The Frightened Man

embarrassed. ‘Is this — ’ Denton gestured around the Haymow — ‘just so you can quiz me?’

‘No, no, no,’ Munro said. ‘Georgie’s just being a good copper. He’s got to follow up the loose ends, see?’

Denton glanced back at Guillam. ‘Am I suspected of something?’

‘Everybody’s suspected of something — that’s the copper’s way. No, you’re not suspected in this, unless it’s spinning a tale about the Ripper for your own amusement. Which would not amuse me.’ Guillam put down his empty glass. ‘Willey’s got his murderer-’ Denton saw Munro’s head come up, and his face must have shown his own surprise, because Guillam said, ‘News to you? — a nigger he picked up with blood all over him, drunk out of his mind and unable to say where he’d been. So you’re not a suspect, see? So please don’t give me a hard time, Mr Denton. If you don’t like talking to me here, I’ll haul your arse down to the Yard and show you how we conduct an interrogation of an unwilling witness — because you say you are a witness. Now, get off your high horse, you.’

Denton felt a contradictory deflation at the news that Willey had the murderer, or at least a suspect; all at once, Mulcahy and his visit seemed irrelevant. He made the mistake of saying so to Guillam. Guillam bared his teeth the way angry dogs do and snarled, ‘Just because you’re a smart fella, don’t try to do my thinking for me!’

Guillam would never have talked to Hench-Rose like that, Denton thought — he’d succeeded in convincing Guillam, at least, that he wasn’t a gentleman. Oddly, the offensive tone made him like Guillam a little, and he laughed. ‘What do you want to know?’

Guillam grunted. ‘I read your statement to Willey and I think it’s a bit peculiar that this fellow — Mulcahy? — just happened to come to your house.’

‘I explained that.’

‘Just came to your house, started to babble, he did.’

Denton tried not to sound defensive. ‘It’s the “sheriff ” thing again. He was frightened out of his wits.’

‘Tell me about that.’

‘What?’

‘How was he frightened? Tell me how you knew he was frightened.’

Denton looked to Munro but got no help. ‘Are you two going to take me to see the girl’s room or aren’t you?’ he said, annoyed again.

Guillam sat back, eyed him. ‘Depends,’ he said. He began working a thumbnail between his front teeth, moved the nail to the right into the next crevice, then the next, then turned the nail horizontally and chewed it. ‘I’m thinking of doing you a service here. In return, I’d like some information. Then, if I’m satisfied, we’ll stroll down to the crime scene because I want to see what you make of that — if you don’t mind.’

‘Munro said that was a tale, taking me along to see what I’d remember.’

‘That’s Donald’s word, tale, not mine.’

‘My God — you really do suspect me of something!’

Guillam hunched forward. ‘Mr Denton, if we really suspected you, we’d have you at the Yard. Now tell me about Mulcahy being frightened out of his wits.’

He went through that, then through Mulcahy’s flight, which Guillam said was ‘convenient’, then through Mulcahy’s arrival and his choice of Denton for his ‘babbling’. The more Denton talked, the weaker it sounded. The more questions Guillam asked, the more Denton thought that he was being looked at as one of those loonies who rush to the police after every sensational crime.

‘City Police didn’t find your tale about this Mulcahy very helpful.’ Guillam gave a glimmer of a smile. ‘I did send a couple of telegrams to check out what you say he told you, nonetheless.’ He looked up at Denton, his huge face on his left fist.

‘Where?’

‘Yorkshire, Paris, Berlin.’ He made a circle with his right thumb and forefinger. ‘Nothing yet.’ Guillam shifted, put both forearms in their heavy tweed sleeves on the little table. ‘You write stories, Mr Denton, fanciful stuff full of ghosts and fairies. Tempting to think your brain’s been too active, it is.’ He held up his left hand again to shush Denton before he could speak. ‘Don’t get your dander up. I know that’s insulting. But see it from my perspective — in walks this gent, feeds Willey a tale that doesn’t help anything, gent turns out to be a professional storyteller, maybe one wanting his name in the papers. Willey’s being run ragged, trying to fend off the press scum and satisfy his masters and solve a crime all at once; what he doesn’t need is a fanciful invention from somebody who then wants to see the victim’s body! Get it? You came across as a — ’ he shrugged — ‘as eccentric.’ He cocked an eyebrow. ‘And maybe a bit more so when you turn up at the post-mortem.’

