Chapter Two
Sergeant Atkins came on his tiptoes into the
parlour-cum-all-purpose room at five in the morning, no stranger to
doors that banged at an hour when his employer was supposed to be
happily between the sheets with his lovey, or to gents who drank
too much to wash away some trouble. Indeed, there was Denton in his
armchair, snoring; there was the mostly empty decanter; there were
his boots, his sodden tailcoat, his necktie. And, in one of his
pockets, a box of Café Royal vestas.
And there was the newspaper. Grisly
Murder.
Atkins picked up the coat and the tie and took them
downstairs to dry in front of the coal stove. He went up again and
got the decanter and carried it to the pantry, got the newspaper,
took it downstairs, put his feet up on his own fender, read it.
Cutting through the journalistic fustian, Atkins concluded that not
a great deal was known except that a woman ‘of evil reputation’ had
been murdered in the Minories - disembowelled and probably, the
prose a little murky here, something cut from her body that had
formerly been part of it.
He read the rest of the newspaper, concentrating on
the personals and skipping over the international news (Small
change to me what you do in India now I’m not there) but
glancing at the Boer War stories to see if any of his old mates
were catching it. The court calendar also took up a little of his
time. Oscar Wilde’s death got only a grunt. At six, he went
upstairs again with coffee and put the tray down beside
Denton.
Denton woke. He looked like hell.
‘Coffee, sir?’
Denton, still sprawled as he had slept, looked
up.
‘Water,’ he croaked.
Atkins poured water from the carboy in the alcove.
Handing it to Denton, he said, ‘Big night at the Royal?’
‘Oscar Wilde was dead.’
‘Still is, according to the paper.’
‘You hear me come in?’ he said.
‘Hard not to.’ Atkins knelt to light the kindling
in the grate. ‘I don’t see your coat or hat.’
‘Oh, Christ. I must have left them at the Royal.
No, no - I was in Jermyn Street without them in the rain - they
must be at Mrs Gosden’s.’ He drank the water and held out the glass
for more. ‘Mrs Gosden gave me my walking papers. I shouldn’t tell
you that. Bad form, right?’
‘You’re the boss.’
Denton laughed - a kind of strangled cough.
Boss was a word he’d taught Atkins to use instead of the
nicer employer or master. ‘I wasn’t the boss last
night - either of her or of myself.’
‘You want me to go and get your coat and hat off
her?’
‘No.’ He drank more water. ‘I wouldn’t put you
through that.’
‘All one to me. Servants’ entrance, everybody
polite but a bit chilly, here comes the coat and hat, off I
go.’
‘No!’ Perhaps Emma would send it back. Get this
out of my sight. Except it wouldn’t be in her sight; it would
be in old Alice’s sight. Oh, well. Except that it was a very good
coat. And it had his derringer in the pocket. ‘Send the boy,’ he
said.
‘What boy?’
‘Whatever boy you send with messages.’
‘I send any body happens to be loitering
about.’
‘Well, do that, then.’
Atkins made a face. ‘Any kid I can find on this
street would have your coat and hat, not to mention a gold-headed
walking stick, at the Jew pawnbroker’s quicker than I could say Gog
and Magog. I’ll go for them myself.’
‘No!’ Denton had shouted the word; he pulled
himself back. ‘Sorry. Just—’ He made a patting motion, palm down,
in the air between them. ‘Leave it.’
Atkins shrugged.
Denton finished the water. ‘I’ll be going out
later.’
‘To make some money, I hope. The bills ain’t been
paid yet this month.’ Atkins, always nervous about money, knew that
Denton was, as he put it, ‘a little close to the edge.’ ‘Better
spend your time finishing a book, I say.’
‘Don’t say!’
‘If I might suggest—’
‘Don’t suggest!’ Denton lay back in the chair.
‘Bring up a couple of eggs at eight and, oh, you know - bacon.
Gammon, whatever the hell you call it. Bread - plenty of
bread!’
Atkins said no more but went out on tiptoe, as he
had come in earlier. He had run into the savage mood before.
Inside every gent, a savage. Lost his honey, is it. Bloody
murder.
Two hours later, Denton still lay collapsed in his
easy chair. The back pages of the newspaper lay tented next to him
on the floor. Atkins was standing, a breakfast tray and the front
section of the newspaper in his hands, wearing an ancient velvet
robe given him in India by some long-dead officer.
