The Frightened Man by Kenneth Cameron Page B

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 own tone, Atkins became apologetic. ‘No, truly, Colonel, I don’t have your gift for making a story out of a bunch of facts. Tell me how you see it.’
    Denton paused with the other shoe in his hands. He moved the shoe up and down as if he were weighing it. ‘All right—’ He looked at nothing, the scene before his eyes like a play. ‘Stella Minter opens the door. Maybe it’s somebody she knows, although that’s just a possibility. Anyway, he comes in - maybe pushes his way in, maybe doesn’t. He hits her - twice, I don’t know why. He undresses. Or maybe he doesn’t. She either takes off her wrapper or he pulls it off her - interesting to know if there’re any rips in it. I suppose the police won’t tell me things like that. She lies down or he pushes her down. He has the clasp knife open in his hand but he’s hiding it. He enters her.
    ‘Mulcahy is watching through the peephole. I think that this is possible only if he has an arrangement with Stella Minter - he’s put up the reverse-painted picture with the scraped-out place, also the reflector on the gas lamp. So he’s watching. He doesn’t see the knife until it’s actually in her throat and the blood spurts. The killer stands up and starts to stab the woman in the bosom. Maybe she tries to roll out of the way, or maybe he moves her; anyway, blood actually spurts as high as the picture, so now Mulcahy sees it all through red.
    ‘Mulcahy throws up. Maybe he makes noise doing it - people do, a coughing, strangling noise - or maybe he screams. And he opens the closet door and runs for his life.
    ‘The killer hears the sound that Mulcahy made. He looks up, and he sees the light from the open closet door shining through the hole in the wall and the glass of the picture. He knows somebody has seen him.
    ‘He panics. Or he doesn’t panic. This is a clever man and a fast thinker, so maybe he doesn’t panic. He wipes the blood off his naked body with the wrapper and drops it into the blood on the floor and puts his clothes back on.’ Denton was seeing it as if it were a scene he was writing. ‘He’s still smeared with blood under his clothes, but there isn’t enough of it to soak through. In the darkness outdoors, he’ll be all right.
    ‘He goes out. Now, he’s almost certainly already mutilated her abdomen and cut out her female parts, because he’s not going to go out and come back and do that - or is he? Is he that clever? That cold-blooded? Whenever he did it, he may have done it out of - what is it? rage? - or maybe that’s where his cleverness comes in; maybe he’s planned it that way to make it look like rage. Or insanity. Or maybe he thinks of it after he’s dressed and has gone out, and he goes back in to do it. But, by the way, if he’s planned all that out, then he’s planned to kill her, and then I think he knew her and there’s a