'Mr Heseltine isn't well, sir.'

'Oh - I'll call again-'

'It might-Let me ask him, sir. It might do him good.'

The man was Denton's age, grave, rather like a doctor who always had bad news. When he came back, he said, 'Mr Heseltine asks if you'd forgive him not dressing.'

'Of course.'

'He hasn't been well.'

'I understand.'

Closer to, the man gave off a mixed odour of bad teeth and sherry. He kept his sombre bedside manner, however; Denton supposed it was the main reason for employing him.

'Mr Denton.'

Heseltine was wearing a dressing gown and slippers, as if he'd just got out of bed.

'I'm sorry you've been ill.'

'Not ill. Just out of-' Heseltine tried to smile, shrugged.

The man came in with a tray of gla.s.ses and a decanter and a plate of mostly broken biscuits - Atkins would have fed them to the dog. There was a slight rattle of gla.s.sware as the tray was put down, something like a hiccup, perhaps a grunt. 'Sherry, sir?'

'I'll take care of it, Jenks.'

The man turned slowly and made his way out. Denton realized now that Jenks was thoroughly boiled. So, apparently, did Heseltine. 'Jenks drinks anything that doesn't have the cork cemented into the bottle. He's quite incorrigible. I should let him go, but I'd have to find somebody else, and I just don't have the go.'

'Better than no man at all?'

'In the morning, yes. After noon, no. But I-What do I care, really? If I had the taste for it, I'd spend my days like him.'

'I only came to tell you about Mary Thomason - the woman whose note you sent on to me. I won't stay.'

'Oh, do! I don't have many visitors.' The wry semi-smile again. 'What about the Thomason girl?'

Denton told him what had happened, ending with the fact that the trunk had never been collected; he didn't say that he had it and had been through it.

'So something terrible has happened to her.' Heseltine looked as if he might burst into tears.

'It's nothing to do with you. It was all over, probably, before you ever found the note.'

'Yes.' Heseltine was looking at his full gla.s.s of sherry, which seemed to puzzle him. 'I saw your name in The Times The Times, Mr Denton. At least I supposed it was you. About somebody a.s.saulted behind your house?'

'I didn't know it had been in the papers. Yes. Kind of a strange tale. Somebody seems to have been watching me.'

'Why?'

'I wish I knew. Or, I think I know, but I wish I understood.' He told him in a few sentences about Albert Cosgrove, the letters, the man with the red moustache.

'And he was in that house, writing some sort of thing that used your words?'

'One of my paragraphs, anyway. "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery." But I don't feel flattered.'

'Soiled, rather, I should think. And he wanted all your books.'

'Signed copies.'

'Does an author sign many copies?'

'To friends, sometimes. I'm not much for sending them to people to impress them.'

'They'd be rather rare then, wouldn't they? Maybe he's tried to find them at the rare-book shops. You might try there to see.'

Denton grinned and got up. 'I've promised the police I won't go poking my nose into their business any more.' He held out his hand. 'I don't think "Good luck" is what I should say, but I hope things work out.'

'Oh, they'll work out, I'm sure!' Heseltine's laugh suggested a state near the edge.

Denton got his coat and hat and said he could let himself out. He said from the door, 'You've got a lawyer and all that?'

'Counsel? Oh, yes. They provide that. Plus my father's hired somebody to advise the military man.' He smiled. 'It will be done with full legal pomp.'

'It may not be as bad as you think.'

'I think they mean to parade me in front of the regiment with my b.u.t.tons torn off. Did they do that in the American army?'

'War makes people bloodthirsty. You'd think it would do the opposite.'

'Only to those of us who are "sensitive, snivelling women". My CO's words.'

Denton stood in the cold sunshine at the entrance to Albany Court. He knew the machinery of military law, its grinding-up of anybody who seemed weak. War likes blockheads, he thought - those too stubborn to turn aside. It dislikes nuance, hesitation, compa.s.sion.