‘You look like a down-at-heels maharajah,’ Denton
said.
‘Happy to give you the name of my tailor. You want
tea?’
‘No, I want to know what you think of Mulcahy’s
story now. What he said was very like what happened to this
tart.’
‘I think it’s bollocks, just like I did eight hours
ago, no, ten hours ago, how time flies when you’re up early waiting
on the master. Eight o’clock, you asked for eggs.’
‘Put them down and sit, you make me tired standing
there. Why bollocks?’
‘It doesn’t hang together.’ Atkins hooked a
straight chair over with his left foot and sat in it, the newspaper
still in his hands. ‘What’ve we got here?’ He rattled the paper.
‘Some poor bint got her throat slit and other unmentionable damage
inflicted, and so we’re supposed to believe it was the
reincarnation of the Ripper, so as to sell more papers. Mulcahy
barges in here and gives you a long tale about cutting up women and
being boys together with the Ripper, so you jump to the conclusion
he was telling the truth. It’s bollocks!’
‘Coincidence, that he told the story last night,
and last night the woman gets murdered?’
‘Maybe he’s one of them psychics. More likely
getting his jollies by telling tales.’
‘He was really frightened, though.’
‘Probably scares himself for the fun of it. Like a
kiddie. Why didn’t he bring them newspaper clippings he talked
about? Why didn’t he give you this boyhood chum’s name? Eh?’
‘He did give me the name of the town and the man’s
first victim. I could tell somebody I know in the police.’
‘“First victim,” oh, yes! My hat! You going to some
pal in the coppers because of Mulcahy? Name of God why?’
‘Maybe it’s evidence.’
Denton slouched deeper into the chair and began to
peel his right boot off by pushing on the heel with the toe of the
left one. Atkins said he would ruin his boots and bent down to
help, and Denton swung his legs away, muttering that he could take
off his own damned boots. ‘Give me that,’ he said, meaning the
paper. He read as he went on ruining them, then flexing his toes
when they were off. ‘“Young woman of evil reputation named Stella
Minter.” Evil reputation, good God.’
‘In short, a tart.’
Denton grunted. ‘“Discovered about midnight in a
horribly mutilated condition in the squalor of her bloodstained
room in the Minories.” I wonder when she was killed.’ He was eating
the eggs and the bread with one hand, holding the newspaper with
the other.
‘Because you’re thinking that Mulcahy could of done
it and then come here, right? That’s far-fetched. I’ll have some of
that tea, myself. Was Mulcahy bloodstained? Had he just washed all
his clothes, including that suit that looked like it was made out
of old blankets? Was his hat red with gore? I think not.’
‘But his story makes a kind of sense in one way,
Sergeant - it puts a man who mutilates women in London so that he
and Mulcahy see each other; then Mulcahy comes to me and the
murderer goes to, what’s her name? Stella Minter.’
‘Who says that Mulcahy and the murderer saw each
other in London, if they saw each other? Could of been
Birmingham, for that matter, what with modern trains. Why d’you
suppose the Ripper never struck in Birmingham, by the bye? Pure
prejudice.’
Denton dropped the newspaper to the floor. ‘We
should talk to Mulcahy again.’
‘Oho, “we”. Well we’d better do something
about our condition if we are going looking for a needle in
a haystack. You’ve brandy sloshing about in your eyeballs like the
bubbles in a mason’s level. You ever looked for a little nobody
like him in London, even stone-cold sober, Captain?’
Denton grunted again. He saw the size of the
undertaking. ‘Any help in that hat of his?’ He was half asleep
again. The ruined breakfast plate was on the floor next to
him.
‘Thought you’d never ask. Initial R - R. Mulcahy.
Randolph, Robert, Reginald, Rex, Ronald, Richard, Roderick—No
address, no shop name, maker’s mark almost erased by his sweat but
can be read as that of the cheapest, biggest hat-maker in England.
No help there.’
‘R. Mulcahy. We’ll work on it.’ Denton stood, not
too steadily, and groped his way down the long room to the stairs.
‘I feel like hell.’
