The Frightened Man (16 page)

‘Well, sir, it’s you,’ a big man said as he opened the door to Denton.

‘Hello, Bull.’ Fred Oldaston had fought bare-knuckled as the Lancashire Bulldog for fourteen years and had been the first Englishman to take Denton into a public house. He had also - same evening - taught Denton how to put a thumb into a man’s eye while punching him. Now fifty and two stone heavier than when he had fought, he was Mrs Castle’s conscience: ‘I keep them honest,’ he had said, meaning the clients. Now, he murmured, ‘Hurt your arm?’ as he closed the door behind Denton.

‘Somebody stabbed me, in fact.’

‘Fighting with knives, bad business, best stay out of it.’

‘I didn’t have much choice.’

Oldaston took his coat and pointed through a fringed and swagged doorway. ‘You know the route. Something to drink?’

‘I’d pass out.’ He went through the drapes and into a large parlour that was a couple of decades out of date, too much furniture and too much darkness, and that smelled of cigars and good perfume and coal fires. A man in evening dress was sitting in a corner with two women, one of whom looked expectantly at Denton; he passed on to a room beyond where a large table lamp with a globe painted with cherubs cast a glow the colour of a sunset. Mrs Castle was sitting where she always sat, in a large armchair surrounded with cushions, so that it was not possible to stand right next to her; the walls, surprisingly after the décor in the other rooms, were covered with a William Morris paper, but the rest was like the parlour - velvet and lace, a bulbous piano with paisley hanging from it like melting icicles, a sideboard big enough to have served as a back bar.

‘Well, here you are, then,’ she said. She held out a hand. ‘I ’eard you’d been ’urt. They say ’e tried to kill you, that true? The black silk thing is ever so elegant.’

Denton squeezed her hand and sat down. She was probably in her forties but looked both older and younger, her face well preserved but weary, her abundant hair her own, her voice firm, her figure overstated but good. He thought her attractive but had never got any encouragement from her. ‘A bad cut is all,’ he said.

‘But in your own house, my dear.’ She had firmer control of the H that time.

‘You seem to know all about it.’

‘Well, friends of friends in the press, you know.’ She sipped champagne. She was one of those drinkers who are always one or two drinks gone but who never seem drunk; one day, he supposed, it would all crash down on her. ‘Can I call somebody for you?’ she said.

‘It’s you I came to see.’

‘Oh, I’m flattered. Poor old me.’

She started to tell him some long story about HRH, whom she actually did know, although not absolutely recently. A lot of it was about horses, and Denton’s mind wandered. He watched, through the doorway, two or three more men in evening dress come in, then several women from another direction. The sound of male voices rose, then a woman’s, singing. Denton realized that one of the men was Hector Hench-Rose. When he sensed that Mrs Castle’s voice had changed tone, he knew that her story was over, and he smiled and nodded. When she stopped to pour herself more champagne, he said, ‘Maybe you can help me.’

‘My dear, I’d be delighted. Anything.’

‘I’d like to talk to somebody who knows the girls who work the street around the Minories.’

‘You’re ’urtin’ my feelin’s, my dear. Not going to be loyal to Westerley Street?’

‘Business. Writer’s business.’

‘What then, somethin’ about that killing? Is this about your arm?’

‘I’d like to find somebody who might help me talk to some of the girls.’

Mrs Castle smoothed her gown. ‘
I
don’t know anybody in that end of town,
I’m
sure. Bit of a ragtag and bobtail there, little of everythin’. I never hire from there, you know, they don’t ’ave the style.’ She looked hurt. ‘Cow-girls and goose-girls.’

‘I didn’t mean it that way.’

‘Surprised you’d think it of me.’

‘I didn’t. I only thought you might know somebody who did. Know that area, I mean.’

He had to apologize again, then wheedle her out of her mood, if it was genuine. She became roguish, then suddenly confiding. She really did know, or know of, all sorts of people, all sorts of stories. She seemed to be coming to some point, perhaps even a name, when Hector Hench-Rose came in with a very young woman, laughing and red-faced and rather tipsy for that early in the night.

