The Frightened Man (24 page)

‘Well, you didn’t. As you say, I’m in Mulcahy up to the - what was the word—?’

‘Oxters. What you’d call armpits.’

‘All right, that deep, so, so are you. You might help, not snipe.’

‘You was actually in his room, was you?’

‘Of course I was.’

‘But wouldn’t tell that copper that.’

‘I’ll tell him before Saturday.’ He caught Atkins’s eye, was irritated to see it wink. ‘He’ll get the truth!’

‘What’d I say? I didn’t say nothing. So did Mulcahy leave a note saying he was going to kill himself and - what? He done the girl? - and then he threw himself out of the window. Very neat. Which you think is all night soil because the madman that crowned me did the nasty to him and made him write? And then threw him out of the window. God!’

Denton thought of what that fall must have been like for the frightened little man - if he’d still been alive - and winced. His own memory of the roof and the imp was still too sharp.

‘Well, then,’ Atkins said, ‘what did you find that you wouldn’t tell the copper about?’

‘Nothing.’ He saw Atkins’s disgust. ‘All I can do is work back from the girl - her real name, her sister. If we find who she was, maybe we’ll find her lover, boyfriend, whatever he was.’

‘Another needle, another haystack.’

‘She’d given birth within the year - say last December. That would make her pregnant the previous March at the earliest. Say she ran away from home in her fourth or fifth month - August or September, perhaps. Or, if the condition didn’t show, maybe as late as October. It might show up in the school records.’

‘You’re hopeless, you are.’ Atkins shook his head. ‘I suppose you mean to spend more money on it? ’Course you do. Well, it’s yours to throw away. Until Friday.’ He went up the room, grumbling to the dog. ‘Best officer I ever worked for, throws me away like the Orient pearl! A fool and his money, Rupert - lucky you’re a dog. Bloody hell.’ He turned at the door that opened on his stairway, light spilling up from below and casting a huge shadow. ‘Mind you see that editor tomorrow, Colonel! Time is short.’

In the morning, Denton sprawled among the newspapers in his armchair, sipping tea and looking for articles about Mulcahy. They were disappointingly small, except in one sensational rag (‘Man’s Corpse Found Fifty Feet from Busy Street - Lay There for Four Days - Jumped to Ghastly Death’), suggesting third-string reporters cadging details from police desks, not from anybody who had actually been on the scene.
The Times
buried the story deep inside and barely raised its voice above a hieratic murmur:

MAN’ S BODY FOUND IN ISLINGTON

The dead body of a man identified as Regis Mulcahy, instrument maker, was discovered yesterday behind a hoarding in Islington. Metropolitan police refused to give details, but an open window four storeys above appears to have indicated the spot from which the victim may have precipitated. A coroner’s jury will sit on the matter on Saturday.

‘They make it sound like he slipped on a patch of mud,’ Atkins said. ‘Nothing about suicide, is there?’

‘They’re keeping the note to themselves. God knows why.’

‘Nail it down at the inquest before they give it to the papers - “death by his own hand while temporarily insane”, then give a juicy account of him killing the girl. What’d the note say?’

‘He loved her.’ Denton cocked an eye at Atkins. ‘Not a word to your pals at the Lamb, mind.’

‘What d’you take me for?’ Atkins gathered up the dishes. ‘Time you was dressed to go and see your publisher, isn’t it? Money don’t wait, you know, Colonel.’

Denton had sent his editor a note asking to see him at eleven. It wasn’t a meeting he wanted to have: he hated asking for anything, especially money; he hated having to admit that his book was in the trash. Still—

‘He must needs go whom the devil driveth,’ he said. He clambered out of the chair.

Chapter Fifteen

‘Horrors! Horrors, Denton! I want horrors.’

Diapason Lang had been his English editor since Denton’s second book. Lang was older than Denton, almost emaciated, his skin taut over his cheekbones but ruddy with good health. His father had been a noted organist, hence the first name. Denton liked him well enough but found Lang’s seemingly wilful mislabelling of his books as ‘horror’ irritating. More than irritating, in fact.

He had come to his publishers by way of Mrs Johnson’s, charging her again to mobilize her women for an assault on the Metropolitan Schools Board. She had, with a toughness she usually masked, pointed out that the women hadn’t been paid in full as yet. Embarrassed, Denton had stood at her door and counted out notes, then coins, not finding it easy to make up the total. ‘The bonus - for finding each Mulcahy - ah, I’ll bring that by - another time—’ He had walked away very quickly.

