Chapter Four
Emma.
Had he really said that to her - ‘You’re mine?’ He
didn’t think so, but he remembered thinking it. Some atavism: the
man owns the woman. It was what asinine juveniles said on the
Criterion Theatre stage to pretty ingénues - ‘You’re mine at last!’
And the ingénues agreed - ‘I’m yours!’ But that was metaphor.
Wasn’t it? Yet his reaction when Emma had thrown him over had been
one of - redness. Blood.
Had that been Stella Minter’s mistake, that she had
left somebody who thought he owned her? He thought of the
grey-green corpse on the table, Parmentier’s scalpel; the feel of
the girl’s waxy, cool ankles; the watching, carefully controlled
but greedy-eyed men. Yes, the savagery of the wounds might have
come from that sort of passion. In the everyday world, the oldest
of old stories, the lover jilted for somebody else. She was
mine.
He had wanted to kill Emma; he saw that now,
as if the post-mortem had opened a window for him. He hadn’t hit a
woman, ever, even his wife when she was raging drunk and reviling
him, although he had once shaken her when she was like that. Had he
felt such shame then as he did now? What he remembered of the
scenes with his wife was a deep loathing of both of them. Now,
realizing his feeling towards Emma, he felt such shame as he had
never known before, even in the worst of the war, when he had done
some terrible things.
He tried to think about Mulcahy, but his mind kept
straying to the post-mortem and the picture of the lot of them,
sitting there in their overcoats, fascinated by the cutting-up of a
woman. Like a show. Where had he seen those blank, rapt
faces before? At a pioneer-country fair - open-mouthed farmers
staring at a bored woman attempting the Dance of the Seven Veils in
a booth.
Denton made his way to the British Museum. He had
some hope of walking off the hangover, of course an illusion -
outdoor air doesn’t change the chemistry of alcohol. The rain had
stopped, and now a wind was driving clouds against a hard blue sky.
Even after years here, Denton lived mentally in Dickens’s London,
that place of twisting streets, poverty, gloom and idiosyncrasy; he
always needed to adjust when he came out into such a day as this,
when London was every bit its modern self - noisy, hard-driving,
bursting at the seams and spilling out into new suburbs at the rate
of thousands of houses a year. He was wearing some sort of tweed
cape-cum-coat that blew around him in points and folds, its
over-cape turning up over his head and half-blinding him when his
back was to the wind. It had been a gift from Emma. Atkins had put
it out for him that morning - an instance of Atkins’s humour?
Emma. The insistent memory mixed with
thoughts of the post-mortem, his mind unable to hold any image or
idea for more than a fraction of a second. Impossible that he’d
lost her. Stab wounds. Exvagination. Impossible. Had a
baby, did that mean anything? Emma was his.
At the Museum, he went into the Reading Room and
found the London directories and began looking for Mulcahy, R. The
long rows of volumes didn’t discourage him, but the lack of system
did. One set was alphabetized, but it was a business directory, and
unless Mulcahy, R. was a professional or a recognized businessman,
he wouldn’t be in there. Denton’s memory of Mulcahy was that he
wouldn’t qualify, and indeed, he wasn’t to be found. There were
Mulcahys in business, but he saw none with a given name that
started with R.
Kelly’s directories were more inclusive. Entirely
inclusive, if their foreword was to be believed, but the fact was
that they missed many, maybe most people who rented rooms,
especially in the slums. In theory, Kelly’s post office directories
included every male working-man in the vast metropolitan area; the
frustration for Denton was that they were arranged by streets, not
personal names. If you wanted to know who lived in every house on
Praed Street, you could find out, but if you knew somebody’s name
and didn’t know where he lived, you were lost. On an impulse, he
looked for Stella Minter in the Minories, but of course he didn’t
find her. Stella Minter had been a transient, a grain of sand in a
shifting ocean.
One thousand, one hundred and thirty-six pages in
the 1899 Kelly’s. And shelves of suburban volumes beyond. Denton
sat, cold enough to have left the unfortunate coat on, turning
pages, glancing at streets, as if the name Mulcahy might leap from
the dense eight-point type.
It would take days. No, weeks.
And no hangover.
He sighed, put the directories back and carried his
fragile head out to Museum Street. The Tavern beckoned, but he
ignored it; he walked down to Holborn, then zigzagged west and
south and headed again for the Metropolitan Police Annexe.
He announced himself to the porter and went up,
put his head into Hench-Rose’s room and was told that Hector was
‘in a meeting of the Examinations Resolution Committee’, whatever
that was, and turned instead and went along the corridor to what he
hoped was Detective Sergeant Munro’s office. He got the wrong room,
of course; an ascetic civil servant who seemed to be preparing for
life in a Himalayan monastery - thin, bald, placid - put him
right.
