The Bohemian Girl Part 16

That was Tuesday. He didn't see her the next two days and didn't hear from her. He had four more letters from his nemesis, but there was nothing in them that helped the police. Denton tried to do as she had said; he worked the entire day, blotting out Mary Thomason, blotting out Albert Cosgrove. The Thomason business was pretty well over, he thought. It galled him that Guillam would do nothing, but it was finally not worth fighting.

Thursday evening he was alone in the house. It was Atkins's half day; he was off somewhere pursuing his moving-picture idea. Denton ordered what proved to be a soggy supper in from the Lamb, ate it with his own wine for contrast, and fell asleep in his armchair afterwards.

At nine, somebody was at his front door.

He woke, groggy, displeased, waited for Atkins to get the door, remembered the man was out and fumbled in an overcoat pocket for the new Colt before going down himself. He cursed his own caution: Albert Cosgrove had made him afraid in his own house. Clever little b.a.s.t.a.r.d Clever little b.a.s.t.a.r.d. He backed off the night bolt and turned the lock and stayed behind the door as he opened it a few inches, willing it to be Cosgrove so that he could end things.

'Telegram, sir.'

Denton looked around the door. A bicycle was leaned against the railing. An almost toothless man the size of a large child was standing on the top step. 'Telegram for Denton.'

He s.h.i.+fted the revolver to his other hand and took the envelope, realized he had no money and made the man wait on the step while he ran up the stairs, then up to his bedroom; he swept coins from his bedside table, ran down again, pa.s.sed too much money out of the door.

He ripped open the envelope as he went more slowly back upstairs. Leaning into his sitting room, he held the yellow oblong to the gaslight.

AM AT WESTERLEY STREET PLEASE COME TO ME STOP JANET.

He pulled his braces over his shoulders as he ran again to his bedroom, pulling on the old jacket in which he had been working. The Colt went back into his overcoat pocket, a hat - any hat - on his head. Rupert was in the lower hall when he went out.

'Hold the fort,' he told the dog.

The ride to Westerley Street seemed interminable, the damp streets unusually clogged, but it was early still by London's nighttime standards.

'Can't you hurry?' he called up to the driver.

'This is London.'

It had got colder. The horse's breath showed, and wisps of steam from its back. To a man who wanted to move quickly, the London streets seemed like a garish part of h.e.l.l: grinning faces, too-bright colours, hooves and wheels and footsteps, crowds on buses and crowds on the pavements, a crush of people and animals and vehicles slowly going nowhere. He had an image of going on like this for ever, like a dream in which the destination is always lost.

'Ah! She's waiting for you in her ladys.h.i.+p's room.' Fred Oldaston was a former boxer who manned the door at Westerley Street. He actually dragged Denton through the doorway and was pulling his overcoat down over his shoulders as he talked. 'Oh, you ain't dressed - well, no matter. The missus is strict about it, you know-' He gave Denton a little push on the shoulder to set him moving.

He pa.s.sed through the first public room, where several young women sat about, one or two with men. They smiled; he pa.s.sed on, turning right into Mrs Castle's reception room, where she lounged on a sofa and drank champagne and received her clientele.

'Oh, G.o.d, Denton, you look absolutely decla.s.se. Go on through the little door there before somebody sees you - go on, go on-!'

She was not yet even moderately drunk but certainly annoyed.

The door was at first hard to find, covered with William Morris paper to match the walls. He found the dark-swirled china k.n.o.b by feeling for it and let himself through. On the other side was a room so different in its simplicity and its calm greens and blues as to have been in another world. Against the far wall, sitting on a dark-green love seat, was Janet Striker.

'What is it?' He went towards her.

She held up a hand to ward him off. 'I'm all right now.'

'Janet, what's happened?'

She looked quite normal, except that she didn't smile. 'He's been in my rooms,' she said. 'You were right.'

'Tell me.' He tried to sit beside her but she wouldn't give him room, and he fetched a chair that was too small for him. 'Janet, what is it?'