His bedroom, which was directly above the alcove,
the dumb waiter, the breakfast table and part of his parlour,
served also as his workroom. The bed, narrow to the point of
monasticism, took up only the wall towards the street; then came an
enormous armoire, hideous but essential in a room without a closet;
then his desk, a vast structure intended for two partners working
face-to-face, filled by him with the mess of one man working alone
- at the moment, a half-finished novel that he was having trouble
with. Regrettably, it represented his best chance for filling his
bank account. Here, he spent most of his mornings, writing with a
stub of pencil, drinking French coffee, staring straight ahead over
a brick wall, two back-to-back privies, and the rear of a house
that faced the next street. Now, seeing it in the double gloom of a
hangover and Emma’s dismissal, it all looked grey - the desk, the
windows, the rain, the blurred wall of the other house.
‘Grey as a ball of lint,’ he said aloud. His voice
was husky. He cleared his throat. He found he didn’t like ‘grey as
a ball of lint’. He cleared his throat again. ‘Grey as the bottom
of a boot.’ Better. But so depressing that he felt even worse.
‘Damn her!’ he groaned. Still. He fell into the desk chair
and wrote Emma an apology and then sent Atkins to find a boy to
deliver it to her. Atkins, always worrying about clothes, reminded
him that he was supposed to be going out to dinner that evening;
Denton cursed, because Emma would be there, the reason in fact that
he’d been invited in the first place. He wrote another note, this
one to the hostess, pleading illness. He couldn’t face Emma. Alone
again, he stared at the pile of manuscript, tried to think about
it, found his mind sloping off to Mulcahy, Emma, the dead tart. He
stood up, leaned his hands on the desk, stared down at its scarred
surface.
Odd, that he should end up at a desk. Or perhaps he
wouldn’t, as it wasn’t yet the end. ‘We all end up in a box, sooner
or later,’ he muttered. Like the woman who had been mutilated and
killed, or the other way around, last night. For her, the box had
come much sooner than later. A dangerous profession, prostitution.
Much safer to be a ‘nice’ woman like Emma Gosden. Damn her.
He kept headache powders in a drawer; the search
for them was irritating and over-long. He gulped more water, the
white powder drifting in it like sand, then headed up the stairs to
the top floor, thinking about nice women and women who weren’t
nice. Nice, not nice. What was ‘not nice’ about a
sixteen-year-old who’d just come to town from a farm? Was she less
‘nice’ than Emma, who’d had at least four lovers before him, had
visited a whorehouse in Paris so she could look on from a hiding
place, and had had him and somebody else on the string at the same
time? How contradictory, now he thought about it, that Emma was
‘nice’ at all, the quality preserved by - what? Manner? No, money.
And the whores, what was not ‘nice’ except their doing openly what
Emma did in private?
In the attic, he forced himself to pick up a
forty-pound iron bar. Each curl seemed to push all his blood into
his aching head.
‘Bad,’ he gasped aloud. He was thinking of Emma,
her behaviour towards him - his towards her, for that matter - but
the word would have done for all sorts of things he’d done in his
life. Or so it seemed from the perspective of the hangover. Or all
manner of things that men did to women. Like Stella Minter, the
extreme case. He screwed his face up, wondering if that was what he
had wanted for Emma in that moment of red blindness. God,
no.
He finished twenty curls and put the bar down with
a thump. The attic smelled of dry wood, a whiff of fir, dust, smoke
from below, the fresh odour of rain. He had two Flobert pistols up
there, ‘parlour pistols’ some called them because their charge was
so weak you could shoot them in a parlour. Or so they said. It was
Denton’s view that if you hit somebody in the eye with one of the
little bullets, you might find yourself a murderer. He perhaps had
too much respect for firearms. But, then, a lot of
experience.
Nice women, ‘not nice’ women, the illusions of
chastity and virginity. He’d never had a virgin except his wife,
and what a horror that had been. They had both been nineteen, the
Civil War just over. Huddled in the cold bedroom of a boarding
house.
‘Cruel to her,’ he said aloud. He set up a target
and walked the length of the attic and aimed. He had been over his
marriage ten thousand times in his mind; it always made him wince
with shame. He could have waited, he knew now, been gentle with
her, helped her. But he had thought that consummation had to be
immediate or she would escape him, become his sister and not his
wife. At nineteen, he had known no better. So, tears, bloody
sheets, a terrible train journey north and west with her in pain.
When she’d got pregnant, she’d fled the farm for her parents’ house
in St Louis, had had both the boys there, gone back to the farm
each time with reluctance. But died on the farm.
Like the murdered tart, in the box sooner, not
later.
He fired one pistol, then the other; reloaded,
fired; reloaded. His head was spinning, his breath was foul, but he
didn’t miss at this distance. He fired again, both pistols, and
when he walked down and looked at the target, he could have covered
the six bullet holes with his thumbnail.
