Bohemian Girl, The (8 page)

Denton lay in a puddle and felt down the top step, then the second. Across the third step, about six inches up, a rope had been stretched, one end tied to a nail and the other to a cluster of used tins that, as he leaned his head down, smelled of old meat and older fish.

An alarm system. Like something from
Boy’s Own
.

He felt his way down and stepped over the rope and down another step, then felt ahead of himself to the crumbling wood of an old doorway. A broom had been leaned across it.

The cellar smelled of earth and cat piss and old fires. Low windows at ground level were pale yellow rectangles. He went on hands and knees across the floor, feeling his way towards where he hoped a set of stairs would go up to the door that stood on the other side of the house. He was off by about five feet but found the stairway well enough because of the light coming in a window at the top, a streetlight throwing yellow-green patterns through it. He went up.

The space above was some kind of corridor, doors opening off it, windows down one wall. Feeling ahead for more
Boy’s Own
alarm systems, he made his way forward towards Millman Street, through a doorway, the door open, and so from what would have been the servants’ part of the house to its public self - a large space, dark, more spaces opening beyond it - an entrance hall? To his left, a stairway up. At the top, sound.

A voice, the words unintelligible. Then another voice, different, no more understandable than the first.

Denton felt with his fingers and then put his left foot on the first stair tread. He pulled himself up, waiting for a creak, got none. He felt for the next tread.

The first voice murmured again, went on. Male, he thought. He went up another step. The other voice, incantatory, sing-song - female?

He was raising his right foot to the fourth tread, off-balance, when a loud noise of knocking racketed from the front of the house -
bang-bang-bang-bang
. ‘Police! Hullo? Police!’

Startled, Denton stumbled momentarily, caught his balance and leaned back against the wall. Above him, there had been a quick sound of scurrying movement, then nothing.

The knocking came again.

Denton charged up the stairs, turned at a landing and started up again and saw something hurtling down at him, big, flying, unreal, and he raised the Colt, flinching away from the thing, his thumb reaching for the familiar big hammer of the old revolver and not finding it. The pistol was too new, too little tried; he forgot that it was double-action and fired simply by pulling the trigger; his thumb fumbled over the smaller hammer, and before he had it cocked and could fire, the thing was on him, smothering him, stinking of mould and mice. He pushed it off, feeling its damp softness, small weight, cocked the revolver at last, and found himself alone on the stairs. He looked up into more darkness.

The pounding came again.

‘Go to the back!’ Denton shouted. ‘The back!’ He charged upstairs and, making the turn at the top into a corridor, felt movement, saw the darkness in motion around him, raised his left arm to shield himself and his right to fire and felt a whack on his shoulder that glanced off and struck his head. He stumbled, dropped to his right knee, points of light in his eyes like sparks. Something shoved him hard on the left side of his head, and heavy footsteps clattered down the stairs.

Denton stayed. He tried to stand and fell to a sitting position against the wall.

The front door opened and slammed shut.

‘Can you walk?’

‘It’s only my arm. I’m all right, Sergeant.’

‘Was it him?’

‘It was somebody - had a bar or a club or something—’

‘Oh, crikey.’

The shrill bleat of a police whistle came from behind them - the constable arriving with reinforcements. They were in the back garden of the house behind his, Denton seated on the ground at the top of the cellar stairs. The rain had stopped. He was thinking that he had underestimated their man, and maybe that was his own fault because he hadn’t taken somebody who’d wear a red moustache seriously. He was also thinking that he’d been an idiot.

‘Dr Bernat’s on his way.’ Dr Bernat had a surgery at the corner of Lamb’s Conduit Street and Guilford Street, only steps from Denton’s house.

‘Stop fussing over me.’

Then a constable came up behind Atkins, and Dr Bernat came the long way around and found the route into the garden from Millman Street. The policeman had a dark lantern, which Atkins held trained on Denton’s arm while the doctor examined it and the constable took ‘the victim’s statement’.

‘It is not broken, only bruised,’ Bernat said. ‘I need more light. I think a cab and the hospital - he protests, but—’

‘No hospital, absolutely not.’

‘You are hurt.’

‘I’m embarrassed! And I’ve been hurt lots worse. All I had was a knock on the arm and a knock on the head. I made my own way down through a dark house. I’m all right, doctor! I was shaken up, that’s all.’

