Kenneth Cameron: The Frightened Man

‘It’s she who’s dead, we think,’ Janet Striker said.

‘Ah, poor tyke. How?’

‘Murdered.’ She glanced at Denton. ‘If it’s the same girl. Look here, Mr Penrose, it’s important that we find the Satterlees. I take it they’re not here any more. Where have they gone?’

Penrose, on his feet now, shook his head. ‘No idea, and good riddance. The company might know — he might’ve gone someplace else to do the same job for them.’ He shook his head again. ‘Murdered! You never know what tomorrow will bring, do you?’

‘What’s the company?’

He looked perplexed, as if everybody knew what the company was. ‘Britannic Improvement. Their name’s all over London.’ He said the name again, as if they might be slow. Then he shook hands with both of them, muttered ‘murdered’, and was gone.

Neither of them had done more than sip the ale, so they left it on the table. Both were silent in the cab, heading back through evening streets towards the Marlborough Road station. It was colder and a few flakes of snow were falling, melting as they touched the pavement. At last he said, ‘I’ve got to find him.’

‘Them,’ she said. ‘It’s the whole family, Denton — and they may be the wrong ones.’

They rode along. He said, ‘How do we find them?’

‘The company, I suppose. If they’ll tell us. Tomorrow’s Saturday; the company offices will be open, but if the important people aren’t there, it might be hard to get them to tell us. “Oh, you must wait for Mr Smith to return on Monday.” Does it really matter, Denton, whether it’s tomorrow or Monday?’

‘It matters to me.’

They waited on the cold platform, then sat silently side by side like a long-established couple who’d been having an argument. At Baker Street, they changed to the Metropolitan Line and went on, silent, swaying, until he said abruptly, ‘We’ll get out at King’s Cross and walk.’

‘I don’t want you to walk me home.’

‘We’re going to my typewriter’s on Lloyd Baker Street. I think I know how to find the Satterlees.’

‘But it’s impossible, Mr Denton!’ Mrs Johnson was less scandalized than usual because Denton had a woman with him; she had even let them both inside the front door. ‘It’s after seven o’clock, Mr Denton — they’ve worked all day and they’re not going to work all night!’

‘I’ll pay double! Triple! They won’t have to work all night — it’s one name, one name!’

‘Mr Denton, they’ve been three days, looking for Ruths and Rebeccas; now you want them to look for Alices and Ednas. I’m sure they’ll be happy to try again on Monday.’

Janet Striker said in her most severe voice, ‘The Metropolitan Schools Board building is open until nine o’clock. I know, because I’ve had to go to meetings there. We have two hours — more, Denton, if you’re not averse to bribing people.’

Mrs Johnson sucked in her breath, as harsh a rebuke as she ever allowed herself.

‘It will also cost something to prise the records out at this hour. Mrs Johnson, do you know what records they were looking at and in what office?’

Mrs Johnson wilted under Janet Striker’s tone. She didn’t know, she murmured; she hadn’t been doing the work, only organizing it; Frederica Tilley had been the one actually there and running things.

‘Where is she now?’ Janet Striker demanded.

‘Home, I suppose, slaving all day as she’s been doing. Several streets away. No, of course I don’t have a telephone — nor she — it’s ten minutes’ walk-’

They made it in six, to find Frederica Tilley relaxing with sherry and sausages in a room above an upholsterer’s. Once she’d got over the surprise of the visit, she told them quite lucidly where the records were in the Schools Board building, and precisely which volumes would hold the most recent reports. ‘But it’s way down Blackfriars Road and a frightful walk from the tube station! You’ll never-’

Then they were in a motorized cab speeding through freezing streets to the south bank. The city was dark but peopled, everybody hugging himself, shoulders hunched, hands at throats to hold collars closed against a wind that seemed to be blowing from the Arctic. Overhead, clouds scudded in the reflected light of London, low and fast and spitting a snowflake now and then. Paying the cab fare, Denton counted his money and wondered if it would last.

Janet Striker, he found to his surprise, knew all about bribing people. When she saw his hesitation, she held her hand out for money and said crisply, ‘I’ll do it.’ She got them into the building — a shilling for the night porter — and into the records room — half a crown for the clerk, half a crown for the watchman — and down at a table near the records themselves. It cost them another crown when the building closed at nine, and then they sat in a big, cold room, the brass Aladdin lamp on the table the only light, bound books of handwritten school reports piled around them.

‘Have you any more money?’ Mrs Striker said at ten-thirty.

He blushed. ‘Coins.’

‘We never had supper.’ She disappeared and came back after ten minutes. ‘The night porter’s gone for food. And drink. I’m afraid we’re entertaining two watchmen, the porter and somebody he calls “Old Geoff ”.’ She smiled into the island of light. ‘If any of “the upper staff ” find we’re here, it’ll cost a good deal more.’ She sat down. ‘Your money ran out. We’re on my shilling now.’

‘I can’t let you.’

‘You can’t stop me.’ She opened a book with a bang. ‘What bad fists people have! My eyes are crossing from the handwriting.’

At half past midnight, she suddenly slapped her worn hand down on the ledger. ‘I have them!’ She raised her voice. ‘Satterlee, Edna, aged 12, East Ham Progressive Central School.’ She looked up at him, her face weary, ironic, smiling. ‘Don’t,’ she said, ‘don’t do it, Denton,’ because apparently she knew he wanted to kiss her.

A hard frost had laid a sheen of palest grey over grasses and had left a gloss of black ice on the streets. East Ham beyond the train station was a bleak expanse of seemingly identical streets of identical houses, all joined into two-storeyed rows under shallow-peaked roofs. At intervals, ancient wetland persevered as dun-coloured grass, now almost white, matted into clumps and hummocks and marked here and there by pools of open water whose edges had frozen overnight. Always, beyond any view that opened — inevitably over the marshes — there was a jagged skyline of factories and the rising plumes of smoke and, this bitter morning, steam.

Denton and Mrs Striker, their cab jogging slowly between the rows of houses, were silent. It was only a little after seven; working-men were moving on the street, dinner buckets hanging from one hand; an odour of pipe smoke, coal and food hung on the chilly air. Denton shivered in his overcoat; the revolver, snug in its pocket, was icy to the touch.

East Ham had been a village for centuries, an inhabited place before the Romans, probably; it had seen farms and orchards in the middle ages and later. Now, London had engorged it as a place for the working people needed to stoke the great British engine. Mean streets , he thought as they clopped along, but that expression had been used for a place far worse than this, the streets here in fact not mean but simply spiritless, grim, repetitive. The farmer in him disliked the erasure of the farms.

‘There are far worse places,’ Mrs Striker said as if they had been discussing it. He grunted. She said, ‘People don’t leave places like East Ham to go back to the farms, Denton.’

‘That’s because there’s no work on the farms.’ He sighed. ‘They’d pave the whole country, if they could.’