The Frightened Man (3 page)

He rushed on, tore open the front door, thinking
To hell with the coat
, thinking
To hell with her and everything
, hating himself and her for what she had done to him and for what she had said. The drizzle was in the air again, beading up on the black shoulders of his dinner suit. He went down the stone steps in two jumps and raged up the street, leaping a puddle to run across and turn at the first corner, to put her and her house and her words behind him. He walked, then broke into a run to the end of the street, then another, heart pounding and breath coming hard. Then he stopped. Looked around, momentarily lost, and then, breathing more slowly, he began to walk.

He headed towards Regent Street without knowing it; the people he began to pass looked at him - hatless, coatless in the rain, somebody crazed or drunk. In the end, he went into the Café Royal because he found himself there and it was bright and warm and he felt battered. He headed for the tables along one side where he wouldn’t know anybody, ordered brandy and glowered at anybody who looked his way. By being rude to people he knew, he managed to drink alone, his thoughts ugly; then a cadger of drinks named Crosland came by trying to sell anybody for a shilling apiece the news that Oscar Wilde had died in Paris. Then people were weeping and shouting - the Royal had been Wilde’s hang-out, his table, until his trial, a salon - and Denton was caught up in what became a wake. There were shouted arguments about who had supported Oscar and who had abandoned him; Denton, who had known Wilde only slightly but who had by then drunk too much, was doing some of the shouting. Then he was talking to a man he didn’t know about the perfidy of women, and then he was standing on a table with the notorious writer and editor Frank Harris, who was proposing a toast to the dead man’s memory, and when the response wasn’t quick enough to suit him, Denton roared, ‘On your feet, you bloody bastards! You killed him, now you’ll damned well drink to him!’

Then the room was half-empty and Denton was alone, looking down at Wilde’s old table, a heap of flowers that had accumulated on it. Peeping out from one side were the remains of a dried and pressed green carnation. Somebody’s secret past, pressed flat. Denton turned to share this insight with the world, and he stumbled and would have fallen if Oddenino, the Royal’s manager, hadn’t caught him.

‘Taxi, sir?’ Oddenino said.

‘Certainly not!’ He could make his own damned way home!

The streets were dark and silent. He was standing looking up at a row of houses he didn’t recognize when a boy came towards him. Denton saw him only as a shape until he passed under a gaslight, thought then it might be a woman or a small adult.

‘Newspaper, sir? ’Stonishin’ murder, sir. Girl cut up like the Sunday joint.’ The boy pulled a newspaper from a sack he wore over one shoulder by a piece of rope. ‘Oscar Wilde dead in Paris, sir. Bobs says boys will be home by summer. Paper?’

Denton read
Grisly Murder in the Minories.

He took out a coin, fumbling and at last aware that he was drunk, and the boy ran off into the drizzle without giving him change - clearly aware that Denton was drunk, too. Denton, swaying, opened the newspaper under a street lamp.
Horrors Committed with a Knife. Unspeakable Mutilation of a Young Victim.

How mad was Mulcahy now?

Chapter Two

Sergeant Atkins came on his tiptoes into the parlour-cum-all-purpose room at five in the morning, no stranger to doors that banged at an hour when his employer was supposed to be happily between the sheets with his lovey, or to gents who drank too much to wash away some trouble. Indeed, there was Denton in his armchair, snoring; there was the mostly empty decanter; there were his boots, his sodden tailcoat, his necktie. And, in one of his pockets, a box of Café Royal vestas.

And there was the newspaper.
Grisly Murder
.

Atkins picked up the coat and the tie and took them downstairs to dry in front of the coal stove. He went up again and got the decanter and carried it to the pantry, got the newspaper, took it downstairs, put his feet up on his own fender, read it. Cutting through the journalistic fustian, Atkins concluded that not a great deal was known except that a woman ‘of evil reputation’ had been murdered in the Minories - disembowelled and probably, the prose a little murky here, something cut from her body that had formerly been part of it.

He read the rest of the newspaper, concentrating on the personals and skipping over the international news (
Small change to me what you do in India now I’m not there
) but glancing at the Boer War stories to see if any of his old mates were catching it. The court calendar also took up a little of his time. Oscar Wilde’s death got only a grunt. At six, he went upstairs again with coffee and put the tray down beside Denton.

Denton woke. He looked like hell.

‘Coffee, sir?’

Denton, still sprawled as he had slept, looked up.

