The Frightened Man (27 page)

Mrs Opdyke stared at it. She drew a breath. ‘My predecessor, ’ she said. She turned away and moved towards a door at the far end of the long room, seeming to move on rollers, her skirts giving no hint of legs moving beneath them. Denton, wanting to get away as fast as possible, still cold and miserable, looked at Janet Striker. He was astonished to see her wink.

The visit became a kind of tour of inspection. Denton thought that they missed nothing except the water closets and perhaps some secret room where the staff sipped gin and smoked cigars. They were shown the kitchens, the dormitories, the chapel (stark), the classroom (girls under twelve were given two hours of lessons a day), the refectory (scrubbed wood tables, grey-green walls, a lectern for ‘improving lectures’ while the women ate), the lying-in rooms, the nursery, the infirmary, the morgue. ‘Yes, we have our deaths,’ Mrs Opdyke sighed. ‘Little deaths, mostly.’ She waved a hand at a pile of fresh wooden boxes that might have held papers but were infant coffins.

Ten women, all young, had been nursing babies in the nursery. They had thirty minutes off from their work, four times a day, Mrs Opdyke said. None of the young women looked at them. Their faces were healthy but tired, perhaps sullen. The kitchens told him in part why: great piles of cabbages lay on central tables; more young women with the same healthy, unhappy look were splitting the cabbage heads with cleavers, then chopping them and flinging the pieces into huge pots.

‘Boiled salt beef once a week,’ Mrs Opdyke said. ‘Fish on Fridays. Milk, four glasses a day, the last before bed with patent malt extract. Porridge found to be excellent for their general health. We do not approve of sauces.’

The lying-in rooms were closed to Denton, but he was allowed into a huge space where babies, new-born to four months, lay in rows like bullets in a belt. Surprisingly few of them were crying. Two women in striped caps and dark aprons moved among them but never picked one up.

‘They get no coddling?’ Janet Striker asked.

‘They are fed, changed, kept warm. Mothers don’t feed their own babies; they don’t know which are theirs, in fact. No, we don’t believe in coddling. These children face a harsh world.’

‘Where?’ Denton said. ‘Adoption?’

Mrs Opdyke turned eyes as weary as those of any of the women on him. ‘One in twenty is adopted. The rest go to institutions.’

Coming out of the babies’ room, they met a spry, angular man who was introduced as Mr Orkwright of the Eugenical Sterilization Society. He shook hands and passed on, grinning at the staff women, who all seemed to know him. Janet Striker stared after him and murmured to Denton, ‘Trolling for victims.’ If Mrs Opdyke heard her, she said nothing.

The work rooms were last. These were, in fact, the two wooden buildings that stood behind the stone structure and were the source of the smell that hung over the place and spilled into the square.

‘Our clients are some of the finest firms in London,’ Mrs Opdyke said.

Women, mostly visibly pregnant and with their sleeves pushed up and their damp hair falling down, stood over vats full of clothes; others turned the handles of big wringers ; still others, using sticks like oversized broom handles, lifted wet cloth from the vats and turned it, stirring the water and the thick mass within. The air was wet; condensation clouded every window and lay as big drops on every cool surface; the floor was slippery. The women, like the others inside, had the ruddy, almost chubby look of the founder, like well-fed animals readying for slaughter.

‘Work and weep,’ Janet Striker said. ‘Dear God.’

In a separate room, six women sat at mangles and foot-pumped the dry cloth over big, heated rollers. Against the far wall, ten more, their bellies prominent, stood over ten ironing boards, running ten sad irons over shirts and collars. In the middle of the room, an oversized stove held a coal fire; irons and mangle cores stood all over its surface. The temperature, Denton guessed, was close to ninety.

‘Are they paid?’ he asked.

‘Of course not.’

‘I’d have thought there was a law.’

‘We are a charitable institution.’

Going back out through one of the wash houses, his eye was caught by a white bit of cloth hanging from a rolling basket between the wringers. It was damp but not soaked; he picked it up, smoothed it, recognized the Napoleonic emblem and the regal R - it was a napkin from the Café Royal. Perhaps he had wiped his mouth on it a couple of evenings ago. He dropped it back into the basket.

‘I think that now you have seen everything,’ Mrs Opdyke said.

‘Enough, at least,’ Janet Striker said. She smiled. ‘Enough, I mean, to appreciate what you do here. May we talk about Stella Minter now?’

