‘Judas Priest,’ Munro muttered.
The smell burst out to meet them as if under pressure. Denton recognized blood and decay; memories of battle-fields flitted down his mind, then an image of a short man he had shotgunned who had bled seemingly everywhere.
‘You were at the post-mortem,’ Guillam said. ‘You know what to expect.’
Stella Minter had died in a room only big enough to hold her bed, a rickety chair, a stand that held a chamber pot, and a curtained area no wider than her shoulders, where her few clothes hung. High in the wall opposite the bed, in that part of the house that jutted forward beyond its neighbour, was an oval window, the long axis vertical, a piece of cloth pinned over it for a curtain. Guillam now tried to pull it aside and managed to pull it down.
‘Touch nothing,’ Guillam said.
‘Anything been removed?’ Munro muttered.
‘Not supposed to’ve been.’ Guillam pulled several folded sheets of paper from some inner pocket and handed it over without looking. Munro opened them and Denton, coming behind him, moved closer and waited for somebody to object. Nobody did. He saw at the top of the paper in a neat hand, ‘Inventory, No. 7-A, Priory Close Alley.’ He ran his eyes down the paper — ‘1 dresses, 1 petticoat, 1 wrapper on floor, 1 nightgown on hook’, (indeed, there it was, next to the bed) ‘undergarments, on chair; 1 pr. shoes; 1 reticule containing 2s 5d, 1 handkerchief, 1 Mason’s toffee in paper …’
Guillam was lighting the only gas lamp, in the wall above the bed, which had been fitted with a polished reflector that made the light briefly painful. When Guillam was finished, he closed the door, making a shooing gesture at somebody outside.
She had been killed on the bed, and most of her blood had soaked into the sheets and the mattress. Some blood, now dry, also lay on the wood floor like ink.
‘She was laying this way, feet towards the door,’ Guillam said. He sliced his right hand through the air, index finger up, palm to the left, parallel to the long axis of the bed. ‘Legs were partly drawn up, arms-’ He scrabbled for another paper. ‘Got the City Police drawing somewhere-’ He unfolded it — a stick figure on a rectangle. The arms were above the head. ‘Could have arranged the body somewhat, our killer could. One foot off the end of the bed a little; maybe moved her, or maybe that’s just the way she placed herself.’ He glanced up at Denton. ‘Notion is that he was a customer and all she was wearing was the wrapper; she opens the door, lets him in, lays herself down, and there you are.’
‘He hit her in the face,’ Denton said. ‘Twice.’ He met Guillam’s stolid look. ‘Post-mortem — two contusions on the right side.’
‘Report didn’t say that he did it and didn’t say there was any damage to the brain or any of that. Whores get whacked all the time. Or, all right, she lets him in, he whacks her, she lays herself down.’
‘Somebody she knew?’ Denton said.
‘Wouldn’t have to be somebody she knew; she was a cheap toss, move them along and get them out, next chap in. Except this one killed her. What you driving at?’
‘Nothing. Only if she knew him, it would have been easier for him. Where’s the wrapper?’
All three looked at the inventory, then at the floor. Guillam muttered, ‘Damn them,’ and got on his knees and looked under the bed. He got up breathing hard, brushing his knees, muttering, ‘Mistakes, mistakes-’ He looked at the list again. ‘Must’ve been taken as evidence.’
‘Why that?’
‘Blowed if I know.’
‘Anything else taken as evidence?’
Guillam looked at him. ‘You ask a lot of questions, you do.’ Surprisingly, he grinned. ‘Yeah, they took the washbowl, the soap dish and the pitcher because the killer might have handled them. Washing himself. Find maybe blood on them or his fingers’ marks. Don’t think much of the finger-mark business — not much to it.’ He was going through the sheets. The last one was headed ‘Seized for evidence at 7-A Priory Close Alley’ and listed the toilet articles and the wrapper. ‘Bit sloppy, putting the wrapper down twice. Damn them.’
Denton was trying to picture the jet of blood from the severed carotid artery. It would have sprayed the murderer, apparently had also sprayed the wall at the head of the bed. There was a line of blood down the wall beside the bed, as well, as if one spurt had struck it. Had he rolled her that way? Or had Stella Minter moved? He thought of the corpse he had seen at Bart’s, the stab wounds in the breasts and the tearing incisions in the pelvis. Parmentier with one leg up on the table, miming intercourse and cutting her throat. ‘He must have been drenched with blood,’ he said. The two detectives looked at him. ‘Even if he wore an overcoat — it would have been all over him.’
