Part 30 (2/2)

Munro, standing now, looked down at him. He shook his head. 'You get well. You look like death warmed over. Stop tormenting yourself with this business and get better.' At the door, he said, 'I think you're on to about half of something. Keep it under your hat until you get the other half.'

Janet Striker came later the same day. She shook an expensive-looking waterproof cape and leaned a new umbrella in the corner. She looked almost pretty. She had come into her money. Rain was driving against the window, which shook from the power of the wind; distant lightning appeared only as a glow on the gla.s.s, as if a dim lamp had been turned on and off.

'I'm going home tomorrow,' he said.

'The doctor wants to keep you here.'

'No point. I can make my way about now. I think I'm ready for a walking stick, get me off those d.a.m.ned crutches. Gallichan just wants to keep on playing with my dreams.' He told her about Munro's return visit, his refusal to get in touch with the French police. 'If I could handle a shovel, I'd do it myself!'

'I'll do it.' She lifted her chin. Her skin was pink from the storm she'd come through; she'd put on a few pounds since she'd got her money, too, looked healthier and happier. 'I'll take the Cohans - he can dig, she can make me look respectable. What a good idea.'

'Cohan can't go near dead bodies - it comes with being kohanim kohanim.'

'No matter. I'll do the digging myself. Or I'll find myself a labourer.'

'You don't speak French.'

'Of course I do. It's one of those things my mother thought would make me more saleable.' Her mother had died, she told him, while Denton had been unconscious; the death made Janet neither more nor less outspoken about her. She stood. 'There's just time to pack and be off first thing.'

'You just got here.'

'And I'm leaving. I'll confess it now; I hate places like this. I'm so glad you're coming home.' She pulled the cape over her shoulders. 'Let's move this matter forward, is what I say.'

'You want to get away from me again.'

'I don't.'

'The doctor told me I'm a violent man.'

'And so you are, but I suspect he doesn't have the slightest notion what that means.' She gave him a quick kiss. 'I'll be back by the weekend. To stay. In London, I mean.'

'I'll want Cohan, as soon as I can have him,' he said. She raised her eyebrows. 'Once I'm home, I think they'll try to kill me again.'

'They.' She held the cape open as if she might take it off again.

'Jarrold's in a prison for the insane.'

'Jarrold was just the means. There's somebody else. I thought they might try to get at me here.'

'They - not he?'

'I don't know - I don't know.' He couldn't keep his face from showing his fear of losing her. 'You'll really come back?'

She kissed him again. 'Really.'

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO.

Denton thought that leaving the nursing home was the final humiliation - a litter carried by two men older than he, with two more to raise him shoulder-high and push him into the horse-drawn ambulance like a loaf of bread going into an oven - but going up his own stairs in his own house was even worse: humiliation turned into farce. Atkins had picked up three day labourers who put Denton into an armchair at the bottom of the stairs, and then, each man taking a leg, carried him with the chair tipped back so far he thought he might do a backwards somersault out of it. They rested at the landing with a lot of heavy breathing and exclamations and then picked him up and carried him the last seven stairs, depositing him in his own sitting room after almost taking his head off on the door jamb.

'Well,' Atkins said when he'd paid them off, 'home again, home again, jiggety-jog.'

'If I'd known you were going to do that, I'd have stayed in the nursing home.'

'Listen, General, they wanted to carry you up on the litter. I've seen men dropped, seen the whole shebang go down a flight of steps. I thought the armchair was a stroke of genius.'

'Help me up.' Denton struggled; the bad leg was no help, and Atkins was not particularly strong. 'It's a good thing I'm skin and bones,' he said when he was standing.

Atkins produced a walking stick. 'You're still about three stone too much for me. You're bivouacked down here for the duration.' He jerked his head towards the unused room next to the sitting room. 'Never make it up and down those stairs day after day. Didn't want to maroon you up there.'

'Oh, h.e.l.l - I hate that room.'

'Yes, well, we do the best we can with what's on offer at this hotel. Can you walk on that stick?'

Denton had tried a stick in the nursing home. He had taken a few steps, the right leg dragging behind, most of his weight hung from his shoulders and supported on his right hand. 'Like running the mile race,' he said.

'We'll have you fit in no time. Mrs O'Cohen has left a pot of soup you're to eat six or eight times a day - very forceful woman.' Denton, out of the habit of Atkins's humour, needed two seconds to realize that O'Cohen was a play on the supposed Irishness of Cohan.

'What's she got to do with it?'

'Oh, ah, she's close to Mrs Striker, isn't she? I'm going to get this armchair out of the way; you walk up and down for a while.'

'I want to rest.'

'Up and down, up and down, General. You've had plenty of rest, if you ask me.'

Denton struggled down the long room, turned at the window and struggled back. He had to pause at the alcove to lean against the cold porcelain stove that stood there, relic of an earlier tenant. Then he went up the room, past his armchair and the fireplace, to the window that looked out on the street. The pavements were wet, the gas lamps on; uneven wiggles of light reflected where the rain, now ended, had collected.

'Let's do it once more for old times' sake, then I'll bring up the tea.'

'I'm worn out, Atkins.'

'That's why you've got to work. Let's march.'

He laboured down the room again. This time he stopped at the window over the back garden, too exhausted in the right arm and shoulders to go on. The bullet wounds ached. 'There are lights in the house behind,' he said.

'Oh, right. But no Albert Cosgrove.'

'What's going on?'

'Workmen. Somebody bought it.'

'Turn your back on the world, it goes right on without you.' He swung around and dragged the leg to the alcove. 'I'm done in. Help me to bed now.'

'I thought I'd serve tea out here.' Atkins's voice became almost kind. 'Look, General, you need to get back to normal. You don't want to start living in a bed.'

<script>