The Frightened Man tds-1 Read online

  He had spent his years in London walking as much as twenty miles a day, seldom less than eight or ten, Baedeker’s in his pocket. He had walked from his house to Richmond on one side, to the Lea on the other; he had crossed the Thames and walked down to Greenwich and up to Kew, and he had found this mechanical pulse of renewal everywhere. London for Denton, when he pushed Dickens out of his head, was a clatter of modernizing machines surrounded by a sea of mud where new suburbs pushed relentlessly outward, chewing up whole streets, whole towns, each one succeeded by a newer that made the earlier one instantly mature.

  He was not afraid of places or people, although if he walked at night he went armed — hence the derringer in the forgotten topcoat. Now, he knew London tolerably well — well enough, at least, that he found, when he got to the Haymow, that he had stopped in it once for a drink when he was walking down to the Tower. The woman at the bar, the few other patrons, hadn’t been welcoming then — gentlemen didn’t go into public houses, weren’t welcome if they did, they had seemed to say. In fact, he’d learned a lesson from that visit to the Haymow. Gentlemen weren’t welcome, but Bohemians were; if he had worn a wider-brimmed American hat (a ‘cowboy hat’, Hench-Rose had once called it, although it in fact had a fairly narrow brim compared with some he’d seen) and no necktie, like the Bohemians at the Café Royal, he’d have been tolerated.

  The Haymow was one of the old pubs, small and simple, with a bar that ran almost the length of the far wall but no divisions into saloon bar or public bar or private rooms or any of the other embellishments of the great public houses that had bloomed over the last quarter-century. It was cream-coloured inside, or had been before a layer of smoke had been laid over the paint, then layers of what seemed to be amber shellac over that, so that the walls were shiny where the lights caught them and glazed as brown as a Dutch painting. PC Catesby had said it was low, but Denton saw nothing very low except a few working-men, hats on, smoke in a cloud around them. Munro was sitting on a faded brown banquette against the wall, far around to the right from the door.

  ‘You found it,’ he said when Denton sat down.

  ‘PC Catesby gave meticulous directions.’ Catesby, he figured, had been trying to do a good job; no need to speak ill of him.

  ‘We’re meeting somebody else.’ Munro waved a hand, and a strong-looking woman nearing middle age — the same woman, so far as Denton could tell, who had served him before — came out from behind the bar and took Denton’s order for a pint. They sat in silence until the ale appeared; then Munro leaned closer and lowered his voice. ‘Pal of mine from Metropolitan CID’s going to take us to the girl’s room. The murder scene. He hasn’t seen it yet, either, wants to have a look because the Ripper file is always open. Mind, nobody believes for a moment it’s the Ripper, but you dot every i. You’re along as a favour to me.’

  ‘My thanks.’

  ‘Could be awkward if you’re called one day to testify, I mean about Mulcahy, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. The tale we’re telling is he wants to question you about evidence you gave Willey and will ask you to walk over the scene to see if any of it reminds you of something you might have forgotten. That’s bollocks, but it’s a tale.’

  ‘Why’s he doing it?’

  ‘I told you, favour to me.’

  ‘Why are you doing it?’

  ‘Favour to myself.’ They both sipped from the big glasses. ‘A chance to think like a detective for a bit. Plus, I confess I’m curious what you’ll do. You’ve a bee in your bonnet about your Mulcahy. Interests me.’ He wiped his upper lip with a crooked forefinger. ‘You think your Mulcahy killed that tart, don’t you?’

  ‘He could have. Likelier that he heard about it and got — excited.’ Remembering the rapt male faces ringing the post-mortem. ‘You believe men are evil?’

  ‘I’d be a poor Christian if I didn’t.’ Munro drank.

  ‘Men, I mean. Not women.’

  ‘What, men worse than women?’ Munro thought about it. ‘Naw, give some women a knife, they’re evil incarnate.’

  Both were leaning on the pub table, their forearms only inches apart. Denton said, ‘Killing prostitutes just seems such a male crime.’

  ‘Well, yes. O’ course. It’s in the nature of the thing, isn’t it?’

  ‘What, killing’s an extension of the — transaction?’

