The Bohemian Girl

Chapter TWENTY-TWO
Denton thought that leaving the nursing home was the final humiliation - a litter carried by two men older than he, with two more to raise him shoulder-high and push him into the horse-drawn ambulance like a loaf of bread going into an oven - but going up his own stairs in his own house was even worse: humiliation turned into farce. Atkins had picked up three day labourers who put Denton into an armchair at the bottom of the stairs, and then, each man taking a leg, carried him with the chair tipped back so far he thought he might do a backwards somersault out of it. They rested at the landing with a lot of heavy breathing and exclamations and then picked him up and carried him the last seven stairs, depositing him in his own sitting room after almost taking his head off on the door jamb.
‘Well,’ Atkins said when he’d paid them off, ‘home again, home again, jiggety-jog.’
‘If I’d known you were going to do that, I’d have stayed in the nursing home.’
‘Listen, General, they wanted to carry you up on the litter. I’ve seen men dropped, seen the whole shebang go down a flight of steps. I thought the armchair was a stroke of genius.’
‘Help me up.’ Denton struggled; the bad leg was no help, and Atkins was not particularly strong. ‘It’s a good thing I’m skin and bones,’ he said when he was standing.
Atkins produced a walking stick. ‘You’re still about three stone too much for me. You’re bivouacked down here for the duration.’ He jerked his head towards the unused room next to the sitting room. ‘Never make it up and down those stairs day after day. Didn’t want to maroon you up there.’
‘Oh, hell - I hate that room.’
‘Yes, well, we do the best we can with what’s on offer at this hotel. Can you walk on that stick?’
Denton had tried a stick in the nursing home. He had taken a few steps, the right leg dragging behind, most of his weight hung from his shoulders and supported on his right hand. ‘Like running the mile race,’ he said.
‘We’ll have you fit in no time. Mrs O’Cohen has left a pot of soup you’re to eat six or eight times a day - very forceful woman.’ Denton, out of the habit of Atkins’s humour, needed two seconds to realize that O’Cohen was a play on the supposed Irishness of Cohan.
‘What’s she got to do with it?’
‘Oh, ah, she’s close to Mrs Striker, isn’t she? I’m going to get this armchair out of the way; you walk up and down for a while.’
‘I want to rest.’
‘Up and down, up and down, General. You’ve had plenty of rest, if you ask me.’
Denton struggled down the long room, turned at the window and struggled back. He had to pause at the alcove to lean against the cold porcelain stove that stood there, relic of an earlier tenant. Then he went up the room, past his armchair and the fireplace, to the window that looked out on the street. The pavements were wet, the gas lamps on; uneven wiggles of light reflected where the rain, now ended, had collected.
‘Let’s do it once more for old times’ sake, then I’ll bring up the tea.’
‘I’m worn out, Atkins.’
‘That’s why you’ve got to work. Let’s march.’
He laboured down the room again. This time he stopped at the window over the back garden, too exhausted in the right arm and shoulders to go on. The bullet wounds ached. ‘There are lights in the house behind,’ he said.
‘Oh, right. But no Albert Cosgrove.’
‘What’s going on?’
‘Workmen. Somebody bought it.’
‘Turn your back on the world, it goes right on without you.’ He swung around and dragged the leg to the alcove. ‘I’m done in. Help me to bed now.’
‘I thought I’d serve tea out here.’ Atkins’s voice became almost kind. ‘Look, General, you need to get back to normal. You don’t want to start living in a bed.’
Denton looked into his face, then put his left hand on a shoulder. ‘Help me along, then.’
He didn’t know how to sit down into a soft, deep chair. Now he found that if he put the right leg out in front of him and bent the left leg, he could fall backwards and land more or less in a sitting position; the left leg trembled from the effort. He said, ‘Do you know how embarrassing this is?’
‘We’ll practise that,’ Atkins said. ‘I’ll get the tea.’
He had made an effort. There were three kinds of biscuits, toast, anchovy paste, clotted cream, and a tureen of soup from which he lifted the lid. Steam rose and a remarkable odour drifted Denton’s way. ‘It doesn’t smell like the nursing home, at least,’ Denton said. He wasn’t sure what it smelled like.
‘Mrs O’Cohen’s speciality. Chicken and a lot of other stuff. She cooks “kosher”, if you know what that is. I don’t, so don’t ask.’ He ladled out a bowl. ‘Good for what ails you.’
