Bohemian Girl, The (9 page)

‘I’ve got a key to the front door,’ the estate agent said.

‘Good for you.’

The cellar, Denton now saw, had a stone floor and the smell of cats and mould and wood that had been too long damp. Dimly seen, a huge fireplace in the far wall proclaimed that this had once been the kitchen. The wooden stairs he had felt his way up led to a corridor, a more recent kitchen now to be seen opposite, a pantry to the left. The house itself was narrow and unfurnished, with mouldings and fireplaces that seemed to Denton old-fashioned, more like those of his childhood.

‘Closed houses’re always colder than your mother-in-law’s breath,’ Munro said.

He led them to the stairs, where Denton recounted what he had done and what he had heard. A soiled mattress for a narrow bed lay partway down the stairs - the shapeless thing that had attacked Denton first. In the daylight, it and everything else looked small and mean and harmless. At the top of the stairs, a fireplace poker without a handle lay against the wall - the thing with which Denton had been struck. Markson used a handkerchief to pick it up.

They went into the room in whose window Atkins thought he had seen the man with the red moustache. The window gave an excellent view of the back of Denton’s house.

‘Could be a tramp. Stood here and watched?’ Munro said. He looked at Denton. ‘Why?’

Denton thought of telling him about the man he had seen at New Scotland Yard, the possibility that had occurred to him that there might be some connection with Guillam, but thought better of it. He said, ‘I wish I knew.’

‘You said you heard two voices.’

‘I thought I did - a man and a woman - but I think only one person went past me down the stairs - I’m not sure—’

‘Enemies? Been getting threatening letters?’

‘Rather the opposite.’

Munro looked as if he was about to say something but turned away. He sent the detective off for somebody to start searching the house. Plumb, the estate agent, was looking uneasily about as if expecting to find that the ceilings had fallen in. Munro warned him to touch nothing and sent him downstairs to open the front door for the police. Then he paced up and down by the window, studying the floor, and got down and put one side of his face against the boards.

‘Been somebody here, all right. Marks in the dust.’ He got up. ‘If you were spying on yourself from here, would you sleep here?’

‘That would be one way to do it.’

‘But the water and gas are off. You’d need a bed and a chamber pot and something to drink and probably something to do. Boring, surveillance is. Done my stint, I can tell you.’ He had taken his hat off again, now put it on. ‘Listen, while there’s just the two of us - what makes you think this had anything to do with you?’

‘Atkins saw somebody. I saw a light—’

‘Yeah, yeah, you told us all that. Could be a tramp. What else?’

‘I’ve had some kind of, mm, strange letters. The last sounded as if he’d been watching me. Had seen me, anyway.’

‘What’s the connection?’

‘I don’t know.’

Munro shook his head. ‘You look in the closets for signs somebody’s spent time here. I’ll be back.’ He started out, turned around. ‘Don’t touch anything unless you use your handkerchief. Upper brass are nuts on fingerprints. I already said that, didn’t I?’

Denton went up another flight to the bedrooms and started going through the rooms. On the floor above that one, in what had been meant as a maid’s room, he supposed, he found two blankets rolled up together in a small cupboard under a stair, along with a chamber pot and a stack of writing paper. He wrapped a pocket handkerchief around one hand, lifted the pot’s lid, got its stink, saw it needed washing.

Most of the paper had been written on in green ink, a cramped hand that couldn’t keep a straight line. The first page was rather elaborately decorated with calligraphic scrolls and tiny faces, impish, like something in a medieval manuscript. In the middle, in half-inch-high decorated letters, it said ‘The Demon Inside His Head’, and below that in smaller letters ‘A Novel. By Albert Cosgrove.’

He lifted the pages with the tip of his pocket-knife. He read words, phrases, saw interleavings and scribbles at angles, what seemed to be a loss of control as he got deeper into the pile. Then pages with only a few words on them in huge letters, then drawings - grotesque faces, penises and balls, an eye. Then a page of incoherence, mere words, illegibility. Then relative coherence, even a sense of starting again - and the names and actions of the characters in the outline that was missing from Denton’s desk.

Then Munro came back and said that the intruder had been emptying his po down the privy in Denton’s garden, and Denton felt sudden queasiness:
He’s being me.

