The Bohemian Girl tds-2

by Kenneth Cameron

  The soldier in Denton wanted to judge him harshly; on the other hand, his older self said, nothing was proven yet. ‘Is it bad?’

  Heseltine gave him the half-smile again. ‘They’ll cashier me.’ ‘You have dreams about the war?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You remember all their names.’

  ‘Yes, yes-’

  ‘You don’t want to go out.’

  ‘No.’ He hardly voiced the syllable.

  ‘I shouldn’t have bothered you.’

  ‘I’m glad you came.’ Heseltine put his face in his hands, then sat up very straight. ‘I’m afraid you must think me weak.’

  Denton stood. ‘Thank you for your help.’

  ‘I thought there might be — something-’

  Something what, Denton wondered. Something more? Something for me? Something to be done? He said, ‘The envelope had a note asking for my help.’

  ‘I’m so glad I sent it on, then.’

  ‘Was there a woman at the shop where you bought the painting? ’

  ‘Only the man in the front, but I think in the back — where they framed and so on — I think there was someone else. But I — didn’t-’

  ‘I wanted to see if the sender of the note was all right.’

  ‘Yes, oh, you must! Yes, it’s so important to help people when they ask you for — protection — help-’ The side of his face pulled down. ‘Will you keep me informed?’

  ‘It’s been so long, I’m not sure it’s worth pursuing.’

  ‘But you must! Yes — please. I’d like to feel I had a part.’

  So Denton took the name of the shop in Burlington Arcade where he’d bought the painting and promised that he’d report back, and each of them said again how important it was to follow things through and to help when help was asked for. As Denton was leaving, he said, ‘Why did you buy that particular painting?’

  ‘The Wesselons? Because — it was a bargain, he said; somebody else had put down money on it and then not taken it — and-It was the idea of the menagerie, the animal so far away from his own kind-’ He was looking at a bookcase, not at Denton, frowning in concentration. ‘He must have been a wretchedly unhappy animal, but he looks so stalwart! As if he’d come through. Do you know what I mean?’

  Outside, the day was close. A dull sky suggested rain. The air smelled of horse dung and urine. The city’s clatter and hum filled Albany Court.

  The old man let Denton out to Piccadilly. He made his way to Burlington Arcade and strolled through, looking at the shops and seeing nothing, wondering how many horrors and sufferings there were just then in London, and how an attempt to resolve one simply led to another.

  He hadn’t intended to push things any farther that day. Or any day — he had enough without a possibly missing woman. He felt sluggish since he had seen Heseltine, drained of the hangover-derived energy that had driven him when walking. But, because it was raining and he was standing outside a shop that said in dull gold letters on black, ‘D. J. Geddys Objects of Virtue’, he went in.

  The public part of the shop seemed small, over-filled with things that even Denton sensed were good — Oriental vases, Wedgwood, Georgian silver, several shawls, many enamelled and decorated surfaces, antique lace, mahogany end tables and tapestry fire screens; on the walls, oil paintings large and small, either safely pre-Victorian or intensely Royal Academy. Denton’s experience of art had been only with big Scottish paintings of sheep and hairy cattle — he had bought by the yard, not the artistry — and had left him indifferent to all of them.

  ‘May I help you, sir?’

  The man had materialized from a dark corner. He was small, so hunched that he was barely five feet, his neck dropped forward and down so that his face had to be turned to the side and up to speak. He had very thick glasses, a beard cut short, the upper lip shaved. He might have been sixty, suggested some near-human, faintly sinister creature, gnome or troll, with a nasty sense of humour kept bottled in, perhaps to come out as practical jokes. His voice was hoarse and very deep, coming out of his pigeon chest in a bass rumble.

  Denton debated pretending to be a customer. What might he have been looking for? He knew nothing about ‘objects of virtue’. Not a field in which he could pretend.

  ‘Mr Geddys?’

  ‘The same.’

  ‘I’m trying to locate a woman named Mary Thomason.’