‘He may have killed her from behind, then arranged her after.’
‘What, while she was standing?’
‘Yeah, a big man, easy to do — reach around, he’s holding her with his other arm.’
‘He’s left-handed, then. Post-mortem made it pretty clear how the cut was made — right side of her throat to the left.’ He hesitated. ‘Mulcahy said he — the man he knew — murdered a woman while he was inside her.’ Again, the two detectives looked at him, their faces unreadable. ‘Killing from the front, his clothes’d have been covered with blood. Wouldn’t have taken his clothes off, I suppose. Wash himself afterwards, or at least wipe himself down. Maybe with the wrapper?’
‘“Mulcahy said.”’ Guillam folded up the inventory. ‘Your Mulcahy was talking about something donkey’s years ago, and anyway he made it up, if you ask me.’
‘That’s what he said, that it was long ago.’
‘You got Mulcahy on the brain, excuse my rudeness, sir.’ Guillam winked at Munro, who turned away. Guillam looked back at Denton, saw that he’d seen the wink, moved his whole torso inside the big tweed coat in what might have been a shrug. ‘I’m about done here,’ he said.
Munro was moving slowly around the outside of the room, apparently studying the bed and avoiding the stain on the floor. Denton, feeling that he didn’t want the visit to be wasted, began to look at the walls. What had he missed? He looked at the ceiling — cracks, discoloration, a moulding that ended halfway along the wall nearest the bed and reappeared on the front wall as if there had once been an opening there, now closed in.
‘No opening into the house?’ he said. Guillam, staring at the dress, shook his head.
‘Used to be.’That got no response. ‘What’s over there?’
‘Number Seven — lodging house,’ Munro said. ‘Nobody heard anything. Nobody saw anything. Right, Georgie?’
‘Nobody, nobody, nobody,’ Guillam muttered.
Denton looked at the walls. Nothing — more cracks, more discoloration. Over the head of the bed, an engraving from a magazine of two young women, one praying and one ascending up what appeared to be a beam of light. Halfway down the bed, on the near wall parallel to it, a reverse painting on glass, much the worse for wear, of a castle in an exaggerated mountain setting. Denton stepped across the stain as Munro had done and worked his way down the narrow space between the bed and the wall to study the blood-splashed picture. ‘Balmoral’ was painted on a grey-green lawn that swept away from the castle, most of whose middle had flaked away, leaving a dark hole where the royal apartments might have been. Denton leaned closer.
‘Mr Sherlock Holmes has found a clue,’ he heard Guillam say.
If he hadn’t said it, Denton might have spoken up. Instead, anger rising, he pushed his hands into his overcoat pockets and stared some seconds longer into the bowels of Balmoral and then turned back to the room, silent about what he’d seen. ‘Not waiting for me, I hope,’ he said.
Guillam was grinning. ‘An admirer of Mr Sherlock Holmes, are you?’
Denton was still standing behind the bloodstained bed. ‘I think it’s claptrap.’
‘You astonish me.’
‘I liked the stupid doctor, what’s-his-name. Reminds me of people I’ve known.’
‘Coppers, probably.’ Guillam’s grin became tight. ‘Coppers are stupid, that’s the tale, isn’t it? Stupid coppers can’t solve a crime, call in the gentleman detective, all will be resolved with the application of one cigar ash, a baby’s wail and eighteen generalizations. Brilliant!’
Denton worked his way down the bed, the space so narrow that he had to go sideways. ‘I don’t know any gentleman detectives.’
‘Neither does anybody else — in real life!’ Guillam guffawed, stopped abruptly and said to Munro, ‘You done? I’m fair sick of this place, I am.’
Munro and Denton stood in the court while Guillam locked up. Munro said in a low voice, ‘Don’t mind him.’
‘I don’t.’
‘Georgie’s overworked. This is on top of everything else he has to do. He’s a good copper.’
Guillam came to them. ‘Talking about me?’ he said. He gripped Denton’s arm. ‘Didn’t mean to come down hard on you, Mr Denton. It’s frustration. Always afraid I’ll see something in these places that could be the Ripper. My nightmare.’
‘Do you think it was the man Willey’s holding that did it?’
Guillam held on to his arm, even massaging it slightly with his thumb. His eyes were fixed on nothing. ‘I think it’s a man. I think he’s vicious. I think he owns a clasp knife with a five-inch blade. Or did own — may not any more, if he’s got any brains.’ He let go of Denton’s arm. ‘That’s what I think. What I think isn’t worth two tinker’s dams in a pisspot until I know something different.’ He winked. ‘But I can report that in my judgement it wasn’t the Ripper, thank God.’
