Bohemian Girl, The (35 page)

When the two detectives reached the door, Denton said, eyes still closed, ‘Munro? What’s happened to Guillam?’

‘He was busted down to detective and sent to East Ham - the whole way across London from where he lives. Satisfied?’

‘Wasn’t Guillam partly responsible for attempted murder?’

Munro sighed. ‘Georgie’s got friends, Denton.’ He and Markson went out, and the door closed.

Gallichan came that afternoon and made himself comfortable so that he could explore more of Denton’s dreams. Denton was tired of it. He said, ‘I read once about a doctor who found a man who’d been shot in the stomach. The man healed with a hole the doctor could look through. He learned all sorts of things about the stomach. It made him famous. I think you’re using these dreams as a hole to look into my mind.’

‘I resent the very idea that I’m doing this for some egoistical purpose of my own.’

‘It’s my mind. I don’t like you looking into it. And dreams aren’t much of a window.’

‘Well, they’re not meaningless, either. The German, what’s-his-name, says that’s the point - dreams aren’t some sort of accident caused by eating too much toasted cheese. They have profound meaning. It is our task to find that out.’

Denton was still smarting from Munro’s visit. To a degree, he had found Gallichan’s interest flattering, the exploration itself interesting, but it had run its course and his mood was bad. ‘Get out of my stomach,’ he said.

‘But we’re making progress! We have identified feeling - fear, guilt - and persons: your dead wife, the laughing child, the man with the shotgun.’

‘I never said I felt guilt, doctor. Sorrow, yes - the two aren’t the same thing. And I didn’t say the person with the shotgun was a man.’

‘Well, it wasn’t a woman, surely. Forgive me, but I think you are deliberately avoiding the obvious conclusion - that the man with the shotgun is yourself.’ He seemed very pleased with that.

Denton simply looked at him. Then he burst out laughing - real laughter. When he was done, he said, ‘I think you need to read another book. My dreams aren’t well-made plays, doctor. They’re a mess. I don’t know about your dreams, but mine are a train wreck - bodies on the track, wreckage everywhere, people staggering around with blood running down their faces. If mine have meaning, it’s for the feelings I have, not some neat tale that’s like
King Lear
reduced to a bedtime story.’ Before Gallichan could object, Denton raised a hand and said, ‘Enough. Get me out of here.’

The portly doctor shook his head. ‘Even your imagery is full of violence. You are a violent man, Mr Denton.’

‘I don’t need you to tell me that.’

Gallichan stood, not entirely willingly. ‘We could go so much deeper,’ he said.

‘Let’s not.’

The doctor shrugged. ‘What a pity.’

‘I want to go home.’

Next day, Munro came back. He was apologetic. Between the two men was a mostly unacknowledged respect, even friendship; if it was made difficult by Denton’s putting his oversized nose into police business, Munro still didn’t want the relationship to end. He said he was sorry about yesterday; he said he had been to some extent carrying on for Markson’s benefit. ‘I don’t like for a youngster to think we let the public make up our minds for us.’

‘Are you going to do anything about France?’

Munro sighed. ‘I’ve been thinking about it.’ He lowered his bulk into the metal chair and put his bowler on the bed. It was raining out, and water dripped from it on the sheet. ‘Tell it to me - all of it.’

Denton tried. Munro groaned when he went all the way back to Mary Thomason, but there was no other way to tell it - the Wesselons, the note to Denton, the remarques on the drawing, the Mayflower Baths. The only thing Denton skimmed over was the trunk, because of Janet; Munro saw the omission, frowned, said, ‘About this drawing—’

‘Don’t interrupt.’

‘Where’d you get the drawing?’

‘What the hell does it matter? I got it and I know it was hers!’

Munro gave him a long look. ‘So you’re hiding something. Better to tell me, you know.’

‘No.’

Munro shrugged. ‘You’ll have to, if I really ask.’

Denton groaned with disgust and finished his story.

‘Are you telling me that you believe the missing woman and the servant who went to France are connected?’

‘If she did the little drawings of Lazarus and the Mayflower Baths, that’s all the connection that’s needed.’

‘And now you think the brother or Crum, or whoever he is, is missing?’

‘He disappeared from the scene.’

‘In France?’

‘Yes.’