Munro was not delighted to see him. His expression
was disapproving. ‘We’re being run ragged here just now.’
‘I’ll come back.’
‘We’re always run ragged.’ They were standing in
the outer room where the three clerks were bending over red-tied
files. ‘We don’t really have time for gentleman detectives.’
‘I’m not a detective, don’t pretend to be.’ He
thought of Emma. ‘And I’m not a gentleman.’
Munro’s expression changed; was he amused? ‘Five
minutes.’ He led the way, limping, to his inner office. ‘You here
about the murder again?’ he said when they were seated.
‘I went to the post-mortem. I told you, Mulcahy,
the man who came to see me, had described a murder—’
‘Yes, yes—’
‘It was very similar.’
Munro shrugged. He was tying and untying the red
tape on a file. ‘Lots of murders are similar. No sign of your
Mulcahy that I’ve heard of. City Police might have something - you
did tell them, right? Have to ask them.’
Denton shifted his body, trying to find a position
that didn’t make his muscles ache. His head was pounding. ‘I’d like
to see her room. Where she was killed.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Mulcahy, Mulcahy.’
Munro fiddled with the tape, then joined his
fingers and looked at Denton. ‘This the western sheriff in you
coming out?’ Before Denton could answer, he said, ‘Read a bit about
you - a pal downstairs keeps a scrapbook, had a newspaper piece
about you.’ He was nodding. ‘Funny, you were down in Nebraska the
same time I was in Alberta. Mounties.’
Denton felt stupid, couldn’t puzzle it out. A Brit
in the Mounties?
‘My dad emigrated from Scotland in 1847. I was born
in Flodden, Quebec, tiny little place. I joined the Mounties in the
second intake. Heard of the Sweet Grass Hills? Old Man River? Fort
MacLeod?’ He grinned. ‘You weren’t a whiskey trader, were
you?’
‘That’s one thing I never tried.’
Munro grunted. ‘Bunch of lowlifes selling flavored
raw alcohol to the Indians on the Assiniboine. I put in twice my
three years and came here - better job, better pay.’
‘I went on west.’
‘It was a rough place back then.’ Munro leaned away
from him. ‘You really kill four men?’
He never talked about it. ‘Two,’ he said. He waited
for Munro to see that it was a poor subject. Munro, however, had
the look of a man who could wait him out. ‘The other two died
later.’
‘Six-gun?’ Said with a grin.
‘Shotgun.’ Said with a scowl.
Munro raised his eyebrows and shook his head.
‘Always wonder how I’d have done, that kind of situation. But the
Mounties were very big on not being like Americans.’
‘Violent people.’ Denton had thought about it. ‘But
we had slavery.’ Slavery, as he had worked it out, made the slaver
violent.
‘Maybe the killer’s an American.’ Munro said it
with another smile.
‘My five minutes are up.’
Munro made a face as if to say it didn’t matter. ‘I
might be able to get you into the scene of the crime and I might
not. Bit difficult because it’s City Police.’
‘Plus Sergeant Willey more or less took against
me.’
‘Yeah, well—The truth is, Willey’s probably so
overworked he’s forgotten you. No offence. But they’ve got a big
thing going on bank fraud over there; a dead prostitute isn’t going
to distract them for long. Let me see what I can do through the
Yard.’
‘You’ve changed your mind about me.’
Munro was playing with the red tapes again.
‘Apparently,’ he said, and he grinned once more. ‘You have the
telephone? ’ Denton shook his head. ‘Leave an address where I can
get a message to you.’ While Denton was extracting a card from his
case with trembling fingers, Munro said, ‘I’d give my right arm to
be back in the CID.’ He seemed to mean it as an explanation of why
he was willing to help Denton now.
Denton’s mouth tasted like burned metal.
He walked back like a man in a walking race.
Always a fast walker, he seemed demented now. His balance was off;
his back and head ached; still he plunged on. He had at first made
for home, but he detoured into Soho and threw himself into a
Chinese noodle shop, where, surrounded by slurping Chinese
labourers, he filled himself with noodles and broth and several
small dumplings. He had discovered Chinese food in California, had
been surprised that the cosmopolitan English looked on it as
comical, possibly dangerous, meaning actually that it was
lower-class and strange. (‘We must never notice things that are
unpleasant,’ he had read in Dickens but not understood until he had
lived in London a while.) The food made him feel suddenly better,
and he was able to lurch his way up to Oxford Street and then east,
turning up Museum Street again because he liked it and at last
through rather awful byways to Lamb’s Conduit. Always, the
darkening blue was above him and the clouds were racing over as if
leaping from the rooftops on one side to those on the other; below,
looking up, trying to walk, he was made dizzy.
