The Bohemian Girl

Chapter NINE
He slept a few hours in the early morning, woke and went back to his desk. The mood of the night, somewhat dissipated in daylight, faded as he bored in on his work.
Atkins, who was going to church (Denton was surprised to find it was Sunday) and apparently thought Denton should, too, made disapproving noises with dishes and clothes hangers.
‘Stop that racket.’
‘Being as quiet as I can.’
‘You’re making noise fit to raise the dead. If you’ve something to say, say it!’
Atkins lifted Denton’s empty plate to the tray with the care of somebody taking an egg from a nest. ‘My grandmother banged the pans about when she was crossed,’ he said.
‘What’s that supposed to mean - you come by noise-making honestly? Go to church!’
‘It isn’t church, it’s chapel.’
Denton looked at him over the tops of his new eyeglasses. ‘Katya went to church.’
‘I’ve moved beyond Katya. I don’t want to hear about her.’
‘Give my regards to the saints.’
Before Atkins could do so, Denton heard a knock at the front door; a minute later, Atkins was beside him again.
‘You know anything about a Son of Abraham’s on our doorstep saying he’s come to dig up the garden?’
Thinking of his work, Denton stared at him. ‘No. Don’t bother me. Wait - yes. Mrs Striker said something about—Hell, she gave me a name.’
‘Cohan. Sounds Irish to me, but he looks about as Irish as the Levite that crossed over the road. Right, he mentioned Mrs Striker’s name.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me that?’
‘Thought I’d get right to the point. You want him to dig up the garden, or not?’
‘Yes, yes, put him to work. Have we got a spade?’
‘Probably. We had good intentions back there, once.’ Atkins put on a pious face. ‘You sure you want him working on the Lord’s Day?’
‘If he’s a Jew, that was yesterday. Go away!’
Denton worked until noon and could do no more. The penalty for having worked part of the night. Atkins, by his own choice, had Sunday off until late evening. Denton found a couple of eggs, scrambled them on the gas ring in the alcove off his sitting room: part pantry, part kitchen. A year before, somebody had waited in there to kill him. He wondered if Albert Cosgrove had been in there, too, handled the cutlery, opened the cupboard, inhaled the air.
Denton prowled his house, restless now. He tried to read and found nothing interesting. He thought he would go out, but where? Not to find Janet Striker, certainly; he didn’t know where she lived, and she wouldn’t be in her office today. Munro wouldn’t be at New Scotland Yard. He looked out of the rear window, saw a dark-haired man, foreshortened, digging up the weeds. He went at them as if they were his worst enemies. Denton went down and introduced himself.
‘All one to me. I got lots of this muck to keep me busy.’ He was overweight, shorter than Denton but broad, with shoulders and arms that filled his threadbare coat like a sausage its skin. He wore a cloth cap, filthy rat-catchers; his nose was mashed to his face, his ears battered. Small eyes glared at Denton as if the world were a perpetual challenge.
Denton said, ‘You’re a prizefighter.’
‘I was, and proud of it! Never knocked off my feet I wasn’t. I may not have won every time the bell rang, but nobody ever knocked me down. Just you ask! Ask them wot the Stepney Jew-Boy did.’ He had a definite accent.
Denton flinched. ‘Jew-Boy?’
‘Jew-Boy. When I started fightink, they’d shout “Jew-Boy” at me to insult me, they did. I thought, I’ll give you Jew-Boy, I will, so I called myself Jew-Boy and beat the livink tar out of the first six gentiles I fought. Then I was the Stepney Jew-Boy for good.’
Denton studied him. ‘What’s a prizefighter want to spade up a back garden for?’
‘Am I still a prizefighter? Do I look twenty again? Or do I look canny enough to’ve got out with my brains intact when I was thirty-five? How old you think I am?’
‘Forty.’
‘And four. How many prizefighters you think are still at it at forty-four without they’re hearink bells nobody else can hear? Judas Cripes, give me some credit for intelligence, please do. I’m forty-four and I ain’t fought in nine years and I got no job! That’s why I’m diggink up your back bloody garden!’
Denton asked what he was to pay him, and he said he and Mrs Striker had settled on three shillings a day, for which she’d paid two days in advance because he’d been ‘caught short’ when he talked to her.
‘So you’ll be back in the morning.’
‘You think I’d take money for work I wasn’t goink to do? Yas, I’ll be here in the mornink. And I don’t steal and I don’t lie and I didn’t kill Christ. Good day to youse.’
