The Frightened Man tds-1 Read online

  The Frightened Man

  ( The Denton series - 1 )

  Kenneth Cameron

  Kenneth Cameron. The Frightened Man

  (The Denton series — 1)

  Chapter One

  The door was made of thin panels, cheap stuff he could put his fist through. She was screaming on the other side. He hated the screams. He raised his fist and saw a knife in it, and he knew where he was then, always this place, this point in this inescapable hell. He shouted at her, meaning to quiet her, but the voice wasn’t his own, something heavy, sinister, frightening: ‘Lily! Lily!’ Her name like blows on the door. He raised his fist and the knife flashed and he

  woke. The old dream. The dream more real for a few seconds than the room. He never dreamed of her any more except in this one horror, bellowing her name with a knife in his fist.

  He was slumped down in his armchair, one shoulder painful, his neck with a crick in it. Sitting up, rubbing his neck, he came completely to in the present: not the young husband of a suicide but a kind of collage, pieces of him from here and there — that town, the war, the farm — the creation a paste-up of contradictions: an American in England now, a soldier who sought peace, a farmer in a heaving city, a nobody who had become a literary lion. He shook his head the way a dog shakes off water and shouted for companionship.

  ‘Sergeant!’

  His voice disappeared into the carpets and the curtains and the padded furniture of the room, which smelled of his cigarettes, of polish, of coal, of gas, of fish that he had had for supper.

  ‘Sergeant! ’

  He heaved himself up, grumbling, strode down the room through the arch, past the alcove where he kept a spirit stove and dishes and bottles, down to the end of the room where a turn to the left led to the stairway and the upper shadows, and to the right was the door down. He opened it, put his head through. ‘Sergeant!’

  At the bottom, a door opened, a fan of green-grey gaslight widening on the floor. ‘Well, what is it?’ Then, before he could answer, ‘We’ve got a bell, you know.’

  The old argument. ‘You know I don’t like to use the bell.’ He meant that he didn’t like summoning a man with a bell, but he wasn’t arguing, only going through the motions because he was grateful for another voice.

  ‘This ain’t a democracy, General. You pay me enough to call me with a bell, just like a dog. Plus I don’t like being shouted at, do I?’

  ‘You got some biscuits down there?’

  ‘Biscuits!’ Biscuits were, the voice said, unimaginable. In fact, Atkins was chewing something as he said it. ‘I could rustle up a biscuit, I suppose.’

  ‘Bring some up, will you?’

  ‘Cheese, too — you want cheese, I suppose.’

  ‘If you have it-’

  ‘Apples? Nice apples in the shops now. Cheese and apple, very tasty.’

  ‘Anything, anything.’

  ‘Oh, yes, my eye!’I’

  Denton closed the door. He was smiling now. The sergeant’s performances always cheered him, as they were meant to. Sergeant Atkins, ex-of the Fusiliers, pretended he had missed a career in the music halls, now believed he had found it with his employer. And in fact he had; Denton had hired him for the cheeky persona. He walked back down the long, sparsely lighted room, which he no longer saw with any great interest. A year of living in it had dulled his taste for green velvet, gold fringe, dark wood, Karamans bought second-hand. The books, on the other hand — the books were another matter, his and other people’s, in ranks on either side of the bow-topped black stone fireplace, books rising to the dark cornice that loomed into the room at the top of every wall.

  He sat again in the same chair — big, deep, green, comfortable — and touched his moustache and his upper lip, an old habit. The moustache now grizzled, worn rather long, the lip thin, fingers big and hard that had held a plough and harnessed horses in cold so deep it made the trees pop like rifle shots, now softer, calluses gone; the pen may not be mightier than the plough, but it is easier on the hands. His nose was too big, a beak, a proboscis, a scimitar, a nose for Mr Punch, thin down the bone with deep-flared nostrils, dominating the face, somehow not comical at all but rather threatening. Consider this nose an eagle’s beak, it seemed to say — never mind the chin, that’s irrelevant, watch the nose and the eyes, which have all the warmth of two dry pebbles until the mouth smiles and the wrinkles form above the cheeks; then you may relax a little and know I won’t bite.