He went to a rowing contraption and made himself
row for half an hour.
As he strained, he thought about Mulcahy, the girl,
Emma.
Mulcahy had certainly been terrified by
something. Whether he’d actually seen what he’d described or
not was another matter. Was Mulcahy one of those lunatics who lived
horrors that existed only in his own mind? Had Mulcahy opened a
window on some inner hell and been appalled by it? But then why had
he lied about it - for surely he’d lied? And why had he thought he
needed protection? Or was that simply some extreme realization of
his fantasy, as Atkins had suggested?
Pouring sweat, his robe discarded and the old shirt
unbuttoned, Denton rested on the oars, panting, heart pounding, his
head aching to the beat of it. He pulled himself up, his legs weak,
and towelled himself and then lay down next to a hundred-pound
dumb-bell. The iron mistress. Like being in bed with it.
Emma weighed only fifteen pounds more. On top of me, she felt
light. Sweet. The sweetness of women, warm, soft— He dragged
the dumb-bell on top of him, arching his back and raising his
abdomen so the bar rested on it, then getting his forearms under it
and hoisting it above him. Twenty lifts, the later ones forcing the
blood into his head again so that it felt as if the veins would
explode.
Had Mulcahy murdered the girl? Was it as simple as
that? But why come to Denton, then?
He had his cap-and-ball pistol from the American
Civil War; he removed it from its case, checked, as he always did,
that it wasn’t loaded (but he knew it wasn’t loaded, hadn’t been
loaded in ten years), and stood with the pistol held at arm’s
length for five minutes, holding the sights on the target. Despite
brandy, hangover, strenuous exercise, the pistol never
wavered.
He was at the Metropolitan Police Additional
Headquarters before eleven, a ridiculous Gothic building from which
passers-by expected to hear groans and sighs, perhaps muffled
screams. The building had in fact been a warren of legal offices
and dismal flats before the expanding police, already bursting out
of New Scotland Yard, had acquired it ‘temporarily’. Its blackened
stones were grim at best, horrible in the rain, and now that it was
an annexe for the police, it had the air of a prison. The vast and
sombre exterior led visitors to expect inside huge, shadowed vistas
with topless staircases and vaults and chains; as it was, Denton
was merely irritated by what he found - a setting for bureaucratic
tedium. Long, uncarpeted passages led to enclosed staircases with,
nonetheless, dark newels and banisters, and here and there were
floors that sloped, others that abruptly took a step up or down. It
was said that new occupants got lost in trying to get about the
building. It made the hung-over Denton dizzy.
On the third floor, past the gloomy entrance hall
and the atrium that poked up through the building as if seeking
light and air, up some stairs and around a balcony that looked down
into the well, and up and around again and up, was the office of
the Assistant Under-Secretary to the Assistant Secretary (not to be
confused with the Permanent Under-Secretary to the Permanent
Assistant Secretary, both career civil servants) who was in a sense
responsible, although in fact not really responsible, for the
apparatus that investigated the Metropolitan Police - not in a
criminal sense, but a business one: its stated goal was efficiency.
The Assistant Under-Secretary was a man named Hector
Hench-Rose.
‘Denton!’ he shouted. ‘Ha-ha!’ Hench-Rose had
ginger hair and a ginger moustache and was, at forty, already
seriously into belly after years of pouring himself into the
uniform of one of the higher-numbered regiments. He was affable,
courageous and useless as an administrator, and so had been given
the equivalent of the rank of superintendent and put one step down
from the top of the division with no more experience of police work
than if he had spent his life running a home for foundlings.
‘Hector.’ Denton liked Hector Hench-Rose in a
qualified way; they were opposites without ever being enemies.
Hench-Rose was energetic, cheerful and happy; Denton was listless,
dour and doubtful that happiness existed. He liked to warm himself
at Hector’s fire now and then.
‘Place stinks,’ Hector said now. He was leading
Denton to a chair in an office so dark it could have been used to
store coal. One window gave on to an air shaft; the only other
light came from a gas lamp above the desk. The rain, nonetheless,
managed to reach that only window and trickle down it with sooty
smears. ‘Something in the chimney. Birds, I think. Place full of
smoke half the time, then we get a puff of wind and this
unspeakable smell.’
‘I had raccoons in a chimney once,’ Denton
said.
