The Bohemian Girl

Chapter TWENTY-THREE
By then, they were into April. Denton wanted to be out, walking in the city. Flowers were blooming; birds were arriving in flocks; some of the days were warm, almost summery. Janet Striker was waiting to move into her own house, with the Cohans to take care of her; she was living partly in his old bedroom, partly in a hotel. He was now sure that her concern for appearances was some irrational personal quirk: she had explained that it was all right for her to sleep on the floor above him so long as he couldn’t climb the stairs.
A doorway was being cut through the garden wall. He didn’t know what she made of the people who could look into the garden from the nearby houses. Perhaps she meant to wear a disguise when she used the new door.
Missing her, wanting to be out and about, he was restless. He was gaining his weight back, but his strength was coming more slowly. One night when she was staying at her hotel and he was lying awake - the nursing-home insomnia had returned - he got out of bed and limped on his stick to the foot of the stairs. He looked up them. They seemed endless.
‘The hell with it.’ He put his left foot on the first stair, grasped the banister in his left hand and pulled the right leg up. It was all right. He went another step, then another. He had to balance on the bad leg and the stick while he moved the good leg, but he was getting used to that; his shoulders were stronger. He went up another step. His breathing was heavy. And so he went up to the landing, made the turn, and pushed and pulled his way up to his bedroom.
He limped about, lit the gas, sat in his desk chair and let his pulse and his breathing recover. There was some scent of her in the room. His desk surprised him with its neatness; she must have straightened it, had probably been working at it on something of her own.
When he had explored the room - it had been more than three months since he had seen it - he went out to the corridor and looked at the closed door to the attic. He had the notion that if he could use his rowing machine, he could build the strength of his leg faster. The rowing machine, a huge contraption of cast iron that Atkins had rightly said was never coming down once it had been got up there, was in the attic.
‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained.’
He opened the door, lit the gas at the bottom of the stairs. When he put his left foot on the first step, he thought that he was probably doing something stupid, but he didn’t change his mind. He thought, I’ll go to the first landing today and then come down. I can sleep in my bedroom and try it again tomorrow. When he got to the first landing, he was trembling, but he didn’t go back, after all. Five steps up was another landing, and then four steps to the attic. He would go to the next landing.
There was no gas to light here. On the third step, in the near darkness, he put the tip of the stick too close to the edge of the tread, and when he swung the bad leg up, the stick slipped. He went down hard on his left side, twisting as he went, wrenching his left shoulder, and then crashing down the stairs to the landing below. He hit his head on one of the steps and he lay there, dazed.
Atkins came pounding up from below. ‘Good on you,’ he said when he saw Denton.
Rupert came behind Atkins and stared.
‘I think I’ve hurt myself.’
‘Well, sit up, let’s have a look at you.’
‘What the hell’s the good? Jesus Christ, I can’t even climb the stairs!’
Atkins helped him sit up against the wall, then went down and got an oil lamp and looked at Denton’s head, then had him work his shoulder. ‘No real harm done, I think, Colonel.’
‘All right, help me down to my bed.’
Atkins held the lamp up. He looked into Denton’s eyes. ‘I think you better try it again, Colonel.’
‘And fall again!’
‘You know what they say - get back on the horse or stop riding. Be that much harder the next time if you don’t do it now.’ Atkins bent and put a hand under Denton’s arm and helped him up, then put the stick in his hand. ‘You slipped in the dark, that’s all. We’ll fix that.’ He went up the stairs with the lamp.
For seconds, Denton hated Atkins. Then he recognized that Atkins was taking a risk for him - if he fell again and hurt himself, it would be Atkins’s fault.
‘All right. Just don’t laugh.’
Six minutes later, weak, panting, he sat on the top step with the darkness of the attic behind him. He grinned at Atkins. ‘All right - now how do I get down?’
‘You stay up there. I’ll brew us up some tea. Going on four, anyway - breakfast soon. I’ll bring it up.’ He looked back from the landing. ‘Take some exercise while you’re about it.’
After that, he was able to labour down the front stairs and so outdoors, and he began to walk in the streets again. First to the Lamb and back, then down to Guilford Street, then to Russell Square, always with a pistol in his pocket and Cohan, borrowed from Janet Striker, behind him. One day he dragged himself up to the attic again and rowed in the contraption, which had to have its springs set at the weakest so he could move the oars. It was the kind of exercise he wanted, but getting up there wore him out.