‘They’ve been feeding me a lot of Bovril.’
‘Rare beef is what you need. Increase the blood. I’ve got a bit downstairs in the ice-cave would delight a cannibal. Thought I’d grill it on some coals.’
‘It’ll taste.’
‘Wood coals, General. Not a green recruit, you know.’
Denton ate the soup, then the toast and anchovy paste, then some of the biscuits. The soup, with enough salt, was edible but peculiar. The sharp saltiness of the anchovies was welcome after the stodge they’d fed him at the nursing home. When he was done, he tried to stand. ‘I can’t even get out of my own chair!’
‘Don’t mind my saying so, but you ain’t trying.’
Denton gave him a look of hatred. ‘I can’t bend this damned leg. What’s your brilliant idea?’
‘Stick it out in front of you and get up on the other one.’
The left leg was weak and his bullet wounds screamed, but he did it, the left thigh now vibrating like a plucked string. He stood looking down at Atkins. ‘You’ve appointed yourself my domestic scold?’
‘That’s the plan.’
Denton hobbled partway down the room and turned to the left and then left again into the room they never used. Most of the blind wall that was shared with the next house was books; on the street side was a single tall window; to his left as he stood in the doorway was a wall with a fireplace, coal burning in the grate. Opposite it, a divan he’d never seen before had been made up as a bed. ‘I’d prefer my own room.’
‘When you can go up and down.’
A big stack of mail stood on a table. Atkins said, ‘Lots of bills and invitations. Give you something to do.’
Denton felt too tired to respond. He’d given up the morphine, had refused chloral hydrate or laudanum. He was wondering, as he settled in the bed, if he should ask Atkins for some of the headache powders, and while he was wondering he fell asleep.
It was a struggle during the night to get from his rooms to the toilet that was tucked behind the alcove and across the side corridor. Atkins heard him and ran upstairs, trailing an unbelted robe behind him, Rupert plodding and breathing heavily behind that. The nursing home had had bedpans, not lavatories. Life was suddenly more complicated, more frustrating. Still, he fell again into deep sleep as soon as he was back in the bed.
The next two days were elaborations on struggle and frustration. The simple had become complex, the difficult impossible. He complained that he was getting his exercise simply by living, but Atkins chivvied him into limping up and down the long room, back and forth, then doing the leg exercises. After the first set, Atkins holding Denton’s feet and pushing the legs for Denton to push back, Atkins said, ‘You’re using that leg, you know.’
‘I’m not.’
‘You are. I can feel it. You ought to try putting more weight on it when you walk.’
‘Hurts like hell.’
‘Not the end of the world, I daresay.’
The meals continued to be enormous, the chicken soup a major part through the first breakfast; by then, Denton had had enough of it and ordered that he wasn’t to be faced with it any more. The second morning, there were kidneys and bacon and eggs and buttery rolls, and Denton complained about too much food.
‘Got to fatten you up, Colonel. Prodigal son come home, and so on. Fatted calf time.’
Denton read his mail and tried not to wonder what Janet Striker was finding in Normandy. All sorts of people had written to him about the shooting - his editor, Lang, nervously, Henry James a bit pompously but in fact rather touchingly. Denton was still at the stage of feeling a stranger in his own house, still catching up with the world that had passed him by. The good wishes of people he hadn’t seen for several months now seemed insubstantial.
At tea, to make conversation, he said to Atkins, ‘What’s happened with your moving picture?’
‘Oh, rather a tale, that. Interesting, amusing, and a delight to both adults and children.’
‘Good. Amuse and delight me.’
Atkins was eating bits of Denton’s toast and sipping tea from an oversized cup. He smiled. ‘Bit of a long story.’
‘I have lots of time.’
‘Well, then—Well, you disappeared from the scene when we was making pictures up in Victoria Park. I’d learned from earlier adventures and got us a permit to shoot blanks in the muskets. Gave us permission to “perform patriotic manoeuvres with rendered-safe firearms”, for which we had to pay for a policeman to watch over us. Also had to provide him with lunch, the which he thought should be a banquet. Anyway, we got through that all right, and then we finished with the pictures of the soldier’s return down at your front door again.’
‘Why didn’t you make that and the farewell at the same time? More efficient!’
