‘Yes.’ Heseltine was looking at his full glass of sherry, which seemed to puzzle him. ‘I saw your name in
‘I didn’t know it had been in the papers. Yes. Kind of a strange tale. Somebody seems to have been watching me.’
‘Why?’
‘I wish I knew. Or, I think I know, but I wish I understood.’ He told him in a few sentences about Albert Cosgrove, the letters, the man with the red moustache.
‘And he was in that house, writing some sort of thing that used your words?’
‘One of my paragraphs, anyway. “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” But I don’t feel flattered.’
‘Soiled, rather, I should think. And he wanted all your books.’
‘Signed copies.’
‘Does an author sign many copies?’
‘To friends, sometimes. I’m not much for sending them to people to impress them.’
‘They’d be rather rare then, wouldn’t they? Maybe he’s tried to find them at the rare-book shops. You might try there to see.’
Denton grinned and got up. ‘I’ve promised the police I won’t go poking my nose into their business any more.’ He held out his hand. ‘I don’t think “Good luck” is what I should say, but I hope things work out.’
‘Oh, they’ll work out, I’m sure!’ Heseltine’s laugh suggested a state near the edge.
Denton got his coat and hat and said he could let himself out. He said from the door, ‘You’ve got a lawyer and all that?’
‘Counsel? Oh, yes. They provide that. Plus my father’s hired somebody to advise the military man.’ He smiled. ‘It will be done with full legal pomp.’
‘It may not be as bad as you think.’
‘I think they mean to parade me in front of the regiment with my buttons torn off. Did they do that in the American army?’
‘War makes people bloodthirsty. You’d think it would do the opposite.’
‘Only to those of us who are “sensitive, snivelling women”. My CO’s words.’
Denton stood in the cold sunshine at the entrance to Albany Court. He knew the machinery of military law, its grinding-up of anybody who seemed weak. War likes blockheads, he thought — those too stubborn to turn aside. It dislikes nuance, hesitation, compassion.
Insofar as he was capable of feeling pity, he felt it for Heseltine. He also felt anger and the decisive man’s contempt for the half-hearted. The military, as he had seen too well, could always find a desk for incompetence, but it drove weakness from the room: it feared that weakness was catching. Heseltine, he thought, was both incompetent and weak. The system was going to grind him into cat’s meat.
There was a light under Atkins’s downstairs door when Denton let himself in that evening. The soldier- servant would be reading the newspaper, he supposed, or possibly his Bible if his enthusiasm still ran to it. The truth was, he had almost no idea of Atkins’s private life, his sex life least of all. Atkins treated a nearby pub as a club, had what seemed a considerable popularity among the nearby housemaids. The social system, however, was rigged against them, Denton knew: occasions were few, privacy almost impossible, the women’s fear of losing a place extreme. Atkins, he guessed, did what soldiers — Denton included — did: found a whorehouse, perhaps the cheap one near Pentonville Road.
Settling in his chair, Denton mused on the difference between Atkins and Heseltine. How easily Atkins would have dealt with whatever mistake Heseltine had made — called in favours from the sergeants and the sergeant major, half-blackmailed his officer (about whom he’d always have known juicy bits), got the company orderly to mislay whatever paperwork implicated him. Heseltine, on the other hand, probably hadn’t so much as objected.
Denton read one of his psychological books about obsession and impersonation. None of it seemed to apply to Albert Cosgrove. About ten, Atkins put his head in and asked if he wanted a carob drink — an affectation he’d picked up in India.
‘I’m having a whisky.’
‘Oh well, carob isn’t in it, then.’ He started away.
‘How was chapel?’
‘Rum — absolutely rum. Saddest place I ever was. People with grey faces and no smiles singing about hope and heaven in the hereafter. I think I’ll concentrate on my secular interests for a bit.’
‘How did the pugilist do in the garden?’
‘Demon worker. Strong as an ox. Did you know he’s descended from Moses’s brother? Says he is, at any rate — you can never tell if people are pulling the wool. Brings the Book of Exodus alive, I must say.’
‘He calls himself the Stepney Jew-Boy.’
‘Told me that — in a voice that made me think I’d better not use the term meself.’
‘Wise. Is his first name Aaron, then?’
‘Hyam, last name Cohan. Peculiar names they have.’
‘Did you ask him what he thought of the name Atkins?’ Denton turned around in the chair to look down the room. ‘Can you take something to be photographed tomorrow? There’s that place on Oxford Street-’
‘Barraud’s.’
‘That’s the one.’ He rummaged in Mary Thomason’s trunk and took out the drawing of the female head with the little sketches in the corners. ‘I want a good copy of the head — size of a sheet of writing paper or thereabouts is all right — and then photos of the little drawings in the corners. Oversized, if they can do them. And one full-size of the whole thing.’
Atkins had come down the room and was leaning over him. ‘I thought we agreed she’s dead.’
‘“We” speculated she was
‘You don’t even know it’s her.’
‘That’s what I’ll find out.’
‘Why?’
Denton looked at him, amused and annoyed. ‘Because like you I’m nosy.’
‘Oh, well — if you’re going to take that line-’ Atkins picked up the drawing. ‘One face-only, one each the little squiggles in the corners, one the lot.’
‘Fastest service. The drawing has to be back by noon in case Mrs Striker comes for the trunk.’ Atkins looked blank. ‘She’s going to take it back where she got it.’
‘I’d pitch it in the Grand Union canal.’ Atkins moved off, grumbling to himself. Rupert, his stump of tail going like a metronome set on Presto, followed.
Denton wanted to take a day away from all of it — the novel, Albert Cosgrove, Mary Thomason, even Janet Striker — and he had a fleeting notion of going to Hammersmith and rowing on the river, then a cut off the joint or something even rougher at the Dove. He didn’t do it, of course, but pushed himself to his desk before eight the next day and made himself write. His brain didn’t want to work — it, too, wanted to be on the river, being washed clean — but he bullied it and began to put words down on the paper as if he were trying to gouge them into it. He wasn’t well into it until ten, and then things started to flow, and he heard the bell pulled by the front door. He muttered a curse, got up and closed his own door, and minutes later was interrupted by a knock.
‘No!’
Another knock.
Denton wrenched the door open. ‘What now?’
‘Policeman below name of Markson. Wants to talk to you.’
‘Oh-! Damn him and damn Albert Cosgrove!’
He heard Atkins mutter, ‘For all the good it does,’ and he made himself more or less presentable and went down. Markson, whom he had last seen after the scuffle in the house behind, was standing by the sitting-room door, a bowler in one hand and a black box tucked under the same arm, looking straight down at Rupert, who had his chin planted in the detective’s crotch. Denton took that in, but what he was focused on was Mary Thomason’s trunk, which was about three feet from Markson’s left leg.
