The Bohemian Girl

Chapter THIRTEEN
Munro and Markson showed up at three-thirty the next afternoon. The two detectives were sombre, Markson clearly nervous, perhaps blaming himself somehow for the attack on Janet Striker’s lodgings. Munro, phlegmatic at best, was apparently calm, but he acknowledged what Markson’s jerkings of a leg and facial tics indicated: the police were worried.
‘He isn’t just some Bohemian would-be writer now. He’s a threat,’ Munro said. He was sitting in the upholstered piece opposite Denton’s armchair; Markson was on an armless side chair that Atkins had fetched from farther up the room. ‘What he did was an act of violence.’
‘Symbolic violence, anyway,’ Denton said. ‘Paint looks like blood, but it isn’t blood. Cutting up clothes isn’t the same as cutting up a woman but gives the sense of it.’
‘You’re not defending him, I hope.’
‘Trying to be accurate.’ He was remembering what Janet Striker had said about insanity.
Munro grunted. ‘For this copper, he’s only one step away from real blood.’
‘You’re the police. Go catch him.’
Munro pushed his lips out and drew his brows down in an expression that, in a saloon, would have meant that a fight was coming. Markson said, ‘We’re trying. Mr Denton, we’ve had men on you all week.’
‘They did a particularly fine job of catching him while he watched Mrs Striker leave this house.’
Munro raised a hand to silence Markson before he could complain. Munro twisted in his chair, crossed his legs, looked at Denton sideways. ‘How did he find her, do you think?’
‘Followed her, I suppose.’
‘“Follow that cab”?’ Munro snorted. ‘What is he, invisible? One of Mr H. G. Wells’s inventions, is he?’
Markson twitched. ‘One of the watchers happened to be on his tea break.’
Munro groaned. ‘Jesus wept.’ He wiped his right hand over his face, then leaned his head on that hand, the elbow on the chair back. He looked like an actor playing great pain. ‘I apologize, all right, Denton? For the Metropolitan Police, for myself - I apologize. We should have done better. All right?’
‘I didn’t ask you to.’
‘No, but it makes me feel better. It’s also a lesson to young Fred here - we’re not always perfect.’ He leaned forward, elbows on knees. ‘Now look. We need to know where we are. How much danger is the woman in? You’ve got to be frank with me, Denton. Fred says she was here while he was here that day - she was collecting for some charity—’
‘The Society for the Improvement of Wayward Women.’
‘This is the same woman that got her face slashed last year and you saved her life, am I right? Now - don’t get your dander up - is there more to it than her stopping by to pick up a contribution?’
‘Why should there be more?’
‘Because I’m a suspicious, cynical Canuck who doesn’t share the English taste for p-ssy-footing about. You saved her life last year. One of the watchers reported following you to the Embankment where you met with a lady. Now she happens to be here collecting a contribution, which seems bloody odd, as the Royal Mail worked efficiently the last time I looked.’
Denton looked into Munro’s eyes without wavering. ‘We’re friends.’
‘Was she here before? Could Cosgrove have seen her with you before?’
Denton knew what Munro was after, knew that it was foolish to splutter and object. ‘Yes.’
Munro looked at Markson, back at Denton. He sat back in his chair, his hands gripping the ends of the velour-covered arms. ‘I’m going to have to put a watch on her.’
‘Bit late. I don’t think she’ll like that.’
‘Nor would I, but we have to catch the bastard.’ He looked at Markson. ‘Report?’
This had been arranged, Denton guessed - a kind of briefing to make him feel that at least he was included, even if little progress was being made. Markson said, one knee vibrating as the heel of that foot went up and down, up and down, ‘The letters have been posted from eight different places in London, but we’ve plotted them on the map and we think it’s west. He’s gone as far afield as Earl’s Court in that direction but only east as far as Holborn Viaduct. We think he’s walking, not using the steam underground or anything like the electric trams to get far out.’
Munro spoke up. ‘Walking would be trying to be like you again, Denton.’
Markson said, ‘Taking into account what you said about him being educated, we think maybe well off, then Mayfair or Kensington or some such.’ Nobody said anything. There was no point in saying the obvious. Munro, however, muttered, as another apology, ‘We admit, it’s thin.’
‘I know you’re doing what you can’
‘There is something—’ Markson looked as if he’d startled himself by speaking. He glanced at Munro for approval. ‘Is there anything else he could have stolen? Anything at all? There might be a clue . . .’ His voice drifted off.
