Bohemian Girl, The (19 page)

He passed through the first public room, where several young women sat about, one or two with men. They smiled; he passed on, turning right into Mrs Castle’s reception room, where she lounged on a sofa and drank champagne and received her clientele.

‘Oh, God, Denton, you look absolutely déclassé. Go on through the little door there before somebody sees you - go on, go on—!’

She was not yet even moderately drunk but certainly annoyed.

The door was at first hard to find, covered with William Morris paper to match the walls. He found the dark-swirled china knob by feeling for it and let himself through. On the other side was a room so different in its simplicity and its calm greens and blues as to have been in another world. Against the far wall, sitting on a dark-green love seat, was Janet Striker.

‘What is it?’ He went towards her.

She held up a hand to ward him off. ‘I’m all right now.’

‘Janet, what’s happened?’

She looked quite normal, except that she didn’t smile. ‘He’s been in my rooms,’ she said. ‘You were right.’

‘Tell me.’ He tried to sit beside her but she wouldn’t give him room, and he fetched a chair that was too small for him. ‘Janet, what is it?’

‘I sent for the police. I’ve talked to them. They didn’t understand, of course. It sounds silly.’ She put a hand on his sleeve without looking at him. ‘I worked late again - I’m trying to leave things right, clean up the files and old letters and - stuff, you know. I got home—’ She laughed unpleasantly. ‘My
home
. My two wretched rooms. I opened the door and thought I was in the wrong place
. Everything
. Everything, Denton! Smashed, ripped - he’d poured red paint on things - on my piano, the only thing I cared about—!’ A kind of spasm took her chin and neck from the clenching of her jaw. Her eyelids reddened, but no tears came. ‘He found the scissors and cut my clothes.’ She laughed again, the same harshness. ‘I don’t own a stitch except what I have on! Everything gone - cut up, red paint poured on it. Clothes I’d haggled over and spent days looking for at the markets, haggled with a pushcart man! You knew they were somebody’s cast-offs, didn’t you - you didn’t think I dressed like this because I wanted to!’ She put her face in her hands. He touched her shoulder; she shrugged him off. He bent forward so far his knee almost touched the floor, the little chair tipped on its front legs. ‘Janet - Janet, it’s all right—’

‘It isn’t all right with me!’

‘Janet - the clothes don’t matter; you’ll get more clothes—’

‘He poured paint on my piano - on the keys!’ And now she wept.

For a piano. Between her sobs, she said, ‘You don’t know. I saved - for months to buy that - piano. And it’s only an old Clementi, a hundred years old, it’s junk you wouldn’t give a child to play, but
it’s what I can afford
!’ She raised her head and sat back, dabbing at her nose with a handkerchief. ‘Or could afford. I’ll have money soon, and money is happiness, am I right?’

‘You know better.’

‘Well - poverty is misery, I can tell you that.’ She wiped her eyes and sniffed. She looked at him as if she saw him for the first time, as if only now she understood that he was there. She leaned forward and put a hand behind his neck, pulled them together, her face hot and damp against his. ‘Well, now you’ve seen me cry,’ she said.

‘I didn’t think you did.’

‘I’ve been known to.’ She kissed his ear. ‘I’d like you to take me to bed.’

‘Yes - yes—’

She pulled away. ‘No. Not here.’

‘Come home with me.’

‘Not that, either. I shall stay here tonight in Ruth’s extra room. I know it seems quixotic, Denton, but I want to stay here. This is my haven - this knocking shop is the closest I have to a home.’

‘But you can’t go to bed in it with me.’

‘We’ve both been in the beds in this house too often as it is.’

She stood and shook her hair back and walked up and down, looking at herself in a mirror and trying to fix what she saw with her fingers and the handkerchief. She poured herself water from a carafe that stood by the sofa, drank it. She said, ‘There’s sherry and whisky over there if you want it.’ She smiled at him. ‘Will that chair hold both of us?’

‘It really doesn’t even hold me.’

She pulled him over to the sofa. ‘Hold me for a bit. Then you must go home.’ She looked into his eyes; they kissed; she put her head back. ‘I just wanted, as you say, to be with you for a little.’ She moved a few inches away. ‘Now you should go home.’

‘I don’t want to.’

