The Frightened Man tds-1

by Kenneth Cameron

  Denton pushed past him and stood close to the lath-and-plaster wall. ‘Close the door,’ he said. ‘Come in or not, Munro, but close the door. I want my eyes to adjust.’

  Munro pushed in and closed the door, and the space was suddenly very tight, Denton able to smell both of them — wool overcoat, tobacco, sweat — and the slightly chemical odour of Munro’s breath over the resident stench. He found himself holding his breath.

  He waited.

  ‘Bit far-fetched, this,’ Munro said.

  In fact, after several minutes, Denton could still see less than he had with the door open. What was he doing in here?

  He felt over the walls with his fingertips, first low down, then standing to reach as high as he could, then standing on the chair and feeling over the upper part of the walls and the ceiling. It was a balancing act to stand on that uncertain chair in the dark; he started to sway, caught himself on Munro’s head, pushing the policeman’s hat down and hearing a grunt of complaint. He held himself that way until he located the light coming under the door, and when it snapped into focus his equilibrium came back and he was secure again. He raised his eyes, ready to work his way down the wall, and then he saw it — a thin line of lesser darkness in the dark where the laths ran.

  ‘There.’

  ‘There what?’

  He slowly lowered himself and put one foot on the floor. From that level, the line of faint light was invisible. He worked his way up again, put his face against the clumps of plaster and the rough wood of the lath and looked down and so could see it. He put his hand on it, first hiding the light, then working the hand down until the light showed, then finding the exact lath and pushing on it and watching the light all but disappear.

  He got down again, keeping his fingers on the lath. He tried pulling on it, catching it at top and bottom with his fingernails, and then he could see a little, dim line as the lath pulled away a fraction of an inch but wouldn’t come free. He tried it several ways, and it was only when he pushed from the bottom that the lath moved upwards and could then be worked up over the roughness above it until it stopped, caught on something above. He felt the movable piece with his fingers in the dark and found that a piece of lath about two inches long had been scarfed on both ends so that they fitted under matching scarves on the strip in the wall — that, in fact, somebody rather skilled had cut the lath twice at an angle. Probing with a finger below this cut-out section, he found a hole.

  He leaned forward. His hat brim hit the wall first; he removed the hat and put it behind him on the chair, leaned forward again, felt the tickle of a horsehair. He put his eye to the dim light and found himself looking, as he expected, into the back of Balmoral Castle and, beyond it, Stella Minter’s room.

  The hole in the reverse painting was big enough that he could see all of the far wall and the oval window in it, through which the light from the outside gas lamp was shining. He could barely make out the shape of the bed, which was below him and close to the wall through which he was looking, most of it invisible because of the dark bloodstains. Yet, he thought, with the gas light on above the bed — now to his left and higher — especially with its silver reflector, somebody standing here could have seen a good deal. Everything that went on in the bed, certainly. He thought of the reflector on the gas lamp: that might have been the work of the person who had cut the lath, too.

  ‘Have a look.’ He pulled Munro into the place where he had been standing and put Munro’s hand on the rough lath and plaster and led it to the hole.

  ‘Voyeur,’ Munro said after perhaps twenty seconds.

  Odd, then, that the closet door was unlocked.

  Munro pushed back, and Denton heard the door latch. ‘This changes the price of fish,’ Munro said. ‘Willey will have to be told.’

  Denton worked the cut piece of lath back into its niche and took up his hat and stepped out into the corridor.

  The house was making sounds, as a house with a dozen or so people in it must. A medley of cooking smells reached him, too, not a bad odour at all, a blend like meat-and-vegetable stew, balm after the closet. Munro was straightening his hat, looking solemn; when the hat was right, he headed down the corridor towards the back of the house. Denton put his own hat on and walked behind him, passing doors on both sides, coming at the end to a kitchen on his left, the door open, and a water closet on his right, the door also open. The water closet was filthy, the kitchen fairly clean; both, he supposed, communal. Three people were eating at a table in the kitchen; two men, one of them the man who had opened the front door for them, were standing by a big coal range, staring into pots. When Munro stepped into the doorway, everybody looked at him and everything stopped. No need to say he was a policeman; the man in the collarless shirt had no doubt already told them what had happened at the front door.

