Bohemian Girl, The (42 page)

The door moved; the scraping sound grated. The opening widened - six inches, a foot, almost enough room for him to go through - and he saw her face, demonic, pale, and the razor that gleamed in an arc and missed his face as he recoiled but slashed down his left arm. He fell back into the hall, almost going down the stairs. The door slammed again.

Blood was running down his arm and dripping on the rag rug. The unconnected thought that she had made the rugs herself came into his mind. She had built herself a nest, he thought. He was tearing off the shirt of his silly outfit and wrapping it around his arm, then pulling it tight and holding the end with his left hand so it wouldn’t unwind.

He pushed the door again. It swung open and banged against the dresser that had been pushed against it. Holding his bleeding arm above his head, Denton nudged the door with his hip, alert for the razor, waiting for her to attack again.

The room was empty. Like the hall it was pretty. On the far wall above a double bed was the ‘little Wesselons’.

The dormer window was open.

He pushed the dresser out of the way and looked around the room for her, even bending and lifting the girlish flounce to look under the bed. She was clever enough to hide and let him think she’d gone out of the window, but she wasn’t in the room.

The dormer was high, six feet wide; the window was a tall double casement that swung from the middle post. Both leaves were open. If he went out of the wrong window, she might be able to come back in the other and escape him before he knew where she was.

He closed the door and pushed the dresser against it again to slow her if she came back in. His blood dripped on the floor and he raised the arm over his head again.

He went out of the right-hand window. When he looked down the pitch of the roof to the eave, vertigo staggered him. His old fear of heights. He closed his eyes, shook his head; then, not looking at the ground, he went out, left leg first, pulling the other after, peering around the corner of the dormer for her and pulling his head back in case the razor swung.

She was most of the way up the roof, heading for the peak. She was sitting, boosting herself up on her buttocks, keeping her feet and hands on the slates. She, too, was afraid of the height, he thought. When she saw him, she began to move faster. Above her and at the edge of the roof to her right was a chimney; she seemed to be making for it. Maybe there was a way down there; he didn’t think so, rather that she was going for the chimney because it was solid and seemed to offer support. If she could get down the other side of the roof, however, she could probably drop to the front garden; the house was higher at the back than the front because of the drop to the river.

‘You can’t make it!’ he shouted.

She moved herself up again. He saw the razor flash in her hand.

‘Give it up!’

He started up the roof. He went on his fingertips and the balls of his feet, the light rubber shoes he wore for rowing a help. She screamed, screamed again. He was aware of voices below them and understood how it must look to anybody who could see them - a half-naked man chasing a woman.

‘Come down from there, you monster!’ a woman’s voice shouted, the sound thinned by distance.

Mary Thomason screamed again. She had almost reached the chimney. And then what?

Denton pushed himself harder. He forgot the bad leg. He looked at nothing but the woman in the white dress. Straightening, he went up on the diagonal faster than she was moving, and when she reached the chimney, he was only three yards behind. He put his right foot over the peak of the roof and balanced there, a foot on each side. She looked down towards the ground at the front of the house. Several people were down there, foreshortened, shouting.

‘Leave that poor girl alone! The police are coming!’ One of them blew a police whistle.

She scrambled upright, using the chimney to support her. With her back to it and the razor at her side where they couldn’t see it from below, she faced him. Denton moved closer. He raised his arm over his head because of the bleeding.

‘Give it up. It’s over.’

She was very like the drawing. Not quite pretty, but arresting. The breeze stirred her hair. He said, ‘Give it up. You think you’re a nasty piece of work, but I’m nastier. I’ll kill you if I have to.’

They were fixed on each other as if they were the only people in the world. They were, in that shared concentration, like lovers. The Thames, the day, the glory of the summer, didn’t exist. He looked at her and she looked at him, and for a moment he saw her face soften and he felt for her something that was beyond sympathy, almost an identification, a sharing of self, as if in the instant of violence that was coming they were the same. He held out the bloody left arm with the hand open. ‘Give it to me. It’s over.’

