The Bohemian Girl

his head and listened for Atkins, for a policeman.

Somebody was inside the house now, he was sure. The cellar door had been left open for a quick escape; it seemed to him a stupid, even childish thing to have done — if a policeman with a lantern came into the garden, it would be the first thing he saw. But the mind at work here was not normal. Childish, perhaps. Less than sane? Denton squatted there in the rain and thought about the face he’d seen at New Scotland Yard. Childish, but — clever? Not stupid, perhaps. And cautious. So if I’m childish but clever, what would I have done here? He thought that a clever child might have put something down there in the darkness to trip an intruder or to sound a warning.

Denton lay in a puddle and felt down the top step, then the second. Across the third step, about six inches up, a rope had been stretched, one end tied to a nail and the other to a cluster of used tins that, as he leaned his head down, smelled of old meat and older fish.

An alarm system. Like something from Boy’s Own.

He felt his way down and stepped over the rope and down another step, then felt ahead of himself to the crumbling wood of an old doorway. A broom had been leaned across it.

The cellar smelled of earth and cat piss and old fires. Low windows at ground level were pale yellow rectangles. He went on hands and knees across the floor, feeling his way towards where he hoped a set of stairs would go up to the door that stood on the other side of the house. He was off by about five feet but found the stairway well enough because of the light coming in a window at the top, a streetlight throwing yellow-green patterns through it. He went up.

The space above was some kind of corridor, doors opening off it, windows down one wall. Feeling ahead for more Boy’s Own alarm systems, he made his way forward towards Millman Street, through a doorway, the door open, and so from what would have been the servants’ part of the house to its public self — a large space, dark, more spaces opening beyond it — an entrance hall? To his left, a stairway up. At the top, sound.

A voice, the words unintelligible. Then another voice, different, no more understandable than the first.

Denton felt with his fingers and then put his left foot on the first stair tread. He pulled himself up, waiting for a creak, got none. He felt for the next tread.

The first voice murmured again, went on. Male, he thought. He went up another step. The other voice, incantatory, sing-song — female?

He was raising his right foot to the fourth tread, off-balance, when a loud noise of knocking racketed from the front of the house — bang-bang-bang-bang. ‘Police! Hullo? Police!’

Startled, Denton stumbled momentarily, caught his balance and leaned back against the wall. Above him, there had been a quick sound of scurrying movement, then nothing.

The knocking came again.

Denton charged up the stairs, turned at a landing and started up again and saw something hurtling down at him, big, flying, unreal, and he raised the Colt, flinching away from the thing, his thumb reaching for the familiar big hammer of the old revolver and not finding it. The pistol was too new, too little tried; he forgot that it was double- action and fired simply by pulling the trigger; his thumb fumbled over the smaller hammer, and before he had it cocked and could fire, the thing was on him, smothering him, stinking of mould and mice. He pushed it off, feeling its damp softness, small weight, cocked the revolver at last, and found himself alone on the stairs. He looked up into more darkness.

The pounding came again.

‘Go to the back!’ Denton shouted. ‘The back!’ He charged upstairs and, making the turn at the top into a corridor, felt movement, saw the darkness in motion around him, raised his left arm to shield himself and his right to fire and felt a whack on his shoulder that glanced off and struck his head. He stumbled, dropped to his right knee, points of light in his eyes like sparks. Something shoved him hard on the left side of his head, and heavy footsteps clattered down the stairs.

Denton stayed. He tried to stand and fell to a sitting position against the wall.

The front door opened and slammed shut.

‘Can you walk?’

‘It’s only my arm. I’m all right, Sergeant.’

‘Was it him?’

‘It was somebody — had a bar or a club or something-’

‘Oh, crikey.’

The shrill bleat of a police whistle came from behind them — the constable arriving with reinforcements. They were in the back garden of the house behind his, Denton seated on the ground at the top of the cellar stairs. The rain had stopped. He was thinking that he had underestimated their man, and maybe that was his own fault because he hadn’t taken somebody who’d wear a red moustache seriously. He was also thinking that he’d been an idiot.

‘Dr Bernat’s on his way.’ Dr Bernat had a surgery at the corner of Lamb’s Conduit Street and Guilford Street, only steps from Denton’s house.

‘Stop fussing over me.’

Then a constable came up behind Atkins, and Dr Bernat came the long way around and found the route into the garden from Millman Street. The policeman had a dark lantern, which Atkins held trained on Denton’s arm while the doctor examined it and the constable took ‘the victim’s statement’.

‘It is not broken, only bruised,’ Bernat said. ‘I need more light. I think a cab and the hospital — he protests, but-’

‘No hospital, absolutely not.’

‘You are hurt.’

‘I’m embarrassed! And I’ve been hurt lots worse. All I had was a knock on the arm and a knock on the head. I made my own way down through a dark house. I’m all right, doctor! I was shaken up, that’s all.’

The policeman said, ‘A bit peculiar.’

‘Which part of it?’

The policeman cleared his throat. He was older than many of them, not brilliant. ‘Them ladders, to start with.’

‘On the garden wall? Yes, well-’

Denton stood, refusing Atkins’s help. Atkins was wearing Denton’s mackintosh, which was so big on him it dragged on the ground. From their own back garden, Rupert was objecting in single, well-spaced barks to being kept away from the action. The policeman shone his dark lantern down the cellar steps. Denton told him about the voices, the attack, the front door. ‘I thought you’d come when I shouted, Constable.’

‘Question of entry, sir. You said to go to the back. I got to the back and didn’t see nothing. Thought it important to get some help.’ He had Atkins hold the lantern while he made notes. ‘About them ladders,’ he said.

‘We found them that way.’

The policeman cleared his throat and took the lantern back and walked over the grass to the rear wall. He aimed his light at the ladder and pulled it down to study the end. ‘Been sawed.’

‘Is that significant?’

‘Something you did yourself, sir?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Not your ladder?’

‘I don’t own a ladder.’

The policeman replaced the ladder and then climbed up it and stood there, looking down into Denton’s back garden. He came down. ‘Ladder on the other side’s also been sawed. Two ladders sawn from one, if you follow my meaning.’

‘I do.’

‘Deliberate.’

‘That sounds right.’

The policeman paced back and shone the light around. ‘This is a matter for a detective.’ He stood straight. ‘Get one here in the morning.’