The Bohemian Girl

Chapter TWO
The outline was nowhere in the house. Nonetheless, the novel was mostly there in his head, still his if he hurried to get it down on paper. He had seen the phenomenon before when he had lost a page or two of something and had had to do it over, then had located the original, and, comparing them, found that the second reproduced the first almost exactly. Writing was concentration; writing was thought: what came hard stayed in the brain. And pulling it back out, setting it down on paper, blotted out everything else - Janet Striker, the little Wesselons, the somebody who might be looking at them from the house behind, although that was an idea of Atkins’s he thought overblown, nonetheless offensive: he hated being spied on. Even having somebody read over his shoulder irritated him.
At two, he threw the pen down and rubbed his eyes. The left one stung. He supposed he’d need glasses soon. Distance vision was good - he could still shoot the spade out of an ace at twenty yards, as he’d proven to the sceptical officer who’d run the Romanian prison. But reading and writing made the eye hurt. The idea of eyeglasses piqued his vanity, reminded him of Janet Striker, brought back his feeling of deflation.
‘I’m going out!’ he shouted down the stairs. He’d walk, he thought, clear out his brain. At the very least, he could carry the pages he’d written up to his typewriter in Lloyd Baker Street. He wouldn’t trust anybody else to do it, anyway - the only copy, its loss not to be risked a second time. He started to pull on a different shirt and trousers, then went to the stairs and bellowed down, ‘Are we still wearing black?’ Victoria had died in January; they had left London in March, the city still in mourning.
Atkins was two flights down. He bellowed back, ‘What?’
‘Are - we - still - in - black?’
‘No - we - are - not!’ Atkins padded up to the first floor, his head appearing at the bottom of Denton’s stairs. ‘New king said three months’ mourning was enough. Wear the brown lounge suit.’
The brown suit was the only one left in the press. Atkins’s revenge for the Commissionaire, he thought: Denton disliked the suit, and Atkins knew it. Passing through his sitting room on the floor below, he automatically reached out towards a box on the mantelpiece, drew his hand back. He had been used to taking the derringer from the box and carrying it in his pocket, but the derringer hadn’t got out of the prison. Still, he flipped up the lid, as if the little pistol might have materialized there. It hadn’t.
He walked to Gray’s Inn Road, then up it to Ampton Street and so across to Lloyd Square, now and then stopping to look behind him, seeing nobody. The idea of being followed by a man in a bowler and a red moustache, of being known, troubled him.
His typewriter was flustered to see him, as always; they embarrassed each other somehow, as if they had some intimate past or future they didn’t dare discuss. He handed over the papers and fled to Pentonville Road where, on an impulse, he swung himself up into a Favourite omnibus - except it wasn’t an impulse, for he was still thinking of Atkins’s ‘bowler and red moustache’ and wanted again to watch to see who climbed aboard. Several bowlers boarded, none interested in him and only one with a moustache, that yellow. Atkins was seeing spooks, he decided, the product of a morbid interest in religion.
The ride invigorated him. London invigorated him, the day sunny and not quite cool - that tremendous sense of bustle that the city had, of pulsing, as if it were a live, growing thing that was always bursting a skin and emerging in a new one. He would visit a friend, he thought - an acquaintance, at least - at New Scotland Yard and report Mary Thomason’s letter, and that would be that matter out of the way. Let the police handle it. Guilt made him add that first he would stop at his publishers to go through some likely unpleasantness about the novel, which at best was going to be two months late.
He got down at London Bridge and got on a Red 21 and rode it to the Temple and in a light drizzle walked into the twistings of little streets north of Temple Bar - Izaak Walton’s London - to the somewhat ramshackle offices of Gweneth and Burse. His editor was a dry, thin man named Diapason Lang (his father an organist of some reputation), at once severely agitated to see Denton. There was no welcome back to London, no polite chit-chat about the trip.
‘I’m awfully glad you’ve come,’ he said, ‘at last. Awfully glad.’ Lang was older than Denton, apparently sexless, in love with books. ‘You’ve brought the new book?’ He sounded hopeless; he must already have seen that, unless Denton’s overcoat had a hidden kangaroo pocket, the manuscript hadn’t come with him.
‘The manuscript is in Romania.’ Denton tried to make a light story of it - Colonel Cieljescu, a novel in English as military contraband. ‘I’m putting it down again as fast as I can, Lang.’
