‘Indeed I will.’ He glanced at Denton. ‘I asked him to tell me “everything” a bit ago, and he didn’t.’
She looked at Denton and winked. It was an astonishing performance for that usually grave face. He smiled despite himself and began to tell it all to Munro again. This time, Munro made notes. There was a lot of fluster over where to put things while he dragged out a notebook and pencil from his heavy tweed jacket. Janet Striker occasionally put a few words in; Munro looked at her each time with a shrewd expression, as if to say, Oho, you’re in it as deep as he is. When they were done, Munro said, ‘All right, now I’m going to find out what you wouldn’t tell me before. This picture you’ve got of the girl. Where’d you get it?’
Denton looked at Janet. She said, utterly cool, ‘It was in the girl’s trunk.’
Munro sighed. ‘You’ve got her trunk.’
‘Not at all. It’s in the “to be called for” office at Biggleswade.’
‘But you’ve been into it!’ He glared at Denton. ‘Come on, come on — it’s all going to come out!’
‘You know, Munro, for a man who’s being given a case on a plate, you’re being a pill.’
‘Case on a plate, my hat! Bunch of speculations and random shots, is what it looks like.’
‘Be grateful for what you get and stop pressing us for how we got something.’
‘If we go to court, it’s all got to come out!’
‘Let’s deal with that when you go to court, then. Look-’ Denton put his cup down. He wiggled himself forward in the soft chair, lifting his bad leg with both hands to raise it. ‘I’ll take responsibility for getting the drawing. Let’s say I was into the trunk — all right. Leave it at that for now.’
‘If you were into the trunk, it and everything in it are tainted. You could have planted anything — that’s what counsel would say.’
‘Damn counsel! You’re concerned with what to tell a French cop about how Arthur Crum’s body got in a hole in Normandy.’
‘Or whoever’s in there,’ Janet Striker murmured. ‘For all we know right now, it could be one of the knights from the Bayeux tapestry.’ She smiled. ‘I read about it in a Baedeker on the Channel crossing. ’
Munro made a rather humourless clucking sound. ‘Well, we’re going to have the devil’s own time making any kind of identification at all as things stand. But one thing at a time — sufficient unto the day, and so on. All right, I’ll go easy on the trunk for now but I want a list of everything that was in it — everything!’ He glared at Denton, then Janet Striker. ‘And mind — the day of reckoning is coming!’ He shook his pencil at Denton.
‘You should have been a preacher. “My god is a jealous god.”’
‘The god of New Scotland Yard is a jealous god! We also grind very slowly, like all gods.’
‘And exceeding small.’
‘That, too.’ Munro looked at his notebook. ‘Well, I don’t see the chain — Mary Thomason goes missing; her brother collects the trunk — but where’s the link to Arthur Crum? A drawing done by somebody who never saw him, based on the drawing of Mary? That’s pure fantasy. This painting of Lazarus?’ He made a sound with his lips that sounded like ‘peuh’. ‘You don’t know how many human faces look alike until you undertake police work. Did you show this supposed drawing of the brother to Mary’s landlady? What’s her name, Mrs — Durnquess? She’s the only one I find in this tangle who actually saw him.’
‘The Irish maid,’ Janet Striker said.
‘Oh, right.’ Munro made a note. ‘Have to interview both of them, and I want a copy of these drawings you’ve built such a sandcastle on. All right — then the Mayflower Baths. I know all about the Mayflower Baths. Lots of jokes about it at the Yard — pardon me, ma’am. I’ll ask around about this man Himple. Also, some of the lads who were picked up at the baths are still in prison; they should be shown the drawing of the “brother”.’ He made another note. ‘Then there’s the letters home from this fellow Himple. To — a valet-’
‘Brown.’
‘Yes — can’t read my own writing. Brown.’ He leaned hard on the pencil. ‘Brown seems to be the one who knows where they were when. Or supposed to be, anyway. And where and when the temporary valet, this Crum, is supposed to have been discharged.’
‘Brown has all that.’
