The Frightened Man

‘No, I want to know what you think of Mulcahy’s story now. What he said was very like what happened to this tart.’

‘I think it’s bollocks, just like I did eight hours ago, no, ten hours ago, how time flies when you’re up early waiting on the master. Eight o’clock, you asked for eggs.’

‘Put them down and sit, you make me tired standing there. Why bollocks?’

‘It doesn’t hang together.’ Atkins hooked a straight chair over with his left foot and sat in it, the newspaper still in his hands. ‘What’ve we got here?’ He rattled the paper. ‘Some poor bint got her throat slit and other unmentionable damage inflicted, and so we’re supposed to believe it was the reincarnation of the Ripper, so as to sell more papers. Mulcahy barges in here and gives you a long tale about cutting up women and being boys together with the Ripper, so you jump to the conclusion he was telling the truth. It’s bollocks!’

‘Coincidence, that he told the story last night, and last night the woman gets murdered?’

‘Maybe he’s one of them psychics. More likely getting his jollies by telling tales.’

‘He was really frightened, though.’

‘Probably scares himself for the fun of it. Like a kiddie. Why didn’t he bring them newspaper clippings he talked about? Why didn’t he give you this boyhood chum’s name? Eh?’

‘He did give me the name of the town and the man’s first victim. I could tell somebody I know in the police.’

‘“First victim,” oh, yes! My hat! You going to some pal in the coppers because of Mulcahy? Name of God why?’

‘Maybe it’s evidence.’

Denton slouched deeper into the chair and began to peel his right boot off by pushing on the heel with the toe of the left one. Atkins said he would ruin his boots and bent down to help, and Denton swung his legs away, muttering that he could take off his own damned boots. ‘Give me that,’ he said, meaning the paper. He read as he went on ruining them, then flexing his toes when they were off. ‘“Young woman of evil reputation named Stella Minter.” Evil reputation, good God.’

‘In short, a tart.’

Denton grunted. ‘“Discovered about midnight in a horribly mutilated condition in the squalor of her bloodstained room in the Minories.” I wonder when she was killed.’ He was eating the eggs and the bread with one hand, holding the newspaper with the other.

‘Because you’re thinking that Mulcahy could of done it and then come here, right? That’s far-fetched. I’ll have some of that tea, myself. Was Mulcahy bloodstained? Had he just washed all his clothes, including that suit that looked like it was made out of old blankets? Was his hat red with gore? I think not.’

‘But his story makes a kind of sense in one way, Sergeant — it puts a man who mutilates women in London so that he and Mulcahy see each other; then Mulcahy comes to me and the murderer goes to, what’s her name? Stella Minter.’

‘Who says that Mulcahy and the murderer saw each other in London, if they saw each other? Could of been Birmingham, for that matter, what with modern trains. Why d’you suppose the Ripper never struck in Birmingham, by the bye? Pure prejudice.’

Denton dropped the newspaper to the floor. ‘We should talk to Mulcahy again.’

‘Oho, “we”. Well we’d better do something about our condition if we are going looking for a needle in a haystack. You’ve brandy sloshing about in your eyeballs like the bubbles in a mason’s level. You ever looked for a little nobody like him in London, even stone-cold sober, Captain?’

Denton grunted again. He saw the size of the undertaking. ‘Any help in that hat of his?’ He was half asleep again. The ruined breakfast plate was on the floor next to him.

‘Thought you’d never ask. Initial R — R. Mulcahy. Randolph, Robert, Reginald, Rex, Ronald, Richard, Roderick-No address, no shop name, maker’s mark almost erased by his sweat but can be read as that of the cheapest, biggest hat-maker in England. No help there.’

‘R. Mulcahy. We’ll work on it.’ Denton stood, not too steadily, and groped his way down the long room to the stairs. ‘I feel like hell.’

