‘Tired of being cooped up.’
‘Wet, sir.’ The damp air had by then produced a fine drizzle. He moved past the constable, waiting to be stopped — the idea was absurd, but Denton felt as if he were doing something underhanded — and moved away as quickly as his still-wobbly legs would allow. Walking lasted only as far as the corner; he knew he couldn’t make it much farther.
He went by cab to Mrs Castle’s famous house, commended to him by Harris, the house otherwise known simply as Westerley Street. Other houses stood in Westerley Street, but only the one was known by the street’s name; more than one of her clients, drunk or sober, had said that it must be awkward actually to live in that street. But all the cabs knew the way, and they all knew what a man meant if he said ‘Westerley Street’. Denton had no idea what they thought if a woman said it.
As higher-class houses went, it was a little shabby, but that seemed to be a sign of its authenticity. Mrs Castle herself was always soberly and tastefully dressed, if not in fact sober and tasteful; she always had champagne at hand and loved to talk politics or racing or what she called ‘sosigh-tih’. A certain shabbiness of speech, as well — the odd dropped H, the even odder dropped final G — went with the patchily worn carpet or faded chair. It was said that she had been the mistress of a personage, had chosen to be a madam rather than a milliner afterwards, knew that the best houses were sometimes the worst kept and kept hers accordingly.
‘Well, sir, it’s you,’ a big man said as he opened the door to Denton.
‘Hello, Bull.’ Fred Oldaston had fought bare-knuckled as the Lancashire Bulldog for fourteen years and had been the first Englishman to take Denton into a public house. He had also — same evening — taught Denton how to put a thumb into a man’s eye while punching him. Now fifty and two stone heavier than when he had fought, he was Mrs Castle’s conscience: ‘I keep them honest,’ he had said, meaning the clients. Now, he murmured, ‘Hurt your arm?’ as he closed the door behind Denton.
‘Somebody stabbed me, in fact.’
‘Fighting with knives, bad business, best stay out of it.’
‘I didn’t have much choice.’
Oldaston took his coat and pointed through a fringed and swagged doorway. ‘You know the route. Something to drink?’
‘I’d pass out.’ He went through the drapes and into a large parlour that was a couple of decades out of date, too much furniture and too much darkness, and that smelled of cigars and good perfume and coal fires. A man in evening dress was sitting in a corner with two women, one of whom looked expectantly at Denton; he passed on to a room beyond where a large table lamp with a globe painted with cherubs cast a glow the colour of a sunset. Mrs Castle was sitting where she always sat, in a large armchair surrounded with cushions, so that it was not possible to stand right next to her; the walls, surprisingly after the décor in the other rooms, were covered with a William Morris paper, but the rest was like the parlour — velvet and lace, a bulbous piano with paisley hanging from it like melting icicles, a sideboard big enough to have served as a back bar.
‘Well, here you are, then,’ she said. She held out a hand. ‘I ’eard you’d been ’urt. They say ’e tried to kill you, that true? The black silk thing is ever so elegant.’
Denton squeezed her hand and sat down. She was probably in her forties but looked both older and younger, her face well preserved but weary, her abundant hair her own, her voice firm, her figure overstated but good. He thought her attractive but had never got any encouragement from her. ‘A bad cut is all,’ he said.
‘But in your own house, my dear.’ She had firmer control of the H that time.
‘You seem to know all about it.’
‘Well, friends of friends in the press, you know.’ She sipped champagne. She was one of those drinkers who are always one or two drinks gone but who never seem drunk; one day, he supposed, it would all crash down on her. ‘Can I call somebody for you?’ she said.
‘It’s you I came to see.’
‘Oh, I’m flattered. Poor old me.’
She started to tell him some long story about HRH, whom she actually did know, although not absolutely recently. A lot of it was about horses, and Denton’s mind wandered. He watched, through the doorway, two or three more men in evening dress come in, then several women from another direction. The sound of male voices rose, then a woman’s, singing. Denton realized that one of the men was Hector Hench-Rose. When he sensed that Mrs Castle’s voice had changed tone, he knew that her story was over, and he smiled and nodded. When she stopped to pour herself more champagne, he said, ‘Maybe you can help me.’
‘My dear, I’d be delighted. Anything.’
‘I’d like to talk to somebody who knows the girls who work the street around the Minories.’
‘You’re ’urtin’ my feelin’s, my dear. Not going to be loyal to Westerley Street?’
‘Business. Writer’s business.’
‘What then, somethin’ about that killing? Is this about your arm?’
‘I’d like to find somebody who might help me talk to some of the girls.’
Mrs Castle smoothed her gown. ‘I don’t know anybody in that end of town, I’m sure. Bit of a ragtag and bobtail there, little of everythin’. I never hire from there, you know, they don’t ’ave the style.’ She looked hurt. ‘Cow-girls and goose-girls.’
‘I didn’t mean it that way.’
‘Surprised you’d think it of me.’
‘I didn’t. I only thought you might know somebody who did. Know that area, I mean.’
He had to apologize again, then wheedle her out of her mood, if it was genuine. She became roguish, then suddenly confiding. She really did know, or know of, all sorts of people, all sorts of stories. She seemed to be coming to some point, perhaps even a name, when Hector Hench-Rose came in with a very young woman, laughing and red-faced and rather tipsy for that early in the night.
‘Denton!’ he shouted, in case anybody in that part of London had missed his name. ‘Saw you when I came in! How’s that arm? I thought you had one foot in the grave, the way the papers went on. This is Yvonne, who’s a charmer, ain’t you? Ah, Mrs C, handsomer every time I see you.’ He kissed Mrs Castle’s hand and accepted a glass of champagne and proceeded to tell her all about a lot of police business that was almost certainly confidential. Yvonne stared into space, laughing when she thought she was supposed to, pulling at her clothes as if she had dressed too fast. Other people wandered in and out; an organ started to play a waltz a couple of rooms away. When Hench-Rose had finished his gossip, Mrs Castle looked at an ormolu clock and said, ‘Supper room’s open.’
‘Aha!’ Hench-Rose stood. He winked at Denton. ‘Join us? Little sustenance? I’ve a mind to visit the last act at the Palace of Varieties in Greenwich — care to join me?’ He didn’t wait for an answer, but in the doorway he called back over his shoulder with another shout of laughter, ‘Making rather a night of it!’ He was married, with several children; his wife was said to be shy.
‘Janet Striker,’ Mrs Castle said. ‘Mrs Janet Striker.’
Denton let his expression ask the question.
‘The person you want, my dear. ’Ench-Rose can be an exhausting soul, can’t he. Thought he’d never come to the point. Gave me a chance to think, though. Mrs Janet Striker. The Society for the Improvement of Wayward Women.’
‘Sounds awful.’
‘It is awful. But she ain’t. Tough as tripe, but a lady, and not your mealy-mouthed do-gooder. She understands the lives the girls live. She tries to find other work for them, get them off the street, which is like tryin’ to bail the Serpentine with a fish fork, but she means well. I wouldn’t send you to most of the hypocrites in that line, but Janet Striker’s a woman who-’ She smiled, cat-like, disingenuous. ‘You’ll have to meet her to see what she is.’ She rested her chin on the fingers of one hand and stared at him. ‘I’m not sure she’ll take to you, Denton.’