The Bohemian Girl

Chapter TWENTY-FOUR
April turned into May, May into June. Heseltine had been dead six months, Erasmus Himple even longer. Mary Thomason and Arthur Crum or whoever they were had vanished.
The Boer War stumbled to an end. Janet Striker moved into her house, with the Cohans to take care of her. Atkins’s vegetable garden produced baby lettuces and early peas and threatened courgettes. Denton rowed on the river every other day from a boathouse above Hammersmith Bridge. The first time, he had worn old trousers and a shirt without a collar but had been surprised to see that most of the men who were serious about it wore some costume of the sort Janet Striker had given him. They seemed unembarrassed by the mid-calf trousers and the collarless shirts, even by the little caps. They looked distinctly silly to him, but he had long since resigned himself to a culture in which the well-off wore different kinds of clothes for every activity and didn’t feel ridiculous in them. Thereafter, he carried his rowing clothes in a little satchel, changed in the boathouse with the rest and rowed in what he called ‘my funny duds’. Warmer weather proved their value: he sweated buckets - so much so that he had to buy two more outfits.
Usually, he rowed downriver, now and then as far as Battersea, then back up against the current, with or against the tide; if he felt strong, he went on past Hammersmith as far as Mortlake before turning back. He loved the pull of the oars, the feeling of power returning in his shoulders. He could lift a hundred pounds again, although only a few lifts without a rest as yet; he had gained back more than twenty of the lost pounds; when he walked, the bad leg had to be favoured but he put the stick aside; he rarely looked behind him any more, although he went on carrying the Colt in the street until the weather got too warm for heavy fabrics and overcoats, and then he carried the derringer, which was easier to hide in light clothes.
The bad leg seemed better when he rowed, delivering force to push the sliding seat back. The boat was not a rowing shell but a kind of long skiff, double-ended, narrow, the interior an intricate crossing of narrow planks and ribs every two inches, the whole thing varnished to a warm, glowing brown. He found himself holding his own with other rowers, knew that his long-postponed urge to row had been correct.
The coronation had been scheduled for 26 June. The city was brilliant with bunting; the newspapers were burbling with patriotism; a kind of hysteria had gripped people of all classes - the Socialists were right: the selling power of the coronation was enormous. Even the sweatshop workers saved to buy a Britannia-ware coronation spoon. There hadn’t been a coronation, after all, in sixty-some years.
On 24 June, the king had an attack of appendicitis. The coronation was put off.
As Denton passed through the city on what should have been the great day, he got a sense of vaguely nasty resentment. It was as if a child’s treat had been denied. The marketing of the crown had created a huge appetite whose denial led to tantrums. There seemed to be an unusual amount of bickering in the underground station. Men whose uniformly black business clothes had been brightened by patriotic colour in the buttonhole were funereal again. People scowled. Although it was the most beautiful day so far of a beautiful summer, the only comment Denton overheard was ‘What a day!’ It was not meant happily.
Changed into his ridiculous costume, he stood on the wooden ramp that sloped down to the water, momentarily leaning on the long, spoon-bladed oars. The water glittered. It was still hardly eight o’clock; the sun was not yet hot, and a soft breeze was blowing upstream, bringing with it what he thought was a smell of the sea. ‘What is so rare as a day in June?’ he muttered, then reminded himself that an American had written that.
He glanced around him, the habit still there, looking for the shadow that never grew solid - Jarrold was still in the institution in Devon, would always be so. The derringer had been left in the valise; a pistol out on the river seemed absurd. Standing in the sun in that glorious weather, he thought, I’m still afraid. He shook the idea off. There was no reason for anybody to follow him now. He was out of it - it was all a police matter now, and already an old one, at that.
The case was open, but Mary Thomason and Arthur Crum were gone. The old man at the Albany gate thought he might have seen somebody who looked like the drawings of Crum, but he couldn’t tell them more than that. Munro had got an exhumation order, despite Heseltine’s father’s anguish; the local coroner had found damage to the back of the skull ‘consistent with a blow or a fall’. But the trail, as Munro had said, was dead cold.
The boat, as always when he first got into it, felt like an uneasy eggshell, yet when he was seated it was secure enough that he could rock his hips and feel no loss of balance. He started downriver slowly, the incoming tide only a ripple against his bow.
What am I really afraid of ?
