The Frightened Man tds-1

by Kenneth Cameron

  Denton asked no questions but made his way into the arena as soon as Parmentier announced that they were done. Detective Sergeant Willey was making his way down from the other side but coming slowly, talking to his companion and the one who had served as clerk. Denton went right to Parmentier and, by talking louder than the nervous medical student already there, said, ‘Could the throat have been slashed while the attacker was engaged in coitus with the victim?’

  The great man eyed him. He paid Denton the compliment of immediately turning his attention away from the student as he began pulling off the rubber gloves. ‘Do I know you, sir? Are you of the profession?’

  ‘I’m a guest of Hector Hench-Rose’s.’ Making it a joke: ‘Not a journalist.’

  ‘I shall take it as given that your interest is not prurient. I don’t know Hench-Rose, unless he’s related to George Hench-Rose.’

  ‘An older brother, I think.’

  ‘Ah. I see him at old-boy dinners.’ He tore at the left glove, which clung to him like skin, muttered, ‘These damnable things-’ and wrenched it off, dropping it on the floor with disgust. He took Denton’s left arm and steered him towards the covered body. ‘Yes, of course, if it was a man, it would be quite possible for him to support himself on his left elbow while grasping the hair with that hand and making that long, powerful cut across the throat with his right.’ He removed the cloth; the body was still face-down. ‘If you’ll just lend a hand-’ Denton took the cool, waxy ankles, and they rolled her over on her back; she seemed weightless. Lighter than Emma. ‘Now, you see how it can be done — the elbow here — the knife in the hand-’ Parmentier was bending over the girl as if he were the murderer still coupled with her, his eyes bright with enthusiasm.

  ‘Was there ejaculate in the vagina?’

  ‘Perhaps. It’s going to be difficult to tell because of the state of the tissue; a good deal of blood and secretion in there. I’ll have a look at it under a microscope. Are you in the police?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I thought not. American? Canadian? American, yes.’ He wiped his hands on the cloth.

  Denton was examining the stab wounds in the breasts. ‘You’re satisfied she’d given birth,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Denton searched for a compliment. He hadn’t sat in on a post-mortem since he’d been a marshal and the local doctor had done an examination that lasted four minutes. ‘An elegant performance, sir.’ He had started to say ‘doctor’, but he couldn’t remember which sorts of medical men liked to be called doctor and which thought the word an insult. Parmentier half-smiled, bowing his head.

  Going out, Denton came face-to-face with Detective Sergeant Willey, who scowled but turned away as if his most cynical ideas of Denton had been confirmed.

  Chapter Four

  Emma.

  Had he really said that to her — ‘You’re mine?’ He didn’t think so, but he remembered thinking it. Some atavism: the man owns the woman. It was what asinine juveniles said on the Criterion Theatre stage to pretty ingénues — ‘You’re mine at last!’ And the ingénues agreed — ‘I’m yours!’ But that was metaphor. Wasn’t it? Yet his reaction when Emma had thrown him over had been one of — redness. Blood.

  Had that been Stella Minter’s mistake, that she had left somebody who thought he owned her? He thought of the grey-green corpse on the table, Parmentier’s scalpel; the feel of the girl’s waxy, cool ankles; the watching, carefully controlled but greedy-eyed men. Yes, the savagery of the wounds might have come from that sort of passion. In the everyday world, the oldest of old stories, the lover jilted for somebody else. She was mine.

  He had wanted to kill Emma; he saw that now, as if the post-mortem had opened a window for him. He hadn’t hit a woman, ever, even his wife when she was raging drunk and reviling him, although he had once shaken her when she was like that. Had he felt such shame then as he did now? What he remembered of the scenes with his wife was a deep loathing of both of them. Now, realizing his feeling towards Emma, he felt such shame as he had never known before, even in the worst of the war, when he had done some terrible things.

  He tried to think about Mulcahy, but his mind kept straying to the post-mortem and the picture of the lot of them, sitting there in their overcoats, fascinated by the cutting-up of a woman. Like a show. Where had he seen those blank, rapt faces before? At a pioneer-country fair — open-mouthed farmers staring at a bored woman attempting the Dance of the Seven Veils in a booth.