The day yawned ahead of him - a Sunday, little doing. He decided to go out, if only to walk himself into exhaustion.
The air beyond his front door was cool, clear - he thought that if he could have got up high, he could have seen all the way down the Thames to the North Sea - with a sky the clear blue of a bottle with the sun behind it. The light was glaring, but even so the day was too cool for sitting about, perfect for walking. Stopping often to look back for Albert Cosgrove, he walked, first to Holborn and Chancery Lane, then along Fleet Street and Cannon Street, turning west again along the river at Billingsgate Market, now only residual fish smell and gulls and a great many cats, and a memory of the days when the fishwives had been there and ‘Billingsgate’ was a term for creative insult. He picked his way through small, silent streets to Soho, turned along Old Compton Street and, on an impulse, having nowhere to go, found his way again to the Albany, where he lingered at the entrance before going in and walking slowly to the door of Heseltine, the man who had found Mary Thomason’s letter. If he objected to be called on on a Sunday, he could always turn him away.
He offered his card to the bottle-nosed man who opened the door.
‘Mr Heseltine isn’t well, sir.’
‘Oh - I’ll call again—’
‘It might—Let me ask him, sir. It might do him good.’
The man was Denton’s age, grave, rather like a doctor who always had bad news. When he came back, he said, ‘Mr Heseltine asks if you’d forgive him not dressing.’
‘Of course.’
‘He hasn’t been well.’
‘I understand.’
Closer to, the man gave off a mixed odour of bad teeth and sherry. He kept his sombre bedside manner, however; Denton supposed it was the main reason for employing him.
‘Mr Denton.’
Heseltine was wearing a dressing gown and slippers, as if he’d just got out of bed.
‘I’m sorry you’ve been ill.’
‘Not ill. Just out of—’ Heseltine tried to smile, shrugged.
The man came in with a tray of glasses and a decanter and a plate of mostly broken biscuits - Atkins would have fed them to the dog. There was a slight rattle of glassware as the tray was put down, something like a hiccup, perhaps a grunt. ‘Sherry, sir?’
‘I’ll take care of it, Jenks.’
The man turned slowly and made his way out. Denton realized now that Jenks was thoroughly boiled. So, apparently, did Heseltine. ‘Jenks drinks anything that doesn’t have the cork cemented into the bottle. He’s quite incorrigible. I should let him go, but I’d have to find somebody else, and I just don’t have the go.’
‘Better than no man at all?’
‘In the morning, yes. After noon, no. But I—What do I care, really? If I had the taste for it, I’d spend my days like him.’
‘I only came to tell you about Mary Thomason - the woman whose note you sent on to me. I won’t stay.’
‘Oh, do! I don’t have many visitors.’ The wry semi-smile again. ‘What about the Thomason girl?’
Denton told him what had happened, ending with the fact that the trunk had never been collected; he didn’t say that he had it and had been through it.
‘So something terrible has happened to her.’ Heseltine looked as if he might burst into tears.
‘It’s nothing to do with you. It was all over, probably, before you ever found the note.’
‘Yes.’ Heseltine was looking at his full glass of sherry, which seemed to puzzle him. ‘I saw your name in The Times, Mr Denton. At least I supposed it was you. About somebody assaulted behind your house?’
‘I didn’t know it had been in the papers. Yes. Kind of a strange tale. Somebody seems to have been watching me.’
‘Why?’
‘I wish I knew. Or, I think I know, but I wish I understood.’ He told him in a few sentences about Albert Cosgrove, the letters, the man with the red moustache.
‘And he was in that house, writing some sort of thing that used your words?’
‘One of my paragraphs, anyway. “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” But I don’t feel flattered.’
‘Soiled, rather, I should think. And he wanted all your books.’
‘Signed copies.’
‘Does an author sign many copies?’
‘To friends, sometimes. I’m not much for sending them to people to impress them.’
‘They’d be rather rare then, wouldn’t they? Maybe he’s tried to find them at the rare-book shops. You might try there to see.’
Denton grinned and got up. ‘I’ve promised the police I won’t go poking my nose into their business any more.’ He held out his hand. ‘I don’t think “Good luck” is what I should say, but I hope things work out.’
‘Oh, they’ll work out, I’m sure!’ Heseltine’s laugh suggested a state near the edge.
