Kenneth Cameron: The Frightened Man

In the attic, he forced himself to pick up a forty-pound iron bar. Each curl seemed to push all his blood into his aching head.

‘Bad,’ he gasped aloud. He was thinking of Emma, her behaviour towards him — his towards her, for that matter — but the word would have done for all sorts of things he’d done in his life. Or so it seemed from the perspective of the hangover. Or all manner of things that men did to women. Like Stella Minter, the extreme case. He screwed his face up, wondering if that was what he had wanted for Emma in that moment of red blindness. God, no.

He finished twenty curls and put the bar down with a thump. The attic smelled of dry wood, a whiff of fir, dust, smoke from below, the fresh odour of rain. He had two Flobert pistols up there, ‘parlour pistols’ some called them because their charge was so weak you could shoot them in a parlour. Or so they said. It was Denton’s view that if you hit somebody in the eye with one of the little bullets, you might find yourself a murderer. He perhaps had too much respect for firearms. But, then, a lot of experience.

Nice women, ‘not nice’ women, the illusions of chastity and virginity. He’d never had a virgin except his wife, and what a horror that had been. They had both been nineteen, the Civil War just over. Huddled in the cold bedroom of a boarding house.

‘Cruel to her,’ he said aloud. He set up a target and walked the length of the attic and aimed. He had been over his marriage ten thousand times in his mind; it always made him wince with shame. He could have waited, he knew now, been gentle with her, helped her. But he had thought that consummation had to be immediate or she would escape him, become his sister and not his wife. At nineteen, he had known no better. So, tears, bloody sheets, a terrible train journey north and west with her in pain. When she’d got pregnant, she’d fled the farm for her parents’ house in St Louis, had had both the boys there, gone back to the farm each time with reluctance. But died on the farm.

Like the murdered tart, in the box sooner, not later.

He fired one pistol, then the other; reloaded, fired; reloaded. His head was spinning, his breath was foul, but he didn’t miss at this distance. He fired again, both pistols, and when he walked down and looked at the target, he could have covered the six bullet holes with his thumbnail.

He went to a rowing contraption and made himself row for half an hour.

As he strained, he thought about Mulcahy, the girl, Emma.

Mulcahy had certainly been terrified by something . Whether he’d actually seen what he’d described or not was another matter. Was Mulcahy one of those lunatics who lived horrors that existed only in his own mind? Had Mulcahy opened a window on some inner hell and been appalled by it? But then why had he lied about it — for surely he’d lied? And why had he thought he needed protection? Or was that simply some extreme realization of his fantasy, as Atkins had suggested?

Pouring sweat, his robe discarded and the old shirt unbuttoned, Denton rested on the oars, panting, heart pounding, his head aching to the beat of it. He pulled himself up, his legs weak, and towelled himself and then lay down next to a hundred-pound dumb-bell. The iron mistress. Like being in bed with it. Emma weighed only fifteen pounds more. On top of me, she felt light. Sweet. The sweetness of women, warm, soft- He dragged the dumb-bell on top of him, arching his back and raising his abdomen so the bar rested on it, then getting his forearms under it and hoisting it above him. Twenty lifts, the later ones forcing the blood into his head again so that it felt as if the veins would explode.

Had Mulcahy murdered the girl? Was it as simple as that? But why come to Denton, then?

He had his cap-and-ball pistol from the American Civil War; he removed it from its case, checked, as he always did, that it wasn’t loaded (but he knew it wasn’t loaded, hadn’t been loaded in ten years), and stood with the pistol held at arm’s length for five minutes, holding the sights on the target. Despite brandy, hangover, strenuous exercise, the pistol never wavered.

He was at the Metropolitan Police Additional Headquarters before eleven, a ridiculous Gothic building from which passers-by expected to hear groans and sighs, perhaps muffled screams. The building had in fact been a warren of legal offices and dismal flats before the expanding police, already bursting out of New Scotland Yard, had acquired it ‘temporarily’. Its blackened stones were grim at best, horrible in the rain, and now that it was an annexe for the police, it had the air of a prison. The vast and sombre exterior led visitors to expect inside huge, shadowed vistas with topless staircases and vaults and chains; as it was, Denton was merely irritated by what he found — a setting for bureaucratic tedium. Long, uncarpeted passages led to enclosed staircases with, nonetheless, dark newels and banisters, and here and there were floors that sloped, others that abruptly took a step up or down. It was said that new occupants got lost in trying to get about the building. It made the hung-over Denton dizzy.

On the third floor, past the gloomy entrance hall and the atrium that poked up through the building as if seeking light and air, up some stairs and around a balcony that looked down into the well, and up and around again and up, was the office of the Assistant Under-Secretary to the Assistant Secretary (not to be confused with the Permanent Under-Secretary to the Permanent Assistant Secretary, both career civil servants) who was in a sense responsible, although in fact not really responsible, for the apparatus that investigated the Metropolitan Police — not in a criminal sense, but a business one: its stated goal was efficiency. The Assistant Under-Secretary was a man named Hector Hench-Rose.

‘Denton!’ he shouted. ‘Ha-ha!’ Hench-Rose had ginger hair and a ginger moustache and was, at forty, already seriously into belly after years of pouring himself into the uniform of one of the higher-numbered regiments. He was affable, courageous and useless as an administrator, and so had been given the equivalent of the rank of superintendent and put one step down from the top of the division with no more experience of police work than if he had spent his life running a home for foundlings.

‘Hector.’ Denton liked Hector Hench-Rose in a qualified way; they were opposites without ever being enemies. Hench-Rose was energetic, cheerful and happy; Denton was listless, dour and doubtful that happiness existed. He liked to warm himself at Hector’s fire now and then.

‘Place stinks,’ Hector said now. He was leading Denton to a chair in an office so dark it could have been used to store coal. One window gave on to an air shaft; the only other light came from a gas lamp above the desk. The rain, nonetheless, managed to reach that only window and trickle down it with sooty smears. ‘Something in the chimney. Birds, I think. Place full of smoke half the time, then we get a puff of wind and this unspeakable smell.’

‘I had raccoons in a chimney once,’ Denton said.

‘Raccoons! Those are the buggers with eye-rings, aren’t they. Look like burglars in an operetta. What’d they do?’

‘They stank.’

This amused Hector mightily. He offered a cigar, tea, an early drink; Denton refused them all. Hector made social small talk, mentioned the opera by way of getting to Emma, as if he knew about her and Denton. His tone was a little odd, perhaps more inquisitive than usual; Hench-Rose was an enthusiastic gossip but usually discreet. Did he know already that Emma had thrown him over?

‘Emma all right?’ Yes, he knew.

‘Fine, of course.’

‘Didn’t see you with her at the opera.’