‘Yes, I said we need to talk to Brown. Give me an address. Good. If the bones turn out to be who you think, then we’ll wire the places where they stayed, and so on — maybe let the French police do that, actually — depends, depends. Hmm.’ He pinched his lower lip between his fingers and studied his notebook. ‘French are digging up the dust pit at the farm to see if they can find the sack the lye came in. Also going to canvass the shops in the nearby town — what is it? Can? Cane-?’
‘Caen,’ she said.
‘That’s it. You sound just like the Frenchman. Plus they’ll be looking for the, mm, other missing things-’
Janet Striker looked at Denton. He said, ‘There’s no head with the bones.’
‘Oh, dear God. And I was so grateful we hadn’t found that first — I didn’t want to see a face that had been-’ She shook her head quickly. ‘Ridiculous to make more of the face than anything else.’
Munro closed his notebook and began to cram it back into some maw within his suit. ‘I don’t see that we can do anything until we have an identification. Metropolitan Police can’t involve themselves until there’s suspicion of a crime. A body found in France isn’t suspicion of a crime.’ He pulled the notebook out again and waved it at Denton. ‘And this doesn’t hold together well enough to be a crime!’
‘And if the French police say in the end that they’re unidentifiable remains?’
Munro stood. ‘They’ll have saved me a lot of grief.’
‘What do you know about women’s time of the month?’ Janet Striker said.
Denton felt his face flush; he thought she would say next something about not being able to go to bed with him. He started to say, ‘I was married,’ to mean that he knew what a woman’s time of the month was, but didn’t get it out because she said, ‘I’ve been thinking about Mary Thomason.’
It made no sense to him. ‘What’s that got to do with — what you asked me?’
He thought she was smiling, but the light was low and he couldn’t tell. She said, ‘You’re embarrassed. So am I. It’s this ridiculous code we have to live by to be “respectable”. We can go to bed and know each other well enough to talk about death and madness, but not menstruation.’ Her hand touched his. ‘I’ve been making the list of things in her trunk for Munro. Racking my brain to make sure I got everything. I think I remember what was in her trunk, but-What wasn’t in Mary Thomason’s trunk?’ she said.
A bit gruffly, he said, ‘I suppose you’ve given me the clue.’
‘Women bleed every month. Unless they’re ignorant and nearly savage and destitute, they use something to catch the blood. Don’t be embarrassed, Denton; this is simple fact. Poor women — that’s most of the women in the world — use rags. Men make jokes about them, don’t they — “She’s got the rag on,” to explain anything odd a woman does. Even the black slaves in America used something, would be my guess, at least if they could get them or hoard them. Moss, grass — something. Poor women in London keep old clothes, old bedclothes, anything they can get their hands on; they fold the rags into a sort of pad and pin them to their underskirts, or they fashion themselves a sort of belt and pin them to that.’
‘Why are you telling me all this?’
‘Wealthy women use pads they buy at places like Harrods. While they’re shopping for the highest-quality shirts Mrs Cohan runs up in the attic, I suppose. The pads are disposable, so the well-off can pretend none of it’s happening. The poor wash the blood out of the rags and use them again and again, and the rags show the brown stains of the blood.’
‘All right, yes — I remember all that.’ He was thinking of his dreams.
‘The rags are valuable, Denton. Not for
money but for convenience, for necessity — when the bleeding starts, you must have them. Else you find blood staining through your petticoat to your skirt, and if you wear light colours, it’s hideously embarrassing.’ She struck his arm lightly with her hand. ‘What wasn’t in Mary Thomason’s trunk?’
‘Rags,’ he said weakly.
‘Or pins or any kind of belt. Not a scrap of cloth with a stain. Nor any stains in her drawers.’
‘She wasn’t, mm, at that time of the month.’
‘On the contrary, the only reason — one of the only reasons — that we didn’t find any could be that she was wearing them, or wearing some and carrying the rest. But surely she’d have had more in reserve. You want never to run out.’ She hesitated, as if what she would say next might annoy him. ‘I went back to Fitzroy Street yesterday and talked to Hannah — the maid at the place where Mary Thomason lived.’
