Bohemian Girl, The (7 page)

Munro had the reports for him from the divisions. They had nothing about a Mary Thomason. He complained that Denton should be getting all this from Guillam’s Missing Persons office, not from him.

‘I get along better with you,’ Denton said.

‘Hmp.’ Munro gave him a rather dead stare. ‘Coroner’s office has three unidentified corpses for the day the “missing” woman wrote you the note, seven for the week following, five for the week before. Five female, ten male. Autopsies performed on two - suspicious causes - and the lot buried after the statutory period because you can’t keep dead bodies indefinitely.’

‘Foul play on any of the women?’

Munro shrugged. ‘Two of them taken out of the river, ditto five of the men, all but one been in too long to know much. Nothing caught the eye.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Didn’t strike anybody as justifying investigation.’ Munro folded his hands on his desk. ‘Fact of life, Denton - some folk are worth the trouble, some aren’t.’

‘You mean they were poor.’

‘I don’t make those judgements. If a middle-class householder with two kids and a wife and a job as a senior clerk turns up in the Thames, we investigate. If somebody in rags with no way of knowing who she was washes up, well—’

‘So if I dress the householder in rags and throw him off a bridge, you bury him without an autopsy?’

‘I’d assume the wife would either raise a stink or the neighbours would.
Respectability
, Denton. It drives the world. You know how it goes - respectability is never being noticed, isn’t it? Never wearing the wrong necktie or saying the wrong word, or suddenly living without a husband when the neighbours know you ought to have one. It comes to our attention. But those who aren’t respectable to start with—’

‘The poor—’

‘You sound like a reformer. Come off it, Denton - you’re respectable, I’m respectable, we read what’s respectable and we think what’s respectable and we don’t go into some parts of London because they aren’t respectable. It’s a not a perfect world out there. A lot gets left to God to sort out.’

‘Mary Thomason maybe wasn’t respectable?’

‘An art student? How would I know? It would help if you could tell me something about her and weren’t just passing gas. Anyway, she should be reported to Missing Persons, which you’ll do posthaste, right?’ Munro slapped his hands on the desk. ‘Tea? Look, Denton, CID aren’t here to find missing shop girls, all right?’

‘Neither am I.’

‘Then give it up. It’s daft, anyway. She probably got a bun in the oven and went home to Ma, or she met some darling artiste and is living in a gypsy caravan someplace.’

Denton accepted a mug of repellent tea. ‘You could be right.’

‘Thank you.’ Munro sipped the tea and made a face. ‘Bitter as a tanner’s pee. My God, why can’t they make it fresh once in a way!’ He pushed several sheets of foolscap across the desk. ‘Keep that, if you like.’

Denton looked it over. Of the list of corpses gathered in after the date of the note to him, one caught his eye, pulled from the Thames - ‘Female, slender, hair long, age unknown because of water and decomposition, contusions on head’ - he thought of bodies he had seen in the war. At the end, he had been in Louisiana; there had been a skirmish, hardly a battle, nothing that would get into the history books, but a dozen bodies had floated down a small river to where he had been camped, three or four catching in a slow eddy; at night, they could hear the alligators tearing at them, their tails splashing the water as they tried to spin pieces off; finally, unable to stand it, he had ordered his men to pull the bodies out and bury them. The faces were ghastly. Was that how Mary Thomason had ended - bloated, unrecognizable, inhuman? ‘Nobody ever heard of Mary Thomason, then. Well—’ He folded the sheets and put them in a pocket. ‘If I’d known what the tea was like, I’d have gone to Guillam.’

‘Try Sewer and Water Authority. Their tea’s capital. They’re not much on crime, though.’ He smiled, the deliberately false smile that merely lifts the corners of the lips. ‘We investigate when we get evidence. There’s no evidence.’

Denton stood. ‘Maybe I’ll find something where she roomed.’

‘If you do -’ Munro pointed a pencil at him, his huge head lowered as if he were going to charge - ‘you report it to Missing Persons. No inspirations, right?’

‘I wouldn’t dare.’ Denton grinned. ‘It wouldn’t be respectable.’ He tried the tea again and gave up on it.