Working his shoulders, he increased his power without upping his tempo; after turning around at Battersea, he raised the beat, his legs working, the boat seeming to fly over the water. On he went upstream, past Putney and Hammersmith and then, feeling glorious and strong and exultant in the day, past Mortlake.
There was bunting on houses and boats along the bank. It had been meant to be a holiday; some people were apparently going to make it one, anyway. A steam launch chugged past, flags flying, heading for Hampton Court; other rowing boats, always recalling water insects, darted back and forth. He went on up the river, his beat slower now, making himself a tourist looking at houses and boats and people, seeing himself as part of the spectacle.
Up past the little village of Strand-on-the-Green. He had been there - why? - of course, to visit the valet, Brown. He looked over his shoulder, searching out Brown’s house, which he remembered for its steep roof and bright blue trim. And, yes, there it was, a low concrete wall meant to keep the river out separating its back garden from the tidal mud, a flagpole flying the Union Jack; in the garden, flowers along each side, multi-coloured, pastel, the stuff of art. And as if called up by that idea, on the green of the little lawn, a woman in a white dress, sitting at an easel.
He came even with the house and went on, meaning to turn around at Kew, and he saw the woman only as a woman - white gown, straw hat, long hair - and then in an instant he saw everything, so startled that he caught a crab with his left oar and almost flipped the boat. Had she noticed? No; she was looking the other way.
He was rowing hard again, sweating, the sweat stinging his eyes. He turned almost too fast at Kew Bridge, backing with one oar, the gunwale coming within an inch of the water, and then he was pulling downriver again and moving to his right, bringing the boat in closer to the stairs that pierced the concrete dyke. He had picked out the high dormer of Brown’s house with its blue-trimmed window, the flagpole and the flag, and he kept his eyes on them until he was right at the shore and beached the boat at the foot of a flight of stairs. He got out clumsily, his bad leg trailing.
The mud was sticky and smelled bad. He grabbed the bow and pulled the boat up the gently sloping bank and tied it off in a ring set in the stone. For no other reason than vanity, he tossed the absurd little hat into the boat. He patted a pocket for the derringer and then remembered that it, too, was back at Hammersmith.
No matter.
Nothing mattered - only this: to climb these stairs, and cross this lawn and then the next and then to approach the woman who was painting at the easel in Brown’s back garden. He never took his eyes from her; she was looking partly upriver, must have seen him as part of her scene as he had rowed up. A bit of moving, anonymous colour.
He stepped over a clump of tall summer flowers and pulled his bad leg after and said, loud enough for her to hear, ‘Miss Mary Thomason, I think.’
Her head whirled.
‘Or is it Arthur Crum?’
She screamed and got up so fast the easel swayed and fell on the bright green grass. Lifting her white skirts, she ran, crying, ‘Ralph! Ralph, help me!’ Her yellow straw hat came off and drifted to the grass.
Denton cursed the leg and the bullet wounds. He moved as fast as he could, a man walking like a pair of compasses, huge strides, stiff. He could hear her screaming the name Ralph. She went through a doorway. The top half was mullioned glass; he could see her after she closed it, a terrified face, hands working frantically.
He didn’t try to be polite. His momentum carried him to within a few feet of the door, his weight coming on his right leg, which was clumsy but would carry it, and, as an extension of his long stride, he raised his good leg and kicked the door open and almost fell through it as his right leg lost its balance.
‘Ralph! Kill him - kill him—’
Through the door, he saw her within two yards of him and reached out. He was late in seeing motion to his right and behind him; too late, he turned, his right arm up, and caught an iron poker just above the elbow as it slammed down where his head was meant to be. The arm went dead, pain shooting to the shoulder. He saw the poker raised again. The face of Brown the valet was dark red, the eyes wide open with hatred. Denton forced himself in tight against the man and felt the poker swing behind him; he smashed his forehead into Brown’s face. Blood spurted. Denton had his left hand twisted into the man’s shirt then, pulling him close and using his head again to batter him, then kneeing him in the groin and hearing him howl. Denton swung him to his right and flung him into a wall. The valet collapsed down it to a sitting position. He put his hands in front of him.
Denton picked the poker up in his left hand. Brown’s eyes pleaded: No more. Denton hit him backhanded with the iron poker. The sound was like a hammer hitting a post.
The woman screamed. She turned and ran for a flight of stairs and up them. Denton followed as fast he could, reaching the bottom of the stairs only as a door slammed on the floor above. He started up, found it hard going without his stick, and he threw the poker aside and used a banister to pull himself up with his right hand. It was like rowing one-handed, the muscles bunching in his back, the blow on the upper arm aching.