‘Raccoons! Those are the buggers with eye-rings,
aren’t they. Look like burglars in an operetta. What’d they
do?’
‘They stank.’
This amused Hector mightily. He offered a cigar,
tea, an early drink; Denton refused them all. Hector made social
small talk, mentioned the opera by way of getting to Emma, as if he
knew about her and Denton. His tone was a little odd, perhaps more
inquisitive than usual; Hench-Rose was an enthusiastic gossip but
usually discreet. Did he know already that Emma had thrown him
over?
‘Emma all right?’ Yes, he knew.
‘Fine, of course.’
‘Didn’t see you with her at the opera.’
‘And never will.’
Hench-Rose showed his teeth in a tight smile,
seemed about to say something, thought better of it and turned to
the question of weekend parties. ‘You shoot?’ he said.
‘Nobody recently.’
‘Oh - ha! Ha-ha! Meant birds, man. Grouse,
partridge, like that.’ He talked about shooting driven birds, which
Denton found about as interesting as the opera - shooters stood at
assigned posts and waited while a small army of beaters drove
everything that could run or fly past them to be slaughtered. ‘Make
some fantastic scores,’ Hector said. ‘Certain royal party knocks
down hundreds in an afternoon.’
‘And then eats them all that night.’
‘Hmm? Oh, ha-ha. No, actually, the birds go off to
the markets. Very important part of the process, selling the
kill.’
‘The purpose of the exercise, in fact.’
Hector frowned, a rare expression on his smooth
face. ‘Well—Yes, in a sense.’
‘The shooting party is in fact a cog in an economic
machine.’
‘What have you been reading? You sound like
an anarchist, Denton. Is this for a new book?’ In fact, Denton had
figured out the economics of shooting for himself because he was an
American, an American who had started with nothing and was always
near ruin; it gave him a point of view. And earned him some insults
- parvenu, nouveau. He wasn’t sure why there was
recourse to French when ‘Johnny-come-lately’ or ‘counter-jumper’
would have served so well. Something about the upper-class English
and French: they decried French morals but envied French culture,
adopted French words, even when they couldn’t pronounce them.
Soi-disant, beauté de singe, nostalgie de la
boue, elle s’affiche.
Hench-Rose waited while an overweight young man
brought in a tea tray and poured two cups, even though Denton had
already refused it. ‘I like something going down the gullet,’
Hench-Rose muttered. He helped himself to scones.
Denton said, ‘I’ve come on a kind of
business.’
‘Oh, really?’ Hector seemed astonished that such a
thing as business might even exist.
‘The newspapers are full of a new tale about a
prostitute being murdered.’
Hector groaned and said he knew it; it was
terrifically boring. He held up a buff-coloured file. ‘I don’t have
time for the interesting stuff. I’m supposed to respond to an
endless minute on the cost of helmets written by that dried-up
dog’s leavings Mortimer Asperley, the Permanent Under-Secretary.
He’s written five pages to do with a three-page file.’
‘How accurate are the newspaper accounts of the new
murder?’
Hector looked blank. ‘The Times is always
accurate.’
‘Hector, I mean I want to know the details of the
crime.’
‘Ah, aha. Writer’s curiosity, eh? Well, you’ve come
to the wrong shop for anything having to do with police work; I
might as well be in Whitehall monitoring the clothing regulations
for other ranks in hot climates as here, for all I know about what
the police are doing.’ He rang the overweight young man back into
the room, told him to ask Detective Sergeant Munro to step round,
looked pleased with himself for moving so briskly. ‘Munro will set
us straight,’ he said. ‘Munro knows everything.’ He smiled the
brilliant and open smile that made up for many failings. ‘Munro is
a real policeman, not an ex-army officer dropped into a sinecure,
like me.’ He beamed.
‘I was an ex-officer, once,’ Denton said.
‘Yes, but you hadn’t cousins in the senior civil
service, had you? You mustered out and went to work - lucky you,
Denton. Look at you now.’
Denton grunted. He had mustered out as a temporary
lieutenant (three months’ worth, a sergeant jumped up to demobilize
what was left) after the American Civil War; ‘going to work,’ as
Hector put it, had meant going to an unploughed piece of prairie
and trying to turn it into a farm. Going to work, indeed.