‘The plump Mrs Durnquess’s.’
‘I asked Hannah where the female tenants washed out their rags. She knew exactly what I meant. There’s a sink for it in the basement; they dry them on a line down there.’ She met his eyes — no trace of embarrassment. ‘I asked her if Mary Thomason ever went down there. She said she couldn’t recall ever seeing her. She hadn’t thought about it, but now she thought about it and she said, “Ain’t that remarkable, ma’am.”’ She tapped his hand. ‘What did we find in her trunk?’
He’d have been a dunce not to know where she was going. ‘The depilatory, but-’
‘We at least have to ask ourselves, Denton, who doesn’t menstruate and would need a depilatory?’
‘You make it sound like a riddle for a parlour game.’ He frowned at her, looked away.
‘I want one of those cream-filled dessert things,’ she said. They were still eating in his sitting room, although Munro was long gone; a small plate of pastries sat on a tiered table nearby. ‘Anyway, it’s a possibility, isn’t it — that Mary Thomason isn’t a woman?’
‘Anything’s possible, but-I’ve heard of women masquerading as men — even as soldiers-’
‘Joan of Arc.’
‘Yes, well-But why would a man masquerade as a woman?’
‘Perhaps he prefers to be a woman. Perhaps he wants to be a woman. Or perhaps it’s simply a wonderful disguise.’
‘Even if he has sex with men — the baths, Himple — that doesn’t mean he wants to be a woman.’
‘Not that crazy, mmm? What sane man would be a woman if he had a choice?’
‘He’d have had to wear a wig. Where’s the wig?’
‘She’d have worn the wig when she left Fitzroy Street. Then got rid of it when she became a man.’
‘But-’ Atkins, who had appeared in response to a jingling bell, followed her pointing finger to a fat eclair. Denton asked for coffee and said when Atkins was gone, ‘What would make such a thing worth it?’
She shook her head. She ate, then pulled the fork between her teeth to scrape the chocolate off. ‘Living another life.’
‘Something to hide.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t see it.’
‘She wrote to you that somebody might be about to hurt her. Might that mean she was afraid she was about to be found out?’
‘Well, I’ve told you, I don’t think that letter was really for me.
It was to scare Wenzli, wasn’t it? And why would somebody hurt her?’
‘Well, if she was really a man-If Mary Thomason had a man — a man who wasn’t so, who wasn’t a puff, a man like Wenzli or Geddys — interested in her, then being found out could mean — outrage? Disgust? If they were, you know, physically involved-’
‘A man with a man? Oh, I see what you mean — the other man thinks he’s a girl — there could be a certain amount of play — like Wenzli-’
‘Kissing and so on, even well beyond that-’
‘But surely, the man would find out when he-’
‘Mmmm.’ She scraped chocolate and cream off her plate, licked the fork with a voluptuous extension of her tongue. ‘Mmmm.’ She put the fork down. ‘Perhaps that was the point Mary and Wenzli had almost reached.’
He shook his head. He watched her eat the eclair. ‘This is a long tale to have built on some missing rags.’ He accepted coffee from Atkins. ‘It would be so complicated!’
‘To the contrary, it’s simplicity itself. A double life isn’t necessarily like something in a Pavilion farce — going in and out of doors in different identities. It’s mostly a matter of keeping your lies straight — like being married and having an affair. You’d want your wits about you, is all.’
‘Not with separate identities — names, clothes, places to live-’
‘It wouldn’t have been that way. Mary was the identity; her way of life was the principal way. But sometimes he — he — was somebody else. Perhaps only occasionally.’
‘To do what?’
‘Something difficult, don’t you think?’ She smiled, but only a little. ‘Like making a middle-aged man fall in love with you?’
He shook his head again. ‘Let’s not tell Munro yet.’
‘Let’s not.’
Ten days later, Munro told him that the French expert had said that the bones were human and almost certainly male. He speculated that they belonged to a man in middle age but couldn’t be certain. However, one tibia had an old fracture.
‘We checked with Himple’s medical man. He’d broken a leg as a boy, falling off a wagon. The French are having local police ask after Himple and Crum at every place he posted letters from.’
