The Bohemian Girl

a pensioner, ‘That’ll be all.’

‘I can go?’

‘Yes, you can go.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘What?’

‘I want you to be sure.’

‘What’s that?’

‘If you aren’t sure, I’d feel better staying here until you are.’

‘If you’re having me on, I’ll make trouble!’

‘So long as you’re sure.’

The clerk stared at him. The bureaucrat and the little boy in him struggled. Finally he said in an unsure voice, ‘I’m sure, then.’

‘Good. Then I’ll go.’ Denton went out.

On his way home, he stopped to talk to Geddys. Only a woman was there. She told him Mr Geddys had gone away on a buying trip and would be back in two weeks.

At home, Atkins greeted him with a dour face and ‘You’ve a letter. From him.’

Denton groaned.

He teased the paper out of its envelope with his pocket-knife and opened it without touching anything but the edges. It said:

You have disappointed me most terribly, and just when we were approaching an understanding. I read in the press that you were in the confederacy against me with the police, I cant comprehend how this can be as we share our profound feeling for Art. Now I must ask you to return what of mine has been stolen, I mean my BOOK, which is not now in the place where I had secured it. I will not stoop to believing that you are using my work on which to model something of your own, much less purloin some of my actual words, but only the return of my MS will assure me that all is well between us and you mean no theft. DO NOT TEST MY RESPECT FOR YOU. I am heartbroken and abject that you have chosen to treat me in this way.

Yours in sorrow.

Albert Cosgrove

‘Rather got the shoe on the wrong foot, hasn’t he,’ Atkins said. He had been reading over Denton’s shoulder.

‘He’s turning.’

‘Turning what?’

‘From adoration to dislike. You see it in hero-worship. What’s constant is the lack of balance.’

‘Loony, as I’ve said a hundred times now.’

‘This’ll have to go to the police.’ He laughed, a single bark that remained humourless. ‘I asked Munro to pull the followers off me. Just in time.’ He looked at the letter again. ‘“I must ask you to return what of mine has been stolen, I mean my BOOK-” He didn’t read about that in the newspaper. The bastard’s been back in that house!’

‘I thought the coppers were watching it.’

‘One posted in the front. How difficult would it be to get into that garden from Lamb’s Conduit Street — come along our passage and through our garden, for that matter?’

‘Rupert’d have heard him.’

Denton looked at the letter again. ‘Check over the garden first thing in the morning. He’s not above leaving something poisoned for the dog, just out of spite — or he won’t be in a little while.’

CHAPTER TEN

‘You think he’s getting worse?’ Janet Striker said. They were gathering themselves together to leave their table at Kettner’s after a long meal full of talk and an increasing mutual understanding. She liked to eat, he found; her affection for the ABC shops was, it appeared, entirely economic. ‘I’ve been living on twenty-six shillings a week for the last ten years,’ she had said at one point, ‘and fed and clothed my mother on it, as well.’ Without bitterness, she had added, ‘The drink, she bought herself.’ When he had asked how her mother was, she had said, ‘She’s dying. I want to get her into a better place before she does — it’s another reason I want my money so soon. Poor old bitch.’

He was counting out money to pay the bill. ‘I knew a man in a prison camp who started acting like a guard.’ He looked up at her to see how she would take it. ‘I was the officer in charge of the guards. This fellow started pushing other prisoners into line at meal time. He wound up killing one of them with a club he’d made from a broken branch.’

‘I didn’t know you’d been at a prison in the war.’

‘It was after the war. Right after. Only for a couple of months. But long enough.’ He got up. ‘Shall we?’

The rain was coming down on the streets in a steady fall, more than drizzle but less than a downpour, umbrellas hurrying through Soho with legs scissoring under them. Denton started to say ‘I’ll put you in a cab,’ but amended it to ‘Do you want a cab?’

She said, ‘I’d like to go to your house for a bit, if I may.’ She smiled. ‘I like your house.’

‘But-’

‘What I said the other day, I know. It’s dark and it’s raining, so nobody will see me — how is that?’

‘“Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” An American said that.’

With the horse clip-clopping along, they were both silent for the first several streets. Then, as if the darkness allowed her to say certain things, she began to talk about her life in the ‘hospital’ for the criminally insane. Her husband had put her there to crush her, but none of her hatred of him showed. She simply told him about other women she’d known. The ‘mad’, the despairing. She had a point to make. ‘Lunacy isn’t always what we’re told it is. Lunacy depends on who gets to define it.’ By then, the cab had pulled up in front of his house. She said, ‘I’m not through. Have him wait.’

They ran to the front door; inside, he shook his hat and then his overcoat; she was shaking out the ugly cape-like thing she had had on over her unbecoming dress. Atkins appeared, said ‘Good evening, madam,’ as if he had known her for years, and took their things.

‘I shall want my coat shortly,’ she said. ‘Just leave it out here.’

‘Of course, madam.’ He hung the cape on a monstrosity that combined mirror, hooks and seat.

Upstairs, she refused drink. She kept her hat on. He sat in his chair; she walked up and down, slowly and silently, beating the palm of her left hand on her upturned right fist. ‘Do you know what I was talking about in the cab, Denton?’

‘You think I should be careful when I say that Cosgrove is insane.’

‘I want you to understand what it’s like to be called insane — and to be helpless. To have “normal” people look at you with that look. To have them laugh at you. Because you’re “insane”.’

She put her right hand on his left shoulder from behind. He was staring into the coals, thinking about what she’d said; unconsciously, he put his left hand up and over hers. ‘You feel sympathy for him,’ he said.

‘I feel sympathy for you.’

‘You don’t want me to be cruel.’

They were silent. He could feel the pulse of his own thumb where it rested against her hand, under it the heat of her skin. She said, ‘Why do you live in England?’

He was silent for many seconds. ‘I suppose I prefer to be an outsider.’ He turned his head a little towards her. ‘Like you.’

‘I’m not one by choice. Or I wasn’t to begin with, anyway.’ She put her left hand on his and traced the big veins with her fingers. ‘Did you really kill four men?’ she said.

‘Yes. Plus the one you saw last year.’

‘Do you think about them?’