It was still raining at nine o’clock that night, when, encased again in the mackintosh, he stepped out into his ‘back garden’, actually a tangle of weeds that he had never bothered himself with before. He had the new Colt in one pocket and a patent ‘Ever Ready’ electric tube light in the other. ‘The very latest thing, and the light lasts as long as twelve seconds,’ the American sender had written. Called it a ‘flash light’. He hadn’t turned it on yet when he tripped over something and almost fell headlong; he caught himself on his right hand and felt loose earth: there were a small hole, a small pile of soil and a spade. Atkins’s imitation of gardening.

The rain poured down, windless and incessant. The nearby houses showed only as shapes against the dull reflected city glow, their masses broken by rectangles of gaslit windows. The garden was a black pit within head-high brick walls. The dead weeds, stiff as sticks now, stood almost as high, and their feathery ends dripped with water as he brushed through them. He and Atkins had once talked about sowing grass and restoring the borders, still a mare’s-nest of old climbing roses, the remains of an espaliered fruit tree, and shrub-like eruptions that may once have been meant to flower. Atkins wanted a kitchen garden, herbs and lettuces. Nothing had come of the talk: the back garden remained a jungle.

Making his way in the dark down what was left of a brick path, Denton found himself thinking about Heseltine. The young man’s anguish had stayed with him. His own response to the hell of war had been delayed and had come out as a failure of sympathy, an isolation from his young wife and then his sons. And it had appeared still later as imaginings and fantasies that had turned into the novels that his English editor called ‘masterpieces of horror’. Now here was young Heseltine, living through a horror of his own, but hard on the heels of the horror itself without the cushioning of delay or metamorphosis into fiction.

He stumbled, cursed, moved on by sliding his feet over the wet bricks and the grass that grew between them. The mackintosh covered him to halfway between his knees and his boots, but his trouser legs were already wet. The broad hat kept the water out of his collar but would soak through, he knew. He was in for a miserable hour or two, because he meant to wait to see if the man in the red moustache - or Albert Cosgrove - went in or out of the vacant house.

He felt the brick bulk of the former privy, once discussed as a possible garden shed. Weed trees surrounded it, gripped it; he had to fight his way through them, head down to keep twigs out of his eyes. When his reaching fingers felt the rear wall of the garden, he shuffled left, flattening against the bricks to escape the densest of the growth. Once behind the privy, he dared to try the ‘flash light’, which showed him rain, branches and, surprisingly, a wooden ladder against the rear wall. He lifted his finger from the touch ring that was the light’s only switch, careful of his batteries.

Up the ladder, belly on the curved top of the wall, he felt downwards and found another ladder on the other side. Grim discovery: somebody seemed to have made himself a route between Denton’s garden and that of the house behind.

And if into the garden, therefore into the house? He felt the sickening lurch of disgust at the idea of somebody’s invading him.

He was clumsy going over. He felt the ladder’s fragility as he put his weight on it but got down to find a real garden shed on that side, wood not brick, and no tangle of weed trees - a true garden that had been the real thing until a couple of months ago. Crossing it was easy - something rigid and crotch-high, a sundial or a statue, was a temporary discomfort - and then he leaned against the back wall of the house between the cellar door and the back door and waited for his man.

And waited.

And waited.

At half past ten, a distant church bell sounding, he felt his way along the house wall to the back door and tested it, found it locked. No such luck.

He gave up at half past eleven. The lights were out in the adjoining houses. The rain still fell; the city glow burned on; the city’s growl was muted.

He went home the way he had come, wet, angry, like a cat who’s been shut out in the rain.

‘Anything?’ Atkins said, not without scepticism.

Denton was in his own entrance hall. Atkins, wearing the bedraggled robe, pyjama bottoms visible between the hem and the floor, was standing in the doorway to his quarters. A staircase ran up the wall on Denton’s left to his own part of the house. Around them, the oversized Scottish genre paintings were inscrutable in the dim light.

Denton shrugged himself out of the mackintosh and handed it over, hat to follow. ‘Your intruder’s either a figment of your imagination or he’s got another home.’

‘Figment? Who chased somebody because he thought he was being followed? Who saw a man with a funny upper lip at New Scotland Yard?’

Denton grunted. ‘Maybe we’re both seeing things.’ He stopped partway up the stairs. ‘I almost tripped over a shovel in the back. Was that you?’