‘What, and have to cut up the film and paste it back together? Not likely, General! No, we did it all in the order it would play, see? Then we have the film what they call “processed”, meaning the pictures come out, and then we bang it back in the camera and project it on a sheet. Did I mention that the camera was also the projecting machine? Well, it was.
‘We rented a former scraps and findings shop just off the Whitechapel Road and had a couple of signs made, “The Boer War - Fascination in Moving Pictures! Villainous Boer and Courageous British Hero! Patriotism Personified!” And so on. Even brought in benches from a Methodist mission that went bust over the way - unheard of, sitting down for a moving picture. Great sensation.
‘So we were prepared to open on a Friday - “open” is what they say in the theatre world, I suppose from the curtains, which we didn’t have - and I was standing outside, ready to take the money of the gathering horde, when up come three fellas with very serious expressions, one of which turns out to be a legal type who slaps a paper into my hand and says, “You’re out of business.” Then the other two chaps go in and seize the picture machine and carry it out under the watchful eye of two constables they’ve brought for the purpose.
‘Well, you can imagine the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. The housemaid had invited her entire family, which was as rum a lot of human beings as you’d never hope to meet, and my chum was tearing his hair out in handfuls and saying we was ruined. I, however, read the piece of paper and found we were being injuncted against by the courts for violating the patent of some American who claimed that our machine was a fiddle copied from his.
‘And so it was. What my chum and partner hadn’t found out when he bought the machine was that the Pole that made it had nicked the idea. But I said to myself, Not so fast, let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater, where does it say they can seize our moving picture along with the machine? So I went to the chap that had sold me the insurance - you remember, you’d advised me to get insurance - and they sent a young fellow that was a clerk in a law office. But, by the time we got it to court, the Yanks had already shipped the machine to the States and had destroyed the film - burned our moving picture all to ashes.
‘The long and the longer of it was that the Yanks settled out of court for illegal destruction of a creative property not their own; my chum ran off with the housemaid; and I made back my expenses, plus three pounds, seven shillings punitive damages, in loo of one per cent of the net profit of the American company on all future moving pictures. A bird in the hand, says I.’
‘I think you did handsomely.’
‘One per cent of future profits is one per cent of nothing.’
‘You never know.’
‘I should of took the long view, you’re thinking.’
‘Not at all’
‘Moving-picture business is too risky. The Yanks wanted to hire me - said I had get-up.’ Atkins laughed. ‘The day I leave your employ, General, it’ll be for a good deal more than running about Victoria Park with a musket.’ He nibbled another piece of toast. ‘Now I’ve got my eye on the truss. You have any idea how many trusses are sold in this country every year? Met a chap who’s invented a pneumatic truss. Latest thing. What do you think?’
‘Did you ever see your moving picture?’
Atkins chewed, thought, shrugged. ‘I saw it made.’
Later that evening, a telegram came from Janet Striker:
YOU WERE CORRECT. FRENCH POLICE INFORMED. HOME SATURDAY.
‘They were bones, Denton. Bones and some leathery-looking stuff I suppose was skin. I’m afraid I felt a bit faint.’
‘You’re sure they were human.’
‘I wanted to believe they weren’t! I’d got a very nice young man named Emile to dig. I told him we were looking for buried money. It gave him something to look forward to. When he found the first bone, he said it was a cow. It seemed to me too slender to be a cow, so I had him dig farther along, where the feet might be. Well.’ She gave him a partial smile. ‘It was a very human foot, with a lot of the skin still intact.’
‘What did you tell the farmer?’
‘I’d given him twenty-five francs; for that, I didn’t think I had to tell him anything. My story was that I wanted to paint where my friend the milord had painted. I set myself up at the door of the barn with a chair and a watercolour block and my paints and tried to look artistic while Emile did the digging.’
‘You paint, too?’
‘I can do anything that my mother thought would make me more saleable - insipid watercolours, insipid piano music, insipid talk - but nothing remotely useful. I learned accounting on a course at the People’s Palace, but in order to take it I had first to do a course in arithmetic. It was humiliating!’
‘And the police, the French police?’