The policeman said, ‘A bit peculiar.’

‘Which part of it?’

The policeman cleared his throat. He was older than many of them, not brilliant. ‘Them ladders, to start with.’

‘On the garden wall? Yes, well—’

Denton stood, refusing Atkins’s help. Atkins was wearing Denton’s mackintosh, which was so big on him it dragged on the ground. From their own back garden, Rupert was objecting in single, well-spaced barks to being kept away from the action. The policeman shone his dark lantern down the cellar steps. Denton told him about the voices, the attack, the front door. ‘I thought you’d come when I shouted, Constable.’

‘Question of entry, sir. You said to go to the back. I got to the back and didn’t see nothing. Thought it important to get some help.’ He had Atkins hold the lantern while he made notes. ‘About them ladders,’ he said.

‘We found them that way.’

The policeman cleared his throat and took the lantern back and walked over the grass to the rear wall. He aimed his light at the ladder and pulled it down to study the end. ‘Been sawed.’

‘Is that significant?’

‘Something you did yourself, sir?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Not your ladder?’

‘I don’t own a ladder.’

The policeman replaced the ladder and then climbed up it and stood there, looking down into Denton’s back garden. He came down. ‘Ladder on the other side’s also been sawed. Two ladders sawn from one, if you follow my meaning.’

‘I do.’

‘Deliberate.’

‘That sounds right.’

The policeman paced back and shone the light around. ‘This is a matter for a detective.’ He stood straight. ‘Get one here in the morning.’

He came closer to Denton. It was cold in the garden. Denton shivered and remembered that his clothes were soaked. Still, there was something perversely pleasant about the moment - the darkness, the quieter city, a star that he could see above them - a sense that things could easily have been worse. ‘Now, sir,’ the policeman said.

‘This isn’t a good place to give a statement. Why don’t we go into my house? There’s tea.’

The man considered that. ‘If your man will just remain here at the scene, sir, I’ll fetch another constable to keep guard, and we’ll proceed.’

It took him fifteen minutes. Denton got quite cold.

He got to bed finally. The story of the man with the red moustache, the figure in the window, the glow Denton had seen there, were more than the policeman wanted to hear. He said several times that Denton would have to tell this to a detective. Denton’s having waited over there himself earlier that evening made him frown; Denton’s actually going into the house made him frown even more.

He was a stolid copper with a balding head that had what seemed to be a permanent red crease where his helmet rode. The hairs at the sides of his head, some grey, were damp from the sweat of it. He shook his head several times but didn’t say outright that this was a strange tale.

‘Matter for the detectives,’ he said once more, and left.

‘Now you’re for it,’ Atkins said.

‘Me?’

‘Police’ll have you the guilty party for breaking and entering, before they’re through.’

‘Go to bed.’

‘I ain’t been staying up because I like it, General.’ Atkins looked at him with suspicion. ‘You sure you’re all right?’

‘My arm hurts, but I can use it and wiggle the fingers. The knock on the head had me seeing stars, but they’re gone and all I have is a headache. Mostly, my feelings are hurt for being such a dub. You’d think I’d never fired a pistol before.’

In the morning, his arm was bruised but his headache was gone. The embarrassment was still there, perhaps more acutely. Wanting to erase it, he went around to Millman Street and looked at the front of the house and found a ‘To Let’ sign, not very large, by the front door. On it in a small, neat handwriting was the name of an estate agent in Russell Square. Neither the sign nor the size of the writing suggested that anybody was very hopeful about Number 14 Millman Street. Denton looked at the house and thought he saw why: too small, too old, too poorly maintained. Had he ever known whoever had lived there before? He didn’t think so.

At nine, cursing the time off from his work, he was at Messrs Plumb and Angevin in Russell Square. Plumb, an eager, smiling, rabbity man too young to be so familiar, was astonished that somebody had been attacked in one of his houses, shocked that the house had been invaded.

‘That’s breaking and entering,’ he said. ‘You should have apprised us!’

‘There was nothing to apprise you about.’

‘You have a duty under the law!’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘That’s a valuable property!’

‘And I’m the King of Siam. Now look, Mr Plumb, it appears to me this man was spying on me from that house.’