  ‘Well, no, I didn’t mean that, but-’ Munro chewed his lip, made a face. ‘Not many people here tonight. Scared of us. Place has been full of coppers — made this their sort of headquarters, Willey and his lot.’ He sipped his ale and looked around at the other men, who seemed as weary and harmless as people could be. ‘Inquest’s tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Not here. Can hold an inquest in a pub, you know.’

  ‘You telling me that because I’m an American?’

  ‘Well, yeah, first time I ran into it here, I was surprised. As a Canadian.’ He raised his eyebrows, looking over Denton’s shoulders. ‘Here’s George.’ Denton turned and watched a large man stroll to the bar. He was wearing a tweed overcoat that billowed around him and perhaps increased his bigness, but under it he was a large man, for sure. Forty, going to fat, but, Denton guessed, powerful and probably fast on his feet, as some heavy men were, maybe a clever dancer. His waistcoat was well filled, his shoulders enormous; Denton thought that his arms would look soft but be as big around as fence posts. Pushing his bowler back on his head, he was chatting up the barmaid and waiting for his pint; when it came, he turned and headed right for their table, although Denton hadn’t seen him even glance their way.

  ‘Georgie,’ Munro said. As Denton half-rose, he said, ‘Detective Sergeant Guillam of the CID, Mr Denton.’

  Guillam sat. He looked at Denton over the rim of his glass. ‘So you’re the sheriff,’ he said.

  ‘I wasn’t a sheriff — I was a town marshal. I get a little tired of people talking about it.’

  ‘Yes, you would, wouldn’t you.’ Guillam had a pleasant baritone, pronunciations that for Denton added up to ‘an accent’, meaning only that it was ‘London’ or ‘Cockney’ or something other than the hieratic cooing of, say, Emma Gosden. ‘So tell me about this man you’ve been going on about.’

  Denton was irritated all over again, ascribed the irritation to the hangover, which had abated but had left behind, like trash on a beach, a general unease. There was also in Guillam’s voice a little too much of the policeman, as if Denton were a suspect, not a witness. Or merely a looker-on. ‘I’ve really nothing to add to what I told Sergeant Willey. He asked a lot of questions; the answers are all there.’ When Guillam still simply looked at him, he said, ‘My servant can bear it all out.’ He sounded defensive and pretty silly to himself.

  ‘Yeah, we’re talking to him right about now. If he’s home.’ Guillam stared straight into his eyes. ‘I got one interest, Mr Denton — that it’s nothing to do with the Ripper. I just want to cross the t’s and dot the i’s and tie it in red ribbon for the great men who run Scotland Yard. So I’d like to hear your tale.’

  Then Denton realized that he really was in some murky way suspect, if not a suspect. And then it struck him that of course Munro had been in cahoots with Guillam when he had asked Denton to meet him here. To see how he would react. Denton looked at Munro, saw that he was perhaps a touch embarrassed. ‘Is this — ’ Denton gestured around the Haymow — ‘just so you can quiz me?’

  ‘No, no, no,’ Munro said. ‘Georgie’s just being a good copper. He’s got to follow up the loose ends, see?’

  Denton glanced back at Guillam. ‘Am I suspected of something?’

  ‘Everybody’s suspected of something — that’s the copper’s way. No, you’re not suspected in this, unless it’s spinning a tale about the Ripper for your own amusement. Which would not amuse me.’ Guillam put down his empty glass. ‘Willey’s got his murderer-’ Denton saw Munro’s head come up, and his face must have shown his own surprise, because Guillam said, ‘News to you? — a nigger he picked up with blood all over him, d
runk out of his mind and unable to say where he’d been. So you’re not a suspect, see? So please don’t give me a hard time, Mr Denton. If you don’t like talking to me here, I’ll haul your arse down to the Yard and show you how we conduct an interrogation of an unwilling witness — because you say you are a witness. Now, get off your high horse, you.’

  Denton felt a contradictory deflation at the news that Willey had the murderer, or at least a suspect; all at once, Mulcahy and his visit seemed irrelevant. He made the mistake of saying so to Guillam. Guillam bared his teeth the way angry dogs do and snarled, ‘Just because you’re a smart fella, don’t try to do my thinking for me!’