‘Denton!’ he shouted, in case anybody in that part of London had missed his name. ‘Saw you when I came in! How’s that arm? I thought you had one foot in the grave, the way the papers went on. This is Yvonne, who’s a charmer, ain’t you? Ah, Mrs C, handsomer every time I see you.’ He kissed Mrs Castle’s hand and accepted a glass of champagne and proceeded to tell her all about a lot of police business that was almost certainly confidential. Yvonne stared into space, laughing when she thought she was supposed to, pulling at her clothes as if she had dressed too fast. Other people wandered in and out; an organ started to play a waltz a couple of rooms away. When Hench-Rose had finished his gossip, Mrs Castle looked at an ormolu clock and said, ‘Supper room’s open.’

‘Aha!’ Hench-Rose stood. He winked at Denton. ‘Join us? Little sustenance? I’ve a mind to visit the last act at the Palace of Varieties in Greenwich - care to join me?’ He didn’t wait for an answer, but in the doorway he called back over his shoulder with another shout of laughter, ‘Making rather a night of it!’ He was married, with several children; his wife was said to be shy.

‘Janet Striker,’ Mrs Castle said. ‘
Mrs
Janet Striker.’

Denton let his expression ask the question.

‘The person you want, my dear. ’Ench-Rose can be an exhausting soul, can’t he. Thought he’d never come to the point. Gave me a chance to think, though. Mrs Janet Striker. The Society for the Improvement of Wayward Women.’

‘Sounds awful.’

‘It
is
awful. But she ain’t. Tough as tripe, but a lady, and not your mealy-mouthed do-gooder. She understands the lives the girls live. She tries to find other work for them, get them off the street, which is like tryin’ to bail the Serpentine with a fish fork, but she
means
well. I wouldn’t send you to most of the hypocrites in that line, but Janet Striker’s a woman who—’ She smiled, cat-like, disingenuous. ‘You’ll have to meet her to see what she is.’ She rested her chin on the fingers of one hand and stared at him. ‘I’m not sure she’ll take to you, Denton.’

‘That’s flattering.’

‘She doesn’t think much of men.’

‘And she’s a Mrs?’

‘All the more reason.’

‘What’s her husband like?’

‘He isn’t like anything - he’s dead.’ She raised the champagne bottle out of the bucket and found it empty. ‘Tell them to send in another as you go out, will you, my dear?’ she said. She was tired of him.

This time, when he got home to bed he stayed there. A pleasant languor had overcome him in the cab. He took one of Dr Bernat’s powders and crawled between the sheets and fell off the edge of the world.

The Society for the Improvement of Wayward Women had an address in Aldersgate. The street was commercial but not prepossessing; the building was grim but not impressive; the office was as squalid as a land company in the Dakotas in mud season. Generations of heads had left hair oil in a smear above the chair rail; thousands of hands had left dirt on the doorjambs; God knows what had chipped the grey-green paint that covered the walls. It was not a setting where he expected to find women, but everybody there was female - a rather sullen, plain woman who guarded the outer office; a younger, morose woman behind a typing machine inside; and, in the far corner between two windows, Janet Striker.

Her look of weariness reminded him of Mrs Castle’s, although it had been earned in another school, he thought. She had a face that had once been unmarked perhaps, was now frankly guarded, any stock of pity or sentimentality expended. Her hair, very dark, was pulled tight back over the top of her head and wound in flat circles that hid her ears like some peculiar helmet. She wore greys and browns, both dark, not so much nun-like, however, as business-like, the dress years out of fashion and mended down near the hem. If a man, she’d have been a manufacturer, he thought, of something entirely practical, shovels or water closets. Or perhaps a policeman; there was, in her steady, appraising look, something of Guillam.

She had his card between her fingers. Denton was watching her eyes but taking in the fact that she had a telephone on the wall, wondering whatever for and then thinking it might be for calling the police. He didn’t know why he thought that - something fortress-like about the office, he thought. Warrior women.

‘What is it you want, Mr Denton?’ Her voice was soft, surprisingly low, genteel.

He was still standing. There was no offer of a chair. There were no chairs, in fact, except in the outer room, where they were lined up around the walls like those in a clinic for the poor. He said, ‘I’m hoping you could help me.’

‘We’re not here to help men, I’m afraid.’ She put his card down towards him as if giving it back.

‘It’s about your, uh, particular area.’

‘This is an office that tries to help women find their way out of prostitution. As men are the reason they get into it, I doubt I can help you.’

‘I’d have said women get into prostitution for the money.’