Insofar as he was capable of feeling pity, he felt it for Heseltine. He also felt anger and the decisive man's contempt for the half-hearted. The military, as he had seen too well, could always find a desk for incompetence, but it drove weakness from the room: it feared that weakness was catching. Heseltine, he thought, was both incompetent and weak. The system was going to grind him into cat's meat.

There was a light under Atkins's downstairs door when Denton let himself in that evening. The soldier-servant would be reading the newspaper, he supposed, or possibly his Bible if his enthusiasm still ran to it. The truth was, he had almost no idea of Atkins's private life, his s.e.x life least of all. Atkins treated a nearby pub as a club, had what seemed a considerable popularity among the nearby housemaids. The social system, however, was rigged against them, Denton knew: occasions were few, privacy almost impossible, the women's fear of losing a place extreme. Atkins, he guessed, did what soldiers - Denton included - did: found a wh.o.r.ehouse, perhaps the cheap one near Pentonville Road.

Settling in his chair, Denton mused on the difference between Atkins and Heseltine. How easily Atkins would have dealt with whatever mistake Heseltine had made - called in favours from the sergeants and the sergeant major, half-blackmailed his officer (about whom he'd always have known juicy bits), got the company orderly to mislay whatever paperwork implicated him. Heseltine, on the other hand, probably hadn't so much as objected.

Denton read one of his psychological books about obsession and impersonation. None of it seemed to apply to Albert Cosgrove. About ten, Atkins put his head in and asked if he wanted a carob drink - an affectation he'd picked up in India.

'I'm having a whisky.'

'Oh well, carob isn't in it, then.' He started away.

'How was chapel?'

'Rum - absolutely rum. Saddest place I ever was. People with grey faces and no smiles singing about hope and heaven in the hereafter. I think I'll concentrate on my secular interests for a bit.'

'How did the pugilist do in the garden?'

'Demon worker. Strong as an ox. Did you know he's descended from Moses's brother? Says he is, at any rate - you can never tell if people are pulling the wool. Brings the Book of Exodus alive, I must say.'

'He calls himself the Stepney Jew-Boy.'

'Told me that - in a voice that made me think I'd better not use the term meself.'

'Wise. Is his first name Aaron, then?'

'Hyam, last name Cohan. Peculiar names they have.'

'Did you ask him what he thought of the name Atkins?' Denton turned around in the chair to look down the room. 'Can you take something to be photographed tomorrow? There's that place on Oxford Street-'

'Barraud's.'

'That's the one.' He rummaged in Mary Thomason's trunk and took out the drawing of the female head with the little sketches in the corners. 'I want a good copy of the head - size of a sheet of writing paper or thereabouts is all right - and then photos of the little drawings in the corners. Oversized, if they can do them. And one full-size of the whole thing.'

Atkins had come down the room and was leaning over him. 'I thought we agreed she's dead.'

'"We" speculated she was probably probably dead. I'm not ready to go that far. I want a picture I can show around.' dead. I'm not ready to go that far. I want a picture I can show around.'

'You don't even know it's her.'

'That's what I'll find out.'

'Why?'

Denton looked at him, amused and annoyed. 'Because like you I'm nosy.'

'Oh, well - if you're going to take that line-' Atkins picked up the drawing. 'One face-only, one each the little squiggles in the corners, one the lot.'

'Fastest service. The drawing has to be back by noon in case Mrs Striker comes for the trunk.' Atkins looked blank. 'She's going to take it back where she got it.'

'I'd pitch it in the Grand Union ca.n.a.l.' Atkins moved off, grumbling to himself. Rupert, his stump of tail going like a metronome set on Presto, followed.

Denton wanted to take a day away from all of it - the novel, Albert Cosgrove, Mary Thomason, even Janet Striker - and he had a fleeting notion of going to Hammersmith and rowing on the river, then a cut off the joint or something even rougher at the Dove. He didn't do it, of course, but pushed himself to his desk before eight the next day and made himself write. His brain didn't want to work - it, too, wanted to be on the river, being washed clean - but he bullied it and began to put words down on the paper as if he were trying to gouge them into it. He wasn't well into it until ten, and then things started to flow, and he heard the bell pulled by the front door. He muttered a curse, got up and closed his own door, and minutes later was interrupted by a knock.

