keys!’
‘I have a few questions.’ Munro held up his badge.
‘Oh, crikey! We’ve had you lot for two days now, give it a rest!’
‘See here, my man—’
‘Come in, then, but give me a rest, I just got home; let me eat my dinner, good God, I ain’t the fount of wisdom!’ Then, knowing he’d given a policeman lip, he hurried off. off. Inside, a long, dirty corridor ran away from the door; the man fled along it and disappeared where it made a jog to the right - another result, Denton thought, of some shift in the building’s destiny.
Denton and the detective stopped just inside the door, Denton closing it firmly behind him and then leaning back on it. He studied the moulding at the top of the left-hand wall, on the other side of which was Stella Minter’s room.
From the wall in which the front door stood to a place six feet along, no moulding existed; then, at a slight, not quite right-angle corner, the moulding began, turning again to run the length of the corridor. Denton pointed at it and said, ‘There used to be an opening here into her room.’ He was almost whispering, no rational cause.
In the wall below this gap was a door, narrower by a lot than the front door, narrower even than the two doors he could see along the corridor on the other side. It had a thumb-latch and a D-shaped handle, an apparently new Yale lock above it. With the front door open, this door would be partly hidden. Denton opened the front door to demonstrate.
Munro put his hand on the worn iron handle, his thumb on the latch above it. With a clank, the latch opened, and the door swung out, and Denton felt a stab of disappointment, because a door that hid anything important would have been locked. A smell, sour and disquieting, oozed out.
Over Munro’s shoulder, he saw a narrow space whose floor was about the size of the inside of a coffin, its long rear wall made of open studs with strips of lath and clumps of horsehair plaster protruding between them - the back side of a plastered wall. Munro leaned in, began to rummage around in the darkness of the closet’s farther end. So far as Denton could make out in the gloom, there were two long-empty night-soil buckets, apparently no longer used; a five-step ladder; a straight chair with a spindled back, missing three spindles; and a broom so worn that the bound-together straws had been reduced to a kind of club, the broom found only by touch while Munro was stumbling around. The smell proved to be recent vomit, now dry, from somebody who had eaten kidneys.
It made me puke, Mulcahy had said.
Munro backed out, forcing Denton out of the closet doorway, then standing aside to let the faint light from a fan over the outer door try to penetrate inside. ‘What we need is a dark lantern. Can’t see my own shoes in there.’ Munro bent forward again and felt over the lath, down to the floor, then got on his knees and passed both hands over the old boards. ‘Puke,’ he muttered. ‘Somebody lost his dinner. Kidneys, for sure - can’t see enough.’ He got up and wiped his fingers on a handkerchief. ‘I hate to ask this lot for so much as a candle.’
Denton pushed past him and stood close to the lath-and-plaster wall. ‘Close the door,’ he said. ‘Come in or not, Munro, but close the door. I want my eyes to adjust.’
Munro pushed in and closed the door, and the space was suddenly very tight, Denton able to smell both of them - wool overcoat, tobacco, sweat - and the slightly chemical odour of Munro’s breath over the resident stench. He found himself holding his breath.
He waited.
‘Bit far-fetched, this,’ Munro said.
In fact, after several minutes, Denton could still see less than he had with the door open. What was he doing in here?
He felt over the walls with his fingertips, first low down, then standing to reach as high as he could, then standing on the chair and feeling over the upper part of the walls and the ceiling. It was a balancing act to stand on that uncertain chair in the dark; he started to sway, caught himself on Munro’s head, pushing the policeman’s hat down and hearing a grunt of complaint. He held himself that way until he located the light coming under the door, and when