‘Now who’s been stupid?’
‘I want you to be there,’ Denton said to Janet Striker, ‘in case it really is the one. At best, it’ll be telling somebody their daughter is dead.’
‘Surely they’ve seen it in the paper.’
‘You’d think. But people are funny - they could be recluses; they could just be people who don’t want to know things. It was a very small notice.’
Mrs Striker raised her chin. ‘They never reported her missing, if her name really was Stella Minter.’
‘We don’t know that.’
‘I know that, Mr Denton. I get a list of missing women every month. I looked, the first time you visited me.’ They were in her office, the workday coming to an end. She gestured at a scruffy stack of papers behind her. ‘If it was her real name, you’re dealing with people who never declared their daughter as missing.’
‘Anyway, I’d like you to be there.’
She stared up at him, her face weary, the skin shiny as if she had a fever. ‘You’re going now?’ He nodded. She looked at a watch pinned on her breast, looked around the office as if to see what was left to do. ‘How far is it?’ she said.
‘Kilburn - off Kilburn High Road. Twenty-seven Balaclava Gardens. That’s the address on the birth record, at any rate.’
‘And they’re still there?’
Her questions irritated him; he wanted to go, to get it done, even while he knew her doubts were good ones. ‘I’ll find out when I get there,’ he growled.
She opened a drawer and burrowed under papers and took out a small, fat book. ‘We shall see.’ She turned pages, asked him to read off the address again, ran a finger down a page and up the next one, and said, ‘Balaclava Gardens, number twenty-seven - Alfred Minter, licensed accountant. ’ She closed the book with a snap. ‘Still there last year, at any rate.’ She stood, tall and thin and weary-looking, then raised her voice to almost a shout. ‘Sylvie, I shall be out on business. Answer the telephone, please.’
A heavy voice came from a surprisingly small woman on the far side of the office. ‘Yes, Mrs Striker.’
‘You think they’ll just let us waltz in,’ she said to Denton.
‘I brought my police letter. You can tell them what a noble sort I am.’
‘And who’s going to tell them how wonderful I am?’
Balaclava Gardens was a terrace on the west side of Kilburn High Road beyond Shoot Up Hill. Denton recognized it as recent but not new, part of an estate developed long enough ago that the trees were nearing maturity and the front gardens looked obsessively trim and spiritless - the real gardens would be at the back. The cab had come along the edge of a more recent building site to reach the street: the area had been built up in stages, was now, he thought, almost complete.
Number 27 looked like all the others, was perhaps a touch nattier, its garden a notch more obsessive, but what set it well apart was the Headland Electric Dogcart parked in front, its rear axle attached by a chain to a ring in a concrete block.
‘Bloke thinks it’s a blooming horse!’ the cabbie guffawed.
‘Or he thinks his neighbours are thieves,’ Denton said. He paid the man but asked him to come back in fifteen minutes ‘just in case’, as he murmured to Janet Striker. ‘We don’t want to get marooned in the wilds of Kilburn.’
‘I can’t make a living hanging about,’ the cabbie said.
Denton gave him one of the coins he’d got from Harris. ‘Find the pub, have one on me, come back.’
Mrs Striker was looking at the electric motor car. ‘It’s quite unusual,’ she said.
‘Small.’
‘Look - there’s not another on the street.’
‘Maybe accountancy pays.’
‘And likes to declare itself. I wonder, does he ever drive it, or does he leave it here to remind the neighbours of how successful he is?’
They turned to the house, a yellow brick in a terrace of identically built houses, now rather hysterically individualized by touches of paint, the occasional bit of sawn fancy-work under an eave, names like ‘The Cedars’ (next door, though there were no cedars). Denton had already seen the lace curtain in the front window of number 27 twitch; in that house at least - perhaps all up and down the street - an arrival by cab had been noticed.
‘You do the talking,’ Denton said.
‘In heaven’s name, why?’
‘You do it better than me. Anyway, people trust a woman.’
They went up the short walk between two