The Bohemian Girl

Chapter FIVE
‘Anything?’ Atkins said, not without scepticism.
Denton was in his own entrance hall. Atkins, wearing the bedraggled robe, pyjama bottoms visible between the hem and the floor, was standing in the doorway to his quarters. A staircase ran up the wall on Denton’s left to his own part of the house. Around them, the oversized Scottish genre paintings were inscrutable in the dim light.
Denton shrugged himself out of the mackintosh and handed it over, hat to follow. ‘Your intruder’s either a figment of your imagination or he’s got another home.’
‘Figment? Who chased somebody because he thought he was being followed? Who saw a man with a funny upper lip at New Scotland Yard?’
Denton grunted. ‘Maybe we’re both seeing things.’ He stopped partway up the stairs. ‘I almost tripped over a shovel in the back. Was that you?’
‘Ha, ha. I hired a layabout that was recommended by the ice-man; he started digging and half an hour later told me the back garden was concrete, not dirt, and I could take my spade and put it in a certain place. Which reminds me, I mean the ice-man does, the ice-cave is leaking again, and I’m sick of mopping up around it.’
‘We just had it soldered.’
‘Well, it’s leaking. We need a proper modern ice-box. Ice-caves went out with the bustle.’
‘Keep mopping.’
He went up to the long sitting room, walked its length without turning up the gas and looked out of the high window at the back. The house behind was mere blackness, a peaked hole in the night. It was almost midnight - no, four minutes to; there was the bell of Holy Trinity, never on time.
He went back to his chair by the near-dead coal fire, tossed on a pitchy stick or two and several chunks of coal and sat in his chair. He opened a book but didn’t read, sat instead with his fist against his lower lip, thinking of Janet Striker.
Later, Atkins came up to clear things away. Putting glasses on a tray, he said, ‘Jesus never laughs.’
‘“Jesus wept.”’
‘Exactly. I been through the gospels and through them. He don’t laugh. He weeps, as you say - the miracle of Lazarus. Wouldn’t hurt him to laugh, would it?’
‘Blasphemous remark.’
‘We’re told he’s the divine made flesh, aren’t we? Flesh laughs!’
‘Katya losing her hold?’
‘Don’t get personal, please - not in our contract.’
‘Go to bed.’
‘I was in bed, and then you come back and now some of us have to wash up the glasses that others have used. Go to bed, my hat.’
Denton smiled at his back. He closed the unread book, turned down the light and walked again to the long window. The rain was a cold drizzle now, holding the reflection of the city in a low yellow blush, against which the houses were uncertain silhouettes. The house behind was only deeper blackness - until a small dot of light moved along it, a will-o’-the-wisp doing a slow dance from right to left.
‘He’s there!’ Denton pounded up his stairs for the new revolver, then down again. ‘Call a constable!’ Another glance out of the back window showed nothing, the moving light now gone.
Atkins was at the bottom of his stairs in pyjamas, his hair tangled. ‘What do I tell the copper?’
‘I saw a light in the rear garden of the house behind, what d’you think you tell him?’ Denton was running down the stairs towards him.
‘I’m ready for bed. Look at me.’
‘Throw on my mac.’ He went around Atkins. ‘I’m going out the back way.’
‘You’ve not even got boots on!’
Then he was in his own back garden again, the tall, wet weeds brushing his face and hands. He should have worn a coat, but there hadn’t been time. His old velvet jacket was already soaked, as were his thin-soled slippers. He pushed his way through the weeds, found the brick path, made better headway. Halfway up the ladder, he realized he’d forgotten the flashlight. He hesitated, one foot up, one on a lower rung, told himself it didn’t matter and went on up and over the wall. Going down the other side, he felt exposed, his back now turned to that upper window where Atkins had seen the figure and he had seen the light. He shivered, told himself it was the wet, and dodged around the obstacle (sundial? statue?) to cross the grass. Far away, he heard a police whistle, like a thin bird’s cry, infinitely lonely - perhaps Atkins calling the constable.
