me to eat what’s put before me. If you’re eating to help that arm, you should have liver.’
‘Beef. The redder the better.’
Munro was whistling when he came back. The whistling got breathy as he struggled up the last flight of stairs with the tray, but he made it - a little red-faced, a little winded - and laid out the beer pitcher and a glass, roast beef (not very red), mash with sprouts, a bottle of some sort of sauce. ‘Barman at the Lamb sends his best. Shocking you’re hurt. Crime is a scandal, and the police should all be sacked.’
‘You didn’t tell him you’re a copper.’
‘Didn’t seem friendly to disabuse him.’ Munro took a long pull at the beer and sighed happily and began to cut up Denton’s meat for him. ‘So - you think it was him?’
‘The attack? Yes, I think it was him.’
‘Well, you’ve seen his face now. He’ll either come again or go to ground.’
‘I saw half his face.’
Munro glanced at the Colt. ‘You expect him back, I see.’ He put the plate on Denton’s legs. ‘Constables going to be kept at your door?’
‘A few days.’ He ate some of the roast beef. ‘I might as well go to Paris.’
‘And give up on Mulcahy?’
‘Mulcahy’s dead by now.’
‘You surprise me. Why?’
‘There’s no point in attacking me unless he’s already got rid of Mulcahy. I think he was afraid that Mulcahy had told me something.’
‘What?’
‘I wish I knew.’
Munro drank his beer and frowned at the wall and said, ‘Willey’s got a solid case on the Cape Coloured he grabbed. They kept a lot of it out of the papers, but the long and the short of it is that the poor bastard was covered with blood and drunk as a lord when they found him, plus he gave them a confession. Willey laid charges a couple of hours ago.’
‘What’s that to me?’
‘Willey’s got the girl’s killer. Whatever your Mulcahy and the man who attacked you do or don’t have to do with the great scheme of things, they didn’t murder the Minter girl.’
‘Because Willey has a South African sailor who’s too frightened to know what’s happened to him? Munro, you know either of us could get a confession from a man in his situation even if we knew for a fact he was innocent - black man in a white country, found drunk and bloody, probably can’t remember what the hell he did that night, afraid they’ll hang him and so willing to say anything. And who made the peephole - the black man?’
‘The peephole’s neither here nor there. Denton, there’s no evidence that it had any connection with the murder at all! Or with your Mulcahy, for the matter of that. Fact, Willey’s people tracked down the landlord of the house in Priory Close Alley - lives out in Staines, never goes near his property, has an agent to do all the dirty work. The agent rented the closet to a man who gave the name Smithers, can’t remember anything of what he looked like. Paid six months in advance. Smithers may have been Mulcahy, but it’s wasted time to Willey.’
‘It means he probably has a witness.’
‘It means there’s an outside chance of a witness, but Willey has a confession, and if the coloured boy’s lawyer wants to go hunting for Smithers-Mulcahy, he’s welcome to do so, but Willey can’t spare the resources!’
Denton swigged borscht and chewed beef and shifted his position in the bed. ‘The girl,’ he said. ‘We have to learn more about the girl.’
Munro grinned and shook his head and, finishing his beer, clumped down the stairs and let himself out.
Chapter Nine
After night fell, he lit the gas in his room and on the stairs, and then, the loaded Colt in his hand, he went down and lit a lamp in the long room. He felt only a little dizzy, still weak but clearer in his mind. After sitting for a few minutes in his chair, he went down to the ground floor and lit the gas there and opened the front door. A different constable was standing out by the street but came hurrying when he saw Denton.
‘Something wrong, sir?’
‘Only putting my head out for air.’The evening was cold, hazy with vapour that was condensing on the stones and starting to drip from the eave. ‘Still somebody in the back?’
‘Yes, sir. Bit dark back there, I expect.’
Denton went through the corridor that ran along Atkins’s part of the house, lighting the gas, speaking