At the top, a corridor ran the length of the small house, a door on each side. He saw but didn’t register the prettiness of it - rag rugs on the floor, watercolours on the walls, fresh flowers. His attention was on the closed door on his left. He tried the handle; it turned, but the door wouldn’t open. He pushed, felt a slight movement and heard the sound of scraping. She had pushed something against it from the other side.
He couldn’t kick this one open, and he couldn’t easily push it with his shoulder. Instead, he put his back against the door and turned the knob with his left hand. It was like pushing the sliding seat in the boat.
The door moved; the scraping sound grated. The opening widened - six inches, a foot, almost enough room for him to go through - and he saw her face, demonic, pale, and the razor that gleamed in an arc and missed his face as he recoiled but slashed down his left arm. He fell back into the hall, almost going down the stairs. The door slammed again.
Blood was running down his arm and dripping on the rag rug. The unconnected thought that she had made the rugs herself came into his mind. She had built herself a nest, he thought. He was tearing off the shirt of his silly outfit and wrapping it around his arm, then pulling it tight and holding the end with his left hand so it wouldn’t unwind.
He pushed the door again. It swung open and banged against the dresser that had been pushed against it. Holding his bleeding arm above his head, Denton nudged the door with his hip, alert for the razor, waiting for her to attack again.
The room was empty. Like the hall it was pretty. On the far wall above a double bed was the ‘little Wesselons’.
The dormer window was open.
He pushed the dresser out of the way and looked around the room for her, even bending and lifting the girlish flounce to look under the bed. She was clever enough to hide and let him think she’d gone out of the window, but she wasn’t in the room.
The dormer was high, six feet wide; the window was a tall double casement that swung from the middle post. Both leaves were open. If he went out of the wrong window, she might be able to come back in the other and escape him before he knew where she was.
He closed the door and pushed the dresser against it again to slow her if she came back in. His blood dripped on the floor and he raised the arm over his head again.
He went out of the right-hand window. When he looked down the pitch of the roof to the eave, vertigo staggered him. His old fear of heights. He closed his eyes, shook his head; then, not looking at the ground, he went out, left leg first, pulling the other after, peering around the corner of the dormer for her and pulling his head back in case the razor swung.
She was most of the way up the roof, heading for the peak. She was sitting, boosting herself up on her buttocks, keeping her feet and hands on the slates. She, too, was afraid of the height, he thought. When she saw him, she began to move faster. Above her and at the edge of the roof to her right was a chimney; she seemed to be making for it. Maybe there was a way down there; he didn’t think so, rather that she was going for the chimney because it was solid and seemed to offer support. If she could get down the other side of the roof, however, she could probably drop to the front garden; the house was higher at the back than the front because of the drop to the river.
‘You can’t make it!’ he shouted.
She moved herself up again. He saw the razor flash in her hand.
‘Give it up!’
He started up the roof. He went on his fingertips and the balls of his feet, the light rubber shoes he wore for rowing a help. She screamed, screamed again. He was aware of voices below them and understood how it must look to anybody who could see them - a half-naked man chasing a woman.
‘Come down from there, you monster!’ a woman’s voice shouted, the sound thinned by distance.
Mary Thomason screamed again. She had almost reached the chimney. And then what?
Denton pushed himself harder. He forgot the bad leg. He looked at nothing but the woman in the white dress. Straightening, he went up on the diagonal faster than she was moving, and when she reached the chimney, he was only three yards behind. He put his right foot over the peak of the roof and balanced there, a foot on each side. She looked down towards the ground at the front of the house. Several people were down there, foreshortened, shouting.
‘Leave that poor girl alone! The police are coming!’ One of them blew a police whistle.
She scrambled upright, using the chimney to support her. With her back to it and the razor at her side where they couldn’t see it from below, she faced him. Denton moved closer. He raised his arm over his head because of the bleeding.
‘Give it up. It’s over.’
She was very like the drawing. Not quite pretty, but arresting. The breeze stirred her hair. He said, ‘Give it up. You think you’re a nasty piece of work, but I’m nastier. I’ll kill you if I have to.’
