Friday morning.
He was awake before Atkins and went downstairs to make his own tea in the alcove, the spirit stove giving off a blue light, the space otherwise dark with the sun not yet up. The window had been replaced at the bottom of the stairs, but the curtains hadn’t yet been put up; now he wanted sunlight to spill through, to tell him that the world was alive, life was good. Instead, he stared at the blue flame, smelled the burning alcohol, thought of the man who had lunged out of this place to attack him. He rubbed his arm. Where was Stella Minter’s murderer now? Awake, walking the streets in fear? Sleeping the sleep of the just? More likely the latter, Denton thought, a man without conscience, reckless, clever. He’d have seen the newspaper stories about Mulcahy’s body, have been watching for them, sure that when the body and the note were found, he’d be safe.
Denton took the tea back up the stairs, sipping as he went, feeling it scald his upper lip; he went on past the bedroom floor and up to the attic, stumbling in the darkness. Was the murderer up here, waiting? No, he’d finished with Denton; he’d realized days ago that if Denton had learned anything from Mulcahy, something would have happened. Now, he thought he was safe. Or all but safe. One day, one fact, one sliver of investigative hope lay between him and complete escape. And it depended not on Denton but on five women making lists and, perhaps, a soldier-servant with an idea.
Not much.
He began to row on the contraption. The attic was cold and silent; the rowlocks groaned. He hadn’t slept well — dreams, long waking periods, tormenting himself with old failures, old humiliations, back to childhood: failure begat failure. His mind turned, twisted, raced, as it had done all night, reviewing everything about the killings, about Mulcahy, the attack, the girl. On and on, over and over. Nothing new, nothing helpful.
He lifted the hundredweight dumb-bell, then lighter weights for each hand. Nothing, nothing, nothing. He fired the parlour pistols, then stood with the old percussion Colt held at arm’s length. Two minutes, three minutes, four, the sights never wavering from the target. He would have liked to shoot the killer right then. Wonderful if he had loomed out of the shadows — a bullet in the eye.
But the killer, he thought, was laughing at him, sitting at his breakfast by now, devouring sausage and potatoes and laughing around the half-chewed food.
Nothing, nothing, nothing.
Atkins was full of himself and his mission, so was particularly hard on Maude that morning, bustling and hectoring, outfitting himself with pads of paper and pencils from Denton’s desk, appropriating a never-used leather dispatch case given him by Emma Gosden (‘You’re never going to use this, right? Shame to waste it’), then swaggering off like a diplomatic courier in mufti. He left behind him an already exhausted Maude who was, as well, terrified of Rupert and who armed himself with biscuits to be produced whenever the dog looked his way.
‘I think I’d like to give notice, sir,’ Maude said as he was taking away Denton’s breakfast dishes.
Mindful that he hadn’t paid him, Denton produced a half-crown he’d got from Harris and said, ‘Could it wait until Monday? It’s rather a bad time.’
‘Oh — yes, sir — it’s only Mr Atkins is so-He’s very particular.’
‘One of his finest qualities.’
‘And then there’s the dog, sir.’
‘Just keep feeding him biscuits, Maude; he’ll follow you around like a, mmm, dog.’
Maude picked up the coin. ‘Is this in addition to my wages, sir?’
Denton sighed, muttered that it must be.
Maude went down the room with the tray; behind him, Rupert kept pace, anticipating a feed before they reached the bottom of the stairs.
Denton could do nothing until other people brought him information. It was no good to say that he should have done the work himself; in fact, he had neither the knowledge nor the patience to do what Mrs Johnson’s five women were doing. Nor could he cause them to work faster, although he now tried to do just that: he walked over to Mrs Johnson’s and asked how the work was coming, then muttered that today was their last day.
‘They’re entirely aware of the day, Mr Denton!’ Mrs Johnson, although she depended on him for work, was not going to suffer him gladly. ‘It does no good to try to hurry them along.’
‘I wasn’t trying to, mmm, hurry … Only thinking, maybe something had, you know, uh-’ He held out a ten-pound note. ‘This is for the earlier, um, bonus.’ She seemed relieved to get it but didn’t encourage him. He said, ‘If you hear anything-’
‘Mr Denton, I will send you a message by hand the instant I know something! Until then-’ She stood in her doorway like a guard, her chin out.
‘Yes, mmm, of course — you’re right, yes-But the instant, the moment — as soon as you know something-Time really is of the-’
She thanked him for the money and closed the door.
