Kenneth Cameron - The Bohemian Girl

‘You can’t make it!’ he shouted.

She moved herself up again. He saw the razor flash in her hand.

‘Give it up!’

He started up the roof. He went on his fingertips and the balls of his feet, the light rubber shoes he wore for rowing a help. She screamed, screamed again. He was aware of voices below them and understood how it must look to anybody who could see them — a half-naked man chasing a woman.

‘Come down from there, you monster!’ a woman’s voice shouted, the sound thinned by distance.

Mary Thomason screamed again. She had almost reached the chimney. And then what?

Denton pushed himself harder. He forgot the bad leg. He looked at nothing but the woman in the white dress. Straightening, he went up on the diagonal faster than she was moving, and when she reached the chimney, he was only three yards behind. He put his right foot over the peak of the roof and balanced there, a foot on each side. She looked down towards the ground at the front of the house. Several people were down there, foreshortened, shouting.

‘Leave that poor girl alone! The police are coming!’ One of them blew a police whistle.

She scrambled upright, using the chimney to support her. With her back to it and the razor at her side where they couldn’t see it from below, she faced him. Denton moved closer. He raised his arm over his head because of the bleeding.

‘Give it up. It’s over.’

She was very like the drawing. Not quite pretty, but arresting. The breeze stirred her hair. He said, ‘Give it up. You think you’re a nasty piece of work, but I’m nastier. I’ll kill you if I have to.’

They were fixed on each other as if they were the only people in the world. They were, in that shared concentration, like lovers. The Thames, the day, the glory of the summer, didn’t exist. He looked at her and she looked at him, and for a moment he saw her face soften and he felt for her something that was beyond sympathy, almost an identification, a sharing of self, as if in the instant of violence that was coming they were the same. He held out the bloody left arm with the hand open. ‘Give it to me. It’s over.’

Then her face changed to the demonic one he had glimpsed through the door, and she swung the razor at him. He flung up his arm and caught it on the part that was wrapped in the shirt. It slashed down; he felt its bite again and grabbed her wrist. He raised it high, as if they were doing some country dance, drawing her off the chimney, and she tried to pull away. His other hand was balled into a fist, and he hesitated an instant because she was a woman, because her female face was so near his own. Then the razor’s blade cut into his palm as his slippery hand lost its grip and she turned in the air in front of him, one foot on a slate and one foot in the air, and then she was gone and he heard the thud of her body on the flagstones beside the house.

And then he felt his own vertigo, and he collapsed against the chimney, hugging it as if he had been thrown against it by a wave.

‘Man or woman?’

‘Man.’ Munro grinned. ‘Relieved?’ He set down a mug of tea for Denton.

‘I was about ninety-eight parts in a hundred sure. But I thought-If she was a woman-’

‘Well, he wasn’t. How’s that arm?’

‘Hurts like hell. Nice lot of stitches.’

‘You lost a good lot of blood. Feeling queasy?’

‘I’ve been told to take Extract of Meat and Malt Wine. I think I’ll stay with Mrs Cohan’s soup. The tea’s a godsend for now.’ They were in a borrowed office in Brentford Infirmary. The local constabulary had first arrested Denton and brought him there in handcuffs to be sewn up. It had taken three hours to sort out what had happened, the actual sorting-out being done only when New Scotland Yard had been brought in. More time had passed while somebody figured out that what had happened at Strand-on-the-Green was part of a case Munro was already working on.

Munro put his hands in his trouser pockets and stared out of the window. ‘He’s dead. I’m sorry about that — I’d like to see the bastard in the dock.’ He looked at Denton. ‘I’ve got a dozen witnesses that will swear they saw you push a woman off that roof.’

‘I’m sure. But I didn’t.’

‘I’ve read your statement. Funny, what people see.’

‘How’s Brown?’

‘Head’s too broken for us to take a statement. Concussion. Maybe by tomorrow. You didn’t have to try to kill him, too, you know.’

‘I didn’t want him behind me while I went after the woman.’

‘His nose was mashed flat against his face, he has two broken ribs, and he fractured a finger, apparently trying to protect himself from the poker. Can’t you ever go easy on them?’

‘I told you, I didn’t want him behind me.’

Munro stared out of the window, then shook his head. ‘ Did you push the woman? The man?’

‘I lost my grip on her wrist. She was off balance.’

‘I wouldn’t blame you if you had. He was an ugly piece of work. Cutting the head off Himple, killing Heseltine — the painting that came from Heseltine’s flat pretty well cinches that one. You’re always right.’

‘Like hell.’

Munro grinned at him, then became serious again. ‘You think he was insane?’

‘Anybody who commits murder is insane, isn’t he?’

‘I meant, playing at being a woman.’

Denton said nothing, then, ‘She was sane. Maybe he wasn’t.’ ‘They were the same person, Denton!’

Denton shrugged again. He felt light-headed, detached. Munro said, ‘We’re digging up Brown’s garden to look for Himple’s head.’

‘Yes, you should do that. Although I don’t think you’ll find it.’

Munro grunted. ‘No. I suppose it’s somewhere like the middle of the Channel.’

‘Or in an abandoned privy in Paris.’

‘She wasn’t here until last week — we’ve asked the neighbours. Why the hell do you think she came back here ?’

‘They wanted to be together, I suppose.’

Munro gave a snort of contempt. ‘Queer sort of being together — murdering folk. You think it was always the two of them?’

‘I didn’t until I saw her in the garden. Yes, I think it was always the two of them — before anything else. Maybe Crum met Himple first at the Baths, but then when he met Brown — funny, how people pair off.’ He gave a grim smile. ‘There’s a novel in that.’ He moved the arm painfully to another position, then sipped the tea. ‘Think you’ll ever know who Arthur Crum really was?’

‘Mr Nobody from Nowhere. Some little chap who thought he’d found himself a clever way off the factory floor.’

‘And it got away from him?’

Munro shrugged. He sighed and opened the door. ‘Well, you can go. Although I think I’m letting the most dangerous man in London walk.’ Denton got up and strode to the door. Munro said, ‘Speaking of walk-’

‘What?’

‘ Look at you.’

Denton looked where Munro was pointing, at his right leg. He wasn’t limping. He didn’t have a stick.

‘Where’s the bad leg, then?’

‘I guess she took it over the roof with her.’

Janet Striker was waiting for him at the infirmary gate. She hurried him into a waiting cab and made him lie back into a nest of pillows she’d put there. ‘Don’t ever let anybody tell you that money isn’t important,’ she said. ‘I bought these for you to lie on and they’re going in the dustbin as soon as we get you home. But worth every penny!’

‘I’m not an invalid.’

‘You bled like a pig, I was told. You should be feeling weak and ill.’

‘I’m not a pig.’

‘No, you’re a man, and a fairly good specimen of one.’ She kissed him. ‘Tell me everything, including how you got your leg back.’