She was living in a hotel again, waiting for the work on her house to be finished. Many afternoons, they sat together in the long room. One day she said, ‘I’ve been reading your Henry James.’
‘My Henry James.’
‘He seems to me sometimes very right about women. You don’t like him? Or you do like him, what does that shake of the head mean?’
‘We’re very different.’
‘Denton, say what you mean.’
Denton moved uncomfortably. ‘People call him a genius. I’m not a genius.’ He didn’t want to say anything else, but she was waiting. ‘He can do a lot of things that I can’t.’
‘And you can do things that he can’t?’
Again, he was uncomfortable. He said, ‘One, maybe.’ He started to go back to his book, raised his eyes to her. ‘I can deal with the life most people know.’ He had let his own book fall on his crossed legs; he raised it, lowered his eyes to it, and again raised them to say, ‘His characters never have to worry about making a living, unless they’re bad and want the money that the good ones have. I’ll admit, this frees James to be high-minded about moral decisions, but he just doesn’t understand that for most of the world, making a living is the great reality. And the interest - the drama, the excitement, whatever you call it - comes from the struggle to survive and to make moral decisions. And the farther down the income ladder you climb, the harder the decisions are.’
‘Like Cohan, who wouldn’t take a place with the Jewish madam.’
‘Yes, just like that.’ He settled the book again and looked down and started to read.
She said, ‘Where do writers get their ideas from?’
He chuckled. ‘That’s just what James and I talked about. From everywhere.’
‘From people they know?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘I don’t want you ever to write about me. Even if we. . .’ She left it hanging. He knew she meant If we go our separate ways, and he didn’t say that if they did, that would be exactly when he’d be likely to write about her. The truth was, he was wondering if he would ever write again; his mind was empty, as if Jarrold’s bullets had gone through his brain and not his back.
He carried the manuscript of the new book down to the publishers himself. He had pretty well forgotten it while he was in the nursing home, certainly had had no desire to work on it. Once home, he had stared at the pile of typed sheets and felt vaguely repelled by it, but he had at last begun to read. The typewriter had done the final copy; still, it had to be gone through once more. Reading it after so long was actually helpful; the months away freshened his eye.
‘It’s damned good,’ he said to Diapason Lang.
‘It’s months late.’
‘I suppose I should have put a clause in my contract about being shot.’
‘Oh, my dear fellow—’ Lang looked anguished. ‘I didn’t mean it that way. It’s only - Gwen’s so particular—’
‘He got the insurer’s money for the motor car.’
‘Oh, yes. Yes, he did.’ Lang looked at the pile of paper, craned his neck to read the title page, read the title, The Love Child, and murmured, glancing at his picture of the maiden being visited by the nightmare, ‘Title’s a bit risqué.’ He peeled back the top sheet as if to make sure the rest of the pages weren’t blank. ‘When can we expect the next one?’
‘What next one?’
‘We always look forward to your next one! And, of course, there’s the, ah, clause in the contract.’ He seemed to want Denton to help him say what had to be said. ‘The clause that we are to be offered your next book.’
‘You have my next book.’ Lang looked startled. ‘This one is the replacement for the one I couldn’t write a year ago. The Transylvania book was therefore the “next book”.’ He smiled, because he’d been thinking about it. ‘The Transylvania book was written under a letter agreement, you’ll remember, that made no mention of a next book.’
Lang stared at him, said that it couldn’t be so, said that they didn’t do things that way, said excuse me and hurried out of the office and came back, his pale face almost pink, with the letter agreement. ‘Well, yes,’ he said, ‘of course we didn’t mention a next book, but—’ He looked hopeful. ‘It was understood as a gentleman’s agreement.’
Denton had brought with him the letters from other publishers that he’d been getting since he’d returned in September. He began to drop them on Lang’s desk. ‘Longwin and Barnes - Low - Hildesheim - Henry Strath - Osgood—’ They piled on the desk like blown leaves. ‘They all want my next book.’
‘They can’t have it.’ Lang’s voice was a whisper.
‘Lang, maybe being shot in the back has made me testy. I like you personally. But I want more money.’
Lang winced. ‘There isn’t any more money.’
‘Five hundred guineas a book in advance against a ten per cent royalty.’
‘Oh, no, no—’
‘Or perhaps I ought to hire one of these agents that keep pestering me.’
‘Oh, don’t do that!’ Lang’s desiccated face looked to be near tears. ‘They’re not gentlemen!’
