Bohemian Girl, The (21 page)

‘You said that would happen.’

‘Yeah, well, what it turns out, Denton, is that Struther Jarrold comes from a very powerful and very rich family. He lives with his mother - that’s the Belgravia address - and she’s Lady Emmeline Jarrold.’

‘Where’s Lord Jarrold?’

‘There isn’t any Lord Jarrold; why would there be a Lord Jarrold?’ He sounded irritable.

‘You say she’s Lady something or other.’

‘Lady Emmeline. Because she’s the sister of the Duke of Edderton.’

‘Who’s her husband, then?’

‘Dead. He
was
Captain Jarrold.’

‘But—’

Munro leaned forward, his huge hands splayed on the desktop. He spoke slowly, as if to a backward child. ‘Duke’s daughters get called “Lady”. They marry commoners, the commoners stay common. Can we take that as read now?’ He wiped a hand down his face. ‘I’m too tired for this. Find yourself a
Debrett’s
.’

‘I’ll never understand this country.’

‘Nor me, and I’m Canadian.’ Munro produced a crumpled white paper from a drawer, then took a sugar bun, somewhat the worse for the night, from the paper. He munched. ‘Markson’s the officer of record, so he laid the charge, but I was there because I thought the legal gentry might make mincemeat of him. Also had somebody from the prosecutor’s shindig. In the event, Markson did all right.’ He finished the bun and dusted grains of sugar from his fingers. ‘However.’

‘I thought you might be leading up to that.’

‘Feeling of nameless dread? Yeah, I had it all through the arraignment. ’ He put his forearms on the desk again. ‘Here’s where we are: things are not ideal, but they’re passable. Markson laid a charge of breaking and entering at Mrs Denton’s, a charge of wilful destruction of property, and a charge of denial of quiet enjoyment. We laid no charges having to do with you, your house, or the house behind because we don’t have hard evidence and it’s better to wait until we do.

‘My super got the chief super out of the theatre last night to tell him that we’d arrested a relative of the Duke of Edderton. Chief Super’s immediate judgement - wise, I think - was that we go only with the things we can prove. Can always build a case on the circumstantials later, hope Jarrold gives us more in examination.

‘Jarrold’s counsel objected ten times - this is in
police court
! - and pled him not guilty on all counts. Magistrate let him out on bond of ten pounds and his recognizance.’

‘Oh, my God.’

‘He’s got no record, Denton. We cited no crime against persons - the attack on you wasn’t in it - and you’re talking about a duke’s nephew, or whatever the hell he is, and invasion of two rooms in bloody Bethnal Green! The clothes were old and shabby. The damned piano is good only for firewood. It’s the sort of thing you call a prank if you’re counsel for the defence.’

‘He’s dangerous, Munro.’

Munro took another bun from the sack. He wet a finger and used it to lift loose grains of sugar, then licked it. ‘His lawyers will fight the fingerprint evidence as an untested theory. They said so. They were quite jolly about it - strong suggestion that it would be like a slice off the rare to them. Not quite honest of them - they know it would be the test case for fingerprints, so the police and the prosecutors would throw everything into it. In fact, I suspect they’d rather not go to court over it.’ He put his head on one hand. ‘However, Crown Prosecutor’s office had a message from the Home Secretary this a.m. that he doesn’t want to use this as the test case on fingerprints.’

‘But that’s the strongest evidence you have!’

‘His view - and looked at from his place, Denton, he’s right - his view is that when we go to court on fingerprint evidence for the first time ever, he wants a sure conviction. To him, that means a full hand of prints and corroborating evidence - that is, good enough that we could convict without the prints. From his viewpoint, it’s important to the whole future of the use of fingerprints. I mean, imagine what would happen if we went to court on Jarrold and lost.’

Denton broke off a piece of the sugar bun and chewed it. The currants on the outside had got hard; inside, they were still fairly good, unlike the bun itself. He said, ‘Tell me the worst.’

‘If he’ll plead guilty, we’ll reduce the charges to trespassing on the premises of another and disrespect of private property.’

‘No imprisonment.’