‘Books?’ Munro said. He looked at the wall of books that framed the fireplace. ‘You said he started off asking for your books. Any chance he stole them when you didn’t answer?’
Denton shook his head. ‘I don’t keep my own stuff out here. I need the space.’
‘In your room?’
‘No.’
‘You don’t have any copies of your own books?’
‘They’re put away someplace. In a box. You think I sit around reading my own books, Munro?’
‘Well—’ Munro squirmed in the chair. ‘I daresay if I’d written a book, I’d have it out where people could see it. Might put it under glass. Hmp. Well - any chance he could have got into the box?’
Denton called Atkins (who was probably listening by the dumb waiter, anyway) and asked him to check the book boxes. While Atkins plodded back downstairs - what passed for a box room was an old pantry off the ground-floor kitchen - Munro tried to put together the sequence of Albert Cosgrove’s actions. When he had led the three of them through it all up to the attack on Mrs Striker’s rooms, he said, ‘So it began three months after you left on this trip you took. Any significance to that, do you think?’
‘You mean, he didn’t break in right away? Maybe the thing grew on him.’
‘So at the first, he really was asking for your books.’
‘All right, say he was. And?’
‘He doesn’t get a response, he’s a bit shirty. He writes again.’
‘The letters that were waiting for me here didn’t seem angry. On the contrary, they were soapy and overdone. Worshipful.’
‘Until you got home.’
‘A bit after.’
‘But he’s waiting in the house behind by then. He even more or less shows himself at the window - you think that was what he was doing, by the way, exhibiting himself?’
‘Like the old men in the park? I don’t think it was a sex thing.’ He listened to himself. ‘Or maybe it was.’
‘Well, you were the one talking about symbolism, not me. But anyway, by the time you come home, he knows you’ve been away. And as we know now, he knows it so well he breaks in here and steals a manuscript of yours and a pen - a bloody pen! But nothing else? That’s almost incredible.’
‘What would you have had him steal?’
‘Something that’s truly you. One of your Western hats. Your gun. Your—You’ve checked your guns, have you? It’d be terrible if he’s out there with a gun.’
‘The guns were with me. Except two parlour pistols, and they were locked away upstairs and were there when I got home.’
Markson jiggled his knee. ‘If I could say, sir—’ Markson’s face twitched. ‘Is it significant that he didn’t put his own address in those early letters? Heaven knows there was none on the recent ones.’
‘I didn’t say he didn’t put an address in them,’ Denton said. ‘I told you I couldn’t remember an address.’
‘Yes, sir, but suppose there hadn’t been any address.’
‘Oh.’ Munro was nodding. ‘Then he never really wanted Denton to send the books, you mean.’
‘Why write, then?’
Markson said, ‘Maybe so he could tell himself you didn’t bother to answer, sir.’
Munro looked as if he’d smelled something off. Denton started to make a face, too, then thought about what Markson had said. ‘So that he could worship me and resent me at the same time?’
‘Fanciful,’ Munro growled.
‘But it would mean, Sergeant, that he never intended - I mean, if he’s capable of “intending” anything - he never intended just to be a well-known author’s follower. He was always after something else.’
‘It’s fanciful, and it doesn’t get us any closer to finding him.’
Atkins came up from below then and announced that the boxes were where they belonged, and there was no sign they’d been opened. ‘I took Rupert and had him give it all a good sniff. He didn’t find anything, either.’
‘Rupert is that animal?’ The dog was sitting behind Atkins, wagging its massive rear because the stub of tail was planted in the carpet.
‘Rupert has the nose of a hound,’ Atkins said.
‘Rupert has a little bit of every dog that’s been down the street this ten years, from the look of him. However, we’ll take it as read that Cosgrove didn’t steal the books.’ Munro grunted. ‘Now I think of it, your own copies wouldn’t be signed anyway, would they? If he meant anything by asking for signed copies - really wanted them, I mean.’ Munro put his hands on his knees. ‘It’s so much a question of just how mad he is, isn’t it? I mean, we know what some criminals - perverts and so on - do with books. What the sex maniac does with pornography, pictures of children—A madman can pull his wire over anything.’
‘Stewart Caterwol,’ Markson said.