‘So you have a man who may or may not exist, who did or did not disappear at some later time, but there’s a body buried in a barn in Normandy, and it may be his.’ Munro shook his head.

‘I don’t have all of it, Munro. But something happened there. And Crum’s disappearance
later
is a matter of one letter Himple wrote to his valet - Crum could have been dead for weeks. Who would know?’ When he saw Munro’s pained expression, he said, ‘If something happened to the brother in France, then maybe something happened earlier to the girl, as well. Ask the French to dig in the barn!’

‘You mean, I should do exactly what Georgie Guillam got sent to Siberia for - use the Metropolitan Police to forward a scheme of a private party.’ He picked up his hat and looked into it as if something that made him unhappy lived in there. ‘It just doesn’t hang together. It’s all speculation. Look - bring me somebody who knows this man Crum and misses him. Bring me a mother, the sister, a wife, a lover - anybody who’s close to him and knows he’s gone. You’re talking about a man you’ve never seen, and you want me to act as if he’s missing. Denton, he’s something you’ve created out of whole cloth!’

‘The valet knew him. The housekeeper knew him.’

‘Have they reported him missing?’

‘All right. I’m going home tomorrow. I’ll handle it myself.’

‘Don’t do it! Now, I’m warning you—!’

‘What are you going to do, break my other leg?’

Munro, standing now, looked down at him. He shook his head. ‘You get well. You look like death warmed over. Stop tormenting yourself with this business and get better.’ At the door, he said, ‘I think you’re on to about half of something. Keep it under your hat until you get the other half.’

Janet Striker came later the same day. She shook an expensive-looking waterproof cape and leaned a new umbrella in the corner. She looked almost pretty. She had come into her money. Rain was driving against the window, which shook from the power of the wind; distant lightning appeared only as a glow on the glass, as if a dim lamp had been turned on and off.

‘I’m going home tomorrow,’ he said.

‘The doctor wants to keep you here.’

‘No point. I can make my way about now. I think I’m ready for a walking stick, get me off those damned crutches. Gallichan just wants to keep on playing with my dreams.’ He told her about Munro’s return visit, his refusal to get in touch with the French police. ‘If I could handle a shovel, I’d do it myself!’

‘I’ll do it.’ She lifted her chin. Her skin was pink from the storm she’d come through; she’d put on a few pounds since she’d got her money, too, looked healthier and happier. ‘I’ll take the Cohans - he can dig, she can make me look respectable. What a good idea.’

‘Cohan can’t go near dead bodies - it comes with being
kohanim
.’

‘No matter. I’ll do the digging myself. Or I’ll find myself a labourer.’

‘You don’t speak French.’

‘Of course I do. It’s one of those things my mother thought would make me more saleable.’ Her mother had died, she told him, while Denton had been unconscious; the death made Janet neither more nor less outspoken about her. She stood. ‘There’s just time to pack and be off first thing.’

‘You just got here.’

‘And I’m leaving. I’ll confess it now; I hate places like this. I’m so glad you’re coming home.’ She pulled the cape over her shoulders. ‘Let’s move this matter forward, is what I say.’

‘You want to get away from me again.’

‘I don’t.’

‘The doctor told me I’m a violent man.’

‘And so you are, but I suspect he doesn’t have the slightest notion what that means.’ She gave him a quick kiss. ‘I’ll be back by the weekend. To stay. In London, I mean.’

‘I’ll want Cohan, as soon as I can have him,’ he said. She raised her eyebrows. ‘Once I’m home, I think they’ll try to kill me again.’

‘
They.
’ She held the cape open as if she might take it off again.

‘Jarrold’s in a prison for the insane.’

‘Jarrold was just the means. There’s somebody else. I thought they might try to get at me here.’

‘They - not he?’

‘I don’t know - I don’t know.’ He couldn’t keep his face from showing his fear of losing her. ‘You’ll really come back?’

She kissed him again. ‘Really.’

Denton thought that leaving the nursing home was the final humiliation - a litter carried by two men older than he, with two more to raise him shoulder-high and push him into the horse-drawn ambulance like a loaf of bread going into an oven - but going up his own stairs in his own house was even worse: humiliation turned into farce. Atkins had picked up three day labourers who put Denton into an armchair at the bottom of the stairs, and then, each man taking a leg, carried him with the chair tipped back so far he thought he might do a backwards somersault out of it. They rested at the landing with a lot of heavy breathing and exclamations and then picked him up and carried him the last seven stairs, depositing him in his own sitting room after almost taking his head off on the door jamb.