‘Sergeant!’ he shouted as he let himself in. He
wanted to lie down but was damned if he would. He would make
himself work, always a panacea, even though the work was no longer
physical.
Atkins appeared in his little doorway at the foot
of the stairs. ‘You rang, sir?’
Denton tossed him the horrible tweed coat. ‘Get rid
of that.’ He put his hat on the newel post. ‘I don’t want
tea.’
‘Good, else I’d have had to send to the Lamb.
Nothing in the house.’
Denton started up the stairs; his head seemed to
pull him backwards.
Atkins shifted the heavy coat to bring it more into
view. ‘When you say, “Get rid of it,” you mean put it away or get
it out of the house?’
‘Throw it in the trash; give it to General Booth;
wear it yourself.’
‘Wouldn’t be caught dead in it.’
He went up to his room. The unfinished novel made
a pile of foolscap an inch high, written neatly enough but then
scribbled over, crossed out, amended in trickles that fell off the
end of the line and ran down the page and sometimes looped around
to the other side of the sheet. He sighed and sat down to it. The
truth was, as he admitted as he read over the last ten pages, the
woman he’d created was a piece of cardboard. A fiction, a
convenience. She was another of his attempts to capture his wife -
to capture what she had done to him, to his life - in fiction. The
scene he was working on had been meant as preparation for the
downward spiral that would leave her dead on a frozen pasture in
winter, raving and wandering in the snow. (The real Lily had taken
poison.) And destroying her husband in the process.
Stella Minter, dead and eviscerated by first her
murderer and then the surgeon, was, he saw, more real, even in
death, than the woman in his novel. He’d tried to recreate his
wife, and he hadn’t even created a corpse. He dropped the scene
into the trash, then began to leaf back through the rest of the
manuscript, pulling out pages, dropping them into oblivion. Not
the way a writer makes money.
He heard Atkins breathing heavily as he came up
the steep stairs.
‘Copper looking for you down below.’
‘I’m working.’
‘Copper wants you.’ Atkins produced a silver salver
from behind his back. ‘Message.’
‘For God’s sake—’ Denton took the paper. ‘The plate
wasn’t necessary, was it?’
‘Might have touched it with my dirty hands
otherwise.’
It was from Munro. ‘Can you meet me at a public
house called the Haymow near the Minories at six o’clock? We can
have a look at the scene you were interested in. PC Catesby will
tell you the way, as it is difficult. Please reply by the
constable.’
‘I’ll go down.’
PC Catesby had a foolish young face and blushed
easily. He drew a map on the back of Munro’s note as laboriously as
if he were working out a problem in mathematics. In fact, Denton
knew the streets he referred to as soon as he mentioned them, but
there was no convincing the policeman. He went on pushing the thick
pencil over the paper, printing names, making arrows, turning
something easy into something tortuous.
‘I understand; it’s one street north and west of
the Minories, right. The Haymow. Got it.’
‘Yes, sir, if you tell the driver the Minories and
then direct him to—’ It was the third time he’d gone over
it. Denton hadn’t told the man he planned to walk, afraid that he’d
get the entire route mapped for him on the same small sheet of
paper. He kept saying yes, right, thank you, and finally PC Catesby
took himself off, turning back in the doorway, then at the gate, to
make some further point. Then he actually came back and said to
Denton, ‘The Haymow’s rather low, sir.’
‘Thank you.’
He wondered if he should have tipped PC Catesby,
decided not. Giving policemen money had a bad reputation.
‘I’ve put out the dark-brown lounge suit,’ Atkins
said when Denton came upstairs. ‘You want another of them headache
powders?’
‘I’m all right.’
Atkins hesitated. ‘Your coat come back from Mrs
Gosden’s. Also hat, gloves, stick. Also the derringer in the
pocket.’ He raised his eyebrows - music-hall astonishment.
‘Somebody brought it?’
‘Commissionaire. Coat et cetera in a box. Carried
the stick.’
In a box. Everything ends in a box.
‘Put the derringer in the hollow book.’
‘Already have.’
Denton started to ask if there had been any message
with the coat, any reply to the apology he had sent Emma, but
Atkins would of course have told him if there had been. In fact,
the coat and hat were the message. They were the full stop
at the end of a sentence - the compound sentence that had been his
affair with Emma and was never to become a paragraph.