They trudged up the long corridor that led past the CID offices.
At the stairs, Munro asked again if he’d reported ‘that missing girl’. When Denton admitted he hadn’t, but it was a dead issue, anyway, Munro walked him back to the corridor where Denton had had the unsatisfactory conversation with Guillam, what seemed like years ago. Munro pointed at a door. ‘You want that one. Take you three minutes.’
‘You said to stay away from Guillam.’
‘Yes, but best to do things by the book.’ Munro walked away.
Inside the office was a young man with spots, wearing a thick wool suit that had belonged to somebody else ten years before. He looked up with what first seemed to be fright, then a stern expression that was ridiculous on his soft face — practising to be a bureaucrat, Denton thought. He explained what he wanted; the young man threw several imagined obstacles in his way; Denton got over them; the young man sighed and took out a form and a pen.
‘Name? That the given name or the family name? Given name? Wot d’you mean, you don’t use your given name? Address?’
They got as far as ‘relationship to the MP’. When Denton said there was no relationship and he hadn’t even known the young woman, the clerk looked around the little office as if help might be there somewhere, then bolted through the door. Munro’s three minutes became fifteen, and then the door opened again and Guillam came in. The clerk lingered behind with a look of ‘now you’re for it’ on his face.
Guillam said, ‘Oh. It’s you. What’s this, then?’
‘I’m reporting a missing person.’
Guillam looked at the form, on which of course he must already have read Denton’s name. ‘No relation? Not even a friend?’
Denton stayed dead calm and explained about the letter.
‘We’re the police. We have serious work to do. We don’t have time for you spinning tales out of nothing.’
‘Munro told me this is the right thing to do.’
‘Oh, it’s Donnie Munro, is it. I should have known. He cuts no ice here. This is my bailiwick.’ He handed the form to the clerk. ‘Finish it and file it with a note, “awaiting more information”.’ Guillam’s brutal face was red, perhaps only from bending to talk to the seated Denton. He said, ‘Don’t bother us with a lot of questions about it,’ and he slammed out.
The clerk went quickly through the rest of the form, almost sneering now, and said, as if he were dismissing a pensioner, ‘That’ll be all.’
‘I can go?’
‘Yes, you can go.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘What?’
‘I want you to be sure.’
‘What’s that?’
‘If you aren’t sure, I’d feel better staying here until you are.’
‘If you’re having me on, I’ll make trouble!’
‘So long as you’re sure.’
The clerk stared at him. The bureaucrat and the little boy in him struggled. Finally he said in an unsure voice, ‘I’m sure, then.’
‘Good. Then I’ll go.’ Denton went out.
On his way home, he stopped to talk to Geddys. Only a woman was there. She told him Mr Geddys had gone away on a buying trip and would be back in two weeks.
At home, Atkins greeted him with a dour face and ‘You’ve a letter. From him.’
Denton groaned.
He teased the paper out of its envelope with his pocket-knife and opened it without touching anything but the edges. It said:
You have disappointed me most terribly, and just when we were approaching an understanding. I read in the press that you were in the confederacy against me with the police, I cant comprehend how this can be as we share our profound feeling for Art. Now I must ask you to return what of mine has been stolen, I mean my BOOK, which is not now in the place where I had secured it. I will not stoop to believing that you are using my work on which to model something of your own, much less purloin some of my actual words, but only the return of my MS will assure me that all is well between us and you mean no theft. DO NOT TEST MY RESPECT FOR YOU. I am heartbroken and abject that you have chosen to treat me in this way.
Yours in sorrow.
Albert Cosgrove
‘Rather got the shoe on the wrong foot, hasn’t he,’ Atkins said. He had been reading over Denton’s shoulder.
‘He’s turning.’
‘Turning what?’
‘From adoration to dislike. You see it in hero-worship. What’s constant is the lack of balance.’
‘Loony, as I’ve said a hundred times now.’
‘This’ll have to go to the police.’ He laughed, a single bark that remained humourless. ‘I asked Munro to pull the followers off me. Just in time.’ He looked at the letter again. ‘“I must ask you to return what of mine has been stolen, I mean my BOOK-” He didn’t read about that in the newspaper. The bastard’s been back in that house!’
‘I thought the coppers were watching it.’
‘One posted in the front. How difficult would it be to get into that garden from Lamb’s Conduit Street — come along our passage and through our garden, for that matter?’
‘Rupert’d have heard him.’
Denton looked at the letter again. ‘Check over the garden first thing in the morning. He’s not above leaving something poisoned for the dog, just out of spite — or he won’t be in a little while.’
CHAPTER TEN
‘You think he’s getting worse?’ Janet Striker said. They were gathering themselves together to leave their table at Kettner’s after a long meal full of talk and an increasing mutual understanding. She liked to eat, he found; her affection for the ABC shops was, it appeared, entirely economic. ‘I’ve been living on twenty-six shillings a week for the last ten years,’ she had said at one point, ‘and fed and clothed my mother on it, as well.’ Without bitterness, she had added, ‘The drink, she bought herself.’ When he had asked how her mother was, she had said, ‘She’s dying. I want to get her into a better place before she does — it’s another reason I want my money so soon. Poor old bitch.’
He was counting out money to pay the bill. ‘I knew a man in a prison camp who started acting like a guard.’ He looked up at her to see how she would take it. ‘I was the officer in charge of the guards. This fellow started pushing other prisoners into line at meal time. He wound up killing one of them with a club he’d made from a broken branch.’
‘I didn’t know you’d been at a prison in the war.’
‘It was after the war. Right after. Only for a couple of months. But long enough.’ He got up. ‘Shall we?’
The rain was coming down on the streets in a steady fall, more than drizzle but less than a downpour, umbrellas hurrying through Soho with legs scissoring under them. Denton started to say ‘I’ll put you in a cab,’ but amended it to ‘Do you want a cab?’
She said, ‘I’d like to go to your house for a bit, if I may.’ She smiled. ‘I like your house.’
‘But-’
‘What I said the other day, I know. It’s dark and it’s raining, so nobody will see me — how is that?’
‘“Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” An American said that.’
With the horse clip-clopping along, they were both silent for the first several streets. Then, as if the darkness allowed her to say certain things, she began to talk about her life in the ‘hospital’ for the criminally insane. Her husband had put her there to crush her, but none of her hatred of him showed. She simply told him about other women she’d known. The ‘mad’, the despairing. She had a point to make. ‘Lunacy isn’t always what we’re told it is. Lunacy depends on who gets to define it.’ By then, the cab had pulled up in front of his house. She said, ‘I’m not through. Have him wait.’