‘You’re making noise fit to raise the dead. If you’ve something to say, say it!’
Atkins lifted Denton’s empty plate to the tray with the care of somebody taking an egg from a nest. ‘My grandmother banged the pans about when she was crossed,’ he said.
‘What’s that supposed to mean — you come by noise-making honestly? Go to church!’
‘It isn’t church, it’s chapel.’
Denton looked at him over the tops of his new eyeglasses. ‘Katya went to
‘I’ve moved beyond Katya. I don’t want to hear about her.’
‘Give my regards to the saints.’
Before Atkins could do so, Denton heard a knock at the front door; a minute later, Atkins was beside him again.
‘You know anything about a Son of Abraham’s on our doorstep saying he’s come to dig up the garden?’
Thinking of his work, Denton stared at him. ‘No. Don’t bother me. Wait — yes. Mrs Striker said something about-Hell, she gave me a name.’
‘Cohan. Sounds Irish to me, but he looks about as Irish as the Levite that crossed over the road. Right, he mentioned Mrs Striker’s name.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me that?’
‘Thought I’d get right to the point. You want him to dig up the garden, or not?’
‘Yes, yes, put him to work. Have we got a spade?’
‘Probably. We had good intentions back there, once.’ Atkins put on a pious face. ‘You sure you want him working on the Lord’s Day?’
‘If he’s a Jew, that was yesterday. Go away!’
Denton worked until noon and could do no more. The penalty for having worked part of the night. Atkins, by his own choice, had Sunday off until late evening. Denton found a couple of eggs, scrambled them on the gas ring in the alcove off his sitting room: part pantry, part kitchen. A year before, somebody had waited in there to kill him. He wondered if Albert Cosgrove had been in there, too, handled the cutlery, opened the cupboard, inhaled the air.
Denton prowled his house, restless now. He tried to read and found nothing interesting. He thought he would go out, but where? Not to find Janet Striker, certainly; he didn’t know where she lived, and she wouldn’t be in her office today. Munro wouldn’t be at New Scotland Yard. He looked out of the rear window, saw a dark-haired man, foreshortened, digging up the weeds. He went at them as if they were his worst enemies. Denton went down and introduced himself.
‘All one to me. I got lots of this muck to keep me busy.’ He was overweight, shorter than Denton but broad, with shoulders and arms that filled his threadbare coat like a sausage its skin. He wore a cloth cap, filthy rat- catchers; his nose was mashed to his face, his ears battered. Small eyes glared at Denton as if the world were a perpetual challenge.
Denton said, ‘You’re a prizefighter.’
‘I was, and proud of it! Never knocked off my feet I wasn’t. I may not have won every time the bell rang, but nobody ever knocked me down. Just you ask! Ask them wot the Stepney Jew-Boy did.’ He had a definite accent.
Denton flinched. ‘Jew-Boy?’
‘Jew-Boy. When I started fightink, they’d shout “Jew-Boy” at me to insult me, they did. I thought, I’ll give you Jew-Boy, I will, so I called myself Jew-Boy and beat the livink tar out of the first six gentiles I fought. Then I was the Stepney Jew-Boy for good.’
Denton studied him. ‘What’s a prizefighter want to spade up a back garden for?’
‘Am I still a prizefighter? Do I look twenty again? Or do I look canny enough to’ve got out with my brains intact when I was thirty-five? How old you think I am?’
‘Forty.’
‘And four. How many prizefighters you think are still at it at forty-four without they’re hearink bells nobody else can hear? Judas Cripes, give me some credit for intelligence, please do. I’m forty-four and I ain’t fought in nine years and I got no job! That’s why I’m diggink up your back bloody garden!’
Denton asked what he was to pay him, and he said he and Mrs Striker had settled on three shillings a day, for which she’d paid two days in advance because he’d been ‘caught short’ when he talked to her.
‘So you’ll be back in the morning.’
‘You think I’d take money for work I wasn’t goink to do? Yas, I’ll be here in the mornink. And I don’t steal and I don’t lie and I didn’t kill Christ. Good day to youse.’
The day yawned ahead of him — a Sunday, little doing. He decided to go out, if only to walk himself into exhaustion.
The air beyond his front door was cool, clear — he thought that if he could have got up high, he could have seen all the way down the Thames to the North Sea — with a sky the clear blue of a bottle with the sun behind it. The light was glaring, but even so the day was too cool for sitting about, perfect for walking. Stopping often to look back for Albert Cosgrove, he walked, first to Holborn and Chancery Lane, then along Fleet Street and Cannon Street, turning west again along the river at Billingsgate Market, now only residual fish smell and gulls and a great many cats, and a memory of the days when the fishwives had been there and ‘Billingsgate’ was a term for creative insult. He picked his way through small, silent streets to Soho, turned along Old Compton Street and, on an impulse, having nowhere to go, found his way again to the Albany, where he lingered at the entrance before going in and walking slowly to the door of Heseltine, the man who had found Mary Thomason’s letter. If he objected to be called on on a Sunday, he could always turn him away.
He offered his card to the bottle-nosed man who opened the door.
‘Mr Heseltine isn’t well, sir.’
‘Oh — I’ll call again-’
‘It might-Let me ask him, sir. It might do him good.’
The man was Denton’s age, grave, rather like a doctor who always had bad news. When he came back, he said, ‘Mr Heseltine asks if you’d forgive him not dressing.’
‘Of course.’
‘He hasn’t been well.’
‘I understand.’
Closer to, the man gave off a mixed odour of bad teeth and sherry. He kept his sombre bedside manner, however; Denton supposed it was the main reason for employing him.
‘Mr Denton.’
Heseltine was wearing a dressing gown and slippers, as if he’d just got out of bed.
‘I’m sorry you’ve been ill.’
‘Not ill. Just out of-’ Heseltine tried to smile, shrugged.
The man came in with a tray of glasses and a decanter and a plate of mostly broken biscuits — Atkins would have fed them to the dog. There was a slight rattle of glassware as the tray was put down, something like a hiccup, perhaps a grunt. ‘Sherry, sir?’
‘I’ll take care of it, Jenks.’
The man turned slowly and made his way out. Denton realized now that Jenks was thoroughly boiled. So, apparently, did Heseltine. ‘Jenks drinks anything that doesn’t have the cork cemented into the bottle. He’s quite incorrigible. I should let him go, but I’d have to find somebody else, and I just don’t have the go.’
‘Better than no man at all?’
‘In the morning, yes. After noon, no. But I-What do I care, really? If I had the taste for it, I’d spend my days like him.’
‘I only came to tell you about Mary Thomason — the woman whose note you sent on to me. I won’t stay.’
‘Oh, do! I don’t have many visitors.’ The wry semi-smile again. ‘What about the Thomason girl?’
Denton told him what had happened, ending with the fact that the trunk had never been collected; he didn’t say that he had it and had been through it.
‘So something terrible has happened to her.’ Heseltine looked as if he might burst into tears.
‘It’s nothing to do with you. It was all over, probably, before you ever found the note.’