Detective Sergeant Munro was huge and walked with a
limp. His massive face widened as it went downwards from his eyes;
the jaws, seen straight on, were enormous, as if he could have
chewed up iron bolts. He had a trace of a Scots accent, something
else unidentifiable. His contempt for Hench-Rose was clear, even to
Hector, who seemed amused by it.
‘Mister Denton is a famous author,’ Hench-Rose
began. ‘He’s interested in a lady of the night who was murdered
yesterday.’
Munro looked at Denton, expanded his circle of
contempt to include him. ‘Yes?’ he said.
Hench-Rose smiled more fiercely. ‘I thought the
first paperwork might have made its way up to us, and we could
share it with him and send him on to the right people in
CID.’
Munro’s great jaws widened, the effect of a smile.
‘Not our crime, Mr Hench-Rose.’ Dripping with contempt. Hector, not
the swiftest of intellects, stared at him. ‘Crime was apparently
committed in the Square Mile, sir.’
Hector frowned. ‘Oh, dear,’ Hector said. He looked
at Denton. ‘Mr Denton’s American.’ Munro grinned at Denton,
offering not a drop of pity for his being American. Hector
explained. ‘The Square Mile is the City of London, Denton. My fault
for not having realized it; I paid no attention to the location
when I read the tale in the paper. We don’t get crimes from the
City; the City of London Police get them.’ He looked up. ‘Sorry,
Munro.’
‘I can go, then?’
‘Well—Perhaps you know somebody over there Mr
Denton could go to see.’
‘Not very hospitable to journalists right now,’
Munro said. He apparently meant the City Police.
‘Mr Denton’s not a journalist.’
Munro looked him over, apparently concluded that
Denton was no better than a journalist, whatever he was.
‘Oh, come on, Munro!’ Hench-Rose’s voice was
wheedling. Denton could imagine his using it on a sergeant major,
one of those invaluable men who do the real work of a regiment.
‘You must know somebody over there who can lend a hand.’ Hench-Rose
smiled, the kind of smile that would remind even a sergeant major
which of them was the superior officer. ‘Munro, I insist.’
Denton had been making small noises, but neither of
the others paid any attention. He had muttered that it wasn’t
important, that he would go, that he’d been stupid. No good. He was
left feeling embarrassed, as he always was by British displays,
however subtle, however polite, of upper-class leverage.
‘I’ll just see what I can do then, sir,’ Munro was
saying. ‘If you’re ready to go, Mr, um, Denton, perhaps you could
come along with me.’
‘There!’ Hench-Rose displayed his wonderful teeth.
‘You see, Denton?’
Denton made a face - lower lip pushed up, corners
of the lips pulled down, eyebrows raised - and thanked Hector for
his help and went out behind Munro, turning to cock an eyebrow
again at Hench-Rose, who seemed vastly amused.
They paced along a dark corridor that looked as if
it ran the length of the building, perhaps of several other
buildings as well, a smell of coal and drains just noticeable. The
corridor was bitterly cold. Munro seemed determined to say nothing,
and Denton, who had lived among all sorts of people, felt no
impulse to change things. They came at last to a varnished door
much like all the others they had passed, and Munro grasped the
handle as if he were going to yank it out of the wall and threw the
door open. Several clerks looked up with frightened faces.
‘This is where we shovel the paper,’ Munro said. He
led Denton towards another door. ‘Raw police reports find their way
up here; we copy them out in a fair hand, three copies each, and
send one to Files, one to Prosecution and one to your friend.’ He
jerked his head towards the north, the direction meant to include
Hench-Rose. ‘No idea what he does with them. In ten years or twenty
the gods may see fit to give us a typewriter.’ Munro went through
the door into a dismal office piled high with faded brown folders,
fell into a chair behind the only desk and began to rummage in a
drawer. ‘I’ll give you a message to somebody I know in City CID.
That’s all I’ll do. Coppers don’t like civilians much.’
‘I know. I used to be one.’ Munro looked up. Denton
said, ‘A place called Railhead, Nebraska.’
‘What was that, two whorehouses and a dog?’
‘Just about. I was the entire police force.’
Munro stared at him. His huge cheeks looked
unhealthy in the gloom. ‘Well, you know how we feel about civilians
putting their nose in, then.’
‘I don’t intend to put my nose in.’ He told him
about the visit from Mulcahy, Munro staring at him the whole time.
When he was finished, Munro said, ‘You mean you have evidence to
offer. Why didn’t you say so?’
‘I’m not sure it’s evidence.’