‘You admit it’s your fault, then.’

Denton considered taking Mr Plumb by his revers and lifting him off the floor. However, at that moment, a detective walked in and showed his credentials, and Denton backed off a step and said, ‘Is this about Number 14 Millman Street?’

The detective, who was young and clearly afraid he didn’t project enough authority, rapped out, ‘Who’re you?’

‘I live in the house behind Number 14. I’m the man who was attacked.’

‘Oh, are you?’ He glanced at some notes. ‘You Mr Denton?’

‘I am.’

‘We want to talk to you.’ He touched Denton’s arm as if he were going to seize him. ‘My name’s Markson. Detective.’

Twenty minutes later, Denton was answering questions in the back garden of Number 14, and Mr Plumb was standing against the house, looking cold and worried. A policeman who had been standing there part of the night looked dour. After some minutes of answering Markson’s questions, Denton was relieved to see Munro, who hove into view around the corner like some large animal. He was carrying his hat - he had been hurrying, he said - and his hair was plastered down as the policeman’s had been last night. He nodded at Denton and loomed over the young detective. ‘What’ve you got?’

‘Just examining the man Denton.’

‘In aid of what?’

‘He was the victim of the attack.’

Munro rolled his eyes. ‘Have you been inside the house yet?’

‘Proceeding deliberately. I was told to be alert for fingerprints.’

Munro exhaled noisily and glanced at Denton. Munro and the detective walked quickly over the turf near the cellar door, which Markson called ‘the crime scene’, Munro saying ‘Yes, yes,’ every few seconds as if he’d heard it all before. Then Munro grabbed Denton’s arm and walked him towards the back of the garden. ‘You think somebody’s been watching you from this house, that true? Didn’t see anything for a couple of nights, then this - true? Saw somebody at a window once
maybe
, then a “glow” at night,
maybe
- true? That it?’

‘The ladders.’

‘Ah, ladders.’ Denton led him to the ladder, which Munro mounted and from which he looked down into Denton’s garden. ‘You going to do something for those roses?’ he said.

‘Hadn’t given it a thought.’

‘Roses are the thing. Now, they’re difficult, mind, but they give great satisfaction. Looks as if the soil would be all right. I could give you some slips - cuttings, you know. Rather pleased with my roses.’

‘Atkins wants to grow vegetables.’

‘He has no soul.’ Munro looked at a notebook. ‘Yes, the ladder’s been cut in two and propped like that - not your doing or your man’s, true?’ He sniffed. ‘The notes from the first copper on the scene were on my desk at seven with a note from Georgie Guillam - “Look what your pal is up to now.” I thought I’d best get over here before somebody decided you were a vicious criminal.’ He put his hat on and lowered his voice. ‘I told you that Georgie could be trouble. This isn’t even his manor, but he must have had somebody looking for paper with your name on it.’ He took Denton’s arm again and steered him back to the young detective. ‘You’re doing a fine job here, Markson, but we don’t want to spend time running the wrong fox. Mr Denton is a well-known man of good reputation, rather a friend to the Yard - I’m sure you remember the Stella Minter case last year - so, a word to the wise from an old hand: don’t spend too much time on him. Right? Right. Let’s go inside.’

Munro raised the cellar door by its U-shaped handle. The estate agent jingled some keys but Munro ignored him. He stood staring down the stone steps at the door in the foundation wall. ‘Modern alarm system, I see.’ He kicked the rope and the tins aside and turned to his right, surprisingly light on his feet, and tiptoed down the edge of the steps, then felt along a ledge up at ground level and grunted. He took out a handkerchief and reached up to the ledge again and came down with a big key. ‘One of those old locks you could open with a hairpin, anyway.’ Holding the key in the handkerchief, he waved it at the detective. ‘Fingerprints, I know.’ He looked at Denton. ‘We just got a directive on fingerprints. Our newest fad. We now have a Fingerprint Branch, as of last August.’ He wrapped the key in the handkerchief and gave it to Markson. ‘I want that handkerchief back.’ He looked up at Denton, still at the top of the stairs. ‘Of course, we can’t get fingerprints off objects unless the person conveniently has paint or mud or dog turd on his fingers, but it’s important that we handle everything with “gloves or clean cotton wool”.’ He growled.