  Denton made his way to the British Museum. He had some hope of walking off the hangover, of course an illusion — outdoor air doesn’t change the chemistry of alcohol. The rain had stopped, and now a wind was driving clouds against a hard blue sky. Even after years here, Denton lived mentally in Dickens’s London, that place of twisting streets, poverty, gloom and idiosyncrasy; he always needed to adjust when he came out into such a day as this, when London was every bit its modern self — noisy, hard-driving, bursting at the seams and spilling out into new suburbs at the rate of thousands of houses a year. He was wearing some sort of tweed cape-cum-coat that blew around him in points and folds, its over-cape turning up over his head and half-blinding him when his back was to the wind. It had been a gift from Emma. Atkins had put it out for him that morning — an instance of Atkins’s humour?

  Emma. The insistent memory mixed with thoughts of the post-mortem, his mind unable to hold any image or idea for more than a fraction of a second. Impossible that he’d lost her. Stab wounds. Exvagination. Impossible. Had a baby, did that mean anything? Emma was his.

  At the Museum, he went into the Reading Room and found the London directories and began looking for Mulcahy, R. The long rows of volumes didn’t discourage him, but the lack of system did. One set was alphabetized, but it was a business directory, and unless Mulcahy, R. was a professional or a recognized businessman, he wouldn’t be in there. Denton’s memory of Mulcahy was that he wouldn’t qualify, and indeed, he wasn’t to be found. There were Mulcahys in business, but he saw none with a given name that started with R.

  Kelly’s directories were more inclusive. Entirely inclusive, if their foreword was to be believed, but the fact was that they missed many, maybe most people who rented rooms, especially in the slums. In theory, Kelly’s post office directories included every male working-man in the vast metropolitan area; the frustration for Denton was that they were arranged by streets, not personal names. If you wanted to know who lived in every house on Praed Street, you could find out, but if you knew somebody’s name and didn’t know where he lived, you were lost. On an impulse, he looked for Stella Minter in the Minories, but of course he didn’t find her. Stella Minter had been a transient, a grain of sand in a shifting ocean.

  One thousand, one hundred and thirty-six pages in the 1899 Kelly’s. And shelves of suburban volumes beyond. Denton sat, cold enough to have left the unfortunate coat on, turning pages, glancing at streets, as if the name Mulcahy might leap from the dense eight-point type.

  It would take days. No, weeks.

  And no hangover.

  He sighed, put the directories back and carried his fragile head out to Museum Street. The Tavern beckoned, but he ignored it; he walked down to Holborn, then zigzagged west and south and headed again for the Metropolitan Police Annexe.

  He announced himself to the porter and went up, put his head into Hench-Rose’s room and was told that Hector was ‘in a meeting of the Examinations Resolution Committee’, whatever that was, and turned instead and went along the corridor to what he hoped was Detective Sergeant Munro’s office. He got the wrong room, of course; an ascetic civil servant who seemed to be preparing for life in a Himalayan monastery — thin, bald, placid — put him right.

  Munro was not delighted to see him. His expression was disapproving. ‘We’re being run ragged here just now.’

  ‘I’ll come back.’

  ‘We’re always run ragged.’ They were standing in the outer room where the three clerks were bending over red
-tied files. ‘We don’t really have time for gentleman detectives.’

  ‘I’m not a detective, don’t pretend to be.’ He thought of Emma. ‘And I’m not a gentleman.’

  Munro’s expression changed; was he amused? ‘Five minutes.’ He led the way, limping, to his inner office. ‘You here about the murder again?’ he said when they were seated.

  ‘I went to the post-mortem. I told you, Mulcahy, the man who came to see me, had described a murder-’

  ‘Yes, yes-’

  ‘It was very similar.’

  Munro shrugged. He was tying and untying the red tape on a file. ‘Lots of murders are similar. No sign of your Mulcahy that I’ve heard of. City Police might have something — you did tell them, right? Have to ask them.’

  Denton shifted his body, trying to find a position that didn’t make his muscles ache. His head was pounding. ‘I’d like to see her room. Where she was killed.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Mulcahy, Mulcahy.’