Denton got his coat and hat and said he could let himself out. He said from the door, ‘You’ve got a lawyer and all that?’
‘Counsel? Oh, yes. They provide that. Plus my father’s hired somebody to advise the military man.’ He smiled. ‘It will be done with full legal pomp.’
‘It may not be as bad as you think.’
‘I think they mean to parade me in front of the regiment with my buttons torn off. Did they do that in the American army?’
‘War makes people bloodthirsty. You’d think it would do the opposite.’
‘Only to those of us who are “sensitive, snivelling women”. My CO’s words.’
Denton stood in the cold sunshine at the entrance to Albany Court. He knew the machinery of military law, its grinding-up of anybody who seemed weak. War likes blockheads, he thought - those too stubborn to turn aside. It dislikes nuance, hesitation, compassion.
Insofar as he was capable of feeling pity, he felt it for Heseltine. He also felt anger and the decisive man’s contempt for the half-hearted. The military, as he had seen too well, could always find a desk for incompetence, but it drove weakness from the room: it feared that weakness was catching. Heseltine, he thought, was both incompetent and weak. The system was going to grind him into cat’s meat.
There was a light under Atkins’s downstairs door when Denton let himself in that evening. The soldier-servant would be reading the newspaper, he supposed, or possibly his Bible if his enthusiasm still ran to it. The truth was, he had almost no idea of Atkins’s private life, his sex life least of all. Atkins treated a nearby pub as a club, had what seemed a considerable popularity among the nearby housemaids. The social system, however, was rigged against them, Denton knew: occasions were few, privacy almost impossible, the women’s fear of losing a place extreme. Atkins, he guessed, did what soldiers - Denton included - did: found a whorehouse, perhaps the cheap one near Pentonville Road.
Settling in his chair, Denton mused on the difference between Atkins and Heseltine. How easily Atkins would have dealt with whatever mistake Heseltine had made - called in favours from the sergeants and the sergeant major, half-blackmailed his officer (about whom he’d always have known juicy bits), got the company orderly to mislay whatever paperwork implicated him. Heseltine, on the other hand, probably hadn’t so much as objected.
Denton read one of his psychological books about obsession and impersonation. None of it seemed to apply to Albert Cosgrove. About ten, Atkins put his head in and asked if he wanted a carob drink - an affectation he’d picked up in India.
‘I’m having a whisky.’
‘Oh well, carob isn’t in it, then.’ He started away.
‘How was chapel?’
‘Rum - absolutely rum. Saddest place I ever was. People with grey faces and no smiles singing about hope and heaven in the hereafter. I think I’ll concentrate on my secular interests for a bit.’
‘How did the pugilist do in the garden?’
‘Demon worker. Strong as an ox. Did you know he’s descended from Moses’s brother? Says he is, at any rate - you can never tell if people are pulling the wool. Brings the Book of Exodus alive, I must say.’
‘He calls himself the Stepney Jew-Boy.’
‘Told me that - in a voice that made me think I’d better not use the term meself.’
‘Wise. Is his first name Aaron, then?’
‘Hyam, last name Cohan. Peculiar names they have.’
‘Did you ask him what he thought of the name Atkins?’ Denton turned around in the chair to look down the room. ‘Can you take something to be photographed tomorrow? There’s that place on Oxford Street—’
‘Barraud’s.’
‘That’s the one.’ He rummaged in Mary Thomason’s trunk and took out the drawing of the female head with the little sketches in the corners. ‘I want a good copy of the head - size of a sheet of writing paper or thereabouts is all right - and then photos of the little drawings in the corners. Oversized, if they can do them. And one full-size of the whole thing.’
Atkins had come down the room and was leaning over him. ‘I thought we agreed she’s dead.’
‘“We” speculated she was probably dead. I’m not ready to go that far. I want a picture I can show around.’
‘You don’t even know it’s her.’
‘That’s what I’ll find out.’
‘Why?’
Denton looked at him, amused and annoyed. ‘Because like you I’m nosy.’
‘Oh, well - if you’re going to take that line—’ Atkins picked up the drawing. ‘One face-only, one each the little squiggles in the corners, one the lot.’
‘Fastest service. The drawing has to be back by noon in case Mrs Striker comes for the trunk.’ Atkins looked blank. ‘She’s going to take it back where she got it.’
‘I’d pitch it in the Grand Union canal.’ Atkins moved off, grumbling to himself. Rupert, his stump of tail going like a metronome set on Presto, followed.
