So he shared his bed with the typed page.
The next day, he went to complain to Munro about the ‘source close to New Scotland Yard’ that had been quoted in the Daily Mail. ‘That’s Guillam!’ he all but shouted at Munro. ‘What the hell is he doing messing in the Jarrold business?’
Munro was busy and tired. His expression suggested a stomach ailment. He looked at Denton through splayed fingers and said, ‘The Jarrold business is Guillam’s business. Jarrold’s fallen into Guillam’s pocket.’
‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’
‘It means that Georgie Guillam knows how to work the system.
I told you — his new office is a catch-all. He persuaded somebody that house arrests are his.’
‘That’s because of me! It is because of me, isn’t it?’
Munro shrugged. ‘I told you he doesn’t forget. Yes, maybe he saw your name on it and thought there’s something in it for him. Nothing I can do about it. It’s out of CID. You want to complain, complain to Georgie.’
‘Oh, hell!’
‘Yeah.’
He got his friend Hector Hench-Rose — his baronetcy still so new it sparkled — to write him a letter of introduction to Lady Emmeline, Struther Jarrold’s mother. Jarrold was said to be under medical supervision in Sussex; the mother, Denton thought, might be amenable to a serious chat about her son.
His first look at her suggested to him that perhaps she would. She was at least as old as he, probably older, but with the most beautiful posture he had ever seen in a woman; she stood straight, not affecting the buttocks-out curve of the new corsetry. A former ‘beauty’, she still had magnificent facial bones, a figure as slender as a girl’s. Her pale hair, partly silver that blended into its original gold, was piled high on her head. She wore a dress of very pale beige with touches of apricot, her slender arms covered in lace, a jabot of the same cascading down her front to below where a vulgar eye might have imagined her to have a navel. She was holding his friend’s letter of introduction.
‘I am so pleased we can have this talk,’ were her first words. She seemed able to speak almost without moving her lower jaw; her accent was odd and to him unidentifiable, reminiscent of Ruth Castle’s when she was well into the champagne. She raised the letter a few inches. ‘I am unacquainted with the current baronet but knew his father, I think. Such a gentle man.’
‘I wanted to speak to you about your son, ma’am.’
‘About Struther, yes, poor dear. Have you come to apologize? Oh, I do hope you have come to apologize.’ Her tone was sad, her voice lovely.
‘Apologize, ma’am? For what?’
She sat. Her back was wonderfully straight; he doubted that her shoulders had ever touched a chair back. Her sadness seemed to expand to include pity, as if she knew that Denton was the sort who couldn’t help himself and therefore might — might — be forgiven. ‘For seducing my poor boy. For forcing him to this unfortunate incident that the police say took him to East London.’
‘Ma’am, it’s not I-’
The sadness in her voice grew metallic. The metal, he thought, was steel. ‘I know how you have worked to seduce him! I know how you have played upon his sensitive nature! I have seen the copies of your books — ’ she made the word sound like a synonym for excrement — ‘which you inscribed to him. Oh, sir, though I feel distaste for saying it — for shame!’
‘I haven’t inscribed any books to him, ma’am.’
She sighed ‘You are a practised liar, too, I see.’
‘Any books inscribed to your son are forgeries.’
‘Do you dare to suggest that my son is a forger? You are pathetic as well as untruthful.’ The sadness fled; only the steel was left. ‘Leave me.’
‘He did ask me to inscribe books to him as Albert Cosgrove. Why did he call himself Albert Cosgrove?’
‘He did nothing of the sort.’ She looked away. ‘Although pseudonyms are not unknown among literary artists.’
Denton was still standing; he saw no hope of being asked to sit. ‘Your son is mentally unbalanced, Lady Emmeline.’
‘How dare you!’
‘He’s dangerous — what he did in Bethnal Green is one step shy of violence-’
‘You go too far, much too far-’
‘Against a woman-’
‘We shall sue you — there is no escape-’ She seemed to have heard what he had said, at last, for she hissed, ‘A woman! Do you mean the trollop who lured him to her squalid room? I warn you, Mr, Mr — ’ she made a gesture that rendered Denton’s name worthless — ‘we shall learn everything and we shall sue you and see you broken. Justice will be on our side. I had thought you had some spark of decency, that you had prevailed upon a baronet to write a letter so that you might confess your crimes, but you — you are contemptible.’
‘Lady Emmeline, your son is not sane!’
She somehow managed to sit still straighter. ‘You are speaking of the nephew of a duke!’ Her bizarre accent made it come out as ‘the nivioo of a juke’.
‘The dangerous “nivioo of a juke”, I think, ma’am.’
She stood. Her nostrils flared ever so slightly — as extreme a sign of passion as she allowed herself, he supposed — and she said, ‘Leave my house, you vulgar little man!’
He bowed. ‘Vulgar I am, ma’am. Little, I ain’t.’ He headed for the door. There seemed no point in staying.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
‘His mama implied that you had lured her poor boy to your room. I suppose she thinks you provided the red paint, too.’
Janet Striker made a face. ‘And Jarrold-known-as-Cosgrove has been sent off to Mama’s country house with two male nurses. Detective Sergeant Munro is keeping me up to date.’
Denton scowled. ‘Some house arrest — hard time in a stately home. Couple of medical men to look in weekly, presumably with lunch laid on. Hard on them, too.’
Janet Striker laughed. ‘No good being angry.’
‘He’s getting off as good as scot-free. I’d tan his hide for him.’
They were eating at Pinoli’s in Wardour Street. He was in ‘informal’ evening clothes — short black jacket with silk revers, white waistcoat, white tie — and she was in a new suit of a dark-green wool tailored to an almost masculine cut, the jacket thigh-length like a frock coat, the skirt box-pleated at the front and back to accommodate her long stride. ‘I like that dress,’ he said.
‘It isn’t a dress; it’s a suit. You look like a successful manufacturer. ’
‘Good a disguise as any.’
‘I thought you enjoyed being an outsider.’
‘It’s no good if you have to work at it. Working at it is Bohemian, isn’t it — the Slade kids in their rags?’
She laughed. ‘I’d never take you for a Bohemian.’
A week had gone by. The book’s end was in sight, if he could keep up the pace. She’d spent a night at his house; a meeting at her hotel had proved less happy — he’d taken a room overnight, had come to her room. It had seemed ‘sordid’, in her word. He had had to admit it had been pretty scatty. He said, ‘We have to make some better arrangement.’
‘We will.’ She had a small, ridiculous hat perched on her forehead; it looked like a soldier’s pillbox, except that instead of a chinstrap it had a ribbon that went around the back of her head. She said, ‘I keep feeling that that thing is falling off into my food.’
‘It’s perky.’
‘“Perky”! Mrs Cohan has an idea for a kind of homburg with a fancy band.’