Denton didn’t know the name. Munro said, ‘Chap who stole women’s shoes to get off into. He was a drayman, used axle grease from his wagon to get his meat into the shoes - long, pointy toes some of them had. Kept the shoes in a trunk - forty-one pairs, every one full of axle grease and duff. Harmless otherwise. Got five years for petty theft times forty-one plus indecency plus moral turpitude. All done, so far as we know, in his own bedroom. Sometimes an Englishman’s home isn’t his castle, after all.’
The doorbell rang.
Denton went to the window and looked down. A cab was waiting at the kerb. When he turned back, he could hear Janet Striker’s voice as she came up the stairs. Atkins would already have told her that the police were there, he knew.
The effect of her coming into the room was as if some loud sound had jolted both policeman to their feet. They shot up, then stood there staring at her, Markson even with his mouth a bit open. Denton said ‘Mrs Striker,’ in a voice that seemed to have been hit almost as hard.
She was transformed.
She was wearing a dress in the nominal colours of autumn - ‘fillemot’, the pale brown of dead leaves, grey-green, dusty yellow - but an autumn that was autumnal only in its muting, the total effect lively and almost summery. The cut was of the moment, perhaps a step in advance of the moment, the skirt above her shoe-tops, the sleeves tight, the fall of the silky fabric almost clinging. Even the usually livid scar seemed to have been muted; he thought that somebody had dusted powder on it. Her hat, which matched the dress, was jaunty, pretty, with a wisp of veiling. Atkins followed behind with her coat and umbrella, both coordinated with the dress. ‘I came,’ she said, smiling at their reaction, ‘to tell Mr Denton something, but as you gentlemen of the police are here, I shall be delighted to tell you, as well. I believe I have found Albert Cosgrove.’
Munro grunted; Markson twitched; Denton ordered tea and put her in his own chair and then retired to the fireplace to look at her. She raised her bit of ecru veil and all but winked at him, then smiled again at the detectives. ‘Do sit down, gentlemen.’
‘You’ve found him, Mrs Striker?’
‘I’m not sure I’ve found him, but I think I have.’
‘Where, ma’am?’
‘In a bookseller’s. That is, he isn’t in the book shop. He left his name and address at the book shops, quite a long time ago. Half a dozen shops. I’ve been all over Charing Cross Road and Booksellers’ Row. It was an idea of someone else’s, told me by Mr Denton. And if it’s the right man, his name isn’t Albert Cosgrove, of course.’ She had a small handbag, which she opened to take out a notebook, from which she took a folded piece of paper. ‘Struther Jarrold - an address in Belgravia.’ She passed the paper across to Munro, who was sitting again. Munro looked at it and passed it to Markson.
Markson said, ‘We would have got to the booksellers on our own. Shortage of personnel.’
Munro shook his head and said to her, ‘We looked for you this morning, Mrs Striker. About the invasion of your rooms, most unfortunate—’
‘I went rather into seclusion, I’m afraid - hid in the house of an old friend. I was shaken.’
‘Anybody would have been.’ Munro was studying her, not without admiration. ‘You’re taking it wonderfully well.’
‘I didn’t yesterday. I work, Mr Munro, as I guess you know. I have - had - very little in those rooms to lose. Still, it was a shock. Even for a resident of Bethnal Green.’ She looked up at Denton and smiled.
It was the first time that Denton had known where she lived: he had guessed it was in a working-class part of London, but not one with a reputation for immigration and hopeless poverty and some of the city’s worst slums, the reputation now perhaps somewhat dated. Nonetheless, despite improvement schemes, ‘model’ housing, and a lot of good intentions, Bethnal Green still had an average income somewhere below fifteen shillings a week. He smiled back at her to show he didn’t care.
Munro asked how she had found Struther Jarrold’s name at the book shops.
‘Oh, I told them I had a set of signed copies of Denton’s books, and did they know anybody who’d buy them. They said they would, of course, and I said each time that I’d get more money from a collector. That was thought amusing; one of them said I ought to go into the book trade. But most of them looked through their lists of customers with special wants, and five of them came up with this Jarrold. I can give you a list of the shops, if you like.’
Munro looked at Markson, then at Denton. Denton said, ‘Well?’
