The Bohemian Girl

the little pistol might have materialized there. It hadn’t.

He walked to Gray’s Inn Road, then up it to Ampton Street and so across to Lloyd Square, now and then stopping to look behind him, seeing nobody. The idea of being followed by a man in a bowler and a red moustache, of being known, troubled him.

His typewriter was flustered to see him, as always; they embarrassed each other somehow, as if they had some intimate past or future they didn’t dare discuss. He handed over the papers and fled to Pentonville Road where, on an impulse, he swung himself up into a Favourite omnibus — except it wasn’t an impulse, for he was still thinking of Atkins’s ‘bowler and red moustache’ and wanted again to watch to see who climbed aboard. Several bowlers boarded, none interested in him and only one with a moustache, that yellow. Atkins was seeing spooks, he decided, the product of a morbid interest in religion.

The ride invigorated him. London invigorated him, the day sunny and not quite cool — that tremendous sense of bustle that the city had, of pulsing, as if it were a live, growing thing that was always bursting a skin and emerging in a new one. He would visit a friend, he thought — an acquaintance, at least — at New Scotland Yard and report Mary Thomason’s letter, and that would be that matter out of the way. Let the police handle it. Guilt made him add that first he would stop at his publishers to go through some likely unpleasantness about the novel, which at best was going to be two months late.

He got down at London Bridge and got on a Red 21 and rode it to the Temple and in a light drizzle walked into the twistings of little streets north of Temple Bar — Izaak Walton’s London — to the somewhat ramshackle offices of Gweneth and Burse. His editor was a dry, thin man named Diapason Lang (his father an organist of some reputation), at once severely agitated to see Denton. There was no welcome back to London, no polite chit-chat about the trip.

‘I’m awfully glad you’ve come,’ he said, ‘at last. Awfully glad.’ Lang was older than Denton, apparently sexless, in love with books. ‘You’ve brought the new book?’ He sounded hopeless; he must already have seen that, unless Denton’s overcoat had a hidden kangaroo pocket, the manuscript hadn’t come with him.

‘The manuscript is in Romania.’ Denton tried to make a light story of it — Colonel Cieljescu, a novel in English as military contraband. ‘I’m putting it down again as fast as I can, Lang.’

‘Oh, dear. Oh, dear. Gwen will be beside himself.’ He looked at Denton as if appealing for help. Gwen was Wilfred Gweneth, the publisher; the Burse of the firm’s name seemed not to exist. Lang picked at his blotter. ‘Gwen’s most unhappy about the motor car.’

‘It was seized, too.’

‘Gwen’s terribly upset. He’s said quite unkind things.’ The publisher had bought the motor car in which Denton had made the trip to Transylvania; it was in the contract, part of the deal. When Denton brought it back to London, it was to have been turned over to the firm. ‘Gwen even suggested you sold it over there.’

It had occurred to Denton that Cieljescu had let them ‘escape’ so he could keep the Daimler, but he wasn’t about to say that to Lang — right now, it would sound too much like having traded it for freedom. He smiled and pointed out that the vehicle had been insured.

‘Yes — yes — but the insurer is balking. They want proof. They want to know if you reported it to the police.’

‘Colonel Cieljescu was the police.’

‘Well, it’s all very awkward. Gwen is terribly upset. He blames me.’ The original idea for the book had been Lang’s, although it had been Denton who had added, in fact demanded, the motor car. Lang inhaled so suddenly the sound vocalized. ‘He’ll be in a state about the novel’s not being done, too.’

‘I’m working as fast as I can. A month. Lang, you’ve got the book on the Transylvanian trip; it’s going to make lots of money! What’s the problem?’ He had written the travel book as a series of articles as he travelled.

Lang looked at him with sick eyes. ‘He’s talking about taking the cost of the motor car out of royalties.’

Denton needed those royalties to live. He felt anger coming but pushed it back. ‘He can’t do that, as you well know. I’ll sue.’

‘I know, I know!’ Lang’s voice was a wail. He looked at a print on his wall — Elihu Vedder’s The Nightmare, a demon looming over a sleeping woman with much exposed flesh — and said to it instead of Denton, ‘We’re having a little party. Please come. It may mollify him.’

‘I hate parties.’

‘It’s to launch the collection of ghost stories. Henry James will be there!’ Lang, who loved horror in any of its forms, had put together stories from twenty authors, not all of them from the house. Denton was one, James another. ‘It would look so well if you came.’

‘And brought the motor car with me?’

‘It isn’t a laughing matter.’

‘I’ll send Gwen a letter explaining everything. Gwen will be delighted.’

Lang groaned, sure that he wouldn’t.

‘Everything will be all right, Lang.’

Lang leaned his narrow head on one dry hand and looked at the Vedder. ‘No, it won’t,’ he said.

Denton gave it up and headed for New Scotland Yard.

‘Well, well, by the saints! How’s the Sheriff of Nottingham?’

‘I wasn’t a sheriff; I was a town marshal.’

‘You’ve lost weight.’ Detective Sergeant Munro of the CID grunted. ‘I haven’t.’

Munro had come limping towards Denton across the lobby, outpacing the porter who’d gone to him with Denton’s card. He was big, as most detectives now were big, with a massive head that seemed to grow into a huge pair of jaws as it went downwards from his hairline, becoming almost Neanderthal. He could be brusque, acid, hard, but he was as dependable as anybody Denton had ever known. And he was good at his job.

‘I was in the clink,’ Denton said with a grin.

‘So I read in the press. Come on upstairs. Cup of tea?’

‘You’ve moved.’

‘I’d moved before you left town — thanks to you, and I do mean thanks, Denton. You got me back into the CID.’

Denton muttered something. Munro had got part of the credit for finding a murderer whom Denton had killed.

‘How’s the lady?’ Munro said.

‘I haven’t seen her yet.’

‘She forgiven you for shooting a bullet past her ear?’

‘She hasn’t said.’ Janet Striker had been held as a shield when Denton had shot the man holding her, who had already slashed her face once. It was true, the bullet had had to pass just above her ear to hit his eye.

They went up a flight of stairs and turned into a corridor where any trace of marble ended and a scruffy look of police business began. At the end was a huge room filled with wooden desks — and men. Denton saw at least a dozen, many in shirtsleeves; a fug of pipe smoke hung in the room, which smelled of the smoke and nervous sweat and damp wool.

Munro waved at somebody and caused two white mugs of tea to appear; he motioned to a chair by a desk that was like all the others. ‘Sit.’

‘No guns here,’ Denton said.

‘This isn’t the Assiniboine.’ Munro was Canadian and had been in the Mounties — the second intake, early days in the Canadian West. ‘We investigate, not shoot it out.’

‘You like it?’

‘It’s heaven, compared to pushing paper like I was. This lot here do nothing but complain; I tell them that a week at the Annexe untying bundles of paper and tying them up again in a ribbon, and they’d sell their wives to get back here.’ He drank tea, looked at Denton, sat back so that his patent chair squeaked on its big springs. ‘All right, what is it? You didn’t come to see me on your first day back in London because you’re in love with me.’

‘I was in the neighbourhood.’