So Denton walked. He thought he walked aimlessly but found himself outside the building that housed Mulcahy’s Inventorium. No policeman was visible, so he crossed the street, at first merely pacing along the building’s front, then going in and retracing his steps of days before. The massive locks were gone from Mulcahy’s door, replaced by two smaller ones and a sign that said ‘Metropolitan Police Premises — Keep Away’. The broken lock to the roof had been replaced, as well, the new one sealed with a police tag. Nobody was about, however, and nobody approached him either coming in or going out: the press had lost any little interest it might once have had in R. Mulcahy.
He walked some more, now down City Road to the warren of old streets around Finsbury, then found himself standing in the Minories and going on to look again at the door behind which Stella Minter had been killed. The constable and the police sign were gone; the room, he was sure, was as yet untenanted by anybody else. Might never be, in fact, its legend now too grim.
He turned away and walked through the new terraces south of Victoria Park, the great bustle of the city nowhere more visible than in these places where building was going on — carts moving in and out, carpenters on scaffolding, a monstrous machine driving piles somewhere with a sound like that from the forge behind Mulcahy’s building — a sense of impending event, of something coming for which great hurry and noise were necessary. The event being, he supposed, the building of the next London terrace, and the next, and the next.
Then he walked back to Mrs Johnson’s (‘I haven’t been home; I thought you might have-No? I’m so sorry-’) then west, then north on York Road along the cattle market and into Kentish Town and another plain where new houses would soon stand. At the moment, it was a field of rubble, devastation as if after a war, with, near the centre, a raw, new building rising alone — a pub. This one was faced with green tile that shone in the white winter light. As he watched, two wagons, looking like centipedes, crawled in from the farthest corner, and men the size of ants began to unload iron pipe, the rattle and clink of the pipes reaching him long after he had seen them dropped. Then he headed south again, paralleling the Great Northern and Midland lines, the trains pounding along the tracks towards the depots in Camden and Somers Towns, their whistles like screams. He wondered how anybody in the new houses that would rise could tolerate the noise, then realized that they could and would: this was London, where there must be always more noise, more houses, more workers — cram them in, stuff them in, subject them to noise and dirt — they will accept it and then love it. He thought of Harris’s We need a revolution and thought, No, he’s wrong; this is what we want, this world, this noise, this bustle. This is the revolution.
In the midst of which a murderer, eating his morning sausage, laughs.
I could do with a revolution that took him with it, Denton thought, heading homeward. But perhaps, then, the murderer was the revolution Harris wanted, an eruption of violence from within. It would be a grim revolution, then. Harris, he thought, had something more dramatic and final in mind.
He stopped again at his own house to ask Maude if any messages had come, learned none had, went off to Privatelli’s to eat Italian food he didn’t taste; then he walked on, down into the City, across the river (looking north, trying to see where Mulcahy’s roof must be), crossing back over Waterloo Bridge, his legs tiring now, grateful for clocks that told him that the day was looking towards its end: grateful because it would be over soon, failure looked in the face, something else waiting up ahead.
And so he came back to his own house about four. He let himself in, took off his coat and hung it, walked up and down the long room, put water on for tea. Only then was there a sound from below — slow footsteps on the stairs (he whirled around, startled despite himself), then the door opening. It was Atkins, much chastened.
‘My very own Isandhlwana,’ he said. ‘Disaster.’
Denton watched his last hope die but smiled to reassure him. ‘Well — you tried.’
‘Oh, yes, the saddest words of voice or pen, “I tried.”’ Atkins looked under Denton’s arm. ‘You making tea? Maude’s got tea downstairs. Want some?’
‘No, the water’s hot; I’ll make fresh.’
‘Well, then. Pour me a half cup, if you will. My confidence in myself is shaken.’
They sat by the cold fireplace, Denton in his armchair. Atkins had dragged the hassock to the hearth and sat with his chin on his fists, staring into the cold grate. ‘Bloody hell,’ he said.
‘No Stella Minter, then?’
‘If you wanted grown women, maiden name of Minter, Stella, I could provide you with two! But neither had a girl child between 1883 and 1886, did they? I could provide you with several dozen ladies, maiden name Minter, who had girl children between 1883 and 1886, but none of them by name Ruth! And none of them match to any woman, maiden name of Minter, what had a baby girl she named Rebecca between 1885 and 1888. Now, I can give you two Rebeccas born to women whose maiden names were Minter, born in the right years, but they don’t have older sisters, do they? Oh, brothers, oh, yes! They got brothers enough to relieve the siege of Ladysmith, but they don’t have sisters! You follow me, General? My idea about the maiden names was bleeding stupid!’