Munro shifted his bulk, looked at Markson. The younger detective said, ‘We don’t want to, uh, take the wrong step—’
Denton plunged his hands deep into his trouser pockets. ‘You’ve got enough now - the letters, the threat, the attack on me—’
‘And woe betide us if we’re wrong,’ Munro growled. ‘If this what’s-his-name - Jarrold - is like anybody else in Eaton Square, he’ll have a solicitor beside him before we can get our first question out, and if we try to take him up on a charge, he’ll walk because we can’t prove he attacked you, we can’t prove he wrote the letters, and we can’t prove he was ever inside the house behind yours.’
‘Search his lodging.’
‘I don’t know how you do it out West, sheriff, but here we have to get a warrant. Nobody on the bench is going to give me a warrant on a suspicion that there might be something in somebody’s lodging that had come out of your house. I grant you there’s a circumstantial case. I’ll take it to the prosecutor, but I know what he’ll say: get me the evidence.’
Markson gave Denton a pleading look. ‘Fingerprint Branch are at the lady’s now.’
‘My piano,’ she said.
‘Yes, ma’am, they’ll do the piano, too.’
‘No, I mean they must take extra care with the piano.’
The two detectives laughed, then saw too late she wasn’t joking. There was some lame fence-mending, some temporizing, and then Janet Striker said, ‘Do you mean, then, that you won’t be arresting him?’
‘Well - not at once, ma’am—’ Markson made the mistake of trying to explain the rules of evidence in a tone he’d have used to a child. Things started to get worse, and then Munro dragged Markson to his feet and the two detectives took themselves off.
When the street door had closed on them, Janet Striker gave a horrible laugh, pulled her hatpins out and threw her little hat as far down the room as she could. ‘Oh, the majesty of the law!’ she shouted.
‘They’re doing their job.’
‘Don’t patronize me! Bloody fools! At least they were stunned when they first saw me.’
‘I hardly recognized you.’
‘It’s the dress.’ She held out the sides of the skirt. ‘I borrowed it from one of Ruth Castle’s French girls.’
‘You look wonderful.’
She was going to say something angry, then caught herself. ‘It isn’t you; it’s them.’ She shook herself. ‘Damn them.’ Walking up and down, she quieted, then laughed, apparently at herself. ‘I had to go to Oxford Street for underclothes - oh, dear God, a corset! I haven’t worn a corset in ten years! I can’t wait to get out of it.’
‘Do.’ He knew at once it was a mistake; sexual innuendo didn’t work on her.
She looked angry. ‘I have to see my solicitor and I have to find a removal man and I said I’d have this dress back by six. First things first - appalling thing to say. I know it, I know it. Oh, God! Oh, damn the police! That they should make this fuss over my rooms in Bethnal Green, and they wouldn’t stir out of New Scotland Yard if my neighbours had had their throats slit!’ She began to stride up and down again. ‘I live in half of what used to be a weaving loft at the top of a ramshackle house. Now the weaving trade’s gone west and the room’s been divided, me on one side and three girls in the other. There’ve been robberies in that house, beatings, drunken abuse, and the only time the police have come is now - you know why? Because of you!’ She turned on him. ‘It isn’t your doing, I know, but if Cosgrove or Jarrold or whoever he is hadn’t painted his demon’s name on my wall, I’d have rated nobody higher than the local constable. But they connect him with you, and you’re well off and you’re famous! Don’t you see the unfairness of it? The comical, terrible unfairness of it? And then I present them with his name and they won’t charge him!’ As quickly as it had come, the mood vanished. ‘Oh, to hell with it.’ She laughed a little nastily. She snatched up the hat and grabbed his hand and started towards the door. ‘See me into my cab.’
While he was out getting dinner, a constable came with a message from Munro. Atkins met him with it at the front door: We have a fingerprint. Keep it to yourself.
Denton was at New Scotland Yard at eight the next morning. He felt guilty at not working; on the other hand, getting Albert Cosgrove out of his life would certainly make the writing go more easily. He expected to be told that Munro was not yet in; to the contrary, Munro was sitting at his desk in the CID room, the space mostly quiet now as a new shift began. Several men were gathered around a movable blackboard, talking and rubbing chalk from their fingers; a couple of others were at the desks. Munro looked grey, older, somehow handsomer because of his obvious fatigue.
‘You have somewhat the look of a Romantic,’ Denton said. ‘Not one of the ones who died young.’
