‘These people will be ruthless, Denton. They’ll hire detectives by the long ton. They’ll find out everything, and then the papers will double that with half-truths and plain lies.’
‘I don’t give a damn.’
‘And everything will come out about her. I know who she is, Denton. Do you want to put her through that again? They’ll start up the old crap about her killing her husband. They’ll say she was insane. You and I know she didn’t kill him; he was a rotten bastard who treated her like shit, but that’s not the line they’ll take. He put her in a mental institution to tame her, but what’ll be said is that she was mad and he committed her because she was dangerous. Do you want her to go through that?’ Before Denton could answer — the question had been rhetorical, anyway — Munro said, ‘They’ll put Mrs Striker on the stand and ask her under oath if she’s been a prostitute. Their line will be that she still is and she lured Jarrold to her rooms and did something to make him angry — tricked him, mocked him. Do you want that?’
Denton breathed noisily. He said, ‘You’ll have to ask her.’
‘I thought you’d be in touch with her.’
‘It isn’t like that. She makes her own decisions.’
Munro stared at him, shrugged.
‘What’s the alternative to a trial?’ Denton said.
‘Let him plead him guilty to lesser charges. Wait.’
‘Until he does something worse?’
Munro picked at the bit of wood. ‘And then only if he leaves evidence.’
Denton wasn’t present when Struther Jarrold pled guilty to the reduced charges. He saw Jarrold outside the courtroom for an instant, got what he thought was a shy smile of recognition that was also a look of satisfaction. The pasty face was that, he thought, of the man he’d seen on the bench at New Scotland Yard days before.
The actual proceedings happened in chambers, to the disappointment of not only Denton but also a small crowd of journalists. Balked of Jarrold — his legal counsel took him down the judge’s private stairs and out a back way — the newspapermen crowded around Denton. He was prepared, however: his tale was that he was there looking over the courts for a new book; he knew nothing about Jarrold; it was all a mystery to him; why didn’t they go after Mr Jarrold?
‘Mr Denton, what’s your relationship with the Striker woman?’
‘What’s that?’
‘Woman whose rooms were vandalized. What’s the connection?’
‘No idea what you’re driving at.’ Where had he learned that expression? Guillam — the former CID man had said that to him. Useful line.
‘Isn’t the Striker woman the same one whose life you saved a year ago? Shot the eye out of the crazed killer that was holding her?’
‘Oh, really?’
‘Mr Denton, Mr Denton! There was a crime at your premises — any connection?’
‘My premises?’
‘Breakin at the house behind. What’s the connection with this Janet Striker?’
‘I think you’ve got the wrong end of the stick.’
‘Mr Denton, is this Striker woman the same one who was put in an institution by her husband some years ago? Great scandal — hospital for the criminally insane — did she do this to her own premises? Is she at it again?’
He bit his tongue. ‘You’re asking the wrong man.’
‘Mr Denton — Mr Denton-!’
He pushed his way through them. ‘I’ve got work to do-Sorry-Let me pass, please-’ He was almost free of them when a florid man his own height blocked his way. When Denton tried to go around, the big man put a hand on his chest. Denton looked down at the hand, up at the man’s eyes. He said, ‘I’ll give you three seconds to take that hand away.’ The man flushed, dropped his hand. The others hooted.
Mostly, the newspapers judged that either there was no story to be told, or the story was about powerful people whom they didn’t discuss in the public press. The Times reported nothing. Another paper buried a short piece headed ‘Peer’s Relative Pleads’ on an inner page. Only the Daily Mail attempted to make a story of it, raking up Janet Striker’s past and her connection to Denton through the violence of a year before but suggesting no other link. It did quote ‘a gentleman close to the said Jarrold’s legal counsel’ who had said that ‘Jarrold was a loyal reader of Mr Denton’s well-known works’, but he had offered no other explanation for the attack on Janet Striker’s rooms than ‘the great stress felt by a sensitive nature’. Denton frowned at a single sentence near the end of the piece: ‘A source close to New Scotland Yard expressed concern at the possible connection between the American novelist, a guest in this country, and recurring acts of violence.’
Guillam.
‘Damn Guillam!’ he shouted.
‘Sue him. We’ve strict laws of libel this side of the water, Colonel.’
Denton flung the paper back at Atkins. ‘I don’t know how you can read that trash.’
‘Down here in the lower classes, we don’t know any better.’
‘Oh, dry up.’
‘There’s tea made. Want some?’
‘Ever occur to you that we were better off in prison, Sergeant?’
‘Book going badly?’
‘No, it’s going like a house afire — when I can get away from these damned distractions. Bring me tea, yes. Upstairs.’ He went up and worked until evening. The stack of manuscript had grown thick, that already typed representing at least half of the book in its neat pile on the corner of the desk. He was able now to spend most of the day writing new material, then take the typed part to bed to correct before he went to sleep. Janet Striker had got herself a room in a small private hotel in Bayswater. Her piano, minus the lid — it had gone off to the Yard with its fingerprint — had been carted down to Collard and Collard ‘successors to Clementi and Company’ for repair. If she was dismayed by the newspaper’s raking up of her old life, she didn’t say so, murmuring only that she would stay away from him for a few days while the newspapermen cooled down, at her legal counsel’s advice — she dared do nothing that might threaten the resolution of her lawsuit.
‘And I’m to stay away from you, I suppose.’
‘I suppose.’
It didn’t seem to him a very good reason, but neither did her concern with propriety or with his public self. She was, he thought, making excuses, and not because of the sex itself. Unless she was pretending (and there was always the knowledge that she had been a prostitute, that dissembling might be habit), sex came easily and rather happily to her. It was, rather, that he was a man. She believed men hated women. All men, all women: there seemed to be no exceptions. She had been raped by a man, abused by a man, humiliated by a man, institutionalized by a man. Men had paid her to invade her. Why, then, should she trust him? Why should she run to have him invade her — although he hated that notion of it, that one of them invaded and the other let it be done: surely it was a mutual wanting, the desire to become one? Or was that a man’s self-congratulation?
One day, he feared, she would go away. Perhaps she would write him a letter; perhaps she would simply go, and he wouldn’t know how to find her. Once she had money, she could go wherever, be whatever she wanted. Her present skittishness, as he thought of it, might be prelude to something more permanent. It wasn’t coyness that was keeping her away from him; it was fear — of the maleness she believed hated her femaleness — and perhaps a bleak sense that it was too late for her, or perhaps that he was the wrong one. Or she was the wrong one. Better a life alone than one that rested on a bad bargain — he knew that feeling.