‘Leave that for City CID.’ He handed over a piece
of paper. ‘Go and see this man. Detective Sergeant Willey. Tell him
what you told me. Don’t tell him you’re a writer.’ He stood; Denton
stood.
‘Were you in CID?’ Denton said.
‘Used to be. Metropolitan, not City. Then I was
crippled. ’ He hesitated. ‘Fell off a roof.’
‘Line of duty?’
‘Pointing the chimney at home.’
Denton went out. Munro had never smiled, he
realized. Nor, he guessed, had he.
Detective Sergeant Willey barely knew Munro, as it
turned out, but was glad for a chance to get out of the bustle of
Bishopsgate Police Station and sit down to listen to Denton’s
‘evidence’. He had a clerk there to take it down in shorthand,
along with the questions and answers that followed, all the things
that Denton had already been over in his own mind. Willey,
long-headed, stooped, tired, was as sceptical as Atkins, but he was
polite because Denton was at least nominally a gentleman. ‘Many
thanks,’ he said when they were done. ‘We appreciate citizen
cooperation. Every bit of information of value.’
Denton wondered how many murders the man had
investigated, as he seemed nervous and defeated already. Contrary
to what Hench-Rose had thought, Denton knew London pretty well,
could have told him that the Minories were in the City if he’d
stopped to think about it - knew, too, that City police probably
spent most of their time on business crime, not murder.
Denton said, ‘I’m afraid I’d like something in
return.’ Willey’s face froze. ‘That’s why I originally went to Mr
Hench-Rose. Is it possible for me to see the corpse?’ That idea had
come to him as they had talked. Why did he want to see a mutilated
female corpse? Emma had swum into his consciousness; he had refused
to believe there was a connection.
‘Absolutely not.’ Shocked.
‘Isn’t there going to be a post-mortem?’
‘Of course.’ Stiff now, defending the procedures of
the City Police.
‘Post-mortems are sometimes open.’
‘Mr Denton!’ Willey leaned towards him, hands
clasped on the scarred desktop. He had hairy backs to his hands,
dark curls like wires springing out. ‘This is a sensational case.
Do you really think we want details of the poor woman’s body known
to civilians?’
‘There’ve been a good many descriptions already,
and she’s dead. Plus, she was a tart. Anyway, I’m not about to
write about it. I simply want to—’ He wanted to say to know what
frightened Mulcahy, but Willey would misinterpret that, he was
sure. So he said, lamely, ‘To follow up.’
Willey was a cynic, like most policemen. ‘Oh, yes?’
he said in a tone that said everything about men who wanted to see
post-mortems on female bodies.
‘To compare it with what the man told me.’
‘That’s police business, and you’re to stay out of
it.’
‘Where’s the post-mortem?’
Willey stood. He was two inches shorter than Denton
but secure of his mastery on his own turf. ‘We’re done here.’ He
nodded to the clerk, who got up and went out. ‘Thank you for your
information, Mr Denton. I’ll show you out.’
Denton went back to Hector Hench-Rose, missing his
lunch - it was now after one - and so accepting Hector’s offer of
scones because the hangover had turned to nausea, and got from him
the information that the post-mortem on Stella Minter’s body would
be at St Bartholomew’s Hospital at two, with Sir Frank Parmentier
wielding the scalpel. Hector found this out only by sending five
messengers in as many directions to other offices. ‘You owe me a
lunch,’ he said when he’d got the news.
‘How do I get into the post-mortem?’
‘Oh, do you really want to? Well, as it’s at
Bart’s, it’s probably in the theatre and so open to the students.
You could just go in, probably, but—’ He took a piece of rather
grand letterhead stationery and scribbled on it, signed with a huge
and illegible flourish, then sent the young man off to get it
stamped and initialled by the commissioner’s clerk.
‘Won’t it be under City Police control?’
‘The worst they can say is no, Denton.’ He twitched
his ginger moustache. ‘Why ever do you want to go to a post-mortem?
’
Denton dragged a version of the truth from the
clutches of the hangover. ‘I want to see if they were in coitus
when he slit her throat. Mulcahy said that’s the way he saw it done
long ago.’ Yes, well - there it was. He’d been shutting out an
insistent image of slitting Emma’s throat while they made
love.
Hench-Rose said hoarsely that you shouldn’t even
think such things.
‘I find myself more and more interested in these
mental cases.’ Not quite true, unless he was himself a mental case.
Still—