The Frightened Man (5 page)

Denton had been making small noises, but neither of the others paid any attention. He had muttered that it wasn’t important, that he would go, that he’d been stupid. No good. He was left feeling embarrassed, as he always was by British displays, however subtle, however polite, of upper-class leverage.

‘I’ll just see what I can do then, sir,’ Munro was saying. ‘If you’re ready to go, Mr, um, Denton, perhaps you could come along with me.’

‘There!’ Hench-Rose displayed his wonderful teeth. ‘You see, Denton?’

Denton made a face - lower lip pushed up, corners of the lips pulled down, eyebrows raised - and thanked Hector for his help and went out behind Munro, turning to cock an eyebrow again at Hench-Rose, who seemed vastly amused.

They paced along a dark corridor that looked as if it ran the length of the building, perhaps of several other buildings as well, a smell of coal and drains just noticeable. The corridor was bitterly cold. Munro seemed determined to say nothing, and Denton, who had lived among all sorts of people, felt no impulse to change things. They came at last to a varnished door much like all the others they had passed, and Munro grasped the handle as if he were going to yank it out of the wall and threw the door open. Several clerks looked up with frightened faces.

‘This is where we shovel the paper,’ Munro said. He led Denton towards another door. ‘Raw police reports find their way up here; we copy them out in a fair hand, three copies each, and send one to Files, one to Prosecution and one to your friend.’ He jerked his head towards the north, the direction meant to include Hench-Rose. ‘No idea what he does with them. In ten years or twenty the gods may see fit to give us a typewriter.’ Munro went through the door into a dismal office piled high with faded brown folders, fell into a chair behind the only desk and began to rummage in a drawer. ‘I’ll give you a message to somebody I know in City CID. That’s all I’ll do. Coppers don’t like civilians much.’

‘I know. I used to be one.’ Munro looked up. Denton said, ‘A place called Railhead, Nebraska.’

‘What was that, two whorehouses and a dog?’

‘Just about. I was the entire police force.’

Munro stared at him. His huge cheeks looked unhealthy in the gloom. ‘Well, you know how we feel about civilians putting their nose in, then.’

‘I don’t intend to put my nose in.’ He told him about the visit from Mulcahy, Munro staring at him the whole time. When he was finished, Munro said, ‘You mean you have evidence to offer. Why didn’t you say so?’

‘I’m not sure it’s evidence.’

‘Leave that for City CID.’ He handed over a piece of paper. ‘Go and see this man. Detective Sergeant Willey. Tell him what you told me. Don’t tell him you’re a writer.’ He stood; Denton stood.

‘Were you in CID?’ Denton said.

‘Used to be. Metropolitan, not City. Then I was crippled. ’ He hesitated. ‘Fell off a roof.’

‘Line of duty?’

‘Pointing the chimney at home.’

Denton went out. Munro had never smiled, he realized. Nor, he guessed, had he.

Detective Sergeant Willey barely knew Munro, as it turned out, but was glad for a chance to get out of the bustle of Bishopsgate Police Station and sit down to listen to Denton’s ‘evidence’. He had a clerk there to take it down in shorthand, along with the questions and answers that followed, all the things that Denton had already been over in his own mind. Willey, long-headed, stooped, tired, was as sceptical as Atkins, but he was polite because Denton was at least nominally a gentleman. ‘Many thanks,’ he said when they were done. ‘We appreciate citizen cooperation. Every bit of information of value.’

Denton wondered how many murders the man had investigated, as he seemed nervous and defeated already. Contrary to what Hench-Rose had thought, Denton knew London pretty well, could have told him that the Minories were in the City if he’d stopped to think about it - knew, too, that City police probably spent most of their time on business crime, not murder.

Denton said, ‘I’m afraid I’d like something in return.’ Willey’s face froze. ‘That’s why I originally went to Mr Hench-Rose. Is it possible for me to see the corpse?’ That idea had come to him as they had talked. Why did he want to see a mutilated female corpse? Emma had swum into his consciousness; he had refused to believe there was a connection.

