‘It was old. Terrible-looking beast. Horrible gait.’
‘What had it to do with the boxes?’
‘Nothing. It simply got me to where the boxes were. And the — figure — with the shotgun. And the girl who laughed at me.’ He’d remembered her a few days before. ‘There’s an American saying — “to get taken for a ride”. To get fooled. The horse took me for a ride, I suppose.’
‘Was the girl your wife?’
‘No, good God.’ Denton could almost laugh at the absurdity of that. ‘She was more like Mary Thomason. But she wasn’t Mary Thomason; she was-’ He told Gallichan about Mary Thomason and her brother and the drawing. When he was done, he said, ‘When Struther Jarrold shot me he shouted, “I did it, I did it!” He was pointing the revolver at me and looking deliriously happy and he said, “I did it, Astoreth.” Maybe the girl was this mad creation of his, Astoreth.’ He tried to pull himself up. ‘I need to talk to a detective named Munro at New Scotland Yard.’
‘When Jarrold shot you with your own gun, you mean.’
‘It wasn’t my own gun; I’d never shot it. It was just a gun I’d paid a couple of shillings for and kept in a drawer.’ He looked at Gallichan. ‘All right, it was my gun, in the legal sense. What are you trying to make of it?’
‘I’m only wondering what you make of it.’
‘I want to talk to Detective Munro.’
Gallichan got up and looked out of the window and made a face at what he saw of the day. He struggled into an overcoat and picked up his hat. ‘I don’t want you to become agitated.’
One day, he was able to make the muscles in his right thigh twitch. He found that he could make them twitch in a kind of order, going clockwise around the leg. He could move the toes and he could tilt the foot back about an inch when he was lying down. Then one morning he woke up with a partial erection. It was February. He announced to the doctor that he was feeling better. It was time to move things along. ‘I want to talk to Detective Munro!’
‘I’ve sent him a message.’
‘And I want to see Heseltine.’ In fact, he was hurt that Heseltine hadn’t tried to see him. ‘Have you been in touch with Heseltine?’
The doctor hesitated. ‘I’ll have a talk with Mrs Striker.’
When Janet Striker came next day, she told him that Heseltine was dead. ‘He killed himself a day or two after you were shot. I’m sorry, Denton.’
‘All this time-!’
‘The doctors didn’t want you to be upset. You weren’t rational that first month. Then I thought, what difference does it make now, and I did what they asked and kept quiet about it.’
‘But-’ The trip with Heseltine to Normandy was recent to him, the most recent thing he remembered except for being shot. His feeling was that he had seen Heseltine only a day or two ago, and suddenly the man was dead. Had been dead for months. ‘Suicide?’
‘Talk to Munro about it. I don’t know what happened.’
After she had gone, he lay in the bed and stared at the ceiling. Mary Thomason, the brother, Himple — all of that paradoxically seemed to him from some long-ago time. But Heseltine? He remembered the young man’s pleasure in the French countryside, his good humour about the bedbugs. His look of vitality when they had separated at Waterloo.
‘Heseltine wouldn’t kill himself,’ he said aloud.
Apparently she agreed. The next time she came, she confessed that she, Atkins and Cohan had been taking turns sitting at his door since he had been moved to the nursing home, and she’d warned the staff against letting anyone else in. ‘I thought somebody might try again.’
‘Why?’
‘You and Heseltine — I was afraid it wasn’t coincidence.’
‘What about yourself? You were in all that with me.’
‘I’ve changed hotels several times.’
He laughed. ‘You should talk to Dr Gallichan. You’re as crazy as I am.’
He wrote a letter to Heseltine’s father. The handwriting didn’t look like his own. He apologized for its being so late and explained that he’d been ill. He said that Heseltine had been a fine man. A few days later, the father wrote to thank him and to say that Heseltine had spoken of him and seemed to take strength from knowing him; was there anything of his son’s that Denton would like to have as a memento? Denton wrote back and said that he’d like to buy the little Dutch painting of the lion that had hung on his son’s wall. The father replied that no such painting had been found among his son’s effects. Would Denton like something else?
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Munro and Sergeant Markson came and were solicitous and gentle, but he knew that Munro thought he was behaving badly. Munro, at least, should have been allowed to see him.
‘I’ve said I’m sorry. At first they wouldn’t let me see you, and then I didn’t want to see you. Why didn’t you insist? You’re the coppers.’
‘Well, no harm done, I suppose.’
‘I still feel like hell.’
‘Two.450s, I’m not surprised.’ Munro sat in the metal chair, Markson in a Thonet that had been dragged in from the corridor. Outside his door, sounds that Denton had become used to — the clink of glass and metal, the clack of feet, voices — were distorted and funnelled by the tile-walled corridor. Every day now, he was pushed up and down this corridor in a wheelchair, then made to try to walk on his new crutches.
Markson cleared his throat. ‘We’d like to ask you a few questions, if we might, sir.’
Munro grunted. ‘Just get on with it, Fred, he knows where we stand.’ He frowned at Denton. ‘And we know where he stands.’
Denton frowned back. He felt as if he were going to jump out of himself somehow. He didn’t sleep at night now without chemicals, and the days were like this.
‘Well, sir-’ Markson cleared his throat again. ‘We’d like to ask you a few questions about the shooting.’
‘All right.’
‘What do you remember, sir?’
‘I don’t remember actually being shot. I have a kind of picture of looking up and seeing Jarrold. He looked beside himself with joy.’
‘He had a gun, sir?’
‘Of course he did. That old Galland.’
‘You recognized it, sir?’
‘You couldn’t mistake that contraption under the barrel.’
‘Could you swear it was your gun, sir?’
‘Well, of course it was-It looked like my gun, all right?’
‘But you can’t swear-’
‘It didn’t have my name on it, if that’s what you mean.’
‘Something like that, yes, sir.’
Munro leaned forward. Like everybody else who came, he had put his hat on the bed next to Denton’s dead leg. ‘Do you remember anything that Jarrold said?’
‘He said, “I did it, I did it, Astoreth.”’
‘You’re sure of that.’
‘I am now. I wasn’t at first. He sounded like a kid who’d caught his first trout. I can’t tell you how — pleased — he looked. What’s happened to him?’
Munro shifted his bulk, glanced at Markson, said, ‘He’s in a prison for the criminally insane.’
‘There’s been a trial?’
‘Not yet. Maybe never. Prosecutor wanted to hear what you’d have to say, and then he may not go to trial. Charge of attempted murder was laid, of course, but in fact Jarrold’s been committed on the earlier business with Mrs Striker’s rooms, and violation of the terms of house arrest. Either road, he isn’t coming out again.’