The Frightened Man (2 page)

‘Uh-
hum
,’ Mulcahy said, clearing his throat. He was intensely nervous, his fingers moving constantly, one knee jerking inside his baggy trousers. Denton went through the courtesies, got the man seated, established that neither cheese nor biscuits nor port was welcome. ‘You wanted to see me,’ Denton said.

‘Yes, ah - yes - alone.’ Mulcahy’s eyes slid aside towards the sergeant. ‘Confidential.’

Denton raised one eyebrow. Atkins picked up the empty tray and went on down the room, pausing to open the door of the dumb waiter, installed by a former owner when the rear half of the space had been a dining room, thus allowing the sergeant to hear what was said from the floor below. He went out.

‘Well, now,’ Denton said. ‘I have to go out soon, Mr Mulcahy.’

‘Yes. Well.’ Mulcahy hunched in his chair, his nervous fingers joined over his middle. The chair was too big for him, made him seem a child called in for punishment. ‘Something terrible happened. To me. I’m in a right state.’

‘You should go to the police.’

‘No!’ Red circles showed on his grey cheeks; the word heaved his body up and then let it go. ‘That’s why I came to you. I can’t—’ He looked into the shadowed corner towards the street, licked his lips, said, ‘Just can’t.’

‘Well—’

‘I know who you are, you see? I mean, everybody knows. Fact, right?’

Not everybody, but many people, indeed knew ‘who he was’, which was to say not who he was but what he had been for barely six months, twenty-five years ago - the American marshal who had shot four men and saved a town. It was part of his myth despite himself, despite his having come to England to get away from it. Newspapers loved it, regularly trotted it out if he wrote a new book or even so much as had tea with the Surbiton Ladies Literary Society.

‘Well—I don’t see what I can do, but tell me what’s happened and maybe I can advise you.’

‘I need
protection
, I do.’

‘Tell me what happened, Mr Mulcahy.’ He made a point of looking at the clock.

Mulcahy looked at his trembling fingers. ‘I seen—I saw the man they call -’ he clenched his hands - ‘Jack the Ripper. And he seen me!’

Denton’s interest sagged. The Ripper had been gone for fifteen years; people who saw him or heard him or got in touch with him in seances were loony. Denton managed a tight smile that was meant to lead to ‘Goodnight’.

‘And he recognized me! I know he did; I could see it in his eyes. He’s after me!’

Ripper stories popped up like daffodils in spring. They were trotted out by the newspapers for space-fillers. Denton, aware that he was dealing with one of the (he hoped) harmlessly deranged, said gently, ‘How do you know it was the Ripper, Mr Mulcahy?’

Mulcahy worked his mouth, studied his hands again. ‘We was - were - boys together.’ He looked up. ‘In Ilkley.’ Then, ‘There!’ he said, as if he had scored a point.

Denton had heard of a woman who said she’d been married to the Ripper. Also one who claimed to be his love child. If Mulcahy had not so clearly been terrified, he’d have eased him out right then. He looked at the clock again, then at the little man, felt again revulsion but also a somewhat clinical interest. A psychological case study, in his own parlour. He could spare seven minutes more. ‘Tell me all about it,’ he said.

Mulcahy needed to look at the door twice before he began; he seemed to need to know that the door, the way out, was still there. He did look shockingly bad, his face sallow in the gaslight, his cheeks grey where his beard was beginning to show. He touched his forehead, then his nose, and said in spurts and starts with many pauses, ‘We was boys together up north. He was never right, but I kind of palled about with him, I did. He was older. Nobody else would, because he was—A kid like me maybe didn’t notice what he was. I don’t mean I was with him all the time, you know, but off and on like. Couple of years. Just - somebody, you know - we’d walk out to where there was some green, you know, and he set snares, for rabbits, he said, but he never caught nothing. Birds - prop a box on a stick. Nothing ever came into the box. Anyways.

‘I was, maybe, fourteen. I
was
fourteen. He got himself a girl for walking out, he did. He made jokes about her to me but they walked out. Elinor Grimble. She was fat, not a pretty girl, glad even to have him, I suppose. He told me things about her - said he, you know, did things to her—’ Mulcahy looked up to make sure that ‘did things to her’ was understood. ‘She let him do things, if you follow.’

Denton wondered if Mulcahy’s was some sort of sexual insanity. The kind of man who bothered women? Some form of compulsion, like exhibitionism? A number of the books on Denton’s shelves were about such men.