The ground-level door was closed and locked, but the sloping door to the cellar was raised, leaned back on a support so it was held safely beyond the vertical. In the wet air, light from the city glow was diffuse, dim, but less than blackness to his now-adjusted eyes. The hole below where the door had lain - surely there were stairs there - was real blackness, however. He knelt and put a hand down, found the first step - stone, cracked, cold. He lifted his head and listened for Atkins, for a policeman.
Somebody was inside the house now, he was sure. The cellar door had been left open for a quick escape; it seemed to him a stupid, even childish thing to have done - if a policeman with a lantern came into the garden, it would be the first thing he saw. But the mind at work here was not normal. Childish, perhaps. Less than sane? Denton squatted there in the rain and thought about the face he’d seen at New Scotland Yard. Childish, but - clever? Not stupid, perhaps. And cautious. So if I’m childish but clever, what would I have done here? He thought that a clever child might have put something down there in the darkness to trip an intruder or to sound a warning.
Denton lay in a puddle and felt down the top step, then the second. Across the third step, about six inches up, a rope had been stretched, one end tied to a nail and the other to a cluster of used tins that, as he leaned his head down, smelled of old meat and older fish.
An alarm system. Like something from Boy’s Own.
He felt his way down and stepped over the rope and down another step, then felt ahead of himself to the crumbling wood of an old doorway. A broom had been leaned across it.
The cellar smelled of earth and cat piss and old fires. Low windows at ground level were pale yellow rectangles. He went on hands and knees across the floor, feeling his way towards where he hoped a set of stairs would go up to the door that stood on the other side of the house. He was off by about five feet but found the stairway well enough because of the light coming in a window at the top, a streetlight throwing yellow-green patterns through it. He went up.
The space above was some kind of corridor, doors opening off it, windows down one wall. Feeling ahead for more Boy’s Own alarm systems, he made his way forward towards Millman Street, through a doorway, the door open, and so from what would have been the servants’ part of the house to its public self - a large space, dark, more spaces opening beyond it - an entrance hall? To his left, a stairway up. At the top, sound.
A voice, the words unintelligible. Then another voice, different, no more understandable than the first.
Denton felt with his fingers and then put his left foot on the first stair tread. He pulled himself up, waiting for a creak, got none. He felt for the next tread.
The first voice murmured again, went on. Male, he thought. He went up another step. The other voice, incantatory, sing-song - female?
He was raising his right foot to the fourth tread, off-balance, when a loud noise of knocking racketed from the front of the house - bang-bang-bang-bang. ‘Police! Hullo? Police!’
Startled, Denton stumbled momentarily, caught his balance and leaned back against the wall. Above him, there had been a quick sound of scurrying movement, then nothing.
The knocking came again.
Denton charged up the stairs, turned at a landing and started up again and saw something hurtling down at him, big, flying, unreal, and he raised the Colt, flinching away from the thing, his thumb reaching for the familiar big hammer of the old revolver and not finding it. The pistol was too new, too little tried; he forgot that it was double-action and fired simply by pulling the trigger; his thumb fumbled over the smaller hammer, and before he had it cocked and could fire, the thing was on him, smothering him, stinking of mould and mice. He pushed it off, feeling its damp softness, small weight, cocked the revolver at last, and found himself alone on the stairs. He looked up into more darkness.
The pounding came again.
‘Go to the back!’ Denton shouted. ‘The back!’ He charged upstairs and, making the turn at the top into a corridor, felt movement, saw the darkness in motion around him, raised his left arm to shield himself and his right to fire and felt a whack on his shoulder that glanced off and struck his head. He stumbled, dropped to his right knee, points of light in his eyes like sparks. Something shoved him hard on the left side of his head, and heavy footsteps clattered down the stairs.
Denton stayed. He tried to stand and fell to a sitting position against the wall.
The front door opened and slammed shut.
‘Can you walk?’
‘It’s only my arm. I’m all right, Sergeant.’
‘Was it him?’
‘It was somebody - had a bar or a club or something—’
‘Oh, crikey.’