They were fixed on each other as if they were the only people in the world. They were, in that shared concentration, like lovers. The Thames, the day, the glory of the summer, didn’t exist. He looked at her and she looked at him, and for a moment he saw her face soften and he felt for her something that was beyond sympathy, almost an identification, a sharing of self, as if in the instant of violence that was coming they were the same. He held out the bloody left arm with the hand open. ‘Give it to me. It’s over.’
Then her face changed to the demonic one he had glimpsed through the door, and she swung the razor at him. He flung up his arm and caught it on the part that was wrapped in the shirt. It slashed down; he felt its bite again and grabbed her wrist. He raised it high, as if they were doing some country dance, drawing her off the chimney, and she tried to pull away. His other hand was balled into a fist, and he hesitated an instant because she was a woman, because her female face was so near his own. Then the razor’s blade cut into his palm as his slippery hand lost its grip and she turned in the air in front of him, one foot on a slate and one foot in the air, and then she was gone and he heard the thud of her body on the flagstones beside the house.
And then he felt his own vertigo, and he collapsed against the chimney, hugging it as if he had been thrown against it by a wave.
‘Man or woman?’
‘Man.’ Munro grinned. ‘Relieved?’ He set down a mug of tea for Denton.
‘I was about ninety-eight parts in a hundred sure. But I thought—If she was a woman—’
‘Well, he wasn’t. How’s that arm?’
‘Hurts like hell. Nice lot of stitches.’
‘You lost a good lot of blood. Feeling queasy?’
‘I’ve been told to take Extract of Meat and Malt Wine. I think I’ll stay with Mrs Cohan’s soup. The tea’s a godsend for now.’ They were in a borrowed office in Brentford Infirmary. The local constabulary had first arrested Denton and brought him there in handcuffs to be sewn up. It had taken three hours to sort out what had happened, the actual sorting-out being done only when New Scotland Yard had been brought in. More time had passed while somebody figured out that what had happened at Strand-on-the-Green was part of a case Munro was already working on.
Munro put his hands in his trouser pockets and stared out of the window. ‘He’s dead. I’m sorry about that - I’d like to see the bastard in the dock.’ He looked at Denton. ‘I’ve got a dozen witnesses that will swear they saw you push a woman off that roof.’
‘I’m sure. But I didn’t.’
‘I’ve read your statement. Funny, what people see.’
‘How’s Brown?’
‘Head’s too broken for us to take a statement. Concussion. Maybe by tomorrow. You didn’t have to try to kill him, too, you know.’
‘I didn’t want him behind me while I went after the woman.’
‘His nose was mashed flat against his face, he has two broken ribs, and he fractured a finger, apparently trying to protect himself from the poker. Can’t you ever go easy on them?’
‘I told you, I didn’t want him behind me.’
Munro stared out of the window, then shook his head. ‘Did you push the woman? The man?’
‘I lost my grip on her wrist. She was off balance.’
‘I wouldn’t blame you if you had. He was an ugly piece of work. Cutting the head off Himple, killing Heseltine - the painting that came from Heseltine’s flat pretty well cinches that one. You’re always right.’
‘Like hell.’
Munro grinned at him, then became serious again. ‘You think he was insane?’
‘Anybody who commits murder is insane, isn’t he?’
‘I meant, playing at being a woman.’
Denton said nothing, then, ‘She was sane. Maybe he wasn’t.’ ‘They were the same person, Denton!’
Denton shrugged again. He felt light-headed, detached. Munro said, ‘We’re digging up Brown’s garden to look for Himple’s head.’
‘Yes, you should do that. Although I don’t think you’ll find it.’
Munro grunted. ‘No. I suppose it’s somewhere like the middle of the Channel.’
‘Or in an abandoned privy in Paris.’
‘She wasn’t here until last week - we’ve asked the neighbours. Why the hell do you think she came back here?’
‘They wanted to be together, I suppose.’
Munro gave a snort of contempt. ‘Queer sort of being together - murdering folk. You think it was always the two of them?’
‘I didn’t until I saw her in the garden. Yes, I think it was always the two of them - before anything else. Maybe Crum met Himple first at the Baths, but then when he met Brown - funny, how people pair off.’ He gave a grim smile. ‘There’s a novel in that.’ He moved the arm painfully to another position, then sipped the tea. ‘Think you’ll ever know who Arthur Crum really was?’
‘Mr Nobody from Nowhere. Some little chap who thought he’d found himself a clever way off the factory floor.’
‘And it got away from him?’
