Bohemian Girl, The (39 page)

Lang stared at him, said that it couldn’t be so, said that they didn’t do things that way, said excuse me and hurried out of the office and came back, his pale face almost pink, with the letter agreement. ‘Well, yes,’ he said, ‘of course we didn’t mention a next book, but—’ He looked hopeful. ‘It was understood as a gentleman’s agreement.’

Denton had brought with him the letters from other publishers that he’d been getting since he’d returned in September. He began to drop them on Lang’s desk. ‘Longwin and Barnes - Low - Hildesheim - Henry Strath - Osgood—’ They piled on the desk like blown leaves. ‘They all want my next book.’

‘They can’t have it.’ Lang’s voice was a whisper.

‘Lang, maybe being shot in the back has made me testy. I like you personally. But I want more money.’

Lang winced. ‘There isn’t any more money.’

‘Five hundred guineas a book in advance against a ten per cent royalty.’

‘Oh, no, no—’

‘Or perhaps I ought to hire one of these agents that keep pestering me.’

‘Oh, don’t do that!’ Lang’s desiccated face looked to be near tears. ‘They’re not gentlemen!’

Denton heard a heavy footstep in the corridor and then the impressive bulk of Wilfred Gweneth himself filled the doorway. ‘What’s this, then? Ah, Denton—’ Gweneth seemed quite jolly, as if the motor car had never existed. They shook hands. Denton was sure that in fact Lang had sent for Gweneth while he was out of the office.

Gweneth looked at Lang. ‘Anything amiss?’

‘Mr Denton - our friend and valued author, Mr Denton - ah—’

‘Wants more money,’ Denton said.

Gweneth smiled. ‘Ah.’

‘You got your money back for the motor car. The Transylvania book has made you a pot. I’ve delivered the new novel. I want more for my next.’ He didn’t say he didn’t have an idea for a next in his head - not a hint.

Gweneth picked up one of the letters from the desk, read it, picked up another, then another. Lang whispered, ‘He’s talking about an agent.’

Gweneth smiled and shook his head, as if the vagaries of authors were beyond understanding. ‘How much?’ he said.

Denton told him. ‘There’s nothing about a next book in the letter agreement.’

‘I know.’ Gweneth laughed and showed his back teeth. He lifted Denton’s new book as if weighing it, apparently judged it sufficiently heavy. ‘Let’s say pounds not guineas, ten per cent royalty, but the old terms on the Empire and we’ll forget about the next-book clause!’ He pointed a hand at Lang. ‘Draw up a contract that meets the new terms. We don’t want him going to a wretched bunch of thieves like Longwin’s.’ Gweneth hooked a hand through Denton’s arm. ‘Lunch? I want to hear about your being shot. Is there a book in it, do you think—? Perhaps something that might touch on spiritualism - a moment when you saw beings in white robes all about you, a magical light, music—? Do you like fresh-caught salmon?’

At the end of April, Janet Striker handed him a pasteboard box. In it was a folded something of grey wool with blue trim. When he laid it out on his bed, he stared at it and tried to guess what it was and what he was supposed to do with it. The sleeves came, he thought, about to the elbows, the trousers to just below the knee. There was a little hat to match, rather like the caps that Eton boys wore. Surely they weren’t some sort of pyjamas she thought he would wear?

‘Unhhh—’ he said.

‘It’s a rowing costume.’ She was undressing, was wearing an only slightly frilly thing that came halfway down her thighs and had garters to attach to her stockings. ‘Can’t you tell that?’

‘You’re distracting me.’

‘You hate it, don’t you.’

‘In the attic, it’ll be fine.’

‘You’re not going to wear it in the attic! You’re going to wear it at Hammersmith. I’ve bought you a season ticket for a rowing boat. You’ll wear it on the Thames!’

He stared at it. She began to unfasten her stockings. He said, ‘I know I told you I’d do anything for you, but—’ She looked up, bent forward, a foot on the divan, pulling off a stocking. He said, ‘Of course I’ll wear it. It’s just the thing.’

The likely death of Erasmus Himple caused a brief sensation. Journalists came to interview Denton and were turned away. A French detective came with a translator and went over everything that Denton and Janet Striker knew and left without comment.

