The Bohemian Girl

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Munro and Sergeant Markson came and were solicitous and gentle, but he knew that Munro thought he was behaving badly. Munro, at least, should have been allowed to see him.

‘I’ve said I’m sorry. At first they wouldn’t let me see you, and then I didn’t want to see you. Why didn’t you insist? You’re the coppers.’

‘Well, no harm done, I suppose.’

‘I still feel like hell.’

‘Two.450s, I’m not surprised.’ Munro sat in the metal chair, Markson in a Thonet that had been dragged in from the corridor. Outside his door, sounds that Denton had become used to — the clink of glass and metal, the clack of feet, voices — were distorted and funnelled by the tile-walled corridor. Every day now, he was pushed up and down this corridor in a wheelchair, then made to try to walk on his new crutches.

Markson cleared his throat. ‘We’d like to ask you a few questions, if we might, sir.’

Munro grunted. ‘Just get on with it, Fred, he knows where we stand.’ He frowned at Denton. ‘And we know where he stands.’

Denton frowned back. He felt as if he were going to jump out of himself somehow. He didn’t sleep at night now without chemicals, and the days were like this.

‘Well, sir-’ Markson cleared his throat again. ‘We’d like to ask you a few questions about the shooting.’

‘All right.’

‘What do you remember, sir?’

‘I don’t remember actually being shot. I have a kind of picture of looking up and seeing Jarrold. He looked beside himself with joy.’

‘He had a gun, sir?’

‘Of course he did. That old Galland.’

‘You recognized it, sir?’

‘You couldn’t mistake that contraption under the barrel.’

‘Could you swear it was your gun, sir?’

‘Well, of course it was-It looked like my gun, all right?’

‘But you can’t swear-’

‘It didn’t have my name on it, if that’s what you mean.’

‘Something like that, yes, sir.’

Munro leaned forward. Like everybody else who came, he had put his hat on the bed next to Denton’s dead leg. ‘Do you remember anything that Jarrold said?’

‘He said, “I did it, I did it, Astoreth.”’

‘You’re sure of that.’

‘I am now. I wasn’t at first. He sounded like a kid who’d caught his first trout. I can’t tell you how — pleased — he looked. What’s happened to him?’

Munro shifted his bulk, glanced at Markson, said, ‘He’s in a prison for the criminally insane.’

‘There’s been a trial?’

‘Not yet. Maybe never. Prosecutor wanted to hear what you’d have to say, and then he may not go to trial. Charge of attempted murder was laid, of course, but in fact Jarrold’s been committed on the earlier business with Mrs Striker’s rooms, and violation of the terms of house arrest. Either road, he isn’t coming out again.’

Denton, sitting up on a pile of pillows, his emaciated chest partly revealed by an unbuttoned nightshirt, stared at Munro. His interest in Jarrold now was rather theoretical, not at all a desire for justice or revenge. ‘Before he shot me, you told Janet Striker he was getting better.’

‘I didn’t; his bleeding doctors did. Any doctor who pretends to know what’s going on in another man’s mind is a bleeding quack. They had him on chloral, so he breaks out and when we arrest him he’s been drinking, and now the doctors tell us the combination of chloral and alcohol’s the sure way to lunacy. Well, they’re right.’

Denton stared at him some more. Not fully aware of his own state, his own motives, Denton sensed he was coming out of the anger and melancholy of the past weeks. He knew that he wanted to show himself to Munro — the gaunt face, the apparently haunted eyes — because he knew that his body was an accusation. Finally, when he could see that Munro was embarrassed and annoyed, he said, ‘Tell me what happened to Heseltine.’

‘Oh, that poor sod.’

‘Yes, that poor sod.’

‘Wasn’t our case; Division handled it. Still, Fred followed it once he found you’d had some connection with him.’

‘How did you find that?’

‘His man. Said Heseltine had been travelling with you.’

Markson was going through a notebook, licking a finger every two or three pages to turn them. ‘Man named Jenks,’ he said when he found the page.

‘I know Jenks.’

‘He found the body. Coroner’s jury ruled suicide, that was it.’ Markson looked up. ‘He was despondent.’

‘Like hell he was.’

Both detectives jerked; Munro looked offended. Markson said, ‘Division reported the man Jenks said his employer had been despondent. Just got chucked out of the army. Confirmed by interview with the victim’s father conducted by — mmm, local constabulary in-’

‘Jenks is a drunkard.’

‘Well, still-’

‘Heseltine wasn’t despondent!’

‘Leave it, Denton. It’s history now.’

‘He wasn’t despondent! I’d just spent three days with him. He was talking about going to Jamaica to take a job. When I left him at Waterloo, he was happy.’

Munro picked up his hat and leaned his forearms on his knees. ‘Leave it.’

‘How did he kill himself?’

Munro looked at Markson. The young detective looked at his notes, clearly marking time, and then said, ‘Slashed his wrists with his razor.’

‘It’s done,’ Munro said. He stood. ‘The coroner’s jury got the evidence, Denton; there was no doubt in anybody’s mind. He got in the bath with his razor and did it. I’m sorry, especially as you have to hear it in your condition, but it’s what happened.’

Denton tried to picture Heseltine’s cutting his veins with a razor. Lying in his own blood? He said, ‘Dressed or naked?’

‘Unh — I don’t have that, sir.’

‘With the water running? A man like Heseltine doesn’t make messes. He’d have known he’d be found by Jenks, who was incompetent; he’d have done everything to avoid leaving a mess. Find out.’

Munro shook his head. ‘It’s over. Don’t tell us how to do our job.’ He fanned a fly away with his hat. ‘Your job is to get well. It hurts me to look at you. I mean it — I want you to focus on getting your old self back; forget all this business. The young man who killed himself-’ He shrugged. ‘These things happen.’

Denton held his eyes and then, feeling the pain in his back, the discomfort of the sheet under his buttocks, used both hands to shift the position of his right leg. He said, ‘Sit down, Munro.’

‘Got a job to do.’

‘Not yet. I want to talk to you.’

Munro looked at Markson as if to ask if Markson should stay, too; Denton nodded. Munro lowered his backside into the chair as if he feared sitting on something. He made a demonstration of taking out his watch and looking at it.

Denton said, ‘I don’t remember everything that happened when I was shot. More of it comes back to me, but I’m still blank where the shooting itself is concerned. Also just before that. I think I was coming to see you-’

‘You’d been at Mrs Castle’s.’