Denton heard a heavy footstep in the corridor and then the impressive bulk of Wilfred Gweneth himself filled the doorway. ‘What’s this, then? Ah, Denton—’ Gweneth seemed quite jolly, as if the motor car had never existed. They shook hands. Denton was sure that in fact Lang had sent for Gweneth while he was out of the office.
Gweneth looked at Lang. ‘Anything amiss?’
‘Mr Denton - our friend and valued author, Mr Denton - ah—’
‘Wants more money,’ Denton said.
Gweneth smiled. ‘Ah.’
‘You got your money back for the motor car. The Transylvania book has made you a pot. I’ve delivered the new novel. I want more for my next.’ He didn’t say he didn’t have an idea for a next in his head - not a hint.
Gweneth picked up one of the letters from the desk, read it, picked up another, then another. Lang whispered, ‘He’s talking about an agent.’
Gweneth smiled and shook his head, as if the vagaries of authors were beyond understanding. ‘How much?’ he said.
Denton told him. ‘There’s nothing about a next book in the letter agreement.’
‘I know.’ Gweneth laughed and showed his back teeth. He lifted Denton’s new book as if weighing it, apparently judged it sufficiently heavy. ‘Let’s say pounds not guineas, ten per cent royalty, but the old terms on the Empire and we’ll forget about the next-book clause!’ He pointed a hand at Lang. ‘Draw up a contract that meets the new terms. We don’t want him going to a wretched bunch of thieves like Longwin’s.’ Gweneth hooked a hand through Denton’s arm. ‘Lunch? I want to hear about your being shot. Is there a book in it, do you think—? Perhaps something that might touch on spiritualism - a moment when you saw beings in white robes all about you, a magical light, music—? Do you like fresh-caught salmon?’
At the end of April, Janet Striker handed him a pasteboard box. In it was a folded something of grey wool with blue trim. When he laid it out on his bed, he stared at it and tried to guess what it was and what he was supposed to do with it. The sleeves came, he thought, about to the elbows, the trousers to just below the knee. There was a little hat to match, rather like the caps that Eton boys wore. Surely they weren’t some sort of pyjamas she thought he would wear?
‘Unhhh—’ he said.
‘It’s a rowing costume.’ She was undressing, was wearing an only slightly frilly thing that came halfway down her thighs and had garters to attach to her stockings. ‘Can’t you tell that?’
‘You’re distracting me.’
‘You hate it, don’t you.’
‘In the attic, it’ll be fine.’
‘You’re not going to wear it in the attic! You’re going to wear it at Hammersmith. I’ve bought you a season ticket for a rowing boat. You’ll wear it on the Thames!’
He stared at it. She began to unfasten her stockings. He said, ‘I know I told you I’d do anything for you, but—’ She looked up, bent forward, a foot on the divan, pulling off a stocking. He said, ‘Of course I’ll wear it. It’s just the thing.’
The likely death of Erasmus Himple caused a brief sensation. Journalists came to interview Denton and were turned away. A French detective came with a translator and went over everything that Denton and Janet Striker knew and left without comment.
Denton sat late one evening with her and let the room go almost dark before he lit a lamp. He said, ‘It grieves me that they’ve got away with it.’
‘They?’
‘There had to be two of them. One man alone couldn’t have murdered Heseltine. You can make a man lie down in a bathtub, maybe, but you can’t hold both his arms and slash his wrists for him. He’ll fight you. From Munro’s description, Heseltine didn’t fight and didn’t splash blood around. That means he was unconscious when his wrists were slashed, already in the bath or there’d have been blood all over his flat. One small man couldn’t have dragged him to the bathroom and got him into the tub, even if he was unconscious.’
‘You still think Mary and her brother are different people.’
‘It’s the explanation that takes care of the most questions.’
‘You think a small man and a small woman could have moved Heseltine?’
‘Oh, yes.’ He stretched out both his legs and slowly raised the right one to put it over his left ankle. ‘I need to think. I’ve missed things.’
Lady Emmeline’s legal people got in touch with Sir Francis Brudenell, his solicitor. They were offering to pay his medical expenses in return for his signing a paper absolving Lady Emmeline and her son of all responsibility. ‘This, of course,’ Sir Francis wrote, ‘is nonsense. They are clearly terrified that we will sue. We should most certainly win, as there is no question of his having shot you or of her negligence in controlling him. However, the law is slow, and publicity could be an embarrassment to you, as it is my understanding that the shooting took place immediately after your egress from a premises less well-respected than many. It is my recommendation that I make them a counter-offer to settle the matter out of court for, let us say, your medical expenses plus ten thousand pounds. We shall settle for five. It will hardly matter to Lady Emmeline, as she owns a good deal of central Portsmouth. Of course, in case there is permanent damage from the bullets, we shall make the matter conditional on full recovery.’