Then her face changed to the demonic one he had glimpsed through the door, and she swung the razor at him. He flung up his arm and caught it on the part that was wrapped in the shirt. It slashed down; he felt its bite again and grabbed her wrist. He raised it high, as if they were doing some country dance, drawing her off the chimney, and she tried to pull away. His other hand was balled into a fist, and he hesitated an instant because she was a woman, because her female face was so near his own. Then the razor’s blade cut into his palm as his slippery hand lost its grip and she turned in the air in front of him, one foot on a slate and one foot in the air, and then she was gone and he heard the thud of her body on the flagstones beside the house.

And then he felt his own vertigo, and he collapsed against the chimney, hugging it as if he had been thrown against it by a wave.

‘Man or woman?’

‘Man.’ Munro grinned. ‘Relieved?’ He set down a mug of tea for Denton.

‘I was about ninety-eight parts in a hundred sure. But I thought—If she was a woman—’

‘Well, he wasn’t. How’s that arm?’

‘Hurts like hell. Nice lot of stitches.’

‘You lost a good lot of blood. Feeling queasy?’

‘I’ve been told to take Extract of Meat and Malt Wine. I think I’ll stay with Mrs Cohan’s soup. The tea’s a godsend for now.’ They were in a borrowed office in Brentford Infirmary. The local constabulary had first arrested Denton and brought him there in handcuffs to be sewn up. It had taken three hours to sort out what had happened, the actual sorting-out being done only when New Scotland Yard had been brought in. More time had passed while somebody figured out that what had happened at Strand-on-the-Green was part of a case Munro was already working on.

Munro put his hands in his trouser pockets and stared out of the window. ‘He’s dead. I’m sorry about that - I’d like to see the bastard in the dock.’ He looked at Denton. ‘I’ve got a dozen witnesses that will swear they saw you push a woman off that roof.’

‘I’m sure. But I didn’t.’

‘I’ve read your statement. Funny, what people see.’

‘How’s Brown?’

‘Head’s too broken for us to take a statement. Concussion. Maybe by tomorrow. You didn’t have to try to kill him, too, you know.’

‘I didn’t want him behind me while I went after the woman.’

‘His nose was mashed flat against his face, he has two broken ribs, and he fractured a finger, apparently trying to protect himself from the poker. Can’t you ever go easy on them?’

‘I told you, I didn’t want him behind me.’

Munro stared out of the window, then shook his head. ‘
Did
you push the woman? The man?’

‘I lost my grip on her wrist. She was off balance.’

‘I wouldn’t blame you if you had. He was an ugly piece of work. Cutting the head off Himple, killing Heseltine - the painting that came from Heseltine’s flat pretty well cinches that one. You’re always right.’

‘Like hell.’

Munro grinned at him, then became serious again. ‘You think he was insane?’

‘Anybody who commits murder is insane, isn’t he?’

‘I meant, playing at being a woman.’

Denton said nothing, then, ‘She was sane. Maybe he wasn’t.’ ‘They were the same person, Denton!’

Denton shrugged again. He felt light-headed, detached. Munro said, ‘We’re digging up Brown’s garden to look for Himple’s head.’

‘Yes, you should do that. Although I don’t think you’ll find it.’

Munro grunted. ‘No. I suppose it’s somewhere like the middle of the Channel.’

‘Or in an abandoned privy in Paris.’

‘She wasn’t here until last week - we’ve asked the neighbours. Why the hell do you think she came back
here
?’

‘They wanted to be together, I suppose.’

Munro gave a snort of contempt. ‘Queer sort of being together - murdering folk. You think it was always the two of them?’

‘I didn’t until I saw her in the garden. Yes, I think it was always the two of them - before anything else. Maybe Crum met Himple first at the Baths, but then when he met Brown - funny, how people pair off.’ He gave a grim smile. ‘There’s a novel in that.’ He moved the arm painfully to another position, then sipped the tea. ‘Think you’ll ever know who Arthur Crum really was?’

‘Mr Nobody from Nowhere. Some little chap who thought he’d found himself a clever way off the factory floor.’

‘And it got away from him?’

Munro shrugged. He sighed and opened the door. ‘Well, you can go. Although I think I’m letting the most dangerous man in London walk.’ Denton got up and strode to the door. Munro said, ‘Speaking of walk—’

‘What?’

‘
Look
at you.’