‘Spent the night here. I was at the magistrate’s until half one, then back here to get it on paper. No way to get to Peckham that hour of the morning.’ He had a mug of tea, waved to somebody to fetch one for Denton. ‘Hope you’ve eaten. The canteen’s swill.’
‘Have you?’
‘Been eating all night - the only way to stay alive - if you can’t sleep, eat. Stopped at a coffee stall and got a bag of buns. Horrible sweet things - the staff of police life.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘You want to hear it?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘We picked Jarrold up last evening. Took his fingerprint. Matched the one on the piano lid. Like he’d dipped his finger in the paint to do it. Took him straight to police court; magistrate was an antique, but he was up on fingerprints - new Bureau has done its work. Got a warrant to search, too.’
‘What’s Jarrold like?’
‘Like a plant that’s been kept indoors too long. Pale, not so much fat as he doesn’t seem to have any muscles. Bag of jelly sort of thing. Perfectly amiable. Smiled, wanted to talk, but not about the case. Absolutely mum on that. Half an hour after he got here, two legal gents showed up, very high on the tree, one in evening dress, both making I’d guess about ten times what I do.’
‘You said that would happen.’
‘Yeah, well, what it turns out, Denton, is that Struther Jarrold comes from a very powerful and very rich family. He lives with his mother - that’s the Belgravia address - and she’s Lady Emmeline Jarrold.’
‘Where’s Lord Jarrold?’
‘There isn’t any Lord Jarrold; why would there be a Lord Jarrold?’ He sounded irritable.
‘You say she’s Lady something or other.’
‘Lady Emmeline. Because she’s the sister of the Duke of Edderton.’
‘Who’s her husband, then?’
‘Dead. He was Captain Jarrold.’
‘But—’
Munro leaned forward, his huge hands splayed on the desktop. He spoke slowly, as if to a backward child. ‘Duke’s daughters get called “Lady”. They marry commoners, the commoners stay common. Can we take that as read now?’ He wiped a hand down his face. ‘I’m too tired for this. Find yourself a Debrett’s.’
‘I’ll never understand this country.’
‘Nor me, and I’m Canadian.’ Munro produced a crumpled white paper from a drawer, then took a sugar bun, somewhat the worse for the night, from the paper. He munched. ‘Markson’s the officer of record, so he laid the charge, but I was there because I thought the legal gentry might make mincemeat of him. Also had somebody from the prosecutor’s shindig. In the event, Markson did all right.’ He finished the bun and dusted grains of sugar from his fingers. ‘However.’
‘I thought you might be leading up to that.’
‘Feeling of nameless dread? Yeah, I had it all through the arraignment. ’ He put his forearms on the desk again. ‘Here’s where we are: things are not ideal, but they’re passable. Markson laid a charge of breaking and entering at Mrs Denton’s, a charge of wilful destruction of property, and a charge of denial of quiet enjoyment. We laid no charges having to do with you, your house, or the house behind because we don’t have hard evidence and it’s better to wait until we do.
‘My super got the chief super out of the theatre last night to tell him that we’d arrested a relative of the Duke of Edderton. Chief Super’s immediate judgement - wise, I think - was that we go only with the things we can prove. Can always build a case on the circumstantials later, hope Jarrold gives us more in examination.
‘Jarrold’s counsel objected ten times - this is in police court! - and pled him not guilty on all counts. Magistrate let him out on bond of ten pounds and his recognizance.’
‘Oh, my God.’
‘He’s got no record, Denton. We cited no crime against persons - the attack on you wasn’t in it - and you’re talking about a duke’s nephew, or whatever the hell he is, and invasion of two rooms in bloody Bethnal Green! The clothes were old and shabby. The damned piano is good only for firewood. It’s the sort of thing you call a prank if you’re counsel for the defence.’
‘He’s dangerous, Munro.’
Munro took another bun from the sack. He wet a finger and used it to lift loose grains of sugar, then licked it. ‘His lawyers will fight the fingerprint evidence as an untested theory. They said so. They were quite jolly about it - strong suggestion that it would be like a slice off the rare to them. Not quite honest of them - they know it would be the test case for fingerprints, so the police and the prosecutors would throw everything into it. In fact, I suspect they’d rather not go to court over it.’ He put his head on one hand. ‘However, Crown Prosecutor’s office had a message from the Home Secretary this a.m. that he doesn’t want to use this as the test case on fingerprints.’
‘But that’s the strongest evidence you have!’
