Bohemian Girl, The (20 page)

‘You mean, he didn’t break in right away? Maybe the thing grew on him.’

‘So at the first, he really
was
asking for your books.’

‘All right, say he was. And?’

‘He doesn’t get a response, he’s a bit shirty. He writes again.’

‘The letters that were waiting for me here didn’t seem angry. On the contrary, they were soapy and overdone. Worshipful.’

‘Until you got home.’

‘A bit after.’

‘But he’s waiting in the house behind by then. He even more or less shows himself at the window - you think that was what he was doing, by the way, exhibiting himself?’

‘Like the old men in the park? I don’t think it was a sex thing.’ He listened to himself. ‘Or maybe it was.’

‘Well, you were the one talking about symbolism, not me. But anyway, by the time you come home, he knows you’ve been away. And as we know now, he knows it so well he breaks in here and steals a manuscript of yours and a pen - a bloody pen! But nothing else? That’s almost incredible.’

‘What would you have had him steal?’

‘Something that’s truly you. One of your Western hats. Your gun. Your—You’ve checked your guns, have you? It’d be terrible if he’s out there with a gun.’

‘The guns were with me. Except two parlour pistols, and they were locked away upstairs and were there when I got home.’

Markson jiggled his knee. ‘If I could say, sir—’ Markson’s face twitched. ‘Is it significant that he didn’t put his own address in those early letters? Heaven knows there was none on the recent ones.’

‘I didn’t say he didn’t put an address in them,’ Denton said. ‘I told you I couldn’t remember an address.’

‘Yes, sir, but suppose there
hadn’t
been any address.’

‘Oh.’ Munro was nodding. ‘Then he never really wanted Denton to send the books, you mean.’

‘Why write, then?’

Markson said, ‘Maybe so he could tell himself you didn’t bother to answer, sir.’

Munro looked as if he’d smelled something off. Denton started to make a face, too, then thought about what Markson had said. ‘So that he could worship me and resent me at the same time?’

‘Fanciful,’ Munro growled.

‘But it would mean, Sergeant, that he never intended - I mean, if he’s capable of “intending” anything - he never intended just to be a well-known author’s follower. He was always after something else.’

‘It’s fanciful, and it doesn’t get us any closer to finding him.’

Atkins came up from below then and announced that the boxes were where they belonged, and there was no sign they’d been opened. ‘I took Rupert and had him give it all a good sniff. He didn’t find anything, either.’

‘Rupert is that animal?’ The dog was sitting behind Atkins, wagging its massive rear because the stub of tail was planted in the carpet.

‘Rupert has the nose of a hound,’ Atkins said.

‘Rupert has a little bit of every dog that’s been down the street this ten years, from the look of him. However, we’ll take it as read that Cosgrove didn’t steal the books.’ Munro grunted. ‘Now I think of it, your own copies wouldn’t be signed anyway, would they? If he meant anything by asking for signed copies - really wanted them, I mean.’ Munro put his hands on his knees. ‘It’s so much a question of just how mad he is, isn’t it? I mean, we know what some criminals - perverts and so on - do with books. What the sex maniac does with pornography, pictures of children—A madman can pull his wire over
anything.
’

‘Stewart Caterwol,’ Markson said.

Denton didn’t know the name. Munro said, ‘Chap who stole women’s shoes to get off into. He was a drayman, used axle grease from his wagon to get his meat into the shoes - long, pointy toes some of them had. Kept the shoes in a trunk - forty-one pairs, every one full of axle grease and duff. Harmless otherwise. Got five years for petty theft times forty-one plus indecency plus moral turpitude. All done, so far as we know, in his own bedroom. Sometimes an Englishman’s home isn’t his castle, after all.’

The doorbell rang.

Denton went to the window and looked down. A cab was waiting at the kerb. When he turned back, he could hear Janet Striker’s voice as she came up the stairs. Atkins would already have told her that the police were there, he knew.

The effect of her coming into the room was as if some loud sound had jolted both policeman to their feet. They shot up, then stood there staring at her, Markson even with his mouth a bit open. Denton said ‘Mrs Striker,’ in a voice that seemed to have been hit almost as hard.

She was transformed.