‘He said - he said I could watch if I wanted. There was a place they went to outside of town, down a railway cutting, a kind of little grove sort of, trees. In there. So I hid there and he brought her and they were in the trees and she let him, you know - he put his hands on her, you know, up top. And she didn’t like it, I could see, but he got quite excited, and when she said that was enough, stop, and so on, he got more excited and more excited and he
hit
her.’ He didn’t look at Denton but seemed lost in the tale - and excited by it. ‘He
hit
her.’

Too late, Denton had a sick sense that he was being used. Like being forced to watch a man masturbate.

‘He got rougher and took some of her, you know, her upper clothing off, and she got nasty and he hit her again, and that went on, I mean him hitting her, and he took out his pocket-knife and he
cut
her.’ Mulcahy paused. The idea of cutting a woman seemed to astonish him. He was sweating. With his eyes closed, he said, ‘First, he did it to her. He violated her. And while he was still - you know, he was, um, inside of her, he cut her.
Throat
.’ His voice was hoarse.

‘All right, all right—’ Denton stood.

‘And then - it was awful, oh, God! - he went to stabbing her and cutting her and him half-naked, his thing hanging down, cutting her and cutting her—! He cut right into her female place and cut through the skin of her belly and then he reached up inside and—!’ He was bug-eyed. Shaking with what seemed like real fear now, but somehow
excited
. ‘It made me puke!’

Mulcahy must be eased out; even a little man could be dangerous if he was crazed. Mulcahy was, he saw, using him to arouse himself - maybe hoping to arouse him, too. Perverse. He went to the door.

Mulcahy didn’t seem to notice him. ‘Then he run off. Right off. Disappeared.’

‘So you were well rid of him.’

‘Not half.’ Mulcahy’s voice was a whisper. ‘I didn’t hear nothing for six years. Then—Then comes a letter from Germany with bits of newspaper in it - that funny-looking lettering. They was about three murders. Women. I knew it was him.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t see how you could know that.’

‘Couple more years, I got a letter from France. Nothing but clippings - more women cut up, murdered. Then Holland!’ He looked up. ‘He was keeping me up to date, see?’

Denton had his hand on the doorknob. ‘I’m afraid this is all the time I can give you, sir.’

‘My mum was dead by then, nothing to hold me. I moved on to a couple of places, and the letters they stopped. Couldn’t find me, and good riddance! I was free of him, see? And then, tonight—’ He put his face in his hands. ‘Tonight - oh, my dear God! - I’m walking on the street and—’

‘Well, sir, you know, we see people who look like people we used to know, but—’

A crash sounded from below and the house shook. Denton heard the sergeant curse. Mulcahy jumped to his feet, shouting, ‘It’s him—!’

Denton strode to the dumb waiter. ‘Sergeant - sergeant, you all right?’

‘What d’you think, bloody silver tray on my head?’ Over the words was the sound of running steps on the stairs, two at a time, going down, and then the front door crashed. Denton walked back down the room. Mulcahy’s chair was empty, the door open. Denton looked down, saw that the hall was empty, too. Mulcahy was gone.

‘Mental case,’ Denton muttered. He shouted over his shoulder, ‘I’m just stepping out, Sergeant - then I really have to dress—’

Denton trotted down the stairs and opened the door. It was two strides to the gate, which was open; beyond it, Lamb’s Conduit Street was dark. Denton looked to his right; not until he saw one of the whores who gave the street its reputation did he see another human being. She hadn’t seen anybody, she said, worse luck. He strolled back the other way. Somebody coming out of the Lamb had seen a man running up towards Holborn.

‘Damned little loony.’

The sergeant was waiting at the top of the stairs. ‘Left his hat,’ he said. He waved it. ‘Valuable object.’

‘How much did you hear?’

‘A lot, until the dumb-waiter clutch gave way and dropped the dishware on my head. Mad story, I thought.’

‘Mad, yes.’

‘You don’t believe him!’

‘I believe he was really frightened, but I think it’s all inside his own head. And maybe he really did see something as a kid - although it could be the sort of fantasy a certain type might invent to entertain himself.’ He looked at the clock. ‘Men like that pull a lot of details out of the newspapers.’

‘One more crackpot trying to climb on the tired old Ripper’s back.’

‘Why come to me?’