The constable saluted them as they went out, his eyes meeting those of each of them in turn as a mark, Denton supposed, of respect. They walked around to the Minories and Guillam got into a cab and, after thanking Denton in a slightly ironic voice, rattled away.
It was almost seven. Munro said he was expected at home. He was heading towards Aldgate station for the steam underground, why didn’t Denton walk with him a bit? But he hesitated, looking down the Minories, hunched, and finally he said, ‘I apologize for not supporting you better, Denton. Georgie can be hard sometimes.’
‘I didn’t expect you to support me.’
‘You know what I mean. I didn’t know he was going to come that rough. I really did think it was a tale, that about seeing how you’d react. He wasn’t quite straight with me.’ Munro looked at him. ‘He’s going to want to know where you were the night the girl was killed, you know. He didn’t ask you yet, but I know him. He will.’
‘My God, Munro, that’s what the whole Mulcahy business was about! I was home!’
‘He’ll want to know about the whole night.’
‘The girl was already dead by the time Mulcahy came to my house.’
Munro frowned as if he was worrying about Denton’s situation, then took Denton’s arm much as Guillam had, perhaps some sort of policeman’s grip, and began to walk him north up the Minories. ‘You could argue it was a good deal later. Office of Prosecutions can make that argument. Food in her stomach may not tell so much; as for rigor — all the blood run out, rigor’s guesswork. Guillam’s men will have talked to your servant by now, so they’ll know about that night. You go out?’
He had gone to Emma’s at eleven and she’d thrown him over. Then he’d gone to the Café Royal and got drunk.
‘I’m not going to answer you, Munro. It’s my business.’ He didn’t want to tell them about Emma. If he did, they’d question her. It occurred to him that she might even be angry enough to deny he had been there. No, surely not. Frailty, thy name is-
Munro made an unsatisfied grunt and muttered that the time would come when he might have to say something, want to or not. They turned into Aldgate High Street, and Munro, letting go of Denton’s arm, said, ‘This is where her pimp worked — here and up Whitechapel Road.’ He nodded at the street ahead of them.
‘I didn’t know she had a pimp.’
‘Kid himself, they say, name of Bobbie. No last name. City police can’t find him. Not that they’re trying what I’d call hard. Short on men, of course.’ He fell silent for several steps and then said, ‘Very modern pimp — used a photograph. It appears he had three, possibly four girls; he’d walk up and down, use that “Want my sister, sir? still a virgin but wanting a man, sir,” and show ’em the picture. Customer says yes, he leads him around to Priory Close Alley and the thing is done.’
‘Couldn’t be that he’s really her brother, could it?’
‘Only if he’s got several sisters, and I doubt they’re all virgins, night after night. Damnable leech.’
‘The girls are as much to blame.’
Munro glanced at him and looked away. Defensively, Denton said, ‘You know what I mean. The girls aren’t prisoners, after all. The oldest profession.’
‘Might as well be, a lot of them.’ He stopped. ‘I’m over there.’ He nodded across the street, where the underground station stood, next to it a chop house called the Three Nuns.
‘What sort of photographs?’
‘You know.’
‘French?’
‘Probably not that bad, they’re actionable, but — suggestive, you know. Revealing. Kind of men who come birding here, it doesn’t take a lot of female flesh to please them, all they get to see usually is the wife’s shoulder when she’s undressing in the closet.’
They shook hands. Before he turned away, Munro said, ‘Georgie doesn’t really suspect you of anything worse than muddying the waters. But don’t annoy him, all right?’ He touched a finger to his hat and moved away into a stream of pedestrians.
Denton watched him go, feeling that he was betraying Munro by keeping what he had seen in the girl’s room from him — Munro a decent man, for all he’d allowed himself to be overawed by Guillam.
‘Munro!’
Denton dived into the street, dodging a hansom and getting shouted at, then running past and around pedestrians like a footballer. He caught Munro at the door of the Three Nuns; somebody opened the door to go in and the warm smell of food was sucked out.
‘Munro!’
Munro looked startled, then guilty, as if Denton had caught him at something.
‘I’ve got something to tell you. Walk back there with me.’
Munro was clearly puzzled, thrown off by his sudden appearance. ‘We could go inside.’
‘No, I want to go back.’ He set his face. ‘I’m going back whether you do or not.’