She was wearing a dress in the nominal colours of autumn - ‘fillemot’, the pale brown of dead leaves, grey-green, dusty yellow - but an autumn that was autumnal only in its muting, the total effect lively and almost summery. The cut was of the moment, perhaps a step in advance of the moment, the skirt above her shoe-tops, the sleeves tight, the fall of the silky fabric almost clinging. Even the usually livid scar seemed to have been muted; he thought that somebody had dusted powder on it. Her hat, which matched the dress, was jaunty, pretty, with a wisp of veiling. Atkins followed behind with her coat and umbrella, both coordinated with the dress. ‘I came,’ she said, smiling at their reaction, ‘to tell Mr Denton something, but as you gentlemen of the police are here, I shall be delighted to tell you, as well. I believe I have found Albert Cosgrove.’

Munro grunted; Markson twitched; Denton ordered tea and put her in his own chair and then retired to the fireplace to look at her. She raised her bit of ecru veil and all but winked at him, then smiled again at the detectives. ‘Do sit down, gentlemen.’

‘You’ve
found
him, Mrs Striker?’

‘I’m not
sure
I’ve found him, but I think I have.’

‘Where, ma’am?’

‘In a bookseller’s. That is,
he
isn’t in the book shop. He left his name and address at the book shops, quite a long time ago. Half a dozen shops. I’ve been all over Charing Cross Road and Booksellers’ Row. It was an idea of someone else’s, told me by Mr Denton. And if it’s the right man, his name isn’t Albert Cosgrove, of course.’ She had a small handbag, which she opened to take out a notebook, from which she took a folded piece of paper. ‘Struther Jarrold - an address in Belgravia.’ She passed the paper across to Munro, who was sitting again. Munro looked at it and passed it to Markson.

Markson said, ‘We would have got to the booksellers on our own. Shortage of personnel.’

Munro shook his head and said to her, ‘We looked for you this morning, Mrs Striker. About the invasion of your rooms, most unfortunate—’

‘I went rather into seclusion, I’m afraid - hid in the house of an old friend. I was shaken.’

‘Anybody would have been.’ Munro was studying her, not without admiration. ‘You’re taking it wonderfully well.’

‘I didn’t yesterday. I work, Mr Munro, as I guess you know. I have - had - very little in those rooms to lose. Still, it was a shock. Even for a resident of Bethnal Green.’ She looked up at Denton and smiled.

It was the first time that Denton had known where she lived: he had guessed it was in a working-class part of London, but not one with a reputation for immigration and hopeless poverty and some of the city’s worst slums, the reputation now perhaps somewhat dated. Nonetheless, despite improvement schemes, ‘model’ housing, and a lot of good intentions, Bethnal Green still had an average income somewhere below fifteen shillings a week. He smiled back at her to show he didn’t care.

Munro asked how she had found Struther Jarrold’s name at the book shops.

‘Oh, I told them I had a set of signed copies of Denton’s books, and did they know anybody who’d buy them. They said
they
would, of course, and I said each time that I’d get more money from a collector. That was thought amusing; one of them said I ought to go into the book trade. But most of them looked through their lists of customers with special wants, and five of them came up with this Jarrold. I can give you a list of the shops, if you like.’

Munro looked at Markson, then at Denton. Denton said, ‘Well?’

Munro shifted his bulk, looked at Markson. The younger detective said, ‘We don’t want to, uh, take the wrong step—’

Denton plunged his hands deep into his trouser pockets. ‘You’ve got enough now - the letters, the threat, the attack on me—’

‘And woe betide us if we’re wrong,’ Munro growled. ‘If this what’s-his-name - Jarrold - is like anybody else in Eaton Square, he’ll have a solicitor beside him before we can get our first question out, and if we try to take him up on a charge, he’ll walk because we can’t prove he attacked you, we can’t prove he wrote the letters, and we can’t prove he was ever inside the house behind yours.’

‘Search his lodging.’

‘I don’t know how you do it out West, sheriff, but here we have to get a warrant. Nobody on the bench is going to give me a warrant on a suspicion that there might be something in somebody’s lodging that had come out of your house. I grant you there’s a circumstantial case. I’ll take it to the prosecutor, but I know what he’ll say: get me the evidence.’

Markson gave Denton a pleading look. ‘Fingerprint Branch are at the lady’s now.’

‘My piano,’ she said.

‘Yes, ma’am, they’ll do the piano, too.’

‘No, I mean they must take extra care with the piano.’

