The Frightened Man (22 page)

‘What did you do?’

She laughed more quietly. ‘I did what women always do. I went on the street.’

He felt her look at him; he met her eyes and saw the challenge. ‘“Hard times will make a bulldog eat red pepper,” ’ he said lamely.

She laughed, this time a real laugh, almost a masculine one. ‘Wherever did that come from?’

‘My grandmother.’

‘Irish?’

‘Scotch.’

‘Scottish. Scotch is whisky.’

‘We say Scotch.’

She looked at him again, smiled, shrugged. More cheerfully then, as if it were all a kind of shared joke, she said, ‘I didn’t know a thing about going on the street. I knew only the words. So I went out on Regent Street. I didn’t know it was the French girls’ pitch. Two of them pushed me into a doorway and slapped me about and told me if I ever came on their territory again they’d cut my nose off. But it was rather pro forma; when they were done, one of them told me to try Westerley Street, where they might have a taste for a woman like me. I thought she meant prison-worn, but now I know she meant English and conventional. Anyway, that’s how I met Mrs Castle. I wasn’t much good to her as a prostitute, except for a few men who wanted to be able to say that they’d had the woman who killed Frank Striker, but she sent me on a bookkeeping course and I became her accountant and played the piano in the parlour for the gentlemen, and so I had a home and an income and a skill.’

Ahead, he saw one of the Aerated Bread Company’s tea shops. ‘May I buy you a cup of tea?’ he said.

‘You mayn’t buy me anything, Mr Denton. But I’ll buy my own cup of tea and drink it with you, if you’ll be quick.’ It surprised him. He realized that she wanted to talk.

‘You’re going on to dinner?’

She hooted again. ‘I’m going to speak at a temperance meeting at a Methodist chapel.’ She looked at the watch again. ‘I’m due in Euston Road at eight.’

‘I’ll put you in a cab after we’ve had some tea.’

They were at the shop door. She looked at him with a kind of weariness. ‘You won’t put me into anything. If I take a cab, I shall take a cab.’

Inside, flanked by a teapot and cups and a plate of aerated bread and butter, they were awkward. The silence between her tirade on the street and their seating themselves had made them both diffident - strangers again. He felt intimidated, yet knew she had told her story to have this effect - and to force him to know, from a curious egoism, who she was - and yet he felt a kind of diffidence towards her because of it. What she had said, the brutality of her saying it, seemed to invite - to challenge? - a response of the same kind. His voice tentative, he said in almost a whisper into the silence between them, ‘I was married when I was young.’

She was pouring tea for herself. Sharp eyes touched his. ‘And?’

‘She killed herself.’ He could have stopped there, had meant to, but it seemed self-pitying, and suddenly he was rushing to tell her. ‘She drank lye. She took the lye bottle out into a field and drank as much as she could stand and then began to scream. I was in the barn. I heard her, but I thought she was just—I was used to hearing her scream. She lived for three days. We were thirty miles from a doctor. I took her in the wagon; it was all we had.’ She wasn’t going to pour him tea, he had seen; he had one hand on the teapot, but his eyes were staring off into the far side of the vast room ‘She’d had four babies in six years. Two stillborn. She was carrying another when she did it. She hadn’t told me.’ He was silent. ‘That one died, of course.’

Janet Striker said nothing. Her eyes were on his face.

‘It was too much for her.
I
was too much for her. We had—We’d done it together. As if we’d conspired to make something that would destroy her. And we called it
love
.’ As he said it, he saw all of a piece what was wrong with the book he had been writing, and he saw the book he should write; he saw the image of a man and a woman making a beautiful and then hideous thing together as they laughed and endured cold silences and made love and hated each other, and he saw the title:
The Machine.

‘Do you blame her?’

‘She took to drink. I’ve always blamed her for that, but I guess I shouldn’t. We did it
together
.’ He felt his hand hot and looked at it and saw that it was still embracing the Britannia-metal teapot. ‘The saddest words of voice or pen - we meant well.’ He grasped the teapot’s handle and poured himself tea, his hand shaking. He gulped the tea, then said, ‘I’ve had a damnable day.’ He told her about Mulcahy then, and the roof, and what he’d found in the Inventorium. ‘Getting back up that roof was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.’

‘I wondered about your clothes.’

‘I sent a note around to a policeman I know. They’ll be all over that place by now, and the body. I suppose they’ll make trouble for me over it. But I know now that Mulcahy didn’t kill Stella Minter.’