It gave Denton something new to think about. With five thousand pounds, he could electrify his house, perhaps put in central heating, buy a motor car and still have enough to put away - a previously impossible luxury. On the other hand, he believed that he should earn whatever money he got. After two days, he scribbled a note: ‘Go ahead.’
He made lists. He compared dates. He reconstructed everything that had happened, dated it, made a chart of the what and the when, with the events down one side in chronological order, from his opening Mary Thomason’s letter through to the finding of the bones in Normandy. He tried to make a graph, or perhaps it was a map, of who had been in various places at various times, but it was too complicated and at the same time too empty: he didn’t know enough. After several days of it, sitting sulkily and looking at the papers he had stuck up with pins on his bedroom wall, he said, ‘Somebody’s lied to us.’
‘Who?’
He chewed on a thumbnail. ‘I mean to find that out.’ He stared at the papers; she moved about the room, picked up a book, sat to read. He said, ‘I’ve been thinking about those dreams. After I was shot.’ He chewed on the thumbnail. ‘I was afraid.’
‘But you know that.’
‘But not afraid the way I thought. It isn’t any of that elaborate allegory the doctor was trying to build; it was fear of—It’s something about the woman. The doctor was sure it was fear of death. Well, of course - all fear is fear of death, I suppose. But this was about—I don’t think the one with the shotgun was a man—’
‘It was Mary Thomason.’
He nodded.
‘A while ago, you thought that “they” would try again.’
‘I think that’s over. If they ever meant to. I wonder a little that they didn’t try to move Himple’s body after they shot me, but it was probably just too much - too risky. And they thought I’d die.’
‘They’ve given up?’
He studied his charts. ‘I hope that they don’t care about me any more. As soon as the news about finding the body hit the newspapers, there was no longer any reason. When the police couldn’t find them, they knew they’d won.’
‘So you’re safe.’
‘Unless we find something that sets them going again.’ He got up and limped around the room. He stood in front of one of his papers, arms folded. ‘I’m going to ask Munro to let me see Struther Jarrold.’
‘Why? ’
‘Because I think he knows who Mary Thomason is.’
The Hobhouse Prison for the Criminally Insane was on the edge of Exmoor, facing a landscape that would have been bleak on the best of days. In a thunderstorm, it was dramatic and dismal. He’d asked Janet Striker if she wanted to come with him, but she’d shuddered and said she’d been inside such a place too long to ever want to see one again. When he said it was supposed to be a model of progressive institutionalization, she had said there was no such thing.
The building was grey stone, with square towers at each corner and a steepled central one for the entrance. Surrounded by a high stone wall, it was inescapably a prison; whatever was modern or progressive about it had to be inside. Munro, seeing it in the distance, said it looked like a cotton mill. ‘Not that a cotton mill wouldn’t be just the thing for Jarrold and his ilk - never done a day’s work in his life. His mum’s got him a private cell that’s furnished like a bedroom, with bookshelves and carpets and easy chairs. Everything bolted to the floor, of course, and nothing dangling about he could hang himself with. Still, it beats ten hours a day bent over a power loom.’
‘That’s the court’s idea of punishment?’
‘He isn’t being punished - no trial yet. He’s being kept isolated for society’s sake.’
Their carriage turned in at a gateway and stopped while Munro identified himself, and then they were waved in and passed under the steeple and into a vast courtyard where barred windows stared down into half an acre of gravel. Around the entire yard at ground level, porches with heavy wire from floor to ceiling held men who gaped, then shouted and gestured at the carriage while they twisted their fingers into the wire mesh.
‘Newest thing,’ Munro growled. ‘No trees or flowers to distract the demented brain.’ He looked at the porches. ‘Hell with fresh air,’ he said.
Jarrold’s cell was on the third floor. They waited in an interview room, very spare, a double table down the middle with a chest-high partition and a few oak straight chairs. The sounds of a prison made their way through the walls: incoherent voices, metal banging on metal, footfalls and the clang of doors, and here and there the screams and laughter of the insane.
They heard Jarrold before they saw him - the metallic scuffing of a chain on stone floors, the jingle of his manacles. Influential mother or not, he was put into chains to move out of his cell, and he came in bowed by the weight of them. Two warders in dark uniforms nudged him along to a chair on the other side of the partition from them, and it was only when Jarrold was seated and had clanked his ankle chains into some sort of comfortable position that he looked up at his visitors. When he saw Denton, his scowling face was replaced with a knowing, childish grin, as if they shared a secret.
