‘You know the names of the people arrested?’
‘Arrested, yes. Detained, no. The tale is the coppers swept up about thirty people but let most of them go at the door of the magistrates’ court. Some rather soiled drawers that night, they say. Names we’d recognize if we heard them.’
‘Himple? Crum?’
Crosland shook his head. ‘Himple the artist? Always rumours about him. You know anything I can use?’
Denton shook his head. ‘When exactly was the raid?’
Crosland raised a finger. He began to spread the coat’s big pockets with both hands, peering down into the messes of papers; at last, he drew out a small black notebook. He leafed through it. The pages looked like damp leather, thick and soft with use. ‘August the seventh.’
‘That was the day of the raid?’
‘Night. Coppers went in the door at nine-forty-five, August the seventh.’
Denton put out another shilling. ‘Worth every penny.’
A day before Mary Thomason had written her letter. Two days before Erasmus Himple had left for the Continent.
When he got home, there was a note from Janet Striker: ‘I am going away for a little. Ruth Castle will know how to reach me.’ He flushed and swore, then saw himself, a large man about to have an infantile tantrum. She has the right to do what she wants. It was difficult to tell himself that and mean it, yet he had to: sometimes when he looked at her, he saw a look of something like absence, and he knew she was away in one of the dark places to which he would never be admitted. He had them, too, those sinks into which the inevitable sorrows of being alive were poured and, for the most part, covered over. But it hurt that she had gone to get away from him, for that was what he was sure she had done. And damn Ruth Castle, of whom he was thoroughly sick and whom he didn’t want to see. Not now, anyway. Maybe it was not having a book to write, something to concentrate on. Maybe in a few days. Maybe Janet would come back quickly. Maybe-
He crushed the paper in his fist.
‘Do you speak French?’
Heseltine’s reactions were a semiquaver slow, as if he were thinking about something else. ‘A bit.’
‘I want to go to France for a few days. I need a translator.’
Again, the delayed response, and then a flicker of what might have been suspicion, some recollection perhaps of the discussion of the Mayflower Baths: what was Denton proposing? Heseltine’s cheekbones got some colour. Denton said, ‘It’s about the girl who sent me the note. You said you wanted to try to help her.’
‘In France?’
‘Her brother.’ He told him quickly about Erasmus Himple.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I don’t either. Something happened in Normandy. They were supposed to stay the summer, but after a month they packed up and went to the South of France. Then Himple fired him. Something started in Normandy, I think. Maybe a lovers’ quarrel.’ He kept his eyes on Heseltine’s. The younger man’s cheeks got bright spots high on the cheekbones. ‘It might do you good to get away. Get a new perspective on things.’
‘I wouldn’t dare take Jenks.’
‘Neither of us needs to take anybody. We can be there in a day, back in another couple. It isn’t as if we’d be staying at the Ritz.’
‘My French is terribly rusty.’
‘Rust is better than no metal at all. I’d just get the spike and shout at them.’
Denton insisted that they could start the next day; he didn’t say that the post-partum depression of having finished the book now gripped him. Heseltine at first demurred, then became almost manic, swinging from torpor to excitement. Now he was sure he could be ready in an hour. They could take the night boat. Anything was possible.
Denton bought two tickets on the morning train and the Le Havre boat. Atkins made a face when he told him but didn’t ask to go. In fact, he made it clear he wouldn’t go on a bet. ‘Had enough travel, thank-you-very-much. Roast beef of olde England’s plenty good enough for me.’
‘You mean you have other plans. How’s the moving picture?’
‘As it happens, we’re scheduled to do the Battle of Ladysmith day after tomorrow, but that’s nothing to do with me and France.’
‘How’s the housemaid?’
‘An insufferable little monosyllable, is how she is. My pal with the picture machine has decided he’s sweet on her. Disgusting.’ He was picking up Denton’s supper tray to take it back to the Lamb. ‘I can get you somebody from an agency if you have to have an attendant on this jaunt.’
‘Much as I hate to hurt your feelings, I don’t need anybody.’
‘Hard to believe.’
‘I lived most of my life without somebody to pick up after me.’
‘That was then, General. Times change.’ Atkins cocked a cynical eye at him. ‘You going to a respectable hotel?’
‘There are no hotels. There’s some sort of village inn.’
‘Oh, well. Wear the old brown tweed. Frenchies won’t know any different.’
Denton didn’t dare let Atkins pack for him after that exchange. He got a somewhat chipped and scuffed pigskin valise out of a wardrobe and put a couple of shirts and collars and a set of woollen combinations in it — it was now almost December — and threw in extra stockings and then stood looking around the room, thinking about what else to pack. A flannel nightshirt, of course. What else would he need?
He decided that the answer was court plasters — he anticipated a lot of walking — and he found one in his desk, then remembered that he owned somewhere a small leather case of plasters, the perfect thing because it came with scissors. Where was it?
At the bottom left of the desk was a drawer he never used except as a place to throw things he wouldn’t want again but couldn’t quite throw away. He grasped the brass handle and pulled hard, because the drawer was always slow to open. To his surprise, it shot back towards him. He bent over it, seeing a lot of useless stuff, through which he tunnelled. Towards the bottom was a small basket in which he found the court-plaster case. Below the basket was only — or should have been only — a pistol almost as ancient as his Navy Colt, a Galland.450 with a curious contraption under the barrel that allowed barrel and cylinder to be moved forward for loading. The pistol was huge and heavy; he had got it for a few shillings from a pal of Atkins’s who had been ‘caught short’ for money. For a while, he had used the gun as a paperweight; then he had thrown it into the drawer.
Where it now most certainly was not. He understood why the drawer had opened so easily now — no mass of iron to weight it on the rails.
He searched the drawer again, then the entire desk.
‘Jarrold,’ he said aloud. Munro had asked him if Jarrold could have stolen any of his guns and he’d said no. He’d entirely forgotten the awkward old weapon.
‘Dammit!’
He wrote a note to Munro and left it with Atkins to be posted first thing in the morning. When he told Atkins about the missing pistol, he said only, ‘Crikey.’
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The village inn at Hinon turned out to be less an inn than what Denton’s English friends called a dosshouse. Downstairs was a café; above it were several rooms where, he learned later, the proprietor stowed the village drunks to sleep it off. This happened on Saturday nights, however, and in the middle of the week the rooms went unused — unheated, grubby, bare. The room they were shown — ‘the best room’ — had a nominally double bed in painted and chipped iron, its mattress deeply furrowed in the middle. The bedspread had been darned in half a dozen places, then given up, the most recent tears left unrepaired. Except for a candle and a tin-topped washstand, that was it. The cour was down a corridor and then down a flight of unpainted, much-worn stairs, through a door and across a yard that was decorated with piles of horse dung. There were a long metal urinal and a single stall, its walls and floor soapstone, a hole to squat over.