  ‘What a mess,’ the sergeant groaned, coming through the door. He hadn’t seen the remains of the supper tray yet; saying it was a mess was merely habit. Now he was halfway down the room and could see the tray; ‘A right mess,’ he said with gloomy satisfaction. He was carrying another tray in both hands, on it two kinds of biscuits, Stilton, Cheddar, something smelly that proved to be an Italian cheese he identified as pecorino, meaningless to Denton.

  ‘Join me?’ Denton said.

  ‘Not tonight, thanks. Port?’ Atkins unfolded a two-tiered biscuit table and began to lay things out.

  ‘Have some yourself, if you like.’

  ‘You finished with me, then?’

  ‘You’re in a great hurry to be gone. What’ve you got down there, a woman?’

  ‘I’m writing me memoirs, Thirty Years a Soldier-Servant. Some of the scenes of polishing boots are quite exciting. Actually, I’m having a good read through Lever again. You lonely, want my company?’

  ‘I’m going out.’

  ‘I know that! I’ve laid out your clothes, haven’t I? What time — half-ten?’

  ‘Eleven.’

  ‘Opera don’t let go easily, does it?’ Denton was meeting a woman named Emma Gosden after the opera, but he wouldn’t sit through it with her. The sergeant was nibbling a biscuit now. He said, ‘See here, General.’ A typical Atkins opening.

  ‘Now what?’

  ‘What would you say to a mechanical safety razor?’ Atkins, unlike many ex-soldiers, didn’t believe that buying a pub was the key to heaven: he saw his future as a captain of industry, preferably in domestic goods. He was attracted by ‘getting in at the start’ of some money-making business.

  ‘I’d say it was daft.’ Denton had already heard about a self-sealing chamber pot, a carpet sweeper that sprayed scent and a bicycle-powered mangle.

  ‘Winds up with a key, like a clock. Put it to your face, turn it on, does all the work.’

  ‘And then you send for the ambulance service.’

  ‘Ten pounds, I can have a third of the business. The latest thing.’

  ‘You’d do better with a tip on a horse race.’

  Atkins nibbled another biscuit and said, ‘Hmm,’ and then, ‘Faint heart never won fistfuls of money.’ He picked up a third biscuit. ‘Coming in later or shall I double-lock?’

  ‘I’ll be back, but I’m not sure exactly-’

  The outer bell rang. The sergeant threw down the biscuit. ‘What the H?’ He went to a door, almost opposite the fireplace, that led down to the street entrance. ‘Shall I answer it, or am I off duty?’

  Denton looked at the mantel clock — ormolu, ugly as sin, came with the house — saw that it was only a few minutes before ten. ‘Better see.’

  The bell rang again; Atkins groaned. ‘Oh, Chri — crikey.’ He opened the door. ‘All right, all right, I’m coming, don’t put the bell through the bleeding door-’ His voice dwindled down the stairs. Cold air blew in from the lower hall, a depressing space that existed only to give an entrance to Denton’s rooms at the side of the house, the rest of the lower storey being rented to a draper, as it had been when he had bought the place. Denton had put a carpet and a settee down there to no avail; a marine painting on the wall hadn’t helped, nor a bit of Scottish genre
picked up cheap; the space remained an excuse for the stairway and the door under it to the sergeant’s part of the house.

  Denton heard a male voice, not Atkins’s, some sort of negotiation, the slamming of the door. More voices, so whoever it was had been allowed in.

  The sergeant clumped back up the stairs. Pulling the door closed behind him, he said, ‘Rum sort calling himself Mulcahy. If I say a bowler hat and a cheap suit, will you get the picture? Wants to see you in a desperate fashion.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘If I knew, I wouldn’t have him down in the hall, would I? Just said he must see you, mentioned life and death, looked awful. I can tell him to come back tomorrow.’

  Denton glanced at the clock again, thought about half an hour of solitude, said, ‘Send him up.’

  The man who called himself Mulcahy was small, one of a million Britons — Atkins was another — from the manufacturing cities who hadn’t been fed the right things when they were children. He had a sharp face, vaguely rodent-like, narrow shoulders, a pot belly just beginning to show. Denton, standing, judged him to be about five-six, weak, forty, bad false teeth, and felt an immediate sympathy, then a kind of revulsion. When the sergeant tried to take his hat, Mulcahy held on to it as if stopping a theft; then he let go, and Atkins exchanged a look with Denton, rubbing his fingers over the greasy brim and making a face.