There is a stage in a hangover where the pain subsides and the nausea goes away and a curious serenity replaces them. Denton had suddenly reached that pleasant place, he found, perhaps helped by the ale. He let himself laugh again. He saw the figure he must make to men like these. ‘Mulcahy isn’t one of my inventions, Sergeant.’

Guillam glanced at Munro, then put his hands flat on the table. ‘Let’s go and look at the crime scene.’

‘I passed the test?’

‘There’s been no test.’ Guillam was standing over him now. ‘But you didn’t pass it, either.’

They came out of the cul-de-sac where the Haymow hid and turned left into Jewry Street, then right and almost immediately left again into a long, very narrow passage that his Baedeker’s later told him was Vine Street. The sky, darkening now towards evening, was a mere slice overhead, the buildings on each side built almost to the kerbs, with paved walks only wide enough for one of them at a time. The street, macadam now but not so long ago cobbled, was itself used as a walkway, men and women moving aside for the barrows that came rolling up as if they would roll right over them. Guillam led them down past one narrow street that went off to their left and joined a thoroughfare that must be, Denton thought, the Minories; a hundred feet beyond, a constable was standing at another opening.

Guillam, walking in front, turned and looked at each of them. He muttered something to the constable, who pointed behind him. Denton expected again to be looking down a narrow street into the Minories, but what he saw instead was a gap between the buildings no more than a dozen feet wide, which opened into a court that was closed on the far end — Priory Close Alley. It was neither particularly clean nor particularly sordid; it was more or less quiet compared with the street; it had two skinny cats, several blown newspapers, weeds in the joints where the stone flags met the walls. All the buildings but one appeared to be commercial, and of no very successful kind.

A religious house had once covered the area of the Minories, its stones still incorporated into some of the buildings roundabout. Those in the court had nothing medieval about them, however, but were rather of some indeterminate style of the first half of the eighteenth century. Of different widths and heights, the four buildings, two on each side, all seemed to drop straight to the pavement from their eaves without setbacks or such luxuries as front steps; two were of blackened grey stone, two of brick so dark that only the pattern of the mortar made it possible to see what they were made of. The far end of the little court was closed by a wall seven or eight feet high, with beyond it an open space and then the upper storeys of a house that must face on the Minories.

Denton looked up and saw an even narrower slice of sky than over Jewry Street. The sun, he decided, would move more or less parallel to the court’s long axis; if it actually shone here, it would light perhaps only the top two or three storeys on his left.

On his right were two buildings, one very narrow. The wider one stood a little advanced, as if shouldering the other aside. It had been, he thought, in one of its lives a warehouse, perhaps a combined warehouse and residence: high up under the eaves a beam thrust out from the facade, supported by a diagonal like a gallows; below it, a bricked-up rectangle suggested a former opening. Farther down were windows, several broken and pasted over with paper; farther down yet, a dead plant on a window ledge, a crockery dish on another, the window open a couple of inches. At ground level, the building had a central door reached by a single horizontal slab of blackened stone that was paler and concave in the middle from many feet. To the left of that door was another, smaller one where a window might have been expected, as if somebody had once decided to make a shop of the space behind it. This doorway was blocked by a sign on a wooden standard that said ‘No Admittance POLICE’.

Guillam had an iron ring in his right hand with several keys hanging from it. He applied one to a new-looking padlock on the smaller door and turned back to them.

‘Smell it out here,’ he said. He moved the sign to his left and pushed the door open. ‘We haven’t let them clean up yet.’