‘Oh, dear. Oh, dear. Gwen will be beside himself.’ He looked at Denton as if appealing for help. Gwen was Wilfred Gweneth, the publisher; the Burse of the firm’s name seemed not to exist. Lang picked at his blotter. ‘Gwen’s most unhappy about the motor car.’
‘It was seized, too.’
‘Gwen’s terribly upset. He’s said quite unkind things.’ The publisher had bought the motor car in which Denton had made the trip to Transylvania; it was in the contract, part of the deal. When Denton brought it back to London, it was to have been turned over to the firm. ‘Gwen even suggested you sold it over there.’
It had occurred to Denton that Cieljescu had let them ‘escape’ so he could keep the Daimler, but he wasn’t about to say that to Lang - right now, it would sound too much like having traded it for freedom. He smiled and pointed out that the vehicle had been insured.
‘Yes - yes - but the insurer is balking. They want proof. They want to know if you reported it to the police.’
‘Colonel Cieljescu was the police.’
‘Well, it’s all very awkward. Gwen is terribly upset. He blames me.’ The original idea for the book had been Lang’s, although it had been Denton who had added, in fact demanded, the motor car. Lang inhaled so suddenly the sound vocalized. ‘He’ll be in a state about the novel’s not being done, too.’
‘I’m working as fast as I can. A month. Lang, you’ve got the book on the Transylvanian trip; it’s going to make lots of money! What’s the problem?’ He had written the travel book as a series of articles as he travelled.
Lang looked at him with sick eyes. ‘He’s talking about taking the cost of the motor car out of royalties.’
Denton needed those royalties to live. He felt anger coming but pushed it back. ‘He can’t do that, as you well know. I’ll sue.’
‘I know, I know!’ Lang’s voice was a wail. He looked at a print on his wall - Elihu Vedder’s The Nightmare, a demon looming over a sleeping woman with much exposed flesh - and said to it instead of Denton, ‘We’re having a little party. Please come. It may mollify him.’
‘I hate parties.’
‘It’s to launch the collection of ghost stories. Henry James will be there!’ Lang, who loved horror in any of its forms, had put together stories from twenty authors, not all of them from the house. Denton was one, James another. ‘It would look so well if you came.’
‘And brought the motor car with me?’
‘It isn’t a laughing matter.’
‘I’ll send Gwen a letter explaining everything. Gwen will be delighted.’
Lang groaned, sure that he wouldn’t.
‘Everything will be all right, Lang.’
Lang leaned his narrow head on one dry hand and looked at the Vedder. ‘No, it won’t,’ he said.
Denton gave it up and headed for New Scotland Yard.
‘Well, well, by the saints! How’s the Sheriff of Nottingham?’
‘I wasn’t a sheriff; I was a town marshal.’
‘You’ve lost weight.’ Detective Sergeant Munro of the CID grunted. ‘I haven’t.’
Munro had come limping towards Denton across the lobby, outpacing the porter who’d gone to him with Denton’s card. He was big, as most detectives now were big, with a massive head that seemed to grow into a huge pair of jaws as it went downwards from his hairline, becoming almost Neanderthal. He could be brusque, acid, hard, but he was as dependable as anybody Denton had ever known. And he was good at his job.
‘I was in the clink,’ Denton said with a grin.
‘So I read in the press. Come on upstairs. Cup of tea?’
‘You’ve moved.’
‘I’d moved before you left town - thanks to you, and I do mean thanks, Denton. You got me back into the CID.’
Denton muttered something. Munro had got part of the credit for finding a murderer whom Denton had killed.
‘How’s the lady?’ Munro said.
‘I haven’t seen her yet.’
‘She forgiven you for shooting a bullet past her ear?’
‘She hasn’t said.’ Janet Striker had been held as a shield when Denton had shot the man holding her, who had already slashed her face once. It was true, the bullet had had to pass just above her ear to hit his eye.
They went up a flight of stairs and turned into a corridor where any trace of marble ended and a scruffy look of police business began. At the end was a huge room filled with wooden desks - and men. Denton saw at least a dozen, many in shirtsleeves; a fug of pipe smoke hung in the room, which smelled of the smoke and nervous sweat and damp wool.
Munro waved at somebody and caused two white mugs of tea to appear; he motioned to a chair by a desk that was like all the others. ‘Sit.’
‘No guns here,’ Denton said.