His bedroom, which was directly above the alcove, the dumb waiter, the breakfast table and part of his parlour, served also as his workroom. The bed, narrow to the point of monasticism, took up only the wall towards the street; then came an enormous armoire, hideous but essential in a room without a closet; then his desk, a vast structure intended for two partners working face-to-face, filled by him with the mess of one man working alone — at the moment, a half-finished novel that he was having trouble with. Regrettably, it represented his best chance for filling his bank account. Here, he spent most of his mornings, writing with a stub of pencil, drinking French coffee, staring straight ahead over a brick wall, two back-to-back privies, and the rear of a house that faced the next street. Now, seeing it in the double gloom of a hangover and Emma’s dismissal, it all looked grey — the desk, the windows, the rain, the blurred wall of the other house.

‘Grey as a ball of lint,’ he said aloud. His voice was husky. He cleared his throat. He found he didn’t like ‘grey as a ball of lint’. He cleared his throat again. ‘Grey as the bottom of a boot.’ Better. But so depressing that he felt even worse. ‘Damn her!’ he groaned. Still. He fell into the desk chair and wrote Emma an apology and then sent Atkins to find a boy to deliver it to her. Atkins, always worrying about clothes, reminded him that he was supposed to be going out to dinner that evening; Denton cursed, because Emma would be there, the reason in fact that he’d been invited in the first place. He wrote another note, this one to the hostess, pleading illness. He couldn’t face Emma. Alone again, he stared at the pile of manuscript, tried to think about it, found his mind sloping off to Mulcahy, Emma, the dead tart. He stood up, leaned his hands on the desk, stared down at its scarred surface.

Odd, that he should end up at a desk. Or perhaps he wouldn’t, as it wasn’t yet the end. ‘We all end up in a box, sooner or later,’ he muttered. Like the woman who had been mutilated and killed, or the other way around, last night. For her, the box had come much sooner than later. A dangerous profession, prostitution. Much safer to be a ‘nice’ woman like Emma Gosden. Damn her.

He kept headache powders in a drawer; the search for them was irritating and over-long. He gulped more water, the white powder drifting in it like sand, then headed up the stairs to the top floor, thinking about nice women and women who weren’t nice. Nice, not nice. What was ‘not nice’ about a sixteen-year-old who’d just come to town from a farm? Was she less ‘nice’ than Emma, who’d had at least four lovers before him, had visited a whorehouse in Paris so she could look on from a hiding place, and had had him and somebody else on the string at the same time? How contradictory, now he thought about it, that Emma was ‘nice’ at all, the quality preserved by — what? Manner? No, money. And the whores, what was not ‘nice’ except their doing openly what Emma did in private?

In the attic, he forced himself to pick up a forty-pound iron bar. Each curl seemed to push all his blood into his aching head.

‘Bad,’ he gasped aloud. He was thinking of Emma, her behaviour towards him — his towards her, for that matter — but the word would have done for all sorts of things he’d done in his life. Or so it seemed from the perspective of the hangover. Or all manner of things that men did to women. Like Stella Minter, the extreme case. He screwed his face up, wondering if that was what he had wanted for Emma in that moment of red blindness. God, no.

He finished twenty curls and put the bar down with a thump. The attic smelled of dry wood, a whiff of fir, dust, smoke from below, the fresh odour of rain. He had two Flobert pistols up there, ‘parlour pistols’ some called them because their charge was so weak you could shoot them in a parlour. Or so they said. It was Denton’s view that if you hit somebody in the eye with one of the little bullets, you might find yourself a murderer. He perhaps had too much respect for firearms. But, then, a lot of experience.

Nice women, ‘not nice’ women, the illusions of chastity and virginity. He’d never had a virgin except his wife, and what a horror that had been. They had both been nineteen, the Civil War just over. Huddled in the cold bedroom of a boarding house.

‘Cruel to her,’ he said aloud. He set up a target and walked the length of the attic and aimed. He had been over his marriage ten thousand times in his mind; it always made him wince with shame. He could have waited, he knew now, been gentle with her, helped her. But he had thought that consummation had to be immediate or she would escape him, become his sister and not his wife. At nineteen, he had known no better. So, tears, bloody