Denton wanted to take a day away from all of it - the novel, Albert Cosgrove, Mary Thomason, even Janet Striker - and he had a fleeting notion of going to Hammersmith and rowing on the river, then a cut off the joint or something even rougher at the Dove. He didn’t do it, of course, but pushed himself to his desk before eight the next day and made himself write. His brain didn’t want to work - it, too, wanted to be on the river, being washed clean - but he bullied it and began to put words down on the paper as if he were trying to gouge them into it. He wasn’t well into it until ten, and then things started to flow, and he heard the bell pulled by the front door. He muttered a curse, got up and closed his own door, and minutes later was interrupted by a knock.
‘No!’
Another knock.
Denton wrenched the door open. ‘What now?’
‘Policeman below name of Markson. Wants to talk to you.’
‘Oh—! Damn him and damn Albert Cosgrove!’
He heard Atkins mutter, ‘For all the good it does,’ and he made himself more or less presentable and went down. Markson, whom he had last seen after the scuffle in the house behind, was standing by the sitting-room door, a bowler in one hand and a black box tucked under the same arm, looking straight down at Rupert, who had his chin planted in the detective’s crotch. Denton took that in, but what he was focused on was Mary Thomason’s trunk, which was about three feet from Markson’s left leg.
‘I see that Rupert’s found you. You’ve been told he’s friendly?’
‘Telling me so himself, isn’t he?’
Atkins was behind Denton now, over by the fireplace. Denton looked towards him, made a face and rolled his eyes towards the trunk before saying to the detective, ‘Ah, I’m working, you know.’
‘Yes, sir, but so are most people. No good time to talk to the Metropolitan Police, is what it comes down to.’
‘Is this about Cosgrove? Why are you coming to talk to me now? All that happened last week!’
‘Yes, sir. It won’t surprise you to hear that the police have been busy, too, I’m sure.’
While this had gone on, Atkins, with one smooth movement, had picked up a travelling rug from the chair opposite Denton’s and draped it over Mary Thomason’s trunk, then brushed the chair seat as if that was what he had meant to do all along, and thrown nonexistent dirt into the coals. ‘Beg pardon, sir,’ he said now in a voice that made both men look at him. Atkins had put on a stern expression. ‘You expressly wanted the sweep in this morning while you wasn’t in this room. If I may, I recommend you repair to your study so as not to suffer the discomfort of the chimney.’
‘Oh - ah - yes, I’d forgotten. Detective Markson - if you don’t mind - upstairs—?’
Markson murmured apologies for upsetting the whole house, but by the time he’d finished they were on their way up to the next floor. Denton’s bedroom-study looked sufficiently workmanlike, Denton thought - Atkins had long since made the bed and hung up the clothes - and he pulled out a chair for Markson as he sat at his desk. ‘As you see - I was working—’
‘I’ll make this quick, sir. Only two things, really. First, a question or two.’ His questions were the ones Denton had already answered - why he’d gone into the house behind, was there any possibility that ‘the man Cosgrove’s’ letters were still about somewhere. Had he received any more letters from the man Cosgrove? When they were done with those, Markson opened the black box and held up the manuscript that Albert Cosgrove had left in the other house.
‘You’ve seen this, sir?’
‘Some of it.’
‘Which you allege is lifted from a book of your own, is it?’
‘I thought so.’
‘Which one?’
‘It’s the opening paragraph of The Demon of the Plains. Then I thought there was some from my outline for the book I’m trying to finish.’
‘Left in this house while you were away, sir?’
‘In a drawer of this desk.’ He pulled open the drawer as if to prove that, there being a drawer there, it must be where the outline had been left.
Markson sniffed. Munro had said Markson was capable; Denton would take his word for it. The questions seemed to him repetitive and obvious, but Markson was perhaps the dogged kind who dotted every i. Now, he said, ‘We’d like to have your reading of this manuscript, Mr Denton.’ Before Denton could say anything, he went on, ‘Literary criticism isn’t common at New Scotland Yard. We’d like to know what you see in it - if there’s anything more of your own, for one thing. And what you find in it - what sort of mind this chap has, what he thinks he’s doing.’
‘Detective, I’m trying to finish a book!’
‘And we’re trying to catch a criminal that attacked you, sir.’
‘He didn’t hurt me.’