‘His view - and looked at from his place, Denton, he’s right - his view is that when we go to court on fingerprint evidence for the first time ever, he wants a sure conviction. To him, that means a full hand of prints and corroborating evidence - that is, good enough that we could convict without the prints. From his viewpoint, it’s important to the whole future of the use of fingerprints. I mean, imagine what would happen if we went to court on Jarrold and lost.’
Denton broke off a piece of the sugar bun and chewed it. The currants on the outside had got hard; inside, they were still fairly good, unlike the bun itself. He said, ‘Tell me the worst.’
‘If he’ll plead guilty, we’ll reduce the charges to trespassing on the premises of another and disrespect of private property.’
‘No imprisonment.’
Munro shook his head. ‘Counsel hinted last night that they’ll go for such a thing. They’re putting it out this morning that Jarrold has been under strain, temporarily unbalanced. Prosecutor thinks they’ll be willing to accept some sort of house arrest under medical supervision, meaning in fact that young Struther will tiptoe off to Mummy’s castle in Sussex and be very quiet for a while.’
‘He’s dangerous!’
‘And there’s something more.’ Munro had sat back, now turned sideways in his chair. He was looking at the edge of the desk, not at Denton, picking at a splinter with a fingernail. ‘If they go to court, everything about you and Mrs Striker will be splattered over the papers brighter than the paint on her walls. No, let me speak. I don’t know what’s between the two of you - it isn’t my business - but it was plain yesterday there’s something. You lit up like a magic lantern when she came into your room.
‘These people will be ruthless, Denton. They’ll hire detectives by the long ton. They’ll find out everything, and then the papers will double that with half-truths and plain lies.’
‘I don’t give a damn.’
‘And everything will come out about her. I know who she is, Denton. Do you want to put her through that again? They’ll start up the old crap about her killing her husband. They’ll say she was insane. You and I know she didn’t kill him; he was a rotten bastard who treated her like shit, but that’s not the line they’ll take. He put her in a mental institution to tame her, but what’ll be said is that she was mad and he committed her because she was dangerous. Do you want her to go through that?’ Before Denton could answer - the question had been rhetorical, anyway - Munro said, ‘They’ll put Mrs Striker on the stand and ask her under oath if she’s been a prostitute. Their line will be that she still is and she lured Jarrold to her rooms and did something to make him angry - tricked him, mocked him. Do you want that?’
Denton breathed noisily. He said, ‘You’ll have to ask her.’
‘I thought you’d be in touch with her.’
‘It isn’t like that. She makes her own decisions.’
Munro stared at him, shrugged.
‘What’s the alternative to a trial?’ Denton said.
‘Let him plead him guilty to lesser charges. Wait.’
‘Until he does something worse?’
Munro picked at the bit of wood. ‘And then only if he leaves evidence.’
Denton wasn’t present when Struther Jarrold pled guilty to the reduced charges. He saw Jarrold outside the courtroom for an instant, got what he thought was a shy smile of recognition that was also a look of satisfaction. The pasty face was that, he thought, of the man he’d seen on the bench at New Scotland Yard days before.
The actual proceedings happened in chambers, to the disappointment of not only Denton but also a small crowd of journalists. Balked of Jarrold - his legal counsel took him down the judge’s private stairs and out a back way - the newspapermen crowded around Denton. He was prepared, however: his tale was that he was there looking over the courts for a new book; he knew nothing about Jarrold; it was all a mystery to him; why didn’t they go after Mr Jarrold?
‘Mr Denton, what’s your relationship with the Striker woman?’
‘What’s that?’
‘Woman whose rooms were vandalized. What’s the connection?’
‘No idea what you’re driving at.’ Where had he learned that expression? Guillam - the former CID man had said that to him. Useful line.
‘Isn’t the Striker woman the same one whose life you saved a year ago? Shot the eye out of the crazed killer that was holding her?’
‘Oh, really?’
‘Mr Denton, Mr Denton! There was a crime at your premises - any connection?’
‘My premises?’
‘Break-in at the house behind. What’s the connection with this Janet Striker?’
‘I think you’ve got the wrong end of the stick.’
‘Mr Denton, is this Striker woman the same one who was put in an institution by her husband some years ago? Great scandal - hospital for the criminally insane - did she do this to her own premises? Is she at it again?’
He bit his tongue. ‘You’re asking the wrong man.’
