the letter didn’t put itself in the back of a painting. Hardly “thinking better of it” to put it there, was it? The trash would be the likelier place.’
‘But you don’t know she did it. It’s moot.’
Denton studied him, or seemed to; he was really thinking of the woman and the somebody who might have wanted to harm her. ‘I think I’d like to know where Mr Heseltine bought the painting.’
Atkins put his eyebrows up and rose, gathering the cups and putting them with the ruin of Denton’s breakfast. ‘I’m off, then,’ he said.
‘What are you off to do?’
‘Stack this lot for Mrs Char and then read my Bible. Going to look for jokes. You’ve got me thinking.’
‘Good.’
Atkins got to the end of the room and put the tray into the dumb waiter and then said from the gloom, ‘Mind, I’m not to be got at with secular reasoning. I’m a saint by revelation.’
‘Nice, having a saint for a servant.’
He went on down the stairs, the door banging behind him. Denton didn’t want to rob the man of his religion if it was a genuine comfort to him, but he liked Atkins better when he was doing what amounted to a music-hall turn as a comic servant. After thirty-one years in the British army, Atkins was an accomplished batman, liar, thief and entertainer; he could cook, press, argue with creditors, give points on etiquette and do imitations of every officer he’d ever served. Denton was sure he did imitations of Denton, too, or at least had until Calvinist humourlessness had revealed itself to him. Atkins needed to be shaken out of his dumps, Denton thought; he needed to be seized by a new interest.
Well, maybe the outdated letter from Mary Thomason would fill the bill.
He went upstairs to the room that served him as both bedroom and office, littered now with the relics of life after the prison. He kicked aside the worn boots in which he’d walked out of Transylvania, the straw suitcase that had been all he could afford in Cluj, the canvas jacket he’d worn as a deckhand on a Danube steamer, and sat at the dusty desk.
It hurt him that there had been no letter from her. Maybe she didn’t know he’d got out. Maybe she thought he was dead; she lived in a world of prostitutes and want, read few newspapers, knew nobody. He sighed. They had corresponded throughout the trip; even in prison he had written to her, for the last weeks almost every day. Letters from her had reached him until he’d been arrested; then he had got nothing from her, hadn’t expected to, but he’d sent her a cable as they had come through Paris on their way back and had thought - hoped - he’d find a note asking him to come to see her. Maybe the cable hadn’t reached her. Maybe—
He tried now to write her a note to tell her he was alive, that he was in London, hesitating at once over ‘My dearest Janet’, settling for ‘My dear Mrs Striker’, then ‘Dear Mrs Striker’, then writing a page about not receiving letters from her at the prison and then being on the run, about missing mail, all of that, then pitching it out and writing simply, ‘I’d like to see you. May I visit?’ He sent an unhappy Atkins out to find a Commissionaire in Russell Square to carry it to the telegraph office, reply prepaid.
He sat on, head on one hand, elbow on desk, staring out of the unclean window at the back of another house forty yards away. He sighed again. The happiness of the early morning couldn’t last; left behind were Janet Striker’s silence, the mystery of the woman who had left the note in the painting, the irritating knut at the Albany who had found it.
He decided to write to him: ‘I must thank you for forwarding to me the envelope you say you found behind a Wesselons. May I call on you to discuss this matter briefly?’ Mr Heseltine, he thought, would say yes, because he suspected that Mr Heseltine was the sort of pretentious ass who would have pitched the envelope into the coals if he hadn’t recognized that it was addressed to a well-known author.
The question was, why did Denton want to discuss the matter with him at all? As so often, his own motives seemed rooted in a guilt about something he hadn’t done. His gloom deepened. The only antidote