  Guillam would never have talked to Hench-Rose like that, Denton thought — he’d succeeded in convincing Guillam, at least, that he wasn’t a gentleman. Oddly, the offensive tone made him like Guillam a little, and he laughed. ‘What do you want to know?’

  Guillam grunted. ‘I read your statement to Willey and I think it’s a bit peculiar that this fellow — Mulcahy? — just happened to come to your house.’

  ‘I explained that.’

  ‘Just came to your house, started to babble, he did.’

  Denton tried not to sound defensive. ‘It’s the “sheriff ” thing again. He was frightened out of his wits.’

  ‘Tell me about that.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘How was he frightened? Tell me how you knew he was frightened.’

  Denton looked to Munro but got no help. ‘Are you two going to take me to see the girl’s room or aren’t you?’ he said, annoyed again.

  Guillam sat back, eyed him. ‘Depends,’ he said. He began working a thumbnail between his front teeth, moved the nail to the right into the next crevice, then the next, then turned the nail horizontally and chewed it. ‘I’m thinking of doing you a service here. In return, I’d like some information. Then, if I’m satisfied, we’ll stroll down to the crime scene because I want to see what you make of that — if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Munro said that was a tale, taking me along to see what I’d remember.’

  ‘That’s Donald’s word, tale, not mine.’

  ‘My God — you really do suspect me of something!’

  Guillam hunched forward. ‘Mr Denton, if we really suspected you, we’d have you at the Yard. Now tell me about Mulcahy being frightened out of his wits.’

  He went through that, then through Mulcahy’s flight, which Guillam said was ‘convenient’, then through Mulcahy’s arrival and his choice of Denton for his ‘babbling’. The more Denton talked, the weaker it sounded. The more questions Guillam asked, the more Denton thought that he was being looked at as one of those loonies who rush to the police after every sensational crime.

  ‘City Police didn’t find your tale about this Mulcahy very helpful.’ Guillam gave a glimmer of a smile. ‘I did send a couple of telegrams to check out what you say he told you, nonetheless.’ He looked up at Denton, his huge face on his left fist.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Yorkshire, Paris, Berlin.’ He made a circle with his right thumb and forefinger. ‘Nothing yet.’ Guillam shifted, put both forearms in their heavy tweed sleeves on the little table. ‘You write stories, Mr Denton, fanciful stuff full of ghosts and fairies. Tempting to think your brain’s been too active, it is.’ He held up his left hand again to shush Denton before he could speak. ‘Don’t get your dander up. I know that’s insulting. But see it from my perspective — in walks this gent, feeds Willey a tale that doesn’t help anything, gent turns out to be a professional storyteller, maybe one wanting his name in the papers. Willey’s being run ragged, trying to fend off the press scum and satisfy his masters and solve a crime all at once; what he doesn’t need is a fanciful invention from somebody who then wants to see the victim’s body! Get it? You came across as a — ’ he shrugged — ‘as eccentric.’ He cocked an eyebrow. ‘And maybe a bit more so when you turn up at the post-mortem.’

  There is a stage in a hangover where the pain subsides and the nausea goes away and a curious serenity replaces them. Denton had suddenly reached that pleasant place, he found, perhaps helped by the ale. He let himself laugh again. He saw the figure he must make to men like these. ‘Mulcahy isn’t one of my inventions, Sergeant.’

  Guillam glanced at Munro, then put his hands flat on the table. ‘Let’s go and look at the crime scene.’

  ‘I passed the test?’

  ‘There’s been no test.’ Guillam was standing over him now. ‘But you didn’t pass it, either.’

  They came out of the cul-de-sac where the Haymow hid and turned left into Jewry Street, then right and almost immediately left again into a long, very narrow passage that his Baedeker’s later told him was Vine Street. The sky, darkening now towards evening, was a mere slice overhead, the buildings on each side built almost to the kerbs, with paved walks only wide enough for one of them at a time. The street, macadam now but not so long ago cobbled, was itself used as a walkway, men and women moving aside for the barrows that came rolling up as if they would roll right over them. Guillam led them down past one narrow street that went off to their left and joined a thoroughfare that must be, Denton thought, the Minories; a hundred feet beyond, a constable was standing at another opening.