Jarrold, he had been told, never spoke. Since he had fired the two bullets into Denton and shouted those few words, he had been silent, even with his attorneys and his mother. ‘Utterly withdrawn into a world of his own,’ the chief physician’s report had said. Denton wondered.
‘Please ask your questions, gentlemen,’ the more senior of the warders said. ‘We have to remain present. We think he hears what’s said to him, but - he don’t respond.’
Jarrold’s face, after that knowing smile, had fallen back into its scowl, and now he looked at his hands, limp in his lap.
Denton remained standing. He took the drawing of Mary Thomason from an inner pocket and unfolded it, looking at it to make sure it was the right side up, and then he leaned quickly forward and held it against Jarrold’s side of the partition. One of the warders started forward, saying, ‘Sir—’ and Denton said, ‘Albert!’
Jarrold’s head lifted; his eyes found the paper. His mouth opened. He began to scream.
‘I never told! Astoreth - Astoreth - I never told! I never did - Astore-e-e-th—!’ His body spasmed and his back arched as he went into a seizure.
Denton was silent all the way back in the train. He’d told Munro he wanted to think and he wanted to talk to Janet Striker; Munro was welcome to come home with him, but he’d have to wait until then.
‘You knew he was going to do that, didn’t you! Dammit, Denton, that was a cheap courtroom trick. And what did you get out of it? All that way so you could—’
Denton held up a hand and said nothing. At Lamb’s Conduit Street, they climbed his stairs and sat silently while Atkins went for Mrs Striker. As soon as she was in the room, Denton told her what had happened.
‘Mary Thomason is Astoreth? But that’s impossible. Jarrold painted “Astoreth” on my wall months ago, when there was no way that—’ She looked at Munro. ‘Has he explained this to you?’
‘He hasn’t explained to me why I spent a day going to Devon and getting nothing out of it. Don’t be cute, Denton - spill it and let me get back to New Scotland Yard.’
‘I don’t have much to spill yet. Yes, Mary Thomason is Astoreth. That’s what I had to know before I could know anything else.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it means she’s alive and she isn’t missing, and because it means that she’s the one who told Jarrold to shoot me.’
Munro was sitting with his head tilted slightly back, his eyes half-closed, looking at Denton. ‘You’re spinning a tale.’
‘Why would Jarrold shoot me? Because his obsession with me had got out of hand? Yes, of course - that was something that was easy for her to play on. But why the very morning that Heseltine and I came back from France? Coincidence? I’d have said yes, if it hadn’t been for Heseltine’s death.’
‘It was suicide.’
‘No, it was murder. I respect you, Munro, and I like you, and you’re a good cop because you’re cautious. But now it’s time to jump. One, we need to show the drawings to the old man who’s supposed to be the gateman at Albany Court, and we need to show them to every man and boy who lives in the Albany. Then, when they identify at least one of them, you need to get Heseltine exhumed.’
‘Like hell - excuse me, Mrs Striker.’
‘I think he’ll show signs of some means of putting him out, probably a knock on the head. Munro, you don’t get a man to lie down in a bathtub so you can cut his wrists without a struggle!’ Munro hadn’t moved. If anything, his eyes had narrowed even more. ‘The coroner didn’t present evidence of a blow to the head, did he?’
‘Because there wasn’t any.’
‘Because he didn’t look for any. Exhumation, Munro.’ When the detective was still unconvinced, Denton leaned towards him and said, ‘If people at the Albany recognize the drawings, what other next move do you have?’
Janet Striker was working a cigarette out of a shagreen case. ‘Denton, it’s fanciful that Mary Thomason and Jarrold knew each other. You knew of Mary Thomason only because that letter reached you by way of Heseltine - the sheerest chance. You said that she wrote the letter to frighten Wenzli or Geddys - maybe both. It wasn’t supposed to reach you, but Heseltine found it and sent it on. Nothing to do with Jarrold! Jarrold was a poor sick man who got obsessed with you because of your books. There’s no connection with Mary Thomason!’
‘Not then, no.’
‘When?’