  The name had a strange effect on Geddys, as if he’d been bumped. He rolled his head as if to get a better look at Denton, but the movement might have been a cover for something else. There was something wrong with his neck, Denton thought, almost as if he had been hanged. Unlikely, however. There was also something wrong with his expression — a false disinterest, perhaps. Geddys said, ‘Yes?’

  ‘I believe that perhaps she worked here.’

  Geddys looked away from him. ‘I can hardly be expected to talk to a stranger about employees.’ He glanced over his shoulder at Denton. ‘If she worked here.’

  Denton produced a card. ‘Did she?’

  ‘I don’t understand your interest.’

  ‘I want to know if she’s missing.’ He was irritated; he said deliberately, ‘I’ve already been to the police.’

  Geddys looked at the card. He flicked it with a finger. ‘This is simply a name. You could be anybody. Are you a relative?’

  ‘Mary Thomason wrote me a letter, asking for my help. She missed an appointment with me.’ That wasn’t quite true, but he found himself wanting to squelch Geddys. ‘Is she missing?’

  Geddys put the card down on a table. ‘She left us.’

  ‘But she did work here.’

  ‘For a while.’

  ‘What did she do?’

  Geddys got cautious again, argued privacy, said that Denton could be anybody, his real feeling perhaps exasperation that Denton wasn’t a customer. Then they got as far as Geddys’s saying that Mary Thomason was young and naive and had framed prints and drawings for him when they were interrupted by a genuine customer, a lavishly got-up woman dripping ecru lace as if it were a skin she were shedding. Denton had to retire to a safe zone between two virtuous objects while they murmured about a ‘sweet bit of pavé’ in a case. But she didn’t buy, and she swept out with a vague promise to look in again, and Geddys smiled his ironic smile, twisting his head at Denton.

  Then Denton had to go through it all — the little Wesselons, the note, his absence — leaving out only the things he didn’t see any point in telling. And Geddys admitted he had been annoyed that Mary Thomason had left him without notice, only a note instead of coming in one day in August pleading ‘a family crisis at home’. He was almost too voluble now, too helpful.

  ‘Where was “home”?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. She seemed more or less genteel.’

  ‘You didn’t know where she lived in London?’

  ‘Ask at the Slade.’

  ‘What’s the Slade?’

  Geddys stared at him. ‘The Slade School of Art.’

  ‘She was an art student?’

  ‘So she said.’

  He persuaded Geddys to find the precise date when Mary Thomason had gone away. Geddys had in fact kept her note. It was dated the same day as the letter to Denton that she or somebody had tucked into the back of Heseltine’s painting.

  ‘I don’t understand about the painting,’ Denton said.

  ‘Neither do I. Most irregular. If I’d known, I’d have stopped it.’

  ‘But why would she do it?’

  Geddys sighed. ‘People, especially young people, do things beyond the comprehension of the mind of man. I hardly knew the young lady.’ He didn’t look Denton in the eye when he said that.

  Other questions got only repetition, as of a well-rehearsed story, and the information that Mary Thomason had been clean, prompt, shy and inarticulate. No, she seemed to have no young men, no ‘followers’. No, he had no idea where she had lived, and would Mr Denton forgive him, but he had a business to manage.

  Mr Denton did
n’t forgive him, because Mr Denton didn’t entirely believe him, but Mr Denton left. Outside the arcade, it was still raining.

  He took a cab to Victoria Street, was surprised to have the doorman at the Army and Navy Stores recognize him, the more so because he was only an associate member, and that because Atkins — an actual veteran of the British army — had got him in. He went directly to the gun department and bought a Colt New Pocket revolver in.32 nitro. It didn’t have the feel of the old Colt, but he knew it was quicker and more powerful, far faster to reload. It was smaller and with a shorter barrel, but it weighted his overcoat pocket like a bag of coins.

  Munro had the reports for him from the divisions. They had nothing about a Mary Thomason. He complained that Denton should be getting all this from Guillam’s Missing Persons office, not from him.

  ‘I get along better with you,’ Denton said.

