The Dark Palace--Murder and mystery in London, 1914 (14 page)

The music then became abruptly celebratory. Something about it suggested the tolling of church bells.

It seemed to be snowing. And then the snow was revealed as confetti.

Eloise was coming out of a church, newly married to the Count of Somewhere or Other. Her eyes were hidden behind a bridal veil.

A shadowy figure attached itself to the edge of the crowd of well-wishers. Quinn immediately recognized the former cavalry officer, though his appearance had undergone another transformation. He was heavily bearded and wearing dark-lensed spectacles, as well as a homburg and cape. But Quinn's training enabled him to look beyond the surface details. He could tell by the physique and gait that it was the same man. Besides, the band gave the game away by playing the killer's theme.

The couple climbed into an open carriage. The camera picked out the sinister onlooker among those celebrating their departure. The bride's former lover had moved into broad daylight now, so it was possible to see that he was dressed in well-tailored clothes that gave the impression of affluence; certainly he no longer cut the disreputable figure of a drunkard. The money he had stolen from the Jew had evidently enabled him to set himself up. Ironically, the full beard gave him a distinctly Jewish appearance and he looked strikingly similar to the man he had murdered. For the first time Quinn wondered if the landlord and the cavalry officer had both somehow been played by the same actor. He supposed it must have been possible.

The carriage pulled away with a lurch. The camera watched it into the distance. The sense of peril was suspended momentarily as a brief, cheery scherzo played. But the sequence closed with a reprise of the killer's face. The scherzo fell apart into a low, inarticulate rumbling of dread.

The film caught up with the newly-weds in a train compartment. The groom was reading a newspaper. An inter-title flashed the headline to the audience: POLICE IN DARK OVER GRUESOME MURDERS. VICTIMS' EYES REMOVED.

Sensing his bride's interest in the morbid article, he hurriedly folded the paper away and began to make love to her, with kisses on her hands, wrists and neck. Her eyelids fluttered in delight. The audience was once again treated to a close-up of her magnetic eyes.

A ticket collector entered the compartment. Quinn recognized him immediately as the cavalry officer, although his beard was now trimmed into an imperial. Some nagging rationality questioned how he came to be here, dressed in a ticket collector's uniform, but Quinn realized that he had to accept the logic of the motion picture. Things only had to be shown to be made possible. The literal consequence of events, one thing happening after another, was more persuasive than any notion of cause and effect. Nothing caused anything. It simply led to it.

He was watching a dream, he realized. And if he accepted it as that, then whatever happened in the darkness made sense.

For example, there was no point in asking,
How was it possible that Eloise did not recognize the man she had once loved?
By the conventions of the kinematic picture play, it was enough for a character to put on a false beard for him to become utterly unrecognizable.

Of course, the real point, as Quinn instinctively grasped, was not that Eloise had once loved the cavalry officer, but that she still loved him. That she would always love him, no matter what he did. That was evident in the first frames of the film, those which showed her eyes in extreme close-up. It was also, by the logic of melodrama, the reason why her lover had had no choice but to strike her and precipitate their separation.

All of this made absolute sense to Quinn.

And it was not so surprising, really, that she didn't recognize him. It wasn't just that he had put on false whiskers. He had put himself into an entirely different class. He had donned the uniform of a working man. Of course she wouldn't recognize him. She barely looked at him. He had become invisible to her.

Naturally he knew who she was and so stared at her with a dangerous fixity that was underlined by a reprise of his theme from the band.

She only noticed the ticket collector – with a vaguely troubled frown – when he refused to move on, long after he had examined their tickets. It took an interjection from her husband to prompt him to leave them in peace.

By the time the police found the real ticket inspector in the mail carriage, stripped to his underclothes, trussed up and gagged, his imposter had long since jumped from the moving train.