He moved uncomfortably, trying to get the bad leg into another position. ‘It’s why I made all those lists. The question is, when did Mary - or her brother - see Struther Jarrold as opportunity? Because they’re opportunists, rather impressively so. But there’s another question that maybe comes first: when did they learn that I was asking about them?’ He glanced at Munro, then back at her. She was smoking now. He put out a hand for one of her cigarettes. ‘That’s when it started - when they learned I was asking questions: that’s when they took notice of me. So who told them? There are several candidates - people we asked about Mary Thomason, I mean. The office people at the Slade, but I think that’s unlikely. Mrs Durnquess. Geddys, the picture dealer. Much later, the other artist, Wenzli; Mrs Evans, Himple’s housekeeper; and his valet, Brown. I think they can be discounted because it was too late - the opportunity to exploit Jarrold must have come earlier to have worked. Mary Thomason must have needed time to work on Jarrold.’
Munro shook his head. ‘Brown’s clean, anyway. I liked the idea of Brown - disgruntled valet, left behind in England, nurses a grudge against Himple and Crum - but it won’t wash. He’s stupid, but he isn’t criminal. Once a week, he goes to the studio to “do the pictures”, which I think is what housemaids call dusting. He sent on the bills and letters to the poste restante boxes; they were still there when the French police went looking. He’s taken a job evenings in a pub - never misses a day. We all wanted Brown to have done the dirty, but he didn’t. Too many people vouch for him.’
‘Well,’ Janet Striker said, ‘somebody told them about Denton.’
Denton made a negative grunting sound. ‘That sounds pretty cold-blooded. Passed a message, more likely - something innocent like “Send me a picture postcard of the beach if anybody asks about me.” This was way back last September, remember. Himple was already dead - had been dead since at least the first week of September. Arthur Crum was travelling, presumably as Himple, forging demands on the letter of credit, forging reports about where they were going next, and then disappearing. He - they - had got off scot-free. Until the message comes that I’m asking questions.’ Abruptly, Denton laughed. ‘But what must they have thought when they first learned I was asking questions? Me! When they were the ones who had used me as the bugbear to scare Wenzli! I wonder if they ever learned somehow that it was their own letter that got me going. My God - do you suppose they saw the horror of it?’
Janet stirred. ‘At any rate, you were asking questions, and somehow they found out - horror or no horror.’
‘Then - I can show you the sequence in my charts - Jarrold savages your rooms and paints “Astoreth” on the wall. At that time, Astoreth exists only in his mind. Mary Thomason hasn’t yet thought of becoming his Astoreth. His attack on your rooms makes the newspapers with lip-licking mention of Jarrold’s possible involvement in the incident behind my house. My name is mentioned, Jarrold’s is trumpeted, and at least the cheap papers do follow-ups that manage to hint at his obsession with me. And they all mention Astoreth and imply that Jarrold is dotty. So Mary Thomason or Arthur Crum needed only to read the papers to see the possibilities of Struther Jarrold. Not as a certainty, but as a possibility. These people are seducers, both of them - Mary Thomason with Geddys and with the other painter, Wenzli; Crum with Himple. They’re like confidence men, able to play on their victims’ wants and needs, able to manoeuvre their victims into wanting to do things for them. Mary got Wenzli to almost give her the painting, the “little Wesselons”; Crum got Himple to make him his valet, to take him to France - to be his lover, I suppose. So I think they decided to have a look at Struther Jarrold and the situation at his mother’s country house, and I think that what they found was that the security was laughable and a woman as talented as Mary Thomason could con that poor, sick brain into believing she was his demon and wanting to do anything she told him to do. So that if I got closer, they had a weapon.’
Munro had put an elbow on his chair arm, and his head on that hand. He looked bored and sleepy, but Denton knew he was as alert as a cat. ‘And she didn’t tell him to do anything until you went to France?’
‘Why would she have? I hadn’t learned anything new in weeks. Not anything serious, anyway. I was writing a book; I had other things on my mind.’ He glanced at Janet, got a cool look from her through the cigarette smoke. ‘What’s more important, they must have been as much in the dark about me as I was about them. That’s why Guillam and the private detectives were a godsend to them, because that way they at least knew when I was getting warmer, as we used to say in the kids’ game. But I think that except for the detectives’ reports they couldn’t keep track of what I was doing. It’s also why I think they never went after Janet - they lost her after she moved out of her rooms in Bethnal Green. It must have made them nervous, maybe frantic, and they did a frantic thing when they got hard information about my going with Heseltine to France - they tried to kill me, and they did kill him. It was the kind of mistake you make when you’re confused and panicked. Even though, as it turned out, finding Himple’s body didn’t help us find them.’
‘Thanks to the incompetence of the CID,’ Munro growled.