The shrill bleat of a police whistle came from behind them - the constable arriving with reinforcements. They were in the back garden of the house behind his, Denton seated on the ground at the top of the cellar stairs. The rain had stopped. He was thinking that he had underestimated their man, and maybe that was his own fault because he hadn’t taken somebody who’d wear a red moustache seriously. He was also thinking that he’d been an idiot.
‘Dr Bernat’s on his way.’ Dr Bernat had a surgery at the corner of Lamb’s Conduit Street and Guilford Street, only steps from Denton’s house.
‘Stop fussing over me.’
Then a constable came up behind Atkins, and Dr Bernat came the long way around and found the route into the garden from Millman Street. The policeman had a dark lantern, which Atkins held trained on Denton’s arm while the doctor examined it and the constable took ‘the victim’s statement’.
‘It is not broken, only bruised,’ Bernat said. ‘I need more light. I think a cab and the hospital - he protests, but—’
‘No hospital, absolutely not.’
‘You are hurt.’
‘I’m embarrassed! And I’ve been hurt lots worse. All I had was a knock on the arm and a knock on the head. I made my own way down through a dark house. I’m all right, doctor! I was shaken up, that’s all.’
The policeman said, ‘A bit peculiar.’
‘Which part of it?’
The policeman cleared his throat. He was older than many of them, not brilliant. ‘Them ladders, to start with.’
‘On the garden wall? Yes, well—’
Denton stood, refusing Atkins’s help. Atkins was wearing Denton’s mackintosh, which was so big on him it dragged on the ground. From their own back garden, Rupert was objecting in single, well-spaced barks to being kept away from the action. The policeman shone his dark lantern down the cellar steps. Denton told him about the voices, the attack, the front door. ‘I thought you’d come when I shouted, Constable.’
‘Question of entry, sir. You said to go to the back. I got to the back and didn’t see nothing. Thought it important to get some help.’ He had Atkins hold the lantern while he made notes. ‘About them ladders,’ he said.
‘We found them that way.’
The policeman cleared his throat and took the lantern back and walked over the grass to the rear wall. He aimed his light at the ladder and pulled it down to study the end. ‘Been sawed.’
‘Is that significant?’
‘Something you did yourself, sir?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Not your ladder?’
‘I don’t own a ladder.’
The policeman replaced the ladder and then climbed up it and stood there, looking down into Denton’s back garden. He came down. ‘Ladder on the other side’s also been sawed. Two ladders sawn from one, if you follow my meaning.’
‘I do.’
‘Deliberate.’
‘That sounds right.’
The policeman paced back and shone the light around. ‘This is a matter for a detective.’ He stood straight. ‘Get one here in the morning.’
He came closer to Denton. It was cold in the garden. Denton shivered and remembered that his clothes were soaked. Still, there was something perversely pleasant about the moment - the darkness, the quieter city, a star that he could see above them - a sense that things could easily have been worse. ‘Now, sir,’ the policeman said.
‘This isn’t a good place to give a statement. Why don’t we go into my house? There’s tea.’
The man considered that. ‘If your man will just remain here at the scene, sir, I’ll fetch another constable to keep guard, and we’ll proceed.’
It took him fifteen minutes. Denton got quite cold.
He got to bed finally. The story of the man with the red moustache, the figure in the window, the glow Denton had seen there, were more than the policeman wanted to hear. He said several times that Denton would have to tell this to a detective. Denton’s having waited over there himself earlier that evening made him frown; Denton’s actually going into the house made him frown even more.
He was a stolid copper with a balding head that had what seemed to be a permanent red crease where his helmet rode. The hairs at the sides of his head, some grey, were damp from the sweat of it. He shook his head several times but didn’t say outright that this was a strange tale.
‘Matter for the detectives,’ he said once more, and left.
‘Now you’re for it,’ Atkins said.
‘Me?’
‘Police’ll have you the guilty party for breaking and entering, before they’re through.’
‘Go to bed.’
‘I ain’t been staying up because I like it, General.’ Atkins looked at him with suspicion. ‘You sure you’re all right?’