‘What the devil for?’
‘I’ll tell you as we go.’
Munro made a face — displeasure, disapproval — but turned back, and they crossed the High Street together, Denton for a moment thinking how crazy it was that this had actually once been a ‘high street’, the spine of a village. London like a monster child that ate its mother and never stopped growing. He checked his watch and wondered where he’d get dinner.
He led them back the same way they had come, Munro always a few inches behind him as if reluctant. ‘I saw something in her room,’ Denton said. ‘I didn’t say anything in front of Guillam; he’d got under my skin — as he meant to.’
‘That’s suppressing evidence.’
‘Oh, come on! It isn’t his case, anyway.’
Munro grunted. They were walking back down the Minories, fewer people out now, everybody seeming in a great hurry. Denton said, ‘There’s a picture on her wall. The frame is fastened to the plaster.’ He waited for a response; none came. ‘Not hanging out from the wall at the top, flat against it.’ Again, nothing. Denton said, ‘Never saw that done except in a sporting house, for looking through from the other side.’ They had almost reached John Street. ‘I want to see what’s on the other side.’ He didn’t say how he knew the finer points of sporting houses.
Munro, interested now, came even with him, and they walked shoulder to shoulder, Munro actually in the gutter because of the narrow pavement. ‘Let me handle this,’ he said when they could see the constable at the opening of Priory Close Alley.
‘Sir,’ the constable said, touching his helmet.
‘I wanted to check something.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Munro held something up and the constable shook his head and said, ‘Remember you from before sir — sir,’ this last to Denton. He suspected that what the policeman was really there to stop were journalists and souvenir-seekers, anyway.
Munro led the way into the court, the sky overhead now slate-blue-grey, several stars quite bright against it, as if seen up a stovepipe. The court itself was gloomy, lit only by the faded end of day and a single gas lamp on the wall at the back. The curtained windows in the former warehouse were unlit.
Munro crossed the court quickly and tried the larger door in the house where Stella Minter had died. It was locked. He knocked. The first knock brought no response, the second only more silence, but the third caused a rumble of footsteps, a clatter of locks and the appearance of a red face above a collarless shirt.
‘It’s unlocked, i’n’t it?’ the man bellowed. He turned the outer handle to demonstrate that the door was unlocked. ‘Unlocked every night seven to half-eight, as everybody knows because you forget your bloody keys!’
‘I have a few questions.’ Munro held up his badge.
‘Oh, crikey! We’ve had you lot for two days now, give it a rest!’
‘See here, my man-’
‘Come in, then, but give me a rest, I just got home; let me eat my dinner, good God, I ain’t the fount of wisdom!’ Then, knowing he’d given a policeman lip, he hurried off. off. Inside, a long, dirty corridor ran away from the door; the man fled along it and disappeared where it made a jog to the right — another result, Denton thought, of some shift in the building’s destiny.
Denton and the detective stopped just inside the door, Denton closing it firmly behind him and then leaning back on it. He studied the moulding at the top of the left-hand wall, on the other side of which was Stella Minter’s room.
From the wall in which the front door stood to a place six feet along, no moulding existed; then, at a slight, not quite right-angle corner, the moulding began, turning again to run the length of the corridor. Denton pointed at it and said, ‘There used to be an opening here into her room.’ He was almost whispering, no rational cause.
In the wall below this gap was a door, narrower by a lot than the front door, narrower even than the two doors he could see along the corridor on the other side. It had a thumb-latch and a D-shaped handle, an apparently new Yale lock above it. With the front door open, this door would be partly hidden. Denton opened the front door to demonstrate.
Munro put his hand on the worn iron handle, his thumb on the latch above it. With a clank, the latch opened, and the door swung out, and Denton felt a stab of disappointment, because a door that hid anything important would have been locked. A smell, sour and disquieting, oozed out.
Over Munro’s shoulder, he saw a narrow space whose floor was about the size of the inside of a coffin, its long rear wall made of open studs with strips of lath and clumps of horsehair plaster protruding between them — the back side of a plastered wall. Munro leaned in, began to rummage around in the darkness of the closet’s farther end. So far as Denton could make out in the gloom, there were two long-empty night-soil buckets, apparently no longer used; a five-step ladder; a straight chair with a spindled back, missing three spindles; and a broom so worn that the bound-together straws had been reduced to a kind of club, the broom found only by touch while Munro was stumbling around. The smell proved to be recent vomit, now dry, from somebody who had eaten kidneys.
