‘Why? ’
‘Because I think he knows who Mary Thomason is.’
The Hobhouse Prison for the Criminally Insane was on the edge of Exmoor, facing a landscape that would have been bleak on the best of days. In a thunderstorm, it was dramatic and dismal. He’d asked Janet Striker if she wanted to come with him, but she’d shuddered and said she’d been inside such a place too long to ever want to see one again. When he said it was supposed to be a model of progressive institutionalization, she had said there was no such thing.
The building was grey stone, with square towers at each corner and a steepled central one for the entrance. Surrounded by a high stone wall, it was inescapably a prison; whatever was modern or progressive about it had to be inside. Munro, seeing it in the distance, said it looked like a cotton mill. ‘Not that a cotton mill wouldn’t be just the thing for Jarrold and his ilk — never done a day’s work in his life. His mum’s got him a private cell that’s furnished like a bedroom, with bookshelves and carpets and easy chairs. Everything bolted to the floor, of course, and nothing dangling about he could hang himself with. Still, it beats ten hours a day bent over a power loom.’
‘That’s the court’s idea of punishment?’
‘He isn’t being punished — no trial yet. He’s being kept isolated for society’s sake.’
Their carriage turned in at a gateway and stopped while Munro identified himself, and then they were waved in and passed under the steeple and into a vast courtyard where barred windows stared down into half an acre of gravel. Around the entire yard at ground level, porches with heavy wire from floor to ceiling held men who gaped, then shouted and gestured at the carriage while they twisted their fingers into the wire mesh.
‘Newest thing,’ Munro growled. ‘No trees or flowers to distract the demented brain.’ He looked at the porches. ‘Hell with fresh air,’ he said.
Jarrold’s cell was on the third floor. They waited in an interview room, very spare, a double table down the middle with a chest-high partition and a few oak straight chairs. The sounds of a prison made their way through the walls: incoherent voices, metal banging on metal, footfalls and the clang of doors, and here and there the screams and laughter of the insane.
They heard Jarrold before they saw him — the metallic scuffing of a chain on stone floors, the jingle of his manacles. Influential mother or not, he was put into chains to move out of his cell, and he came in bowed by the weight of them. Two warders in dark uniforms nudged him along to a chair on the other side of the partition from them, and it was only when Jarrold was seated and had clanked his ankle chains into some sort of comfortable position that he looked up at his visitors. When he saw Denton, his scowling face was replaced with a knowing, childish grin, as if they shared a secret.
Jarrold, he had been told, never spoke. Since he had fired the two bullets into Denton and shouted those few words, he had been silent, even with his attorneys and his mother. ‘Utterly withdrawn into a world of his own,’ the chief physician’s report had said. Denton wondered.
‘Please ask your questions, gentlemen,’ the more senior of the warders said. ‘We have to remain present. We think he hears what’s said to him, but — he don’t respond.’
Jarrold’s face, after that knowing smile, had fallen back into its scowl, and now he looked at his hands, limp in his lap.
Denton remained standing. He took the drawing of Mary Thomason from an inner pocket and unfolded it, looking at it to make sure it was the right side up, and then he leaned quickly forward and held it against Jarrold’s side of the partition. One of the warders started forward, saying, ‘Sir-’ and Denton said, ‘Albert!’
Jarrold’s head lifted; his eyes found the paper. His mouth opened. He began to scream.
‘I never told! Astoreth — Astoreth — I never told! I never did — Astore-e-e-th-!’ His body spasmed and his back arched as he went into a seizure.
Denton was silent all the way back in the train. He’d told Munro he wanted to think and he wanted to talk to Janet Striker; Munro was welcome to come home with him, but he’d have to wait until then.
‘You knew he was going to do that, didn’t you! Dammit, Denton, that was a cheap courtroom trick. And what did you get out of it? All that way so you could-’
Denton held up a hand and said nothing. At Lamb’s Conduit Street, they climbed his stairs and sat silently while Atkins went for Mrs Striker. As soon as she was in the room, Denton told her what had happened.
‘Mary Thomason is Astoreth? But that’s impossible. Jarrold painted “Astoreth” on my wall months ago, when there was no way that-’ She looked at Munro. ‘Has he explained this to you?’
‘He hasn’t explained to me why I spent a day going to Devon and getting nothing out of it. Don’t be cute, Denton — spill it and let me get back to New Scotland Yard.’
‘I don’t have much to spill yet. Yes, Mary Thomason is Astoreth. That’s what I had to know before I could know anything else.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it means she’s alive and she isn’t missing, and because it means that she’s the one who told Jarrold to shoot me.’
Munro was sitting with his head tilted slightly back, his eyes half-closed, looking at Denton. ‘You’re spinning a tale.’
‘Why would Jarrold shoot me? Because his obsession with me had got out of hand? Yes, of course — that was something that was easy for her to play on. But why the very morning that Heseltine and I came back from France? Coincidence? I’d have said yes, if it hadn’t been for Heseltine’s death.’
‘It was suicide.’
‘No, it was murder. I respect you, Munro, and I like you, and you’re a good cop because you’re cautious. But now it’s time to jump. One, we need to show the drawings to the old man who’s supposed to be the gateman at Albany Court, and we need to show them to every man and boy who lives in the Albany. Then, when they identify at least one of them, you need to get Heseltine exhumed.’
‘Like hell — excuse me, Mrs Striker.’
‘I think he’ll show signs of some means of putting him out, probably a knock on the head. Munro, you don’t get a man to lie down in a bathtub so you can cut his wrists without a struggle!’ Munro hadn’t moved. If anything, his eyes had narrowed even more. ‘The coroner didn’t present evidence of a blow to the head, did he?’
‘Because there wasn’t any.’
‘Because he didn’t look for any. Exhumation, Munro.’ When the detective was still unconvinced, Denton leaned towards him and said, ‘If people at the Albany recognize the drawings, what other next move do you have?’
Janet Striker was working a cigarette out of a shagreen case. ‘Denton, it’s fanciful that Mary Thomason and Jarrold knew each other. You knew of Mary Thomason only because that letter reached you by way of Heseltine — the sheerest chance. You said that she wrote the letter to frighten Wenzli or Geddys — maybe both. It wasn’t supposed to reach you, but Heseltine found it and sent it on. Nothing to do with Jarrold! Jarrold was a poor sick man who got obsessed with you because of your books. There’s no connection with Mary Thomason!’
‘Not then, no.’
‘When?’
He moved uncomfortably, trying to get the bad leg into another position. ‘It’s why I made all those lists. The question is, when did Mary — or her brother — see Struther Jarrold as opportunity? Because they’re opportunists, rather impressively so. But there’s another question that maybe comes first: when did they learn that I was asking about them?’ He glanced at Munro, then back at her. She was smoking now. He put out a hand for one of her cigarettes. ‘That’s when it started — when they learned I was asking questions: that’s when they took notice of me. So who told them? There are several candidates — people we asked about Mary Thomason, I mean. The office people at the Slade, but I think that’s unlikely. Mrs Durnquess. Geddys, the picture dealer. Much later, the other artist, Wenzli; Mrs Evans, Himple’s housekeeper; and his valet, Brown. I think they can be discounted because it was too late — the opportunity to exploit Jarrold must have come earlier to have worked. Mary Thomason must have needed time to work on Jarrold.’