‘I’m going to take one of Ruth’s laudanum pills and slip into the land of dreams for a while. I used to do it rather too much. But not in a long time.’ She leaned into the curved back of the sofa, which rose towards the ends in great loops like bows. ‘He painted “Astoreth” on the wall. I take it to mean that I’d been paid a visit by his demon.’ She exhaled shakily. ‘What sort of demon takes an interest in old clothes and a lot of odd bits picked off the rubbish tip? It makes me question the demon’s judgement.’ She looked shrewdly at him. ‘It was meant for you, you know.’

‘Partly.’

‘And part for me? Yes, perhaps. “See what I can do.” Be careful, Denton.’

‘Will you be safe here?’

‘Between Fred, Ruth, the girls and the clientele, I shall be safer than in the Tower of London. Go home now.’

‘Can I come back tomorrow?’

She frowned. ‘I’ll come to you. When do you stop working? Four? By then I’ll have begged or borrowed some clothes. I’ll come to you. Four?’

He held her again, kissed her and slipped out of the little door. In her receiving room, Ruth Castle was now surrounded by men, two or three with women of the house. Everybody was in formal dress. There was a smell of cigars and alcohol and perfume. Denton was impressed by the fact that he hadn’t heard them from the inner room - nor they he, therefore.

‘Denton, you look a fright - I’ve seen better-dressed navvies. Do go away.’ Mrs Castle looked to the sleek, well-dressed men. ‘When he’s properly turned out, he’s quite one of my favourite people.’ Her voice was nasal, easily mocking; she dropped the H in ‘he’, perhaps intentionally. The received wisdom was that Ruth Castle had been a child from one of the rookeries who had been plucked out, bathed and raped by a wealthy man who had kept her for several years before sending her off to a house. From there, she had continued to rise - a ‘personage’, a marriage (or at least the honorific ‘Mrs’), her own house.

She held out a hand, which he kissed, something he’d have done with nobody else. She pulled him close. ‘Take care of her,’ she murmured. The sour breath of champagne washed over him.

‘I mean to.’

‘You’d better.’ She shoved him off. ‘Now take your awful suit away.’

Seeing Oldaston again as he went out, he said, ‘You ever know somebody called the Stepney Jew-Boy?’

‘Jew-Boy Cohan? Haven’t heard that name since Hector was a pup. Yes, I remember him well - mind, I never fought him, too small for me by a couple of stone.’

‘He says he was never knocked down.’

‘That’s a fact. Very tough. But not fast enough. He could take a terrific blow, but he couldn’t move his hands quick. Mind, he won fights, quite a deal of them. But lost, too.’

‘He’s looking for work, if you hear of anything.’

‘No! Well, that’s the pugilist’s life in a nutshell. He addled?’

‘No - seems quite sharp.’

‘Tell you what I’d do if I was him - go to Mrs Franken. She’s a Jewess herself, nothing wrong with that. She might have something in my line of work. She has a couple of houses, you never know.’

Atkins was waiting at home. He’d found Janet Striker’s telegram beside Denton’s armchair. And he’d read it, of course, so there was no point in pretending nothing had happened, some gain perhaps in telling him.

‘I think I’ll keep carrying that derringer,’ Atkins said.

‘You have Rupert.’

‘All very well for you to say. You’re sitting on an arsenal.’

‘Don’t shoot yourself.’

‘Oh, ha-ha. Thirty years in the British army and I never so much as pinched my thumb in a breech. So your loony’s turned dangerous. Well, you said he would. Now what?’

‘A good citizen would wait for the police to catch him.’

‘Yes, but what are
you
going to do?’

Munro and Markson showed up at three-thirty the next afternoon. The two detectives were sombre, Markson clearly nervous, perhaps blaming himself somehow for the attack on Janet Striker’s lodgings. Munro, phlegmatic at best, was apparently calm, but he acknowledged what Markson’s jerkings of a leg and facial tics indicated: the police were worried.

‘He isn’t just some Bohemian would-be writer now. He’s a threat,’ Munro said. He was sitting in the upholstered piece opposite Denton’s armchair; Markson was on an armless side chair that Atkins had fetched from farther up the room. ‘What he did was an act of violence.’

‘Symbolic violence, anyway,’ Denton said. ‘Paint looks like blood, but it isn’t blood. Cutting up clothes isn’t the same as cutting up a woman but gives the sense of it.’

‘You’re not defending him, I hope.’

‘Trying to be accurate.’ He was remembering what Janet Striker had said about insanity.

Munro grunted. ‘For this copper, he’s only one step away from real blood.’

‘You’re the police. Go catch him.’

