Bohemian Girl, The (37 page)

‘You’re sure it’s murder.’

‘Bodies buried under straw piles are usually murder, Denton.’

‘The owner of the farm in any trouble?’

Munro grunted. ‘When a body’s found, you don’t want to be the owner of the plot where it’s buried. I’m sure they showed him a fairly bad time. No arrest made, however. There’s a major problem - they don’t know yet how long the body’s been there.’ He got up and took off his overcoat, threw it over the back of his chair and sat down again, shaking his head when Denton made a move for the bell-pull. ‘The body was buried in lye.’

Denton slowly sat back, letting his head roll until it was supported by the chair. ‘That’s why the skin is white.’

‘What’s left of it. Lot of lye used - French police think as much as a hundred pounds. Not enough to dissolve the bones, but it’s apparently done some major damage. Plus there’s a complication.’

Denton raised himself upright.

‘There’s no head.’

‘Oh, dammit.’

‘They’ve sent everything off to Paris to a
professeur
who’s some sort of expert in old bones. He’s going to tell them - maybe - how long they’ve been in the ground and what sort of creature it was: male, female; old, young.’ Munro leaned forward with his hands on his knees. ‘Look, Denton, we’re not in it yet - CID have no official interest. They came to me because Mrs Striker gave them my name. We’re in it if the body turns out to be English.’ His eyes opened slightly; his brow went up. ‘I think you’d better tell me everything.’

‘I tried to already.’

‘I know. I was right not to listen then. Now I’m right to demand you tell me. Everything.’

Atkins came in with a tray, put it down on the folding table, opened the dumb-waiter doors, and turned left and went upstairs. Half a minute later, he came down again and vanished into his own lower regions.

‘He telling her I’m here?’ Munro said.

‘I suspect he’s asking her to join us for whatever’s on that tray.’

‘Hmp.’ Munro looked down at the tray, which held mostly crockery. ‘Not very nourishing.’ He looked at Denton again. ‘I daresay it’s better that she be here, anyway.’ He filled the time until she appeared with chatter. He talked about the coronation, now a few months off. There was great concern about anarchists. Police were going to be brought into London from the rest of England. He was sure the London criminals were already booking accommodation in other cities for the easy pickings. ‘Curious thing when you think about it, a coronation,’ he said.

‘I don’t think about it much.’

‘Well, it’s what your people had a rebellion about.’

‘Revolution. Rebellion is when you lose.’

‘Ah. Did you win? I thought it was the French who won.’ Munro looked sly and laughed. At that point Atkins and Mrs Striker almost collided at the foot of the stairs; she pulled back and insisted that Atkins, carrying another tray, go ahead.

‘Very sorry, madam, very sorry,’ Atkins said as he put the tray down on another table.

‘No harm done,’ she said. ‘Hallo, Sergeant. Are you angry with me?’

‘For putting the French on me? I’m not delighted.’

‘I thought they should have the best the Yard had to offer.’ She was bending over a teapot, looking into its steam as if she could read her future there.

‘Oh, ha-ha. Well, it might well have come my way, anyway.’ She was wearing an unfussy blouse and the green wool skirt with the box pleats, part of one of her suits; her hair was piled high, a comb with brilliants in it - diamond chips? - at the back. While she passed filled cups to Atkins to hand around, Munro told her what he’d already told Denton. He skipped the part about the missing head. When Atkins was gone, Munro said, ‘He hears everything down that dumb-waiter shaft, am I right?’

Denton said in a dry voice, ‘I don’t try to keep much from him, if that’s what you mean.’

Janet Striker sat on a side chair, crossed her legs and set her cup and saucer on them, keeping the saucer in the fingers of one hand. She said, ‘You’ll want to know everything.’

‘Indeed I will.’ He glanced at Denton. ‘I asked him to tell me “everything” a bit ago, and he didn’t.’

She looked at Denton and winked. It was an astonishing performance for that usually grave face. He smiled despite himself and began to tell it all to Munro again. This time, Munro made notes. There was a lot of fluster over where to put things while he dragged out a notebook and pencil from his heavy tweed jacket. Janet Striker occasionally put a few words in; Munro looked at her each time with a shrewd expression, as if to say,
Oho, you’re in it as deep as he is.
When they were done, Munro said, ‘All right, now I’m going to find out what you wouldn’t tell me before. This picture you’ve got of the girl. Where’d you get it?’