It made me puke, Mulcahy had said.
Munro backed out, forcing Denton out of the closet doorway, then standing aside to let the faint light from a fan over the outer door try to penetrate inside. ‘What we need is a dark lantern. Can’t see my own shoes in there.’ Munro bent forward again and felt over the lath, down to the floor, then got on his knees and passed both hands over the old boards. ‘Puke,’ he muttered. ‘Somebody lost his dinner. Kidneys, for sure — can’t see enough.’ He got up and wiped his fingers on a handkerchief. ‘I hate to ask this lot for so much as a candle.’
Denton pushed past him and stood close to the lath-and-plaster wall. ‘Close the door,’ he said. ‘Come in or not, Munro, but close the door. I want my eyes to adjust.’
Munro pushed in and closed the door, and the space was suddenly very tight, Denton able to smell both of them — wool overcoat, tobacco, sweat — and the slightly chemical odour of Munro’s breath over the resident stench. He found himself holding his breath.
He waited.
‘Bit far-fetched, this,’ Munro said.
In fact, after several minutes, Denton could still see less than he had with the door open. What was he doing in here?
He felt over the walls with his fingertips, first low down, then standing to reach as high as he could, then standing on the chair and feeling over the upper part of the walls and the ceiling. It was a balancing act to stand on that uncertain chair in the dark; he started to sway, caught himself on Munro’s head, pushing the policeman’s hat down and hearing a grunt of complaint. He held himself that way until he located the light coming under the door, and when it snapped into focus his equilibrium came back and he was secure again. He raised his eyes, ready to work his way down the wall, and then he saw it — a thin line of lesser darkness in the dark where the laths ran.
‘There.’
‘There what?’
He slowly lowered himself and put one foot on the floor. From that level, the line of faint light was invisible. He worked his way up again, put his face against the clumps of plaster and the rough wood of the lath and looked down and so could see it. He put his hand on it, first hiding the light, then working the hand down until the light showed, then finding the exact lath and pushing on it and watching the light all but disappear.
He got down again, keeping his fingers on the lath. He tried pulling on it, catching it at top and bottom with his fingernails, and then he could see a little, dim line as the lath pulled away a fraction of an inch but wouldn’t come free. He tried it several ways, and it was only when he pushed from the bottom that the lath moved upwards and could then be worked up over the roughness above it until it stopped, caught on something above. He felt the movable piece with his fingers in the dark and found that a piece of lath about two inches long had been scarfed on both ends so that they fitted under matching scarves on the strip in the wall — that, in fact, somebody rather skilled had cut the lath twice at an angle. Probing with a finger below this cut-out section, he found a hole.
He leaned forward. His hat brim hit the wall first; he removed the hat and put it behind him on the chair, leaned forward again, felt the tickle of a horsehair. He put his eye to the dim light and found himself looking, as he expected, into the back of Balmoral Castle and, beyond it, Stella Minter’s room.
The hole in the reverse painting was big enough that he could see all of the far wall and the oval window in it, through which the light from the outside gas lamp was shining. He could barely make out the shape of the bed, which was below him and close to the wall through which he was looking, most of it invisible because of the dark bloodstains. Yet, he thought, with the gas light on above the bed — now to his left and higher — especially with its silver reflector, somebody standing here could have seen a good deal. Everything that went on in the bed, certainly. He thought of the reflector on the gas lamp: that might have been the work of the person who had cut the lath, too.
‘Have a look.’ He pulled Munro into the place where he had been standing and put Munro’s hand on the rough lath and plaster and led it to the hole.
‘Voyeur,’ Munro said after perhaps twenty seconds.
Odd, then, that the closet door was unlocked.
Munro pushed back, and Denton heard the door latch. ‘This changes the price of fish,’ Munro said. ‘Willey will have to be told.’
Denton worked the cut piece of lath back into its niche and took up his hat and stepped out into the corridor.
The house was making sounds, as a house with a dozen or so people in it must. A medley of cooking smells reached him, too, not a bad odour at all, a blend like meat-and-vegetable stew, balm after the closet. Munro was straightening his hat, looking solemn; when the hat was right, he headed down the corridor towards the back of the house. Denton put his own hat on and walked behind him, passing doors on both sides, coming at the end to a kitchen on his left, the door open, and a water closet on his right, the door also open. The water closet was filthy, the kitchen fairly clean; both, he supposed, communal. Three people were eating at a table in the kitchen; two men, one of them the man who had opened the front door for them, were standing by a big coal range, staring into pots. When Munro stepped into the doorway, everybody looked at him and everything stopped. No need to say he was a policeman; the man in the collarless shirt had no doubt already told them what had happened at the front door.