‘Ha, ha. I hired a layabout that was recommended by the ice-man; he started digging and half an hour later told me the back garden was concrete, not dirt, and I could take my spade and put it in a certain place. Which reminds me, I mean the ice-man does, the ice-cave is leaking again, and I’m sick of mopping up around it.’

‘We just had it soldered.’

‘Well, it’s leaking. We need a proper modern ice-box. Ice-caves went out with the bustle.’

‘Keep mopping.’

He went up to the long sitting room, walked its length without turning up the gas and looked out of the high window at the back. The house behind was mere blackness, a peaked hole in the night. It was almost midnight - no, four minutes to; there was the bell of Holy Trinity, never on time.

He went back to his chair by the near-dead coal fire, tossed on a pitchy stick or two and several chunks of coal and sat in his chair. He opened a book but didn’t read, sat instead with his fist against his lower lip, thinking of Janet Striker.

Later, Atkins came up to clear things away. Putting glasses on a tray, he said, ‘Jesus never laughs.’

‘“Jesus wept.”’

‘Exactly. I been through the gospels and through them. He don’t laugh. He weeps, as you say - the miracle of Lazarus. Wouldn’t hurt him to laugh, would it?’

‘Blasphemous remark.’

‘We’re told he’s the divine made flesh, aren’t we? Flesh laughs!’

‘Katya losing her hold?’

‘Don’t get personal, please - not in our contract.’

‘Go to bed.’

‘I was
in
bed, and then you come back and now some of us have to wash up the glasses that others have used. Go to bed, my hat.’

Denton smiled at his back. He closed the unread book, turned down the light and walked again to the long window. The rain was a cold drizzle now, holding the reflection of the city in a low yellow blush, against which the houses were uncertain silhouettes. The house behind was only deeper blackness - until a small dot of light moved along it, a will-o’-the-wisp doing a slow dance from right to left.

‘He’s there!’ Denton pounded up his stairs for the new revolver, then down again. ‘Call a constable!’ Another glance out of the back window showed nothing, the moving light now gone.

Atkins was at the bottom of his stairs in pyjamas, his hair tangled. ‘What do I tell the copper?’

‘I saw a light in the rear garden of the house behind, what d’you think you tell him?’ Denton was running down the stairs towards him.

‘I’m ready for bed. Look at me.’

‘Throw on my mac.’ He went around Atkins. ‘I’m going out the back way.’

‘You’ve not even got boots on!’

Then he was in his own back garden again, the tall, wet weeds brushing his face and hands. He should have worn a coat, but there hadn’t been time. His old velvet jacket was already soaked, as were his thin-soled slippers. He pushed his way through the weeds, found the brick path, made better headway. Halfway up the ladder, he realized he’d forgotten the flashlight. He hesitated, one foot up, one on a lower rung, told himself it didn’t matter and went on up and over the wall. Going down the other side, he felt exposed, his back now turned to that upper window where Atkins had seen the figure and he had seen the light. He shivered, told himself it was the wet, and dodged around the obstacle (sundial? statue?) to cross the grass. Far away, he heard a police whistle, like a thin bird’s cry, infinitely lonely - perhaps Atkins calling the constable.

The ground-level door was closed and locked, but the sloping door to the cellar was raised, leaned back on a support so it was held safely beyond the vertical. In the wet air, light from the city glow was diffuse, dim, but less than blackness to his now-adjusted eyes. The hole below where the door had lain - surely there were stairs there - was real blackness, however. He knelt and put a hand down, found the first step - stone, cracked, cold. He lifted his head and listened for Atkins, for a policeman.

Somebody was inside the house now, he was sure. The cellar door had been left open for a quick escape; it seemed to him a stupid, even childish thing to have done - if a policeman with a lantern came into the garden, it would be the first thing he saw. But the mind at work here was not normal. Childish, perhaps. Less than sane? Denton squatted there in the rain and thought about the face he’d seen at New Scotland Yard. Childish, but - clever? Not stupid, perhaps. And cautious.
So if I’m childish but clever, what would I have done here?
He thought that a clever child might have put something down there in the darkness to trip an intruder or to sound a warning.