The Dark Palace--Murder and mystery in London, 1914 (22 page)

The door to the conservatory opened. A silver tray bearing the morning's post appeared on the table in front of him. He did not look up. He did not smile. He did not thank the maid who placed it there. It was as if his famous charm was a scarce resource that he had to preserve for when he really needed it.

He folded away the newspaper and turned his attention to the correspondence. One envelope drew his attention. He frequently received begging letters from the Old Country, essentially feckless Irishmen touching him for money, and basing their appeals purely on their compatriotism. As if he ought to give a penny to every Irishman in the world! Some of the letters dressed themselves up as investment opportunities (
encl.: incomprehensible plans for half-baked schemes
); others were chain letters in which semi-mystical means to success were promised, we all know the kind of thing –
send ten pounds to this address and good luck will surely follow
; others again were barely disguised extortion rackets, with thinly veiled threats and invariably shocking spelling:
yor dorter is a bewty wuld be a sham if ennythin hapent to her now.

Lennox's response to them all was to ignore them.

With its green-inked address, this had the look of being another of the same. Green for Ireland, presumably. He was in half a mind to throw it in the wastepaper bin without opening it. But he wasn't a newsman for nothing. The old curiosity always got the better of him.

The envelope was small, the size of a personal letter. It did not feel as though there was any enclosure, so no plans for a harebrained invention in this one. In fact, he could not be sure that the envelope contained anything. He looked for the post mark, but couldn't find one. It seemed that it had been delivered by hand, presumably just after or before the postman had called.

He tore the envelope open distractedly and took out a single playing card, the Jack of Hearts, a one-eyed Jack. But where the eye should have been, a small hole had been pierced.

There was nothing written on the card, face or reverse. He looked inside the envelope, but found no cover note.

The conservatory suddenly seemed a dark and inhospitable place, as if a shadow had settled over it. A shiver seemed to lurk in the air, waiting to take possession of him. And yet there had been no change in the external quality of the light, no drop in the temperature. It was simply that, for some unaccountable reason, he had experienced real and physical dread.

H
e found a medical supply shop open on Wigmore Street, where he purchased a pair of spectacles with darkened lenses. It was not that his eyes' sensitivity to light had increased since his self-inflicted wound. Just that if he was going to return to the office he wanted to forestall for as long as possible any questions regarding the stitches over his eye.

With the swelling and dressing in his injured eye, he was half-blind anyhow. Such was the prevalent gloom of the morning that once he put the glasses on he could hardly see a thing. Even so, it was a relief to be hidden behind the blessed darkness of the celluloid-coated disks.

He groped his way out of the shop and headed south to Oxford Street. At one point he was even helped across the road by a solicitous gent. He was used to giving himself over to the hands of strangers, but not under these circumstances.

On Oxford Street, he stumbled into a Lyons tea house and made his way to a table in the gloom-encompassed rear. After a moment or two, the waitress came up to take his order: tea and a crumpet.

As he waited for his morning sustenance to arrive, he tried to get his story straight.

Of course, it would have been a different matter if his stunt had come up trumps, if he had found the girl and got a story out of her. But he had drawn a blank on both fronts.

It had all seemed so simple in the picture palace of his imagination. Without his having to say a word, the nurses would rush him to the very same ward where she was being held. The affinity of their wounds would make sure of that. And even if that did not happen, someone would be bound to comment on the startling coincidence of their admitting two patients with eye injuries on the very same night. He could get into easy conversation with said someone, and tease out of them where the girl was now.

In the event, the first nurse who saw him had smelled the whisky on his breath and assumed that he had sustained his injury as the result of a drunken brawl. And so he was given a wad of cotton wool to hold to his eye and kept waiting for three hours.

A second nurse stitched his eye, without any attempt to anaesthetize the area. When he cried out in pain, she commented that she should have thought all the whisky he had drunk would have numbed the pain.

He did not see the girl in the ward, and no one who spoke to him made mention of her. When he tried to ask in a casual manner whether they saw many eye injuries, his enquiries were met with sullen silence. And when he resorted to telling the nurse who stitched him what he had witnessed in Cecil Court, it was clear she regarded him as the worst kind of lunatic.

And so, at last, he had been discharged. He had wandered the streets until he found the medical supply shop.

His tea and crumpet arrived. He let the sugar flow freely from the jar. And asked the waitress for jam.

He felt a childish need for sweet and comforting consumption.

Only one conclusion could be drawn. The doctor had taken her to UCH, despite the fact that the Middlesex was closer to the scene of the attack.

Once he had finished his tea, he would head there. This time he would walk up to the front desk, present his credentials and ask for them to confirm the admittance of a female patient suffering from a vicious wound which had resulted in the enucleation of her eye. Sometimes, the most straightforward approach was the best.

That was something a man like Lennox would never understand.

T
he clanging siren ripped into the morning's torpor. The morning answered with a pale indignant glare, but was essentially powerless to resist.

Quinn stepped to one side as the St John's ambulance sped into the courtyard of the Middlesex Hospital. He followed the gleaming white vehicle with his gaze. A bowler-hatted man in black was standing at the entrance to the hospital, just where the ambulance came to a screeching, grinding halt. But he ignored the vehicle's dramatic arrival and instead stared fixedly in Quinn's direction. Quinn immediately recognized the deep-furrowed frown. It was the man he had first seen in the Tube carriage, the man with the unspeakably bitter face. The same man who had reappeared last night in Leicester Square to berate first Waechter and then Porrick.