  ‘Hmp.’ Munro gave him a rather dead stare. ‘Coroner’s office has three unidentified corpses for the day the “missing” woman wrote you the note, seven for the week following, five for the week before. Five female, ten male. Autopsies performed on two — suspicious causes — and the lot buried after the statutory period because you can’t keep dead bodies indefinitely.’

  ‘Foul play on any of the women?’

  Munro shrugged. ‘Two of them taken out of the river, ditto five of the men, all but one been in too long to know much. Nothing caught the eye.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Didn’t strike anybody as justifying investigation.’ Munro folded his hands on his desk. ‘Fact of life, Denton — some folk are worth the trouble, some aren’t.’

  ‘You mean they were poor.’

  ‘I don’t make those judgements. If a middle-class householder with two kids and a wife and a job as a senior clerk turns up in the Thames, we investigate. If somebody in rags with no way of knowing who she was washes up, well-’

  ‘So if I dress the householder in rags and throw him off a bridge, you bury him without an autopsy?’

  ‘I’d assume the wife would either raise a stink or the neighbours would. Respectability, Denton. It drives the world. You know how it goes — respectability is never being noticed, isn’t it? Never wearing the wrong necktie or saying the wrong word, or suddenly living without a husband when the neighbours know you ought to have one. It comes to our attention. But those who aren’t respectable to start with-’

  ‘The poor-’

  ‘You sound like a reformer. Come off it, Denton — you’re respectable, I’m respectable, we read what’s respectable and we think what’s respectable and we don’t go into some parts of London because they aren’t respectable. It’s a not a perfect world out there. A lot gets left to God to sort out.’

  ‘Mary Thomason maybe wasn’t respectable?’

  ‘An art student? How would I know? It would help if you could tell me something about her and weren’t just passing gas. Anyway, she should be reported to Missing Persons, which you’ll do posthaste, right?’ Munro slapped his hands on the desk. ‘Tea? Look, Denton, CID aren’t here to find missing shop girls, all right?’

  ‘Neither am I.’

  ‘Then give it up. It’s daft, anyway. She probably got a bun in the oven and went home to Ma, or she met some darling artiste and is living in a gypsy caravan someplace.’

  Denton accepted a mug of repellent tea. ‘You could be right.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Munro sipped the tea and made a face. ‘Bitter as a tanner’s pee. My God, why can’t they make it fresh once in a way!’ He pushed several sheets of foolscap across the desk. ‘Keep that, if you like.’

  Denton looked it over. Of the list of corpses gathered in after the date of the note to him, one caught his eye, pulled from the Thames — ‘Female, slender, hair long, age unknown because of water and decomposition, contusions on head’ — he thought of bodies he had seen in the war. At the end, he had been in Louisiana; there had been a skirmish, hardly a battle, nothing that would get into the history books, but a dozen bodies had floated down a small river to where he had been camped, three or four catching in a slow eddy; at night, they could hear the alligators tearing at them, their tails splashing the water as they tried to spin pieces off; finally, unable to stand it, he had ordered his men to pull the bodies out and bury them. The faces were ghastly. Was that how Mary Thomason had ended — bloated, unrecognizable, inhuman? ‘Nobody ever heard of Mary Thomason, then. Well-’ He folded the sheets and put them in a pocket. ‘If I’d known what the tea was like, I’d have gone to Guillam.’

  ‘Try Sewer and Water Authority. Their tea’s capital. They’re not much on crime, though.’ He smiled, the deliberately false smile that merely lifts the corners of the lips. ‘We investigate when we get evidence. There’s no evidence.’

  Denton stood. ‘Maybe I’ll find something where she roomed.’

  ‘If you do — ’ Munro pointed a pencil at him, his huge head lowered as if he were going to charge — ‘you report it to Missing Persons. No inspirations, right?’

  ‘I wouldn’t dare.’ Denton grinned. ‘It wouldn’t be respectable.’ He tried the tea again and gave up on it.

  It was still raining at nine o’clock that night, when, encased again in the mackintosh, he stepped out into his ‘back garden’, actually a tangle of weeds that he had never bothered himself with before. He had the new Colt in one pocket and a patent ‘Ever Ready’ electric tube light in the other. ‘The very latest thing, and the light lasts as long as twelve seconds,’ the American sender had written. Called it a ‘flash light’. He hadn’t turned it on yet when he tripped over something and almost fell headlong; he caught himself on his right hand and felt loose earth: there were a small hole, a small pile of soil and a spade. Atkins’s imitation of gardening.