‘Why do you care?’

He opened his mouth to speak and then hesitated. ‘Because - because Mulcahy was a pathetic little man who came to me for help. And I didn’t help him. And because—’ He chewed on his moustache with his lower teeth. His left hand was clenched at the edge of the table. ‘I went to the post-mortem. It was all men. All of us - like a theatre, like—No better than Mulcahy.
Watching
, you know.’ He stammered a few syllables that made no sense. ‘I saw - Mulcahy made me see—It’s something about men and women.’ He shook his head.

‘Men hate women,’ she said, as if she were saying that tea was made with tea leaves and hot water.

‘That’s damned nonsense!’

After half a minute’s pained silence, she said, ‘You weren’t surprised to hear from Mary Kate that the Minter girl had had a baby.’

‘The surgeon at the post-mortem found something about - milk—’

‘She was still lactating? Oh, the stupid girl! If she’d come to me, I could have found her a place as a wet nurse. The money isn’t much, but she’d have had a roof over her head and a leg up on a servant’s place.’

‘Maybe she didn’t want to be a wet nurse.’

‘“Hard times will make a bulldog eat red pepper.”’ She grinned. It was a peace offering. ‘Did the girls tell you anything worthwhile? Were your twelve shillings well spent?’

‘Thirteen,’ he said, meaning Sticks. Atkins would have been furious. ‘Yes, her name. And her sister’s name. And that about being educated - I think that’s significant.’

‘Lillian wouldn’t know what education is. “Eddicated” may simply mean that Stella - Ruth - spoke better than the others. Or she knew where Norway is.’

‘Still - maybe she did have more education. How would she have got it?’

‘Oh - perhaps nothing more than doing her lessons. That would make her “eddicated” to Lillian, I suppose.’

He stirred his tea, although there was nothing in it to stir. ‘It’s grasping at straws, isn’t it.’

She poured herself more tea, then, after hesitating, poured some into his cup, as well.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It isn’t your fault.’

She chewed a piece of the bread and butter, saying it was all she’d get to eat until she got home. Thinking of what her ‘home’ might be, he said, ‘What’s become of your mother?’

‘She’s become a drunkard. She lives with me.’ She finished the bread and wiped her fingers. ‘You can’t keep them away from it. You do everything. Finally, you give up and let them drink.’

He remembered all that. Seen through the gears of the machine they’d built, he realized now that Lily’s drinking had been an effect, not the cause. ‘Your life isn’t easy,’ he said.

‘No life is easy. I curse those mindless women who swan about in carriages and dress for dinner and have everything done for them - the women who live the way my mother meant me to - but in fact I know that even their lives aren’t easy. Theirs are lives of ease, but not
easy
.’

He frowned, chewed his moustache, bit something back and at last, having thought of Emma Gosden and Stella Minter and Sticks and Janet Striker and his dead wife, he settled for mumbling, ‘Yes.’

Out on the street, she strode off without waiting for him. ‘The Humphrey,’ he said, catching up.

‘The Humphrey Institution for the Betterment of Unwanted Children. Yes.’

‘I want to talk to them.’

‘Grasping at more straws?’ She hesitated. ‘I suppose I could help you - I know them from my work, not that they think much of what I do. They’re not such very nice people.’ She grunted. ‘People who do good often aren’t.’

‘Would you go with me?’

She seemed to be totting up a column of figures in some moral account book. ‘I suppose. If I have the time.’ She was walking as if trying to outpace him, and she said, ‘I shan’t want company beyond this point, thank you.’ She stopped and put out her hand. He took it, saw there was no going farther with her. He said, ‘You don’t really believe that men hate women, do you?’

‘Of course I do,’ she said and walked away.

Chapter Fourteen

A constable was waiting at his front door to tell him that Munro would be by to see him soon, and the police would greatly prefer him not to leave his house until they had spoken.

‘And if I do?’

‘Just giving you what I was told, sir. Please to tell me where you can be found.’

Denton changed his clothes, realizing that he felt guilty and that the suit was incriminating. In law, he assured himself, he had done nothing by going to Mulcahy’s Inventorium - a bit of breaking and entering, perhaps, but hardly at a level to interest Munro - and in fact he had done the Metropolitan Police a favour. Unless he’d gone down the roof and seen the body, there’d have been no justification for their going into the Inventorium, as he was sure they’d done by now.