‘What’s the name of the landlord?’ Munro said.
Nobody spoke. After some seconds, a pretty, rather showy young woman said, ‘Never see him. Wouldn’t know him if he appeared in a car drawn by the royal family.’
‘Don’t make smart remarks, young woman! Who takes the rent?’
She looked at the others, blushing but apparently excited by her defiance. ‘His collector slithers in on Mondays. A charmer, I don’t think.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Clebbins,’ the other man by the stove said.
‘Just Clebbins?’
‘All I ever heard.’
They didn’t know where Clebbins lived or where he went or what other properties he gouged rents out of, although there was some sense that the owner might live in Chelsea, or possibly Hammersmith.
‘Who uses that cupboard up at the front?’
Four of the five didn’t seem to know that there was a cupboard up at the front. The fifth, an older, dour woman at the table, opined that nobody used it because it was always locked.
Denton pushed himself a little forward and gave them a quick description of Mulcahy. Had they ever seen him?
They had all seen him a thousand times, every day of their lives.
‘That’s all we’ll get out of this lot tonight,’ Munro said. He raised his voice to include them all. ‘City of London Police will be back tomorrow. See you’re ready to talk to them without a lot of lip.’ The collarless man dropped his eyes to his pot; the young woman flounced or shrugged and looked sideways at a woman who had never spoken.
Out in the court again, Munro said, ‘I wish you’d told Guillam.’ He was looking up into the steely sky, apparently studying the stars — six or eight now — with his hands behind him under his overcoat tails. ‘He’ll be annoyed.’
‘I can’t help that.’
‘You could have earlier.’ It sounded petulant. Denton didn’t respond. Munro straightened and put his hands into his overcoat pockets. ‘It’s possible to see it as a little too convenient — you finding it.’
‘Wouldn’t have been less convenient if I’d pointed it out an hour ago. What are you saying, that I’m a suspicious person because I found something the police missed?’
‘If they missed it. Willey’s people might have found it and not told anybody.’ He breathed deeply, as if he was inhaling the night air for its odour. ‘What d’you make of it?’
‘You said “voyeur”. That’s about it.’ He had been surprised that Munro had known the word, the sexual type. As this wasn’t fair to Munro, he felt vaguely ashamed.
‘Your man Mulcahy?’
‘“My man,” good God. Why don’t you work it out and tell me.’
Munro bounced on his toes and said ‘Mm’ a couple of times. ‘I’ll do that. But you know, if you’re so hot on your Mulcahy, you need to find him yourself. Nobody’s going to do it for you — there just isn’t enough in it. Enough likely information, I mean. We’re not perfect, Denton, and there’s not enough of us. We have to balance the likely gain against how many men and how much time.’ He led Denton out of the alley and up Vine Street, saying nothing, and at the corner of John Street he stopped and gripped Denton’s arm, this time while facing him. ‘Come and see me in the morning. Georgie and Willey’ll have it on paper by then. I’m on my way to the Yard now, file a report.’
‘Feeling like a detective again?’
Munro grunted. ‘Wife’s waiting, dinner’s waiting, kids’re waiting. A policeman’s lot is not a happy one.’ Suddenly, he clapped Denton on the arm. ‘Good work. You’re all right, Mr Denton.’ He limped away on John Street and disappeared around the corner.
It was growing dark. Denton found he was hungry. The evening loomed — no Emma, no dinner out. His interest in Mulcahy, however, had revived; it had sunk to almost nothing after Guillam implied that Willey had made an arrest, but the closet and the peephole had revived it. He thought about what Munro had said about finding Mulcahy himself. It would be a matter of time and people — both things that money could buy, although money was something he was not flush with just then. Still-
Denton walked another street and then hailed a cab and told the driver to head for Lloyd Baker Street; once there, he pulled one of the three bells that hung by the door of a run-down but still respectable house. This was the lodging of his typewriter, who translated his scribbled-over, crossed-out scrawls into legible pages. She lived on the first floor and he saw a light, but it was now night and he felt awkward about being there, a male figure in the dark when she opened the front door.
‘Oh — Mr Denton.’ Not particularly welcoming, nor particularly relieved. She was a very proper woman, he remembered too late.
‘I know it’s late, Mrs Johnson.’
