as a comic servant. After thirty-one years in the British army, Atkins was an accomplished batman, liar, thief and entertainer; he could cook, press, argue with creditors, give points on etiquette and do imitations of every officer he’d ever served. Denton was sure he did imitations of Denton, too, or at least had until Calvinist humourlessness had revealed itself to him. Atkins needed to be shaken out of his dumps, Denton thought; he needed to be seized by a new interest.
Well, maybe the outdated letter from Mary Thomason would fill the bill.
He went upstairs to the room that served him as both bedroom and office, littered now with the relics of life after the prison. He kicked aside the worn boots in which he’d walked out of Transylvania, the straw suitcase that had been all he could afford in Cluj, the canvas jacket he’d worn as a deckhand on a Danube steamer, and sat at the dusty desk.
It hurt him that there had been no letter from
He tried now to write her a note to tell her he was alive, that he was in London, hesitating at once over ‘My dearest Janet’, settling for ‘My dear Mrs Striker’, then ‘Dear Mrs Striker’, then writing a page about not receiving letters from her at the prison and then being on the run, about missing mail, all of that, then pitching it out and writing simply, ‘I’d like to see you. May I visit?’ He sent an unhappy Atkins out to find a Commissionaire in Russell Square to carry it to the telegraph office, reply prepaid.
He sat on, head on one hand, elbow on desk, staring out of the unclean window at the back of another house forty yards away. He sighed again. The happiness of the early morning couldn’t last; left behind were Janet Striker’s silence, the mystery of the woman who had left the note in the painting, the irritating knut at the Albany who had found it.
He decided to write to him: ‘I must thank you for forwarding to me the envelope you say you found behind a Wesselons. May I call on you to discuss this matter briefly?’ Mr Heseltine, he thought, would say yes, because he suspected that Mr Heseltine was the sort of pretentious ass who would have pitched the envelope into the coals if he hadn’t recognized that it was addressed to a well-known author.
The question was, why did Denton want to discuss the matter with him at all? As so often, his own motives seemed rooted in a guilt about something he hadn’t done. His gloom deepened. The only antidote he knew was work. He would go to work; he would try to recover the novel that he couldn’t bring out of Central Europe. He had written an outline of it before he had left London six months before. It was in a drawer in the desk.
He pulled the drawer open. It was empty. He was going to shout for Atkins when he found that Atkins was standing at his door. Denton said, ‘Have you been cleaning up my desk?’
‘Not likely. You know somebody wears a black bowler and has a red moustache?’
‘Did you find a Commissionaire?’
‘’Course I did.’
‘I’m missing something from my desk.’
‘I haven’t been home long enough to pinch it. You know a bowler and a red moustache or don’t you?’
Denton was going through the other drawers. ‘I hope not. Why?’
‘Looking at us from the window of the house behind.’
‘Lives there, I suppose.’
‘Housemaid two doors up says the house is empty and to let. Then, coming back from finding the Commissionaire, I see him skulking across the way. Have yourself a look.’
They both went along the corridor to the front of the house, on this floor a small bedroom he never used. Side by side, they looked down into the street. ‘Gone,’ Atkins said. ‘I knew it.’ He sniffed. ‘Suspicious.’
‘What’s suspicious about it?’
‘He had a rum look.’
‘Probably what he’d say about you.’ Denton went back to his desk.
Atkins followed. ‘As long as I’ve come this far, I might as well get your clothes.’ Denton’s blank look made him add, ‘Air them out. Six months in the clothes press. Eh?’
‘Well, hurry up, I’m working.’ He began again to search the drawers he’d already looked through.
‘Could have fooled me.’ Atkins loaded his arms with wool suits. Going out, he said, ‘That fellow was a bad actor, I’m telling you. They know you’re back, Colonel.’
‘Who?’
‘Your enemies.’
Denton put on an old shirt and hugely baggy corduroy trousers, stuffed his feet into leather slippers and went up another flight to the attic. Could he have left the outline up there? The unfinished wood smelled the same as it had six months before — dusty, dry, resinous — and his exercise contraption seemed the same, his dumb-bells, his Flobert parlour pistols, locked in their case and hidden under his massive rowing machine. The old Navy Colt that had been with him since the American Civil War, however, wasn’t there; like his novel and his Remington derringer, it hadn’t made it back from Transylvania. The outline wasn’t to be found, either. Denton hoisted a hundred-pound dumb-bell, thought he’d lost strength in the prison. He sat in the rowing machine, looked up at the skylight to make sure that nobody had tried to break in, went back downstairs. Checking his domain, like a dog pissing at corners.
Then he sat again, trying to find if he could recall, word by word, the novel that the Romanians had thought too dangerous to return.
CHAPTER TWO
The outline was nowhere in the house. Nonetheless, the novel was mostly there in his head, still his if he hurried to get it down on paper. He had seen the phenomenon before when he had lost a page or two of something and had had to do it over, then had located the original, and, comparing them, found that the second reproduced the first almost exactly. Writing was concentration; writing was thought: what came hard stayed in the brain. And pulling it back out, setting it down on paper, blotted out everything else — Janet Striker, the little Wesselons, the somebody who might be looking at them from the house behind, although that was an idea of Atkins’s he thought overblown, nonetheless offensive: he hated being spied on. Even having somebody read over his shoulder irritated him.
At two, he threw the pen down and rubbed his eyes. The left one stung. He supposed he’d need glasses soon. Distance vision was good — he could still shoot the spade out of an ace at twenty yards, as he’d proven to the sceptical officer who’d run the Romanian prison. But reading and writing made the eye hurt. The idea of eyeglasses piqued his vanity, reminded him of Janet Striker, brought back his feeling of deflation.
‘I’m going out!’ he shouted down the stairs. He’d walk, he thought, clear out his brain. At the very least, he could carry the pages he’d written up to his typewriter in Lloyd Baker Street. He wouldn’t trust anybody else to do it, anyway — the only copy, its loss not to be risked a second time. He started to pull on a different shirt and trousers, then went to the stairs and bellowed down, ‘Are we still wearing black?’ Victoria had died in January; they had left London in March, the city still in mourning.
Atkins was two flights down. He bellowed back, ‘What?’
‘Are — we — still — in — black?’
‘No — we — are — not!’ Atkins padded up to the first floor, his head appearing at the bottom of Denton’s stairs. ‘New king said three months’ mourning was enough. Wear the brown lounge suit.’
The brown suit was the only one left in the press. Atkins’s revenge for the Commissionaire, he thought: Denton disliked the suit, and Atkins knew it. Passing through his sitting room on the floor below, he automatically reached out towards a box on the mantelpiece, drew his hand back. He had been used to taking the derringer from the box and carrying it in his pocket, but the derringer hadn’t got out of the prison. Still, he flipped up the lid, as if