Denton sat late one evening with her and let the room go almost dark before he lit a lamp. He said, ‘It grieves me that they’ve got away with it.’

‘They?’

‘There had to be two of them. One man alone couldn’t have murdered Heseltine. You can make a man lie down in a bathtub, maybe, but you can’t hold both his arms and slash his wrists for him. He’ll fight you. From Munro’s description, Heseltine didn’t fight and didn’t splash blood around. That means he was unconscious when his wrists were slashed, already in the bath or there’d have been blood all over his flat. One small man couldn’t have dragged him to the bathroom and got him into the tub, even if he was unconscious.’

‘You still think Mary and her brother are different people.’

‘It’s the explanation that takes care of the most questions.’

‘You think a small man and a small woman could have moved Heseltine?’

‘Oh, yes.’ He stretched out both his legs and slowly raised the right one to put it over his left ankle. ‘I need to think. I’ve missed things.’

Lady Emmeline’s legal people got in touch with Sir Francis Brudenell, his solicitor. They were offering to pay his medical expenses in return for his signing a paper absolving Lady Emmeline and her son of all responsibility. ‘This, of course,’ Sir Francis wrote, ‘is nonsense. They are clearly terrified that we will sue. We should most certainly win, as there is no question of his having shot you or of her negligence in controlling him. However, the law is slow, and publicity could be an embarrassment to you, as it is my understanding that the shooting took place immediately after your egress from a premises less well-respected than many. It is my recommendation that I make them a counter-offer to settle the matter out of court for, let us say, your medical expenses plus ten thousand pounds. We shall settle for five. It will hardly matter to Lady Emmeline, as she owns a good deal of central Portsmouth. Of course, in case there is permanent damage from the bullets, we shall make the matter conditional on full recovery.’

It gave Denton something new to think about. With five thousand pounds, he could electrify his house, perhaps put in central heating, buy a motor car and still have enough to put away - a previously impossible luxury. On the other hand, he believed that he should earn whatever money he got. After two days, he scribbled a note: ‘Go ahead.’

He made lists. He compared dates. He reconstructed everything that had happened, dated it, made a chart of the what and the when, with the events down one side in chronological order, from his opening Mary Thomason’s letter through to the finding of the bones in Normandy. He tried to make a graph, or perhaps it was a map, of who had been in various places at various times, but it was too complicated and at the same time too empty: he didn’t know enough. After several days of it, sitting sulkily and looking at the papers he had stuck up with pins on his bedroom wall, he said, ‘Somebody’s lied to us.’

‘Who?’

He chewed on a thumbnail. ‘I mean to find that out.’ He stared at the papers; she moved about the room, picked up a book, sat to read. He said, ‘I’ve been thinking about those dreams. After I was shot.’ He chewed on the thumbnail. ‘I was afraid.’

‘But you know that.’

‘But not afraid the way I thought. It isn’t any of that elaborate allegory the doctor was trying to build; it was fear of—It’s something about the woman. The doctor was sure it was fear of death. Well, of course - all fear is fear of death, I suppose. But this was about—I don’t think the one with the shotgun was a man—’

‘It was Mary Thomason.’

He nodded.

‘A while ago, you thought that “they” would try again.’

‘I think that’s over. If they ever meant to. I wonder a little that they didn’t try to move Himple’s body after they shot me, but it was probably just too much - too risky. And they thought I’d die.’

‘They’ve given up?’

He studied his charts. ‘I hope that they don’t care about me any more. As soon as the news about finding the body hit the newspapers, there was no longer any reason. When the police couldn’t find them, they knew they’d won.’

‘So you’re safe.’

‘Unless we find something that sets them going again.’ He got up and limped around the room. He stood in front of one of his papers, arms folded. ‘I’m going to ask Munro to let me see Struther Jarrold.’

‘
Why?
’

‘Because I think he knows who Mary Thomason is.’

The Hobhouse Prison for the Criminally Insane was on the edge of Exmoor, facing a landscape that would have been bleak on the best of days. In a thunderstorm, it was dramatic and dismal. He’d asked Janet Striker if she wanted to come with him, but she’d shuddered and said she’d been inside such a place too long to ever want to see one again. When he said it was supposed to be a model of progressive institutionalization, she had said there was no such thing.