  Munro fiddled with the tape, then joined his fingers and looked at Denton. ‘This the western sheriff in you coming out?’ Before Denton could answer, he said, ‘Read a bit about you — a pal downstairs keeps a scrapbook, had a newspaper piece about you.’ He was nodding. ‘Funny, you were down in Nebraska the same time I was in Alberta. Mounties.’

  Denton felt stupid, couldn’t puzzle it out. A Brit in the Mounties?

  ‘My dad emigrated from Scotland in 1847. I was born in Flodden, Quebec, tiny little place. I joined the Mounties in the second intake. Heard of the Sweet Grass Hills? Old Man River? Fort MacLeod?’ He grinned. ‘You weren’t a whiskey trader, were you?’

  ‘That’s one thing I never tried.’

  Munro grunted. ‘Bunch of lowlifes selling flavored raw alcohol to the Indians on the Assiniboine. I put in twice my three years and came here — better job, better pay.’

  ‘I went on west.’

  ‘It was a rough place back then.’ Munro leaned away from him. ‘You really kill four men?’

  He never talked about it. ‘Two,’ he said. He waited for Munro to see that it was a poor subject. Munro, however, had the look of a man who could wait him out. ‘The other two died later.’

  ‘Six-gun?’ Said with a grin.

  ‘Shotgun.’ Said with a scowl.

  Munro raised his eyebrows and shook his head. ‘Always wonder how I’d have done, that kind of situation. But the Mounties were very big on not being like Americans.’

  ‘Violent people.’ Denton had thought about it. ‘But we had slavery.’ Slavery, as he had worked it out, made the slaver violent.

  ‘Maybe the killer’s an American.’ Munro said it with another smile.

  ‘My five minutes are up.’

  Munro made a face as if to say it didn’t matter. ‘I might be able to get you into the scene of the crime and I might not. Bit difficult because it’s City Police.’

  ‘Plus Sergeant Willey more or less took against me.’

  ‘Yeah, well-The truth is, Willey’s probably so overworked he’s forgotten you. No offence. But they’ve got a big thing going on bank fraud over there; a dead prostitute isn’t going to distract them for long. Let me see what I can do through the Yard.’

  ‘You’ve changed your mind about me.’

  Munro was playing with the red tapes again. ‘Apparently,’ he said, and he grinned once more. ‘You have the telephone? ’ Denton shook his head. ‘Leave an address where I can get a message to you.’ While Denton was extracting a card from his case with trembling fingers, Munro said, ‘I’d give my right arm to be back in the CID.’ He seemed to mean it as an explanation of why he was willing to help Denton now.

  Denton’s mouth tasted like burned metal.

  He walked back like a man in a walking race. Always a fast walker, he seemed demented now. His balance was off; his back and head ached; still he plunged on. He had at first made for home, but he detoured into Soho and threw himself into a Chinese noodle shop, where, surrounded by slurping Chinese labourers, he filled himself with noodles and broth and several small dumplings. He had discovered Chinese food in California, had been surprised that the cosmopolitan English looked on it as comical, possibly dangerous, meaning actually that it was lower-class and strange. (‘We must never notice things that are unpleasant,’ he had read in Dickens but not understood until he had lived in London a while.) The food made him feel suddenly better, and he was able to lurch his way up to Oxford Street and then east, turning up Museum Street again because he liked it and at last through rather awful byways to Lamb’s Conduit. Always, the darkening blue was above him and the clouds were racing over as if leaping from the rooftops on one side to those on the other; below, looking up, trying to walk, he was made dizzy.

  ‘Sergeant!’ he shouted as he let himself in. He wanted to lie down but was damned if he would. He would make himself work, always a panacea, even though the work was no longer physical.

  Atkins appeared in his little doorway at the foot of the stairs. ‘You rang, sir?’

  Denton tossed him the horrible tweed coat. ‘Get rid of that.’ He put his hat on the newel post. ‘I don’t want tea.’

  ‘Good, else I’d have had to send to the Lamb. Nothing in the house.’

  Denton started up the stairs; his head seemed to pull him backwards.

  Atkins shifted the heavy coat to bring it more into view. ‘When you say, “Get rid of it,” you mean put it away or get it out of the house?’

  ‘Throw it in the trash; give it to General Booth; wear it yourself.’

  ‘Wouldn’t be caught dead in it.’