Munro shook his head. ‘Counsel hinted last night that they’ll go for such a thing. They’re putting it out this morning that Jarrold has been under strain, temporarily unbalanced. Prosecutor thinks they’ll be willing to accept some sort of house arrest under medical supervision, meaning in fact that young Struther will tiptoe off to Mummy’s castle in Sussex and be very quiet for a while.’

‘He’s dangerous!’

‘And there’s something more.’ Munro had sat back, now turned sideways in his chair. He was looking at the edge of the desk, not at Denton, picking at a splinter with a fingernail. ‘If they go to court, everything about you and Mrs Striker will be splattered over the papers brighter than the paint on her walls. No, let me speak. I don’t know what’s between the two of you - it isn’t my business - but it was plain yesterday there’s something. You lit up like a magic lantern when she came into your room.

‘These people will be ruthless, Denton. They’ll hire detectives by the long ton. They’ll find out everything, and then the papers will double that with half-truths and plain lies.’

‘I don’t give a damn.’

‘And everything will come out about
her
. I know who she is, Denton. Do you want to put her through that again? They’ll start up the old crap about her killing her husband. They’ll say she was insane. You and I know she didn’t kill him; he was a rotten bastard who treated her like shit, but that’s not the line they’ll take. He put her in a mental institution to tame her, but what’ll be said is that she was mad and he committed her because she was dangerous. Do you want her to go through that?’ Before Denton could answer - the question had been rhetorical, anyway - Munro said, ‘They’ll put Mrs Striker on the stand and ask her under oath if she’s been a prostitute. Their line will be that she still is and she lured Jarrold to her rooms and did something to make him angry - tricked him, mocked him. Do you want that?’

Denton breathed noisily. He said, ‘You’ll have to ask her.’

‘I thought you’d be in touch with her.’

‘It isn’t like that. She makes her own decisions.’

Munro stared at him, shrugged.

‘What’s the alternative to a trial?’ Denton said.

‘Let him plead him guilty to lesser charges. Wait.’

‘Until he does something worse?’

Munro picked at the bit of wood. ‘And then only if he leaves evidence.’

Denton wasn’t present when Struther Jarrold pled guilty to the reduced charges. He saw Jarrold outside the courtroom for an instant, got what he thought was a shy smile of recognition that was also a look of satisfaction. The pasty face was that, he thought, of the man he’d seen on the bench at New Scotland Yard days before.

The actual proceedings happened in chambers, to the disappointment of not only Denton but also a small crowd of journalists. Balked of Jarrold - his legal counsel took him down the judge’s private stairs and out a back way - the newspapermen crowded around Denton. He was prepared, however: his tale was that he was there looking over the courts for a new book; he knew nothing about Jarrold; it was all a mystery to him; why didn’t they go after Mr Jarrold?

‘Mr Denton, what’s your relationship with the Striker woman?’

‘What’s that?’

‘Woman whose rooms were vandalized. What’s the connection?’

‘No idea what you’re driving at.’ Where had he learned that expression? Guillam - the former CID man had said that to him. Useful line.

‘Isn’t the Striker woman the same one whose life you saved a year ago? Shot the eye out of the crazed killer that was holding her?’

‘Oh, really?’

‘Mr Denton, Mr Denton! There was a crime at your premises - any connection?’

‘My premises?’

‘Break-in at the house behind. What’s the connection with this Janet Striker?’

‘I think you’ve got the wrong end of the stick.’

‘Mr Denton, is this Striker woman the same one who was put in an institution by her husband some years ago? Great scandal - hospital for the criminally insane - did she do this to her own premises? Is she at it again?’

He bit his tongue. ‘You’re asking the wrong man.’

‘Mr Denton - Mr Denton—!’

He pushed his way through them. ‘I’ve got work to do—Sorry—Let me pass, please—’ He was almost free of them when a florid man his own height blocked his way. When Denton tried to go around, the big man put a hand on his chest. Denton looked down at the hand, up at the man’s eyes. He said, ‘I’ll give you three seconds to take that hand away.’ The man flushed, dropped his hand. The others hooted.

