The Frightened Man

Denton felt stupid, couldn’t puzzle it out. A Brit in the Mounties?

‘My dad emigrated from Scotland in 1847. I was born in Flodden, Quebec, tiny little place. I joined the Mounties in the second intake. Heard of the Sweet Grass Hills? Old Man River? Fort MacLeod?’ He grinned. ‘You weren’t a whiskey trader, were you?’

‘That’s one thing I never tried.’

Munro grunted. ‘Bunch of lowlifes selling flavored raw alcohol to the Indians on the Assiniboine. I put in twice my three years and came here — better job, better pay.’

‘I went on west.’

‘It was a rough place back then.’ Munro leaned away from him. ‘You really kill four men?’

He never talked about it. ‘Two,’ he said. He waited for Munro to see that it was a poor subject. Munro, however, had the look of a man who could wait him out. ‘The other two died later.’

‘Six-gun?’ Said with a grin.

‘Shotgun.’ Said with a scowl.

Munro raised his eyebrows and shook his head. ‘Always wonder how I’d have done, that kind of situation. But the Mounties were very big on not being like Americans.’

‘Violent people.’ Denton had thought about it. ‘But we had slavery.’ Slavery, as he had worked it out, made the slaver violent.

‘Maybe the killer’s an American.’ Munro said it with another smile.

‘My five minutes are up.’

Munro made a face as if to say it didn’t matter. ‘I might be able to get you into the scene of the crime and I might not. Bit difficult because it’s City Police.’

‘Plus Sergeant Willey more or less took against me.’

‘Yeah, well-The truth is, Willey’s probably so overworked he’s forgotten you. No offence. But they’ve got a big thing going on bank fraud over there; a dead prostitute isn’t going to distract them for long. Let me see what I can do through the Yard.’

‘You’ve changed your mind about me.’

Munro was playing with the red tapes again. ‘Apparently,’ he said, and he grinned once more. ‘You have the telephone? ’ Denton shook his head. ‘Leave an address where I can get a message to you.’ While Denton was extracting a card from his case with trembling fingers, Munro said, ‘I’d give my right arm to be back in the CID.’ He seemed to mean it as an explanation of why he was willing to help Denton now.

Denton’s mouth tasted like burned metal.

He walked back like a man in a walking race. Always a fast walker, he seemed demented now. His balance was off; his back and head ached; still he plunged on. He had at first made for home, but he detoured into Soho and threw himself into a Chinese noodle shop, where, surrounded by slurping Chinese labourers, he filled himself with noodles and broth and several small dumplings. He had discovered Chinese food in California, had been surprised that the cosmopolitan English looked on it as comical, possibly dangerous, meaning actually that it was lower-class and strange. (‘We must never notice things that are unpleasant,’ he had read in Dickens but not understood until he had lived in London a while.) The food made him feel suddenly better, and he was able to lurch his way up to Oxford Street and then east, turning up Museum Street again because he liked it and at last through rather awful byways to Lamb’s Conduit. Always, the darkening blue was above him and the clouds were racing over as if leaping from the rooftops on one side to those on the other; below, looking up, trying to walk, he was made dizzy.

‘Sergeant!’ he shouted as he let himself in. He wanted to lie down but was damned if he would. He would make himself work, always a panacea, even though the work was no longer physical.

Atkins appeared in his little doorway at the foot of the stairs. ‘You rang, sir?’

Denton tossed him the horrible tweed coat. ‘Get rid of that.’ He put his hat on the newel post. ‘I don’t want tea.’

‘Good, else I’d have had to send to the Lamb. Nothing in the house.’

Denton started up the stairs; his head seemed to pull him backwards.

Atkins shifted the heavy coat to bring it more into view. ‘When you say, “Get rid of it,” you mean put it away or get it out of the house?’

‘Throw it in the trash; give it to General Booth; wear it yourself.’

‘Wouldn’t be caught dead in it.’

He went up to his room. The unfinished novel made a pile of foolscap an inch high, written neatly enough but then scribbled over, crossed out, amended in trickles that fell off the end of the line and ran down the page and sometimes looped around to the other side of the sheet. He sighed and sat down to it. The truth was, as he admitted as he read over the last ten pages, the woman he’d created was a piece of cardboard. A fiction, a convenience. She was another of his attempts to capture his wife — to capture what she had done to him, to his life — in fiction. The scene he was working on had been meant as preparation for the downward spiral that would leave her dead on a frozen pasture in winter, raving and wandering in the snow. (The real Lily had taken poison.) And destroying her husband in the process.

Stella Minter, dead and eviscerated by first her murderer and then the surgeon, was, he saw, more real, even in death, than the woman in his novel. He’d tried to recreate his wife, and he hadn’t even created a corpse. He dropped the scene into the trash, then began to leaf back through the rest of the manuscript, pulling out pages, dropping them into oblivion. Not the way a writer makes money.

He heard Atkins breathing heavily as he came up the steep stairs.

‘Copper looking for you down below.’

‘I’m working.’

‘Copper wants you.’ Atkins produced a silver salver from behind his back. ‘Message.’

‘For God’s sake-’ Denton took the paper. ‘The plate wasn’t necessary, was it?’

‘Might have touched it with my dirty hands otherwise.’

It was from Munro. ‘Can you meet me at a public house called the Haymow near the Minories at six o’clock? We can have a look at the scene you were interested in. PC Catesby will tell you the way, as it is difficult. Please reply by the constable.’

‘I’ll go down.’

PC Catesby had a foolish young face and blushed easily. He drew a map on the back of Munro’s note as laboriously as if he were working out a problem in mathematics. In fact, Denton knew the streets he referred to as soon as he mentioned them, but there was no convincing the policeman. He went on pushing the thick pencil over the paper, printing names, making arrows, turning something easy into something tortuous.

‘I understand; it’s one street north and west of the Minories, right. The Haymow. Got it.’

‘Yes, sir, if you tell the driver the Minories and then direct him to-’ It was the third time he’d gone over it. Denton hadn’t told the man he planned to walk, afraid that he’d get the entire route mapped for him on the same small sheet of paper. He kept saying yes, right, thank you, and finally PC Catesby took himself off, turning back in the doorway, then at the gate, to make some further point. Then he actually came back and said to Denton, ‘The Haymow’s rather low, sir.’

‘Thank you.’

He wondered if he should have tipped PC Catesby, decided not. Giving policemen money had a bad reputation.

‘I’ve put out the dark-brown lounge suit,’ Atkins said when Denton came upstairs. ‘You want another of them headache powders?’

‘I’m all right.’

Atkins hesitated. ‘Your coat come back from Mrs Gosden’s. Also hat, gloves, stick. Also the derringer in the pocket.’ He raised his eyebrows — music-hall astonishment.

‘Somebody brought it?’

‘Commissionaire. Coat et cetera in a box. Carried the stick.’

In a box. Everything ends in a box.

‘Put the derringer in the hollow book.’