The Dark Palace--Murder and mystery in London, 1914 (25 page)

‘Rest a while. Before you press on with your investigation.'

‘I don't have time.' Quinn swung his legs up and lay back on the chaise longue.

‘There is always time to tend to the needs of the soul.'

‘It was after my father died,' said Quinn suddenly. He was aware of feeling slightly surprised that he had blurted out this confidence. It had been the last thing he had wanted to divulge. He was puzzled as to how the doctor had managed to induce him to confess it, merely by urging Quinn to tend to the needs of his soul. Perhaps that was a technique he could apply when interrogating suspects.

‘Your father's death affected you badly?'

‘The inquest verdict was death by misadventure. But there were rumours that he took his own life. That was certainly what my mother believed.'

‘And you did not?'

‘Not then.'

‘And now?'

‘There's a man, who claims he knows the truth about my father's death. I … I ran away from him, from finding out the truth. I had always thought of myself as a seeker of the truth. And yet, when presented with the opportunity to find out the one thing that I most desired to know, I … ran away.'

‘If you don't know the truth, you can make it be whatever you want it to be.'

‘They write about me in the newspapers.'

Quinn heard the doctor's pen scratch excitedly in the dark.

‘They have begun to call me Quick-Fire Quinn.'

‘How does that make you feel?'

‘I don't like it.' But Quinn wondered if this were true, even as he said it.

‘There is no truth in it?'

‘No … well, it is true that some of the suspects I have hunted over the years have … died at my hands. But it has been necessary. These are invariably dangerous men. I have a duty to protect the public, and my men.'

‘And yourself.'

‘Is that so wrong?'

‘Not wrong at all. You do what you have to do.'

‘But today, I thought … on the way here to see you … the thought occurred to me … What if I kill them for the same reason that I ran from this man? Because I don't want to know the truth. I am afraid of the truth! After all these years in the force!'

There was a long pause. Eventually Dr Casaubon coughed, as though in some embarrassment. ‘You really are a policeman, aren't you?'

‘Of course.'

‘I believe I can help you. If you wish to be helped.'

‘I don't need that kind of help.'

‘And yet you came here today.'

‘As part of my investigation.'

‘Of course. That's how the unconscious works. It always provides a plausible specious reason – a rational explanation – alongside the true reason.'

‘What are you saying? I had no idea what kind of doctor you were before I came here. And I had no control over what name that man last night would give. My unconscious has played no part in bringing me here.'

‘I wasn't talking about
your
unconscious especially. The world has an unconscious, you know. You may call it God, if you wish. Although sometimes it seems more like the Devil. In point of fact, it is both. In psychoanalysis, opposing forces are reconciled. The polarity of good on the one hand and evil on the other becomes resolved into a unity in which both good and evil coexist. For instance, it was undoubtedly an evil that this poor girl was attacked. And yet some good has come of it. It has led you here to me, and perhaps to your psychic salvation.'

‘It's just a coincidence.'

Dr Casaubon chuckled, as if the notion of a coincidence was the most ridiculous thing he had ever heard. ‘The unconscious is cunning. It always allows us that explanation too. It is consistent with the polarity I have touched upon. It presents us with the path to our own healing, but at the same time provides us with the excuses for not taking it.'

‘With respect, Doctor, this all sounds like mumbo-jumbo.'

‘Yes. That is how you feel about it now. I expect you will change your mind. At any rate, you have found me once. You may find me again.'

In the shadowed gloom of the doctor's surgery, Quinn was momentarily disorientated. There was some quality in Casaubon's voice that took him back to an earlier time in his life, to a place he had long believed he had left behind for good: the Colney Hatch Asylum. Indeed, so intense was the sensation that he wondered if he had ever left there.

Q
uinn noticed the gleam of a familiar excitement in Macadam's eye as soon as he stepped back into the department.

‘There's been a development, sir. They've found her. A girl with one eye missing. We're to go to an address in Soho. Shall I fetch the Ford?'