'I sent for the police. I've talked to them. They didn't understand, of course. It sounds silly.' She put a hand on his sleeve without looking at him. 'I worked late again - I'm trying to leave things right, clean up the files and old letters and - stuff, you know. I got home-' She laughed unpleasantly. 'My home home. My two wretched rooms. I opened the door and thought I was in the wrong place. Everything. Everything, Denton! Smashed, ripped - he'd poured red paint on things - on my piano, the only thing I cared about-!' A kind of spasm took her chin and neck from the clenching of her jaw. Her eyelids reddened, but no tears came. 'He found the scissors and cut my clothes.' She laughed again, the same harshness. 'I don't own a st.i.tch except what I have on! Everything gone - cut up, red paint poured on it. Clothes I'd haggled over and spent days looking for at the markets, haggled with a pushcart man! You knew they were somebody's cast-offs, didn't you - you didn't think I dressed like this because I wanted to!' She put her face in her hands. He touched her shoulder; she shrugged him off. He bent forward so far his knee almost touched the floor, the little chair tipped on its front legs. 'Janet - Janet, it's all right-'

'It isn't all right with me!'

'Janet - the clothes don't matter; you'll get more clothes-'

'He poured paint on my piano - on the keys!' And now she wept.

For a piano. Between her sobs, she said, 'You don't know. I saved - for months to buy that - piano. And it's only an old Clementi, a hundred years old, it's junk you wouldn't give a child to play, but it's what I can afford it's what I can afford!' She raised her head and sat back, dabbing at her nose with a handkerchief. 'Or could afford. I'll have money soon, and money is happiness, am I right?'

'You know better.'

'Well - poverty is misery, I can tell you that.' She wiped her eyes and sniffed. She looked at him as if she saw him for the first time, as if only now she understood that he was there. She leaned forward and put a hand behind his neck, pulled them together, her face hot and damp against his. 'Well, now you've seen me cry,' she said.

'I didn't think you did.'

'I've been known to.' She kissed his ear. 'I'd like you to take me to bed.'

'Yes - yes-'

She pulled away. 'No. Not here.'

'Come home with me.'

'Not that, either. I shall stay here tonight in Ruth's extra room. I know it seems quixotic, Denton, but I want to stay here. This is my haven - this knocking shop is the closest I have to a home.'

'But you can't go to bed in it with me.'

'We've both been in the beds in this house too often as it is.'

She stood and shook her hair back and walked up and down, looking at herself in a mirror and trying to fix what she saw with her fingers and the handkerchief. She poured herself water from a carafe that stood by the sofa, drank it. She said, 'There's sherry and whisky over there if you want it.' She smiled at him. 'Will that chair hold both of us?'

'It really doesn't even hold me.'

She pulled him over to the sofa. 'Hold me for a bit. Then you must go home.' She looked into his eyes; they kissed; she put her head back. 'I just wanted, as you say, to be with you for a little.' She moved a few inches away. 'Now you should go home.'

'I don't want to.'

'I'm going to take one of Ruth's laudanum pills and slip into the land of dreams for a while. I used to do it rather too much. But not in a long time.' She leaned into the curved back of the sofa, which rose towards the ends in great loops like bows. 'He painted "Astoreth" on the wall. I take it to mean that I'd been paid a visit by his demon.' She exhaled shakily. 'What sort of demon takes an interest in old clothes and a lot of odd bits picked off the rubbish tip? It makes me question the demon's judgement.' She looked shrewdly at him. 'It was meant for you, you know.'

'Partly.'

'And part for me? Yes, perhaps. "See what I can do." Be careful, Denton.'

'Will you be safe here?'

'Between Fred, Ruth, the girls and the clientele, I shall be safer than in the Tower of London. Go home now.'

'Can I come back tomorrow?'

She frowned. 'I'll come to you. When do you stop working? Four? By then I'll have begged or borrowed some clothes. I'll come to you. Four?'

He held her again, kissed her and slipped out of the little door. In her receiving room, Ruth Castle was now surrounded by men, two or three with women of the house. Everybody was in formal dress. There was a smell of cigars and alcohol and perfume. Denton was impressed by the fact that he hadn't heard them from the inner room - nor they he, therefore.

'Denton, you look a fright - I've seen better-dressed navvies. Do go away.' Mrs Castle looked to the sleek, well-dressed men. 'When he's properly turned out, he's quite one of my favourite people.' Her voice was nasal, easily mocking; she dropped the H in 'he', perhaps intentionally. The received wisdom was that Ruth Castle had been a child from one of the rookeries who had been plucked out, bathed and raped by a wealthy man who had kept her for several years before sending her off to a house. From there, she had continued to rise - a 'personage', a marriage (or at least the honorific 'Mrs'), her own house.

She held out a hand, which he kissed, something he'd have done with n.o.body else. She pulled him close. 'Take care of her,' she murmured. The sour breath of champagne washed over him.

'I mean to.'

'You'd better.' She shoved him off. 'Now take your awful suit away.'

Seeing Oldaston again as he went out, he said, 'You ever know somebody called the Stepney Jew-Boy?'