‘Now, now-’ Denton made comforting noises that he didn’t feel. He let Atkins sputter and run down, and, as sop to Atkins’s vanity, he said, ‘She lied. Not your fault.’
‘Who lied?’
‘Stella Minter. I suppose her real name wasn’t Ruth any more than it was Stella — she lied when she used it at the Humphrey, and she lied when she told the other tart it was her name. She was a really frightened girl — not trusting anybody. It isn’t your doing, Sergeant.’
‘What, I spent the day looking for Ruth and there ain’t no Ruth?’
‘Ain’t no Ruth and ain’t no Rebecca, I suspect, and ain’t no Stella Minter, either.’
Atkins pushed his chin harder against his fists and growled. ‘Yes, that one there is! A Stella Minter there is.’
‘Two, you said. Wrong age — they’re mothers?’
‘One yes, one no. A girl, born — I’ve got it written down someplace — it’s in me dispatch case — born in the right years. Named Stella Minter — there she was, plain as currants in a cake. You do all those names, column after column, you forget what you’re looking for. I’d already done the Minter maidens; I was doing baby Ruths, but I got confused or sleepy, God knows, and there’s a Stella baby, father’s name Minter, and I wrote it down. Stupid, I’m just stupid. It’s a wonder you put up with me, Major.’
Denton stared at the angry servant’s profile. The room was cold; he’d been feeling it for a quarter of an hour, only now realized it. ‘Light the fire,’ he said. He stood. ‘I’m going out.’
‘You just came in.’
‘I want the information you took down about the infant Stella Minter. Chop-chop.’
Atkins looked up at him. ‘What for?’
‘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.’
Minter touched her hand and inclined his head, moving it in a quarter-circle to take in both of them. ‘And the reason for-?’ he said.
‘The matter is rather delicate.’
He looked at her, then Denton.
‘Your daughter-’ she said. Minter’s head snapped up. ‘We’d like to ask you about your daughter.’
‘This is most unusual.’ He tugged again at his waistcoat. ‘Most surprising. I fail to see why you — why anyone — would ask me about my-’ He made a gesture, as if the word ‘daughter’ was too sacred to pronounce.
‘Do you have a daughter named Stella?’
He pulled himself up to his full five feet six inches. He raised a hand and moved it slowly past the row of calligraphies on the wall. ‘An accomplished young woman. Thoroughly accomplished. The apple of our eye! I don’t understand your interest, madam.’
‘Might we see her?’
‘Certainly not. She is a girl, a sensitive and good girl. I see no reason to, mm, expose her to the-’ He frowned. ‘To strangers. Who, I must say, give me no reason to entertain, mm, to have confidence in, mm, to know who or what they are! I don’t know you, madam. Or you, sir.’
Janet Striker gave Denton a look; he got out a calling card, then searched his pockets for Hench-Rose’s letter, now somewhat battered. He handed both over. Minter took them, held the card low and well away, tipping his head back, then went to the front window and studied them there. After that, he held the letter at arm’s length and read it. He looked back at Denton, perhaps to determine if he could really be the Sir Galahad described by Hench-Rose, then returned to the letter and apparently read it again. At last, he came back to them and stood in the same spot in front of his fireplace, defender of the hearth. ‘What is all this about?’ he said a little hoarsely.
Janet Striker sat, the chair dark and overwrought, both hideous and uncomfortable-looking; she took up only the forward two or three inches of it. ‘A young woman using the name Stella Minter has met her death. We are looking for her parents.’
His left hand went unconsciously to his chest; the idea of his daughter’s death caused a spasm of pain on his face. ‘But she is alive and well!’ he gasped. ‘In this house. At this moment!’
‘May we see her?’
Minter’s lips moved; he hesitated, decided, went to the door and called into the darkness of the hall, ‘Mother! Please to bring our Stella to the front parlour. At once — please.’ He turned back to them. ‘You will see-’ He touched his forehead. ‘You gave me a turn. To suggest that our Stella-’
‘I’m so sorry, Mr Minter. I didn’t mean to suggest that your daughter was the victim. Only that we are looking for her parents.’
He went back to his place by the hearth and stared at the floor. ‘That was cruel,’ he murmured.
A middle-aged woman paused in the doorway, then came into the room; behind her, holding the woman’s hand, a young but very large girl followed, clearly the girl in the photograph. Both were taller than Minter, neither ‘good-looking’ by most standards, the girl’s face broad and long, her colour good, her hair lank. Both, Denton thought, were overdressed: did they put on their best to welcome Papa home to tea? Or were the clothes a declaration of status, like the little motor car?