Munro again demanded a copy of the drawings that Augustus John had made. A few days later, he sent a note to say that Mrs Durnquess had told Markson that John’s drawing was very like the young man who had come to get the trunk; the maid had agreed. Meanwhile, the CID, now accepting the probability of a crime, had found Himple’s bank and asked what arrangements he’d made for money while he travelled. He had carried a letter of credit, was the answer, and had used it in three places, for a total of more than three hundred pounds. The CID had also interviewed several of the young men who had been picked up in the raid on the Mayflower Baths. Two of them recognized the John drawing as somebody they called ‘Eddie’. He’d been at the baths off and on, but they hadn’t seen him, they thought, in a year. Several more of them recognized a photograph of Himple; he was ‘a regular’.
Munro had more copies of the drawing made and sent to France. After another week, the word came back that two people at the banks where the letter of credit had been used thought that John’s drawing was like the man who had cashed a letter of credit as Erasmus Himple, RA.
‘So he’s a forger as well as a murderer. Dear God.’ Denton was still shocked. ‘I was so sure he would turn out to be the victim!’
‘Why?’ she said.
‘Because-I’m still looking for Mary Thomason.’
‘Well, it isn’t a she, at least.’
‘No, of course not.’
The valet and the housekeeper, Mrs Evans, said that of course the John drawing wasn’t Himple; it was the young man known as Arthur Crum.
After another week, Munro said, ‘He’s skipped. Absolutely skipped. The trail’s cold — the last time he was seen was six months ago in Nice. He’s beaten us.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
By then, they were into April. Denton wanted to be out, walking in the city. Flowers were blooming; birds were arriving in flocks; some of the days were warm, almost summery. Janet Striker was waiting to move into her own house, with the Cohans to take care of her; she was living partly in his old bedroom, partly in a hotel. He was now sure that her concern for appearances was some irrational personal quirk: she had explained that it was all right for her to sleep on the floor above him so long as he couldn’t climb the stairs.
A doorway was being cut through the garden wall. He didn’t know what she made of the people who could look into the garden from the nearby houses. Perhaps she meant to wear a disguise when she used the new door.
Missing her,
wanting to be out and about, he was restless. He was gaining his weight back, but his strength was coming more slowly. One night when she was staying at her hotel and he was lying awake — the nursing-home insomnia had returned — he got out of bed and limped on his stick to the foot of the stairs. He looked up them. They seemed endless.
‘The hell with it.’ He put his left foot on the first stair, grasped the banister in his left hand and pulled the right leg up. It was all right. He went another step, then another. He had to balance on the bad leg and the stick while he moved the good leg, but he was getting used to that; his shoulders were stronger. He went up another step. His breathing was heavy. And so he went up to the landing, made the turn, and pushed and pulled his way up to his bedroom.
He limped about, lit the gas, sat in his desk chair and let his pulse and his breathing recover. There was some scent of her in the room. His desk surprised him with its neatness; she must have straightened it, had probably been working at it on something of her own.
When he had explored the room — it had been more than three months since he had seen it — he went out to the corridor and looked at the closed door to the attic. He had the notion that if he could use his rowing machine, he could build the strength of his leg faster. The rowing machine, a huge contraption of cast iron that Atkins had rightly said was never coming down once it had been got up there, was in the attic.
‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained.’
He opened the door, lit the gas at the bottom of the stairs. When he put his left foot on the first step, he thought that he was probably doing something stupid, but he didn’t change his mind. He thought, I’ll go to the first landing today and then come down. I can sleep in my bedroom and try it again tomorrow. When he got to the first landing, he was trembling, but he didn’t go back, after all. Five steps up was another landing, and then four steps to the attic. He would go to the next landing.
There was no gas to light here. On the third step, in the near darkness, he put the tip of the stick too close to the edge of the tread, and when he swung the bad leg up, the stick slipped. He went down hard on his left side, twisting as he went, wrenching his left shoulder, and then crashing down the stairs to the landing below. He hit his head on one of the steps and he lay there, dazed.
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