'No!'

Another knock.

Denton wrenched the door open. 'What now?'

'Policeman below name of Markson. Wants to talk to you.'

'Oh-! d.a.m.n him and d.a.m.n Albert Cosgrove!'

He heard Atkins mutter, 'For all the good it does,' and he made himself more or less presentable and went down. Markson, whom he had last seen after the scuffle in the house behind, was standing by the sitting-room door, a bowler in one hand and a black box tucked under the same arm, looking straight down at Rupert, who had his chin planted in the detective's crotch. Denton took that in, but what he was focused on was Mary Thomason's trunk, which was about three feet from Markson's left leg.

'I see that Rupert's found you. You've been told he's friendly?'

'Telling me so himself, isn't he?'

Atkins was behind Denton now, over by the fireplace. Denton looked towards him, made a face and rolled his eyes towards the trunk before saying to the detective, 'Ah, I'm working, you know.'

'Yes, sir, but so are most people. No good time to talk to the Metropolitan Police, is what it comes down to.'

'Is this about Cosgrove? Why are you coming to talk to me now now? All that happened last week!'

'Yes, sir. It won't surprise you to hear that the police have been busy, too, I'm sure.'

While this had gone on, Atkins, with one smooth movement, had picked up a travelling rug from the chair opposite Denton's and draped it over Mary Thomason's trunk, then brushed the chair seat as if that was what he had meant to do all along, and thrown nonexistent dirt into the coals. 'Beg pardon, sir,' he said now in a voice that made both men look at him. Atkins had put on a stern expression. 'You expressly wanted the sweep in this morning while you wasn't in this room. If I may, I recommend you repair to your study so as not to suffer the discomfort of the chimney.'

'Oh - ah - yes, I'd forgotten. Detective Markson - if you don't mind - upstairs-?'

Markson murmured apologies for upsetting the whole house, but by the time he'd finished they were on their way up to the next floor. Denton's bedroom-study looked sufficiently workmanlike, Denton thought - Atkins had long since made the bed and hung up the clothes - and he pulled out a chair for Markson as he sat at his desk. 'As you see - I was working-'

'I'll make this quick, sir. Only two things, really. First, a question or two.' His questions were the ones Denton had already answered - why he'd gone into the house behind, was there any possibility that 'the man Cosgrove's' letters were still about somewhere. Had he received any more letters from the man Cosgrove? When they were done with those, Markson opened the black box and held up the ma.n.u.script that Albert Cosgrove had left in the other house.

'You've seen this, sir?'

'Some of it.'

'Which you allege is lifted from a book of your own, is it?'

'I thought so.'

'Which one?'

'It's the opening paragraph of The Demon of the Plains The Demon of the Plains. Then I thought there was some from my outline for the book I'm trying to finish.'

'Left in this house while you were away, sir?'

'In a drawer of this desk.' He pulled open the drawer as if to prove that, there being a drawer there, it must be where the outline had been left.

Markson sniffed. Munro had said Markson was capable; Denton would take his word for it. The questions seemed to him repet.i.tive and obvious, but Markson was perhaps the dogged kind who dotted every i. Now, he said, 'We'd like to have your reading of this ma.n.u.script, Mr Denton.' Before Denton could say anything, he went on, 'Literary criticism isn't common at New Scotland Yard. We'd like to know what you see in it - if there's anything more of your own, for one thing. And what you find in it - what sort of mind this chap has, what he thinks he's doing.'

'Detective, I'm trying to finish a book!'

'And we're trying to catch a criminal that attacked you, sir.'

'He didn't hurt me.'

'Also broke into the house over there and, it looks like, broke into this house as well. Anything else missing, by the way?'

Denton stared at the desk. 'I think a pen.' It sounded absurd. He'd noticed only that morning that a pen he sometimes used wasn't there.

'Yes, sir. That sounds right. Anything else? How about clothing? ' He raised his eyebrows. 'Underclothing?' The question surprised Denton, suggested a sophistication he hadn't expected in Markson.