‘My wife, Mrs Minter,’ Minter said, drawing her still farther in, ‘and our beloved daughter, Stella.’
The family stood together. They looked expectant. Minter stared at Janet Striker as if for help. Yet she looked at Denton, who saw it was his turn. ‘I’m happy to see,’ he said, ‘that Miss Minter isn’t the young lady we’re looking for.’
‘Looking for!’ the woman cried. ‘Why should you be looking for her?’
Minter turned his head to say something to her, but Denton said loudly, ‘It’s a case of mistaken identity, ma’am. Another young woman of the same name.’ He didn’t say how disappointed he was.
‘I should think so!’ she said. ‘Very mistaken, indeed, I should think! You really ought to determine your facts in a better fashion, I think!’
‘Now, Mother-’ Minter managed to say.
‘Anyone who knows her knows that there can’t be any confusion about who she is! I can’t hardly understand how her identity could be confused! I think you must be very ignorant people!’
‘Oh, Mama-!’ the girl moaned.
‘Hush, dear.’
‘My wife is overwrought,’ Minter said. ‘Stella is the apple of our eye.’
‘Apple, indeed!’ Mrs Minter shouted. ‘A girl of such accomplishments-! ’
‘That’s enough, Mother!’ Minter said. He had reverted to the clergyman’s voice; the effect was instantaneous, Mrs Minter’s mouth remaining open but no sound coming out. The girl blushed and looked at Janet Striker in appeal, perhaps apology; she looked at Denton and gave him a tentative, awkward smile. She was sixteen, the birth record had told him that; she had the adolescent’s embarrassment at her parents, however they loved her and she them. Her smile to Denton seemed to ask for an understanding of that, and on an impulse, he said to her, ‘Is that your picture on the mantel, Miss Minter?’
Her mother started to answer for her, but Minter said, ‘Now!’ in a warning voice; the girl, after a second or two, blushing some more, said, ‘I was just finished at the common school. I was only fourteen then.’
‘And look,’ Minter said, ‘at all she’s accomplished since! She’s won a scholarship to the Roedean School!’
‘And will go on to university — her teachers say so!’ the mother burst out.
‘That’s wonderful,’ Denton said. ‘Wonderful. You went to the local school, then? And stayed after age eleven, and went on as long as you could.’
‘I love studying.’
‘What’s your favourite?’
‘Science. I’m going to be a scientist.’
‘Or a teacher,’ her mother said; unresolved conflict hovered over the words.
‘Yours is an unusual name,’ Denton said. The girl nodded, blushed, as if to suggest that the name was not her doing. ‘I wonder,’ Denton started, looking aside at Janet Striker, the idea forming in his head as he asked the question, ‘if any other girls have ever used your name. Pretended to be you.’
‘What, as a kind of cheat? To get money or something?’
‘No, dear,’ Mrs Striker said, picking up Denton’s notion, ‘no, more from, perhaps, admiration. Or envy. “The sincerest form of flattery,” do you know that saying?’
‘Yes, but that’s imitation.’
‘Well, yes, dear, that’s I think what Mr Denton means. Imitating you. Has there ever been anybody like that?’
Mrs Minter laughed, a dismissive, contemptuous laugh. ‘They all envy her.’
‘Oh, Mama-’
‘Well, some are quite nasty, you’ve said so yourself! The green-eyed monster, that’s what afflicts people.’
Denton crossed his arms over his chest, his words trying to pull the talk back to his question. ‘But has there ever been anybody — some special friend, some girl who admired you, maybe talked like you, even said she wanted to be like you-?’
Stella Minter looked at her mother, made nervous movements with her shoulders, said, ‘Alice, I suppose.’
Her mother sniffed.
‘Well, she did admire me, Mama! She said so!’ She looked at Denton. ‘She was ever so unhappy, she said, and she wanted to make something of herself, to become somebody. She hadn’t my advantages, you see. We were such good friends, and she came here and she asked questions about everything, about-’
‘When they were very little girls; I think that when they are still in the age of innocence, little girls can be accepted where, later, they cannot,’ her mother said.
‘She wanted to know what a maid did, and what all the books I owned were, and how to play the piano, and — just everything! She was so sweet and she was my best friend, but-’ She glanced at her mother. ‘As Mama says, it was all right when we were little girls. She used to come here every day. I couldn’t go to her house, you see-’
‘A public house,’ Mrs Minter said. ‘We didn’t know, in the beginning. Then — it would have been most improper.’
‘Alice,’ Janet Striker said. ‘Alice what?’
‘Satterlee,’ Mrs Minter said. ‘The Satterlees, we found out too late, were low and common.’
