Denton produced a card. ‘Did she?’
‘I don’t understand your interest.’
‘I want to know if she’s missing.’ He was irritated; he said deliberately, ‘I’ve already been to the police.’
Geddys looked at the card. He flicked it with a finger. ‘This is simply a name. You could be anybody. Are you a relative?’
‘Mary Thomason wrote me a letter, asking for my help. She missed an appointment with me.’ That wasn’t quite true, but he found himself wanting to squelch Geddys. ‘Is she missing?’
Geddys put the card down on a table. ‘She left us.’
‘But she did work here.’
‘For a while.’
‘What did she do?’
Geddys got cautious again, argued privacy, said that Denton could be anybody, his real feeling perhaps exasperation that Denton wasn’t a customer. Then they got as far as Geddys’s saying that Mary Thomason was young and naive and had framed prints and drawings for him when they were interrupted by a genuine customer, a lavishly got-up woman dripping ecru lace as if it were a skin she were shedding. Denton had to retire to a safe zone between two virtuous objects while they murmured about a ‘sweet bit of pavé’ in a case. But she didn’t buy, and she swept out with a vague promise to look in again, and Geddys smiled his ironic smile, twisting his head at Denton.
Then Denton had to go through it all — the little Wesselons, the note, his absence — leaving out only the things he didn’t see any point in telling. And Geddys admitted he had been annoyed that Mary Thomason had left him without notice, only a note instead of coming in one day in August pleading ‘a family crisis at home’. He was almost too voluble now, too helpful.
‘Where was “home”?’
‘I’ve no idea. She seemed more or less genteel.’
‘You didn’t know where she lived in London?’
‘Ask at the Slade.’
‘What’s the Slade?’
Geddys stared at him. ‘The Slade School of Art.’
‘She was an art student?’
‘So she said.’
He persuaded Geddys to find the precise date when Mary Thomason had gone away. Geddys had in fact kept her note. It was dated the same day as the letter to Denton that she or somebody had tucked into the back of Heseltine’s painting.
‘I don’t understand about the painting,’ Denton said.
‘Neither do I. Most irregular. If I’d known, I’d have stopped it.’
‘But why would she do it?’
Geddys sighed. ‘People, especially young people, do things beyond the comprehension of the mind of man. I hardly knew the young lady.’ He didn’t look Denton in the eye when he said that.
Other questions got only repetition, as of a well-rehearsed story, and the information that Mary Thomason had been clean, prompt, shy and inarticulate. No, she seemed to have no young men, no ‘followers’. No, he had no idea where she had lived, and would Mr Denton forgive him, but he had a business to manage.
Mr Denton didn’t forgive him, because Mr Denton didn’t entirely believe him, but Mr Denton left. Outside the arcade, it was still raining.
He took a cab to Victoria Street, was surprised to have the doorman at the Army and Navy Stores recognize him, the more so because he was only an associate member, and that because Atkins — an actual veteran of the British army — had got him in. He went directly to the gun department and bought a Colt New Pocket revolver in.32 nitro. It didn’t have the feel of the old Colt, but he knew it was quicker and more powerful, far faster to reload. It was smaller and with a shorter barrel, but it weighted his overcoat pocket like a bag of coins.
Munro had the reports for him from the divisions. They had nothing about a Mary Thomason. He complained that Denton should be getting all this from Guillam’s Missing Persons office, not from him.
‘I get along better with you,’ Denton said.
‘Hmp.’ Munro gave him a rather dead stare. ‘Coroner’s office has three unidentified corpses for the day the “missing” woman wrote you the note, seven for the week following, five for the week before. Five female, ten male. Autopsies performed on two — suspicious causes — and the lot buried after the statutory period because you can’t keep dead bodies indefinitely.’
‘Foul play on any of the women?’
Munro shrugged. ‘Two of them taken out of the river, ditto five of the men, all but one been in too long to know much. Nothing caught the eye.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Didn’t strike anybody as justifying investigation.’ Munro folded his hands on his desk. ‘Fact of life, Denton — some folk are worth the trouble, some aren’t.’
‘You mean they were poor.’
‘I don’t make those judgements. If a middle-class householder with two kids and a wife and a job as a senior clerk turns up in the Thames, we investigate. If somebody in rags with no way of knowing who she was washes up, well-’
‘So if I dress the householder in rags and throw him off a bridge, you bury him without an autopsy?’
‘I’d assume the wife would either raise a stink or the neighbours would. Respectability, Denton. It drives the world. You know how it goes — respectability is never being noticed, isn’t it? Never wearing the wrong necktie or saying the wrong word, or suddenly living without a husband when the neighbours know you ought to have one. It comes to our attention. But those who aren’t respectable to start with-’
‘The poor-’
‘You sound like a reformer. Come off it, Denton — you’re respectable, I’m respectable, we read what’s respectable and we think what’s respectable and we don’t go into some parts of London because they aren’t respectable. It’s a not a perfect world out there. A lot gets left to God to sort out.’
‘Mary Thomason maybe wasn’t respectable?’
‘An art student? How would I know? It would help if you could tell me something about her and weren’t just passing gas. Anyway, she should be reported to Missing Persons, which you’ll do posthaste, right?’ Munro slapped his hands on the desk. ‘Tea? Look, Denton, CID aren’t here to find missing shop girls, all right?’
‘Neither am I.’
‘Then give it up. It’s daft, anyway. She probably got a bun in the oven and went home to Ma, or she met some darling artiste and is living in a gypsy caravan someplace.’
Denton accepted a mug of repellent tea. ‘You could be right.’
‘Thank you.’ Munro sipped the tea and made a face. ‘Bitter as a tanner’s pee. My God, why can’t they make it fresh once in a way!’ He pushed several sheets of foolscap across the desk. ‘Keep that, if you like.’
Denton looked it over. Of the list of corpses gathered in after the date of the note to him, one caught his eye, pulled from the Thames — ‘Female, slender, hair long, age unknown because of water and decomposition, contusions on head’ — he thought of bodies he had seen in the war. At the end, he had been in Louisiana; there had been a skirmish, hardly a battle, nothing that would get into the history books, but a dozen bodies had floated down a small river to where he had been camped, three or four catching in a slow eddy; at night, they could hear the alligators tearing at them, their tails splashing the water as they tried to spin pieces off; finally, unable to stand it, he had ordered his men to pull the bodies out and bury them. The faces were ghastly. Was that how Mary Thomason had ended — bloated, unrecognizable, inhuman? ‘Nobody ever heard of Mary Thomason, then. Well-’ He folded the sheets and put them in a pocket. ‘If I’d known what the tea was like, I’d have gone to Guillam.’
‘Try Sewer and Water Authority. Their tea’s capital. They’re not much on crime, though.’ He smiled, the deliberately false smile that merely lifts the corners of the lips. ‘We investigate when we get evidence. There’s no evidence.’