  He went up to his room. The unfinished novel made a pile of foolscap an inch high, written neatly enough but then scribbled over, crossed out, amended in trickles that fell off the end of the line and ran down the page and sometimes looped around to the other side of the sheet. He sighed and sat down to it. The truth was, as he admitted as he read over the last ten pages, the woman he’d created was a piece of cardboard. A fiction, a convenience. She was another of his attempts to capture his wife — to capture what she had done to him, to his life — in fiction. The scene he was working on had been meant as preparation for the downward spiral that would leave her dead on a frozen pasture in winter, raving and wandering in the snow. (The real Lily had taken poison.) And destroying her husband in the process.

  Stella Minter, dead and eviscerated by first her murderer and then the surgeon, was, he saw, more real, even in death, than the woman in his novel. He’d tried to recreate his wife, and he hadn’t even created a corpse. He dropped the scene into the trash, then began to leaf back through the rest of the manuscript, pulling out pages, dropping them into oblivion. Not the way a writer makes money.

  He heard Atkins breathing heavily as he came up the steep stairs.

  ‘Copper looking for you down below.’

  ‘I’m working.’

  ‘Copper wants you.’ Atkins produced a silver salver from behind his back. ‘Message.’

  ‘For God’s sake-’ Denton took the paper. ‘The plate wasn’t necessary, was it?’

  ‘Might have touched it with my dirty hands otherwise.’

  It was from Munro. ‘Can you meet me at a public house called the Haymow near the Minories at six o’clock? We can have a look at the scene you were interested in. PC Catesby will tell you the way, as it is difficult. Please reply by the constable.’

  ‘I’ll go down.’

  PC Catesby had a foolish young face and blushed easily. He drew a map on the back of Munro’s note as laboriously as if he were working out a problem in mathematics. In fact, Denton knew the streets he referred to as soon as he mentioned them, but there was no convincing the policeman. He went on pushing the thick pencil over the paper, printing names, making arrows, turning something easy into something tortuous.

  ‘I understand; it’s one street north and west of the Minories, right. The Haymow. Got it.’

  ‘Yes, sir, if you tell the driver the Minories and then direct
him to-’ It was the third time he’d gone over it. Denton hadn’t told the man he planned to walk, afraid that he’d get the entire route mapped for him on the same small sheet of paper. He kept saying yes, right, thank you, and finally PC Catesby took himself off, turning back in the doorway, then at the gate, to make some further point. Then he actually came back and said to Denton, ‘The Haymow’s rather low, sir.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He wondered if he should have tipped PC Catesby, decided not. Giving policemen money had a bad reputation.

  ‘I’ve put out the dark-brown lounge suit,’ Atkins said when Denton came upstairs. ‘You want another of them headache powders?’

  ‘I’m all right.’

  Atkins hesitated. ‘Your coat come back from Mrs Gosden’s. Also hat, gloves, stick. Also the derringer in the pocket.’ He raised his eyebrows — music-hall astonishment.

  ‘Somebody brought it?’

  ‘Commissionaire. Coat et cetera in a box. Carried the stick.’

  In a box. Everything ends in a box.

  ‘Put the derringer in the hollow book.’

  ‘Already have.’

  Denton started to ask if there had been any message with the coat, any reply to the apology he had sent Emma, but Atkins would of course have told him if there had been. In fact, the coat and hat were the message. They were the full stop at the end of a sentence — the compound sentence that had been his affair with Emma and was never to become a paragraph.

  Chapter Five

  Denton walked to his meeting with Munro — down to Holborn, along to the Holborn Viaduct, to Newgate Street, Cheapside, Cornhill, Leadenhall Street, Aldgate High Street — almost the whole width of the City. It was nearly evening, but the streets were banging with mechanical life — steam diggers clawing up the earth, steam cranes lifting bundles of wood and stone into the sky. London was a mythical beast that was tearing out its own innards and regrowing them in a new form — new streets, new buildings, new tunnels and railways. It was destroying — or hiding — what was sick or poor or weak or decayed and putting up the new, the vigorous, the aggressive. No wonder the directories couldn’t keep up with people like Mulcahy and Stella Minter: the city itself was flinging people from place to place.