‘Very suspicious - of me. I finally told them to wire Munro at New Scotland Yard and he’d explain everything. Of course he didn’t. But I looked respectable - meaning I looked as if I had money - and so they didn’t toss me into the lock-up. They did want to know why we were digging in a barn, and I told him them the truth, which of course they thought was a fantastical improvisation. Emile confused things by saying we were digging for treasure. However, the main point was that we’d found human remains, and after the second day they let me come home.’
‘Do you think it was Arthur Crum?’
‘How would I know? I was so sickened by what I saw - I’ve seen a lot in the East End, Denton; I’m not easily made queasy - but the thought that those scraps of white leather and long bones were human—!’
‘White leather?’
‘Yes, the skin, what was left of it, looked white.’
‘I’d have thought it would be brown.’
‘Don’t quibble.’
She had returned late in the morning, had come straight to his house. She looked remarkable - a travelling costume in a green so dark it was almost black, her hair done in a new way, a mannish hat like a homburg, a single peacock’s sword slanting down from it. She could wear clothes with a masculine cut - often a lesbian uniform - without seeming to make any proclamation about herself: she was herself, the scar down her face worn now without apology or even powder.
‘You’re magnificent,’ he said.
‘You mustn’t say things like that.’ She had reddened. ‘Come, Atkins says you must exercise - walk up and down the room with me.’
‘Atkins is trying to kill me - he brought two dumb-bells down from the attic this morning and told me to start lifting them.’ He groaned as he got out of his chair. ‘Only ten pounds each, and I had trouble getting them off the floor. God, when will this be over!’
They walked the length of the room and back, then up it again to the window over the garden, where he stopped, then leaned against the window frame and looked out. ‘Somebody’s bought the house behind,’ he said.
‘Good for Atkins! He didn’t tell you.’
‘What didn’t he tell me?’
She smiled. ‘I bought it.’
She was a few inches shorter than he; he looked down into her eyes. It dawned on him what she meant: she had found a way to live, if not with him, then near him. He pulled her to himself clumsily, off-balance; he kissed her. She tipped her head back and said, ‘What did you think I’d gone away for, Denton? I had to decide about you. And I decided.’ She kissed him again. ‘There’s to be a door knocked in the garden wall. For those who want to visit.’ When he bent to kiss her again, she said, ‘And there’s to be a lock on my side of the door. For those who don’t want a visit.’
He said, ‘I wish we could go to bed.’
‘Who says we can’t?’
‘I’m so - so—’
‘Like hell.’ She led him back down the room to the short corridor that led to his ad hoc bedroom, then into it, where she took his stick and pushed him gently down. He lay on his elbows, watching her as she undressed - that always-renewed wonder. Naked, she came to the foot of the bed, then climbed him like a horizontal ladder and took him to a place he had feared he would never see again.
Munro came on the Monday about the middle of the day. Denton had been working with the ten-pound dumb-bells on his sitting-room floor, gasping and groaning as if they weighed a hundred; by the time Munro had been shown up, he was knotting a cord around a dressing gown.
‘By God, it’s good to see you standing.’ Munro seemed truly glad to see him; he even shook Denton’s hand.
‘I’ve a long row to hoe yet.’
Munro bent and picked up one of the dumb-bells. ‘About six stone’s worth, I’d say. Well, Rome wasn’t built in a day.’ Munro sat heavily. ‘You’ve heard from Mrs Striker, I suppose?’
‘She’s here, in fact. She’s staying upstairs.’ Denton smiled. ‘Where I can’t go. Can’t do stairs yet.’
Munro didn’t say But she can; probably he didn’t care. What he did say was, ‘She’s stirred up a hornet’s nest at the Yard.’
‘You should be grateful.’ Denton, for his part, didn’t say You wouldn’t do it yourself.
‘A detective arrived from Paris this morning - last night, actually. Was practically waiting on the doorstep this morning. He’s very keen.’
‘What have they found?’
‘Well, you don’t think he’s going to tell me right off, do you?’ Munro laughed. He seemed in good spirits. ‘Lot of horse-trading to be done. Whose case, and so on. Matter of jurisdiction. He jabbered something about the Quai d’Orsay, which I found later means their foreign office. Bloody French haven’t forgotten Waterloo, I think. Anyway, he seems to be a good copper, and very keen when it comes to murder.’
‘You’re sure it’s murder.’
‘Bodies buried under straw piles are usually murder, Denton.’
‘The owner of the farm in any trouble?’