  The rain poured down, windless and incessant. The nearby houses showed only as shapes against the dull reflected city glow, their masses broken by rectangles of gaslit windows. The garden was a black pit within head-high brick walls. The dead weeds, stiff as sticks now, stood almost as high, and their feathery ends dripped with water as he brushed through them. He and Atkins had once talked about sowing grass and restoring the borders, still a mare’s-nest of old climbing roses, the remains of an espaliered fruit tree, and shrub-like eruptions that may once have been meant to flower. Atkins wanted a kitchen garden, herbs and lettuces. Nothing had come of the talk: the back garden remained a jungle.

  Making his way in the dark down what was left of a brick path, Denton found himself thinking about Heseltine. The young man’s anguish had stayed with him. His own response to the hell of war had been delayed and had come out as a failure of sympathy, an isolation from his young wife and then his sons. And it had appeared still later as imaginings and fantasies that had turned into the novels that his English editor called ‘masterpieces of horror’. Now here was young Heseltine, living through a horror of his own, but hard on the heels of the horror itself without the cushioning of delay or metamorphosis into fiction.

  He stumbled, cursed, moved on by sliding his feet over the wet bricks and the grass that grew between them. The mackintosh covered him to halfway between his knees and his boots, but his trouser legs were already wet. The broad hat kept the water out of his collar but would soak through, he knew. He was in for a miserable hour or two, because he meant to wait to see if the man in the red moustache — or Albert Cosgrove — went in or out of the vacant house.

  He felt the brick bulk of the former privy, once discussed as a possible garden shed. Weed trees surrounded it, gripped it; he had to fight his way through them, head down to keep twigs out of his eyes. When his reaching fingers felt the rear wall of the garden, he shuffled left, flattening against the bricks to escape the densest of the growth. Once behind the privy, he dared to try the ‘flash light’, which showed him rain, branches and, surprisingly, a wooden ladder against the rear wall. He lifted his finger from the touch ring that was the light’s only switch, careful of his batteries.

  Up
the ladder, belly on the curved top of the wall, he felt downwards and found another ladder on the other side. Grim discovery: somebody seemed to have made himself a route between Denton’s garden and that of the house behind.

  And if into the garden, therefore into the house? He felt the sickening lurch of disgust at the idea of somebody’s invading him.

  He was clumsy going over. He felt the ladder’s fragility as he put his weight on it but got down to find a real garden shed on that side, wood not brick, and no tangle of weed trees — a true garden that had been the real thing until a couple of months ago. Crossing it was easy — something rigid and crotch-high, a sundial or a statue, was a temporary discomfort — and then he leaned against the back wall of the house between the cellar door and the back door and waited for his man.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  At half past ten, a distant church bell sounding, he felt his way along the house wall to the back door and tested it, found it locked. No such luck.

  He gave up at half past eleven. The lights were out in the adjoining houses. The rain still fell; the city glow burned on; the city’s growl was muted.

  He went home the way he had come, wet, angry, like a cat who’s been shut out in the rain.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘Anything?’ Atkins said, not without scepticism.

  Denton was in his own entrance hall. Atkins, wearing the bedraggled robe, pyjama bottoms visible between the hem and the floor, was standing in the doorway to his quarters. A staircase ran up the wall on Denton’s left to his own part of the house. Around them, the oversized Scottish genre paintings were inscrutable in the dim light.

  Denton shrugged himself out of the mackintosh and handed it over, hat to follow. ‘Your intruder’s either a figment of your imagination or he’s got another home.’

  ‘Figment? Who chased somebody because he thought he was being followed? Who saw a man with a funny upper lip at New Scotland Yard?’

  Denton grunted. ‘Maybe we’re both seeing things.’ He stopped partway up the stairs. ‘I almost tripped over a shovel in the back. Was that you?’