startling.
‘Oh, no,’ Atkins said, reading over his shoulder. ‘Not more Mulcahy! Send it off to that copper, Guillam.’
‘Never again.’
‘You just said you’ve washed your hands of Mulcahy - didn’t you? You did; I heard it with my own ears. You’re done with Mulcahy!’
‘I’m more done with Guillam. I wouldn’t send him my old drawers.’ He was looking at the new list Mrs Johnson had sent. Only seven addresses, all businesses; four were far from the metropolitan centre, all suburban shops that seemed to offer him nothing. Of three closer in, one was a Regina Mulcahy, Fine Linens - not likely; one was a Richard Mulcahy, Processed Beverages, the Famous So-Do-Pep, Health Drinks for the Health Conscious - possible, but nothing leapt out at him; and one was a Regis Mulcahy, Now Proprietor of the Photographic Inventorium, Under New Management, the Famous Periscopic Lens, Patent Applied For. ‘Photography!’ he said.
‘Wash your hands of it, General!’
‘A camera, Atkins! That’s what he could have left behind in the closet - a camera! And that’s why the murderer went after him - he thought Mulcahy had taken a photo of him and had run out with the plate. And maybe he had! My God, no wonder Mulcahy was terrified!’
‘You’re making it up, General!’
‘It fits.’
‘You’re writing fiction. Go make money off of it.’
‘It all fits, damn it!’
‘I’ll have fits if we don’t pay some of those bills!’
Denton turned on him and was ready to say something ugly, but he was stopped by Atkins’s ridiculous costume and his ridiculous dog. He grunted, shook his head, said, ‘I’m going out.’
‘Oh, no - no, don’t, Captain! Bloody hell, you’ll be in it up to your elbows again!’
‘Just this once.’
Atkins groaned, but Denton was already grabbing up his mackintosh and hat. He grinned. ‘Don’t wait up.’
Atkins met him at the downstairs door with the overcoat he’d been working on. ‘You can’t wear a mac on a day like this - what would people say? Take it off.’ He took the Colt from Denton and demonstrated his handiwork: the revolver’s barrel slipped through a hole into the overcoat’s lining; a kind of envelope of canvas-lined tweed held it upright, the grip ready to the hand.
‘Ingenious,’ Denton said. He put the coat on. The pistol’s weight dragged it down on the right side, but he could draw the weapon easily without having to fumble for it as he had before. ‘And it’s practically invisible,’ he said.
‘It’s invisible the way Nellie’s mistake’s invisible in about the sixth month, General, but it’s better than it was and you’re not an embarrassment to me going out in it. Though I say again, you ought to be filling the coffers and not chasing will-o’-the-wisps.’
Denton put a fingertip on Atkins’s shoulder. ‘Was it a will-o’-the-wisp that put that turban on your head?’ He withdrew the finger. ‘Expect me when you see me.’
The Photographic Inventorium was in a tall building behind Camden Passage in Islington, a former house that may once have stood alone. Denton’s eye told him it was eighteenth century, maybe a bit earlier; it looked asymmetrical because one rank of windows had been bricked up, but in fact it had a centre entrance with two bays on each side, small pediments over the windows like plucked eyebrows, and a shallow hip roof that hung over the top storey. Only from the side could he see two tall dormers in the steep part of the roof, the window open wide in one of them.
If the neighbourhood had ever been up, it had come down; lower houses on each side had weeds where there might once have been grass, broken windows stuffed with rag or filled with paper. From somewhere behind the street, the sound of a machine thudded, and there was a faintly chemical smell. Denton went close to the building on one side, trying to look along it, but a tall wooden gate closed off the narrow space between it and the next house. Looking in through a crack, he could see only weeds, in a space the sun never touched.
He went up the three steps to the central door. On one side, the remains of a stone urn, in which torches had long ago been extinguished, remained; the other had been tipped down into the lower entry, where it lay in pieces among smashed bottles and weeds. The door was open; through it, the thudding noise was louder, rather menacing, and the chemical smell was strong. Denton stepped inside. Straight ahead was a