The couple honeymooned in Venice. Inevitably there was a scene on a gondola, and even more inevitably, the extravagantly mustachioed gondolier turned out to be none other than the former cavalry officer. If there were titters at the implausibility of this, Quinn did not hear them. It occurred to Quinn that, by virtue of the murders he had committed, the character had acquired a kind of mythical status, becoming almost a supernatural being, like a Hindu avatar. Or perhaps these scenes were merely the mirror images of those in which the murderer was haunted by the eyes of his beloved? That is to say, the former cavalry officer was not really there, it was simply that Eloise's character saw him wherever she looked.

When the couple dined in a restaurant, the waiter bringing them their food was the former cavalry officer. He stood over them, curling his lip, as they fed each other ice cream from tall glasses with long spoons. The friendly priest who pointed out the mosaics in St Mark's Basilica – Quinn knew him immediately. The flower vendor in the Piazza di San Marco, the Carabiniere lurking on the Rialto Bridge, the attendant who showed them to their box at the theatre, the tenor on the stage, the dancer in the beaked
Medico della Peste
mask who led the masquerade through the midnight alleyways, the night porter who greeted them on their return to their hotel … they were all him. Of that Quinn had no doubt.

So it was clear that the psychological explanation was the one that the film was forcing on the audience. Although she was on honeymoon with the Count of Somewhere or Other, Eloise's character could not get the image of her former lover out of her mind. But just when Quinn persuaded himself to be satisfied with this explanation, he remembered the trussed-up guard on the express train.

On the surface, Eloise remained untroubled by these visions, if indeed she was conscious of them. She dined and danced and visited the sights with her bridegroom. On her lips was always the happy smile of a new bride. But her eyes were a different matter. There was no doubt now that her eyes had a haunted quality to them.

The director again chose to present an extended close-up of those eyes, just as he had done at the beginning of the film. As before, the camera's viewpoint moved back to show her whole face. In contrast to the earlier sequence, a hand – her husband's, presumably – came into the frame, this time though to caress her cheek with a loving touch. Tellingly, Eloise flinched away.

A dramatic flurry of high, discordant intervals from the band underlined the significance of this gesture. Her husband's expression was wounded. To repair the damage, she grasped his hand and held it to her cheek, her eyes closed longingly. She was wishing herself into love for this man. But Quinn knew that the truth was concealed behind those eyelids. Her eyes still desired the disgraced cavalry officer. This was clear the next time she opened them and the director once again treated the audience to an extreme, overwhelming close-up. Eyes were not meant to be seen so large, nor looked into for so long. Quinn became aware of how long she had held them open without blinking. He began to feel tense and uncomfortable. It was inhuman, almost cruel, to force him to continue looking into those eyes.

The eyes themselves, once objects of beauty, became objects of terror. It was not just the melodramatic music that suggested this idea.

There was horror in their gaze, a dawning realization of the tragedy and abasement that lay ahead. A despair so complete that it took away hope from all who gazed into them.

By another of his clever camera tricks, the director revealed that the isolated eyes were looking down from a cracked plaster ceiling at the former cavalry officer, who was stretched out on the grubby mattress of an iron-framed bed. A metallic object glinted in his hands. Quinn recognized it as one of the long spoons with which the couple had eaten ice cream. And so, once again, he had to reassess his interpretation of what he was seeing. Was he to take it that the cavalry officer really had been the waiter in the restaurant, and therefore all the other manifestations?

The next scene showed the couple asleep in a hotel suite. The large window was open on a night dominated by an enormous full moon. Eloise stirred and woke as a shadowy figure appeared silhouetted against the moon, climbing in through the window.

She did not cry out. She knew it was him. The man she had seen wherever she looked. He had come for her.

She rose from the bed; they looked into each other's eyes. And then threw themselves at each other.

As they kissed, the Count of Somewhere or Other woke. He leapt from the bed with a cry, which the band did its best to convey musically. A struggle ensued between the count and the former cavalry officer. But the latter had come armed. A close-up showed a stiletto blade sinking into the count's soft flank. He fell to the floor.