  ‘Uh-hum,’ Mulcahy said, clearing his throat. He was intensely nervous, his fingers moving constantly, one knee jerking inside his baggy trousers. Denton went through the courtesies, got the man seated, established that neither cheese nor biscuits nor port was welcome. ‘You wanted to see me,’ Denton said.

  ‘Yes, ah — yes — alone.’ Mulcahy’s eyes slid aside towards the sergeant. ‘Confidential.’

  Denton raised one eyebrow. Atkins picked up the empty tray and went on down the room, pausing to open the door of the dumb waiter, installed by a former owner when the rear half of the space had been a dining room, thus allowing the sergeant to hear what was said from the floor below. He went out.

  ‘Well, now,’ Denton said. ‘I have to go out soon, Mr Mulcahy.’

  ‘Yes. Well.’ Mulcahy hunched in his chair, his nervous fingers joined over his middle. The chair was too big for him, made him seem a child called in for punishment. ‘Something terrible happened. To me. I’m in a right state.’

  ‘You should go to the police.’

  ‘No!’ Red circles showed on his grey cheeks; the word heaved his body up and then let it go. ‘That’s why I came to you. I can’t-’ He looked into the shadowed corner towards the street, licked his lips, said, ‘Just can’t.’

  ‘Well-’

  ‘I know who you are, you see? I mean, everybody knows. Fact, right?’

  Not everybody, but many people, indeed knew ‘who he was’, which was to say not who he was but what he had been for barely six months, twenty-five years ago — the American marshal who had shot four men and saved a town. It was part of his myth despite himself, despite his having come to England to get away from it. Newspapers loved it, regularly trotted it out if he wrote a new book or even so much as had tea with the Surbiton Ladies Literary Society.

  ‘Well-I don’t see what I can do, but tell me what’s happened and maybe I can advise you.’

  ‘I need protection, I do.’

  ‘Tell me what happened, Mr Mulcahy.’ He made a point of looking at the clock.

  Mulcahy looked at his trembling fingers. ‘I seen-I saw the man they call — ’ he clenched his hands — ‘Jack the Ripper. And he seen me!’

  Denton’s interest sagged. The Ripper had been gone for fifteen years; people who saw him or heard him or got in touch with him in seances were loony. Denton managed a tight smile that was meant to lead to ‘Goodnight’.

  ‘And he recognized me! I know he did; I could see it in his eyes. He’s after me!’

  Ripper stories popped up like daffodils in spring. They were trotted out by the newspapers for space-fillers. Denton, aware that he was dealing with one of the (he hoped) harmlessly deranged, said gently, ‘How do you know it was the Ripper, Mr Mulcahy?’

  Mulcahy worked his mouth, studied his hands again. ‘We was — were — boys together.’ He looked up. ‘In Ilkley.’ Then, ‘There!’ he said, as if he had scored a point.

  Denton had heard of a woman who said she’d been married to the Ripper. Also one who claimed to be his love child. If Mulcahy had not so clearly been terrified, he’d have eased him out right then. He looked at the clock again, then at the little man, felt again revulsion but also a somewhat clinical interest. A psychological case study, in his own parlour. He could spare seven minutes more. ‘Tell me all about it,’ he said.

  Mulcahy needed to look at the door twice before he began; he seemed to need to know that the door, the way out, was still there. He did look shockingly bad, his face sallow in the gaslight, his cheeks grey where his beard was beginning to show. He touched his forehead, then his nose, and said in spurts and starts with many pauses, ‘We was boys together up north. He was never right, but I kind of palled about with him, I did. He was older. Nobody else would, because he was-A kid like me maybe didn’t notice what he was. I don’t mean I was with him all the time, you know, but off and on like. Couple of years. Just — somebody, you know — we’d walk out to where there was some green, you know, and he set snares, for rabbits, he said, but he never caught nothing. Birds — prop a box on a stick. Nothing ever came into the box. Anyways.