‘This isn’t the Assiniboine.’ Munro was Canadian and had been in the Mounties - the second intake, early days in the Canadian West. ‘We investigate, not shoot it out.’
‘You like it?’
‘It’s heaven, compared to pushing paper like I was. This lot here do nothing but complain; I tell them that a week at the Annexe untying bundles of paper and tying them up again in a ribbon, and they’d sell their wives to get back here.’ He drank tea, looked at Denton, sat back so that his patent chair squeaked on its big springs. ‘All right, what is it? You didn’t come to see me on your first day back in London because you’re in love with me.’
‘I was in the neighbourhood.’
‘Tell that to some sailor on a horse!’ Munro laughed. ‘You’re all business, Denton - I’ve watched you. Don’t tell me you’ve got another corpse for me.’
‘Only a letter. Maybe a missing girl.’
Munro slapped the desk. ‘How do you do it? Twenty-four hours home and you’re making trouble for me! Look, we don’t do missing girls here. We investigate. We—’
‘She sent me a letter just after I left. Months ago.’
‘And she’s actually missing?’
‘She said somebody was trying to harm her.’
‘And she’s missing?’
‘I don’t know.’ Denton leaned forward to cut off Munro’s response. ‘The letter reached me kind of roundabout. I don’t want to make a lot out of it.’
‘Good. Don’t. Drop it.’
‘I thought you’d know how to find if anything bad had happened to her.’
Munro stared at him. His jaws bulged even more. He said, ‘Do you know what “gall” means?’
‘I thought maybe you thought you owed me a favour.’
Munro tipped his head back so he could study Denton down the length of his fleshy nose. He stuck his lips out. He pushed out his chin. ‘You got a name?’
‘Mary Thomason.’
‘What division?’
‘She didn’t give an address.’
Munro made it clear he thought that that was the last straw. He muttered that Denton was going to give him heart failure one day. He gulped down his tea and stamped off through the room to a bank of three telephones on the wall at the far end. When he came back, he seemed better humoured.
‘Two days,’ Munro said. ‘Hope you can wait two days.’
‘Beggars can’t be choosers.’
Munro began to fill a pipe. ‘Beggars, my arse! Well, you’re right I owe you one - wouldn’t be back here if not for you. I’ve put a query in train at the divisions, anything they have on Mary Thomason, same at the coroner’s. If she’s made a complaint or died, you’ll hear of it.’
‘I don’t remember you smoking.’
‘Self-defence in this place. Go home stinking of it, anyway; the wife complains. You don’t have a wife.’
‘Indeed.’
‘Thought there might be something with the lady whose ear you almost shot off. Mmm?’
‘Unlikely.’
‘Oh, well, take that line if you must. How’d you like prison?’
‘I’m taking up your time.’
‘Slack hour. The prison?’
So Denton gave him a sketch of life as a political prisoner in a country that was still squirming out of the mire of the Middle Ages. Munro filled out paperwork and grunted. When Denton was done, Munro said, ‘Been in prison before?’
‘I was a guard once.’
‘Dear heaven. Almost as bad.’ He pushed his papers aside and laid both forearms on the desk. ‘Ever think about joining the police again? I could use a partner with some brains.’
Denton smiled. He liked Munro. ‘I write books,’ he said.
‘A waste and a shame.’
‘Get Guillam.’
Munro made a face. George Guillam was a Detective Sergeant who had accepted a false confession in the crime that had led to Denton’s shooting the real criminal; Guillam and Denton had started off on the wrong foot and got worse. Munro said, ‘Georgie’s in a bit of a funk just now. Not saying much to me.’
‘The business last spring?’
‘Aye, that and me getting some credit. And there’s you.’
‘I didn’t strike on his box.’
‘You might say you weren’t his favourite fella.’
‘He still want to be a superintendent?’
‘In a funny kind of way, he is - acting like a super, anyway, but without the title. They kicked him sideways after the business with you. He’s “on leave” from CID and acting as super of a division of odds and sods - Domestic, Missing Persons, Juvenile, a lot of stuff. Georgie has pals upstairs, but he put his foot in the dog’s mess with that false confession he accepted. There’s some talk it was got with some physical persuasion, too. Georgie did what was right for him, not for the law, and he’s going to be in bad odour for a while. Serves him right, although I don’t say that to his face.’
‘Maybe I should have a word with him.’