Munro grunted. ‘When a body’s found, you don’t want to be the owner of the plot where it’s buried. I’m sure they showed him a fairly bad time. No arrest made, however. There’s a major problem - they don’t know yet how long the body’s been there.’ He got up and took off his overcoat, threw it over the back of his chair and sat down again, shaking his head when Denton made a move for the bell-pull. ‘The body was buried in lye.’
Denton slowly sat back, letting his head roll until it was supported by the chair. ‘That’s why the skin is white.’
‘What’s left of it. Lot of lye used - French police think as much as a hundred pounds. Not enough to dissolve the bones, but it’s apparently done some major damage. Plus there’s a complication.’
Denton raised himself upright.
‘There’s no head.’
‘Oh, dammit.’
‘They’ve sent everything off to Paris to a professeur who’s some sort of expert in old bones. He’s going to tell them - maybe - how long they’ve been in the ground and what sort of creature it was: male, female; old, young.’ Munro leaned forward with his hands on his knees. ‘Look, Denton, we’re not in it yet - CID have no official interest. They came to me because Mrs Striker gave them my name. We’re in it if the body turns out to be English.’ His eyes opened slightly; his brow went up. ‘I think you’d better tell me everything.’
‘I tried to already.’
‘I know. I was right not to listen then. Now I’m right to demand you tell me. Everything.’
Atkins came in with a tray, put it down on the folding table, opened the dumb-waiter doors, and turned left and went upstairs. Half a minute later, he came down again and vanished into his own lower regions.
‘He telling her I’m here?’ Munro said.
‘I suspect he’s asking her to join us for whatever’s on that tray.’
‘Hmp.’ Munro looked down at the tray, which held mostly crockery. ‘Not very nourishing.’ He looked at Denton again. ‘I daresay it’s better that she be here, anyway.’ He filled the time until she appeared with chatter. He talked about the coronation, now a few months off. There was great concern about anarchists. Police were going to be brought into London from the rest of England. He was sure the London criminals were already booking accommodation in other cities for the easy pickings. ‘Curious thing when you think about it, a coronation,’ he said.
‘I don’t think about it much.’
‘Well, it’s what your people had a rebellion about.’
‘Revolution. Rebellion is when you lose.’
‘Ah. Did you win? I thought it was the French who won.’ Munro looked sly and laughed. At that point Atkins and Mrs Striker almost collided at the foot of the stairs; she pulled back and insisted that Atkins, carrying another tray, go ahead.
‘Very sorry, madam, very sorry,’ Atkins said as he put the tray down on another table.
‘No harm done,’ she said. ‘Hallo, Sergeant. Are you angry with me?’
‘For putting the French on me? I’m not delighted.’
‘I thought they should have the best the Yard had to offer.’ She was bending over a teapot, looking into its steam as if she could read her future there.
‘Oh, ha-ha. Well, it might well have come my way, anyway.’ She was wearing an unfussy blouse and the green wool skirt with the box pleats, part of one of her suits; her hair was piled high, a comb with brilliants in it - diamond chips? - at the back. While she passed filled cups to Atkins to hand around, Munro told her what he’d already told Denton. He skipped the part about the missing head. When Atkins was gone, Munro said, ‘He hears everything down that dumb-waiter shaft, am I right?’
Denton said in a dry voice, ‘I don’t try to keep much from him, if that’s what you mean.’
Janet Striker sat on a side chair, crossed her legs and set her cup and saucer on them, keeping the saucer in the fingers of one hand. She said, ‘You’ll want to know everything.’
‘Indeed I will.’ He glanced at Denton. ‘I asked him to tell me “everything” a bit ago, and he didn’t.’
She looked at Denton and winked. It was an astonishing performance for that usually grave face. He smiled despite himself and began to tell it all to Munro again. This time, Munro made notes. There was a lot of fluster over where to put things while he dragged out a notebook and pencil from his heavy tweed jacket. Janet Striker occasionally put a few words in; Munro looked at her each time with a shrewd expression, as if to say, Oho, you’re in it as deep as he is. When they were done, Munro said, ‘All right, now I’m going to find out what you wouldn’t tell me before. This picture you’ve got of the girl. Where’d you get it?’
Denton looked at Janet. She said, utterly cool, ‘It was in the girl’s trunk.’
Munro sighed. ‘You’ve got her trunk.’