‘Water,’ he croaked.

Atkins poured water from the carboy in the alcove. Handing it to Denton, he said, ‘Big night at the Royal?’

‘Oscar Wilde was dead.’

‘Still is, according to the paper.’

‘You hear me come in?’ he said.

‘Hard not to.’ Atkins knelt to light the kindling in the grate. ‘I don’t see your coat or hat.’

‘Oh, Christ. I must have left them at the Royal. No, no - I was in Jermyn Street without them in the rain - they must be at Mrs Gosden’s.’ He drank the water and held out the glass for more. ‘Mrs Gosden gave me my walking papers. I shouldn’t tell you that. Bad form, right?’

‘You’re the boss.’

Denton laughed - a kind of strangled cough.
Boss
was a word he’d taught Atkins to use instead of the nicer
employer
or
master
. ‘I wasn’t the boss last night - either of her or of myself.’

‘You want me to go and get your coat and hat off her?’

‘No.’ He drank more water. ‘I wouldn’t put you through that.’

‘All one to me. Servants’ entrance, everybody polite but a bit chilly, here comes the coat and hat, off I go.’

‘No!’ Perhaps Emma would send it back.
Get this out of my sight.
Except it wouldn’t be in her sight; it would be in old Alice’s sight. Oh, well. Except that it was a very good coat. And it had his derringer in the pocket. ‘Send the boy,’ he said.

‘What boy?’

‘Whatever boy you send with messages.’

‘I send any body happens to be loitering about.’

‘Well, do that, then.’

Atkins made a face. ‘Any kid I can find on this street would have your coat and hat, not to mention a gold-headed walking stick, at the Jew pawnbroker’s quicker than I could say Gog and Magog. I’ll go for them myself.’

‘No!’ Denton had shouted the word; he pulled himself back. ‘Sorry. Just—’ He made a patting motion, palm down, in the air between them. ‘Leave it.’

Atkins shrugged.

Denton finished the water. ‘I’ll be going out later.’

‘To make some money, I hope. The bills ain’t been paid yet this month.’ Atkins, always nervous about money, knew that Denton was, as he put it, ‘a little close to the edge.’ ‘Better spend your time finishing a book, I say.’

‘Don’t say!’

‘If I might suggest—’

‘Don’t suggest!’ Denton lay back in the chair. ‘Bring up a couple of eggs at eight and, oh, you know - bacon. Gammon, whatever the hell you call it. Bread - plenty of bread!’

Atkins said no more but went out on tiptoe, as he had come in earlier. He had run into the savage mood before.
Inside every gent, a savage. Lost his honey, is it. Bloody murder.

Two hours later, Denton still lay collapsed in his easy chair. The back pages of the newspaper lay tented next to him on the floor. Atkins was standing, a breakfast tray and the front section of the newspaper in his hands, wearing an ancient velvet robe given him in India by some long-dead officer.

‘You look like a down-at-heels maharajah,’ Denton said.

‘Happy to give you the name of my tailor. You want tea?’

‘No, I want to know what you think of Mulcahy’s story now. What he said was very like what happened to this tart.’

‘I think it’s bollocks, just like I did eight hours ago, no, ten hours ago, how time flies when you’re up early waiting on the master. Eight o’clock, you asked for eggs.’

‘Put them down and sit, you make me tired standing there. Why bollocks?’

‘It doesn’t hang together.’ Atkins hooked a straight chair over with his left foot and sat in it, the newspaper still in his hands. ‘What’ve we got here?’ He rattled the paper. ‘Some poor bint got her throat slit and other unmentionable damage inflicted, and so we’re supposed to believe it was the reincarnation of the Ripper, so as to sell more papers. Mulcahy barges in here and gives you a long tale about cutting up women and being boys together with the Ripper, so you jump to the conclusion he was telling the truth. It’s bollocks!’

‘Coincidence, that he told the story last night, and last night the woman gets murdered?’

‘Maybe he’s one of them psychics. More likely getting his jollies by telling tales.’

‘He was really frightened, though.’

‘Probably scares himself for the fun of it. Like a kiddie. Why didn’t he bring them newspaper clippings he talked about? Why didn’t he give you this boyhood chum’s name? Eh?’

‘He did give me the name of the town and the man’s first victim. I could tell somebody I know in the police.’

‘“First victim,” oh, yes! My hat! You going to some pal in the coppers because of Mulcahy? Name of God why?’