'Jew-Boy Cohan? Haven't heard that name since Hector was a pup. Yes, I remember him well - mind, I never fought him, too small for me by a couple of stone.'

'He says he was never knocked down.'

'That's a fact. Very tough. But not fast enough. He could take a terrific blow, but he couldn't move his hands quick. Mind, he won fights, quite a deal of them. But lost, too.'

'He's looking for work, if you hear of anything.'

'No! Well, that's the pugilist's life in a nutsh.e.l.l. He addled?'

'No - seems quite sharp.'

'Tell you what I'd do if I was him - go to Mrs Franken. She's a Jewess herself, nothing wrong with that. She might have something in my line of work. She has a couple of houses, you never know.'

Atkins was waiting at home. He'd found Janet Striker's telegram beside Denton's armchair. And he'd read it, of course, so there was no point in pretending nothing had happened, some gain perhaps in telling him.

'I think I'll keep carrying that derringer,' Atkins said.

'You have Rupert.'

'All very well for you to say. You're sitting on an a.r.s.enal.'

'Don't shoot yourself.'

'Oh, ha-ha. Thirty years in the British army and I never so much as pinched my thumb in a breech. So your loony's turned dangerous. Well, you said he would. Now what?'

'A good citizen would wait for the police to catch him.'

'Yes, but what are you you going to do?' going to do?'

CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

Munro and Markson showed up at three-thirty the next afternoon. The two detectives were sombre, Markson clearly nervous, perhaps blaming himself somehow for the attack on Janet Striker's lodgings. Munro, phlegmatic at best, was apparently calm, but he acknowledged what Markson's jerkings of a leg and facial tics indicated: the police were worried.

'He isn't just some Bohemian would-be writer now. He's a threat,' Munro said. He was sitting in the upholstered piece opposite Denton's armchair; Markson was on an armless side chair that Atkins had fetched from farther up the room. 'What he did was an act of violence.'

'Symbolic violence, anyway,' Denton said. 'Paint looks like blood, but it isn't blood. Cutting up clothes isn't the same as cutting up a woman but gives the sense of it.'

'You're not defending him, I hope.'

'Trying to be accurate.' He was remembering what Janet Striker had said about insanity.

Munro grunted. 'For this copper, he's only one step away from real blood.'

'You're the police. Go catch him.'

Munro pushed his lips out and drew his brows down in an expression that, in a saloon, would have meant that a fight was coming. Markson said, 'We're trying. Mr Denton, we've had men on you all week.'

'They did a particularly fine job of catching him while he watched Mrs Striker leave this house.'

Munro raised a hand to silence Markson before he could complain. Munro twisted in his chair, crossed his legs, looked at Denton sideways. 'How did he find her, do you think?'

'Followed her, I suppose.'

'"Follow that cab"?' Munro snorted. 'What is he, invisible? One of Mr H. G. Wells's inventions, is he?'

Markson twitched. 'One of the watchers happened to be on his tea break.'

Munro groaned. 'Jesus wept.' He wiped his right hand over his face, then leaned his head on that hand, the elbow on the chair back. He looked like an actor playing great pain. 'I apologize, all right, Denton? For the Metropolitan Police, for myself - I apologize. We should have done better. All right?'

'I didn't ask you to.'

'No, but it makes me feel better. It's also a lesson to young Fred here - we're not always perfect.' He leaned forward, elbows on knees. 'Now look. We need to know where we are. How much danger is the woman in? You've got to be frank with me, Denton. Fred says she was here while he was here that day - she was collecting for some charity-'

'The Society for the Improvement of Wayward Women.'

'This is the same woman that got her face slashed last year and you saved her life, am I right? Now - don't get your dander up - is there more to it than her stopping by to pick up a contribution?'

'Why should there be more?'

'Because I'm a suspicious, cynical Canuck who doesn't share the English taste for p.u.s.s.y-footing about. You saved her life last year. One of the watchers reported following you to the Embankment where you met with a lady. Now she happens to be here collecting a contribution, which seems b.l.o.o.d.y odd, as the Royal Mail worked efficiently the last time I looked.'

Denton looked into Munro's eyes without wavering. 'We're friends.'

'Was she here before? Could Cosgrove have seen her with you before?'

Denton knew what Munro was after, knew that it was foolish to splutter and object. 'Yes.'

Munro looked at Markson, back at Denton. He sat back in his chair, his hands gripping the ends of the velour-covered arms. 'I'm going to have to put a watch on her.'