‘My arm hurts, but I can use it and wiggle the fingers. The knock on the head had me seeing stars, but they’re gone and all I have is a headache. Mostly, my feelings are hurt for being such a dub. You’d think I’d never fired a pistol before.’
In the morning, his arm was bruised but his headache was gone. The embarrassment was still there, perhaps more acutely. Wanting to erase it, he went around to Millman Street and looked at the front of the house and found a ‘To Let’ sign, not very large, by the front door. On it in a small, neat handwriting was the name of an estate agent in Russell Square. Neither the sign nor the size of the writing suggested that anybody was very hopeful about Number 14 Millman Street. Denton looked at the house and thought he saw why: too small, too old, too poorly maintained. Had he ever known whoever had lived there before? He didn’t think so.
At nine, cursing the time off from his work, he was at Messrs Plumb and Angevin in Russell Square. Plumb, an eager, smiling, rabbity man too young to be so familiar, was astonished that somebody had been attacked in one of his houses, shocked that the house had been invaded.
‘That’s breaking and entering,’ he said. ‘You should have apprised us!’
‘There was nothing to apprise you about.’
‘You have a duty under the law!’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘That’s a valuable property!’
‘And I’m the King of Siam. Now look, Mr Plumb, it appears to me this man was spying on me from that house.’
‘You admit it’s your fault, then.’
Denton considered taking Mr Plumb by his revers and lifting him off the floor. However, at that moment, a detective walked in and showed his credentials, and Denton backed off a step and said, ‘Is this about Number 14 Millman Street?’
The detective, who was young and clearly afraid he didn’t project enough authority, rapped out, ‘Who’re you?’
‘I live in the house behind Number 14. I’m the man who was attacked.’
‘Oh, are you?’ He glanced at some notes. ‘You Mr Denton?’
‘I am.’
‘We want to talk to you.’ He touched Denton’s arm as if he were going to seize him. ‘My name’s Markson. Detective.’
Twenty minutes later, Denton was answering questions in the back garden of Number 14, and Mr Plumb was standing against the house, looking cold and worried. A policeman who had been standing there part of the night looked dour. After some minutes of answering Markson’s questions, Denton was relieved to see Munro, who hove into view around the corner like some large animal. He was carrying his hat - he had been hurrying, he said - and his hair was plastered down as the policeman’s had been last night. He nodded at Denton and loomed over the young detective. ‘What’ve you got?’
‘Just examining the man Denton.’
‘In aid of what?’
‘He was the victim of the attack.’
Munro rolled his eyes. ‘Have you been inside the house yet?’
‘Proceeding deliberately. I was told to be alert for fingerprints.’
Munro exhaled noisily and glanced at Denton. Munro and the detective walked quickly over the turf near the cellar door, which Markson called ‘the crime scene’, Munro saying ‘Yes, yes,’ every few seconds as if he’d heard it all before. Then Munro grabbed Denton’s arm and walked him towards the back of the garden. ‘You think somebody’s been watching you from this house, that true? Didn’t see anything for a couple of nights, then this - true? Saw somebody at a window once maybe, then a “glow” at night, maybe - true? That it?’
‘The ladders.’
‘Ah, ladders.’ Denton led him to the ladder, which Munro mounted and from which he looked down into Denton’s garden. ‘You going to do something for those roses?’ he said.
‘Hadn’t given it a thought.’
‘Roses are the thing. Now, they’re difficult, mind, but they give great satisfaction. Looks as if the soil would be all right. I could give you some slips - cuttings, you know. Rather pleased with my roses.’
‘Atkins wants to grow vegetables.’
