The Bohemian Girl Part 6

'Something you did yourself, sir?'

'Of course not.'

'Not your ladder?'

'I don't own a ladder.'

The policeman replaced the ladder and then climbed up it and stood there, looking down into Denton's back garden. He came down. 'Ladder on the other side's also been sawed. Two ladders sawn from one, if you follow my meaning.'

'I do.'

'Deliberate.'

'That sounds right.'

The policeman paced back and shone the light around. 'This is a matter for a detective.' He stood straight. 'Get one here in the morning.'

He came closer to Denton. It was cold in the garden. Denton shivered and remembered that his clothes were soaked. Still, there was something perversely pleasant about the moment - the darkness, the quieter city, a star that he could see above them - a sense that things could easily have been worse. 'Now, sir,' the policeman said.

'This isn't a good place to give a statement. Why don't we go into my house? There's tea.'

The man considered that. 'If your man will just remain here at the scene, sir, I'll fetch another constable to keep guard, and we'll proceed.'

It took him fifteen minutes. Denton got quite cold.

He got to bed finally. The story of the man with the red moustache, the figure in the window, the glow Denton had seen there, were more than the policeman wanted to hear. He said several times that Denton would have to tell this to a detective. Denton's having waited over there himself earlier that evening made him frown; Denton's actually going into the house made him frown even more.

He was a stolid copper with a balding head that had what seemed to be a permanent red crease where his helmet rode. The hairs at the sides of his head, some grey, were damp from the sweat of it. He shook his head several times but didn't say outright that this was a strange tale.

'Matter for the detectives,' he said once more, and left.

'Now you're for it,' Atkins said.

'Me?'

'Police'll have you the guilty party for breaking and entering, before they're through.'

'Go to bed.'

'I ain't been staying up because I like it, General.' Atkins looked at him with suspicion. 'You sure you're all right?'

'My arm hurts, but I can use it and wiggle the fingers. The knock on the head had me seeing stars, but they're gone and all I have is a headache. Mostly, my feelings are hurt for being such a dub. You'd think I'd never fired a pistol before.'

In the morning, his arm was bruised but his headache was gone. The embarra.s.sment was still there, perhaps more acutely. Wanting to erase it, he went around to Millman Street and looked at the front of the house and found a 'To Let' sign, not very large, by the front door. On it in a small, neat handwriting was the name of an estate agent in Russell Square. Neither the sign nor the size of the writing suggested that anybody was very hopeful about Number 14 Millman Street. Denton looked at the house and thought he saw why: too small, too old, too poorly maintained. Had he ever known whoever had lived there before? He didn't think so.

At nine, cursing the time off from his work, he was at Messrs Plumb and Angevin in Russell Square. Plumb, an eager, smiling, rabbity man too young to be so familiar, was astonished that somebody had been attacked in one of his houses, shocked that the house had been invaded.

'That's breaking and entering,' he said. 'You should have apprised us!'

'There was nothing to apprise you about.'

'You have a duty under the law!'

'Don't be ridiculous.'

'That's a valuable property!'

'And I'm the King of Siam. Now look, Mr Plumb, it appears to me this man was spying on me from that house.'

'You admit it's your fault, then.'

Denton considered taking Mr Plumb by his revers and lifting him off the floor. However, at that moment, a detective walked in and showed his credentials, and Denton backed off a step and said, 'Is this about Number 14 Millman Street?'

The detective, who was young and clearly afraid he didn't project enough authority, rapped out, 'Who're you?'

'I live in the house behind Number 14. I'm the man who was attacked.'

'Oh, are you?' He glanced at some notes. 'You Mr Denton?'

'I am.'

'We want to talk to you.' He touched Denton's arm as if he were going to seize him. 'My name's Markson. Detective.'

Twenty minutes later, Denton was answering questions in the back garden of Number 14, and Mr Plumb was standing against the house, looking cold and worried. A policeman who had been standing there part of the night looked dour. After some minutes of answering Markson's questions, Denton was relieved to see Munro, who hove into view around the corner like some large animal. He was carrying his hat - he had been hurrying, he said - and his hair was plastered down as the policeman's had been last night. He nodded at Denton and loomed over the young detective. 'What've you got?'

'Just examining the man Denton.'

'In aid of what?'

'He was the victim of the attack.'

Munro rolled his eyes. 'Have you been inside the house yet?'

'Proceeding deliberately. I was told to be alert for fingerprints.'

Munro exhaled noisily and glanced at Denton. Munro and the detective walked quickly over the turf near the cellar door, which Markson called 'the crime scene', Munro saying 'Yes, yes,' every few seconds as if he'd heard it all before. Then Munro grabbed Denton's arm and walked him towards the back of the garden. 'You think somebody's been watching you from this house, that true? Didn't see anything for a couple of nights, then this - true? Saw somebody at a window once maybe maybe, then a "glow" at night, maybe maybe - true? That it?' - true? That it?'

'The ladders.'

'Ah, ladders.' Denton led him to the ladder, which Munro mounted and from which he looked down into Denton's garden. 'You going to do something for those roses?' he said.

'Hadn't given it a thought.'

'Roses are the thing. Now, they're difficult, mind, but they give great satisfaction. Looks as if the soil would be all right. I could give you some slips - cuttings, you know. Rather pleased with my roses.'

'Atkins wants to grow vegetables.'

'He has no soul.' Munro looked at a notebook. 'Yes, the ladder's been cut in two and propped like that - not your doing or your man's, true?' He sniffed. 'The notes from the first copper on the scene were on my desk at seven with a note from Georgie Guillam - "Look what your pal is up to now." I thought I'd best get over here before somebody decided you were a vicious criminal.' He put his hat on and lowered his voice. 'I told you that Georgie could be trouble. This isn't even his manor, but he must have had somebody looking for paper with your name on it.' He took Denton's arm again and steered him back to the young detective. 'You're doing a fine job here, Markson, but we don't want to spend time running the wrong fox. Mr Denton is a well-known man of good reputation, rather a friend to the Yard - I'm sure you remember the Stella Minter case last year - so, a word to the wise from an old hand: don't spend too much time on him. Right? Right. Let's go inside.'

Munro raised the cellar door by its U-shaped handle. The estate agent jingled some keys but Munro ignored him. He stood staring down the stone steps at the door in the foundation wall. 'Modern alarm system, I see.' He kicked the rope and the tins aside and turned to his right, surprisingly light on his feet, and tiptoed down the edge of the steps, then felt along a ledge up at ground level and grunted. He took out a handkerchief and reached up to the ledge again and came down with a big key. 'One of those old locks you could open with a hairpin, anyway.' Holding the key in the handkerchief, he waved it at the detective. 'Fingerprints, I know.' He looked at Denton. 'We just got a directive on fingerprints. Our newest fad. We now have a Fingerprint Branch, as of last August.' He wrapped the key in the handkerchief and gave it to Markson. 'I want that handkerchief back.' He looked up at Denton, still at the top of the stairs. 'Of course, we can't get fingerprints off objects unless the person conveniently has paint or mud or dog t.u.r.d on his fingers, but it's important that we handle everything with "gloves or clean cotton wool".' He growled.

'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 bra.s.s 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 ma.n.u.script. 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, p.e.n.i.ses and b.a.l.l.s, 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. 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 pa.s.s 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 G.o.d, 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 ma.n.u.script?'

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