‘Absolutely not.’ Shocked.

‘Isn’t there going to be a post-mortem?’

‘Of course.’ Stiff now, defending the procedures of the City Police.

‘Post-mortems are sometimes open.’

‘Mr Denton!’ Willey leaned towards him, hands clasped on the scarred desktop. He had hairy backs to his hands, dark curls like wires springing out. ‘This is a sensational case. Do you really think we want details of the poor woman’s body known to civilians?’

‘There’ve been a good many descriptions already, and she’s dead. Plus, she was a tart. Anyway, I’m not about to write about it. I simply want to—’ He wanted to say
to know what frightened Mulcahy
, but Willey would misinterpret that, he was sure. So he said, lamely, ‘To follow up.’

Willey was a cynic, like most policemen. ‘Oh, yes?’ he said in a tone that said everything about men who wanted to see post-mortems on female bodies.

‘To compare it with what the man told me.’

‘That’s police business, and you’re to stay out of it.’

‘Where’s the post-mortem?’

Willey stood. He was two inches shorter than Denton but secure of his mastery on his own turf. ‘We’re done here.’ He nodded to the clerk, who got up and went out. ‘Thank you for your information, Mr Denton. I’ll show you out.’

Denton went back to Hector Hench-Rose, missing his lunch - it was now after one - and so accepting Hector’s offer of scones because the hangover had turned to nausea, and got from him the information that the post-mortem on Stella Minter’s body would be at St Bartholomew’s Hospital at two, with Sir Frank Parmentier wielding the scalpel. Hector found this out only by sending five messengers in as many directions to other offices. ‘You owe me a lunch,’ he said when he’d got the news.

‘How do I get into the post-mortem?’

‘Oh, do you really want to? Well, as it’s at Bart’s, it’s probably in the theatre and so open to the students. You could just go in, probably, but—’ He took a piece of rather grand letterhead stationery and scribbled on it, signed with a huge and illegible flourish, then sent the young man off to get it stamped and initialled by the commissioner’s clerk.

‘Won’t it be under City Police control?’

‘The worst they can say is no, Denton.’ He twitched his ginger moustache. ‘Why ever do you want to go to a post-mortem? ’

Denton dragged a version of the truth from the clutches of the hangover. ‘I want to see if they were in coitus when he slit her throat. Mulcahy said that’s the way he saw it done long ago.’ Yes, well - there it was. He’d been shutting out an insistent image of slitting Emma’s throat while they made love.

Hench-Rose said hoarsely that you shouldn’t even think such things.

‘I find myself more and more interested in these mental cases.’ Not quite true, unless he was himself a mental case. Still—

Chapter Three

The operating theatre was circular and steep, the central well thirty feet across with only three steep ranks of seats rising around it. A lantern rose from the roof above, giving only gloomy light because of the rain, augmented by standard gas lamps in a rough circle around the wheeled table that was the centrepiece. The unheated space felt arctic; a coal stove on the far side was unlit. Fewer people than Denton had expected sat as audience, all men, most in overcoats as he was. Denton didn’t register as a separate fact that the only woman in the room was the dead one until he had looked around, got bored and begun really to see. He would, on the other hand, have been surprised to find a living woman there. He would not have been able to articulate why he would have been surprised. Now, he thought about it. Why was the murder of a woman a solely male concern?

On the table lay, presumably, what was left of Stella Minter, covered with a much-washed white cloth, some old stains barely perceptible as yellowish blooms. Sir Frank Parmentier stood a few feet away next to a table of instruments, consulting with, or giving orders to, a smaller man. Parmentier was tall, thin, fully bearded, an apparently virile man in his fifties with a full head of rather long, possibly curled, hair. Denton judged him something of an egoist, as he seemed to like poses that threw his head well back. Both men were wearing day clothes - dark coats and waistcoats, Parmentier’s in the rather outdated style named after the late husband of the Widow of Windsor. For the third time since Denton had come in, Parmentier consulted a pocket watch, and at the same moment three men came in from the staff entrance, one of whom Denton recognized as Detective Sergeant Willey of the City Police. If Willey recognized him - unlikely in that gloom, that crowd - he gave no sign; he was muttering with Parmentier, who was gesturing impatiently. Willey and one of the other policemen (such they had to be, Denton thought) went up into the seats; the third put a chair near the table of instruments and took out a notebook and a pencil.