And so he had come to his publishers. The firm was in a narrow building off Fleet Street, only two houses from the one once occupied by Izaak Walton; it had a look of untidiness that correctly embodied the business it housed: door jambs tilted, floors sagged, cracks in the plaster had become so institutionalized that baseboards had been cut to accommodate them. Yet the firm itself was a good one with a notable backlist in fiction and botany, the combination pure accident, the reasons no longer remembered. Diapason Lang had been with them for more than thirty years and was in good part responsible for the fiction list. A type not unknown among editors, he often misunderstood the books he selected but selected well, nonetheless. Like his saying now, ‘Horrors, Denton! I want horrors!’ Then he leaned forward and said, as if they were friends with a common passion, ‘
You
know!’

In fact, Denton didn’t know. He would never have told Lang that he was there because if he didn’t get some money, his manservant was going to leave him; and he hadn’t yet had the gumption to tell Lang that he had decided to abandon the book that he was due to deliver in three months. Or - the worst - that he nonetheless wanted another advance. ‘I’m never quite sure what you mean by “horror”,’ he muttered. Playing for time.

Denton hadn’t started out to be a horror writer - if that’s what he was, and he didn’t see it - or in fact to be a writer at all. All he’d managed to become after the war was a failing young farmer who didn’t know he was failing, able to keep going by not adding up his debts. Then, after he failed completely and everything was gone, his wife dead and his sons sent off to his sister because he had failed as a father, too, he had gone farther west and rattled about, done his marshalling, gone on to California. Then he’d begun writing because his head was so stuffed with sorrow he thought it would burst, and he had had to get it out. He had written half of a novel called
William Read
before he realized it was self-pitying claptrap - more failure. Then, disciplining the self-pity by realizing that it was not the same thing as sorrow, he had begun to set down experiences as if he were writing instructions on how to harness a team to a plough, and the result was
The Demon of the Plains
. That first novel ended with the farmer-hero hanging himself in the barn he had built with his own hands, and his body being wrapped in a horse blanket, already frozen, and stacked with the cordwood until the ground might thaw enough to bury him. Denton had found his method: a plain, unfeeling style that embodied appalling events.

The Demon of the Plains
had given him a reputation beyond America. The French had made comparisons to Poe (whom he despised), the English to Le Fanu (whom he didn’t know). In fact, he saw no horror in
The Demon of the Plains
except the horror of solitude and unending labour and failure, and the hero’s sense that a force, a demon or perhaps a ghost of the Indians who had lived there, persecuted him. Denton thought he had made it clear that the demon was only in the character’s mind, a way of making the untractable and the appalling comprehensible, but the word ‘demon’ set people going. When his second book,
At Battle’s End
, proved to have ghosts in it (who were not ghosts to him but fantasies of the war-maddened hero’s collapse), the word ‘horror’ was everywhere in the reviews. At Lang’s urging (at that time not yet met in the attenuated flesh, expressed as a letter to his American publisher), his third book was titled
Jonas Sniden’s Horrors
, and it was compared favourably to the Stevenson of
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
. Diapason Lang, when they finally met in the late nineties, had told him he was the best horror writer in the English language.

It had made Denton squirm.

Now Lang bent forward over his desk. ‘We English
love
horrors. It comes from hiding everything from us as children; we have dreadful nightmares. Unaskable questions answered out of our imaginations. Do you know my picture of the nightmare?’

Lang had spoken of it before, so of course he knew it; Lang in fact had a print on the wall, was pointing at it with a bony finger without turning his eyes towards it. Elihu Vedder. Denton nodded. ‘I suppose it refers to something sexual,’ Denton said. It showed a hideous figure - demonic but certainly male - crouching over a nude woman in a bed. He thought of Janet Striker’s idea of men and women.

Lang looked pained. ‘Americans are so much more outspoken than we are.’ Now he glanced at the painting. ‘Perhaps - perhaps. You think she’s having a nightmare about the sex act itself ?’ His voice was high, a bit cracked. ‘Fearing it? All women do, you know.’

‘Not knowing what it is, more likely. But possessed by it.’

‘It isn’t titled “Desire”, my boy. I’ve never asked a woman what she thought the painting meant. Nor would I, of course.’ He tittered. Lang’s sexual preferences were matters of speculation but no evidence.

