it was now night and he felt awkward about being there, a male figure in the dark when she opened the front door.
‘Oh - Mr Denton.’ Not particularly welcoming, nor particularly relieved. She was a very proper woman, he remembered too late.
‘I know it’s late, Mrs Johnson.’
‘No, no - quite all right—’ She looked anguished. Wondering if he would want to come in, perhaps.
‘I won’t come in,’ he said. ‘I only wondered if you could organize a, well - a job of work for me.’
‘Oh, yes?’ Dubious. She was a stout woman, still fairly young, widowed. She earned her living by typewriting, gave off no signals about having any other life.
‘I need for somebody to go through the London directories to look for a man who came to visit me. He left no address, but it’s important that I find him. It would take several people to do it.’
‘I can’t take time away from my typing machine, I’m afraid.’ She had a shawl clutched tight at her throat with one hand, the other on the door as if she wanted to be sure she could close it on him.
‘I thought you might know other people, other women, who could use the work. It would be several days’ work. I’d pay them for a week - let’s say three people - even if they finished before that.’ He didn’t confess that his bank account was running down towards zero; paying several women would probably get it there.
She looked out at the cab, which she seemed to see for the first time. The cabman was holding a water bag under the animal’s mouth. ‘I’m keeping you,’ she said.
‘No, I’m keeping you from your, um, meal.’ Did you say ‘supper’ in this situation? Perhaps ‘tea’. What the hell. ‘I really need this to be done, Mrs Johnson.’
‘Well - I know a few other typewriters from the agency—They don’t get the work that I do.’ Said with pride. She was good, and very fast.
Denton wrote ‘R. Mulcahy’ on a card and held it out. ‘That’s the name. And of course, I’d pay you for getting things organized.’
She stared at the card, which she’d taken with the hand that had been holding the shawl. ‘I don’t have any time open—’ She clutched the shawl again, the card close to her chin. ‘Still, because it’s you—Can you pay them five shillings a day? They have to be assured it’s worth passing up typewriting jobs for.’
He said that yes, of course, that would be fine, although he was thinking that twenty-five shillings for a week’s work was more than working-men made. Still, he was in no position to bargain. ‘And a bonus of a shilling for each R. Mulcahy they find.’ He hesitated. ‘There may be more than one.’ If there were a lot of them, however, he’d done something stupid. But how many could there be?
She muttered a good night, and the door closed. Denton felt as he had with Guillam, suspected of something nasty and not exonerated.
Well, of course, he was male.
At home, Atkins had been grumpy because he was trying to recover from an uncomfortable hour with two detectives while Denton had been with Munro and Guillam. He had started complaining about it at the front door and had continued all the way through Denton’s stepping into the hot bath he thought he’d earned. In turn, while he dressed again, Denton had told Atkins about the visit to the dead woman’s room.
‘What do you make of it?’ Denton said now.
‘Nothing.’ Atkins jiggled the coat he was waiting for Denton to put on - the same brown suit he had worn earlier, now found déclassé by Atkins for evening wear but just right for Denton’s Bohemian mood. ‘They also serve who only stand and answer coppers’ questions about their employer, leaving out the difficult bits like where you was going at eleven o’clock that night, the which I kept to myself.’
‘And grateful I am to you for it. But I don’t want to talk about that; I want to talk about the girl’s death.’ He sat on the bed and began to pull on a shoe. ‘I’ll tell you how I see it.’ He looked up to see if Atkins was going to pout. ‘Do you want to know how I see it?’
‘Of course I do; it’ll be better than Charlie O’Malley.’ Charles Lever’s Charles O’Malley, the Irish Dragoon was Atkins’s favourite book, said by him to have been read twenty times. Apparently hearing his