‘No, no — quite all right-’ She looked anguished. Wondering if he would want to come in, perhaps.
‘I won’t come in,’ he said. ‘I only wondered if you could organize a, well — a job of work for me.’
‘Oh, yes?’ Dubious. She was a stout woman, still fairly young, widowed. She earned her living by typewriting, gave off no signals about having any other life.
‘I need for somebody to go through the London directories to look for a man who came to visit me. He left no address, but it’s important that I find him. It would take several people to do it.’
‘I can’t take time away from my typing machine, I’m afraid.’ She had a shawl clutched tight at her throat with one hand, the other on the door as if she wanted to be sure she could close it on him.
‘I thought you might know other people, other women, who could use the work. It would be several days’ work. I’d pay them for a week — let’s say three people — even if they finished before that.’ He didn’t confess that his bank account was running down towards zero; paying several women would probably get it there.
She looked out at the cab, which she seemed to see for the first time. The cabman was holding a water bag under the animal’s mouth. ‘I’m keeping you,’ she said.
‘No, I’m keeping you from your, um, meal.’ Did you say ‘supper’ in this situation? Perhaps ‘tea’. What the hell. ‘I really need this to be done, Mrs Johnson.’
‘Well — I know a few other typewriters from the agency-They don’t get the work that I do.’ Said with pride. She was good, and very fast.
Denton wrote ‘R. Mulcahy’ on a card and held it out. ‘That’s the name. And of course, I’d pay you for getting things organized.’
She stared at the card, which she’d taken with the hand that had been holding the shawl. ‘I don’t have any time open-’ She clutched the shawl again, the card close to her chin. ‘Still, because it’s you-Can you pay them five shillings a day? They have to be assured it’s worth passing up typewriting jobs for.’
He said that yes, of course, that would be fine, although he was thinking that twenty-five shillings for a week’s work was more than working-men made. Still, he was in no position to bargain. ‘And a bonus of a shilling for each R. Mulcahy they find.’ He hesitated. ‘There may be more than one.’ If there were a lot of them, however, he’d done something stupid. But how many could there be?
She muttered a good night, and the door closed. Denton felt as he had with Guillam, suspected of something nasty and not exonerated.
Well, of course, he was male.
At home, Atkins had been grumpy because he was trying to recover from an uncomfortable hour with two detectives while Denton had been with Munro and Guillam. He had started complaining about it at the front door and had continued all the way through Denton’s stepping into the hot bath he thought he’d earned. In turn, while he dressed again, Denton had told Atkins about the visit to the dead woman’s room.
‘What do you make of it?’ Denton said now.
‘Nothing.’ Atkins jiggled the coat he was waiting for Denton to put on — the same brown suit he had worn earlier, now found déclassé by Atkins for evening wear but just right for Denton’s Bohemian mood. ‘They also serve who only stand and answer coppers’ questions about their employer, leaving out the difficult bits like where you was going at eleven o’clock that night, the which I kept to myself.’
‘And grateful I am to you for it. But I don’t want to talk about that; I want to talk about the girl’s death.’ He sat on the bed and began to pull on a shoe. ‘I’ll tell you how I see it.’ He looked up to see if Atkins was going to pout. ‘Do you want to know how I see it?’
‘Of course I do; it’ll be better than Charlie O’Malley.’ Charles Lever’s Charles O’Malley, the Irish Dragoon was Atkins’s favourite book, said by him to have been read twenty times. Apparently hearing his own tone, Atkins became apologetic. ‘No, truly, Colonel, I don’t have your gift for making a story out of a bunch of facts. Tell me how you see it.’
Denton paused with the other shoe in his hands. He moved the shoe up and down as if he were weighing it. ‘All right-’ He looked at nothing, the scene before his eyes like a play. ‘Stella Minter opens the door. Maybe it’s somebody she knows, although that’s just a possibility. Anyway, he comes in — maybe pushes his way in, maybe doesn’t. He hits her — twice, I don’t know why. He undresses. Or maybe he doesn’t. She either takes off her wrapper or he pulls it off her — interesting to know if there’re any rips in it. I suppose the police won’t tell me things like that. She lies down or he pushes her down. He has the clasp knife open in his hand but he’s hiding it. He enters her.
‘Mulcahy is watching through the peephole. I think that this is possible only if he has an arrangement with Stella Minter — he’s put up the reverse-painted picture with the scraped-out place, also the reflector on the gas lamp. So he’s watching. He doesn’t see the knife until it’s actually in her throat and the blood spurts. The killer stands up and starts to stab the woman in the bosom. Maybe she tries to roll out of the way, or maybe he moves her; anyway, blood actually spurts as high as the picture, so now Mulcahy sees it all through red.