Sitting in his own room again with coffee, Munro opposite with his overcoat open, Denton pondered the question - was it the menace? - of Albert Cosgrove. Down towards the far end of the room, the doors to the dumb waiter stood open - Sergeant Atkins’s means of eavesdropping on what was said. Denton didn’t mind; he’d want to discuss it with him later, anyway.

‘I’m losing a day’s work,’ Denton said.

‘And me? I’m on my hols? I’m not even supposed to be here, Denton; CID have better things for me to do.’

‘Run off, if you must.’

‘Markson, that young detective, is a good lad. This is his case; he’ll be the one you talk to. But bear in mind that he’s young and on the make and he don’t necessarily know better than to let Georgie Guillam sniff around his tail.’

‘What’s all that about fingerprints?’

‘You know what they are? Of course you do. No two alike, and so on.’ He grunted. ‘Let’s pass over whether that’s proven. What matters is the Home Secretary and other powers that be want us to collect fingerprints at crime scenes. Will they help us find criminals? No, because we don’t have anything to compare them with. Will they help us in ten or twenty years if we get enough of them? Maybe, if the theory is correct. Right now, all they’ll tell us is if somebody whose prints we already have may have been at a crime scene. Which is why you’re to come down to the Yard today and get your prints taken.’

‘I’ve better things to do.’

‘Fingerprint fella goes off at six; get it done before then. All right?’

‘Look, Munro—’

‘You’re not hearing me! The nicer you are, the quicker it’ll go away.’ He leaned forward for emphasis. ‘
I want you to give your fingerprints today.
’ He held up a hand. ‘And another thing.’

‘My God, what now!’

‘You had no business going into that house. You should have called a constable.’

‘I sent Atkins to call one.’

‘While you went inside a house that wasn’t your own, in the dark, and forced the hand of somebody who might have really broken your crown.’ He shook his head. ‘It wasn’t wisely done, Denton.’

‘All right, all right. It wasn’t wise.’

‘You’re a man that attracts trouble. Last year, it was a murderer; a few days ago you came to me about some girl who’d disappeared—How is that, anyway?’

‘Stymied.’

‘And now there’s this - somebody - shadowing you and breaking into a house to do it.’

‘It isn’t my fault that some lunatic wants to spy on me.’

‘Who says he’s a lunatic?’

‘Did you look at that manuscript?’

‘Little faces on the front, yes, seems a bit peculiar. Fairies, were they supposed to be? That a fairy tale he was writing?’

Denton looked grim. ‘The first paragraph is a word-for-word theft from the first paragraph of one of my books. Partway through, his scribbles start to use the outline for the book I’m working on. That outline was in my desk when I left London!’

‘He’s been in your house? What else is missing?’

‘Nothing that I know of. But - goddamnit, Munro, he’s been
in
here. He’s sat in my chair, he’s lain down on my bed, I’ll bet anything he took a crap in my WC because he couldn’t control himself!’

‘Burglars do that, it’s true - often in the middle of the carpet.’

‘Munro, I thought this was some harmless booby. Now I think otherwise. It’s - it’s “creepy”!’ A British reviewer had called Denton’s second book ‘an American fantasy of the creepy variety’. Now the word had come home to roost.

Munro’s stolid face seemed to become wooden. He stared at Denton. ‘I don’t see what it’s about.’

Denton got up and took a few steps down the room, then back. ‘I think it’s about imitation.’

‘You lost me.’

‘“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” Would-be writers imitate writers who’ve made it - “playing the sedulous ape”, Stevenson called it. I think “Albert Cosgrove” may have gone a few miles beyond that.’

‘So you make him out a loony.’

‘I don’t know. But it’s creepy, finding something of my own that somebody else has taken over lock, stock and barrel. He may even believe he made it up himself.’

‘You mean, if he knows it’s yours, he’s an honest thief; if he thinks it’s his own, he’s mad - that it?’ Munro tapped the crease in his soft hat lightly with the side of a hand. ‘He dangerous, you think?’

‘How would I know?’

‘Well, he hit you with a poker. I think we’d best put some minders on you - see if he’s following you about.’

Denton didn’t like the idea of minders. ‘He may just be some kid who’s wild to be somebody.’

‘The somebody is you?’