Mostly, the newspapers judged that either there was no story to be told, or the story was about powerful people whom they didn’t discuss in the public press.
The Times
reported nothing. Another paper buried a short piece headed ‘Peer’s Relative Pleads’ on an inner page. Only the
Daily Mail
attempted to make a story of it, raking up Janet Striker’s past and her connection to Denton through the violence of a year before but suggesting no other link. It did quote ‘a gentleman close to the said Jarrold’s legal counsel’ who had said that ‘Jarrold was a loyal reader of Mr Denton’s well-known works’, but he had offered no other explanation for the attack on Janet Striker’s rooms than ‘the great stress felt by a sensitive nature’. Denton frowned at a single sentence near the end of the piece: ‘A source close to New Scotland Yard expressed concern at the possible connection between the American novelist, a guest in this country, and recurring acts of violence.’

‘Damn Guillam!’ he shouted.

‘Sue him. We’ve strict laws of libel this side of the water, Colonel.’

Denton flung the paper back at Atkins. ‘I don’t know how you can read that trash.’

‘Down here in the lower classes, we don’t know any better.’

‘Oh, dry up.’

‘There’s tea made. Want some?’

‘Ever occur to you that we were better off in prison, Sergeant?’

‘Book going badly?’

‘No, it’s going like a house afire - when I can get away from these damned distractions. Bring me tea, yes. Upstairs.’ He went up and worked until evening. The stack of manuscript had grown thick, that already typed representing at least half of the book in its neat pile on the corner of the desk. He was able now to spend most of the day writing new material, then take the typed part to bed to correct before he went to sleep. Janet Striker had got herself a room in a small private hotel in Bayswater. Her piano, minus the lid - it had gone off to the Yard with its fingerprint - had been carted down to Collard and Collard ‘successors to Clementi and Company’ for repair. If she was dismayed by the newspaper’s raking up of her old life, she didn’t say so, murmuring only that she would stay away from him for a few days while the newspapermen cooled down, at her legal counsel’s advice - she dared do nothing that might threaten the resolution of her lawsuit.

‘And I’m to stay away from you, I suppose.’

‘I suppose.’

It didn’t seem to him a very good reason, but neither did her concern with propriety or with his public self. She was, he thought, making excuses, and not because of the sex itself. Unless she was pretending (and there was always the knowledge that she had been a prostitute, that dissembling might be habit), sex came easily and rather happily to her. It was, rather, that he was a man. She believed men hated women. All men, all women: there seemed to be no exceptions. She had been raped by a man, abused by a man, humiliated by a man, institutionalized by a man. Men had paid her to invade her. Why, then, should she trust him? Why should she run to have him invade her - although he hated that notion of it, that one of them invaded and the other let it be done: surely it was a mutual wanting, the desire to become one? Or was that a man’s self-congratulation?

One day, he feared, she would go away. Perhaps she would write him a letter; perhaps she would simply go, and he wouldn’t know how to find her. Once she had money, she could go wherever, be whatever she wanted. Her present skittishness, as he thought of it, might be prelude to something more permanent. It wasn’t coyness that was keeping her away from him; it was fear - of the maleness she believed hated her femaleness - and perhaps a bleak sense that it was too late for her, or perhaps that he was the wrong one. Or she was the wrong one. Better a life alone than one that rested on a bad bargain - he knew that feeling.

So he shared his bed with the typed page.

The next day, he went to complain to Munro about the ‘source close to New Scotland Yard’ that had been quoted in the
Daily Mail
. ‘That’s Guillam!’ he all but shouted at Munro. ‘What the hell is he doing messing in the Jarrold business?’

Munro was busy and tired. His expression suggested a stomach ailment. He looked at Denton through splayed fingers and said, ‘The Jarrold business
is
Guillam’s business. Jarrold’s fallen into Guillam’s pocket.’

‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’

‘It means that Georgie Guillam knows how to work the system.

I told you - his new office is a catch-all. He persuaded somebody that house arrests are his.’

‘That’s because of me! It is because of me, isn’t it?’

Munro shrugged. ‘I told you he doesn’t forget. Yes, maybe he saw your name on it and thought there’s something in it for him. Nothing I can do about it. It’s out of CID. You want to complain, complain to Georgie.’

‘Oh, hell!’

‘Yeah.’

He got his friend Hector Hench-Rose - his baronetcy still so new it sparkled - to write him a letter of introduction to Lady Emmeline, Struther Jarrold’s mother. Jarrold was said to be under medical supervision in Sussex; the mother, Denton thought, might be amenable to a serious chat about her son.