  ‘What’s the name of the landlord?’ Munro said.

  Nobody spoke. After some seconds, a pretty, rather showy young woman said, ‘Never see him. Wouldn’t know him if he appeared in a car drawn by the royal family.’

  ‘Don’t make smart remarks, young woman! Who takes the rent?’

  She looked at the others, blushing but apparently excited by her defiance. ‘His collector slithers in on Mondays. A charmer, I don’t think.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Clebbins,’ the other man by the stove said.

  ‘Just Clebbins?’

  ‘All I ever heard.’

  They didn’t know where Clebbins lived or where he went or what other properties he gouged rents out of, although there was some sense that the owner might live in Chelsea, or possibly Hammersmith.

  ‘Who uses that cupboard up at the front?’

  Four of the five didn’t seem to know that there was a cupboard up at the front. The fifth, an older, dour woman at the table, opined that nobody used it because it was always locked.

  Denton pushed himself a little forward and gave them a quick description of Mulcahy. Had they ever seen him?

  They had all seen him a thousand times, every day of their lives.

  ‘That’s all we’ll get out of this lot tonight,’ Munro said. He raised his voice to include them all. ‘City of London Police will be back tomorrow. See you’re ready to talk to them without a lot of lip.’ The collarless man dropped his eyes to his pot; the young woman flounced or shrugged and looked sideways at a woman who had never spoken.

  Out in the court again, Munro said, ‘I wish you’d told Guillam.’ He was looking up into the steely sky, apparently studying the stars — six or eight now — with his hands behind him under his overcoat tails. ‘He’ll be annoyed.’

  ‘I can’t help that.’

  ‘You could have earlier.’ It sounded petulant. Denton didn’t respond. Munro straightened and put his hands into his overcoat pockets. ‘It’s possible to see it as a little too convenient — you finding it.’

  ‘Wouldn’t have been less convenient if I’d pointed it out an hour ago. What are you saying, that I’m a suspicious person because I found something the police missed?’

  ‘If they missed it. Willey’s people might have found it and not told anybody.’ He breathed deeply, as if he was inhaling the night air for its odour. ‘What d’you make of it?’

  ‘You said “voyeur”. That’s about it.’ He had been surprised that Munro had known the word, the sexual type. As this wasn’t fair to Munro, he felt vaguely ashamed.

  ‘Your man Mulcahy?’

  ‘“My man,” good God. Why don’t you work it out and tell me.’

  Munro bounced on his toes and said ‘Mm’ a couple of times. ‘I’ll do that. But you know, if you’re so hot on your Mulcahy, you need to find him yourself. Nobody’s going to do it for you — there just isn’t enough in it. Enough likely information, I mean. We’re not perfect, Denton, and there’s not enough of us. We have to balance the likely gain against how many men and how much time.’ He led Denton out of the alley and up Vine Street, saying nothing, and at the corner of John Street he sto
pped and gripped Denton’s arm, this time while facing him. ‘Come and see me in the morning. Georgie and Willey’ll have it on paper by then. I’m on my way to the Yard now, file a report.’

  ‘Feeling like a detective again?’

  Munro grunted. ‘Wife’s waiting, dinner’s waiting, kids’re waiting. A policeman’s lot is not a happy one.’ Suddenly, he clapped Denton on the arm. ‘Good work. You’re all right, Mr Denton.’ He limped away on John Street and disappeared around the corner.