Munro shrugged. He sighed and opened the door. ‘Well, you can go. Although I think I’m letting the most dangerous man in London walk.’ Denton got up and strode to the door. Munro said, ‘Speaking of walk—’
‘What?’
‘Look at you.’
Denton looked where Munro was pointing, at his right leg. He wasn’t limping. He didn’t have a stick.
‘Where’s the bad leg, then?’
‘I guess she took it over the roof with her.’
Janet Striker was waiting for him at the infirmary gate. She hurried him into a waiting cab and made him lie back into a nest of pillows she’d put there. ‘Don’t ever let anybody tell you that money isn’t important,’ she said. ‘I bought these for you to lie on and they’re going in the dustbin as soon as we get you home. But worth every penny!’
‘I’m not an invalid.’
‘You bled like a pig, I was told. You should be feeling weak and ill.’
‘I’m not a pig.’
‘No, you’re a man, and a fairly good specimen of one.’ She kissed him. ‘Tell me everything, including how you got your leg back.’
As they rode, he went through it all. ‘Finally,’ he said when he had told her everything, ‘I felt sorry for her. Not sorry, perhaps, but - sorrow.’
‘And then you could walk.’
‘It was going up the roof. I had to and I did. I’ve been letting it rule me, giving in to it. Being an invalid meant I’d never have to risk killing her.’
‘Is that what it was about - not killing her?’
‘Being afraid to kill her? No, more like being afraid I’d get to the moment and find I wanted to kill her.’
‘Because I told you all men hate women.’
He was silent.
‘And you found you didn’t.’ Janet held his good hand. ‘Does it make a difference that he wasn’t a woman?’
‘She was a woman when she went off that roof. I know in my soul I didn’t want her to go off, and I’m satisfied.’
They were silent for a long way, and then they talked of trivial things like the cancelled coronation. He said, ‘Atkins, at least, is delighted. The pneumatic truss wasn’t ready, and now they’ve got at least a couple of months to get it right.’ Just before they reached his house, he said, ‘You had it figured. I wouldn’t accept that the woman and the brother were the same.’
‘Well, the evidence was thin.’
He remembered the dreams. ‘It was the rags. I couldn’t—’
She put a finger on his lips. ‘It doesn’t matter. You did what you set out to do - you found the woman who asked for your help.’
‘And found that I was the one who was going to hurt her.’ He shook his head. ‘She didn’t really ask for my help at all, but—I wonder if she was thinking about her letter when we were up on that roof.’
She came behind him up the stairs as if she might need to push, but he made it well enough, light-headed, weak. Atkins appeared with a bottle of the Army and Navy Stores’ Extract of Meat and Malt Wine. That, and more tea, and a chop from the Lamb, gave Denton the illusion of feeling normal. A false euphoria came over him; he didn’t recognize it as the giddiness of blood loss. As they ate, he talked about the future, an idea for a new book that had leapt into his head while he was on the roof, some sort of travel they could do together. He was opening his mail at the same time, over-excited, hands trembling. He hooted.
‘Jarrold’s sainted ma has instructed her lawyers to offer me seven thousand pounds and medical expenses!’ He cackled happily. ‘Sergeant!’ When an answer came up the dumb-waiter shaft, he shouted, ‘We’re getting electric in the house! And heat! And a proper modern ice-box!’ He turned back to Janet Striker. ‘I’m going to buy a motor car. Where would you like to go?’
‘University College.’
‘Ah, I’d hoped Constantinople by way of Athens.’
She laughed, shook her head.
He shouted, ‘Sergeant! Want to motor to—?’
‘No,’ came the hollow answer, ‘and neither does Rupert.’
He put the letter down. He looked at her. ‘Well, I’ll pretend that your house is Constantinople. Your bed, most certainly.’
‘Some of the time, anyway.’
‘There’ll always be the door in the garden wall, you mean.’
‘But with a lock.’
‘And you’ll have the key.’
‘I’ll have the key.’
‘Oh - well—’ He leaned back, then suddenly sat up and said, ‘Dammit! I left my boat tied up by the river!’ He jumped up too quickly, felt the room start to go black and collapsed back into his cushions. He grinned at her foolishly. ‘Maybe I’ll leave that for tomorrow.’



About the Author
Kenneth Cameron is the author of one previous novel featuring Denton, The Frightened Man, as well as of plays staged in Britain and the US, and the award-winning Africa on Film: Beyond Black and White. He lives part of the year in northern New York State and part in the southern US.