A public benefactor
, he thought. The truth was, he’d set himself against doing anything that could help Guillam, and he was damned if he would tell Guillam first about what he thought he’d found in the Inventorium. As a result, he’d sent a note about it to Munro. On the other hand, what he’d learned from Janet Striker’s girls, although it hadn’t been much, was
his
, and he’d keep that to himself. And as for his having told Atkins that he’d washed his hands of it, well - that had been before he’d crossed the roof.

He ate something sent in from the Lamb and sat staring at a book, saying nothing to Atkins about where he’d been or what he’d done, not wanting to involve him. Atkins had forgone the hard hat that had crowned his bandages. Dressed now in a sober suit, he looked almost normal except for his tight white turban. Looking at the suit that Denton had worn to cross Mulcahy’s roof, he made noises and raised his eyebrows and muttered ‘Bloody hell’. Getting nothing from Denton, he had snatched up the suit and said, ‘Can’t weave a new seat into these trousers, you know.’

‘What’s wrong with the old seat?’

‘Ha-ha. You got a new pal with rawhide chair seats, or where were you today?’

‘Mind your own business, Sergeant.’

Munro came at last after nine. Denton heard him limping up from the front door, his breathing heavy. His face, appearing in the doorway, was exhausted and angry.

‘Well,’ Denton said. Munro waved a hand, as if the idea of Denton wore him out. He wouldn’t sit. Denton, nervous and trying to seem calm - nervous because he liked this man and wanted to be liked by him - sat, offered drink, food, finally silence.

After the silence had got long and ugly and then threatening, Munro said, ‘You were in that damned place today.’ His voice expressed controlled outrage.

‘What place?’

‘Don’t try that on with me! You put me in the middle of this business instead of going to any copper on the street as you should have! Well, by God, I’m not going to make it easy for you! What the hell were you trying to do, Denton? Did you think I’d lie for you?’

‘I thought you’d do exactly what I believe you did - turn it over to the right people.’

‘Oh, is that what you thought! You mean, anybody but Guillam, isn’t that what you thought? Well, you guessed right; I didn’t take it to Guillam. You got me bang on with that, Denton. I didn’t see it right off; then it was too late. You knew I’d keep it away from Guillam so I wouldn’t stir him up - and that’s exactly what I did.’ Munro looked at him bitterly. ‘You didn’t even tell me it was Mulcahy.’

‘I couldn’t know it was Mulcahy.’

‘Straight below his window and you didn’t know it was Mulcahy! What do you take me for, an idiot?’

‘What makes you think I was inside that room?’

Munro pushed his hands so deep into his trouser pockets he seemed hunched. ‘You’re too good an old copper not to have been.’

‘Two padlocks on the door. No keys.’

‘You went over the roof, don’t guy me.’

‘I’m afraid of heights, Munro.’

‘Yeah? Show me the physician who’s treated you for it.’

‘Heights
terrify
me.’

‘You went over the roof! Look me in the face and deny it - go on! Will you lie in my face, man?’

Denton looked at the exhausted, angry eyes and couldn’t hold them. He glanced away; Munro gave a sigh of disgust. Lamely, Denton said, ‘Guillam doesn’t care rat’s piss about Mulcahy.’ He turned back, almost pleading. ‘Guillam tossed aside a list I paid people to drag out of the directories of all the R. Mulcahys like it was, was - trash!’

‘This isn’t Guillam, Denton. This is me.’

‘Guillam’s the police.’

‘
I’m
the police.’ He pointed a thick finger. ‘You had no business going in that room!’

Again, Denton couldn’t face him. After several seconds, he got out of his chair and paced up the room to get away, then went on and fetched himself a brandy from the alcove and a bottled ale for Munro. He felt bone-weary now, hardly able to haul himself back up the room.

Munro opened the big bottle with a tool from his pocket and watched a mushroom of foam rise to the lip and subside. He sat down, poured ale into a glass. ‘You should have gone to a police station.’

‘I went to you.’

‘You sent a bloody note!’ Munro’s voice had risen and he knew it. ‘You look like death. Where’s your sling for that arm?’ Before Denton could answer, he growled, ‘It must have been hell going down the last pitch of that roof. No wonder you look bad.’ He sipped the beer, repressed a sigh of satisfaction, but he was over the worst of his anger now. In a voice more weary than enraged, he said, ‘You could be up on a charge, Denton.’