  It was growing dark. Denton found he was hungry. The evening loomed — no Emma, no dinner out. His interest in Mulcahy, however, had revived; it had sunk to almost nothing after Guillam implied that Willey had made an arrest, but the closet and the peephole had revived it. He thought about what Munro had said about finding Mulcahy himself. It would be a matter of time and people — both things that money could buy, although money was something he was not flush with just then. Still-

  Denton walked another street and then hailed a cab and told the driver to head for Lloyd Baker Street; once there, he pulled one of the three bells that hung by the door of a run-down but still respectable house. This was the lodging of his typewriter, who translated his scribbled-over, crossed-out scrawls into legible pages. She lived on the first floor and he saw a light, but it was now night and he felt awkward about being there, a male figure in the dark when she opened the front door.

  ‘Oh — Mr Denton.’ Not particularly welcoming, nor particularly relieved. She was a very proper woman, he remembered too late.

  ‘I know it’s late, Mrs Johnson.’

  ‘No, no — quite all right-’ She looked anguished. Wondering if he would want to come in, perhaps.

  ‘I won’t come in,’ he said. ‘I only wondered if you could organize a, well — a job of work for me.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ Dubious. She was a stout woman, still fairly young, widowed. She earned her living by typewriting, gave off no signals about having any other life.

  ‘I need for somebody to go through the London directories to look for a man who came to visit me. He left no address, but it’s important that I find him. It would take several people to do it.’

  ‘I can’t take time away from my typing machine, I’m afraid.’ She had a shawl clutched tight at her throat with one hand, the other on the door as if she wanted to be sure she could close it on him.

  ‘I thought you might know other people, other women, who could use the work. It would be several days’ work. I’d pay them for a week — let’s say three people — even if they finished before that.’ He didn’t confess that his bank account was running down towards zero; paying several women would probably get it there.

  She looked out at the cab, which she seemed to see for the first time. The cabman was holding a water bag under the animal’s mouth. ‘I’m keeping you,’ she said.

  ‘No, I’m keeping you from your, um, meal.’ Did you say ‘supper’ in this situation? Perhaps ‘tea’. What the hell. ‘I really need this to be done, Mrs Johnson.’

  ‘Well — I know a few other typewriters from the agency-They don’t get the work that I do.’ Said with pride. She was good, and very fast.

  Denton wrote ‘R. Mulcahy’ on a card and held it out. ‘That’s the name. And of course, I’d pay you for getting things organized.’

  She stared at the card, which she’d taken with the hand that had been holding the shawl. ‘I don’t have any time open-’ She clutched the shawl again, the card close to her chin. ‘Still, because it’s you-Can you pay them five shillings a day? They have to be assured it’s worth passing up typewriting jobs for.’

  He said that yes, of course, that would be fine, although he was thinking that twenty-five shillings for a week’s work was more than working-men made. Still, he was in no position to bargain. ‘And a bonus of a shilling for each R. Mulcahy they find.’ He hesitated. ‘There may be more than one.’ If there were a lot of them, however, he’d done something stupid. But how many could there be?

  She muttered a good night, and the door closed. Denton felt as he had with Guillam, suspected of something nasty and not exonerated.

  Well, of course, he was male.

  At home, Atkins had been grumpy because he was trying to recover from an uncomfortable hour with two detectives while Denton had been with Munro and Guillam. He had started complaining about it at the front door and had continued all the way through Denton’s stepping into the hot bath he thought he’d earned. In turn, while he dressed again, Denton had told Atkins about the visit to the dead woman’s room.

  ‘What do you make of it?’ Denton said now.

  ‘Nothing.’ Atkins jiggled the coat he was waiting for Denton to put on — the same brown suit he had worn earlier, now found déclassé by Atkins for evening wear but just right for Denton’s Bohemian mood. ‘They also serve who only stand and answer coppers’ questions about their employer, leaving out the difficult bits like where you was going at eleven o’clock that night, the which I kept to myself.’

  ‘And grateful I am to you for it. But I don’t want to talk about that; I want to talk about the girl’s death.’ He sat on the bed and began to pull on a shoe. ‘I’ll tell you how I see it.’ He looked up to see if Atkins was going to pout. ‘Do you want to know how I see it?’

