He walked to the work table and looked again at Stella Minter. The light had come from the photographer’s right, yes, but not at all harshly. There were the chair and the velour curtain. But on the left side of the photo, the velour curtain curved down and towards the right, caught back by a rope, revealing what seemed to be a pastoral scene with a waterfall and some sort of tree.
He went to the left side of the curtain and raised it with the back of his right hand. There were the waterfall and the tree and, in fact, a painted landscape that must fill the entire space. This was the explanation for the canvas-covered frame — a sort of theatrical flat; and indeed the scene might once have been some sort of drop curtain.
Denton looked for the rope by which the curtain had been caught back in Stella Minter’s photograph. He didn’t find it, but he did find the hook to which it had been tied, and, in the thin gap between the hook’s backplate and the wooden frame, several red threads. So, a red rope with a decorative knot and a fringe, to judge from the photograph. Of which some threads had also been caught in the hideous armchair.
He spent an hour in the Inventorium, walking up and down, looking into things, trying to understand Mulcahy’s life. And his death. Along the corridor behind the work table were a door to the photographic darkroom, where Mulcahy also kept a grubby cot and an extra shirt. The cot, its single sheet wrinkled in long lines, had a smell, and, his nose almost down among the soiled folds, he recognized the smell as that of the man who had tried to kill him with the knife. It brought that night back; unconsciously, he grabbed his left arm where he had been cut. He was here. He slept here and waited for Mulcahy. Beyond the darkroom was a newer, narrower door with a patent Excelsior water closet behind it, filthy but fairly new. It was a long walk down to the privy in the foundry yard.
On the far end of the work table from Stella Minter’s shrine were rolled-up papers that proved to be mechanical drawings, all apparently by Mulcahy and all competently done. Several showed stages in the development of the Mulcahy Moving Picture Machine, parts of which (in wood) lay on the work table with the drawings. The machine, Denton guessed, had never worked, certainly had never reached manufacture. Edison’s patent was safe.
Drawers in the work table held glass negatives and prints, one drawer devoted to girls like Stella Minter. A few had been photographed against the background of the curtain and the pastoral scene, but most were against a cheaper-looking background of two-dimensional pillars and a balustrade — Mulcahy’s lesser resources before he moved to the Inventorium, Denton supposed. The photos themselves were much the same, neither quite art nor quite French postcards, the girls always young, partly undressed, seemingly passive.
The poor sonofabitch, Denton thought.
He looked everywhere for the red cord. When he was satisfied that it was not in the Inventorium, he leaned out of the dormer window again and looked down at the body. He ignored the imp. Denton didn’t think that what was left of Mulcahy had a red rope around his neck — and who would hang himself by jumping out of a window? And if he had done such a daft thing, why was there no sign of the cord’s having been tied off up here? No, Mulcahy hadn’t hanged himself.
Where, then, was the red cord?
Denton stood in the window for some minutes trying to work it out. Then he stood there for several more, thinking about how he would go back up the roof to the trapdoor.
When he was ready to go, he was shaking.
Chapter Thirteen
‘You’re late,’ Mrs Striker said. She was rushing towards him from her scarred door, thrusting a hatpin through a flat black hat that did nothing to flatter her. In the outer room, Denton was waiting with half a dozen women who, if they were prostitutes, gave him none of the smiles he might have expected.
‘I was working late,’ he said. In fact, he’d been to a cheap tailor on Whitechapel Road whose sign he had remembered — ‘We Press, You Wait.’ An ascetic-looking Eastern European had shaken his head over Denton’s suit and tut-tutted while he brushed off moss and sewed up tears; Denton had waited, trouserless and jacketless, in a sort of booth with a swinging door, until the tailor appeared and, helping him on with the jacket, had said, ‘A shame — a shame — such good cloth-’ But Denton had walked out looking more or less respectable again, the damage of the roof muted. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said now.
‘I’ve another appointment at eight.’ She made it sound as if he had already made her late, although it wasn’t quite five.
‘Which are the ones I’m supposed to meet?’ He looked around at the unsmiling women.
‘Oh, they wouldn’t meet you here!’ She gave him a little push towards the door. ‘We’re going up Aldgate High Street.’ When they were out on the pavement, she said, ‘We’ll walk,’ and strode away. Denton caught up, did a sort of dance to get on her left, and found her laughing at him.
‘Quite gentlemanly,’ she said.
‘Do you mind?’
‘It’s nothing to me either way.’They walked a few strides and she said more soberly, ‘These girls won’t go near my office. They think I’ll send for the police — as if I’d do such a thing! We’re meeting them in a public house, not a very nice one — they feel safe there.’ Another stride, and she had changed the subject — a habit he would eventually get used to. ‘I asked some of my nicer acquaintances about you. They said you were “entirely respectable”. Otherwise, I’d not have let you meet these girls.’ She smiled. ‘Did you ask about me?’
Denton thought of lying, didn’t. ‘One friend,’ he muttered.
‘A man? What did he tell you? That I’d killed my husband? ’
Startled, Denton jerked his head and made a sort of grunt.
‘It’s what they usually say,’ she murmured. Pointing ahead, she again shifted ground. ‘There’s the place where we’re meeting them. Let me speak for you, please. They’re like wild kittens.’ She walked faster and led him to the saloon door of a large pub with an electric-lighted front and several entrances. With her hand ready to push the door open, she said, a rather sly smile turning up her lips, ‘I didn’t kill my husband, in fact, no matter what your friend said.’ The smile turned wry. ‘Did he say I’d spent four and a half years in an institution for the criminally insane? Well, I did.’ And she pushed her way in.
The pub was huge, pounding with human noise, most of it coming from the other side of a wall to their right. The interior managed to be both muted and garish, dark green walls punctuated with the white, glaring electric globes. Part of a mahogany bar that must have served the whole house in a shape like a racetrack jutted from the wall in front of them, disappeared in a wall at their left; in that same wall, a door with frosted glass and ‘Private Rooms’ stood just beyond the bar’s curving end. Above the bar, coloured glass panes made a screen. The overall air was of activity and seediness, false elegance blurred by a fug of pipe smoke and coal.
‘In there,’ Mrs Striker said, again shoving him, this time towards the private rooms. ‘I’ll find the girls.’
Denton stopped. ‘I don’t really like to be pushed,’ he said.
‘Oh.’ She frowned. ‘I didn’t know I’d done it. Oh, I’m sorry.’ She muttered something about bad habits and, flustered, disappeared through a door marked ‘Ladies’ Bar’.
Denton waited. His suit smelled of the pressing — hot cloth, his own sweat. The memory of the roof made him sweat again. He was still rattled by it, not really able to focus well. He wished he could go home, have a hot bath, sit in the green armchair with a drink.