‘To be able to say he’d laid his mad tale on you. Good story with the girls. “How I Met the Sheriff.” You’re going to be late.’

‘Mmmm.’ Denton doubted that Mulcahy told this story to ‘the girls’. Mulcahy, he thought Krafft-Ebing would say, was one of those men who had difficulties with women. Probably impotent. He started towards the stairs at the rear. ‘Still, these cases are interesting.’

‘And you say you don’t like opera!’

‘Well, he didn’t sing.’

As he dressed, he thought about the story, the obvious inventions. The newspaper clippings, for example - Mulcahy hadn’t said anything about getting them translated, but surely he didn’t read German, French and Dutch. And not a word about the uproar that would have followed such a murder as that of - what was her name? - Elinor Grimble. Of Ilkley.

There didn’t seem to be anything that needed to be done about Mr Mulcahy, and as for his tale that the Ripper was back, that was merely stupid. Mulcahy was a sad freak, to be forgotten, at least until he returned for his valuable hat.

Denton went off to Emma Gosden’s. He carried a derringer in his coat pocket out of habit. A certain caution, never lost. The rain had stopped, leaving an occasional misting drizzle that was pleasant to walk through, the streets wet and shining, lamps reflected in long, shivering tracks down puddles.

Alice, the elderly maid, recognized him and took his damp coat, hat and stick and let him into the small drawing room, which he knew well enough to know which was the most comfortable chair. When Emma came in, he was staring into the coal fire, already thinking of her, but he stood, and she smiled but stopped well short of him and so postponed his kiss.

‘I thought I’d be ahead of you,’ he said. ‘How was the opera?’

‘Awful people with me. I don’t know why I go out so much.’ She had moved to the small fireplace, a dark red love seat behind her, clashing with her dress, also dark red but the wrong shade. She was remarkably pretty, nonetheless, the dress cut low, her arms bare.

He moved a half-step towards her, the beginning of something he never finished; he would have embraced her, kissed her, started them upstairs.

‘Not yet,’ she said, holding out a hand, palm towards him. She smiled. ‘I wanted to have a word with you first. Down here.’ She laughed. ‘Where it’s safe.’ They looked at each other. Her smile was brilliant, slightly false.

‘Well, Emma, what?’

She chuckled, surprising him. ‘This is more difficult than I thought,’ she said. The smile became more brilliant. ‘I’ve found somebody else, Denton. There!’

At first, he didn’t make sense of ‘finding’ somebody else. Then he understood: she’d found somebody she preferred to him and was giving him his walking papers. He wondered later if he had closed his eyes, because he couldn’t see her for one sightless instant, a moment of horrendous rage that deafened and blinded him. When he could see again, she was smiling at him.

‘Now, now,’ she said. ‘Take it like a man.’
Smiling
.

He governed himself. ‘While you take it like a woman? A professional woman?’ He managed to force his violence down into words, words alone. She had meant that tonight would be their last time together, but that there
would
be tonight. That she had found somebody she preferred so much that this would be the last,
but this would happen
- that she would open herself to him while she had already decided on the other man, undoubtedly had already opened herself to him too.

Her face flushed; her eyes widened.

‘“Take it like a man,”’ he said, ‘what the hell does that mean - take it from you and then jump in bed with you and then leave you for your new man to—?’ He crossed the little room to her in two strides, still not able to control himself fully but getting enough control so that he wouldn’t do something terrible. ‘Goddamn you!’ he said very low. ‘How long have you been going to bed with both of us?’

‘Long enough to know which I prefer.’

He wanted to say
But you’re mine
, to shout
You belong to me
, but he knew she belonged to nobody, never had; it was what he liked about her. He was panting, his collar seeming to strangle him. ‘You whore,’ he said.

‘Get out of my house,’ she said in a voice so low it sounded like a growl.

‘Christ, woman—’ He leaned towards her and she backed away, leaning on the love seat and putting it partly between them.

‘I gave you a chance to make me admire you, Denton. You failed.’ She was still flushed but very much in charge of herself. She chuckled. ‘I gave you the chance to act like a gentleman, and you showed yourself to be the vulgar American oaf everybody thinks you are. Get out!’

He tried to stare her down, failed, turned in a rage and tore the door open and rushed out. The elderly maid was there in the dark hall, frightened, recoiling when she saw him but muttering, ‘Coat, sir, your coat—’