‘Maybe it’s evidence.’

Denton slouched deeper into the chair and began to peel his right boot off by pushing on the heel with the toe of the left one. Atkins said he would ruin his boots and bent down to help, and Denton swung his legs away, muttering that he could take off his own damned boots. ‘Give me that,’ he said, meaning the paper. He read as he went on ruining them, then flexing his toes when they were off. ‘“Young woman of evil reputation named Stella Minter.” Evil reputation, good God.’

‘In short, a tart.’

Denton grunted. ‘“Discovered about midnight in a horribly mutilated condition in the squalor of her bloodstained room in the Minories.” I wonder when she was killed.’ He was eating the eggs and the bread with one hand, holding the newspaper with the other.

‘Because you’re thinking that Mulcahy could of done it and then come here, right? That’s far-fetched. I’ll have some of that tea, myself. Was Mulcahy bloodstained? Had he just washed all his clothes, including that suit that looked like it was made out of old blankets? Was his hat red with gore? I think not.’

‘But his story makes a kind of sense in one way, Sergeant - it puts a man who mutilates women in London so that he and Mulcahy see each other; then Mulcahy comes to me and the murderer goes to, what’s her name? Stella Minter.’

‘Who says that Mulcahy and the murderer saw each other in
London
, if they saw each other? Could of been Birmingham, for that matter, what with modern trains. Why d’you suppose the Ripper never struck in Birmingham, by the bye? Pure prejudice.’

Denton dropped the newspaper to the floor. ‘We should talk to Mulcahy again.’

‘Oho, “we”. Well
we’d
better do something about our condition if
we
are going looking for a needle in a haystack. You’ve brandy sloshing about in your eyeballs like the bubbles in a mason’s level. You ever looked for a little nobody like him in London, even stone-cold sober, Captain?’

Denton grunted again. He saw the size of the undertaking. ‘Any help in that hat of his?’ He was half asleep again. The ruined breakfast plate was on the floor next to him.

‘Thought you’d never ask. Initial R - R. Mulcahy. Randolph, Robert, Reginald, Rex, Ronald, Richard, Roderick—No address, no shop name, maker’s mark almost erased by his sweat but can be read as that of the cheapest, biggest hat-maker in England. No help there.’

‘R. Mulcahy. We’ll work on it.’ Denton stood, not too steadily, and groped his way down the long room to the stairs. ‘I feel like hell.’

His bedroom, which was directly above the alcove, the dumb waiter, the breakfast table and part of his parlour, served also as his workroom. The bed, narrow to the point of monasticism, took up only the wall towards the street; then came an enormous armoire, hideous but essential in a room without a closet; then his desk, a vast structure intended for two partners working face-to-face, filled by him with the mess of one man working alone - at the moment, a half-finished novel that he was having trouble with. Regrettably, it represented his best chance for filling his bank account. Here, he spent most of his mornings, writing with a stub of pencil, drinking French coffee, staring straight ahead over a brick wall, two back-to-back privies, and the rear of a house that faced the next street. Now, seeing it in the double gloom of a hangover and Emma’s dismissal, it all looked grey - the desk, the windows, the rain, the blurred wall of the other house.

‘Grey as a ball of lint,’ he said aloud. His voice was husky. He cleared his throat. He found he didn’t like ‘grey as a ball of lint’. He cleared his throat again. ‘Grey as the bottom of a boot.’ Better. But so depressing that he felt even worse. ‘Damn her!’ he groaned.
Still.
He fell into the desk chair and wrote Emma an apology and then sent Atkins to find a boy to deliver it to her. Atkins, always worrying about clothes, reminded him that he was supposed to be going out to dinner that evening; Denton cursed, because Emma would be there, the reason in fact that he’d been invited in the first place. He wrote another note, this one to the hostess, pleading illness. He couldn’t face Emma. Alone again, he stared at the pile of manuscript, tried to think about it, found his mind sloping off to Mulcahy, Emma, the dead tart. He stood up, leaned his hands on the desk, stared down at its scarred surface.

Odd, that he should end up at a desk. Or perhaps he wouldn’t, as it wasn’t yet the end. ‘We all end up in a box, sooner or later,’ he muttered. Like the woman who had been mutilated and killed, or the other way around, last night. For her, the box had come much sooner than later. A dangerous profession, prostitution. Much safer to be a ‘nice’ woman like Emma Gosden. Damn her.