‘Well,’ Atkins said when he’d paid them off, ‘home again, home again, jiggety-jog.’

‘If I’d known you were going to do that, I’d have stayed in the nursing home.’

‘Listen, General, they wanted to carry you up on the litter. I’ve seen men dropped, seen the whole shebang go down a flight of steps. I thought the armchair was a stroke of genius.’

‘Help me up.’ Denton struggled; the bad leg was no help, and Atkins was not particularly strong. ‘It’s a good thing I’m skin and bones,’ he said when he was standing.

Atkins produced a walking stick. ‘You’re still about three stone too much for me. You’re bivouacked down here for the duration.’ He jerked his head towards the unused room next to the sitting room. ‘Never make it up and down those stairs day after day. Didn’t want to maroon you up there.’

‘Oh, hell - I hate that room.’

‘Yes, well, we do the best we can with what’s on offer at this hotel. Can you walk on that stick?’

Denton had tried a stick in the nursing home. He had taken a few steps, the right leg dragging behind, most of his weight hung from his shoulders and supported on his right hand. ‘Like running the mile race,’ he said.

‘We’ll have you fit in no time. Mrs O’Cohen has left a pot of soup you’re to eat six or eight times a day - very forceful woman.’ Denton, out of the habit of Atkins’s humour, needed two seconds to realize that O’Cohen was a play on the supposed Irishness of Cohan.

‘What’s she got to do with it?’

‘Oh, ah, she’s close to Mrs Striker, isn’t she? I’m going to get this armchair out of the way; you walk up and down for a while.’

‘I want to rest.’

‘Up and down, up and down, General. You’ve had plenty of rest, if you ask me.’

Denton struggled down the long room, turned at the window and struggled back. He had to pause at the alcove to lean against the cold porcelain stove that stood there, relic of an earlier tenant. Then he went up the room, past his armchair and the fireplace, to the window that looked out on the street. The pavements were wet, the gas lamps on; uneven wiggles of light reflected where the rain, now ended, had collected.

‘Let’s do it once more for old times’ sake, then I’ll bring up the tea.’

‘I’m worn out, Atkins.’

‘That’s why you’ve got to work. Let’s march.’

He laboured down the room again. This time he stopped at the window over the back garden, too exhausted in the right arm and shoulders to go on. The bullet wounds ached. ‘There are lights in the house behind,’ he said.

‘Oh, right. But no Albert Cosgrove.’

‘What’s going on?’

‘Workmen. Somebody bought it.’

‘Turn your back on the world, it goes right on without you.’ He swung around and dragged the leg to the alcove. ‘I’m done in. Help me to bed now.’

‘I thought I’d serve tea out here.’ Atkins’s voice became almost kind. ‘Look, General, you need to get back to normal. You don’t want to start living in a bed.’

Denton looked into his face, then put his left hand on a shoulder. ‘Help me along, then.’

He didn’t know how to sit down into a soft, deep chair. Now he found that if he put the right leg out in front of him and bent the left leg, he could fall backwards and land more or less in a sitting position; the left leg trembled from the effort. He said, ‘Do you know how embarrassing this is?’

‘We’ll practise that,’ Atkins said. ‘I’ll get the tea.’

He had made an effort. There were three kinds of biscuits, toast, anchovy paste, clotted cream, and a tureen of soup from which he lifted the lid. Steam rose and a remarkable odour drifted Denton’s way. ‘It doesn’t smell like the nursing home, at least,’ Denton said. He wasn’t sure what it smelled like.

‘Mrs O’Cohen’s speciality. Chicken and a lot of other stuff. She cooks “kosher”, if you know what that is. I don’t, so don’t ask.’ He ladled out a bowl. ‘Good for what ails you.’

‘They’ve been feeding me a lot of Bovril.’

‘Rare beef is what you need. Increase the blood. I’ve got a bit downstairs in the ice-cave would delight a cannibal. Thought I’d grill it on some coals.’

‘It’ll taste.’

‘Wood coals, General. Not a green recruit, you know.’