‘Also broke into the house over there and, it looks like, broke into this house as well. Anything else missing, by the way?’
Denton stared at the desk. ‘I think a pen.’ It sounded absurd. He’d noticed only that morning that a pen he sometimes used wasn’t there.
‘Yes, sir. That sounds right. Anything else? How about clothing? ’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘Underclothing?’ The question surprised Denton, suggested a sophistication he hadn’t expected in Markson.
‘You’d have to ask Atkins. I don’t keep track.’
‘Yes, sir. You’ll read the manuscript?’
‘Oh - if I have to—’ He reached for it.
‘At New Scotland Yard, I’m afraid, sir. Evidence. I had to sign for it, myself. This afternoon?’
Denton allowed himself the luxury, later to be the cause of self-flagellation, of blowing up. It had no effect. One of the qualities Munro may have been thinking of when he’d said that Markson was capable was a calm stubbornness. When Denton’s tantrum was over, Markson said, ‘Yes, sir. What time would be best for you?’
Denton had another, lesser eruption. When he had subsided, he was aware of voices downstairs, then that one was a woman’s, which he sorted out as Janet Striker’s. He was out of the chair and down the stairs in seconds. She was standing at the far end of the room with Atkins and the dog. The trunk, which he’d feared Atkins would already have uncovered again, wasn’t there.
‘I’ve just come for the—’ she began.
‘Detective!’ Denton shouted. ‘I’m with a detective from the Metropolitan Police. Uuuhhh—’ He was aware of Markson’s coming up behind him.
Janet Striker smiled and held out her hand. ‘How nice to see you again, Mr Denton. I’ve just come for the donation you promised us.’
‘Aaahh—’ He was shaking her hand. ‘This is Mrs Striker of the Society for the Improvement of Wayward Women. Um - Detective Markson.’
Then Denton said he’d write a cheque; she said that would be very fine of him; Atkins took the dog away; and Markson said he would go. ‘Three o’clock today, sir?’
‘Oh, if I have to. Yes, all right - all right—’
Markson went down the stairs quickly, seeming light on his feet. Moments later, Denton heard Atkins close the front door on him.
Janet Striker was giggling. He’d never heard her giggle before; it was a minor revelation. He said, ‘I was afraid you’d mention the damned trunk.’
‘I know!’ She went off into laughter again, this time more boisterously. He thought perhaps he was seeing some sort of metamorphosis in her, the result of leaving the Society - maybe of leaving an entire way of life. ‘Is he gone?’
Denton looked out, didn’t see Markson, glanced up and down out of habit for Albert Cosgrove. ‘You brought a cab.’
‘I’m not about to carry the trunk to Euston station on my shoulder. Well!’ She laughed again. ‘That was fun.’
‘I have to go to New Scotland Yard at three to read that damned lunatic’s scribbles.’
‘I’ll be on my way back from Biggleswade by then. Did you get the drawing photographed?’
‘Atkins did, I hope.’ He turned to bellow for Atkins, found him standing ten feet away with the trunk in his arms.
‘Of course I did,’ Atkins said. ‘Prints ready tomorrow.’
‘Where’s the drawing?’
‘In the trunk.’
She interrupted, ‘We found it under most of the other things.’
‘I put it towards the bottom, with the sketchbook, madam.’
‘You’re a pearl of great price.’
Atkins smiled the gracious smile of royalty receiving tribute. ‘I’ll just put it in the cab.’
When he was gone, Denton said, ‘I’m losing my mind, between the book and these interruptions.’
‘No you’re not. You’re the sanest man I’ve ever known - also the best. There! You see what comes out when I’m contented.’
‘So I’m forgiven? Will you have dinner with me?’
‘Can’t - I’m having dinner with my solicitor. It’s all about money, mostly about when I get some from the lawsuit. I’m as poor as a church mouse, Denton - getting that money is important to me. What did Geddys say?’
‘Geddys. Geddys? Oh, dammit - I forgot—’ It seemed weeks ago that he’d said he’d talk to Geddys again about the man’s apparent lie about knowing where Mary Thomason lived.
‘No harm done. I’m off, then.’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘Yes, tomorrow, absolutely tomorrow.’
‘Kettner’s again?’ They were going down the stairs. Atkins, coming in, held the door for her. They made their arrangements and then she was gone. Denton went back to work.