The two detectives laughed, then saw too late she wasn’t joking. There was some lame fence-mending, some temporizing, and then Janet Striker said, ‘Do you mean, then, that you won’t be arresting him?’

‘Well - not at once, ma’am—’ Markson made the mistake of trying to explain the rules of evidence in a tone he’d have used to a child. Things started to get worse, and then Munro dragged Markson to his feet and the two detectives took themselves off.

When the street door had closed on them, Janet Striker gave a horrible laugh, pulled her hatpins out and threw her little hat as far down the room as she could. ‘Oh, the majesty of the law!’ she shouted.

‘They’re doing their job.’

‘Don’t patronize me! Bloody fools! At least they were stunned when they first saw me.’

‘I hardly recognized you.’

‘It’s the dress.’ She held out the sides of the skirt. ‘I borrowed it from one of Ruth Castle’s French girls.’

‘You look wonderful.’

She was going to say something angry, then caught herself. ‘It isn’t you; it’s
them.
’ She shook herself. ‘Damn them.’ Walking up and down, she quieted, then laughed, apparently at herself. ‘I had to go to Oxford Street for underclothes - oh, dear God, a corset! I haven’t worn a corset in ten years! I can’t wait to get out of it.’

‘Do.’ He knew at once it was a mistake; sexual innuendo didn’t work on her.

She looked angry. ‘I have to see my solicitor and I have to find a removal man and I said I’d have this dress back by six. First things first - appalling thing to say. I know it, I know it. Oh, God! Oh, damn the police! That they should make this fuss over
my
rooms in Bethnal Green, and they wouldn’t stir out of New Scotland Yard if my neighbours had had their throats slit!’ She began to stride up and down again. ‘I live in half of what used to be a weaving loft at the top of a ramshackle house. Now the weaving trade’s gone west and the room’s been divided, me on one side and three girls in the other. There’ve been robberies in that house, beatings, drunken abuse, and the only time the police have come is now - you know why? Because of you!’ She turned on him. ‘It isn’t your doing, I know, but if Cosgrove or Jarrold or whoever he is hadn’t painted his demon’s name on my wall, I’d have rated nobody higher than the local constable. But they connect him with you, and you’re well off and you’re famous! Don’t you see the unfairness of it? The comical, terrible unfairness of it? And then I present them with his name and they won’t charge him!’ As quickly as it had come, the mood vanished. ‘Oh, to hell with it.’ She laughed a little nastily. She snatched up the hat and grabbed his hand and started towards the door. ‘See me into my cab.’

While he was out getting dinner, a constable came with a message from Munro. Atkins met him with it at the front door:
We have a fingerprint. Keep it to yourself
.

Denton was at New Scotland Yard at eight the next morning. He felt guilty at not working; on the other hand, getting Albert Cosgrove out of his life would certainly make the writing go more easily. He expected to be told that Munro was not yet in; to the contrary, Munro was sitting at his desk in the CID room, the space mostly quiet now as a new shift began. Several men were gathered around a movable blackboard, talking and rubbing chalk from their fingers; a couple of others were at the desks. Munro looked grey, older, somehow handsomer because of his obvious fatigue.

‘You have somewhat the look of a Romantic,’ Denton said. ‘Not one of the ones who died young.’

‘Spent the night here. I was at the magistrate’s until half one, then back here to get it on paper. No way to get to Peckham that hour of the morning.’ He had a mug of tea, waved to somebody to fetch one for Denton. ‘Hope you’ve eaten. The canteen’s swill.’

‘Have you?’

‘Been eating all night - the only way to stay alive - if you can’t sleep, eat. Stopped at a coffee stall and got a bag of buns. Horrible sweet things - the staff of police life.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘You want to hear it?’

‘Of course I do.’

‘We picked Jarrold up last evening. Took his fingerprint. Matched the one on the piano lid. Like he’d dipped his finger in the paint to do it. Took him straight to police court; magistrate was an antique, but he was up on fingerprints - new Bureau has done its work. Got a warrant to search, too.’

‘What’s Jarrold like?’

‘Like a plant that’s been kept indoors too long. Pale, not so much fat as he doesn’t seem to have any muscles. Bag of jelly sort of thing. Perfectly amiable. Smiled, wanted to talk, but not about the case. Absolutely mum on that. Half an hour after he got here, two legal gents showed up, very high on the tree, one in evening dress, both making I’d guess about ten times what I do.’