The Frightened Man

earlier, now found declasse by Atkins for evening wear but just right for Denton’s Bohemian mood. ‘They also serve who only stand and answer coppers’ questions about their employer, leaving out the difficult bits like where you was going at eleven o’clock that night, the which I kept to myself.’

‘And grateful I am to you for it. But I don’t want to talk about that; I want to talk about the girl’s death.’ He sat on the bed and began to pull on a shoe. ‘I’ll tell you how I see it.’ He looked up to see if Atkins was going to pout. ‘Do you want to know how I see it?’

‘Of course I do; it’ll be better than Charlie O’Malley.’ Charles Lever’s Charles O’Malley, the Irish Dragoon was Atkins’s favourite book, said by him to have been read twenty times. Apparently hearing his own tone, Atkins became apologetic. ‘No, truly, Colonel, I don’t have your gift for making a story out of a bunch of facts. Tell me how you see it.’

Denton paused with the other shoe in his hands. He moved the shoe up and down as if he were weighing it. ‘All right-’ He looked at nothing, the scene before his eyes like a play. ‘Stella Minter opens the door. Maybe it’s somebody she knows, although that’s just a possibility. Anyway, he comes in — maybe pushes his way in, maybe doesn’t. He hits her — twice, I don’t know why. He undresses. Or maybe he doesn’t. She either takes off her wrapper or he pulls it off her — interesting to know if there’re any rips in it. I suppose the police won’t tell me things like that. She lies down or he pushes her down. He has the clasp knife open in his hand but he’s hiding it. He enters her.

‘Mulcahy is watching through the peephole. I think that this is possible only if he has an arrangement with Stella Minter — he’s put up the reverse-painted picture with the scraped-out place, also the reflector on the gas lamp. So he’s watching. He doesn’t see the knife until it’s actually in her throat and the blood spurts. The killer stands up and starts to stab the woman in the bosom. Maybe she tries to roll out of the way, or maybe he moves her; anyway, blood actually spurts as high as the picture, so now Mulcahy sees it all through red.

‘Mulcahy throws up. Maybe he makes noise doing it — people do, a coughing, strangling noise — or maybe he screams. And he opens the closet door and runs for his life.

‘The killer hears the sound that Mulcahy made. He looks up, and he sees the light from the open closet door shining through the hole in the wall and the glass of the picture. He knows somebody has seen him.

‘He panics. Or he doesn’t panic. This is a clever man and a fast thinker, so maybe he doesn’t panic. He wipes the blood off his naked body with the wrapper and drops it into the blood on the floor and puts his clothes back on.’ Denton was seeing it as if it were a scene he was writing. ‘He’s still smeared with blood under his clothes, but there isn’t enough of it to soak through. In the darkness outdoors, he’ll be all right.

‘He goes out. Now, he’s almost certainly already mutilated her abdomen and cut out her female parts, because he’s not going to go out and come back and do that — or is he? Is he that clever? That cold-blooded? Whenever he did it, he may have done it out of — what is it? rage? — or maybe that’s where his cleverness comes in; maybe he’s planned it that way to make it look like rage. Or insanity. Or maybe he thinks of it after he’s dressed and has gone out, and he goes back in to do it. But, by the way, if he’s planned all that out, then he’s planned to kill her, and then I think he knew her and there’s a personal reason for killing her — he’s a rejected lover, maybe. Or, if it’s just something he did, then he’s a maniac. But a damned clever one.

‘So he goes out, and he goes in the main door of the house, and he sees the closet door at once — open. Think of it, Sergeant — he was in that house, maybe somebody in the kitchen or the WC, and nobody saw him. He’s clever and he’s brave, or audacious, anyway. So he steps into the closet and he sees the hole and the lath, and this is where his cleverness comes in — he pushes the lath back into place, because he doesn’t want the police to find it. He doesn’t want them to have any clues to Mulcahy’s existence, at least not before he’s found Mulcahy first.