  ‘Of course I do; it’ll be better than Charlie O’Malley.’ Charles Lever’s Charles O’Malley, the Irish Dragoon was Atkins’s favourite book, said by him to have been read twenty times. Apparently hearing his own tone, Atkins became apologetic. ‘No, truly, Colonel, I don’t have your gift for making a story out of a bunch of facts. Tell me how you see it.’

  Denton paused with the other shoe in his hands. He moved the shoe up and down as if he were weighing it. ‘All right-’ He looked at nothing, the scene before his eyes like a play. ‘Stella Minter opens the door. Maybe it’s somebody she knows, although that’s just a possibility. Anyway, he comes in — maybe pushes his way in, maybe doesn’t. He hits her — twice, I don’t know why. He undresses. Or maybe he doesn’t. She either takes off her wrapper or he pulls it off her — interesting to know if there’re any rips in it. I suppose the police won’t tell me things like that. She lies down or he pushes her down. He has the clasp knife open in his hand but he’s hiding it. He enters her.

  ‘Mulcahy is watching through the peephole. I think that this is possible only if he has an arrangement with Stella Minter — he’s put up the reverse-painted picture with the scraped-out place, also the reflector on the gas lamp. So he’s watching. He doesn’t see the knife until it’s actually in her throat and the blood spurts. The killer stands up and starts to stab the woman in the bosom. Maybe she tries to roll out of the way, or maybe he moves her; anyway, blood actually spurts as high as the picture, so now Mulcahy sees it all through red.

  ‘Mulcahy throws up. Maybe he makes noise doing it — people do, a coughing, strangling noise — or maybe he screams. And he opens the closet door and runs for his life.

  ‘The killer hears the sound that Mulcahy made. He looks up, and he sees the light from the open closet door shining through the hole in the wall and the glass of the picture. He knows somebody has seen him.

  ‘He panics. Or he doesn’t panic. This is a clever man and a fast thinker, so maybe he doesn’t panic. He wipes the blood off his naked body with the wrapper and drops it into the blood on the floor and puts his clothes back on.’ Denton was seeing it as if it were a scene he was writing. ‘He’s still smeared with blood under his clothes, but there isn’t enough of it to soak through. In the darkness outdoors, he’ll be all right.

  ‘He goes out. Now, he’s almost certainly already mutilated her abdomen and cut out her female parts, because he’s not going to go out and come back and do that — or is he? Is he that clever? That cold-blooded? Whenever he did it, he may have done it out of — what is it? rage? — or maybe that’s where his cleverness comes in; maybe he’s planned it that way to make it look like rage. Or insanity. Or maybe he thinks of it after he’s dressed and
has gone out, and he goes back in to do it. But, by the way, if he’s planned all that out, then he’s planned to kill her, and then I think he knew her and there’s a personal reason for killing her — he’s a rejected lover, maybe. Or, if it’s just something he did, then he’s a maniac. But a damned clever one.

  ‘So he goes out, and he goes in the main door of the house, and he sees the closet door at once — open. Think of it, Sergeant — he was in that house, maybe somebody in the kitchen or the WC, and nobody saw him. He’s clever and he’s brave, or audacious, anyway. So he steps into the closet and he sees the hole and the lath, and this is where his cleverness comes in — he pushes the lath back into place, because he doesn’t want the police to find it. He doesn’t want them to have any clues to Mulcahy’s existence, at least not before he’s found Mulcahy first.

  ‘Or that’s the way I see it, because I think Mulcahy was so terrified that he wouldn’t have stopped to push the piece of lath down. Nor to lock the closet door, by the way — the reason we found it unlocked. And the killer didn’t lock it because he didn’t have a key — it was in Mulcahy’s pocket.

  ‘So the killer’s mind is racing. He knows he has to get out at once, but he knows he has to find whoever was in the closet. It’s too late to try to follow him. What does he do?’

  He looked up at Atkins. The sergeant let himself be looked at, shrugged, stood there. ‘Runs like H, I suppose.’

  ‘Well, yes. But suppose he finds something that Mulcahy has left in the closet in his terror — and that has his name on it.’