‘Maybe you should and maybe you shouldn’t. Georgie don’t forgive easily.’ Munro dropped his voice to an almost inaudible rumble and leaned closer. ‘Georgie piles up grudges like bricks. Says all’s forgiven and then can’t resist the knife when you turn your back.’ He raised his voice to its normal boom. ‘Mind what I say.’ He put a finger next to his nose, an antiquated and strange gesture that made him seem like an actor playing Father Christmas. ‘Now I’ve got work to do.’
Denton found his way back to the lobby and was about to leave the building when he realized that postponing a meeting with Guillam was stupid. Denton didn’t mind being disliked, didn’t mind even being hated if the hater was of the right contemptible kind, but he had once wanted Guillam’s respect and he didn’t see that things had much changed. If Guillam had a bean up his nose, better to face him than skulk away.
The porter led him to where Guillam could be found. Denton climbed the stairs again, went up a second flight this time, followed the man into more barren corridors and stopped by a door that the porter held open. Inside were four men, each at a desk, electric lights burning overhead, a smell like burnt toast mingling with the tobacco and wet wool. All four looked up. Three swept their eyes over him and went back to their work. The fourth stared at him, frowned, got up as if he were in pain and came around the desk.
‘I thought we’d let bygones be bygones,’ Denton said. ‘I was in the building.’ He put out his hand.
‘What bygones are those?’ Guillam ignored the hand.
‘We had some differences a while back.’
‘News to me.’
‘I thought there might be some - feeling - over - you know.’
‘Can’t say I do. No idea what you’re getting at. I got work to do.’
And he turned his back and headed for his desk.
Denton tried to find his way out, got lost, felt the sting of Guillam’s rejection turn to rage. Where was the buoyant mood of the morning? He wanted to kick something. Somebody. A young constable finally had to lead him down to the lobby. Denton steamed through it and aimed himself at the door.
A bench stood next to the porter’s lodge. Several sorry specimens were sitting on the bench. Denton merely glanced at them, details in the landscape to be forgotten, until one detail caught his eye: a raised newspaper, folded almost to the size of a book, the newspaper lowered to show a pair of eyes. And then a hairless face, no red moustache, although his upper lip had a gleam that could have been gum arabic. The newspaper was raised again. On the bench, upside down, a black bowler.
‘The moustache could be false! But who’d be stupid enough to put on a red moustache if he was going to follow somebody, unless he wanted to call attention to himself?’
‘You’ve lost me.’ Atkins put on his deliberately stupid look.
‘Wear the thing, you’re the most memorable man on the street!’
‘Yes, but take it off, the most memorable thing about you is gone, you’re nobody!’
Denton had started in on it as soon as he had come through his front door. ‘He could have been following me all day. Probably was!’
‘Master of disguise, you mean? Popping in and out of beards and Inverness capes? Bit Strand Magazine, isn’t it?’
‘You’re the one who said he was a rum one!’
‘So he was. But like you pointed out, General, black bowlers is tuppence a hundred.’
‘Well, red moustaches aren’t. And at New Scotland Yard! Hell’s bells, that’s brazen.’
He had shouted his way up the stairs and into the sitting room, had shucked himself out of his overcoat and tossed it at Atkins, thrown his hat at a table and flung himself into his armchair before Atkins managed to say, ‘You got a telegram. Telegram from her, eh? On the sideboard.’
‘Why the hell didn’t you say so?’
Atkins muttered something that sounded like ‘Just listen to yourself’ and wandered away with the coat. Denton tore the telegram apart and read:
TOMORROW 5 PM ABC BARBICAN STOP JANET STRIKER
His heart jumped, even though the message was as impersonal as a military order. He tried to remember his own message to her. Had it been as heartless? Had he started them off wrong? He threw himself down again. He remembered her choice once before of an ABC - a shop of the Aerated Bread Company, cheap and faceless. Five tomorrow - twenty-four hours more, good God.
Returning, Atkins said, ‘You’ve a parcel, too.’ He was standing now behind Denton’s chair; next to him, Rupert was cleaning his private parts. Atkins handed Denton a battered package. ‘From the garden of Central Europe.’ He had been holding it with both hands; Denton took it, found why: it was heavy. Atkins wasn’t leaving, his posture said; he wanted to see what was in the package. To make sure that he did, he held out his pocket-knife, already open.
