughter—’ she said. Minter’s head snapped up. ‘We’d like to ask you about your daughter.’

‘This is most unusual.’ He tugged again at his waistcoat. ‘Most surprising. I fail to see why you - why anyone - would ask me about my—’ He made a gesture, as if the word ‘daughter’ was too sacred to pronounce.

‘Do you have a daughter named Stella?’

He pulled himself up to his full five feet six inches. He raised a hand and moved it slowly past the row of calligraphies on the wall. ‘An accomplished young woman.
Thoroughly
accomplished. The apple of our eye! I don’t understand your interest, madam.’

‘Might we see her?’

‘Certainly not. She is a girl, a sensitive and good girl. I see no reason to, mm, expose her to the—’ He frowned. ‘To strangers. Who, I must say, give me no reason to entertain, mm, to have confidence in, mm, to know who or what they are! I don’t
know
you, madam. Or you, sir.’

Janet Striker gave Denton a look; he got out a calling card, then searched his pockets for Hench-Rose’s letter, now somewhat battered. He handed both over. Minter took them, held the card low and well away, tipping his head back, then went to the front window and studied them there. After that, he held the letter at arm’s length and read it. He looked back at Denton, perhaps to determine if he could really be the Sir Galahad described by Hench-Rose, then returned to the letter and apparently read it again. At last, he came back to them and stood in the same spot in front of his fireplace, defender of the hearth. ‘What is all this about?’ he said a little hoarsely.

Janet Striker sat, the chair dark and overwrought, both hideous and uncomfortable-looking; she took up only the forward two or three inches of it. ‘A young woman using the name Stella Minter has met her death. We are looking for her parents.’

His left hand went unconsciously to his chest; the idea of his daughter’s death caused a spasm of pain on his face. ‘But she is alive and well!’ he gasped. ‘In this house. At this moment!’

‘May we see her?’

Minter’s lips moved; he hesitated, decided, went to the door and called into the darkness of the hall, ‘Mother! Please to bring our Stella to the front parlour. At once - please.’ He turned back to them. ‘You will see—’ He touched his forehead. ‘You gave me a turn. To suggest that our Stella—’

‘I’m so sorry, Mr Minter. I didn’t mean to suggest that your daughter was the victim. Only that we are looking for her parents.’

He went back to his place by the hearth and stared at the floor. ‘That was cruel,’ he murmured.

A middle-aged woman paused in the doorway, then came into the room; behind her, holding the woman’s hand, a young but very large girl followed, clearly the girl in the photograph. Both were taller than Minter, neither ‘good-looking’ by most standards, the girl’s face broad and long, her colour good, her hair lank. Both, Denton thought, were overdressed: did they put on their best to welcome Papa home to tea? Or were the clothes a declaration of status, like the little motor car?

‘My wife,
Mrs
Minter,’ Minter said, drawing her still farther in, ‘and our beloved daughter, Stella.’

The family stood together. They looked expectant. Minter stared at Janet Striker as if for help. Yet she looked at Denton, who saw it was his turn. ‘I’m happy to see,’ he said, ‘that Miss Minter isn’t the young lady we’re looking for.’

‘Looking for!’ the woman cried. ‘Why should you be looking for her?’

Minter turned his head to say something to her, but Denton said loudly, ‘It’s a case of mistaken identity, ma’am. Another young woman of the same name.’ He didn’t say how disappointed he was.

‘I should think so!’ she said. ‘Very mistaken, indeed, I should think! You really ought to determine your facts in a better fashion, I think!’

‘Now, Mother—’ Minter managed to say.

‘Anyone who knows her knows that there can’t be any confusion about who she is! I can’t hardly understand how her identity could be confused! I think you must be very ignorant people!’

‘Oh, Mama—!’ the girl moaned.

‘Hush, dear.’

‘My wife is overwrought,’ Minter said. ‘Stella is the apple of our eye.’

‘Apple, indeed!’ Mrs Minter shouted. ‘A girl of such accomplishments—! ’

‘That’s enough, Mother!’ Minter said. He had reverted to the clergyman’s voice; the effect was instantaneous, Mrs Minter’s mouth remaining open but no sound coming out. The girl blushed and looked at Janet Striker in appeal, perhaps apology; she looked at Denton and gave him a tentative, awkward smile. She was sixteen, the birth record had told him that; she had the adolescent’s embarrassment at her parents, however they loved her and she them. Her smile to Denton seemed to ask for an understanding of that, and on an impulse, he said to her, ‘Is that your picture on the mantel, Miss Minter?’