Free Bohemian Girl, The by Cameron Kenneth Page B

for paper with your name on it.’ He took Denton’s arm again and steered him back to the young detective. ‘You’re doing a fine job here, Markson, but we don’t want to spend time running the wrong fox. Mr Denton is a well-known man of good reputation, rather a friend to the Yard - I’m sure you remember the Stella Minter case last year - so, a word to the wise from an old hand: don’t spend too much time on him. Right? Right. Let’s go inside.’
    Munro raised the cellar door by its U-shaped handle. The estate agent jingled some keys but Munro ignored him. He stood staring down the stone steps at the door in the foundation wall. ‘Modern alarm system, I see.’ He kicked the rope and the tins aside and turned to his right, surprisingly light on his feet, and tiptoed down the edge of the steps, then felt along a ledge up at ground level and grunted. He took out a handkerchief and reached up to the ledge again and came down with a big key. ‘One of those old locks you could open with a hairpin, anyway.’ Holding the key in the handkerchief, he waved it at the detective. ‘Fingerprints, I know.’ He looked at Denton. ‘We just got a directive on fingerprints. Our newest fad. We now have a Fingerprint Branch, as of last August.’ He wrapped the key in the handkerchief and gave it to Markson. ‘I want that handkerchief back.’ He looked up at Denton, still at the top of the stairs. ‘Of course, we can’t get fingerprints off objects unless the person conveniently has paint or mud or dog turd on his fingers, but it’s important that we handle everything with “gloves or clean cotton wool”.’ He growled.
    ‘I’ve got a key to the front door,’ the estate agent said.
    ‘Good for you.’
    The cellar, Denton now saw, had a stone floor and the smell of cats and mould and wood that had been too long damp. Dimly seen, a huge fireplace in the far wall proclaimed that this had once been the kitchen. The wooden stairs he had felt his way up led to a corridor, a more recent kitchen now to be seen opposite, a pantry to the left. The house itself was narrow and unfurnished, with mouldings and fireplaces that seemed to Denton old-fashioned, more like those of his childhood.
    ‘Closed houses’re always colder than your mother-in-law’s breath,’ Munro said.
    He led them to the stairs, where Denton recounted what he had done and what he had heard. A soiled mattress for a narrow bed lay partway down the stairs - the shapeless thing that had attacked Denton first. In the daylight, it and everything else looked small and mean and harmless. At the top of the stairs, a fireplace poker without a handle lay against the wall - the thing with which Denton had been struck. Markson used a handkerchief to pick it up.
    They went into the room in whose window Atkins thought he had seen the man with the red moustache. The window gave an excellent view of the back of Denton’s house.
    ‘Could be a tramp. Stood here and watched?’ Munro said. He looked at Denton. ‘Why?’
    Denton thought of telling him about the man he had seen at New Scotland Yard, the possibility that had occurred to him that there might be some connection with Guillam, but thought better of it. He said, ‘I wish I knew.’
    ‘You said you heard two voices.’
    ‘I thought I did - a man and a woman - but I think only one person went past me down the stairs - I’m not sure—’
    ‘Enemies? Been getting threatening letters?’
    ‘Rather the opposite.’
    Munro looked as if he was about to say something but turned away. He sent the detective off for somebody to start searching the house. Plumb, the estate agent, was looking uneasily about as if expecting to find that the ceilings had fallen in. Munro warned him to touch nothing and sent him downstairs to open the front door for the police. Then he paced up and down by the window, studying the floor, and got down and put one side of his face against the boards.
    ‘Been somebody here, all right. Marks in