‘He has no soul.’ Munro looked at a notebook. ‘Yes, the ladder’s been cut in two and propped like that - not your doing or your man’s, true?’ He sniffed. ‘The notes from the first copper on the scene were on my desk at seven with a note from Georgie Guillam - “Look what your pal is up to now.” I thought I’d best get over here before somebody decided you were a vicious criminal.’ He put his hat on and lowered his voice. ‘I told you that Georgie could be trouble. This isn’t even his manor, but he must have had somebody looking for paper with your name on it.’ He took Denton’s arm again and steered him back to the young detective. ‘You’re doing a fine job here, Markson, but we don’t want to spend time running the wrong fox. Mr Denton is a well-known man of good reputation, rather a friend to the Yard - I’m sure you remember the Stella Minter case last year - so, a word to the wise from an old hand: don’t spend too much time on him. Right? Right. Let’s go inside.’
Munro raised the cellar door by its U-shaped handle. The estate agent jingled some keys but Munro ignored him. He stood staring down the stone steps at the door in the foundation wall. ‘Modern alarm system, I see.’ He kicked the rope and the tins aside and turned to his right, surprisingly light on his feet, and tiptoed down the edge of the steps, then felt along a ledge up at ground level and grunted. He took out a handkerchief and reached up to the ledge again and came down with a big key. ‘One of those old locks you could open with a hairpin, anyway.’ Holding the key in the handkerchief, he waved it at the detective. ‘Fingerprints, I know.’ He looked at Denton. ‘We just got a directive on fingerprints. Our newest fad. We now have a Fingerprint Branch, as of last August.’ He wrapped the key in the handkerchief and gave it to Markson. ‘I want that handkerchief back.’ He looked up at Denton, still at the top of the stairs. ‘Of course, we can’t get fingerprints off objects unless the person conveniently has paint or mud or dog turd on his fingers, but it’s important that we handle everything with “gloves or clean cotton wool”.’ He growled.
‘I’ve got a key to the front door,’ the estate agent said.
‘Good for you.’
The cellar, Denton now saw, had a stone floor and the smell of cats and mould and wood that had been too long damp. Dimly seen, a huge fireplace in the far wall proclaimed that this had once been the kitchen. The wooden stairs he had felt his way up led to a corridor, a more recent kitchen now to be seen opposite, a pantry to the left. The house itself was narrow and unfurnished, with mouldings and fireplaces that seemed to Denton old-fashioned, more like those of his childhood.
‘Closed houses’re always colder than your mother-in-law’s breath,’ Munro said.
He led them to the stairs, where Denton recounted what he had done and what he had heard. A soiled mattress for a narrow bed lay partway down the stairs - the shapeless thing that had attacked Denton first. In the daylight, it and everything else looked small and mean and harmless. At the top of the stairs, a fireplace poker without a handle lay against the wall - the thing with which Denton had been struck. Markson used a handkerchief to pick it up.
They went into the room in whose window Atkins thought he had seen the man with the red moustache. The window gave an excellent view of the back of Denton’s house.
‘Could be a tramp. Stood here and watched?’ Munro said. He looked at Denton. ‘Why?’
Denton thought of telling him about the man he had seen at New Scotland Yard, the possibility that had occurred to him that there might be some connection with Guillam, but thought better of it. He said, ‘I wish I knew.’
‘You said you heard two voices.’
‘I thought I did - a man and a woman - but I think only one person went past me down the stairs - I’m not sure—’
‘Enemies? Been getting threatening letters?’
‘Rather the opposite.’
Munro looked as if he was about to say something but turned away. He sent the detective off for somebody to start searching the house. Plumb, the estate agent, was looking uneasily about as if expecting to find that the ceilings had fallen in. Munro warned him to touch nothing and sent him downstairs to open the front door for the police. Then he paced up and down by the window, studying the floor, and got down and put one side of his face against the boards.
‘Been somebody here, all right. Marks in the dust.’ He got up. ‘If you were spying on yourself from here, would you sleep here?’
‘That would be one way to do it.’
‘But the water and gas are off. You’d need a bed and a chamber pot and something to drink and probably something to do. Boring, surveillance is. Done my stint, I can tell you.’ He had taken his hat off again, now put it on. ‘Listen, while there’s just the two of us - what makes you think this had anything to do with you?’
‘Atkins saw somebody. I saw a light—’
‘Yeah, yeah, you told us all that. Could be a tramp. What else?’