‘Oh, Mama-’
‘You don’t understand these things yet, Stella. I couldn’t know her mother — to think of such a thing makes me ill; was it right that her child should know you? We decided not, finally. The girl was appealing when she was little, but at twelve, you can understand our position. It wasn’t proper.’
Minter smiled. ‘But it was a spectacle to see them together! Little Alice was another Stella! She did talk like our Stella; you could hear her using the big words, hear her trying to talk proper. She’d borrow books and try to read them, I suppose.’
‘Steal them, you mean.’
‘She didn’t!’
‘One of your books simply disappeared!’
‘She wanted to learn things, Mama.’
‘Giving herself airs,’ the mother said.
‘Mama, she was trying to better herself. She was trying to be proper.’
Janet Striker said, ‘Did she ever play at being you?’
The girl blushed again. ‘I suppose. Maybe.’ She looked at her mother. ‘We had a game. When we played me giving a tea party with my tea set. I’d be somebody — oh, it’s awfully silly, but we were children — I’d be one of the royal princesses or a maid of honour, and she’d be me. It was just a game.’
‘And she called herself Stella?’ Mrs Striker said.
‘That was the game. She was Stella.’
‘But you said,’ Minter interrupted, ‘that a girl using the name had passed away.’ Mrs Minter said ‘Oh’ in a tiny voice and turned her daughter aside as if to protect her, but the girl shrugged her off. ‘Do I hear now that you think this other girl might have known our Stella?’
Denton and Janet Striker exchanged a look; she said, ‘It seems possible.’
‘You mean Alice Satterlee?’ Stella said. ‘She’s — passed away?’
‘We don’t know,’ Denton said. ‘We’re trying to find out.’
Tears stood in the girl’s eyes, and Denton realized what a nice girl she probably was — truly touched, probably lonely, sentimental, treasuring the memory of somebody who had worshipped her. Her mother saw the tears, however, as danger and, after a glare at Denton, pushed the girl from the room.
‘Mrs Minter is very protective of our Stella,’ Minter said. ‘She doesn’t allow emotional scenes.’
‘How well did you know the Satterlees?’ Denton said.
‘As Mrs Minter said, they weren’t our sort of people. We never crossed paths, as the saying is.’
‘They lived in a pub?’
‘That’s a bit of an exaggeration. I believe they lived next to the public house.’
‘Satterlee was a publican?’
‘Satterlee was something for the building estate — over there on the other side of Crimea Way. He did something while the site was prepared, before the houses were put up — I remember walking Stella over there once and seeing the great expanse of it, levelled and nothing on it but the pub. Stella makes it sound as if they were friends for years, but it can’t have been awfully long; I think at most a year. Then they were gone.’
‘What’s the name of the pub?’
‘Oh-! I’ve never been in it.’ He frowned to indicate disapproval of the public house. ‘I think something about a rose. I really wouldn’t know.’
A silence fell; Denton knew it was over. Janet Striker stood, and then they were out in the front garden again, and the cab was waiting at the kerb.
‘You know a pub beyond Crimea Way called the rose, or some such?’ Denton said to the driver.
‘Just been there, many thanks.’
‘Take us there.’ He winked. ‘You can have another and then take us to the station.’
In the cab he leaned back against the stiff cushions, aware of how tired he was and how disappointed. That morning, he had despaired; now, they had come close, he thought, perhaps very close — yet not close enough.
‘I liked that girl,’ he said.
‘She has a hard row to hoe. As your grandmother might say.’
The Rose and Rooster was less than half a dozen years old but looked as if it came from the seventies or eighties, a public house purpose-built to the designs of a man who specialized in pubs for a large syndicate. Its dark wood, stained glass and gleaming brass were meant to evoke those earlier houses in which such details had been innovative, were now ‘pub style’, to be expected by the patrons. The tiled front, the name in gold letters, were standins for a national nostalgia — the roast beef of old England.
Denton steered Janet Striker around to the saloon bar, now comfortably full, the usual fug of pipe smoke hanging at chest level, women mostly sitting quietly while men in bowlers laughed or wrangled.
‘What’ll it be, then, love?’ the barmaid said to him as soon as they sat down at a small table. She was thirtyish, cheerful, professionally flirtatious.
Janet Striker said, ‘A half of your best bitter.’
‘Two,’ Denton said, ‘and I’ll have a word with the publican, if I can.’
‘He’s that busy, I wouldn’t put money on it, dearie. What’s it about, then?’
‘Tell him it’s personal-historical.’
She laughed, showing big, cream-coloured teeth. ‘You’re not a debt collector, I hope.’ When she was gone, Denton said, ‘Well?’
