‘I don’t like the brother somehow.’
‘He’s a man.’
‘There is that.’ They walked on a few steps and he said, ‘I don’t like Geddys.’ He looked aside at her. ‘He lied to me.’
‘How?’
‘Saying he didn’t know where she lived. Mrs Durnquess said he’d seen her home and was “interested” in her. You deal with Alf; I’ll tackle Geddys again.’
Opposite the corner of Judd Street, she said, ‘I’ll leave you here.’ ‘Dinner?’
‘Not tonight.’
‘I feel like one of those knights in an old tale who’s being set a test to prove himself.’
She shook her head. ‘I’m the one being tested. You don’t understand. ’ She walked away towards Euston station.
CHAPTER EIGHT
He was at work again next morning by eight, hard at it still at three that afternoon, grateful for the eyeglasses that made hours of writing possible. He felt harried by the need to get the book out of his head and on paper — the more so because of Cosgrove’s theft of the outline, as if irrationally he believed that Cosgrove might replicate it. Atkins, when he had first seen the glasses — Denton, of course, had forgotten he had them on — had blinked once and raised his thin eyebrows a fraction of an inch. Joker though he was, Atkins had a sense of tact. Later, when Denton, in pacing around his bedroom, passed the mirror, he saw the strange face, its huge nose topped by the spectacles that enlarged the eyes behind them. He looked like somebody on the stage. Somebody definitely comic.
At four, when his back hurt and his wrist was sore, Atkins appeared in the bedroom door.
‘Mrs Striker’s below with a box. Cab waiting at the door.’
Denton jumped up, struggled into a coat. When he turned to Atkins, the soldier-servant tapped between his own eyes. When Denton didn’t get it, Atkins made circles around his eyes with thumbs and fingers.
‘Oh — dammit-’ He pulled the glasses off, threw them on the desk and started out of the door.
‘Collar and tie, Colonel,’ Atkins murmured from the stairs.
Why did it matter? Why did such trivialities matter? But he put on a collar and tie.
Of course.
She was standing at the far end of the long sitting room, wearing the same or another equally awful hat and a dark coat. At her feet was a small trunk. She smiled when she saw him. ‘I’ve found Mary Thomason’s trunk.’
He stared at her. ‘How?’
She laughed. ‘It’s rather a tale.’
‘Atkins — take her coat, Mrs Striker’s coat-Want tea? Or coffee? There’s sherry-’ He had thought he would never get her here; now she was here under her own steam, and he didn’t know how to behave.
‘I have a cab waiting,’ she said as she handed over her coat. She kept the hat on.
‘Send it away. We can get another when-’
She shook her head. ‘It’s one thing for a woman to go to a man’s house and leave the cab waiting in front. It’s another for her to send it away. I don’t give a damn, but you’re a public sort of man.’
‘You know I don’t care about that — ’ he hesitated, finished lamely — ‘stuff.’
‘Then you’ve lost whatever common sense you had. I’ll stay twenty minutes, no more.’ She glanced at Atkins. ‘Tea, if you can have it here in ten.’
‘At once, madam.’
Denton frowned, aware that Atkins was doing his perfect-servant turn, waved him away. He went closer to her. ‘I’m having a hard time realizing you’re really here.’
‘Do you want to hear my story or don’t you?’
‘Have you opened it?’
‘All in good time.’ She sat in the chair across the small fireplace from his; he perched on the arm of his own. She said, ‘Alf found me last evening. You remember Alf, the carter — St Pancras Road? Well, I’d written “To hear something to your advantage” on the card I left for him, and my address-’
‘You never left me your address.’
‘Perhaps I had nothing of advantage for you. At any rate, he turned up last evening. Alf lacks teeth and had been into gin somewhere, and he looked as if he might have been carrying sacks of coal — a sort of overall and a cap with a flap down the back — not awfully well washed, shorter than he ought to be, perhaps from bending. But agreeable in the way of men who say what they think you want to hear.
‘So I asked him if he remembered picking up a box from a house in Fitzroy Street in August. He didn’t, nor did he remember the brother, but he remembered Hannah well enough — mostly her scones — and then it came back to him. More or less. The long and the short of it was that if he sent the box off somewhere, he’d have a receipt for it. So back to St Pancras Road we went.’
‘You didn’t!’
‘I did. What have I better to do? He lives there, under the railway arch. It was as filthy as you’d expect. I’ve seen worse. He keeps his receipts impaled on a nail driven in from the outside — several nails, actually — and he went through them pile by pile, as apparently there’s no order to them — he smashes one on whatever nail he’s near. He found it at last, by the date. The signature was illegible — presumably the brother’s — intentionally so? But there it was, a receipt for one small trunk sent by rail to Biggleswade, “Hold until called for.”’
‘My God, you’re a wonder!’
‘It was getting on for dark by then. I stepped outside where I could see and asked him if he’d let me have the receipt for a few days. Alf was shocked at the very idea. Could I rent it for a few days? Alf said it would upset his record-keeping something fierce, not to mention morality, but two-and-six turned out to be the price of his record-keeping and his scruples. He was casting about for something else to sell me by then, but I had the receipt and I simply walked away to the telegraph office at St Pancras station, where I sent a telegram to the left-luggage office at Biggleswade to ask if the item number of the receipt had been picked up.’ She grinned. ‘They wired back this morning that it hadn’t.’
Denton slid down into his armchair. ‘Mary Thomason never got there.’
‘The trunk hadn’t been retrieved, at any rate. So this morning, I went and got it.’
He looked down at the trunk. It was shaped like a loaf of bread, perhaps two feet long, cheap wood partly covered with pressed tin and held together by oak slats. ‘What’s in it?’
‘I stopped at a locksmith’s on my way here and had it unlocked. But I haven’t looked inside.’
He tried to smile at her, but the smile was crooked and unconvincing because he was thinking she could be in trouble if somebody eventually came looking for the trunk. There was, too, a hesitation about looking into somebody’s privacy — more pointed, perhaps, because somebody had been looking into his. ‘You’re a wonder,’ he said again.
Atkins came in with a tea tray, which he put on a folding cake stand that he produced from the shadows of the room like somebody doing a magic trick. He put it down near Janet Striker with a perfect-servant flourish, poured her a cup of tea, and then faded back down the long room, hardly pausing as he opened the doors of the dumb waiter before disappearing down his stairs.
Denton took a cup of tea, then put it aside and bent forward and pulled, using the trunk’s hasp as a handle. Inside, a folded dress was visible, filling the interior, white with a narrow yellow line in the fabric, wrinkled bits of ruffle and lace showing; the fabric looked much washed. When he didn’t move to take it out, Janet Striker lifted it in both hands and put it on the chair in which she’d been sitting, then thought better of it and shook the dress out, turning it so that it fell from her hands as if it were being worn. She held it against herself. ‘Rather jeune fille. Appropriate, then. Summer dress, cotton, not awfully well made. She wasn’t as tall as I.’