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 turd 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 motherin-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?’