Janet Striker shook her head. After several seconds, she said, ‘I was thinking of that poor girl — Satterlee. Wanting so much to get out of what she was and not knowing how to do it.’
‘And ending up dead. If it was her.’
‘The mother was a piece of work.’ She meant the real Stella Minter’s mother, he knew.
He said, ‘Defending her chick.’
Janet Striker snorted. ‘Defending the proper and the prudish, you mean. Ambitious for the girl, probably driving her husband as hard as she drives her daughter, wanting she doesn’t quite know what — more of something: more propriety, more money, more things, more signs around her of how proper and accomplished she is — through her husband and her daughter. You can build empires with women like that pushing people.’
‘You think the motor car is his idea or hers?’
‘His, of course. He handles the money and makes the decisions; she pushes and mostly sets the terms. I’m sure she wants a better house — wouldn’t surprise me if she has one picked out for the moment when Stella is launched from university and a success. Suburban, detached, stylish. What a weight that child has to carry!’
‘But carries it pretty well,’ he murmured as the barmaid came back, placed the two wet glasses neatly in front of them and said, ‘Landlord’s drawing pints for a party of nine and then he’ll pop in, but he says to tell you — his words, not mine, don’t take it out on me, love — “If it isn’t important, I’ll be back drawing pints faster’n Jack Sprat.”’ She bent down so that her hair brushed Denton’s face. ‘His bark’s worse’n his bite.’ She giggled again, straightened, winked at Janet Striker and whirled away.
They toyed with the glasses, sipped — neither wanted the ale — tried to make the time pass. Janet Striker said, ‘Don’t jump at its being the Satterlees.’
‘I know, I know. We have to be dead certain. I want to be certain, that’s the trouble — it’s tempting to jump ahead.’
‘Don’t jump.’
He studied her face, saw its intelligence, its hardness, wondered if he could ever get past that. She looked at him, looked away, then back; their eyes joined and held. It was disturbing: long, shared looks were supposed to be examples of intimacy, thus with her were embarrassing. He knew he was getting red, face warm; she looked cool and detached. He wanted to say something, to do something like touch her hand, but he didn’t dare.
‘Now then,’ a big voice bellowed next to him, ‘who wants to see me?’ He was a wide, solid man, shorter than Denton, confident and even brassy. Ex-military, Denton thought; he put on more assurance than he felt and said, ‘My name’s Denton.’ Taking the chance, he added, ‘Exsergeant, infantry. Sit down, will you?’
He was holding out his hand; the other man took it, gripped it hard. ‘Penrose, gunner. Like calls to like, eh?’ He let go. ‘Can’t sit down, no time.’ Then, to Mrs Striker, ‘Evening to you, ma’am.’
‘Janet Striker,’ she said, holding her own hand out. He touched it but turned back to Denton; men were for business, he seemed to say. ‘What’s up, then?’
‘We’re trying to locate a family named Satterlee.’
Penrose tipped his head back as if to have a better look at Denton. ‘This the personal or the historical?’
‘Little of both, I expect. We were told they used to live here.’
‘In aid of what?’
‘An enquiry.’
‘You got do better than that, ex-sergeant. American, are you? What army?’
‘Union. Our Civil War.’
‘Oh, that one. Saw a lot of it, did you? Yes, I think you did. I was lucky — thirteen years in South Africa, I never got so much as a stone thrown at me. All right, ex-sergeant, tell it to me straight what you want — I’ve a lot of thirsty people waiting.’
Denton looked at Janet Striker, saw her nod, said, ‘A girl is dead. We think she might be a Satterlee.’
‘The little one or the big one?’
Janet Striker jumped in. ‘There were two? Only two, or more?’
Penrose drew a chair from another table and sat, opening his attention to include her. ‘You’re not the police,’ he said. ‘Not that it’d matter if you were; we’re clean here. There were two girls, Alice, the bigger one, and a younger one named — now let me think — Eadie — that’s what they called her, but it wasn’t Edith — Edna. Edna! Alice and Edna.’ He leaned a forearm on the table. ‘They didn’t live in the pub itself; I and the missus live upstairs and always have. The Satterlees lived in the extension next door — other people in there now. When they put these buildings up, they build on the extension for the company’s business — works manager, engineer, whatever it is — and then it becomes the sales office when the houses are ready to sell. When all the houses are sold, they rent it out.’
‘Satterlee was the works manager?’
‘Nothing quite so fancy. More like the work gangs’ foreman. ’
There was a silence. Denton, fearing the man would run off, said quickly, ‘What were they like?’
