The iron paws had been put up in lines at right angles to the eaves, so that one jutted up eight feet below the broken one. His foot caught it, slid over, and would have gone on except for his turn-up, which snagged and held — good British woollens. The paw sagged, bent, but held. He felt it, felt his direction change from a downward plunge to a swing as the turn-up became the centre of a circle on which his weight spun, throwing him down and to his right, closer to the dormer. He dug with his hands, his arms; he tried to force his chest into the slates; his injured arm felt a jolt like electricity as it took all his weight. His hands, swinging around, struck the side of the dormer and he slowed and stopped, his hands spread against the wood as if he were a suction-toed frog, held for as long as his trousers and his arms could hold out; and then there was nothing for it but to look down, terrified, down the steep slope to the vertical drop-off. Just short of the edge, another iron support jutted up, closer to the line of the dormer than his right foot, which had got within inches of the edge. He thought he could have hung there longer except for the pain that was burning up his injured arm and into his shoulder, now spreading over the top of his left arm towards his clavicle.
He moved the foot over and caught the iron paw. And then hung there. Listening to the imp.
He could see the dormer’s corner now; it rose in line with the building’s external wall, about eighteen inches from the edge of the roof. He was still two feet above the corner, his right foot six inches below it. He had either to move his left foot so as to put all his weight on the one support, or move his hands down the dormer wall until he could grasp something, perhaps a window ledge, to pull himself up.
The fingers of his right hand inched down the wall, palm flat against it. At the bottom, an irregular brick gave a kind of fingerhold. Then he inched his left foot off its support and moved his left leg over towards his right, finding it impossible to put both feet on the paw because he couldn’t get his left leg under his right, and then he was lying partly on his left side. Bending his legs, he let himself down the dormer and felt around the corner, up, then a few inches across the face, and at last to the sill of the open window.
He found a handhold in the windowsill, a blessed, blissful handhold, and he pulled his weight to the corner and then up, and then he could pull his right foot up and put the left foot briefly on the paw, and then he was sitting in the open window with his feet on the slates, his toes six inches from the edge of the roof.
Then he was going to be sick, and the imp was tempting him to be sick over the edge, and he scrambled through the window, his knees on the floor inside and his belly on the windowsill, and he bent forward, ready to vomit, his chin where his toes had been, almost at the edge. And he looked down, straight down into the void, and saw the black walls of the buildings like the sides of a funnel, and the strip of weeds at the bottom, and among them an unrecognizable dark shape like a twisted dark star.
He had found R. Mulcahy.
Chapter Twelve
He stood up and turned towards the room inside the window. The corpse below, he had decided when his eyes had made sense of it, had to be Mulcahy’s if this room was the Photographic Inventorium, as of course it was — a huge wooden camera stood on a wheeled tripod; a smaller device, a black cloth, and the corner of a dais on which, perhaps, photographic subjects posed were just visible before the inner corner of the dormer cut them off.
Straight ahead of him across the thirty-foot-wide space was a heavy door — the door with the two padlocks on it, he thought, the door to the corridor and the stairway. The camera and the dais were to his left as he faced the door; to his right, a counter or work table ran towards him and disappeared behind the dormer wall.
He walked on still-trembling knees out of the dormer’s enclosure into the room proper and found it large, almost airy, the feeling of space increased by the enormous paned window that took up most of the wall to his left, the rear of the building. This was the source of the photographer’s light, which poured through even on this gloomy day. The dais he had glimpsed was set at an angle to this window, undoubtedly movable, because the wooden floor was scarred with long marks. As he moved farther into the room, he found that the dais was backed with some sort of framed canvas, over which, on the photographer’s side, a piece of black velour like a theatrical curtain was hung; in front of it, a carved armchair crouched. The camera, as big as a small trunk, looked like some resting animal.
The work table on his right ran from the wall in which the locked door stood to within five or six feet of the facing wall, its far side tight against a wall that ran almost the width of the room, leaving only a narrow corridor between it and the outer wall. It was neither the corridor nor the work table itself that caught Denton’s attention, however, but a shrine-like arrangement of dying flowers on the table’s far end. He went close and examined it — two pink roses in a cracked vase, dropped petals on the tabletop; a water glass of once-green weeds, drooping now; a brown bottle, perhaps originally meant for chemicals, with a nosegay of the sort girls sold at the theatres stuck into its mouth. These were in a triangle, the roses at the apex. In front of them and resting against the vase was a cabinet photograph of Stella Minter, the face recognizable as that of the waxen, bruised girl of the post-mortem.
She was sitting in the ornate chair that now stood on the dais, her body turned away from the camera but her face in profile. Her back was almost bare, as was her near shoulder; one lacy strip rose from the froth of clothing at her shoulder blade and crossed her upper arm almost at the elbow; the arm, pulled back, revealed one breast just to the top of the nipple. Her lips were open, as if she were speaking — as if, still a child, she were asking, ‘Am I doing it right?’
In front of the photograph and flat on the table was a sheet of business letterhead, with ‘The Photographic Inventorium’ and the address at the top, and ‘Under New Management’. On the white sheet was written in a large scrawl, ‘I love her but I cant have her so I killed her. I got nothing to live for.’ It was signed ‘Regis F. Mulcahy’.
Denton bent close to the paper, as if smelling out its secrets. He was in fact looking at the writing, which was very slightly shaky, the result perhaps of excitement or even a fit of weeping. The paper had no blots or bulges from tears, however, and no smudges or stains.
He went to the chair and made sure that it was the chair in the photograph. There was no mistaking its hideous griffin’s heads on the arms, the overdone curlicues on the upper back that would have made sitting in it torture. Denton looked it all over, back and front, bringing his eyes as close to it as he had to the paper. The upholstered seat had a faint smell — urine? Excrement? Using his handkerchief, he tipped the chair back — it was as heavy as a library table — and then forward. He took particular interest in the joints where the back legs met the seat, where, by looking very close, he could see a few red threads caught. Seen from one angle, several of the threads glinted — silk or satin, he thought. He looked then at the arms but found nothing, then at the back and, in one of the many piercings that made the thing notably ugly, two more of the red threads.
Denton stood back by the camera and looked at the dais. Black curtain, chair. Light from the photographer’s right.