‘Heard everything, did you?’ Denton said.
‘Enough.’
‘You know what’s going on, then.’
‘I know you’re in it up to your oxters again, is what I know! “I wash my hands of it,” my hat!’ Atkins picked up the beer bottle and glass. ‘If you’re keeping on with the late Mulcahy, I’m off to the agencies in the morning to list myself for a new place.’
‘Oh, now-’
‘I don’t mind the odd rough-up as a condition of working for you, General, but I can’t have my employer’s bills going unpaid. I know it’s fashionable, but I ain’t the glass of fashion.’
‘You’ve always been paid.’
‘And mean to continue to be. It’s me for the agents.’
Denton knew that if he had been an English gentleman he’d have given Atkins a tongue-lashing and sent him packing, but he felt a probably North American, certainly democratic, guilt towards Atkins. Or maybe it was simply the guilt of a man born to a dirt-poor Maine farmer. At any rate, to scold Atkins would be failure, as if he had abandoned some ideal of equality.
‘Sergeant, not so fast! I’m meeting with my editor tomorrow. I mean to ask him for the money in my current account — the publishers always have money they’re holding back. You know my business well enough for that; they pay up every six months, and it accumulates between times. They’ll give it to me.’
‘Enough?’
‘There should be an American payment, royalties on the last book — there’s others on the backlist-’
Atkins made a mock curtsey. ‘I leap at the opportunity to remain with you, then. I’ll wait to visit the agents until — Friday, how’s that?’
‘The day before Mulcahy’s inquest.’
‘Mulcahy! I wish I’d thrown him down the front steps and slammed the bleeding door!’
‘Well, you didn’t. As you say, I’m in Mulcahy up to the — what was the word-?’
‘Oxters. What you’d call armpits.’
‘All right, that deep, so, so are you. You might help, not snipe.’
‘You was actually in his room, was you?’
‘Of course I was.’
‘But wouldn’t tell that copper that.’
‘I’ll tell him before Saturday.’ He caught Atkins’s eye, was irritated to see it wink. ‘He’ll get the truth!’
‘What’d I say? I didn’t say nothing. So did Mulcahy leave a note saying he was going to kill himself and — what? He done the girl? — and then he threw himself out of the window. Very neat. Which you think is all night soil because the madman that crowned me did the nasty to him and made him write? And then threw him out of the window. God!’
Denton thought of what that fall must have been like for the frightened little man — if he’d still been alive — and winced. His own memory of the roof and the imp was still too sharp.
‘Well, then,’ Atkins said, ‘what did you find that you wouldn’t tell the copper about?’
‘Nothing.’ He saw Atkins’s disgust. ‘All I can do is work back from the girl — her real name, her sister. If we find who she was, maybe we’ll find her lover, boyfriend, whatever he was.’
‘Another needle, another haystack.’
‘She’d given birth within the year — say last December. That would make her pregnant the previous March at the earliest. Say she ran away from home in her fourth or fifth month — August or September, perhaps. Or, if the condition didn’t show, maybe as late as October. It might show up in the school records.’
‘You’re hopeless, you are.’ Atkins shook his head. ‘I suppose you mean to spend more money on it? ’Course you do. Well, it’s yours to throw away. Until Friday.’ He went up the room, grumbling to the dog. ‘Best officer I ever worked for, throws me away like the Orient pearl! A fool and his money, Rupert — lucky you’re a dog. Bloody hell.’ He turned at the door that opened on his stairway, light spilling up from below and casting a huge shadow. ‘Mind you see that editor tomorrow, Colonel! Time is short.’
In the morning, Denton sprawled among the newspapers in his armchair, sipping tea and looking for articles about Mulcahy. They were disappointingly small, except in one sensational rag (‘Man’s Corpse Found Fifty Feet from Busy Street — Lay There for Four Days — Jumped to Ghastly Death’), suggesting third-string reporters cadging details from police desks, not from anybody who had actually been on the scene. The Times buried the story deep inside and barely raised its voice above a hieratic murmur:
MAN’ S BODY FOUND IN ISLINGTON
The dead body of a man identified as Regis Mulcahy, instrument maker, was discovered yesterday behind a hoarding in Islington. Metropolitan police refused to give details, but an open window four storeys above appears to have indicated the spot from which the victim may have precipitated. A coroner’s jury will sit on the matter on Saturday.
‘They make it sound like he slipped on a patch of mud,’ Atkins said. ‘Nothing about suicide, is there?’
‘They’re keeping the note to themselves. God knows why.’
‘Nail it down at the inquest before they give it to the papers — “death by his own hand while temporarily insane”, then give a juicy account of him killing the girl. What’d the note say?’
‘He loved her.’ Denton cocked an eye at Atkins. ‘Not a word to your pals at the Lamb, mind.’
‘What d’you take me for?’ Atkins gathered up the dishes. ‘Time you was dressed to go and see your publisher, isn’t it? Money don’t wait, you know, Colonel.’
Denton had sent his editor a note asking to see him at eleven. It wasn’t a meeting he wanted to have: he hated asking for anything, especially money; he hated having to admit that his book was in the trash. Still-
‘He must needs go whom the devil driveth,’ he said. He clambered out of the chair.
Chapter Fifteen
‘Horrors! Horrors, Denton! I want horrors.’
Diapason Lang had been his English editor since Denton’s second book. Lang was older than Denton, almost emaciated, his skin taut over his cheekbones but ruddy with good health. His father had been a noted organist, hence the first name. Denton liked him well enough but found Lang’s seemingly wilful mislabelling of his books as ‘horror’ irritating. More than irritating, in fact.
He had come to his publishers by way of Mrs Johnson’s, charging her again to mobilize her women for an assault on the Metropolitan Schools Board. She had, with a toughness she usually masked, pointed out that the women hadn’t been paid in full as yet. Embarrassed, Denton had stood at her door and counted out notes, then coins, not finding it easy to make up the total. ‘The bonus — for finding each Mulcahy — ah, I’ll bring that by — another time-’ He had walked away very quickly.
And so he had come to his publishers. The firm was in a narrow building off Fleet Street, only two houses from the one once occupied by Izaak Walton; it had a look of untidiness that correctly embodied the business it housed: door jambs tilted, floors sagged, cracks in the plaster had become so institutionalized that baseboards had been cut to accommodate them. Yet the firm itself was a good one with a notable backlist in fiction and botany, the combination pure accident, the reasons no longer remembered. Diapason Lang had been with them for more than thirty years and was in good part responsible for the fiction list. A type not unknown among editors, he often misunderstood the books he selected but selected well, nonetheless. Like his saying now, ‘Horrors, Denton! I want horrors!’ Then he leaned forward and said, as if they were friends with a common passion, ‘You know!’
In fact, Denton didn’t know. He would never have told Lang that he was there because if he didn’t get some money, his manservant was going to leave him; and he hadn’t yet had the gumption to tell Lang that he had decided to abandon the book that he was due to deliver in three months. Or — the worst — that he nonetheless wanted another advance. ‘I’m never quite sure what you mean by “horror”,’ he muttered. Playing for time.