‘Weren’t like nothing, because you never saw them. I saw the girls now and then in the back, playing out there, but him only when he wanted me to. And her, never. See, they kept to themselves and shut the rest of us out — curtains always closed, never going about or chatting like normal folk, wouldn’t hardly open the door to the postman’s knock. My missus said we ought to extend the hand of neighbourliness; I said they could go to the hot place, pardon me, miss. I mean, here we was, two families marooned in the only building in the middle of a bleeding metropolitan desert, and they wouldn’t offer to share a cup of cold tea!’
Janet Striker leaned forward. ‘What were the girls like?’
‘Pathetic. Not out of want, I don’t mean pathetic that way, but off to themselves all the time and lonely. You could tell. Like they was dying for company, for conversation. Nice enough girls, mind.’
‘Did you ever hear them talk about Stella Minter?’
Penrose stared at her. ‘That’s an odd one. That’s right odd, I mean it.’
‘Why?’
‘How could you know about that?’ He looked at them with sudden suspicion, as if they had revealed some incriminating secret — a tail, or an odour of brimstone. Then he thought better of it. ‘It was a game they played, the two sisters. It was sort of a tea party or something — all in dumb show, mind, except for the odd old cup or a rock they’d picked up. But I’d look down from our window — I’d have put my feet up for a bit — and, there they’d be out in the garden, except there wasn’t no garden then, jabbering to each other and playing at pouring tea — I got that much — and other stuff I couldn’t tell, like talking to people that wasn’t there, and so on. I went down one day, I had something to fix on our back door, and the little one sees me and she says — they was always eager to talk — she says, “We’re playing cellar-minto.” Or that’s what I thought she said. Made no sense, but I thought it was some word they’d made up; I don’t know kids’ games. Then later, another day, she said it again and I got it as stellar-minto. Stellar-minto, all right, makes no sense to me either, but so what? Now here you come along and say it again, I haven’t heard it in, what? — four years. And it all comes right back. What’s it mean, then?’
‘It’s a girl’s name — Stella Minter.’
He looked at her, frowned. ‘What’s that mean, then — we’re playing Stella Minter? Playing at somebody else? Making fun?’
‘More like being somebody else.’
Penrose went on frowning, then shook his head; he put his hands on the table as if to push himself up, and Denton hurried to say, ‘What sort of man was Satterlee?’
Penrose grunted, a single scornful sound. ‘Harold Satterlee was the sort you don’t want hanging about. Full of himself. Drove his workmen like billy-o; that’s why the company hired him, I suppose. I had one run-in with him, that was all I needed to see of him.’
‘What happened?’
‘Look, mate, I’ve really got to go. I’ll make this quick.’ But it was clear that Penrose liked the chance to tell the story. ‘Satterlee comes to me and says he wants me to refuse to sell beer to his men in the middle of the day — says it slows them down in the p.m. I said that was bleeding nonsense and I wouldn’t do it. He says if I don’t do it, he’ll go to the company and close me down. Well, I laughed in his face! I said to him, see here, my man, they didn’t build this pub first because they liked the look of it, you know; they built it so the workmen can grab a pint! You go and tell the company to shut it down, and they’ll shut you down. You’ll be out on the street, not me. Well, he knew I was right, but he got mad as a wet hen. Swore terrible, put his face in mine, said he was going to pound me. So I showed him my friend in need — ’ Penrose pulled only the handle of a leather-covered truncheon from his trouser pocket — ‘and said I’d have him level on the ground before he could swing a fist. Well, he knew I’d do it, so he stomps off bellowing and never spoke to me again. Nor could his kids after that — they’d look away if they saw me. I felt that sorry for them. The bigger one, Alice, she could have been pretty, but she had a hard time of it. And a hard time since, I’d wager.’
‘It’s she who’s dead, we think,’ Janet Striker said.
‘Ah, poor tyke. How?’
‘Murdered.’ She glanced at Denton. ‘If it’s the same girl. Look here, Mr Penrose, it’s important that we find the Satterlees. I take it they’re not here any more. Where have they gone?’
Penrose, on his feet now, shook his head. ‘No idea, and good riddance. The company might know — he might’ve gone someplace else to do the same job for them.’ He shook his head again. ‘Murdered! You never know what tomorrow will bring, do you?’
‘What’s the company?’
He looked perplexed, as if everybody knew what the company was. ‘Britannic Improvement. Their name’s all over London.’ He said the name again, as if they might be slow. Then he shook hands with both of them, muttered ‘murdered’, and was gone.
