The Frightened Man

there and it was bright and warm and he felt battered. He headed for the tables along one side where he wouldn’t know anybody, ordered brandy and glowered at anybody who looked his way. By being rude to people he knew, he managed to drink alone, his thoughts ugly; then a cadger of drinks named Crosland came by trying to sell anybody for a shilling apiece the news that Oscar Wilde had died in Paris. Then people were weeping and shouting — the Royal had been Wilde’s hang-out, his table, until his trial, a salon — and Denton was caught up in what became a wake. There were shouted arguments about who had supported Oscar and who had abandoned him; Denton, who had known Wilde only slightly but who had by then drunk too much, was doing some of the shouting. Then he was talking to a man he didn’t know about the perfidy of women, and then he was standing on a table with the notorious writer and editor Frank Harris, who was proposing a toast to the dead man’s memory, and when the response wasn’t quick enough to suit him, Denton roared, ‘On your feet, you bloody bastards! You killed him, now you’ll damned well drink to him!’

Then the room was half-empty and Denton was alone, looking down at Wilde’s old table, a heap of flowers that had accumulated on it. Peeping out from one side were the remains of a dried and pressed green carnation. Somebody’s secret past, pressed flat. Denton turned to share this insight with the world, and he stumbled and would have fallen if Oddenino, the Royal’s manager, hadn’t caught him.

‘Taxi, sir?’ Oddenino said.

‘Certainly not!’ He could make his own damned way home!

The streets were dark and silent. He was standing looking up at a row of houses he didn’t recognize when a boy came towards him. Denton saw him only as a shape until he passed under a gaslight, thought then it might be a woman or a small adult.

‘Newspaper, sir? ’Stonishin’ murder, sir. Girl cut up like the Sunday joint.’ The boy pulled a newspaper from a sack he wore over one shoulder by a piece of rope. ‘Oscar Wilde dead in Paris, sir. Bobs says boys will be home by summer. Paper?’

Denton read Grisly Murder in the Minories.

He took out a coin, fumbling and at last aware that he was drunk, and the boy ran off into the drizzle without giving him change — clearly aware that Denton was drunk, too. Denton, swaying, opened the newspaper under a street lamp. Horrors Committed with a Knife. Unspeakable Mutilation of a Young Victim.

How mad was Mulcahy now?

Chapter Two

Sergeant Atkins came on his tiptoes into the parlour-cum-all-purpose room at five in the morning, no stranger to doors that banged at an hour when his employer was supposed to be happily between the sheets with his lovey, or to gents who drank too much to wash away some trouble. Indeed, there was Denton in his armchair, snoring; there was the mostly empty decanter; there were his boots, his sodden tailcoat, his necktie. And, in one of his pockets, a box of Cafe Royal vestas.

And there was the newspaper. Grisly Murder.

Atkins picked up the coat and the tie and took them downstairs to dry in front of the coal stove. He went up again and got the decanter and carried it to the pantry, got the newspaper, took it downstairs, put his feet up on his own fender, read it. Cutting through the journalistic fustian, Atkins concluded that not a great deal was known except that a woman ‘of evil reputation’ had been murdered in the Minories — disembowelled and probably, the prose a little murky here, something cut from her body that had formerly been part of it.

He read the rest of the newspaper, concentrating on the personals and skipping over the international news (Small change to me what you do in India now I’m not there) but glancing at the Boer War stories to see if any of his old mates were catching it. The court calendar also took up a little of his time. Oscar Wilde’s death got only a grunt. At six, he went upstairs again with coffee and put the tray down beside Denton.

Denton woke. He looked like hell.

‘Coffee, sir?’

Denton, still sprawled as he had slept, looked up.

‘Water,’ he croaked.

Atkins poured water from the carboy in the alcove. Handing it to Denton, he said, ‘Big night at the Royal?’

‘Oscar Wilde was dead.’

‘Still is, according to the paper.’

‘You hear me come in?’ he said.

‘Hard not to.’ Atkins knelt to light the kindling in the grate. ‘I don’t see your coat or hat.’

‘Oh, Christ. I must have left them at the Royal. No, no — I was in Jermyn Street without them in the rain — they must be at Mrs Gosden’s.’ He drank the water and held out the glass for more. ‘Mrs Gosden gave me my walking papers. I shouldn’t tell you that. Bad form, right?’

‘You’re the boss.’

Denton laughed — a kind of strangled cough. Boss was a word he’d taught Atkins to use instead of the nicer employer or master. ‘I wasn’t the boss last night — either of her or of myself.’

‘You want me to go and get your coat and hat off her?’

‘No.’ He drank more water. ‘I wouldn’t put you through that.’

‘All one to me. Servants’ entrance, everybody polite but a bit chilly, here comes the coat and hat, off I go.’

‘No!’ Perhaps Emma would send it back. Get this out of my sight. Except it wouldn’t be in her sight; it would be in old Alice’s sight. Oh, well. Except that it was a very good coat. And it had his derringer in the pocket. ‘Send the boy,’ he said.

‘What boy?’

‘Whatever boy you send with messages.’

‘I send any body happens to be loitering about.’

‘Well, do that, then.’

Atkins made a face. ‘Any kid I can find on this street would have your coat and hat, not to mention a gold- headed walking stick, at the Jew pawnbroker’s quicker than I could say Gog and Magog. I’ll go for them myself.’

‘No!’ Denton had shouted the word; he pulled himself back. ‘Sorry. Just-’ He made a patting motion, palm down, in the air between them. ‘Leave it.’

Atkins shrugged.

Denton finished the water. ‘I’ll be going out later.’

‘To make some money, I hope. The bills ain’t been paid yet this month.’ Atkins, always nervous about money, knew that Denton was, as he put it, ‘a little close to the edge.’ ‘Better spend your time finishing a book, I say.’

‘Don’t say!’

‘If I might suggest-’

‘Don’t suggest!’ Denton lay back in the chair. ‘Bring up a couple of eggs at eight and, oh, you know — bacon. Gammon, whatever the hell you call it. Bread — plenty of bread!’

Atkins said no more but went out on tiptoe, as he had come in earlier. He had run into the savage mood before. Inside every gent, a savage. Lost his honey, is it. Bloody murder.

Two hours later, Denton still lay collapsed in his easy chair. The back pages of the newspaper lay tented next to him on the floor. Atkins was standing, a breakfast tray and the front section of the newspaper in his hands, wearing an ancient velvet robe given him in India by some long-dead officer.

‘You look like a down-at-heels maharajah,’ Denton said.

‘Happy to give you the name of my tailor. You want tea?’