‘I am about to begin,’ Parmentier announced. It was said the way a stage magician might have announced that he was now going to lock himself into a trunk. The audience of mostly medical students, who had been making a good deal of noise, shut up as if a curtain had been dropped. Parmentier pulled on rubber gloves that looked very white in the brightness and glanced in Willey’s direction. ‘Belatedly,’ he said in an acid tone, but Willey didn’t react.

‘I am about to perform a post-mortem examination on the body in a police matter of a victim named Sarah Minter.’ The accent was upper-class, the voice accustomed to inspiring awe.

The man with the notebook said something. Parmentier frowned. ‘
Stella
Minter,’ he said. He let several seconds pass. Then, deliberately, he selected a bone-handled scalpel from the tray of instruments, turned back and in one swift gesture strode to the table and whipped the cloth aside. The rubber gloves, coming high on his arms over his coat sleeves, gave him a vaguely rakish look, the gauntlets of a pirate or a highwayman, at odds with his clothes and his voice.

Denton, like others, gave no outward reaction when the body was exposed, but, to someone standing close and looking directly at him with a good light, he could have been seen to narrow his eyes, a kind of blink; looking closer, a dilation of the pupils would have been visible. The widespread effort to show no reaction made the theatre quite silent as even breathing stopped.

Stella Minter lay on her back, nude, legs together, head sticking a few inches beyond the end of the table so that her light-brown hair fell back and down and the slash across her throat gaped. She was painfully thin; her ribs showed clearly; but her breasts, flattened by her position, were nonetheless large, the aureoles dark. Her skin was greenish-grey, the light unkind to it; she had no hint of warmth, of the pink that is life. Using a cheap pair of opera glasses picked up on the way, Denton could see the curled, grey-brown edges of wounds on her breasts and abdomen. Two inches below the navel, the abdomen was open, and unidentifiable organs lay on her joined thighs, as grey now as pickled specimens. Denton counted eleven wounds on the upper half of the torso. Visible blood was brown but very scanty; the body, he thought, had been washed.
The bloody sheets of his wedding night. Not a lot, but it seemed so, his new wife in tears, wanting to wash the sheet before it was discovered. So much of women was about blood
.

‘The subject is a woman, somewhat but not excessively undernourished, height—’ Parmentier gestured; the assistant handed him one end of a tape, and Parmentier walked to the feet. The assistant muttered to him. ‘Five feet, four and one-quarter inches.’ He let go of the tape. ‘Age—’ He walked to the middle of the body, felt over first one hip and then the other; walked to the head, felt the top of the head; returned to the middle and leaned over the pubis, apparently studying the rather sparse, sandy hair. ‘Perhaps sixteen or seventeen; if we had time, we would excise one tip of the pelvis to study bone growth.’ He started again for the head and paused at the breasts, again leaned forward until his eyes were directly above the right breast. With his left hand, he touched the nipple, rubbed the tips of the fingers together, sniffed them, then leaned still farther and examined the other breast. ‘Evidence of lactation in both breasts, which also appear to be engorged.’ He straightened. He looked halfway around the circle of men. ‘What does this suggest to us, gentlemen?’ He waited and waited until somebody at last said in a gruff but hesitant voice, ‘Had a baby?’

‘Recent parturition, exactly, albeit crudely put. We speculate tentatively that subject has given birth within perhaps six months.’

He continued up to the head and examined the face, then the top of the head, parting the hair with one hand. The assistant made measurements - circumference of the skull, eye-line to back of the head, ear-to-ear width.

‘I find two contusions on the right side of the face, one on the maxillary, one two inches lower.’