Neither of them had done more than sip the ale, so they left it on the table. Both were silent in the cab, heading back through evening streets towards the Marlborough Road station. It was colder and a few flakes of snow were falling, melting as they touched the pavement. At last he said, ‘I’ve got to find him.’
‘Them,’ she said. ‘It’s the whole family, Denton — and they may be the wrong ones.’
They rode along. He said, ‘How do we find them?’
‘The company, I suppose. If they’ll tell us. Tomorrow’s Saturday; the company offices will be open, but if the important people aren’t there, it might be hard to get them to tell us. “Oh, you must wait for Mr Smith to return on Monday.” Does it really matter, Denton, whether it’s tomorrow or Monday?’
‘It matters to me.’
They waited on the cold platform, then sat silently side by side like a long-established couple who’d been having an argument. At Baker Street, they changed to the Metropolitan Line and went on, silent, swaying, until he said abruptly, ‘We’ll get out at King’s Cross and walk.’
‘I don’t want you to walk me home.’
‘We’re going to my typewriter’s on Lloyd Baker Street. I think I know how to find the Satterlees.’
‘But it’s impossible, Mr Denton!’ Mrs Johnson was less scandalized than usual because Denton had a woman with him; she had even let them both inside the front door. ‘It’s after seven o’clock, Mr Denton — they’ve worked all day and they’re not going to work all night!’
‘I’ll pay double! Triple! They won’t have to work all night — it’s one name, one name!’
‘Mr Denton, they’ve been three days, looking for Ruths and Rebeccas; now you want them to look for Alices and Ednas. I’m sure they’ll be happy to try again on Monday.’
Janet Striker said in her most severe voice, ‘The Metropolitan Schools Board building is open until nine o’clock. I know, because I’ve had to go to meetings there. We have two hours — more, Denton, if you’re not averse to bribing people.’
Mrs Johnson sucked in her breath, as harsh a rebuke as she ever allowed herself.
‘It will also cost something to prise the records out at this hour. Mrs Johnson, do you know what records they were looking at and in what office?’
Mrs Johnson wilted under Janet Striker’s tone. She didn’t know, she murmured; she hadn’t been doing the work, only organizing it; Frederica Tilley had been the one actually there and running things.
‘Where is she now?’ Janet Striker demanded.
‘Home, I suppose, slaving all day as she’s been doing. Several streets away. No, of course I don’t have a telephone — nor she — it’s ten minutes’ walk-’
They made it in six, to find Frederica Tilley relaxing with sherry and sausages in a room above an upholsterer’s. Once she’d got over the surprise of the visit, she told them quite lucidly where the records were in the Schools Board building, and precisely which volumes would hold the most recent reports. ‘But it’s way down Blackfriars Road and a frightful walk from the tube station! You’ll never-’
Then they were in a motorized cab speeding through freezing streets to the south bank. The city was dark but peopled, everybody hugging himself, shoulders hunched, hands at throats to hold collars closed against a wind that seemed to be blowing from the Arctic. Overhead, clouds scudded in the reflected light of London, low and fast and spitting a snowflake now and then. Paying the cab fare, Denton counted his money and wondered if it would last.
Janet Striker, he found to his surprise, knew all about bribing people. When she saw his hesitation, she held her hand out for money and said crisply, ‘I’ll do it.’ She got them into the building — a shilling for the night porter — and into the records room — half a crown for the clerk, half a crown for the watchman — and down at a table near the records themselves. It cost them another crown when the building closed at nine, and then they sat in a big, cold room, the brass Aladdin lamp on the table the only light, bound books of handwritten school reports piled around them.
‘Have you any more money?’ Mrs Striker said at ten-thirty.
He blushed. ‘Coins.’
‘We never had supper.’ She disappeared and came back after ten minutes. ‘The night porter’s gone for food. And drink. I’m afraid we’re entertaining two watchmen, the porter and somebody he calls “Old Geoff ”.’ She smiled into the island of light. ‘If any of “the upper staff ” find we’re here, it’ll cost a good deal more.’ She sat down. ‘Your money ran out. We’re on my shilling now.’
‘I can’t let you.’
‘You can’t stop me.’ She opened a book with a bang. ‘What bad fists people have! My eyes are crossing from the handwriting.’
At half past midnight, she suddenly slapped her worn hand down on the ledger. ‘I have them!’ She raised her voice. ‘Satterlee, Edna, aged 12, East Ham Progressive Central School.’ She looked up at him, her face weary, ironic, smiling. ‘Don’t,’ she said, ‘don’t do it, Denton,’ because apparently she knew he wanted to kiss her.