Denton smiled. ‘I don’t think it’s just children you English keep things from.’

‘There are some things one doesn’t mention. To women, I mean.’

Denton thought that Lang travelled in the wrong circles. Among Emma Gosden’s friends, anything could be said; the same was true among the artists who clustered at the Café Royal. Denton looked again at the painting. And, he suspected, anything could be said to Janet Striker. ‘I had a man tell me recently that he’d been watching another man cut a woman’s throat while coupled with her. Maybe that’s what the nightmare is.’

Lang blinked. ‘Ah. Mmm.’ He grew cheerful. ‘Might be a book in that.’

‘The sex act itself a kind of murder,’ Denton said, still looking at the picture. Like his wedding night. The blood, of course. He shook the idea off. ‘I wanted to see you, Lang.’

‘Yes, yes, yes, and I wanted to see you! I have an idea - a
horrible
idea!’ He cackled. ‘But routine business first - how’s the new book coming?’

There it was. Denton looked into his eyes, pursed his lips, said, ‘I’ve thrown it into the trash.’

Lang tried blankness, then a titter - it must be an American joke, he seemed to imply - then severity. ‘You’re not serious.’

‘I’m afraid I am.’ He tried to explain the revelation he’d had while he’d talked with Janet Striker - the woman not a real woman, the marriage all wrong, the book sick at its very heart.

‘I’ve always thought your women quite good,’ Lang moaned. Denton didn’t say that this might say more about Lang than about Denton’s women, or that perhaps Hench-Rose had been right when he’d said Denton knew nothing about women. He brushed residual drops of rain from his hat, which was on his lap; the warren of publishing offices had no place for visitors’ clothes - hardly room for visitors, in fact. ‘But you
can’t
have thrown it out,’ Lang said. ‘You can’t!’

‘I did.’

‘It’s what
first
novelists do. It’s what
young
men do.’

‘I have a better idea. A new book.’

‘Pull it out of the trash, Denton, we can salvage it.
I
can salvage it.’

Denton waved a hand. ‘I’ve got a better idea, I told you.’ Lang looked sick, then profoundly annoyed, then, with an effort, attentive - that smiling, wide-eyed look that women learn to put on when men talk. ‘It’s called
The Machine
,’ Denton said.

‘
The Machine.
A little too H. G. Wells?’

Denton sketched it for him: a young husband and wife who build together the machine that destroys them, their marriage.

‘But a machine? I’d think something organic would be more likely, something that they nurture—’

‘I see it as a machine.’

‘Well - of course, it’s your idea—’ Lang sounded dubious. ‘Rather fashionable, perhaps - machines, I mean. Fear of the clang and bang of modern life, the dark Satanic mills, all that.
Motor cars
.’ He raised his eyebrows and waved a hand. ‘But a machine as the embodiment of horror, Denton—’

‘Oh, forget your damned horror!’

‘Oh, dear, oh, no—’

‘Lang, the horror is something you’ve all read into the books. I write about people, about suffering, about—’

Lang waved his fingers again. ‘Writers don’t know what they write about. It’s horror, take my word for it. But a machine, oh dear—’ He tittered. ‘Perhaps a runaway motor car with an evil engine? Something that goes about murdering people at crossings? You’re not amused, I see.’

Denton put his hands on the desk and spoke slowly and with great emphasis. ‘Lang, I need money!’

‘Ah. Oh, it’s that way.’

‘It’s exactly that way.’

Lang looked about as if for a secret exit he’d forgotten the exact location of. ‘I suppose we could do something—’

‘My royalty account.’

‘Statements aren’t due yet, you know.’

‘But there’s money you owe me. There always is!’

‘Well, I suppose—Oh, well, of course - as you’re such a pillar of the backlist—’ He rang a little bell. Heavy footsteps sounded in the corridor, and a young man materialized in the doorway. Lang cleared his throat. ‘Ask Mr Frewn to step around, please, Meer.’

The heavy footsteps went away, went up some stairs, faded. Lang tapped on his desk. He said, ‘Frewn doesn’t get around as well as he used to.’ Denton put his coat and hat on the floor and crossed his legs. When slow, light footsteps sounded overhead, Lang smiled and murmured, ‘There we are,’ but it was another long silence, marked by increasingly loud footsteps, before a white-haired, bent man looked in. His black suit hung on him, giving him the look of a wet raven. In a surprisingly deep voice, he said, ‘You wanted something?’