‘I had morphine.’
‘Do as you’re told, Corporal.’
Denton took the pills, sipped the water.
‘You think it was him, don’t you,’ Atkins said.
Denton stared at him, shook his head. He was too wobbly to think. He waved a finger at the decanter. ‘Nightcap?’
‘It’s practically bloody morning, General!’
Denton stretched his feet out. ‘I feel like hell. A little, Sergeant.’
Atkins set the glass where he could reach it. ‘Medical officer didn’t say nothing about mixing laudanum with brandy. Be it on your head.’
‘It isn’t my head, it’s my arm. And my damned mid-section. ’ He sipped. The brandy, the taste of it, the strike of it, was far more satisfying than any pills. ‘Go to bed, Sergeant.’
Atkins was looking at the carpets. ‘Be a right treat, getting the bloodstains out of these. No bleeding rest for the weary!’
‘Tomorrow, tomorrow.’
Atkins grunted and disappeared through his doorway, glad, apparently to get to his own spaces at last.
Denton might have slept a little, might even have slept and woken several times. Each time, his disengagement from his body and from the room seemed greater. A part of him knew it was the laudanum; part of him didn’t care. The pain was gone, or reduced and changed, like a constant bass note that was not unpleasant. The brandy glass was empty. He stared at the blanket, which seemed to grow thick between his fingers, as thick as a snowdrift; his feet, mounded under it, were far away; he was like a vast field under snow, quiet, at peace.
And then, at the far end of the long room, Atkins’s door was opening. A hand, turning out the gaslight. The man’s smell reaching out ahead of him.
Denton watched him come down the room. Smelled him. Same smell, same man. Bottom part of his face covered again. He seemed to be coming a great distance, walking and walking and making no headway. Then suddenly he was there. With the knife.
Denton wanted to open his mouth and call out. He wanted to stand, to run to the door. A policeman was just outside.
He couldn’t make enough sound to summon him.
He looked at the man’s eyes, which looked at his. The man was sweating. Denton tried to force his hand to pick up the derringer and aim it, but he could command the hand only to move under the blanket to the arm of the chair and then, in a spasm, strike the edge of the table. Seeing the movement, the man with the knife moved faster. Their eyes remained locked. The man was trying to assess how best to do it, he thought, changing his grip on the knife and bringing it across his own body as if for a backhand stroke, as if he would perhaps grab Denton’s hair with his left hand and sweep the blade across his throat. As he had murdered Stella Minter.
Denton’s palm rested on the derringer.
The man with the knife moved.
Denton willed his arm to raise the gun, willed his eyes to aim, willed his finger to pull the trigger, but all that happened was that the gun, still on the table, went off, burning a crease across the tabletop, the bullet smashing through the thin, pie-crust edging and going into the wall.
The man with the knife cried out. He turned and raced back down the room, and Denton heard the sound of smashing glass. He was using something, maybe a foot, a boot, to break out the glass from the window at the foot of the stairs. The cooler air caressed Denton’s face; there was silence; he smelled burning coal and the last of the man’s stench. He tried again to call out, but nothing came.
Then a pounding on the front door. The policeman had heard the shot. Denton waited for Atkins to open the door. The pounding went on. Where was Atkins? But the man with the knife had come from Atkins’s doorway, so where had Atkins been then?
He was waiting for us, Denton thought. He never left the house. He slammed the front door but stayed inside, and he hid down in Atkins’s rooms until he could deal with Atkins, and then he came up to deal with me.
‘Sergeant,’ he managed to croak. His voice was expressionless. He was still covered in snow. Like being his own ghost.
Outside, the policeman was shouting, then blowing his whistle. Denton pushed with his right hand and the little table on which the derringer rested toppled over. Denton rolled himself off the chair. He lay on the floor, then pulled himself to his knees, up to a crouch to shamble towards the door. A huge effort to open it, then beyond it the stairs down; he held on to the banister with both hands but still fell halfway and wound up sitting at the bottom. He crawled to the door and opened it.
The policeman’s face was terrified, then enraged. Another whistle was sounding somewhere. Denton tried to speak.
Chapter Eight
It was morning.
‘How is Atkins?’
‘He’s had his head bashed in.’ Detective Sergeant Guillam looked angry, apparently his normal expression. He glared at Denton with what seemed to be disgust. ‘Didn’t the constables even come into the house with you?’
Denton moved his head from side to side. He felt as if he’d ploughed a forty-acre field. ‘I didn’t ask them to.’
‘It isn’t your business to ask them! They’re supposed to use their bloody heads!’
It was a little after eight in the morning. Atkins had been carried away to a hospital before daybreak; since then, the place had swarmed with police. Two of them were posted now, one in front and one in the back garden, through which, presumably, the man with the knife had escaped — classic closing of the door after the horse was gone. The window by the stairs, all its glass broken out except for sharp triangles along the frame, was hung with a blanket until the glazier arrived.
‘You didn’t see his whole face either time. He smelled. You say he looked frightened — what the hell does that mean?’
‘He was sweating. His eyes were frightened.’
‘Of what? You were there in your drug stupor; what’d he to be frightened of?’ Guillam was a Puritan, Denton decided; ‘drug stupor’ was a deliberately outrageous moral statement. ‘Why didn’t he kill you if he had the chance?’
‘The gun went off.’
Guillam glanced at the hole the bullet had made in the plaster. ‘You’re a brilliant marksman,’ he muttered.
‘I want my gun back.’ The local detective had made off with it before Guillam had got there.
‘You’ll get it back, you’ll get it back. You’re going to get into trouble, having guns about.’ Guillam was grumpy: it was early; he had been got out of bed to take the case. Without Atkins in the house, nobody was offering him even tea.
Denton used his good hand to point towards the pantry. ‘There’s an alcohol stove in there. Water. You could make us tea.’ His throat was sore, his mouth dry. ‘All of us.’
‘That where he attacked you the first time, is it?’ Guillam lumbered down the room and looked. He still had his bowler and his overcoat on. It was raining again; the smell of wet wool had come in with him. A certain amount of banging from the pantry indicated he was trying to make tea. He cursed. While the kettle heated, he pulled the now wet blanket aside and looked out of the broken window. ‘Probably cut himself,’ he said. ‘Not enough to matter, I suppose.’ He came towards Denton, looking at this and that in the room, sizing it up. ‘You sure it was the same man both times?’
‘Yes.’
‘No burglar stays inside once he’s been seen. He skedaddles, he does.’