‘Not at all. It’s in the “to be called for” office at Biggleswade.’
‘But you’ve been into it!’ He glared at Denton. ‘Come on, come on - it’s all going to come out!’
‘You know, Munro, for a man who’s being given a case on a plate, you’re being a pill.’
‘Case on a plate, my hat! Bunch of speculations and random shots, is what it looks like.’
‘Be grateful for what you get and stop pressing us for how we got something.’
‘If we go to court, it’s all got to come out!’
‘Let’s deal with that when you go to court, then. Look—’ Denton put his cup down. He wiggled himself forward in the soft chair, lifting his bad leg with both hands to raise it. ‘I’ll take responsibility for getting the drawing. Let’s say I was into the trunk - all right. Leave it at that for now.’
‘If you were into the trunk, it and everything in it are tainted. You could have planted anything - that’s what counsel would say.’
‘Damn counsel! You’re concerned with what to tell a French cop about how Arthur Crum’s body got in a hole in Normandy.’
‘Or whoever’s in there,’ Janet Striker murmured. ‘For all we know right now, it could be one of the knights from the Bayeux tapestry.’ She smiled. ‘I read about it in a Baedeker on the Channel crossing. ’
Munro made a rather humourless clucking sound. ‘Well, we’re going to have the devil’s own time making any kind of identification at all as things stand. But one thing at a time - sufficient unto the day, and so on. All right, I’ll go easy on the trunk for now but I want a list of everything that was in it - everything!’ He glared at Denton, then Janet Striker. ‘And mind - the day of reckoning is coming!’ He shook his pencil at Denton.
‘You should have been a preacher. “My god is a jealous god.”’
‘The god of New Scotland Yard is a jealous god! We also grind very slowly, like all gods.’
‘And exceeding small.’
‘That, too.’ Munro looked at his notebook. ‘Well, I don’t see the chain - Mary Thomason goes missing; her brother collects the trunk - but where’s the link to Arthur Crum? A drawing done by somebody who never saw him, based on the drawing of Mary? That’s pure fantasy. This painting of Lazarus?’ He made a sound with his lips that sounded like ‘peuh’. ‘You don’t know how many human faces look alike until you undertake police work. Did you show this supposed drawing of the brother to Mary’s landlady? What’s her name, Mrs - Durnquess? She’s the only one I find in this tangle who actually saw him.’
‘The Irish maid,’ Janet Striker said.
‘Oh, right.’ Munro made a note. ‘Have to interview both of them, and I want a copy of these drawings you’ve built such a sandcastle on. All right - then the Mayflower Baths. I know all about the Mayflower Baths. Lots of jokes about it at the Yard - pardon me, ma’am. I’ll ask around about this man Himple. Also, some of the lads who were picked up at the baths are still in prison; they should be shown the drawing of the “brother”.’ He made another note. ‘Then there’s the letters home from this fellow Himple. To - a valet—’
‘Brown.’
‘Yes - can’t read my own writing. Brown.’ He leaned hard on the pencil. ‘Brown seems to be the one who knows where they were when. Or supposed to be, anyway. And where and when the temporary valet, this Crum, is supposed to have been discharged.’
‘Brown has all that.’
‘Yes, I said we need to talk to Brown. Give me an address. Good. If the bones turn out to be who you think, then we’ll wire the places where they stayed, and so on - maybe let the French police do that, actually - depends, depends. Hmm.’ He pinched his lower lip between his fingers and studied his notebook. ‘French are digging up the dust pit at the farm to see if they can find the sack the lye came in. Also going to canvass the shops in the nearby town - what is it? Can? Cane—?’
‘Caen,’ she said.
‘That’s it. You sound just like the Frenchman. Plus they’ll be looking for the, mm, other missing things—’
Janet Striker looked at Denton. He said, ‘There’s no head with the bones.’
‘Oh, dear God. And I was so grateful we hadn’t found that first - I didn’t want to see a face that had been—’ She shook her head quickly. ‘Ridiculous to make more of the face than anything else.’
Munro closed his notebook and began to cram it back into some maw within his suit. ‘I don’t see that we can do anything until we have an identification. Metropolitan Police can’t involve themselves until there’s suspicion of a crime. A body found in France isn’t suspicion of a crime.’ He pulled the notebook out again and waved it at Denton. ‘And this doesn’t hold together well enough to be a crime!’