The building was grey stone, with square towers at each corner and a steepled central one for the entrance. Surrounded by a high stone wall, it was inescapably a prison; whatever was modern or progressive about it had to be inside. Munro, seeing it in the distance, said it looked like a cotton mill. ‘Not that a cotton mill wouldn’t be just the thing for Jarrold and his ilk - never done a day’s work in his life. His mum’s got him a private cell that’s furnished like a bedroom, with bookshelves and carpets and easy chairs. Everything bolted to the floor, of course, and nothing dangling about he could hang himself with. Still, it beats ten hours a day bent over a power loom.’

‘That’s the court’s idea of punishment?’

‘He isn’t being punished - no trial yet. He’s being kept isolated for society’s sake.’

Their carriage turned in at a gateway and stopped while Munro identified himself, and then they were waved in and passed under the steeple and into a vast courtyard where barred windows stared down into half an acre of gravel. Around the entire yard at ground level, porches with heavy wire from floor to ceiling held men who gaped, then shouted and gestured at the carriage while they twisted their fingers into the wire mesh.

‘Newest thing,’ Munro growled. ‘No trees or flowers to distract the demented brain.’ He looked at the porches. ‘Hell with fresh air,’ he said.

Jarrold’s cell was on the third floor. They waited in an interview room, very spare, a double table down the middle with a chest-high partition and a few oak straight chairs. The sounds of a prison made their way through the walls: incoherent voices, metal banging on metal, footfalls and the clang of doors, and here and there the screams and laughter of the insane.

They heard Jarrold before they saw him - the metallic scuffing of a chain on stone floors, the jingle of his manacles. Influential mother or not, he was put into chains to move out of his cell, and he came in bowed by the weight of them. Two warders in dark uniforms nudged him along to a chair on the other side of the partition from them, and it was only when Jarrold was seated and had clanked his ankle chains into some sort of comfortable position that he looked up at his visitors. When he saw Denton, his scowling face was replaced with a knowing, childish grin, as if they shared a secret.

Jarrold, he had been told, never spoke. Since he had fired the two bullets into Denton and shouted those few words, he had been silent, even with his attorneys and his mother. ‘Utterly withdrawn into a world of his own,’ the chief physician’s report had said. Denton wondered.

‘Please ask your questions, gentlemen,’ the more senior of the warders said. ‘We have to remain present. We think he hears what’s said to him, but - he don’t respond.’

Jarrold’s face, after that knowing smile, had fallen back into its scowl, and now he looked at his hands, limp in his lap.

Denton remained standing. He took the drawing of Mary Thomason from an inner pocket and unfolded it, looking at it to make sure it was the right side up, and then he leaned quickly forward and held it against Jarrold’s side of the partition. One of the warders started forward, saying, ‘Sir—’ and Denton said, ‘Albert!’

Jarrold’s head lifted; his eyes found the paper. His mouth opened. He began to scream.

‘I never told! Astoreth - Astoreth - I never told! I never did - Astore-e-e-th—!’ His body spasmed and his back arched as he went into a seizure.

Denton was silent all the way back in the train. He’d told Munro he wanted to think and he wanted to talk to Janet Striker; Munro was welcome to come home with him, but he’d have to wait until then.

‘You knew he was going to do that, didn’t you! Dammit, Denton, that was a cheap courtroom trick. And what did you get out of it? All that way so you could—’

Denton held up a hand and said nothing. At Lamb’s Conduit Street, they climbed his stairs and sat silently while Atkins went for Mrs Striker. As soon as she was in the room, Denton told her what had happened.

‘Mary Thomason is Astoreth? But that’s impossible. Jarrold painted “Astoreth” on my wall months ago, when there was no way that—’ She looked at Munro. ‘Has he explained this to you?’

‘He hasn’t explained to me why I spent a day going to Devon and getting nothing out of it. Don’t be cute, Denton - spill it and let me get back to New Scotland Yard.’

‘I don’t have much to spill yet. Yes, Mary Thomason is Astoreth. That’s what I had to know before I could know anything else.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it means she’s alive and she isn’t missing, and because it means that she’s the one who told Jarrold to shoot me.’

Munro was sitting with his head tilted slightly back, his eyes half-closed, looking at Denton. ‘You’re spinning a tale.’