The Frightened Man

Denton had his hand on the doorknob. ‘I’m afraid this is all the time I can give you, sir.’

‘My mum was dead by then, nothing to hold me. I moved on to a couple of places, and the letters they stopped. Couldn’t find me, and good riddance! I was free of him, see? And then, tonight-’ He put his face in his hands. ‘Tonight — oh, my dear God! — I’m walking on the street and-’

‘Well, sir, you know, we see people who look like people we used to know, but-’

A crash sounded from below and the house shook. Denton heard the sergeant curse. Mulcahy jumped to his feet, shouting, ‘It’s him-!’

Denton strode to the dumb waiter. ‘Sergeant — sergeant, you all right?’

‘What d’you think, bloody silver tray on my head?’ Over the words was the sound of running steps on the stairs, two at a time, going down, and then the front door crashed. Denton walked back down the room. Mulcahy’s chair was empty, the door open. Denton looked down, saw that the hall was empty, too. Mulcahy was gone.

‘Mental case,’ Denton muttered. He shouted over his shoulder, ‘I’m just stepping out, Sergeant — then I really have to dress-’

Denton trotted down the stairs and opened the door. It was two strides to the gate, which was open; beyond it, Lamb’s Conduit Street was dark. Denton looked to his right; not until he saw one of the whores who gave the street its reputation did he see another human being. She hadn’t seen anybody, she said, worse luck. He strolled back the other way. Somebody coming out of the Lamb had seen a man running up towards Holborn.

‘Damned little loony.’

The sergeant was waiting at the top of the stairs. ‘Left his hat,’ he said. He waved it. ‘Valuable object.’

‘How much did you hear?’

‘A lot, until the dumb-waiter clutch gave way and dropped the dishware on my head. Mad story, I thought.’

‘Mad, yes.’

‘You don’t believe him!’

‘I believe he was really frightened, but I think it’s all inside his own head. And maybe he really did see something as a kid — although it could be the sort of fantasy a certain type might invent to entertain himself.’ He looked at the clock. ‘Men like that pull a lot of details out of the newspapers.’

‘One more crackpot trying to climb on the tired old Ripper’s back.’

‘Why come to me?’

‘To be able to say he’d laid his mad tale on you. Good story with the girls. “How I Met the Sheriff.” You’re going to be late.’

‘Mmmm.’ Denton doubted that Mulcahy told this story to ‘the girls’. Mulcahy, he thought Krafft-Ebing would say, was one of those men who had difficulties with women. Probably impotent. He started towards the stairs at the rear. ‘Still, these cases are interesting.’

‘And you say you don’t like opera!’

‘Well, he didn’t sing.’

As he dressed, he thought about the story, the obvious inventions. The newspaper clippings, for example — Mulcahy hadn’t said anything about getting them translated, but surely he didn’t read German, French and Dutch. And not a word about the uproar that would have followed such a murder as that of — what was her name? — Elinor Grimble. Of Ilkley.

There didn’t seem to be anything that needed to be done about Mr Mulcahy, and as for his tale that the Ripper was back, that was merely stupid. Mulcahy was a sad freak, to be forgotten, at least until he returned for his valuable hat.

Denton went off to Emma Gosden’s. He carried a derringer in his coat pocket out of habit. A certain caution, never lost. The rain had stopped, leaving an occasional misting drizzle that was pleasant to walk through, the streets wet and shining, lamps reflected in long, shivering tracks down puddles.

Alice, the elderly maid, recognized him and took his damp coat, hat and stick and let him into the small drawing room, which he knew well enough to know which was the most comfortable chair. When Emma came in, he was staring into the coal fire, already thinking of her, but he stood, and she smiled but stopped well short of him and so postponed his kiss.

‘I thought I’d be ahead of you,’ he said. ‘How was the opera?’

‘Awful people with me. I don’t know why I go out so much.’ She had moved to the small fireplace, a dark red love seat behind her, clashing with her dress, also dark red but the wrong shade. She was remarkably pretty, nonetheless, the dress cut low, her arms bare.

He moved a half-step towards her, the beginning of something he never finished; he would have embraced her, kissed her, started them upstairs.

‘Not yet,’ she said, holding out a hand, palm towards him. She smiled. ‘I wanted to have a word with you first. Down here.’ She laughed. ‘Where it’s safe.’ They looked at each other. Her smile was brilliant, slightly false.

‘Well, Emma, what?’

She chuckled, surprising him. ‘This is more difficult than I thought,’ she said. The smile became more brilliant. ‘I’ve found somebody else, Denton. There!’

At first, he didn’t make sense of ‘finding’ somebody else. Then he understood: she’d found somebody she preferred to him and was giving him his walking papers. He wondered later if he had closed his eyes, because he couldn’t see her for one sightless instant, a moment of horrendous rage that deafened and blinded him. When he could see again, she was smiling at him.

‘Now, now,’ she said. ‘Take it like a man.’ Smiling.

He governed himself. ‘While you take it like a woman? A professional woman?’ He managed to force his violence down into words, words alone. She had meant that tonight would be their last time together, but that there would be tonight. That she had found somebody she preferred so much that this would be the last, but this would happen — that she would open herself to him while she had already decided on the other man, undoubtedly had already opened herself to him too.

Her face flushed; her eyes widened.

‘“Take it like a man,”’ he said, ‘what the hell does that mean — take it from you and then jump in bed with you and then leave you for your new man to-?’ He crossed the little room to her in two strides, still not able to control himself fully but getting enough control so that he wouldn’t do something terrible. ‘Goddamn you!’ he said very low. ‘How long have you been going to bed with both of us?’

‘Long enough to know which I prefer.’

He wanted to say But you’re mine, to shout You belong to me, but he knew she belonged to nobody, never had; it was what he liked about her. He was panting, his collar seeming to strangle him. ‘You whore,’ he said.

‘Get out of my house,’ she said in a voice so low it sounded like a growl.

‘Christ, woman-’ He leaned towards her and she backed away, leaning on the love seat and putting it partly between them.

‘I gave you a chance to make me admire you, Denton. You failed.’ She was still flushed but very much in charge of herself. She chuckled. ‘I gave you the chance to act like a gentleman, and you showed yourself to be the vulgar American oaf everybody thinks you are. Get out!’

He tried to stare her down, failed, turned in a rage and tore the door open and rushed out. The elderly maid was there in the dark hall, frightened, recoiling when she saw him but muttering, ‘Coat, sir, your coat-’

He rushed on, tore open the front door, thinking To hell with the coat, thinking To hell with her and everything, hating himself and her for what she had done to him and for what she had said. The drizzle was in the air again, beading up on the black shoulders of his dinner suit. He went down the stone steps in two jumps and raged up the street, leaping a puddle to run across and turn at the first corner, to put her and her house and her words behind him. He walked, then broke into a run to the end of the street, then another, heart pounding and breath coming hard. Then he stopped. Looked around, momentarily lost, and then, breathing more slowly, he began to walk.

He headed towards Regent Street without knowing it; the people he began to pass looked at him — hatless, coatless in the rain, somebody crazed or drunk. In the end, he went into the Cafe Royal because he found himself