Albert Cosgrove’s manuscript was a painful, sometimes bewildering thing to read. There was a story - or there had started out to be one - that had been infected by Denton’s outline, which the writer had apparently tried to blend with his own tale. The result was like a crossing of radically different strains, producing a monstrosity.
Or perhaps it would have been a monstrosity anyway. Denton guessed that Cosgrove wasn’t able to concentrate. This seemed contradictory in somebody obsessed, but the obsession, he thought, was not quite the same as what he was writing: that is, the story - novel, novella, whatever it was meant to be - was about obsession but it was not the object of obsession.
In the story with which Cosgrove had started, a young violinist who wants to know the ‘secret’ of greatness steals a violin bow. It belongs to a famous violinist who becomes a menace - never explained or defined - that looms over the young man. The bow does make him ‘great’ but it comes at a cost - a demon, who appears each time he plays. The demon takes a payment each time - first, the ability to sleep; then boils that appear on the violinist’s face; then the use of a foot. However, by that point (which, for Denton, happened far too soon - Cosgrove was having the non-writer’s problem ‘making it long enough’) Denton’s outline had been forced in, and a wife appeared, domestic scenes that had no connection to anything else were added, attempts at Denton’s sort of realistic detail were tacked on. Then the demon announced that he wanted the wife for himself, and then a page - the last - seemed to suggest that the demon and the ‘great’ violinist from whom the bow had been stolen were the same, or somehow connected, or at least in communication.
The prose was bad. Too many words, Denton would have said, too many long words, too much pretentious pseudo-philosophy. Some of it reminded him of Wagner, whom he despised. When Munro put his head in - Denton was reading, as promised, at New Scotland Yard - Denton groaned.
‘Not delighting you, is it?’ Munro limped in. ‘Getting anything? ’
Denton held up a list he had jotted down. Munro took it, raised it towards the gas, tipped his head back. ‘“Intelligent, incoherent, educated - Latin, Greek? reads books - knows mine well, also Shakespeare, poets; young - doesn’t know real life; never poor, never hungry, never married.” Sounds like most of the lads at our great universities.’
‘I think he’s unbalanced.’
‘I could have told you that without reading his slop.’
‘You’ve read it?’
‘Tried. That’s why we called on you.’
‘I think he’s trying to make a fable about himself and Art with a capital A - something about having ability but not making it because of some older fellow who’s in the way, the older one being there through magic. Except the magic is also the Art - he’s pretty confused. The idea might make it as a kind of horror tale - my editor’s speciality - but Cosgrove can’t do it. He wants to be a great writer - or thinks he wants to be - but people like me use our magic to keep him unknown. Does that make sense?’
‘He might try some honest work.’
‘He doesn’t know what work is.’
‘Well off?’
‘There’s a sinister female who wanders through it. I think she represents something, but I’m damned if I know what it is. But she’s always “richly dressed” and “glittering with jewels”. He hates her, but there’s no reason why.’
‘So you’re Harlequin, with the magic wand.’
‘Violin bow, in his case - not so far off.’
‘So, he’s spying on you to find your magic wand.’
‘He may have stolen a pen, in fact. Sort of like a wand.’ Denton stood and stretched. ‘He doesn’t really believe all that, at least not yet. I mean, he’s writing a tale he knows - has to know - is fantasy. So he’s sane, in that sense. But doing the other things he’s done - spying on me, following me, breaking into houses - they aren’t sane.’
‘We’ve an entire category of criminals who do nothing but break into houses.’
‘But they’re after things of value. Things they can sell for money. They’re sane - criminal but sane. We understand the motive - it’s the basis of society and the Empire, right? Make money. But not Albert Cosgrove.’
Munro put the paper in a pocket. ‘You done, then?’
‘Hell will be having to read that thing again.’
‘I’ll have your list copied, give it to Markson.’
‘It won’t help.’
‘What would help is an arrest. He hasn’t followed you, I take it.’
‘Ask your people. I see them behind me all the time. Call them off, will you? I’m sick of having somebody always looking over my shoulder.’
Munro laughed. ‘They were walked off their feet yesterday. One of them told Markson he was going to take up a collection to pay you to take a cab - hadn’t walked so much since he was a constable. I’ll talk to Markson about pulling them off - may be too soon yet.’
They trudged up the long corridor that led past the CID offices.