Denton looked at Janet. She said, utterly cool, ‘It was in the girl’s trunk.’

Munro sighed. ‘You’ve got her trunk.’

‘Not at all. It’s in the “to be called for” office at Biggleswade.’

‘But you’ve been into it!’ He glared at Denton. ‘Come on, come on - it’s all going to come out!’

‘You know, Munro, for a man who’s being given a case on a plate, you’re being a pill.’

‘Case on a plate, my hat! Bunch of speculations and random shots, is what it looks like.’

‘Be grateful for what you get and stop pressing us for how we got something.’

‘If we go to court, it’s all got to come out!’

‘Let’s deal with that when you go to court, then. Look—’ Denton put his cup down. He wiggled himself forward in the soft chair, lifting his bad leg with both hands to raise it. ‘I’ll take responsibility for getting the drawing. Let’s say I was into the trunk - all right. Leave it at that for now.’

‘If you were into the trunk, it and everything in it are tainted. You could have planted anything - that’s what counsel would say.’

‘Damn counsel! You’re concerned with what to tell a French cop about how Arthur Crum’s body got in a hole in Normandy.’

‘Or whoever’s in there,’ Janet Striker murmured. ‘For all we know right now, it could be one of the knights from the Bayeux tapestry.’ She smiled. ‘I read about it in a Baedeker on the Channel crossing. ’

Munro made a rather humourless clucking sound. ‘Well, we’re going to have the devil’s own time making any kind of identification at all as things stand. But one thing at a time - sufficient unto the day, and so on. All right, I’ll go easy on the trunk for now but I want a list of everything that was in it - everything!’ He glared at Denton, then Janet Striker. ‘And mind - the day of reckoning is coming!’ He shook his pencil at Denton.

‘You should have been a preacher. “My god is a jealous god.”’

‘The god of New Scotland Yard
is
a jealous god! We also grind very slowly, like all gods.’

‘And exceeding small.’

‘That, too.’ Munro looked at his notebook. ‘Well, I don’t see the chain - Mary Thomason goes missing; her brother collects the trunk - but where’s the link to Arthur Crum? A drawing done by somebody who never saw him, based on the drawing of Mary? That’s pure fantasy. This painting of Lazarus?’ He made a sound with his lips that sounded like ‘peuh’. ‘You don’t know how many human faces look alike until you undertake police work. Did you show this supposed drawing of the brother to Mary’s landlady? What’s her name, Mrs - Durnquess? She’s the only one I find in this tangle who actually
saw
him.’

‘The Irish maid,’ Janet Striker said.

‘Oh, right.’ Munro made a note. ‘Have to interview both of them, and I want a copy of these drawings you’ve built such a sandcastle on. All right - then the Mayflower Baths. I know all about the Mayflower Baths. Lots of jokes about it at the Yard - pardon me, ma’am. I’ll ask around about this man Himple. Also, some of the lads who were picked up at the baths are still in prison; they should be shown the drawing of the “brother”.’ He made another note. ‘Then there’s the letters home from this fellow Himple. To - a valet—’

‘Brown.’

‘Yes - can’t read my own writing. Brown.’ He leaned hard on the pencil. ‘Brown seems to be the one who knows where they were when. Or supposed to be, anyway. And where and when the temporary valet, this Crum, is supposed to have been discharged.’

‘Brown has all that.’

‘Yes, I
said
we need to talk to Brown. Give me an address. Good. If the bones turn out to be who you think, then we’ll wire the places where they stayed, and so on - maybe let the French police do that, actually - depends, depends. Hmm.’ He pinched his lower lip between his fingers and studied his notebook. ‘French are digging up the dust pit at the farm to see if they can find the sack the lye came in. Also going to canvass the shops in the nearby town - what is it? Can? Cane—?’

‘Caen,’ she said.

‘That’s it. You sound just like the Frenchman. Plus they’ll be looking for the, mm, other missing things—’

Janet Striker looked at Denton. He said, ‘There’s no head with the bones.’

‘Oh, dear God. And I was so grateful we hadn’t found that first - I didn’t want to see a face that had been—’ She shook her head quickly. ‘Ridiculous to make more of the face than anything else.’