On that occasion, Quinn had avoided confronting the man. He wondered now if that had turned out to be a fatal error. The persistent recurrence of this bitter-faced revenant was forcing upon Quinn the very real possibility that he was the girl's attacker. Quinn tried to unravel the complex psychological contortions that would make this hypothesis plausible. The attack was an attempt to injure Waechter and Porrick, against whom he seemed to have some kind of grudge. Possibly, even, it was an attack on the entire film production, distribution and exhibition industries. From what he had heard of the man's tirade, his grudge was fairly widespread. He seemed to think the film industry owed him something. It was not unfeasible that he would set upon a course of action to injure its interests.

But why had he shown himself to Quinn before the attack? Perhaps he did not intend for Quinn to see him. Perhaps, having been ignored by the film industry, he now believed himself to be invisible to the world. He had been watching Quinn, because he believed that it would be Quinn who would be called upon to investigate whatever crimes he was intending to commit.

The man stood rooted to the spot, still staring at Quinn. If he were the girl's attacker, it might make sense that he had come here to find out news of her condition. But wouldn't he make some attempt to evade capture, instead of standing there in the open?

Quinn waved and shouted, as he trotted across the courtyard. ‘Wait! I want to speak to you a moment.'

The man made no move to get away, nor did he acknowledge Quinn's hail. However, there was something awkward – an unnatural constraint – to his posture. His body was held at an angle, and he kept one hand determinedly behind his back. Looking down at the other hand, Quinn noticed that for once it was not gloved.

‘Who are you? What do you want with me?'

For an answer, the man looked deep into Quinn's eyes. Quinn found his gaze both troubling and compelling. He recognized that secret quality that marked not just a capability, but also a willingness, to do anything. It was a capacity that was released when an individual went beyond despair. He had seen it in many murderers. He had seen it in himself.

Neither the man nor Quinn blinked, as if they had gone too far for that.

‘I knew your father,' he said at last.

Quinn's heart took up where the ambulance's siren had left off.

‘How is that possible?'

‘I know what happened to him. I know why … why he took his own life.'

‘No!'

‘Do you not wish to know?'

‘What has this to do with what happened last night? A girl was viciously attacked last night after the premiere of a new motion picture. I saw you there. You argued with the maker of that film. You came here to see her …'

‘How do you know that?'

‘Why else would you be here?'

‘Your logic is faulty. However, it is true that I made some enquiries at the desk. They know me here. I was able to ask questions without arousing suspicion. She was not admitted.'

‘Do you know her name?'

‘No. But I think they would have remarked upon the nature of her injury sufficiently to identify her. No one with an enucleated eye was admitted last night.'

‘Why do you care? What has this got to do with you?'

‘I believe Waechter did it. I have reason to believe he is a Satanist. This may be connected to some kind of perverted ritual.'

‘Who are you?'

‘My name is Hugh Grant-Sissons. I knew your father.'

‘Yes, you said. Are you a doctor? Is that why they know you?'

‘No. I am an inventor. I worked with your father on some ideas for a new apparatus that could have transformed medical science. Unfortunately, nothing came of it. Various unfortunate circumstances, including your father's death, cut our enterprise short. Do you not find it strange that there is no record of her admittance?' To Quinn, the abrupt change of tack seemed indicative of a dislocated mind.

‘She must have been taken to a different hospital.'

‘That will be a simple matter for you and your officers to confirm.'

‘Are you still following me?'

‘How could I be following you when I was here before you?'

‘What if you were the one who attacked her?'

The furrow in Grant-Sissons's brow seemed to ripple and deepen, as if the invisible hatchet that had caused it had landed a second, firmer blow. ‘Why would I do that?'

‘Revenge.'

‘To the best of my knowledge, that poor girl has never done anything to me. Indeed, I have no idea who she is.'

‘That's not what I mean. You know what I mean. This is an attack on Waechter.'

Grant-Sissons took some time to consider this. At length, he decided on his answer. ‘On the contrary. It will do no harm to the success of his film whatsoever. In fact, if my understanding of the baseness of human nature is correct, it will serve to promote considerable public interest in Herr Waechter and his odious films. As that is the last thing I want, I think you must agree that I am the last person who would carry out this attack.'

‘Why do you hate Waechter so much?'

‘Oh, I don't hate him any more than I hate them all. Every single person who has profited from my invention – for which I never received a penny, may I say. My ideas were stolen from me by Edison. I have devoted my life since to exposing this injustice and reclaiming what is mine by rights.'

‘So do you picket every screening of every film?'

‘Not every. I cannot be everywhere. But there are other reasons for objecting to Waechter. He is a degenerate pervert. He cannot go back to Austria because he is wanted there for buggery.'

Quinn suppressed a smile. ‘I thought it was for duelling?'

‘That is a pretext. And as for that creature Porrick – in many ways he is even worse. He caused a man's death, you know.'

‘Really?' As always, Quinn's interest in a person was piqued by an association with death.

‘Yes. He had a workman solder a tin trunk shut.'

‘How did that cause his death?'

‘The trunk contained film stock, which as you know is made from highly flammable cellulose nitrate. One spark was enough to send the whole thing up in flames. The poor fellow was working in a tiny basement room, the way out blocked by more film stock, all of which caught fire. He didn't stand a chance.'

‘How do you know all this?'

‘I make it my business. This industry was spawned from my invention. Creatures like Porrick would be nothing without me. Naturally, I follow news of their doings closely.'

‘What exactly was it you invented?'

‘I invented the mechanism that allows the staggered passage of a roll of sensitized film through a metal gate, at the same time as activating a synchronized shutter, so that a rapid series of photographs may be taken – and by the same mechanism, projected. In layman's terms, I invented the motion picture camera and projector. I have here a copy of a letter I sent to Thomas Edison in 1889, together with the reply, which proves that they received it even though they claimed that the plans I enclosed were impracticable. So impracticable that, in the following year, they produced a machine which is in all essentials identical to mine!'