The Frightened Man

‘Perhaps. It’s going to be difficult to tell because of the state of the tissue; a good deal of blood and secretion in there. I’ll have a look at it under a microscope. Are you in the police?’

‘No.’

‘I thought not. American? Canadian? American, yes.’ He wiped his hands on the cloth.

Denton was examining the stab wounds in the breasts. ‘You’re satisfied she’d given birth,’ he said.

‘Oh, yes.’

‘Thank you.’ Denton searched for a compliment. He hadn’t sat in on a post-mortem since he’d been a marshal and the local doctor had done an examination that lasted four minutes. ‘An elegant performance, sir.’ He had started to say ‘doctor’, but he couldn’t remember which sorts of medical men liked to be called doctor and which thought the word an insult. Parmentier half-smiled, bowing his head.

Going out, Denton came face-to-face with Detective Sergeant Willey, who scowled but turned away as if his most cynical ideas of Denton had been confirmed.

Chapter Four

Emma.

Had he really said that to her — ‘You’re mine?’ He didn’t think so, but he remembered thinking it. Some atavism: the man owns the woman. It was what asinine juveniles said on the Criterion Theatre stage to pretty ingenues — ‘You’re mine at last!’ And the ingenues agreed — ‘I’m yours!’ But that was metaphor. Wasn’t it? Yet his reaction when Emma had thrown him over had been one of — redness. Blood.

Had that been Stella Minter’s mistake, that she had left somebody who thought he owned her? He thought of the grey-green corpse on the table, Parmentier’s scalpel; the feel of the girl’s waxy, cool ankles; the watching, carefully controlled but greedy-eyed men. Yes, the savagery of the wounds might have come from that sort of passion. In the everyday world, the oldest of old stories, the lover jilted for somebody else. She was mine.

He had wanted to kill Emma; he saw that now, as if the post-mortem had opened a window for him. He hadn’t hit a woman, ever, even his wife when she was raging drunk and reviling him, although he had once shaken her when she was like that. Had he felt such shame then as he did now? What he remembered of the scenes with his wife was a deep loathing of both of them. Now, realizing his feeling towards Emma, he felt such shame as he had never known before, even in the worst of the war, when he had done some terrible things.

He tried to think about Mulcahy, but his mind kept straying to the post-mortem and the picture of the lot of them, sitting there in their overcoats, fascinated by the cutting-up of a woman. Like a show. Where had he seen those blank, rapt faces before? At a pioneer-country fair — open-mouthed farmers staring at a bored woman attempting the Dance of the Seven Veils in a booth.

Denton made his way to the British Museum. He had some hope of walking off the hangover, of course an illusion — outdoor air doesn’t change the chemistry of alcohol. The rain had stopped, and now a wind was driving clouds against a hard blue sky. Even after years here, Denton lived mentally in Dickens’s London, that place of twisting streets, poverty, gloom and idiosyncrasy; he always needed to adjust when he came out into such a day as this, when London was every bit its modern self — noisy, hard-driving, bursting at the seams and spilling out into new suburbs at the rate of thousands of houses a year. He was wearing some sort of tweed cape-cum-coat that blew around him in points and folds, its over-cape turning up over his head and half-blinding him when his back was to the wind. It had been a gift from Emma. Atkins had put it out for him that morning — an instance of Atkins’s humour?

Emma. The insistent memory mixed with thoughts of the post-mortem, his mind unable to hold any image or idea for more than a fraction of a second. Impossible that he’d lost her. Stab wounds. Exvagination. Impossible. Had a baby, did that mean anything? Emma was his.

At the Museum, he went into the Reading Room and found the London directories and began looking for Mulcahy, R. The long rows of volumes didn’t discourage him, but the lack of system did. One set was alphabetized, but it was a business directory, and unless Mulcahy, R. was a professional or a recognized businessman, he wouldn’t be in there. Denton’s memory of Mulcahy was that he wouldn’t qualify, and indeed, he wasn’t to be found. There were Mulcahys in business, but he saw none with a given name that started with R.

Kelly’s directories were more inclusive. Entirely inclusive, if their foreword was to be believed, but the fact was that they missed many, maybe most people who rented rooms, especially in the slums. In theory, Kelly’s post office directories included every male working-man in the vast metropolitan area; the frustration for Denton was that they were arranged by streets, not personal names. If you wanted to know who lived in every house on Praed Street, you could find out, but if you knew somebody’s name and didn’t know where he lived, you were lost. On an impulse, he looked for Stella Minter in the Minories, but of course he didn’t find her. Stella Minter had been a transient, a grain of sand in a shifting ocean.

One thousand, one hundred and thirty-six pages in the 1899 Kelly’s. And shelves of suburban volumes beyond. Denton sat, cold enough to have left the unfortunate coat on, turning pages, glancing at streets, as if the name Mulcahy might leap from the dense eight-point type.

It would take days. No, weeks.

And no hangover.

He sighed, put the directories back and carried his fragile head out to Museum Street. The Tavern beckoned, but he ignored it; he walked down to Holborn, then zigzagged west and south and headed again for the Metropolitan Police Annexe.

He announced himself to the porter and went up, put his head into Hench-Rose’s room and was told that Hector was ‘in a meeting of the Examinations Resolution Committee’, whatever that was, and turned instead and went along the corridor to what he hoped was Detective Sergeant Munro’s office. He got the wrong room, of course; an ascetic civil servant who seemed to be preparing for life in a Himalayan monastery — thin, bald, placid — put him right.

Munro was not delighted to see him. His expression was disapproving. ‘We’re being run ragged here just now.’

‘I’ll come back.’

‘We’re always run ragged.’ They were standing in the outer room where the three clerks were bending over red-tied files. ‘We don’t really have time for gentleman detectives.’

‘I’m not a detective, don’t pretend to be.’ He thought of Emma. ‘And I’m not a gentleman.’

Munro’s expression changed; was he amused? ‘Five minutes.’ He led the way, limping, to his inner office. ‘You here about the murder again?’ he said when they were seated.

‘I went to the post-mortem. I told you, Mulcahy, the man who came to see me, had described a murder-’

‘Yes, yes-’

‘It was very similar.’

Munro shrugged. He was tying and untying the red tape on a file. ‘Lots of murders are similar. No sign of your Mulcahy that I’ve heard of. City Police might have something — you did tell them, right? Have to ask them.’

Denton shifted his body, trying to find a position that didn’t make his muscles ache. His head was pounding. ‘I’d like to see her room. Where she was killed.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Mulcahy, Mulcahy.’

Munro fiddled with the tape, then joined his fingers and looked at Denton. ‘This the western sheriff in you coming out?’ Before Denton could answer, he said, ‘Read a bit about you — a pal downstairs keeps a scrapbook, had a newspaper piece about you.’ He was nodding. ‘Funny, you were down in Nebraska the same time I was in Alberta. Mounties.’