‘Or that’s the way I see it, because I think Mulcahy was so terrified that he wouldn’t have stopped to push the piece of lath down. Nor to lock the closet door, by the way — the reason we found it unlocked. And the killer didn’t lock it because he didn’t have a key — it was in Mulcahy’s pocket.

‘So the killer’s mind is racing. He knows he has to get out at once, but he knows he has to find whoever was in the closet. It’s too late to try to follow him. What does he do?’

He looked up at Atkins. The sergeant let himself be looked at, shrugged, stood there. ‘Runs like H, I suppose.’

‘Well, yes. But suppose he finds something that Mulcahy has left in the closet in his terror — and that has his name on it.’

He was still looking at Atkins, who said, ‘Well, it ain’t his hat, because we had that, at least until the coppers took it away for evidence this afternoon. His coat? Unlikely to have his address in it, any more than his hat. All right, I’ll bite — what did he take away that had Mulcahy’s name on it?’

Denton shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Maybe nothing.’ He saw Atkins’s frown. ‘I think that Mulcahy’s a voyeur. He saw the crime. He was there, Sergeant — that’s why he told us all those lies. He didn’t want to confess what he was, but he wanted help.’

‘No reason to want help unless he looked back and saw the murderer, covered with blood and gore, running at him with an axe, is there?’ Atkins was being distinctly sarcastic. ‘What I mean is — if he was so scared he come to you, he had a reason for thinking the murderer was on to him. Right?’

Denton was fastening his cuffs. He made an equivocal sound, like a small machine starting up.

‘If you ask me, General, he’s a damned lucky voyeur if he isn’t dead by now. The man who butchered the Minter bitch wouldn’t rest until he’d got Mulcahy, too, if he knew where to find him.’

Denton stood still to have his coat put on. ‘That’s what’s got me worried. And there isn’t a damned thing I can do about it. Except — I put Mrs Johnson on getting some women to search the directories for him.’ He saw Atkins frown — more money going out — but he ignored him and pulled his shirt cuffs down inside the coat sleeves. ‘You going out?’

‘It’s one of my nights, isn’t it?’ Atkins had two nights a week off, part of the generous deal he had made for himself with Denton. There was much to be said, from his point of view, in serving a man who felt guilty about being served. ‘Yes, I’m going out!’

Denton sighed. ‘Enjoy yourself.’ It was more than he expected, in his present mood, to do himself.

Chapter Seven

He walked again, enjoying the night but chewing moodily on the problem of Mulcahy. The streets were quieter, the city now a background roar, the hard sounds of digging and drilling ended for the day. He made his way to Glasshouse Street, looked in the bar of the Cafe Royal, then went around to the Piccadilly entrance and into the Domino Room. Unlike his visit of the night before, it was still early and the place was half empty.

There was an easy camaraderie to the Domino Room that belied its showy decor — high ceilings, mirrored walls, pillars like great trees in a fanciful forest, an overall colour scheme of peacock blue and gold. Bookies, artists, journalists, tarts, models, the would-bes and the has-beens, all mixed here with people from their own worlds and from that genteel one in which nobody worked but everybody was well off. Generosity, in the form of the casual invitation or the standing of drinks with somebody’s last shilling, was the rule. Denton had learned to love the place. He loved to keep his hat on, to lounge against a banquette. You could do that in the Domino Room, and a good deal more — like last night.

Denton looked around and saw Frank Harris in his usual place; he moved to him and stood until the man looked up with hangover-reddened eyes. Harris groaned.

Denton collapsed beside him, ordered a milky coffee — a house speciality — and choucroute, part of the Royal’s French past. When he said, by way of making conversation, how much he liked the Cafe, Harris growled, ‘This place is the boue in nostalgie de la boue. It appeals to the worst in all of us, and we all respond with a joy bordering on indecency.’

‘Like last night.’

Harris groaned again. ‘Did you drink as much as I did?’

‘We stood on a table and bullied people into drinking to Wilde.’

Harris put a hand on his forehead. ‘There’s a stage after you’ve been drunk where you think you’ll kill yourself, and then there’s a stage of absolute euphoria. I think that I’d have been wiser to stop at euphoria and not drunk