‘I certainly hope not.’ Denton was no enthusiast of the new pseudo-science of psychology, but he’d read enough - Krafft-Ebing, James - to know that there was a form of fantasy that merged into obsession. He sometimes wrote about it, in fact, although differently, expressing it as a ghost or a demon instead of an aspect of personality. He wondered now if Albert Cosgrove had used ‘demon’ in his title as a deliberate imitation. Or was it identification? ‘Maybe he wants to hide in somebody else.’

‘From what? You’re off in fairy-land, Denton.’ Munro got up. He jiggled his hat on a finger inserted into the crown. ‘Sending you love notes, sort of, was he?’

‘You make it sound female - like a schoolgirl’s crush. Atkins said something like that.’

‘Well?’

‘Yes, it could be like that.’

‘You have any of his letters?’

‘Burned them the night I got home. No, maybe I have the one that came yesterday—’ He knelt by the grate, saw only ash and dying coals. ‘I’ll look for it. Maybe it’s in the waste bin.’

‘And you’ve forgotten the address.’

‘I’m not even sure there was one.’ He jammed his hands into his pockets. ‘I get letters like that, maybe not as excitable, all the time. It comes with the profession.’

‘The trials of the famous. You ever answer them?’

Denton huffed. ‘These had been here for a while. Of course I didn’t answer them. My God, in one he wanted a copy of each of my books, signed, with a personal inscription!’

‘But there wasn’t an address?’

‘I don’t think so. He isn’t rational.’

‘Mmp.’ Munro buttoned his overcoat. ‘Anyway, you’re to be a good citizen and take yourself down to New Scotland Yard before six tonight. And we’ll put somebody to trail you. And you’re going to let us know anything else that happens. Aren’t you.’ It wasn’t a question.

‘Anything related.’

Munro gestured with the hat, holding it so its brim was vertical and waving it up and down. ‘And you’re not to go off on this by yourself! I don’t care if you were once upon a time the Lord High Sheriff of America,
we’re
the police authority here.’

‘My main concern is to finish my book.’

‘Good. Keep that in your head and we’ll be all right.’ He put his hat on. ‘You ever report that girl as a missing person?’

‘I never established that she was missing.’

‘Albert Cosgrove is police business enough for you for this year, anyway.’ He stood, bear-like, by the door, turned abruptly. ‘Dammit, I know it isn’t your fault, Denton, but you’re a bleeding magnet for loonies and misfits! I’ll see myself out.’

And he did. Denton heard the rumble of Atkins’s voice mingle with the sound of the front door’s opening.

When Atkins came up, Denton was back in his chair. ‘You heard?’ he said.

‘Couldn’t help myself. Dumb waiter left open through oversight. ’

‘The bastard was in here. He took my outline. God knows what else he did.’

‘Kind of makes you want to give everything a wash, don’t it.’

‘What d’you think?’

‘I think you’ve put your foot in a bow-wow’s mess. Best take a few weeks in Italy.’

‘We just got home.’

‘Awfully nice, Italy.’ Atkins pursed his lips. ‘I think I’ll hang on to the derringer for a bit. You really think this Cosgrove is mental?’

‘
I
don’t know. I don’t need these distractions just now!’

‘Say it louder, General. Maybe they’ll go away.’

Dr Bernat came in towards noon and looked at his arm and his head and told him he was a very hard nut. When he was done with the back of Denton’s head, Bernat came around to the front, stepped closer, lifted his spectacles to look at Denton’s eyes. He had to stand on tiptoe to do so, a short man with a beard, stocky, rather handsome. ‘Your eyes are not happy, Mr Denton.’

‘I’ve been working.’

‘Eye strain.’ Bernat backed away and picked a book at random from the shelf and opened it. ‘Read.’ He held the book at eye level several feet from Denton.

‘Uh - no, too small—’

The doctor came a step closer. ‘Now?’ He moved again. ‘Now?’ ‘It’s blurry.’

Bernat closed the book with a clap. ‘You are needing eyeglasses for the close work.’

‘I haven’t got time to go someplace and go through a lot of rigmarole! ’

Bernat was writing on a pad. ‘You can go to Harley Street and pay several pounds and then go somewhere else and pay several more for eyeglasses.’ He handed over the paper. ‘Or you can go where I am going and where Whitechapel people are going and pay very little. You just try on glasses until you are finding a pair you like. Very nice people, also Jews like me, helpful - I am recommending it.’ He looked over his glasses. ‘Go today.’