‘I’ve had some kind of, mm, strange letters. The last sounded as if he’d been watching me. Had seen me, anyway.’
‘What’s the connection?’
‘I don’t know.’
Munro shook his head. ‘You look in the closets for signs somebody’s spent time here. I’ll be back.’ He started out, turned around. ‘Don’t touch anything unless you use your handkerchief. Upper brass are nuts on fingerprints. I already said that, didn’t I?’
Denton went up another flight to the bedrooms and started going through the rooms. On the floor above that one, in what had been meant as a maid’s room, he supposed, he found two blankets rolled up together in a small cupboard under a stair, along with a chamber pot and a stack of writing paper. He wrapped a pocket handkerchief around one hand, lifted the pot’s lid, got its stink, saw it needed washing.
Most of the paper had been written on in green ink, a cramped hand that couldn’t keep a straight line. The first page was rather elaborately decorated with calligraphic scrolls and tiny faces, impish, like something in a medieval manuscript. In the middle, in half-inch-high decorated letters, it said ‘The Demon Inside His Head’, and below that in smaller letters ‘A Novel. By Albert Cosgrove.’
He lifted the pages with the tip of his pocket-knife. He read words, phrases, saw interleavings and scribbles at angles, what seemed to be a loss of control as he got deeper into the pile. Then pages with only a few words on them in huge letters, then drawings - grotesque faces, penises and balls, an eye. Then a page of incoherence, mere words, illegibility. Then relative coherence, even a sense of starting again - and the names and actions of the characters in the outline that was missing from Denton’s desk.
Then Munro came back and said that the intruder had been emptying his po down the privy in Denton’s garden, and Denton felt sudden queasiness: He’s being me.
Sitting in his own room again with coffee, Munro opposite with his overcoat open, Denton pondered the question - was it the menace? - of Albert Cosgrove. Down towards the far end of the room, the doors to the dumb waiter stood open - Sergeant Atkins’s means of eavesdropping on what was said. Denton didn’t mind; he’d want to discuss it with him later, anyway.
‘I’m losing a day’s work,’ Denton said.
‘And me? I’m on my hols? I’m not even supposed to be here, Denton; CID have better things for me to do.’
‘Run off, if you must.’
‘Markson, that young detective, is a good lad. This is his case; he’ll be the one you talk to. But bear in mind that he’s young and on the make and he don’t necessarily know better than to let Georgie Guillam sniff around his tail.’
‘What’s all that about fingerprints?’
‘You know what they are? Of course you do. No two alike, and so on.’ He grunted. ‘Let’s pass over whether that’s proven. What matters is the Home Secretary and other powers that be want us to collect fingerprints at crime scenes. Will they help us find criminals? No, because we don’t have anything to compare them with. Will they help us in ten or twenty years if we get enough of them? Maybe, if the theory is correct. Right now, all they’ll tell us is if somebody whose prints we already have may have been at a crime scene. Which is why you’re to come down to the Yard today and get your prints taken.’
‘I’ve better things to do.’
‘Fingerprint fella goes off at six; get it done before then. All right?’
‘Look, Munro—’
‘You’re not hearing me! The nicer you are, the quicker it’ll go away.’ He leaned forward for emphasis. ‘I want you to give your fingerprints today.’ He held up a hand. ‘And another thing.’
‘My God, what now!’
‘You had no business going into that house. You should have called a constable.’
‘I sent Atkins to call one.’
‘While you went inside a house that wasn’t your own, in the dark, and forced the hand of somebody who might have really broken your crown.’ He shook his head. ‘It wasn’t wisely done, Denton.’
‘All right, all right. It wasn’t wise.’
‘You’re a man that attracts trouble. Last year, it was a murderer; a few days ago you came to me about some girl who’d disappeared—How is that, anyway?’
‘Stymied.’
‘And now there’s this - somebody - shadowing you and breaking into a house to do it.’
‘It isn’t my fault that some lunatic wants to spy on me.’
‘Who says he’s a lunatic?’
‘Did you look at that manuscript?’