‘Mr Denton - Mr Denton—!’
He pushed his way through them. ‘I’ve got work to do—Sorry—Let me pass, please—’ He was almost free of them when a florid man his own height blocked his way. When Denton tried to go around, the big man put a hand on his chest. Denton looked down at the hand, up at the man’s eyes. He said, ‘I’ll give you three seconds to take that hand away.’ The man flushed, dropped his hand. The others hooted.
Mostly, the newspapers judged that either there was no story to be told, or the story was about powerful people whom they didn’t discuss in the public press. The Times reported nothing. Another paper buried a short piece headed ‘Peer’s Relative Pleads’ on an inner page. Only the Daily Mail attempted to make a story of it, raking up Janet Striker’s past and her connection to Denton through the violence of a year before but suggesting no other link. It did quote ‘a gentleman close to the said Jarrold’s legal counsel’ who had said that ‘Jarrold was a loyal reader of Mr Denton’s well-known works’, but he had offered no other explanation for the attack on Janet Striker’s rooms than ‘the great stress felt by a sensitive nature’. Denton frowned at a single sentence near the end of the piece: ‘A source close to New Scotland Yard expressed concern at the possible connection between the American novelist, a guest in this country, and recurring acts of violence.’
Guillam.
‘Damn Guillam!’ he shouted.
‘Sue him. We’ve strict laws of libel this side of the water, Colonel.’
Denton flung the paper back at Atkins. ‘I don’t know how you can read that trash.’
‘Down here in the lower classes, we don’t know any better.’
‘Oh, dry up.’
‘There’s tea made. Want some?’
‘Ever occur to you that we were better off in prison, Sergeant?’
‘Book going badly?’
‘No, it’s going like a house afire - when I can get away from these damned distractions. Bring me tea, yes. Upstairs.’ He went up and worked until evening. The stack of manuscript had grown thick, that already typed representing at least half of the book in its neat pile on the corner of the desk. He was able now to spend most of the day writing new material, then take the typed part to bed to correct before he went to sleep. Janet Striker had got herself a room in a small private hotel in Bayswater. Her piano, minus the lid - it had gone off to the Yard with its fingerprint - had been carted down to Collard and Collard ‘successors to Clementi and Company’ for repair. If she was dismayed by the newspaper’s raking up of her old life, she didn’t say so, murmuring only that she would stay away from him for a few days while the newspapermen cooled down, at her legal counsel’s advice - she dared do nothing that might threaten the resolution of her lawsuit.
‘And I’m to stay away from you, I suppose.’
‘I suppose.’
It didn’t seem to him a very good reason, but neither did her concern with propriety or with his public self. She was, he thought, making excuses, and not because of the sex itself. Unless she was pretending (and there was always the knowledge that she had been a prostitute, that dissembling might be habit), sex came easily and rather happily to her. It was, rather, that he was a man. She believed men hated women. All men, all women: there seemed to be no exceptions. She had been raped by a man, abused by a man, humiliated by a man, institutionalized by a man. Men had paid her to invade her. Why, then, should she trust him? Why should she run to have him invade her - although he hated that notion of it, that one of them invaded and the other let it be done: surely it was a mutual wanting, the desire to become one? Or was that a man’s self-congratulation?
One day, he feared, she would go away. Perhaps she would write him a letter; perhaps she would simply go, and he wouldn’t know how to find her. Once she had money, she could go wherever, be whatever she wanted. Her present skittishness, as he thought of it, might be prelude to something more permanent. It wasn’t coyness that was keeping her away from him; it was fear - of the maleness she believed hated her femaleness - and perhaps a bleak sense that it was too late for her, or perhaps that he was the wrong one. Or she was the wrong one. Better a life alone than one that rested on a bad bargain - he knew that feeling.
So he shared his bed with the typed page.
The next day, he went to complain to Munro about the ‘source close to New Scotland Yard’ that had been quoted in the Daily Mail. ‘That’s Guillam!’ he all but shouted at Munro. ‘What the hell is he doing messing in the Jarrold business?’
Munro was busy and tired. His expression suggested a stomach ailment. He looked at Denton through splayed fingers and said, ‘The Jarrold business is Guillam’s business. Jarrold’s fallen into Guillam’s pocket.’
‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’
‘It means that Georgie Guillam knows how to work the system.