‘How … how is she?'

‘She's dead, sir. It's a body they've found.'

Of course, he had known right from the start that that was what Macadam would say. He knew it as soon as he saw that gleam in his eye.

Q
uinn was aware of a ticklish apprehension, a sense of inevitability and dread. He had the feeling that they were moving under a cloud of spreading blackness, towards something very black indeed. And yet the day was bright enough. The blackness was of entirely psychological origin.

His encounter with the second Dr Casaubon had unnerved him. And the fact that the girl had now apparently turned up dead depressed him. It was another death that could be lain at his door. He had permitted the man who had called himself Dr Casaubon to take her away. Impressed by the man's natural air of confidence and authority, and the superficial evidence he gave of medical knowledge, he had failed to ask for any credentials. But had instead surrendered a vulnerable, wounded girl to a complete stranger.

And now it seemed possible, if not likely, that this man was her attacker come to finish off what he started. If he had been wearing a mask at the time of the attack – a devil's mask perhaps, in keeping with the woman's insistence that she had been attacked by the devil – she would not have recognized him. Even more chillingly, perhaps he was a second predatory individual. One more violent than the original attacker, one drawn to the acts of horror that others had initiated, but prepared to take them to their ultimate conclusion. Prepared, in other words, to kill, whereas the first attacker had only maimed.

Macadam drove them north to Dean Street. A couple of uniforms on the street signalled the door they were looking for. Inside, Quinn's psychological darkness was almost equalled by the gloom of the narrow stairway. Male voices, and the clumping of boots on boards, drew them up to the first-floor landing.

A door was open on to a small rented room. It was even darker in there than on the landing, as the curtains were still drawn from the night before. Hard to see what was what, especially as a wall of burly backs filled the threshold, screening the scene of crime from Quinn's view.

Macadam took umbrage at this cluster of detectives from the local Great Marlborough Street nick. ‘What's all this? Come on, out of the way, out of the way! Don't you lot know anything about forensics? You can't go clodhopping all over the place like this.'

The wall of backs parted. Several bewildered, bewhiskered faces turned at once to confront their admonisher. Initial aggression turned to chastened deference when they saw Quinn.

Macadam confirmed their suspicions. ‘That's right. Special Crimes. It's our case now. You men better make way.'

There was a moment while the locals filed out. In fact, there had only been three men in there, but the room was small, and the men were big.

The air was dead and stifling, filled with the odours of the night before. Alcohol and cigarette smoke were the strongest, but there were also more obscure and somehow more potent smells. Quinn was able to identify blood, the metallic tang of a body leeching out its life fluids. In the tenebrous gloom, it seemed as though her face had been painted black. But the darkness was especially thick around the left eye, or rather where the left eye had been. He realized it was blood that caked her face, not make-up. There was blood on her throat too, and a glistening disruption of flesh on one side.

Of course, he knew straight away. ‘This is not her. It's not the girl who was attacked in Cecil Court.'

‘Are you sure, sir?'

‘You saw her, did you not, Macadam?'

‘That I did, sir. But it was dark.'

‘For one thing, it was the other eye. But this girl – this is someone else. This girl is an actress, of sorts. She was in the film, last night. And she was at the premiere. And I believe at the party afterwards.' Quinn turned back towards the three policemen who were waiting out on the landing. ‘Do you have a name for her?'

One of the men stepped forward with a barely perceptible dip of the head, a gesture in the direction of a bow. His face was sunken-cheeked, its grey pallor tinged by bristles like iron filings. At the sides, the bristles burgeoned into mutton-chop whiskers. ‘The room was rented by a couple by the name of Novak. A neighbour has identified her as the wife. Dolores Novak.'

‘And her husband? Do you know where he is?'

‘Done a bunk, we reckon.'

Quinn nodded. This was consistent with the impression he had formed of the fellow from watching him the night before. ‘Have you circulated a description to the ports? The chances are he will try to get abroad.'