‘And if the French police say in the end that they’re unidentifiable remains?’
Munro stood. ‘They’ll have saved me a lot of grief.’
‘What do you know about women’s time of the month?’ Janet Striker said.
Denton felt his face flush; he thought she would say next something about not being able to go to bed with him. He started to say, ‘I was married,’ to mean that he knew what a woman’s time of the month was, but didn’t get it out because she said, ‘I’ve been thinking about Mary Thomason.’
It made no sense to him. ‘What’s that got to do with - what you asked me?’
He thought she was smiling, but the light was low and he couldn’t tell. She said, ‘You’re embarrassed. So am I. It’s this ridiculous code we have to live by to be “respectable”. We can go to bed and know each other well enough to talk about death and madness, but not menstruation.’ Her hand touched his. ‘I’ve been making the list of things in her trunk for Munro. Racking my brain to make sure I got everything. I think I remember what was in her trunk, but—What wasn’t in Mary Thomason’s trunk?’ she said.
A bit gruffly, he said, ‘I suppose you’ve given me the clue.’
‘Women bleed every month. Unless they’re ignorant and nearly savage and destitute, they use something to catch the blood. Don’t be embarrassed, Denton; this is simple fact. Poor women - that’s most of the women in the world - use rags. Men make jokes about them, don’t they - “She’s got the rag on,” to explain anything odd a woman does. Even the black slaves in America used something, would be my guess, at least if they could get them or hoard them. Moss, grass - something. Poor women in London keep old clothes, old bedclothes, anything they can get their hands on; they fold the rags into a sort of pad and pin them to their underskirts, or they fashion themselves a sort of belt and pin them to that.’
‘Why are you telling me all this?’
‘Wealthy women use pads they buy at places like Harrods. While they’re shopping for the highest-quality shirts Mrs Cohan runs up in the attic, I suppose. The pads are disposable, so the well-off can pretend none of it’s happening. The poor wash the blood out of the rags and use them again and again, and the rags show the brown stains of the blood.’
‘All right, yes - I remember all that.’ He was thinking of his dreams.
‘The rags are valuable, Denton. Not for money but for convenience, for necessity - when the bleeding starts, you must have them. Else you find blood staining through your petticoat to your skirt, and if you wear light colours, it’s hideously embarrassing.’ She struck his arm lightly with her hand. ‘What wasn’t in Mary Thomason’s trunk?’
‘Rags,’ he said weakly.
‘Or pins or any kind of belt. Not a scrap of cloth with a stain. Nor any stains in her drawers.’
‘She wasn’t, mm, at that time of the month.’
‘On the contrary, the only reason - one of the only reasons - that we didn’t find any could be that she was wearing them, or wearing some and carrying the rest. But surely she’d have had more in reserve. You want never to run out.’ She hesitated, as if what she would say next might annoy him. ‘I went back to Fitzroy Street yesterday and talked to Hannah - the maid at the place where Mary Thomason lived.’
‘The plump Mrs Durnquess’s.’
‘I asked Hannah where the female tenants washed out their rags. She knew exactly what I meant. There’s a sink for it in the basement; they dry them on a line down there.’ She met his eyes - no trace of embarrassment. ‘I asked her if Mary Thomason ever went down there. She said she couldn’t recall ever seeing her. She hadn’t thought about it, but now she thought about it and she said, “Ain’t that remarkable, ma’am.”’ She tapped his hand. ‘What did we find in her trunk?’
He’d have been a dunce not to know where she was going. ‘The depilatory, but—’
‘We at least have to ask ourselves, Denton, who doesn’t menstruate and would need a depilatory?’
‘You make it sound like a riddle for a parlour game.’ He frowned at her, looked away.
‘I want one of those cream-filled dessert things,’ she said. They were still eating in his sitting room, although Munro was long gone; a small plate of pastries sat on a tiered table nearby. ‘Anyway, it’s a possibility, isn’t it - that Mary Thomason isn’t a woman?’
‘Anything’s possible, but—I’ve heard of women masquerading as men - even as soldiers—’
‘Joan of Arc.’
‘Yes, well—But why would a man masquerade as a woman?’
‘Perhaps he prefers to be a woman. Perhaps he wants to be a woman. Or perhaps it’s simply a wonderful disguise.’