‘Mulcahy throws up. Maybe he makes noise doing it — people do, a coughing, strangling noise — or maybe he screams. And he opens the closet door and runs for his life.
‘The killer hears the sound that Mulcahy made. He looks up, and he sees the light from the open closet door shining through the hole in the wall and the glass of the picture. He knows somebody has seen him.
‘He panics. Or he doesn’t panic. This is a clever man and a fast thinker, so maybe he doesn’t panic. He wipes the blood off his naked body with the wrapper and drops it into the blood on the floor and puts his clothes back on.’ Denton was seeing it as if it were a scene he was writing. ‘He’s still smeared with blood under his clothes, but there isn’t enough of it to soak through. In the darkness outdoors, he’ll be all right.
‘He goes out. Now, he’s almost certainly already mutilated her abdomen and cut out her female parts, because he’s not going to go out and come back and do that — or is he? Is he that clever? That cold-blooded? Whenever he did it, he may have done it out of — what is it? rage? — or maybe that’s where his cleverness comes in; maybe he’s planned it that way to make it look like rage. Or insanity. Or maybe he thinks of it after he’s dressed and has gone out, and he goes back in to do it. But, by the way, if he’s planned all that out, then he’s planned to kill her, and then I think he knew her and there’s a personal reason for killing her — he’s a rejected lover, maybe. Or, if it’s just something he did, then he’s a maniac. But a damned clever one.
‘So he goes out, and he goes in the main door of the house, and he sees the closet door at once — open. Think of it, Sergeant — he was in that house, maybe somebody in the kitchen or the WC, and nobody saw him. He’s clever and he’s brave, or audacious, anyway. So he steps into the closet and he sees the hole and the lath, and this is where his cleverness comes in — he pushes the lath back into place, because he doesn’t want the police to find it. He doesn’t want them to have any clues to Mulcahy’s existence, at least not before he’s found Mulcahy first.
‘Or that’s the way I see it, because I think Mulcahy was so terrified that he wouldn’t have stopped to push the piece of lath down. Nor to lock the closet door, by the way — the reason we found it unlocked. And the killer didn’t lock it because he didn’t have a key — it was in Mulcahy’s pocket.
‘So the killer’s mind is racing. He knows he has to get out at once, but he knows he has to find whoever was in the closet. It’s too late to try to follow him. What does he do?’
He looked up at Atkins. The sergeant let himself be looked at, shrugged, stood there. ‘Runs like H, I suppose.’
‘Well, yes. But suppose he finds something that Mulcahy has left in the closet in his terror — and that has his name on it.’
He was still looking at Atkins, who said, ‘Well, it ain’t his hat, because we had that, at least until the coppers took it away for evidence this afternoon. His coat? Unlikely to have his address in it, any more than his hat. All right, I’ll bite — what did he take away that had Mulcahy’s name on it?’
Denton shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Maybe nothing.’ He saw Atkins’s frown. ‘I think that Mulcahy’s a voyeur. He saw the crime. He was there, Sergeant — that’s why he told us all those lies. He didn’t want to confess what he was, but he wanted help.’
‘No reason to want help unless he looked back and saw the murderer, covered with blood and gore, running at him with an axe, is there?’ Atkins was being distinctly sarcastic. ‘What I mean is — if he was so scared he come to you, he had a reason for thinking the murderer was on to him. Right?’
Denton was fastening his cuffs. He made an equivocal sound, like a small machine starting up.
‘If you ask me, General, he’s a damned lucky voyeur if he isn’t dead by now. The man who butchered the Minter bitch wouldn’t rest until he’d got Mulcahy, too, if he knew where to find him.’
Denton stood still to have his coat put on. ‘That’s what’s got me worried. And there isn’t a damned thing I can do about it. Except — I put Mrs Johnson on getting some women to search the directories for him.’ He saw Atkins frown — more money going out — but he ignored him and pulled his shirt cuffs down inside the coat sleeves. ‘You going out?’
‘It’s one of my nights, isn’t it?’ Atkins had two nights a week off, part of the generous deal he had made for himself with Denton. There was much to be said, from his point of view, in serving a man who felt guilty about being served. ‘Yes, I’m going out!’
Denton sighed. ‘Enjoy yourself.’ It was more than he expected, in his present mood, to do himself.