‘We thought of that, guv. He's a foreigner, see.'

‘And has the medical examiner seen her yet?'

‘He has, guv.'

‘Did he have anything of interest to say?'

‘Cause of death as you'd expect, guv. Loss of blood caused by her wounds.'

‘Wounds?'

‘She had her throat cut as well as her eye taken out. He seemed to think it was a botched job. The entry point of the blade ought to have missed her carotid artery, according to the doctor. But somehow it found it.'

‘So there was a lot of blood?' Quinn's question might have seemed redundant, fuelled by simple ghoulishness.

‘You could say that, guv. It was that, coupled with the excessive shock to the heart what did for her. Whoever did this, left her to die.'

‘And her husband, if he was here, did nothing to help her either, it seems. Even if he is not the man who took her eye out.'

‘Neighbours attest to some rum comings and goings in the night, guv. Seems there may have been some other individuals here. No one saw anyone, of course. A question of raised voices.'

‘An altercation?'

‘There may have been. A level of intoxication was attested to. Some kind of party. If you take my meaning.'

Quinn at last identified one of the other lingering smells. ‘Did the medical examiner offer any opinion about whether there had been recent sexual activity?'

‘He did. And there had. Someone had shot their bolt inside her. It may or may not have been her husband. Them other individuals were thought to be men.'

Quinn gave voice to his thoughts: ‘Was she an actress or a prostitute?' He scanned the room, as if he would find the answer nailed to the wall. ‘Or a little of both, perhaps?' He remembered the interest the couple had seemed to be taking in Lord Dunwich. ‘Macadam, you stay here and look the crime scene over. You might also see if you can get anything else out of the neighbours.'

‘What am I looking for in particular, sir?'

‘Any evidence of her visitors would be helpful. If someone left in a hurry, there is a chance they might have left something behind.'

Macadam's ruthless eye was already taking in the room. From his bearing, it was clear that he would consider it a matter of pride to come up with something.

Before he left, Quinn allowed himself one last glance at that centre of darkness in her face. In the dim obscurity of the curtained room it was hard to know what he could see and what he was imagining. The impossible depths of blackness that he had seen in the other cavity came back to him. In truth, they had never been far away. Last night, he had told himself that he never wanted to see that blackness again. Now he realized that was another of his self-deceptions. There was nothing he wanted more than to stare into it. It was with some effort of will that he tore himself away.

A
s he turned from the open expanse of Charing Cross Road into the sun-starved alleyway of Cecil Court, Quinn felt a physical chill descend. The events of the previous night came back to him, as if the ghosts of all those involved were now in place. The huddle of men around the screaming girl. Her body racked with uncontrollable shudders. The man who stepped from the carriage and took over with the assumed authority of a doctor. The arrival of the party from Leicester Square. The nasty yapping dog with the eye between its teeth.

The scene replayed itself in his mind. It took on the quality of a kinematograph projection, flickering, grainy, juddering and monochrome. In fact, it was like several films projected simultaneously, and repeatedly. At first, the layered multiplicity of images confused him. It was hard to see through the ever-shifting fog of movement.

But then his perceiving mind got used to the patterns of repetition in the presentation that his subconscious mind was trying to force on him. One detail cut through. The iris of the eye he had held in his hand.

This was the only part of the mental diorama to have colour.

But his mind must have been playing tricks on him. It presented the eye to him as blue. And yet he remembered – not as a visual memory, but as a factual memory – the moment when he had first consciously registered the colour of her eyes.

He had been talking to Lord Dunwich. He had opened the handkerchief in which the eye was wrapped and looked down to see a brown eye looking back at him.

This was why, as Macadam would no doubt remind him, it was so important to gather firm evidence, and subject it to meticulous scientific scrutiny. Memory was unreliable. His own mind could not even agree with itself as to the colour of her eyes. Fortunately, he had retrieved the enucleated eye and sent it for analysis by a pathologist. All that he lacked was the girl from whom it had been taken.