The Frightened Man

‘Maybe we’ve been working on a wrong assumption. Maybe her name really was Stella Minter.’

Atkins got up slowly. He fetched matches from the mantel, bent over the grate, in which Maude had laid a fire that morning, then straightened. ‘Bloody hell,’ he said again. ‘Now who’s been stupid?’

‘I want you to be there,’ Denton said to Janet Striker, ‘in case it really is the one. At best, it’ll be telling somebody their daughter is dead.’

‘Surely they’ve seen it in the paper.’

‘You’d think. But people are funny — they could be recluses; they could just be people who don’t want to know things. It was a very small notice.’

Mrs Striker raised her chin. ‘They never reported her missing, if her name really was Stella Minter.’

‘We don’t know that.’

‘I know that, Mr Denton. I get a list of missing women every month. I looked, the first time you visited me.’ They were in her office, the workday coming to an end. She gestured at a scruffy stack of papers behind her. ‘If it was her real name, you’re dealing with people who never declared their daughter as missing.’

‘Anyway, I’d like you to be there.’

She stared up at him, her face weary, the skin shiny as if she had a fever. ‘You’re going now?’ He nodded. She looked at a watch pinned on her breast, looked around the office as if to see what was left to do. ‘How far is it?’ she said.

‘Kilburn — off Kilburn High Road. Twenty-seven Balaclava Gardens. That’s the address on the birth record, at any rate.’

‘And they’re still there?’

Her questions irritated him; he wanted to go, to get it done, even while he knew her doubts were good ones. ‘I’ll find out when I get there,’ he growled.

She opened a drawer and burrowed under papers and took out a small, fat book. ‘We shall see.’ She turned pages, asked him to read off the address again, ran a finger down a page and up the next one, and said, ‘Balaclava Gardens, number twenty-seven — Alfred Minter, licensed accountant. ’ She closed the book with a snap. ‘Still there last year, at any rate.’ She stood, tall and thin and weary-looking, then raised her voice to almost a shout. ‘Sylvie, I shall be out on business. Answer the telephone, please.’

A heavy voice came from a surprisingly small woman on the far side of the office. ‘Yes, Mrs Striker.’

‘You think they’ll just let us waltz in,’ she said to Denton.

‘I brought my police letter. You can tell them what a noble sort I am.’

‘And who’s going to tell them how wonderful I am?’

Balaclava Gardens was a terrace on the west side of Kilburn High Road beyond Shoot Up Hill. Denton recognized it as recent but not new, part of an estate developed long enough ago that the trees were nearing maturity and the front gardens looked obsessively trim and spiritless — the real gardens would be at the back. The cab had come along the edge of a more recent building site to reach the street: the area had been built up in stages, was now, he thought, almost complete.

Number 27 looked like all the others, was perhaps a touch nattier, its garden a notch more obsessive, but what set it well apart was the Headland Electric Dogcart parked in front, its rear axle attached by a chain to a ring in a concrete block.

‘Bloke thinks it’s a blooming horse!’ the cabbie guffawed.

‘Or he thinks his neighbours are thieves,’ Denton said. He paid the man but asked him to come back in fifteen minutes ‘just in case’, as he murmured to Janet Striker. ‘We don’t want to get marooned in the wilds of Kilburn.’

‘I can’t make a living hanging about,’ the cabbie said.

Denton gave him one of the coins he’d got from Harris. ‘Find the pub, have one on me, come back.’

Mrs Striker was looking at the electric motor car. ‘It’s quite unusual,’ she said.

‘Small.’

‘Look — there’s not another on the street.’

‘Maybe accountancy pays.’

‘And likes to declare itself. I wonder, does he ever drive it, or does he leave it here to remind the neighbours of how successful he is?’

They turned to the house, a yellow brick in a terrace of identically built houses, now rather hysterically individualized by touches of paint, the occasional bit of sawn fancy-work under an eave, names like ‘The Cedars’ (next door, though there were no cedars). Denton had already seen the lace curtain in the front window of number 27 twitch; in that house at least — perhaps all up and down the street — an arrival by cab had been noticed.

‘You do the talking,’ Denton said.

‘In heaven’s name, why?’

‘You do it better than me. Anyway, people trust a woman.’

They went up the short walk between two rows of bricks half-buried on the diagonal, two rows of rigorously trimmed box beyond them, English ivy and a monkey puzzle tree in each ten-by-twelve-foot plot. ‘You expect too much of me,’ she said.

‘You can do anything, is what I think.’

She gave him a look — amused? annoyed? — and rang the bell. The door opened too quickly; the middle-aged woman behind it had been waiting. She was wearing a nondescript dress, but Mrs Striker seemed to know she was the maid (and would be the only maid in this house, and would live out somewhere) and wasn’t the mistress. Denton wanted to say that this was a perfect example of her abilities, because he’d have got it wrong and thought her the mistress.

‘We should like to call on Mr and Mrs Minter, if you please. Will you show us in?’ She held out a calling card.

The maid frowned. Her face said that she was neither bright nor well paid, so why should she be forced to make a decision in such a matter? Then her face more or less collapsed, as if to say, It’s beyond me, it really is. She said in a whisper, ‘Wait, please.’ And closed the door.

Janet Striker rolled her eyes. ‘Not done,’ she said softly. ‘Poor frightened soul-!’ A murmur of voices came from inside the house; Janet Striker smiled unpleasantly and said, ‘Now she’s being scolded. Mrs Minter will be saying, “What will the neighbours think? Everybody’s seen them come by cab; we can’t leave them on the doorstep, Alfred! It will cause the most awful gossip! They’ll think, oh, what will they think-!”’ She displayed a talent for mimicry he hadn’t expected, then remembered her contempt for ‘nice’ women. ‘And he’ll be saying, “Can it be the religious canvassers, do you think? At this hour?”’

With that, the door opened again and the maid, now red-faced, whispered, ‘Come in, please, miss,’ and stood aside. They passed through into a tiny vestibule with a tiled floor, beyond it a narrow hall with oppressively dark but very shiny woodwork and a staircase. At the far end of the hall a man was standing, pulling at the bottom of his waistcoat and looking severe. In the middle of his tea, Denton thought.

‘Show our guests into the front parlour, Mrs Wick,’ the man said in the voice of a clergyman welcoming somebody to a funeral.

The room was small — twelve feet on a side — with a coal grate, unlit, and the same dark and brutally shiny woodwork, and dark furniture, vaguely Eastlake, that could be dated to the beginning of the Minters’ marriage. Antimacassars everywhere; on the walls calligraphic certificates in which the name Stella Minter could be made out, and on the dark mantel a tinted photograph (not one of Regis Mulcahy’s — wrong pose) of a plump young woman holding a book.

‘I’m afraid I am not cognizant of the reason for your visit,’ the man said. He was short, bald, plump and entirely sure of himself. ‘I am Alfred Minter,’ as if to say, I am the reason for all this magnificence.

Janet Striker smiled as brightly as the woodwork and held out her hand. ‘I am Janet Striker of the Society for the Improvement of Women. And this,’ indicating Denton as the prize item in the menagerie, ‘is Mr Denton, the famous author.’