‘Yes - and men have the money. When you’re starving, you sell what you can.’

It wasn’t an argument he wanted to get into. The view that marriage itself was a kind of prostitution had once shocked him, now seemed fairly sensible - dramatized by Shaw but hardly original. ‘I’m sorry. I’m not here to argue.’

‘We’re busy here, Mr - Denton; please don’t take up our time.’

He felt himself flush. ‘It’s about a girl who was murdered, ’ he said too quickly.

‘That’s a police matter. Are you with the police?’

‘I—’ He fought his irritation. ‘May I sit down and explain this to you?’

‘Do you mean will somebody fetch you a chair? No. There’s nobody to do that here. We don’t have
time
, sir.’

So, standing like a schoolboy at the teacher’s desk, he ran through the high points of the story of Mulcahy and Stella Minter. He wasn’t going to go into the attack in his house because she didn’t need to know that to understand, but she said, pointing at his sling with a pencil, ‘What happened to your arm?’

He sighed. ‘Somebody attacked me in my house. The man who killed her, I think.’

‘What’s this to do with us?’

‘I was told you might be able to put me into contact with some of the girls who knew Stella Minter. The other young ones on the street.
Somebody
must know her story.’

‘Surely that’s a police matter.’

‘The police are slow.’

‘You’re very foolish to take matters into your own hands. Is this some male idea of revenge for the arm? You’d do better to go to bed.’ She started to look at something on her desk and then looked up again. ‘Who told you I might be able to put you into contact with street girls?’

‘Do you know Mrs Castle?’

It was the first time she had smiled. ‘Mrs Castle of Westerley Street? Of course, you must be one of her clients, then. How I do loathe your sort.’ She said it quite casually.

‘Stella Minter was murdered in a horrible, ugly—’

‘I know how she was murdered.’

‘Aren’t your - clients - frightened?’

‘Of course they are.’

‘Then why don’t you want to help get her murderer off the street?’

‘The morning newspapers say that the police have her murderer and he’s confessed.’

‘Do you know how easy it is to get a confession from somebody who’s alone and terrified and probably brutalized, Mrs Striker?’

She raised her eyebrows, pursed her lips, not looking at him, and he had the sense of her looking inward, for the first time affected by something he’d said. He leaned a few inches towards her over the desk. ‘The police don’t believe me about Mulcahy. The City Police aren’t exactly bowled over by Stella Minter’s death. It isn’t that they don’t care; they’ve got other fish to fry. I’m willing to take the time to pursue it. I’m paying a number of women to look for Mulcahy in the directories. I’d like to look for Stella Minter, too - who she was, why her killer chose her. I’m not trying to pick up young prostitutes, if that’s what you think, Mrs Striker!’

She toyed with the pencil, then looked up at him. ‘What is it you want from us?’

‘Ask the - your clients - if they knew Stella Minter. If they did, ask if they’ll meet with me - and you or somebody else or a policeman, if you like - and tell me what they remember about her. That’s all. I swear, that’s all.’

She retrieved his card, looked at it, and put it down in front of him with the pencil. ‘Put her name and the other man’s name on it. You’ll hear from me if I learn anything.’

That was that. When he was done writing, he found himself looking at the straight parting in her dark hair, her attention entirely on something she was reading. There were no goodbyes.

He visited Atkins in the hospital on his way to the Paris boat train. The sergeant’s head was wrapped in cotton, most of it on the top and back but one wrap coming around the forehead as if to hold things together. His face looked small, rat-like, rather old.

‘Still, you’re alive,’ Denton said.

‘Take more than that to kill me.’ The voice was small. He had had concussion and his eyes looked strange. ‘Bastard hit me from behind.’

‘Dr Bernat says you’re on the mend.’

‘Old biddy wants to keep me in here a week.’

‘It’s necessary, Atkins. You’ve been wounded.’

‘Most soldiers die in hospital, not the battlefield - ever hear that?’

‘This isn’t a soldier’s hospital. It’s where you need to be.’

‘Feels like a soldier’s hospital to me.’ It was a ward, with a long range of beds down both sides and an aisle up the middle. Coughs, sighs, the sounds of other visitors swept up and down the big room.

‘The soldier’s hospitals I saw,’ Denton said, ‘they laid them on the ground. In the rain.’