  Guillam, walking in front, turned and looked at each of them. He muttered something to the constable, who pointed behind him. Denton expected again to be looking down a narrow street into the Minories, but what he saw instead was a gap between the buildings no more than a dozen feet wide, which opened into a court that was closed on the far end — Priory Close Alley. It was neither particularly clean nor particularly sordid; it was more or less quiet compared with the street; it had two skinny cats, several blown newspapers, weeds in the joints where the stone flags met the walls. All the buildings but one appeared to be commercial, and of no very successful kind.

  A religious house had once covered the area of the Minories, its stones still incorporated into some of the buildings roundabout. Those in the court had nothing medieval about them, however, but were rather of some indeterminate style of the first half of the eighteenth century. Of different widths and heights, the four buildings, two on each side, all seemed to drop straight to the pavement from their eaves without setbacks or such luxuries as front steps; two were of blackened grey stone, two of brick so dark that only the pattern of the mortar made it possible to see what they were made of. The far end of the little court was closed by a wall seven or eight feet high, with beyond it an open space and then the upper storeys of a house that must face on the Minories.

  Denton looked up and saw an even narrower slice of sky than over Jewry Street. The sun, he decided, would move more or less parallel to the court’s long axis; if it actually shone here, it would light perhaps only the top two or three storeys on his left.

  On his right were two buildings, one very narrow. The wider one stood a little advanced, as if shouldering the other aside. It had been, he thought, in one of its lives a warehouse, perhaps a combined warehouse and residence: high up under the eaves a beam thrust out from the façade, supported by a diagonal like a gallows; below it, a bricked-up rectangle suggested a former opening. Farther down were windows, several broken and pasted over with paper; farther down yet, a dead plant on a window ledge, a crockery dish on another, the window open a couple of inches. At ground level, the building had a central door reached by a single horizontal slab of blackened stone that was paler and concave in the middle from many feet. To the left of that door was another, smaller one where a window might have been expected, as if somebody had once decided to make a shop of the space behind it. This doorway was blocked by a sign on a wooden standard that said ‘No Admittance POLICE’.

  Guillam had an iron ring in his right hand with several keys hanging from it. He applied one to a new-looking padlock on the smaller door and turned back to them.

  ‘Smell it out here,’ he said. He moved the sign to his left and pushed the door open. ‘We haven’t let them clean up yet.’
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br />   Chapter Six

  ‘Judas Priest,’ Munro muttered.

  The smell burst out to meet them as if under pressure. Denton recognized blood and decay; memories of battle-fields flitted down his mind, then an image of a short man he had shotgunned who had bled seemingly everywhere.

  ‘You were at the post-mortem,’ Guillam said. ‘You know what to expect.’

  Stella Minter had died in a room only big enough to hold her bed, a rickety chair, a stand that held a chamber pot, and a curtained area no wider than her shoulders, where her few clothes hung. High in the wall opposite the bed, in that part of the house that jutted forward beyond its neighbour, was an oval window, the long axis vertical, a piece of cloth pinned over it for a curtain. Guillam now tried to pull it aside and managed to pull it down.

  ‘Touch nothing,’ Guillam said.

  ‘Anything been removed?’ Munro muttered.

  ‘Not supposed to’ve been.’ Guillam pulled several folded sheets of paper from some inner pocket and handed it over without looking. Munro opened them and Denton, coming behind him, moved closer and waited for somebody to object. Nobody did. He saw at the top of the paper in a neat hand, ‘Inventory, No. 7-A, Priory Close Alley.’ He ran his eyes down the paper — ‘1 dresses, 1 petticoat, 1 wrapper on floor, 1 nightgown on hook’, (indeed, there it was, next to the bed) ‘undergarments, on chair; 1 pr. shoes; 1 reticule containing 2s 5d, 1 handkerchief, 1 Mason’s toffee in paper …’

  Guillam was lighting the only gas lamp, in the wall above the bed, which had been fitted with a polished reflector that made the light briefly painful. When Guillam was finished, he closed the door, making a shooing gesture at somebody outside.