‘You know I don’t believe that.’
Munro took his head off his hand and studied his fingers. ‘We tried to pick up that trunk at Biggleswade. It had been collected.’
Denton was surprised. ‘When?’
Munro glanced at a notebook. ‘Ninth of October.’
Janet said, ‘Not too long after I put it back.’
‘As apparently Mary Thomason’s still with us,’ Munro said, ‘why didn’t she pick up her trunk before?’
‘You’re sure it was she who picked it up?’
‘Not sure of anything. Clerk said a young woman; he thought the drawing “might have been her” but wasn’t sure.’ He turned to Denton. ‘But I want to hear what you think - why didn’t she pick up the trunk as soon as she could after it was sent?’
‘Maybe that’s exactly what she did. It depends, doesn’t it, on where she was and what she was doing between writing me the note in early August and picking up the trunk in October. And once she knew that Himple was dead, she had to disappear, because she was too connected to Himple - her face was in the Lazarus; her brother was the man who went to Normandy with Himple. She couldn’t go back to work for Geddys, couldn’t go back to the Slade, couldn’t go back to modelling and flirting with Wenzli. I suppose she was quite right in thinking that the trunk wasn’t going anywhere. And there was nothing in it worth a damn, anyway.’
‘Except the drawing,’ Janet Striker said. She was involved in handing a cigarette to Munro, who had been seduced by their smoke. ‘If she made the little drawings in the corners - but then she didn’t, did she! The bit from the Lazarus and the sketch of the baths were about Arthur Crum, not her.’ She smiled and took out another cigarette for herself. ‘Which might suggest to some that they were the same person.’
The remark hung in the room like the sonority of a bell. Denton knew he had caught his breath; he thought Munro had, too. Janet’s smile, faintly wicked, persisted. At last, Munro grunted and said, ‘I wondered when somebody would get to that.’
‘By God, Munro, you mean the idea doesn’t disgust you? Janet’s been pushing it for days. I thought you’d have a fit.’
‘Even at New Scotland Yard, we old fogies are now and then able to tell a hack from a handsaw.’ Munro ground out his cigarette. ‘I have to think of them as two people, brother and sister, Mary and Arthur. But, yes, I can see a version of the tale where they’re the same person.’ He pulled himself out of his chair, rose to his full height, like a bear on its hind legs. ‘I’m not saying you two are right. Not even saying I’m convinced that your ideas hold together. But I will say, it’s always a treat to hear you talk. Makes you understand the power of the storyteller in olden days of yore. Ring for my hat and coat, will you?’
‘You still don’t believe us?’
‘Just the opposite - I do. That’s what’s got me worried.’
On a balmy, breezy day, Denton and Janet Striker took a cab to Fitzroy Street. She said, ‘Are we starting here because it’s the likeliest? ’
‘Or the safest; I don’t know.’
They gave their names again to the harassed Irish maid and were shown into the same cluttered room, where the same plump woman sat in what looked to be the same clothes. She was shocked by the very idea that she might not have told them the entire truth. ‘The police have been here!’ she said. Her laces fluttered. ‘Do you think I would dare to lie to the police?’
‘We thought you might have forgotten something.’
‘Do you think I am senile? Do you think me incompetent? You are very insulting. Please to ring the bell and tell the maid to show you out.’
Denton bowed, winked at Janet Striker and limped out of the crowded, stuffy room.
When they had been standing in the central hall for more than a minute, the Irish maid appeared from somewhere below. Her sleeves were rolled up again, and sweat had stained her blouse. Pushing back loose coils of hair, she said, ‘I’m mangling. It’s hot work.’
Denton held up a shilling. She reached for it and he said, closing his fingers over the coin, ‘Do you remember we talked about Mary Thomason?’
‘Oh, that again.’
‘You remember.’
‘Of course I do.’
He held her eyes. Her look was what so-so novelists called ‘bold’, meaning she didn’t flinch. He said, ‘When Mary Thomason left, did she give you a way to get in touch with her?’
The bold look wavered. ‘Why would she?’
‘She might have wanted to know when somebody came asking after her.’
‘Well, what if she did?’
‘How did you let her know after we were here asking?’
The young woman hesitated, wiped her forehead with the back of her hand, and settled back on her spine and looked straight at him. ‘She left me a card with a stamp to post to her - what of it?’
‘You didn’t tell us that when we were here before.’
‘You didn’t ast me.’
‘Did you tell the police?’