Denton looked where Munro was pointing, at his right leg. He wasn’t limping. He didn’t have a stick.

‘Where’s the bad leg, then?’

‘I guess she took it over the roof with her.’

Janet Striker was waiting for him at the infirmary gate. She hurried him into a waiting cab and made him lie back into a nest of pillows she’d put there. ‘Don’t ever let anybody tell you that money isn’t important,’ she said. ‘I bought these for you to lie on and they’re going in the dustbin as soon as we get you home. But worth every penny!’

‘I’m not an invalid.’

‘You bled like a pig, I was told. You should be feeling weak and ill.’

‘I’m not a pig.’

‘No, you’re a man, and a fairly good specimen of one.’ She kissed him. ‘Tell me everything, including how you got your leg back.’

As they rode, he went through it all. ‘Finally,’ he said when he had told her everything, ‘I felt sorry for her. Not sorry, perhaps, but - sorrow.’

‘And then you could walk.’

‘It was going up the roof. I had to and I did. I’ve been letting it rule me, giving in to it. Being an invalid meant I’d never have to risk killing her.’

‘Is that what it was about - not killing her?’

‘Being afraid to kill her? No, more like being afraid I’d get to the moment and find I
wanted
to kill her.’

‘Because I told you all men hate women.’

He was silent.

‘And you found you didn’t.’ Janet held his good hand. ‘Does it make a difference that he wasn’t a woman?’

‘She was a woman when she went off that roof. I know in my soul I didn’t want her to go off, and I’m satisfied.’

They were silent for a long way, and then they talked of trivial things like the cancelled coronation. He said, ‘Atkins, at least, is delighted. The pneumatic truss wasn’t ready, and now they’ve got at least a couple of months to get it right.’ Just before they reached his house, he said, ‘You had it figured. I wouldn’t accept that the woman and the brother were the same.’

‘Well, the evidence was thin.’

He remembered the dreams. ‘It was the rags. I couldn’t—’

She put a finger on his lips. ‘It doesn’t matter. You did what you set out to do - you found the woman who asked for your help.’

‘And found that I was the one who was going to hurt her.’ He shook his head. ‘She didn’t really ask for my help at all, but—I wonder if she was thinking about her letter when we were up on that roof.’

She came behind him up the stairs as if she might need to push, but he made it well enough, light-headed, weak. Atkins appeared with a bottle of the Army and Navy Stores’ Extract of Meat and Malt Wine. That, and more tea, and a chop from the Lamb, gave Denton the illusion of feeling normal. A false euphoria came over him; he didn’t recognize it as the giddiness of blood loss. As they ate, he talked about the future, an idea for a new book that had leapt into his head while he was on the roof, some sort of travel they could do together. He was opening his mail at the same time, over-excited, hands trembling. He hooted.

‘Jarrold’s sainted ma has instructed her lawyers to offer me seven thousand pounds and medical expenses!’ He cackled happily. ‘Sergeant!’ When an answer came up the dumb-waiter shaft, he shouted, ‘We’re getting electric in the house! And heat! And a proper modern ice-box!’ He turned back to Janet Striker. ‘I’m going to buy a motor car. Where would you like to go?’

‘University College.’

‘Ah, I’d hoped Constantinople by way of Athens.’

She laughed, shook her head.

He shouted, ‘Sergeant! Want to motor to—?’

‘No,’ came the hollow answer, ‘and neither does Rupert.’

He put the letter down. He looked at her. ‘Well, I’ll pretend that your house is Constantinople. Your bed, most certainly.’

‘Some of the time, anyway.’

‘There’ll always be the door in the garden wall, you mean.’

‘But with a lock.’

‘And you’ll have the key.’

‘I’ll have the key.’

‘Oh - well—’ He leaned back, then suddenly sat up and said, ‘Dammit! I left my boat tied up by the river!’ He jumped up too quickly, felt the room start to go black and collapsed back into his cushions. He grinned at her foolishly. ‘Maybe I’ll leave that for tomorrow.’

Kenneth Cameron is the author of one previous novel featuring Denton,
The Frightened Man
, as well as of plays staged in Britain and the US, and the award-winning
Africa on Film: Beyond Black and White
. He lives part of the year in northern New York State and part in the southern US.