Kenneth Cameron - The Frightened Man

Emma. The insistent memory mixed with thoughts of the post-mortem, his mind unable to hold any image or idea for more than a fraction of a second. Impossible that he’d lost her . Stab wounds. Exvagination. Impossible . Had a baby, did that mean anything? Emma was his.

At the Museum, he went into the Reading Room and found the London directories and began looking for Mulcahy, R. The long rows of volumes didn’t discourage him, but the lack of system did. One set was alphabetized, but it was a business directory, and unless Mulcahy, R. was a professional or a recognized businessman, he wouldn’t be in there. Denton’s memory of Mulcahy was that he wouldn’t qualify, and indeed, he wasn’t to be found. There were Mulcahys in business, but he saw none with a given name that started with R.

Kelly’s directories were more inclusive. Entirely inclusive, if their foreword was to be believed, but the fact was that they missed many, maybe most people who rented rooms, especially in the slums. In theory, Kelly’s post office directories included every male working-man in the vast metropolitan area; the frustration for Denton was that they were arranged by streets, not personal names. If you wanted to know who lived in every house on Praed Street, you could find out, but if you knew somebody’s name and didn’t know where he lived, you were lost. On an impulse, he looked for Stella Minter in the Minories, but of course he didn’t find her. Stella Minter had been a transient, a grain of sand in a shifting ocean.

One thousand, one hundred and thirty-six pages in the 1899 Kelly’s. And shelves of suburban volumes beyond. Denton sat, cold enough to have left the unfortunate coat on, turning pages, glancing at streets, as if the name Mulcahy might leap from the dense eight-point type.

It would take days. No, weeks.

And no hangover.

He sighed, put the directories back and carried his fragile head out to Museum Street. The Tavern beckoned, but he ignored it; he walked down to Holborn, then zigzagged west and south and headed again for the Metropolitan Police Annexe.

He announced himself to the porter and went up, put his head into Hench-Rose’s room and was told that Hector was ‘in a meeting of the Examinations Resolution Committee’, whatever that was, and turned instead and went along the corridor to what he hoped was Detective Sergeant Munro’s office. He got the wrong room, of course; an ascetic civil servant who seemed to be preparing for life in a Himalayan monastery — thin, bald, placid — put him right.

Munro was not delighted to see him. His expression was disapproving. ‘We’re being run ragged here just now.’

‘I’ll come back.’

‘We’re always run ragged.’ They were standing in the outer room where the three clerks were bending over red-tied files. ‘We don’t really have time for gentleman detectives.’

‘I’m not a detective, don’t pretend to be.’ He thought of Emma. ‘And I’m not a gentleman.’

Munro’s expression changed; was he amused? ‘Five minutes.’ He led the way, limping, to his inner office. ‘You here about the murder again?’ he said when they were seated.

‘I went to the post-mortem. I told you, Mulcahy, the man who came to see me, had described a murder-’

‘Yes, yes-’

‘It was very similar.’

Munro shrugged. He was tying and untying the red tape on a file. ‘Lots of murders are similar. No sign of your Mulcahy that I’ve heard of. City Police might have something — you did tell them, right? Have to ask them.’

Denton shifted his body, trying to find a position that didn’t make his muscles ache. His head was pounding. ‘I’d like to see her room. Where she was killed.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Mulcahy, Mulcahy.’

Munro fiddled with the tape, then joined his fingers and looked at Denton. ‘This the western sheriff in you coming out?’ Before Denton could answer, he said, ‘Read a bit about you — a pal downstairs keeps a scrapbook, had a newspaper piece about you.’ He was nodding. ‘Funny, you were down in Nebraska the same time I was in Alberta. Mounties.’

Denton felt stupid, couldn’t puzzle it out. A Brit in the Mounties?

‘My dad emigrated from Scotland in 1847. I was born in Flodden, Quebec, tiny little place. I joined the Mounties in the second intake. Heard of the Sweet Grass Hills? Old Man River? Fort MacLeod?’ He grinned. ‘You weren’t a whiskey trader, were you?’

‘That’s one thing I never tried.’

Munro grunted. ‘Bunch of lowlifes selling flavored raw alcohol to the Indians on the Assiniboine. I put in twice my three years and came here — better job, better pay.’

‘I went on west.’

‘It was a rough place back then.’ Munro leaned away from him. ‘You really kill four men?’

He never talked about it. ‘Two,’ he said. He waited for Munro to see that it was a poor subject. Munro, however, had the look of a man who could wait him out. ‘The other two died later.’

‘Six-gun?’ Said with a grin.

‘Shotgun.’ Said with a scowl.

Munro raised his eyebrows and shook his head. ‘Always wonder how I’d have done, that kind of situation. But the Mounties were very big on not being like Americans.’

‘Violent people.’ Denton had thought about it. ‘But we had slavery.’ Slavery, as he had worked it out, made the slaver violent.

‘Maybe the killer’s an American.’ Munro said it with another smile.

‘My five minutes are up.’

Munro made a face as if to say it didn’t matter. ‘I might be able to get you into the scene of the crime and I might not. Bit difficult because it’s City Police.’

‘Plus Sergeant Willey more or less took against me.’

‘Yeah, well-The truth is, Willey’s probably so overworked he’s forgotten you. No offence. But they’ve got a big thing going on bank fraud over there; a dead prostitute isn’t going to distract them for long. Let me see what I can do through the Yard.’

‘You’ve changed your mind about me.’

Munro was playing with the red tapes again. ‘Apparently,’ he said, and he grinned once more. ‘You have the telephone? ’ Denton shook his head. ‘Leave an address where I can get a message to you.’ While Denton was extracting a card from his case with trembling fingers, Munro said, ‘I’d give my right arm to be back in the CID.’ He seemed to mean it as an explanation of why he was willing to help Denton now.

Denton’s mouth tasted like burned metal.

He walked back like a man in a walking race. Always a fast walker, he seemed demented now. His balance was off; his back and head ached; still he plunged on. He had at first made for home, but he detoured into Soho and threw himself into a Chinese noodle shop, where, surrounded by slurping Chinese labourers, he filled himself with noodles and broth and several small dumplings. He had discovered Chinese food in California, had been surprised that the cosmopolitan English looked on it as comical, possibly dangerous, meaning actually that it was lower-class and strange. (‘We must never notice things that are unpleasant,’ he had read in Dickens but not understood until he had lived in London a while.) The food made him feel suddenly better, and he was able to lurch his way up to Oxford Street and then east, turning up Museum Street again because he liked it and at last through rather awful byways to Lamb’s Conduit. Always, the darkening blue was above him and the clouds were racing over as if leaping from the rooftops on one side to those on the other; below, looking up, trying to walk, he was made dizzy.

‘Sergeant!’ he shouted as he let himself in. He wanted to lie down but was damned if he would. He would make himself work, always a panacea, even though the work was no longer physical.