The lovers confronted one another. Once again, Eloise's eyes held and conveyed the entire meaning of the moment. The horror that had been nascent in them before bloomed into a deep revulsion. The former cavalry officer had to see that all was lost. Quinn certainly understood this.

She hated him. There was only hatred in those eyes now.

The next sequence showed the cavalry officer stealing away from the couple's suite. The band rumbled ominously and then fell silent as the camera returned to the bedroom.

There were now two bodies on the floor. The director went in for his favourite close-up. But where Eloise's eyes should have been there were two black chasms.

Quinn couldn't say whether he was one of those who shrieked. But he certainly felt himself bodily leave his seat.

Of course, he had seen worse in reality. But there was something about having such horrors depicted in art that he found more shocking than to discover them in the course of his professional life. Their representation signified some kind of acknowledgement. It opened a door.

If it was only policemen and police surgeons – and the occasional accidental witness – who were obliged to confront such crimes, they could be contained and prevented from contaminating the wider society. It was part of his job to take these things on himself. It was his responsibility. He thought of Sir Edward's secretary, Miss Latterly. Her horrified reaction to the little he had inadvertently let slip about his work was perfectly proper. This was how the public ought to view such things.

This wallowing in horror and violence, this fascination with gruesome and macabre spectacle, it was unwholesome. It was obscene. More than that, it was dangerous. Who knew where it would lead?

But the film wasn't over yet. Quinn could not imagine what else, what new horrors, the makers could have in store for the audience. But he sensed the eager anticipation in those around him.

The murderer returned to his lair. It was not clear where this was, whether in Venice, or Vienna. It didn't matter. It was a psychological place. It existed both as an idea in the murderer's head, and – now that it had been filmed – as an external reality. It was inside all their heads now.

He was hunched over something, a bundle in a knotted handkerchief, through which dark stains had seeped. The shape of the bundle, the suggestion of a double rotundity, left little doubt to its contents.

The film showed the killer decant the eyes into a jar, which he topped up with a clear liquid before sealing. By chance, the dead eyes were looking out, suspended midway in the preserving fluid. He held up the jar so that the eyes were level with his own. He then addressed a bitter soliloquy to them, the gist of which was represented on a series of inter-titles. In short, he blamed the eyes for all the misfortunes that had befallen him. They had haunted him, given him no peace, driven him to murder. And worse. It was to rid himself of the spectre of those eyes that he had been forced to remove the eyes from the women he had killed. Women in whose faces he had seen her eyes.

The camera then showed a close-up of the killer placing the jar on a shelf, the eyes still looking out into the room, and towards the audience. A wider shot revealed it was not the only such jar on that shelf. And that that was not the only shelf. In fact, the wall was lined with jar after jar, each containing a pair of eyes looking out.

In the final frames of the film, as the killer moved out of shot, all the eyes in the jars swivelled to watch him go. The violins produced a suitably chilling glissando. The audience went wild, delighted and terrified in equal degree.

T
he lights came up.

The audience was wrenched away from another man's shimmering dreams back into their own duller, if more solid, realities. But though the glow of the projector had died on the screen, its silver cast lingered in their minds. The glamour as well as the horror of what they had just witnessed enlivened them. They sprang to their feet and filed out of the auditorium in a state of heightened excitement, almost shouting their pleasure, laughing nervously at the memory of their earlier disturbed emotions. The horror they had felt had now abated. It was safe to make a joke of it.

Their own attempts at lustre, the sheen on the top hats of the men and the cosmetic gloss of the women's lips, struck Quinn as tawdry and counterfeit. An attempt to stave off the great unspeakable truth: their own mortality. The sour odours of too many bodies enclosed in a confined space were beginning to cut through. Whatever it was that had been sprayed over their heads, perfume or disinfectant, it was losing its efficacy.

In contrast, the weightless entities spun out of the criss-crossing of light and darkness – Eloise and the mournful-eyed actor who played the cavalry officer – embraced the great unspeakable and in so doing transformed and transcended it. It was a kind of alchemy.