Munro closed his notebook and began to cram it back into some maw within his suit. ‘I don’t see that we can do anything until we have an identification. Metropolitan Police can’t involve themselves until there’s suspicion of a crime. A body found in France isn’t suspicion of a crime.’ He pulled the notebook out again and waved it at Denton. ‘And this doesn’t hold together well enough to be a crime!’

‘And if the French police say in the end that they’re unidentifiable remains?’

Munro stood. ‘They’ll have saved me a lot of grief.’

‘What do you know about women’s time of the month?’ Janet Striker said.

Denton felt his face flush; he thought she would say next something about not being able to go to bed with him. He started to say, ‘I was married,’ to mean that he knew what a woman’s time of the month was, but didn’t get it out because she said, ‘I’ve been thinking about Mary Thomason.’

It made no sense to him. ‘What’s that got to do with - what you asked me?’

He thought she was smiling, but the light was low and he couldn’t tell. She said, ‘You’re embarrassed. So am I. It’s this ridiculous code we have to live by to be “respectable”. We can go to bed and know each other well enough to talk about death and madness, but not menstruation.’ Her hand touched his. ‘I’ve been making the list of things in her trunk for Munro. Racking my brain to make sure I got everything. I think I remember what was in her trunk, but—What
wasn’t
in Mary Thomason’s trunk?’ she said.

A bit gruffly, he said, ‘I suppose you’ve given me the clue.’

‘Women bleed every month. Unless they’re ignorant and nearly savage and destitute, they use something to catch the blood. Don’t be embarrassed, Denton; this is simple fact. Poor women - that’s most of the women in the world - use rags. Men make jokes about them, don’t they - “She’s got the rag on,” to explain anything odd a woman does. Even the black slaves in America used something, would be my guess, at least if they could get them or hoard them. Moss, grass - something. Poor women in London keep old clothes, old bedclothes, anything they can get their hands on; they fold the rags into a sort of pad and pin them to their underskirts, or they fashion themselves a sort of belt and pin them to that.’

‘Why are you telling me all this?’

‘Wealthy women use pads they buy at places like Harrods. While they’re shopping for the highest-quality shirts Mrs Cohan runs up in the attic, I suppose. The pads are disposable, so the well-off can pretend none of it’s happening. The poor wash the blood out of the rags and use them again and again, and the rags show the brown stains of the blood.’

‘All right, yes - I remember all that.’ He was thinking of his dreams.

‘The rags are
valuable
, Denton. Not for money but for convenience, for necessity - when the bleeding starts, you must have them. Else you find blood staining through your petticoat to your skirt, and if you wear light colours, it’s hideously embarrassing.’ She struck his arm lightly with her hand. ‘What wasn’t in Mary Thomason’s trunk?’

‘Rags,’ he said weakly.

‘Or pins or any kind of belt. Not a scrap of cloth with a stain. Nor any stains in her drawers.’

‘She wasn’t, mm, at that time of the month.’

‘On the contrary, the only reason - one of the only reasons - that we didn’t find any could be that she was wearing them, or wearing some and carrying the rest. But surely she’d have had more in reserve. You want never to run out.’ She hesitated, as if what she would say next might annoy him. ‘I went back to Fitzroy Street yesterday and talked to Hannah - the maid at the place where Mary Thomason lived.’

‘The plump Mrs Durnquess’s.’

‘I asked Hannah where the female tenants washed out their rags. She knew exactly what I meant. There’s a sink for it in the basement; they dry them on a line down there.’ She met his eyes - no trace of embarrassment. ‘I asked her if Mary Thomason ever went down there. She said she couldn’t recall ever seeing her. She hadn’t thought about it, but now she thought about it and she said, “Ain’t that remarkable, ma’am.”’ She tapped his hand. ‘What
did
we find in her trunk?’

He’d have been a dunce not to know where she was going. ‘The depilatory, but—’

‘We at least have to ask ourselves, Denton, who doesn’t menstruate and would need a depilatory?’

‘You make it sound like a riddle for a parlour game.’ He frowned at her, looked away.

‘I want one of those cream-filled dessert things,’ she said. They were still eating in his sitting room, although Munro was long gone; a small plate of pastries sat on a tiered table nearby. ‘Anyway, it’s a possibility, isn’t it - that Mary Thomason isn’t a woman?’

‘Anything’s possible, but—I’ve heard of women masquerading as men - even as soldiers—’