The package was tied with heavy string that had been stuck down with sealing wax in six places; the paper, brown, cheap, had been so battered in its travels that it looked like lizard skin, but the string had held everything together. The stamps were triangular, green and purple, now peeling. Denton cut the string, then enlarged a tear in the front of the package to reveal something like a tea box, which the knife made quick work of - the small nails in the lid could be prised up - and Denton dumped the contents into his chair: a tied packet of envelopes with British stamps, the name Striker in the upper left corners (his heart lurched); two objects wrapped in the same brown paper and tied with the same string, one long, one short, both heavy; and, in a separate envelope, a photograph and a sheet of embossed notepaper. ‘From Colonel Cieljescu,’ he said.
‘The Transylvanian Napoleon.’
‘Now, now—’ Colonel Cieljescu had subjected Denton to long, almost nightly monologues about ‘culture’, most of which Denton hadn’t understood because he didn’t know Central European history, but the gist of it had been that English was a barbaric language and America was a desert. ‘I think it was the Colonel who got us sprung from that hole.’
‘Katya said it was God’s will.’
‘Yes, but the Colonel had the keys. Somebody left the doors open, and if you tell me it was an angel, I’ll fire you.’ He pocketed the letters from Janet Striker, then tore open the two heavy wrappings: one was his Navy Colt, the other his derringer.
‘Must be he don’t fancy antiques,’ Atkins said.
Denton pulled out the note. Under an embossed double eagle and the name of the prison where they had almost starved was the date in blue ink - three weeks before, a month after their ‘escape’ - and a message:
My dear American friend Denton,
Now you read this I am believing you are in your own bed. I am desolated to not have you my guest any more for our long chats anent art. For remembrance, herewith is new photo of me for you. Also I am forced by duty to keep your writings which you say is fiction but may be espionage, one day you must read Alfons Duchinatz a real author. Plus some letters I am sending you were overlooked in giving to you during your stay with us. Your vehicle I have with gratest regret empounded for military contrabandage. Hoping you are found good in health, Your esteamed friend, Cieljescu, Anton-Pauli, Colonel, Imperial Corps of Mounted Infantry and Guards, by the Grace of His Imperial Highness, Franz Joseph, Archduke of Austria and Hungary . . .
Denton picked up the photograph. A large man in uniform, recognizably the Colonel, was sitting in the passenger seat of a motor car, recognizably Denton’s Daimler 8. The man was smiling. Beside him, a driver, less clear, sat with both hands grasping the wheel as if to keep it from flying away.
Denton burst into laughter. ‘It’s our motor car! He sent back my guns and he kept the car!’
Atkins looked over his shoulder. He groaned. ‘That’s Katya beside him. That’s Katya!’
‘God works in mysterious ways.’
Atkins snatched his knife from Denton’s hand and turned for the stairs. ‘I’m sure there’s an explanation. She was to me an angel!’ He strode away, and Denton heard him mutter as he closed the door, ‘The bitch—’
Denton found himself filled again with something that felt good - contentment, perhaps, even happiness. At once, with the two pistols in his lap, he read Mrs Striker’s letters. Written weeks before, they were about trivia - her job with the Society for the Improvement of Wayward Women, her alcoholic mother, the weather, her piano - but they delighted him. More than that, the fact of them delighted him. The last letter was dated well after they had left the prison, so she had gone on writing even when he hadn’t. Never intimately, never warmly, always signing herself ‘your friend’, but she had written.
He loaded the derringer - .41 black-powder Remington, wildly inaccurate but horrific at a foot or two - and put it in its old place in the box on the mantel, then took the Colt up to the attic and laid it in its case. Somebody in Transylvania had screwed the balls out and dumped the gunpowder and cleaned it. Closing the lid on it now, he thought, was like closing a coffin - the pistol, which he had picked up on a Civil War battlefield and carried through his early years in the West, which he had used to kill the man who had been threatening to slash Janet Striker’s throat only six months before - the pistol had earned a rest. Obsolete, big, it had become a relic. He loved the Colt, but sentiment has its limits.
Downstairs again, he clapped his hands together and walked up and down his bedroom. It was all right. Everything would be all right. Her message had seemed curt because that was the nature of telegrams. The ABC could be quickly got over. Or out of. He was back, he was free, he was going to see her. What were twenty-four hours after all these weeks?
He put the photograph and Cieljescu’s letter in an envelope to go to his publisher, Gweneth; if that didn’t settle the matter of the motor car, the hell with him.