Friday morning.
He was awake before Atkins and went downstairs to make his own tea in the alcove, the spirit stove giving off a blue light, the space otherwise dark with the sun not yet up. The window had been replaced at the bottom of the stairs, but the curtains hadn’t yet been put up; now he wanted sunlight to spill through, to tell him that the world was alive, life was good. Instead, he stared at the blue flame, smelled the burning alcohol, thought of the man who had lunged out of this place to attack him. He rubbed his arm. Where was Stella Minter’s murderer now? Awake, walking the streets in fear? Sleeping the sleep of the just? More likely the latter, Denton thought, a man without conscience, reckless, clever. He’d have seen the newspaper stories about Mulcahy’s body, have been watching for them, sure that when the body and the note were found, he’d be safe.
Denton took the tea back up the stairs, sipping as he went, feeling it scald his upper lip; he went on past the bedroom floor and up to the attic, stumbling in the darkness. Was the murderer up here, waiting? No, he’d finished with Denton; he’d realized days ago that if Denton had learned anything from Mulcahy, something would have happened. Now, he thought he was safe. Or all but safe. One day, one fact, one sliver of investigative hope lay between him and complete escape. And it depended not on Denton but on five women making lists and, perhaps, a soldier-servant with an idea.
Not much.
He began to row on the contraption. The attic was cold and silent; the rowlocks groaned. He hadn’t slept well — dreams, long waking periods, tormenting himself with old failures, old humiliations, back to childhood: failure begat failure. His mind turned, twisted, raced, as it had done all night, reviewing everything about the killings, about Mulcahy, the attack, the girl. On and on, over and over. Nothing new, nothing helpful.
He lifted the hundredweight dumb-bell, then lighter weights for each hand. Nothing, nothing, nothing. He fired the parlour pistols, then stood with the old percussion Colt held at arm’s length. Two minutes, three minutes, four, the sights never wavering from the target. He would have liked to shoot the killer right then. Wonderful if he had loomed out of the shadows — a bullet in the eye.
But the killer, he thought, was laughing at him, sitting at his breakfast by now, devouring sausage and potatoes and laughing around the half-chewed food.
Nothing, nothing, nothing.
Atkins was full of himself and his mission, so was particularly hard on Maude that morning, bustling and hectoring, outfitting himself with pads of paper and pencils from Denton’s desk, appropriating a never-used leather dispatch case given him by Emma Gosden (‘You’re never going to use this, right? Shame to waste it’), then swaggering off like a diplomatic courier in mufti. He left behind him an already exhausted Maude who was, as well, terrified of Rupert and who armed himself with biscuits to be produced whenever the dog looked his way.
‘I think I’d like to give notice, sir,’ Maude said as he was taking away Denton’s breakfast dishes.
Mindful that he hadn’t paid him, Denton produced a half-crown he’d got from Harris and said, ‘Could it wait until Monday? It’s rather a bad time.’
‘Oh — yes, sir — it’s only Mr Atkins is so-He’s very particular.’
‘One of his finest qualities.’
‘And then there’s the dog, sir.’
‘Just keep feeding him biscuits, Maude; he’ll follow you around like a, mmm, dog.’
Maude picked up the coin. ‘Is this in addition to my wages, sir?’
Denton sighed, muttered that it must be.
Maude went down the room with the tray; behind him, Rupert kept pace, anticipating a feed before they reached the bottom of the stairs.
Denton could do nothing until other people brought him information. It was no good to say that he should have done the work himself; in fact, he had neither the knowledge nor the patience to do what Mrs Johnson’s five women were doing. Nor could he cause them to work faster, although he now tried to do just that: he walked over to Mrs Johnson’s and asked how the work was coming, then muttered that today was their last day.
‘They’re entirely aware of the day, Mr Denton!’ Mrs Johnson, although she depended on him for work, was not going to suffer him gladly. ‘It does no good to try to hurry them along.’
‘I wasn’t trying to, mmm, hurry … Only thinking, maybe something had, you know, uh-’ He held out a ten-pound note. ‘This is for the earlier, um, bonus.’ She seemed relieved to get it but didn’t encourage him. He said, ‘If you hear anything-’
‘Mr Denton, I will send you a message by hand the instant I know something! Until then-’ She stood in her doorway like a guard, her chin out.
‘Yes, mmm, of course — you’re right, yes-But the instant, the moment — as soon as you know something-Time really is of the-’
She thanked him for the money and closed the door.
So Denton walked. He thought he walked aimlessly but found himself outside the building that housed Mulcahy’s Inventorium. No policeman was visible, so he crossed the street, at first merely pacing along the building’s front, then going in and retracing his steps of days before. The massive locks were gone from Mulcahy’s door, replaced by two smaller ones and a sign that said ‘Metropolitan Police Premises — Keep Away’. The broken lock to the roof had been replaced, as well, the new one sealed with a police tag. Nobody was about, however, and nobody approached him either coming in or going out: the press had lost any little interest it might once have had in R. Mulcahy.
He walked some more, now down City Road to the warren of old streets around Finsbury, then found himself standing in the Minories and going on to look again at the door behind which Stella Minter had been killed. The constable and the police sign were gone; the room, he was sure, was as yet untenanted by anybody else. Might never be, in fact, its legend now too grim.
He turned away and walked through the new terraces south of Victoria Park, the great bustle of the city nowhere more visible than in these places where building was going on — carts moving in and out, carpenters on scaffolding, a monstrous machine driving piles somewhere with a sound like that from the forge behind Mulcahy’s building — a sense of impending event, of something coming for which great hurry and noise were necessary. The event being, he supposed, the building of the next London terrace, and the next, and the next.
Then he walked back to Mrs Johnson’s (‘I haven’t been home; I thought you might have-No? I’m so sorry-’) then west, then north on York Road along the cattle market and into Kentish Town and another plain where new houses would soon stand. At the moment, it was a field of rubble, devastation as if after a war, with, near the centre, a raw, new building rising alone — a pub. This one was faced with green tile that shone in the white winter light. As he watched, two wagons, looking like centipedes, crawled in from the farthest corner, and men the size of ants began to unload iron pipe, the rattle and clink of the pipes reaching him long after he had seen them dropped. Then he headed south again, paralleling the Great Northern and Midland lines, the trains pounding along the tracks towards the depots in Camden and Somers Towns, their whistles like screams. He wondered how anybody in the new houses that would rise could tolerate the noise, then realized that they could and would: this was London, where there must be always more noise, more houses, more workers — cram them in, stuff them in, subject them to noise and dirt — they will accept it and then love it. He thought of Harris’s We need a revolution and thought, No, he’s wrong; this is what we want, this world, this noise, this bustle. This is the revolution.