  ‘I was, maybe, fourteen. I was fourteen. He got himself a girl for walking out, he did. He made jokes about her to me but they walked out. Elinor Grimble. She was fat, not a pretty girl, glad even to have him, I suppose. He told me things about her — said he, you know, did things to her-’ Mulcahy looked up to make sure that ‘did things to her’ was understood. ‘She let him do things, if you follow.’

  Denton wondered if Mulcahy’s was some sort of sexual insanity. The kind of man who bothered women? Some form of compulsion, like exhibitionism? A number of the books on Denton’s shelves were about such men.

  ‘He said — he said I could watch if I wanted. There was a place they went to outside of town, down a railway cutting, a kind of little grove sort of, trees. In there. So I hid there and he brought her and they were in the trees and she let him, you know — he put his hands on her, you know, up top. And she didn’t like it, I could see, but he got quite excited, and when she said that was enough, stop, and so on, he got more excited and more excited and he hit her.’ He didn’t look at Denton but seemed lost in the tale — and excited by it. ‘He hit her.’

  Too late, Denton had a sick sense that he was being used. Like being forced to watch a man masturbate.

  ‘He got rougher and took some of her, you know, her upper clothing off, and she got nasty and he hit her again, and that went on, I mean him hitting her, and he took out his pocket-knife and he cut her.’ Mulcahy paused. The idea of cutting a woman seemed to astonish him. He was sweating. With his eyes closed, he said, ‘First, he did it to her. He violated her. And while he was still — you know, he was, um, inside of her, he cut her. Throat.’ His voice was hoarse.

  ‘All right, all right-’ Denton stood.

  ‘And then — it was awful, oh, God! — he went to stabbing her and cutting her and him half-naked, his thing hanging down, cutting her and cutting her-! He cut right into her female place and cut through the skin of her belly and then he reached up inside and-!’ He was bug-eyed. Shaking with what seemed like real fear now, but somehow excited. ‘It made me puke!’

  Mulcahy must be eased out; even a little man could be dangerous if he was crazed. Mulcahy was, he saw, using him to arouse himself — maybe hoping to arouse him, too. Perverse. He went to the door.

  Mulcahy didn’t seem to notice him. ‘Then he run off. Right off. Disappeared.’

  ‘So you were well rid of him.’

  ‘Not half.’ Mulcahy’s voice was a whisper. ‘I didn’t hear nothing for six years. Then-Then comes a letter from G
ermany with bits of newspaper in it — that funny-looking lettering. They was about three murders. Women. I knew it was him.’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t see how you could know that.’

  ‘Couple more years, I got a letter from France. Nothing but clippings — more women cut up, murdered. Then Holland!’ He looked up. ‘He was keeping me up to date, see?’

  Denton had his hand on the doorknob. ‘I’m afraid this is all the time I can give you, sir.’

  ‘My mum was dead by then, nothing to hold me. I moved on to a couple of places, and the letters they stopped. Couldn’t find me, and good riddance! I was free of him, see? And then, tonight-’ He put his face in his hands. ‘Tonight — oh, my dear God! — I’m walking on the street and-’

  ‘Well, sir, you know, we see people who look like people we used to know, but-’

  A crash sounded from below and the house shook. Denton heard the sergeant curse. Mulcahy jumped to his feet, shouting, ‘It’s him-!’

  Denton strode to the dumb waiter. ‘Sergeant — sergeant, you all right?’

  ‘What d’you think, bloody silver tray on my head?’ Over the words was the sound of running steps on the stairs, two at a time, going down, and then the front door crashed. Denton walked back down the room. Mulcahy’s chair was empty, the door open. Denton looked down, saw that the hall was empty, too. Mulcahy was gone.

  ‘Mental case,’ Denton muttered. He shouted over his shoulder, ‘I’m just stepping out, Sergeant — then I really have to dress-’

  Denton trotted down the stairs and opened the door. It was two strides to the gate, which was open; beyond it, Lamb’s Conduit Street was dark. Denton looked to his right; not until he saw one of the whores who gave the street its reputation did he see another human being. She hadn’t seen anybody, she said, worse luck. He strolled back the other way. Somebody coming out of the Lamb had seen a man running up towards Holborn.

  ‘Damned little loony.’

  The sergeant was waiting at the top of the stairs. ‘Left his hat,’ he said. He waved it. ‘Valuable object.’