Mrs Opdyke had perhaps hoped that they would somehow not get to the moment - perhaps they would change their minds, or die - but she tried to straighten her slumped shoulders and led them back into the stone building and along a wood-floored, scarred corridor to the front, again into the lobby with the portraits, and through a door in the far side. Beyond it was a dark-panelled office that might have suited a particularly hard-hearted banker: everything was dark, nothing was comfortable, not even Mrs Opdyke’s chair. Boxes with faded orange ties and labels rose up the walls on shelves perhaps meant once for books; only two black-and-white engravings relieved what wall space was left, one of them, Denton guessed, having something to do with Rome and rapine, the other too dark to see. A single window, barred, heavily draped in old brown velour, looked out on the square, where it was still raining.

Denton was assigned a chair too low for him, so that he sat with his knees up and his hat beside him; Mrs Striker got something a little better, although hard and straight. Mrs Opdyke, seating herself behind a black oak desk that seemed to have the mass and weight of a safe, sighed, as if to say
So we’ve come to this ugly business at last
, and said, ‘What was it you wanted, again?’

‘A young woman named Ruth, also known as Stella Minter,’ Janet Striker said.

‘Ruth. We’ve had several Ruths. Many, in fact. We don’t use last names here. Ruth or Stella, then.’

She bent and unlocked a drawer with one of her keys, removed a large ledger, opened it and, forehead propped on her left hand, began to turn pages. Janet Striker told her when they thought Stella Minter’s baby had been born, about when they thought she had left the institution. Mrs Opdyke made ambiguous sounds and turned a number of pages at once. Denton described the girl as he had seen her in the operating theatre and as she had appeared in Mulcahy’s photograph, and Mrs Opdyke seemed to recognize her, for she sniffed mightily. She seemed then to be looking for something specific, not browsing names, and she seemed to have found it when she said, her voice almost angry, ‘Oh,
yes
.’

Denton tried to sit forward, almost fell off his inadequate chair. ‘You have her?’

‘A bad child. An
evil
child.’

‘Ruth?’

‘I could hardly forget her - rebellious, ungrateful, vicious. What happened to her, then? Did she take to the streets? I predicted that she would - dirt seeking dirt. Did she?’ She glowered at Denton. ‘If it is through
that
connection that you know her, you will leave at once, sir.’

‘She was murdered, ma’am. I learned of her only after she was dead.’

Mrs Opdyke nodded. ‘Murdered. Of course.’ She shook her head, spoke to Mrs Striker. ‘It was foreordained. We could see it in her from the first week she was with us. Twice, I considered ordering her out. A bad child.’

‘Do you have her name?’

‘Ruth - what I have is Ruth. I told you, we don’t deal in last names. They come to us with their histories behind them; they leave us, we hope, with no history whatsoever. If they return to families, that is their business; if they go elsewhere—’ she waved several fingers - ‘so be it. We are here to accept the innocents they have carried. Did she go on the streets?’

‘She did.’

‘She was far too knowing for a girl of her age. A sly girl, her language sometimes highly offensive. I would say she had already been on the streets, but she insisted not. But they lie, of course - they lie.’

‘Who was the father of her child?’

Mrs Opdyke held up both hands. ‘We dare not ask; if we learn such a thing, it is locked up in our hearts and never committed to paper!’ She looked in her book again, rubbing her eyes. She read off the dates when Ruth had arrived and left; Denton wrote them down on a cuff. ‘Demerits, demerits, punishment,
severe
punishment, more demerits - a thoroughly bad young woman.’ She raised her head. ‘She disappeared two weeks after she gave birth. We make every effort to keep track of our women, but this isn’t a prison. She went out through the laundry gate, we think - chatted up one of the draymen, I should imagine. She could be charming when she chose. Without a backward glance or a thought of her child, I’m sure.’

They asked more questions - Ruth’s age, anything she’d said about parents or family, any idea of where she’d come from, anything - but Mrs Opdyke’s ledger was unyielding.

‘Was the birth registered?’ Mrs Striker said.

‘Our legal adviser keeps a record by date and sex, but without names. No other formality is required by law.’ She drew her lips in. ‘He makes an annual report to the registry office.’

‘And her baby?’

‘I am not at liberty to tell you. The child is long gone from here, at any rate. And from its mother, to its eternal benefit.’ She put her glasses back on. ‘Murdered, you say.’