She snorted. ‘The English polis can go suck eggs for all of me.’
He held out the coin. When she took it, he said, ‘Which of them came back - Mary Thomason, or her brother?’ He had caught her fingers and held them as they held the shilling.
The girl’s voice fell almost to a whisper. ‘How’d you know somebody come back?’
‘Which?’
‘Her.’
‘She wanted to know who’d been here?’
‘Yeah. Just that.’
‘You had our names?’
‘Your cards, yeah. I give them to her.’ She flared up. ‘Where’s the harm, then? She was a poor lone thing like me; she had somebody meaning to hurt her! She give me a sixpence - be like a sovereign to you! She was a sweet, harmless little thing that wanted to know who was after her!’
‘So she left you a stamped card to send to her. What was the address on the card?’
‘You think I can read?’ She made a contemptuous, snorting sound in the back of her nose. ‘I grew up in a house no better than a pigsty that was a dozen miles from the nearest school - you think the old folks sent me there? I was needed to home! Reading’s for you fine English people.’
‘Did you send her a card or anything after Mrs Striker was here the other day?’
‘She left me oney the one card. It was oney the once!’
‘And after we leave here today - are you going to tell her somehow? ’
‘I ain’t, I ain’t, I got better things to do! I ain’t seen her in half a year and I got no more cards with stamps to them! Now leave me be.’
She started back for the stairs, but Denton caught her arm and held her. She was frightened, but she was angry; he thought that if he spoke one wrong word, she’d punch him. ‘If Mary Thomason or her brother comes back again, Hannah, you have to tell me. I’m going to give you a card. If either of them comes back, you take the card to Mrs Durnquess and have her read my address to you. Mary and her brother are involved in some very bad business. You don’t want to help them.’ He let her go and gave her one of his cards.
When they were out on the street, Janet Striker said, ‘I hope you don’t believe she’ll do what you told her to.’
‘No. She thinks Mary’s a victim, and she’ll side with her. Still, it was worth a try.’
Walking down Fitzroy Street, Janet said, ‘You thought all along she was the one?’
‘Since I thought there had to be somebody, yes. She seemed the likeliest. I’d rather it was Geddys - I don’t like him, and I like her - but I’ll take what I can get.’
‘You going to tell Munro?’
‘Mmm. Maybe. Not yet.’
She squeezed his arm. He told her he wanted to walk, to help his recovery; they went on down Charlotte Street. The bad leg dragged and had to be favoured, with much use of the walking stick, but he got around well on it now, not as fast as he used to but well enough. At Oxford Street, she suggested they stroll along past the shops. ‘If you’re not too tired.’
‘Being tired isn’t the problem; it’s being slow.’ They turned into Oxford Street. ‘You have shopping to do?’
‘I come to places like this to look. To see what I’m not missing, perhaps. Mrs Cohan is making curtains at the moment; I’m shopping for ideas.’
‘Which you won’t buy?’
‘She knows the remnant houses in the East End. We’ll go there when I know what I want. She has fantastic taste. One of her places has bolts of old Liberty silks and cashmeres, magnificent things that are out of fashion. I intend to surround myself with it.’
The shop windows were full of coronation goods, the coronation itself still almost two months off. They saw coronation chocolates, coronation cakes, the Coronation Tea Set with Spirit Lamp and Kettle, coronation platters and plates and bone china cups with portraits of the new king and queen. A coronation corset was being advertised.
‘The Socialists say that the coronation is a trick, a very large piece of advertising for capitalism and the Empire,’ she said.
‘What do you know about the Socialists?’
‘I go to the Reading Room. I read about everything! Because I know nothing, Denton - nothing! I’m as ignorant as that Irish girl, except I can write a ladylike hand.’
‘Atkins has got himself into the truss business. They’re going to call it the Coronation Model if they can get it ready in time.’
They stopped at a window where a portrait of the king was displayed on a carved easel and surrounded with velour draperies. She said, ‘A fairly common type in a whorehouse.’
‘Kings?’
‘Fat men with stinking cigar breath and plenty of money to pay people to do things that humiliate them.’
‘You don’t have respect for your new sovereign?’
‘None.’
They turned back at Oxford Circus. She said, ‘What would you think of my attending University College?’
‘If it’s what you want to do.’
‘I’m so ignorant. Truly, I don’t know anything. I might even take a degree. Would you mind?’
‘If you became learned? Of course not. A degree in what?’
She hesitated as if she feared his answer. ‘Economics,’ she said. ‘I so like having money.’ They both started laughing.