I told you - his new office is a catch-all. He persuaded somebody that house arrests are his.’
‘That’s because of me! It is because of me, isn’t it?’
Munro shrugged. ‘I told you he doesn’t forget. Yes, maybe he saw your name on it and thought there’s something in it for him. Nothing I can do about it. It’s out of CID. You want to complain, complain to Georgie.’
‘Oh, hell!’
‘Yeah.’
He got his friend Hector Hench-Rose - his baronetcy still so new it sparkled - to write him a letter of introduction to Lady Emmeline, Struther Jarrold’s mother. Jarrold was said to be under medical supervision in Sussex; the mother, Denton thought, might be amenable to a serious chat about her son.
His first look at her suggested to him that perhaps she would. She was at least as old as he, probably older, but with the most beautiful posture he had ever seen in a woman; she stood straight, not affecting the buttocks-out curve of the new corsetry. A former ‘beauty’, she still had magnificent facial bones, a figure as slender as a girl’s. Her pale hair, partly silver that blended into its original gold, was piled high on her head. She wore a dress of very pale beige with touches of apricot, her slender arms covered in lace, a jabot of the same cascading down her front to below where a vulgar eye might have imagined her to have a navel. She was holding his friend’s letter of introduction.
‘I am so pleased we can have this talk,’ were her first words. She seemed able to speak almost without moving her lower jaw; her accent was odd and to him unidentifiable, reminiscent of Ruth Castle’s when she was well into the champagne. She raised the letter a few inches. ‘I am unacquainted with the current baronet but knew his father, I think. Such a gentle man.’
‘I wanted to speak to you about your son, ma’am.’
‘About Struther, yes, poor dear. Have you come to apologize? Oh, I do hope you have come to apologize.’ Her tone was sad, her voice lovely.
‘Apologize, ma’am? For what?’
She sat. Her back was wonderfully straight; he doubted that her shoulders had ever touched a chair back. Her sadness seemed to expand to include pity, as if she knew that Denton was the sort who couldn’t help himself and therefore might - might - be forgiven. ‘For seducing my poor boy. For forcing him to this unfortunate incident that the police say took him to East London.’
‘Ma’am, it’s not I—’
The sadness in her voice grew metallic. The metal, he thought, was steel. ‘I know how you have worked to seduce him! I know how you have played upon his sensitive nature! I have seen the copies of your books -’ she made the word sound like a synonym for excrement - ‘which you inscribed to him. Oh, sir, though I feel distaste for saying it - for shame!’
‘I haven’t inscribed any books to him, ma’am.’
She sighed ‘You are a practised liar, too, I see.’
‘Any books inscribed to your son are forgeries.’
‘Do you dare to suggest that my son is a forger? You are pathetic as well as untruthful.’ The sadness fled; only the steel was left. ‘Leave me.’
‘He did ask me to inscribe books to him as Albert Cosgrove. Why did he call himself Albert Cosgrove?’
‘He did nothing of the sort.’ She looked away. ‘Although pseudonyms are not unknown among literary artists.’
Denton was still standing; he saw no hope of being asked to sit. ‘Your son is mentally unbalanced, Lady Emmeline.’
‘How dare you!’
‘He’s dangerous - what he did in Bethnal Green is one step shy of violence—’
‘You go too far, much too far—’
‘Against a woman—’
‘We shall sue you - there is no escape—’ She seemed to have heard what he had said, at last, for she hissed, ‘A woman! Do you mean the trollop who lured him to her squalid room? I warn you, Mr, Mr -’ she made a gesture that rendered Denton’s name worthless - ‘we shall learn everything and we shall sue you and see you broken. Justice will be on our side. I had thought you had some spark of decency, that you had prevailed upon a baronet to write a letter so that you might confess your crimes, but you - you are contemptible.’
‘Lady Emmeline, your son is not sane!’
She somehow managed to sit still straighter. ‘You are speaking of the nephew of a duke!’ Her bizarre accent made it come out as ‘the nivioo of a juke’.
‘The dangerous “nivioo of a juke”, I think, ma’am.’
She stood. Her nostrils flared ever so slightly - as extreme a sign of passion as she allowed herself, he supposed - and she said, ‘Leave my house, you vulgar little man!’
He bowed. ‘Vulgar I am, ma’am. Little, I ain’t.’ He headed for the door. There seemed no point in staying.