‘Quite savagely.’

‘I shall not be so unkind as to say that she put herself beyond God’s mercy with her wilfulness.’

Denton smiled. ‘“And one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.”’

She glanced quickly at him; her cheeks reddened again. ‘Sparrow me no sparrows, sir - she was an evil girl and I was glad to see the last of her. Rather than concern yourself with an object of God’s justice, you might turn your attention to good works.’

Denton struggled to his feet. ‘Finding the girl’s murderer is a good work, ma’am. Maybe I’m an agent of God’s interest in sparrows, too - in my way.’

She stared at him, then said, ‘Hmmp,’ and stood. Janet Striker tried to ask another question, but Mrs Opdyke said, ‘You know everything I am able to tell you,’ and moved towards the door.

Out on the front steps with the door closed behind them, they stood close together and stared into the rain. Janet Striker took his arm and held it as if glad for its warmth. ‘What a God-awful place,’ she said. ‘Do you suppose it was a day like this when she ran off? Oh, God, if she’d only come to me!’

He wondered how they were going to get a cab. He didn’t want to think of what it would be like to be out on such a day with no money, no warm clothes, nothing. ‘I wonder how she found this place,’ he said.

‘Maybe she lived nearby.’

‘Or the opposite - she wanted to be as far as she could from - from whatever it was.’

They stared into the rain. ‘We didn’t learn much,’ she said. Abruptly, as if she’d just realized what she’d done, she jerked her hand out of the crook of his arm.

Nothing moved. The smell of laundry was thick, troubling. She said, ‘I wish one of us had brought an umbrella.’

Chapter Seventeen

His house felt icy. The door closed with a slam like thunder, echoed by the real thing from somewhere south of the river, a great rolling crescendo like kettledrums. Water dripped from his soaked hat, and he whipped it off. Mrs Striker had been right; they should have had an umbrella. It had been difficult to find a cab, and they had both been wet and grumpy when at last he had dropped her at her office.

Atkins was standing near the alcove with his arms folded, watching the young would-be valet, Maude, who seemed to be operating a boat pump. For an instant, Denton thought there must be water in the sitting room; he even looked up at the ceiling. The idea was rejected almost as soon as he had it - the absurdity of using a pump in a room, the lack of damp on the ceiling - and he tossed his hat at the green armchair and tried to struggle out of his coat. Atkins, who knew where he had been going that afternoon, came forward and said, ‘Looks like the baby factory wasn’t no help, am I right?’

‘You’re always right, aren’t you?’ Free of the wet coat, Denton looked through his mail, found an envelope marked ‘
Deliver by hand
’ from Mrs Johnson, inside a note that said only, ‘
Nothing yet
.’

Yet
seemed unjustifiably hopeful.

He tossed the envelopes aside and leaned forward to stare at Maude and the contraption he was working. ‘What the hell?’ he said.

‘Patent vacuum sweeper,’ Atkins said with what sounded like pride. ‘Very latest thing.’

Relieved of the coat, Denton took a couple of steps towards Maude, whose face was running with sweat and whose breath was rasping as he pumped the wooden handle of a long metal tube that did, in fact, look like a boat pump. Maude looked up, misery on his childish face.

‘Labour-saving miracle,’ Atkins said.

‘Doesn’t seem to be saving Maude any labour.’

‘He’s not used to it. That device is going to put the housemaid out of business. It’s going to liberate a generation from the drudgery of beating rugs. It’s going to—’

‘You’ve got money in it, is that it?’

Atkins bristled. ‘How could any intelligent person not see the advantages of it?’

‘Another of your investments? Sergeant, Sergeant—!’

Atkins draped his coat over the fire screen and scampered to the device. Pushing Maude aside, he bent down and twisted a latch in the metal tube and a door popped open. Behind it was a grey mass of fibres that looked like something a mouse had put together against the winter. ‘Look!’ Atkins cried. ‘Look!’

Denton bent to look. ‘Rats or squirrels?’ he said.

Atkins grabbed the mass with his fingers and pulled it out. ‘Dirt!’ he shouted. Dust and fibres floated out into the room. ‘From your floor, General! Your carpets! You think you can get that kind of filth out of a carpet with a broom? Have another think, then - only the Patent Pneumatic Vacuum Sweeper can pull fibres, dust, dirt, lint, microbes, insect bodies, effluvia—’