At the stairs, Munro asked again if he’d reported ‘that missing girl’. When Denton admitted he hadn’t, but it was a dead issue, anyway, Munro walked him back to the corridor where Denton had had the unsatisfactory conversation with Guillam, what seemed like years ago. Munro pointed at a door. ‘You want that one. Take you three minutes.’
‘You said to stay away from Guillam.’
‘Yes, but best to do things by the book.’ Munro walked away.
Inside the office was a young man with spots, wearing a thick wool suit that had belonged to somebody else ten years before. He looked up with what first seemed to be fright, then a stern expression that was ridiculous on his soft face - practising to be a bureaucrat, Denton thought. He explained what he wanted; the young man threw several imagined obstacles in his way; Denton got over them; the young man sighed and took out a form and a pen.
‘Name? That the given name or the family name? Given name? Wot d’you mean, you don’t use your given name? Address?’
They got as far as ‘relationship to the MP’. When Denton said there was no relationship and he hadn’t even known the young woman, the clerk looked around the little office as if help might be there somewhere, then bolted through the door. Munro’s three minutes became fifteen, and then the door opened again and Guillam came in. The clerk lingered behind with a look of ‘now you’re for it’ on his face.
Guillam said, ‘Oh. It’s you. What’s this, then?’
‘I’m reporting a missing person.’
Guillam looked at the form, on which of course he must already have read Denton’s name. ‘No relation? Not even a friend?’
Denton stayed dead calm and explained about the letter.
‘We’re the police. We have serious work to do. We don’t have time for you spinning tales out of nothing.’
‘Munro told me this is the right thing to do.’
‘Oh, it’s Donnie Munro, is it. I should have known. He cuts no ice here. This is my bailiwick.’ He handed the form to the clerk. ‘Finish it and file it with a note, “awaiting more information”.’ Guillam’s brutal face was red, perhaps only from bending to talk to the seated Denton. He said, ‘Don’t bother us with a lot of questions about it,’ and he slammed out.
The clerk went quickly through the rest of the form, almost sneering now, and said, as if he were dismissing a pensioner, ‘That’ll be all.’
‘I can go?’
‘Yes, you can go.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘What?’
‘I want you to be sure.’
‘What’s that?’
‘If you aren’t sure, I’d feel better staying here until you are.’
‘If you’re having me on, I’ll make trouble!’
‘So long as you’re sure.’
The clerk stared at him. The bureaucrat and the little boy in him struggled. Finally he said in an unsure voice, ‘I’m sure, then.’
‘Good. Then I’ll go.’ Denton went out.
On his way home, he stopped to talk to Geddys. Only a woman was there. She told him Mr Geddys had gone away on a buying trip and would be back in two weeks.
At home, Atkins greeted him with a dour face and ‘You’ve a letter. From him.’
Denton groaned.
He teased the paper out of its envelope with his pocket-knife and opened it without touching anything but the edges. It said:
You have disappointed me most terribly, and just when we were approaching an understanding. I read in the press that you were in the confederacy against me with the police, I cant comprehend how this can be as we share our profound feeling for Art. Now I must ask you to return what of mine has been stolen, I mean my BOOK, which is not now in the place where I had secured it. I will not stoop to believing that you are using my work on which to model something of your own, much less purloin some of my actual words, but only the return of my MS will assure me that all is well between us and you mean no theft. DO NOT TEST MY RESPECT FOR YOU. I am heartbroken and abject that you have chosen to treat me in this way.
Yours in sorrow.
Albert Cosgrove
‘Rather got the shoe on the wrong foot, hasn’t he,’ Atkins said. He had been reading over Denton’s shoulder.
‘He’s turning.’
‘Turning what?’
‘From adoration to dislike. You see it in hero-worship. What’s constant is the lack of balance.’
‘Loony, as I’ve said a hundred times now.’
‘This’ll have to go to the police.’ He laughed, a single bark that remained humourless. ‘I asked Munro to pull the followers off me. Just in time.’ He looked at the letter again. ‘“I must ask you to return what of mine has been stolen, I mean my BOOK—” He didn’t read about that in the newspaper. The bastard’s been back in that house!’
‘I thought the coppers were watching it.’
‘One posted in the front. How difficult would it be to get into that garden from Lamb’s Conduit Street - come along our passage and through our garden, for that matter?’
‘Rupert’d have heard him.’
Denton looked at the letter again. ‘Check over the garden first thing in the morning. He’s not above leaving something poisoned for the dog, just out of spite - or he won’t be in a little while.’