Munro pushed his lips out and drew his brows down in an expression that, in a saloon, would have meant that a fight was coming. Markson said, ‘We’re trying. Mr Denton, we’ve had men on you all week.’

‘They did a particularly fine job of catching him while he watched Mrs Striker leave this house.’

Munro raised a hand to silence Markson before he could complain. Munro twisted in his chair, crossed his legs, looked at Denton sideways. ‘How did he find her, do you think?’

‘Followed her, I suppose.’

‘“Follow that cab”?’ Munro snorted. ‘What is he, invisible? One of Mr H. G. Wells’s inventions, is he?’

Markson twitched. ‘One of the watchers happened to be on his tea break.’

Munro groaned. ‘Jesus wept.’ He wiped his right hand over his face, then leaned his head on that hand, the elbow on the chair back. He looked like an actor playing great pain. ‘I apologize, all right, Denton? For the Metropolitan Police, for myself - I apologize. We should have done better. All right?’

‘I didn’t ask you to.’

‘No, but it makes me feel better. It’s also a lesson to young Fred here - we’re not always perfect.’ He leaned forward, elbows on knees. ‘Now look. We need to know where we are. How much danger is the woman in? You’ve got to be frank with me, Denton. Fred says she was here while he was here that day - she was collecting for some charity—’

‘The Society for the Improvement of Wayward Women.’

‘This is the same woman that got her face slashed last year and you saved her life, am I right? Now - don’t get your dander up - is there more to it than her stopping by to pick up a contribution?’

‘Why should there be more?’

‘Because I’m a suspicious, cynical Canuck who doesn’t share the English taste for pussy-footing about. You saved her life last year. One of the watchers reported following you to the Embankment where you met with a lady. Now she happens to be here collecting a contribution, which seems bloody odd, as the Royal Mail worked efficiently the last time I looked.’

Denton looked into Munro’s eyes without wavering. ‘We’re friends.’

‘Was she here before? Could Cosgrove have seen her with you before?’

Denton knew what Munro was after, knew that it was foolish to splutter and object. ‘Yes.’

Munro looked at Markson, back at Denton. He sat back in his chair, his hands gripping the ends of the velour-covered arms. ‘I’m going to have to put a watch on her.’

‘Bit late. I don’t think she’ll like that.’

‘Nor would I, but we have to catch the bastard.’ He looked at Markson. ‘Report?’

This had been arranged, Denton guessed - a kind of briefing to make him feel that at least he was included, even if little progress was being made. Markson said, one knee vibrating as the heel of that foot went up and down, up and down, ‘The letters have been posted from eight different places in London, but we’ve plotted them on the map and we think it’s west. He’s gone as far afield as Earl’s Court in that direction but only east as far as Holborn Viaduct. We think he’s walking, not using the steam underground or anything like the electric trams to get far out.’

Munro spoke up. ‘Walking would be trying to be like you again, Denton.’

Markson said, ‘Taking into account what you said about him being educated, we think maybe well off, then Mayfair or Kensington or some such.’ Nobody said anything. There was no point in saying the obvious. Munro, however, muttered, as another apology, ‘We admit, it’s thin.’

‘I know you’re doing what you can’

‘There is something—’ Markson looked as if he’d startled himself by speaking. He glanced at Munro for approval. ‘Is there anything else he could have stolen? Anything at all? There might be a clue . . .’ His voice drifted off.

‘Books?’ Munro said. He looked at the wall of books that framed the fireplace. ‘You said he started off asking for your books. Any chance he stole them when you didn’t answer?’

Denton shook his head. ‘I don’t keep my own stuff out here. I need the space.’

‘In your room?’

‘No.’

‘You don’t have
any
copies of your own books?’

‘They’re put away someplace. In a box. You think I sit around reading my own books, Munro?’

‘Well—’ Munro squirmed in the chair. ‘I daresay if I’d written a book, I’d have it out where people could see it. Might put it under glass. Hmp. Well - any chance he could have got into the box?’

Denton called Atkins (who was probably listening by the dumb waiter, anyway) and asked him to check the book boxes. While Atkins plodded back downstairs - what passed for a box room was an old pantry off the ground-floor kitchen - Munro tried to put together the sequence of Albert Cosgrove’s actions. When he had led the three of them through it all up to the attack on Mrs Striker’s rooms, he said, ‘So it began three months after you left on this trip you took. Any significance to that, do you think?’