The Bohemian Girl

even if little progress was being made. Markson said, one knee vibrating as the heel of that foot went up and down, up and down, ‘The letters have been posted from eight different places in London, but we’ve plotted them on the map and we think it’s west. He’s gone as far afield as Earl’s Court in that direction but only east as far as Holborn Viaduct. We think he’s walking, not using the steam underground or anything like the electric trams to get far out.’

Munro spoke up. ‘Walking would be trying to be like you again, Denton.’

Markson said, ‘Taking into account what you said about him being educated, we think maybe well off, then Mayfair or Kensington or some such.’ Nobody said anything. There was no point in saying the obvious. Munro, however, muttered, as another apology, ‘We admit, it’s thin.’

‘I know you’re doing what you can’

‘There is something-’ Markson looked as if he’d startled himself by speaking. He glanced at Munro for approval. ‘Is there anything else he could have stolen? Anything at all? There might be a clue. .’ His voice drifted off.

‘Books?’ Munro said. He looked at the wall of books that framed the fireplace. ‘You said he started off asking for your books. Any chance he stole them when you didn’t answer?’

Denton shook his head. ‘I don’t keep my own stuff out here. I need the space.’

‘In your room?’

‘No.’

‘You don’t have any copies of your own books?’

‘They’re put away someplace. In a box. You think I sit around reading my own books, Munro?’

‘Well-’ Munro squirmed in the chair. ‘I daresay if I’d written a book, I’d have it out where people could see it. Might put it under glass. Hmp. Well — any chance he could have got into the box?’

Denton called Atkins (who was probably listening by the dumb waiter, anyway) and asked him to check the book boxes. While Atkins plodded back downstairs — what passed for a box room was an old pantry off the ground- floor kitchen — Munro tried to put together the sequence of Albert Cosgrove’s actions. When he had led the three of them through it all up to the attack on Mrs Striker’s rooms, he said, ‘So it began three months after you left on this trip you took. Any significance to that, do you think?’

‘You mean, he didn’t break in right away? Maybe the thing grew on him.’

‘So at the first, he really was asking for your books.’

‘All right, say he was. And?’

‘He doesn’t get a response, he’s a bit shirty. He writes again.’

‘The letters that were waiting for me here didn’t seem angry. On the contrary, they were soapy and overdone. Worshipful.’

‘Until you got home.’

‘A bit after.’

‘But he’s waiting in the house behind by then. He even more or less shows himself at the window — you think that was what he was doing, by the way, exhibiting himself?’

‘Like the old men in the park? I don’t think it was a sex thing.’ He listened to himself. ‘Or maybe it was.’

‘Well, you were the one talking about symbolism, not me. But anyway, by the time you come home, he knows you’ve been away. And as we know now, he knows it so well he breaks in here and steals a manuscript of yours and a pen — a bloody pen! But nothing else? That’s almost incredible.’

‘What would you have had him steal?’

‘Something that’s truly you. One of your Western hats. Your gun. Your-You’ve checked your guns, have you? It’d be terrible if he’s out there with a gun.’

‘The guns were with me. Except two parlour pistols, and they were locked away upstairs and were there when I got home.’

Markson jiggled his knee. ‘If I could say, sir-’ Markson’s face twitched. ‘Is it significant that he didn’t put his own address in those early letters? Heaven knows there was none on the recent ones.’

‘I didn’t say he didn’t put an address in them,’ Denton said. ‘I told you I couldn’t remember an address.’

‘Yes, sir, but suppose there hadn’t been any address.’

‘Oh.’ Munro was nodding. ‘Then he never really wanted Denton to send the books, you mean.’

‘Why write, then?’

Markson said, ‘Maybe so he could tell himself you didn’t bother to answer, sir.’

Munro looked as if he’d smelled something off. Denton started to make a face, too, then thought about what Markson had said. ‘So that he could worship me and resent me at the same time?’

‘Fanciful,’ Munro growled.

‘But it would mean, Sergeant, that he never intended — I mean, if he’s capable of “intending” anything — he never intended just to be a well-known author’s follower. He was always after something else.’

‘It’s fanciful, and it doesn’t get us any closer to finding him.’

Atkins came up from below then and announced that the boxes were where they belonged, and there was no sign they’d been opened. ‘I took Rupert and had him give it all a good sniff. He didn’t find anything, either.’

‘Rupert is that animal?’ The dog was sitting behind Atkins, wagging its massive rear because the stub of tail was planted in the carpet.

‘Rupert has the nose of a hound,’ Atkins said.

‘Rupert has a little bit of every dog that’s been down the street this ten years, from the look of him. However, we’ll take it as read that Cosgrove didn’t steal the books.’ Munro grunted. ‘Now I think of it, your own copies wouldn’t be signed anyway, would they? If he meant anything by asking for signed copies — really wanted them, I mean.’ Munro put his hands on his knees. ‘It’s so much a question of just how mad he is, isn’t it? I mean, we know what some criminals — perverts and so on — do with books. What the sex maniac does with pornography, pictures of children-A madman can pull his wire over anything.’

‘Stewart Caterwol,’ Markson said.

Denton didn’t know the name. Munro said, ‘Chap who stole women’s shoes to get off into. He was a drayman, used axle grease from his wagon to get his meat into the shoes — long, pointy toes some of them had. Kept the shoes in a trunk — forty-one pairs, every one full of axle grease and duff. Harmless otherwise. Got five years for petty theft times forty-one plus indecency plus moral turpitude. All done, so far as we know, in his own bedroom. Sometimes an Englishman’s home isn’t his castle, after all.’

The doorbell rang.

Denton went to the window and looked down. A cab was waiting at the kerb. When he turned back, he could hear Janet Striker’s voice as she came up the stairs. Atkins would already have told her that the police were there, he knew.

The effect of her coming into the room was as if some loud sound had jolted both policeman to their feet. They shot up, then stood there staring at her, Markson even with his mouth a bit open. Denton said ‘Mrs Striker,’ in a voice that seemed to have been hit almost as hard.

She was transformed.

She was wearing a dress in the nominal colours of autumn — ‘fillemot’, the pale brown of dead leaves, grey- green, dusty yellow — but an autumn that was autumnal only in its muting, the total effect lively and almost summery. The cut was of the moment, perhaps a step in advance of the moment, the skirt above her shoe-tops, the sleeves tight, the fall of the silky fabric almost clinging. Even the usually livid scar seemed to have been muted; he thought that somebody had dusted powder on it. Her hat, which matched the dress, was jaunty, pretty, with a wisp of veiling. Atkins followed behind with her coat and umbrella, both coordinated with the dress. ‘I came,’ she said, smiling at their reaction, ‘to tell Mr Denton something, but as you gentlemen of the police are here, I shall be delighted to tell you, as well. I believe I have found Albert Cosgrove.’

Munro grunted; Markson twitched; Denton ordered tea and put her in his own chair and then retired to the fireplace to look at her. She raised her bit of ecru veil and all but winked at him, then smiled again at the detectives. ‘Do sit down, gentlemen.’

‘You’ve found him, Mrs Striker?’

‘I’m not sure I’ve found him, but I think I have.’

‘Where, ma’am?’

‘In a bookseller’s. That is, he isn’t in the book shop. He left his name and address