‘Little faces on the front, yes, seems a bit peculiar. Fairies, were they supposed to be? That a fairy tale he was writing?’
Denton looked grim. ‘The first paragraph is a word-for-word theft from the first paragraph of one of my books. Partway through, his scribbles start to use the outline for the book I’m working on. That outline was in my desk when I left London!’
‘He’s been in your house? What else is missing?’
‘Nothing that I know of. But - goddamnit, Munro, he’s been in here. He’s sat in my chair, he’s lain down on my bed, I’ll bet anything he took a crap in my WC because he couldn’t control himself!’
‘Burglars do that, it’s true - often in the middle of the carpet.’
‘Munro, I thought this was some harmless booby. Now I think otherwise. It’s - it’s “creepy”!’ A British reviewer had called Denton’s second book ‘an American fantasy of the creepy variety’. Now the word had come home to roost.
Munro’s stolid face seemed to become wooden. He stared at Denton. ‘I don’t see what it’s about.’
Denton got up and took a few steps down the room, then back. ‘I think it’s about imitation.’
‘You lost me.’
‘“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” Would-be writers imitate writers who’ve made it - “playing the sedulous ape”, Stevenson called it. I think “Albert Cosgrove” may have gone a few miles beyond that.’
‘So you make him out a loony.’
‘I don’t know. But it’s creepy, finding something of my own that somebody else has taken over lock, stock and barrel. He may even believe he made it up himself.’
‘You mean, if he knows it’s yours, he’s an honest thief; if he thinks it’s his own, he’s mad - that it?’ Munro tapped the crease in his soft hat lightly with the side of a hand. ‘He dangerous, you think?’
‘How would I know?’
‘Well, he hit you with a poker. I think we’d best put some minders on you - see if he’s following you about.’
Denton didn’t like the idea of minders. ‘He may just be some kid who’s wild to be somebody.’
‘The somebody is you?’
‘I certainly hope not.’ Denton was no enthusiast of the new pseudo-science of psychology, but he’d read enough - Krafft-Ebing, James - to know that there was a form of fantasy that merged into obsession. He sometimes wrote about it, in fact, although differently, expressing it as a ghost or a demon instead of an aspect of personality. He wondered now if Albert Cosgrove had used ‘demon’ in his title as a deliberate imitation. Or was it identification? ‘Maybe he wants to hide in somebody else.’
‘From what? You’re off in fairy-land, Denton.’ Munro got up. He jiggled his hat on a finger inserted into the crown. ‘Sending you love notes, sort of, was he?’
‘You make it sound female - like a schoolgirl’s crush. Atkins said something like that.’
‘Well?’
‘Yes, it could be like that.’
‘You have any of his letters?’
‘Burned them the night I got home. No, maybe I have the one that came yesterday—’ He knelt by the grate, saw only ash and dying coals. ‘I’ll look for it. Maybe it’s in the waste bin.’
‘And you’ve forgotten the address.’
‘I’m not even sure there was one.’ He jammed his hands into his pockets. ‘I get letters like that, maybe not as excitable, all the time. It comes with the profession.’
‘The trials of the famous. You ever answer them?’
Denton huffed. ‘These had been here for a while. Of course I didn’t answer them. My God, in one he wanted a copy of each of my books, signed, with a personal inscription!’
‘But there wasn’t an address?’
‘I don’t think so. He isn’t rational.’
‘Mmp.’ Munro buttoned his overcoat. ‘Anyway, you’re to be a good citizen and take yourself down to New Scotland Yard before six tonight. And we’ll put somebody to trail you. And you’re going to let us know anything else that happens. Aren’t you.’ It wasn’t a question.
‘Anything related.’
Munro gestured with the hat, holding it so its brim was vertical and waving it up and down. ‘And you’re not to go off on this by yourself! I don’t care if you were once upon a time the Lord High Sheriff of America, we’re the police authority here.’
‘My main concern is to finish my book.’
‘Good. Keep that in your head and we’ll be all right.’ He put his hat on. ‘You ever report that girl as a missing person?’