‘Even if he has sex with men - the baths, Himple - that doesn’t mean he wants to be a woman.’
‘Not that crazy, mmm? What sane man would be a woman if he had a choice?’
‘He’d have had to wear a wig. Where’s the wig?’
‘She’d have worn the wig when she left Fitzroy Street. Then got rid of it when she became a man.’
‘But—’ Atkins, who had appeared in response to a jingling bell, followed her pointing finger to a fat eclair. Denton asked for coffee and said when Atkins was gone, ‘What would make such a thing worth it?’
She shook her head. She ate, then pulled the fork between her teeth to scrape the chocolate off. ‘Living another life.’
‘Something to hide.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t see it.’
‘She wrote to you that somebody might be about to hurt her. Might that mean she was afraid she was about to be found out?’
‘Well, I’ve told you, I don’t think that letter was really for me.
It was to scare Wenzli, wasn’t it? And why would somebody hurt her?’
‘Well, if she was really a man—If Mary Thomason had a man - a man who wasn’t so, who wasn’t a puff, a man like Wenzli or Geddys - interested in her, then being found out could mean - outrage? Disgust? If they were, you know, physically involved—’
‘A man with a man? Oh, I see what you mean - the other man thinks he’s a girl - there could be a certain amount of play - like Wenzli—’
‘Kissing and so on, even well beyond that—’
‘But surely, the man would find out when he—’
‘Mmmm.’ She scraped chocolate and cream off her plate, licked the fork with a voluptuous extension of her tongue. ‘Mmmm.’ She put the fork down. ‘Perhaps that was the point Mary and Wenzli had almost reached.’
He shook his head. He watched her eat the eclair. ‘This is a long tale to have built on some missing rags.’ He accepted coffee from Atkins. ‘It would be so complicated!’
‘To the contrary, it’s simplicity itself. A double life isn’t necessarily like something in a Pavilion farce - going in and out of doors in different identities. It’s mostly a matter of keeping your lies straight - like being married and having an affair. You’d want your wits about you, is all.’
‘Not with separate identities - names, clothes, places to live—’
‘It wouldn’t have been that way. Mary was the identity; her way of life was the principal way. But sometimes he - he - was somebody else. Perhaps only occasionally.’
‘To do what?’
‘Something difficult, don’t you think?’ She smiled, but only a little. ‘Like making a middle-aged man fall in love with you?’
He shook his head again. ‘Let’s not tell Munro yet.’
‘Let’s not.’
Ten days later, Munro told him that the French expert had said that the bones were human and almost certainly male. He speculated that they belonged to a man in middle age but couldn’t be certain. However, one tibia had an old fracture.
‘We checked with Himple’s medical man. He’d broken a leg as a boy, falling off a wagon. The French are having local police ask after Himple and Crum at every place he posted letters from.’
Munro again demanded a copy of the drawings that Augustus John had made. A few days later, he sent a note to say that Mrs Durnquess had told Markson that John’s drawing was very like the young man who had come to get the trunk; the maid had agreed. Meanwhile, the CID, now accepting the probability of a crime, had found Himple’s bank and asked what arrangements he’d made for money while he travelled. He had carried a letter of credit, was the answer, and had used it in three places, for a total of more than three hundred pounds. The CID had also interviewed several of the young men who had been picked up in the raid on the Mayflower Baths. Two of them recognized the John drawing as somebody they called ‘Eddie’. He’d been at the baths off and on, but they hadn’t seen him, they thought, in a year. Several more of them recognized a photograph of Himple; he was ‘a regular’.
Munro had more copies of the drawing made and sent to France. After another week, the word came back that two people at the banks where the letter of credit had been used thought that John’s drawing was like the man who had cashed a letter of credit as Erasmus Himple, RA.
‘So he’s a forger as well as a murderer. Dear God.’ Denton was still shocked. ‘I was so sure he would turn out to be the victim!’
‘Why?’ she said.
‘Because—I’m still looking for Mary Thomason.’
‘Well, it isn’t a she, at least.’
‘No, of course not.’
The valet and the housekeeper, Mrs Evans, said that of course the John drawing wasn’t Himple; it was the young man known as Arthur Crum.
After another week, Munro said, ‘He’s skipped. Absolutely skipped. The trail’s cold - the last time he was seen was six months ago in Nice. He’s beaten us.’