Denton was fastening his cuffs. He made an equivocal sound, like a small machine starting up.
‘If you ask me, General, he’s a damned lucky voyeur if he isn’t dead by now. The man who butchered the Minter bitch wouldn’t rest until he’d got Mulcahy, too, if he knew where to find him.’
Denton stood still to have his coat put on. ‘That’s what’s got me worried. And there isn’t a damned thing I can do about it. Except — I put Mrs Johnson on getting some women to search the directories for him.’ He saw Atkins frown — more money going out — but he ignored him and pulled his shirt cuffs down inside the coat sleeves. ‘You going out?’
‘It’s one of my nights, isn’t it?’ Atkins had two nights a week off, part of the generous deal he had made for himself with Denton. There was much to be said, from his point of view, in serving a man who felt guilty about being served. ‘Yes, I’m going out!’
Denton sighed. ‘Enjoy yourself.’ It was more than he expected, in his present mood, to do himself.
Chapter Seven
He walked again, enjoying the night but chewing moodily on the problem of Mulcahy. The streets were quieter, the city now a background roar, the hard sounds of digging and drilling ended for the day. He made his way to Glasshouse Street, looked in the bar of the Café Royal, then went around to the Piccadilly entrance and into the Domino Room. Unlike his visit of the night before, it was still early and the place was half empty.
There was an easy camaraderie to the Domino Room that belied its showy décor — high ceilings, mirrored walls, pillars like great trees in a fanciful forest, an overall colour scheme of peacock blue and gold. Bookies, artists, journalists, tarts, models, the would-bes and the has-beens, all mixed here with people from their own worlds and from that genteel one in which nobody worked but everybody was well off. Generosity, in the form of the casual invitation or the standing of drinks with somebody’s last shilling, was the rule. Denton had learned to love the place. He loved to keep his hat on, to lounge against a banquette. You could do that in the Domino Room, and a good deal more — like last night.
Denton looked around and saw Frank Harris in his usual place; he moved to him and stood until the man looked up with hangover-reddened eyes. Harris groaned.
Denton collapsed beside him, ordered a milky coffee — a house speciality — and choucroute, part of the Royal’s French past. When he said, by way of making conversation, how much he liked the Café, Harris growled, ‘This place is the boue in nostalgie de la boue. It appeals to the worst in all of us, and we all respond with a joy bordering on indecency.’
‘Like last night.’
Harris groaned again. ‘Did you drink as much as I did?’
‘We stood on a table and bullied people into drinking to Wilde.’
Harris put a hand on his forehead. ‘There’s a stage after you’ve been drunk where you think you’ll kill yourself, and then there’s a stage of absolute euphoria. I think that I’d have been wiser to stop at euphoria and not drunk anything tonight.’ He sighed. ‘Not to mention what I had with lunch and the one or two before.’ He sat back in his chair and clutched his head.
Denton said, ‘I need a bit of advice.’ Harris was supposed to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the darker side of London — indeed, of the darker side of a lot of things. ‘Who can tell me about vice in the East End?’
Harris turned his red eyes on him, looked at him for long seconds as if he’d forgotten who he was. ‘You’re talking to an expert,’ he said.
‘There was a girl murdered there last night. I want to know who she was — where she came from, who her-’
‘East End?’
‘Well, the Minories.’
With his head back, Harris looked at Denton as if he were looking into a too bright light. ‘What’s the allure of a murdered tart? Idea for a book?’
Denton mentioned Mulcahy, said only that the man had told him a wild tale and been terrified — his now-familiar recitation.
Harris wrinkled his nose and stuck out his lips, then rubbed his eyes. ‘You know Ruth Castle?’
‘Mrs Castle?’ She was a famous madam; of course he knew her. ‘We all know Mrs Castle.’
Harris laughed. ‘Could make a comic song of that. “Oh, we all know Mrs Castle here in London-”’ He sang it a bit tunelessly. ‘What the hell rhymes with London?’
‘Done-done. Undone.’ He looked at Harris’s empty glass. ‘Y ’know, you’d do best to go home.’
‘At this hour? My God, what would people say?’
‘Why Mrs Castle?’
‘Why not Mrs Castle? What are we talking about?’
‘Vice in the East End.’
Harris waved a hand. ‘She knows everything. Tell her I sent you. Better yet, don’t tell her I sent you; I think she had me thrown out last time. But go and see her. Fount of knowledge.’ Harris ordered himself another brandy and began to lecture about Bohemianism and the decline of art. Denton, finishing his choucroute as fast as he could eat, muttered a goodbye and got up.
He left Harris trying to start an argument about Fabianism with a man he didn’t know and went out. He debated following Harris’s advice to talk to Mrs Castle that night but thought his own advice to Harris was best: early to bed.
Home again, he dropped his hat and coat on a chair, added coal to his living-room fire, stood there looking into the orange heat that was still deep inside the black pile, thinking of the stupidities people, himself included, do.
He poked the fire and put the poker back in its iron stand and heard a sound that might have been the poker hitting another piece of metal but that might have been something else. He stood still, listening. He really believed the sound had come from somewhere else. Outside? Most likely not; it had been too muffled. And closer.
‘Sergeant?’
They had had trouble with rats for a while. The sound was not unlike that of an animal dropping to the floor from a table. When they had had rats, a cat had got in once; it had made that sound, dropping in the dark on a rat to break its back.
Denton hated rats. He took up the poker again.
The gas light was on by the door nearest him, the only light in the long room other than the coal fire. If Atkins had been home, a lamp at the far end near his door would probably have been lit, too; instead, the room receded into darkness, past the dumb waiter, past the alcove on the left where the spirit stove and the makeshift pantry were, to the stairs and the window at their foot, now only a silvered reflection of the light.
Later, he would think he should have taken the derringer, but then he would think that it wouldn’t have mattered. When the attack came, it came so fast that he was unable fully to react, and it came from his left side; the derringer would have been in his right. The poker — well, it saved his life, if not his arm.
He had started to pass the opening to the pantry alcove. He was listening, his head slightly cocked, and he was thinking that the light near Atkins’s door should have been on, whether Atkins was there or not. He had reached the point of wondering why the light was out, and he was just beginning to appreciate an alien smell that was reaching his nose, when the attacker came in a blurred silver slash from the black alcove. Denton reacted away, turning, raising his left arm against that shining slice through the darkness, and his arm caught fire as something ripped through the coat sleeve and slashed him from elbow to wrist. He heard himself gasp in shock and something like indignation, then rage at himself for being so stupid, and then the blade, which had caught for an instant in the sleeve buttons, tore free and was being raked across his mid-section.