‘I never established that she was missing.’
‘Albert Cosgrove is police business enough for you for this year, anyway.’ He stood, bear-like, by the door, turned abruptly. ‘Dammit, I know it isn’t your fault, Denton, but you’re a bleeding magnet for loonies and misfits! I’ll see myself out.’
And he did. Denton heard the rumble of Atkins’s voice mingle with the sound of the front door’s opening.
When Atkins came up, Denton was back in his chair. ‘You heard?’ he said.
‘Couldn’t help myself. Dumb waiter left open through oversight. ’
‘The bastard was in here. He took my outline. God knows what else he did.’
‘Kind of makes you want to give everything a wash, don’t it.’
‘What d’you think?’
‘I think you’ve put your foot in a bow-wow’s mess. Best take a few weeks in Italy.’
‘We just got home.’
‘Awfully nice, Italy.’ Atkins pursed his lips. ‘I think I’ll hang on to the derringer for a bit. You really think this Cosgrove is mental?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t need these distractions just now!’
‘Say it louder, General. Maybe they’ll go away.’
Dr Bernat came in towards noon and looked at his arm and his head and told him he was a very hard nut. When he was done with the back of Denton’s head, Bernat came around to the front, stepped closer, lifted his spectacles to look at Denton’s eyes. He had to stand on tiptoe to do so, a short man with a beard, stocky, rather handsome. ‘Your eyes are not happy, Mr Denton.’
‘I’ve been working.’
‘Eye strain.’ Bernat backed away and picked a book at random from the shelf and opened it. ‘Read.’ He held the book at eye level several feet from Denton.
‘Uh - no, too small—’
The doctor came a step closer. ‘Now?’ He moved again. ‘Now?’ ‘It’s blurry.’
Bernat closed the book with a clap. ‘You are needing eyeglasses for the close work.’
‘I haven’t got time to go someplace and go through a lot of rigmarole! ’
Bernat was writing on a pad. ‘You can go to Harley Street and pay several pounds and then go somewhere else and pay several more for eyeglasses.’ He handed over the paper. ‘Or you can go where I am going and where Whitechapel people are going and pay very little. You just try on glasses until you are finding a pair you like. Very nice people, also Jews like me, helpful - I am recommending it.’ He looked over his glasses. ‘Go today.’
‘I’m already supposed to go to New Scotland Yard to have my fingerprints taken.’
‘That sounds interesting. Good for you!’ He reached up to put a hand on Denton’s shoulder. ‘Splash cold water on the eyelids when there is pain or, what is the word - stinging. Also rest once each hour. Also look away from the work at some distant beauty—’ He waved a hand. ‘Maybe a pretty girl. But only at a distance!’ He laughed and headed for the door. ‘Don’t be putting too much strain on that arm. Meanwhile - look at a pretty girl.’
Denton was off at two towards the typewriter’s with more manuscript; then he took the underground to Whitechapel because his eyes were on fire and he thought that if he didn’t get relief, he wouldn’t be able to go on with the book. Far behind him, a fat man in dark clothes seemed to appear, then be replaced by a thin man in brown, then reappear. These were his police minders, he supposed.
He found his way to Newark Street and the Fancy Modern Imperial Spectacles and Eyeglass Emporium, where dour young men in business suits and pince-nez behaved as much as possible like doctors, helping the clientele pick glasses from shallow trays that covered twenty or so long tables.
‘Short-sighted, is it?’ a youth said.
‘For reading.’
‘Fuzzy? Not clear?’
‘That’s it.’
‘No tunnelling? No like looking through the keyhole? No black around the edges?’
He left, the possessor, for one and six, of spectacles with thick rims the motley colours of a cat (‘best artificial tortoise’). He thought he looked comical in them but decided he’d let nobody see them except, perhaps, Atkins. With the glasses in his pocket, he went back to New Scotland Yard, where a man who smelled like a navvy held each of his ten fingers one by one and pushed them into an inked pad as if he meant to break them.
He fell into bed at ten and was asleep almost at once.