The Dark Palace--Murder and mystery in London, 1914 (3 page)

Miss Ibbott offered no comment on Quinn's outburst, unless shutting the door in his face is to be considered a comment.

He could not look at Miss Dillard. He wondered if the consolation of her pewter-grey eyes was denied him forever now, their startling beauty an unreliable memory he struggled to conjure.

T
he lights in the carriage flickered in time with the clatter and sway of the Tube train, the darkness reasserting its presence.

Quinn had entered its realm voluntarily, lowering himself into it in a shuddering cage. Today he was shunning the daylight. Dipping his face away from its intrusive glare. Something to do with the awkward episode on the landing, no doubt. He had wanted the ground to open up and swallow him. Taking the Tube was a practicable alternative.

Under normal circumstances, Quinn rarely took the Tube. But at least on the Tube he didn't have to meet anyone's eye. Most of his fellow travellers hid themselves away behind their newspapers. If they did not, they stared fixedly at a chosen point. A spot on the carriage wall. An arbitrary word in an advertisement. A cigarette stub caught between the wooden slats of the floor. Occasionally they might look away to catch the eye of one of the pale ghosts riding the darkness outside, mournful, perplexed, perpetually excluded. In that moment they understood: how incomprehensible we are to our own reflections. To ourselves.

Quinn could not say when he had first been aware of the man looking at him. But his sense was that the whole reason the man was there was to look at him. There was a purpose to his staring. Being a policeman, Quinn might have said it was
premeditated
.

The fellow must have followed him on to the platform and into the train carriage. That meant that he must have been waiting outside the lodging house for Quinn to leave that morning.

Yes, he had registered something out of the corner of his eye, or at least in hindsight he believed he had. A blur of movement configured by intent. Resolving itself into a human form shadowing him. Footsteps moving in time with his own.

He had thought nothing of it. Or very little. He had registered the sensation and dismissed it. No, not quite dismissed it. He
was
a policeman, after all. Over the years he had put away more than his fair share of villains, and dispatched another quota to face a higher justice. The former would have grudges of their own against him, which they would nurture and fatten as they served out their sentences (if they had not paid the ultimate price); many of the latter would have left behind associates who might be presumed to have sworn oaths of vengeance on their behalf.

It was a plain fact that there were people in the world who were out for Quinn's blood.

He accepted this, but the thing was not to become obsessed by it. No doubt the day would come when he would find himself face to face with a man who would calmly aim a revolver between his eyes and fire. In the meantime, he couldn't go around jumping at shadows.

And so, he had registered the sensation of being followed and pushed it to the back of his mind. It was most likely a coincidence. Someone else on their way to Brompton Road Tube Station, whose footsteps would naturally follow Quinn's.

It occurred to him that this sensation of being followed was simply a fact of modern life. This is how it feels to live in a crowded metropolis at the beginning of the twentieth century, he realized. To notice it, to become preoccupied with it, disturbed by it, was perhaps the sign of a man at odds with his existence. There was danger in that. The danger of alienation, and madness. Quinn knew enough about that to recognize the signs. It was something he in particular needed to be on his guard against.

On the platform, he had felt sufficiently invisible to put the sensation from his mind. The brown and green tiles seemed to suck the life out of the feeble electric lights. It was a space that fell away at its soft dark edges. He had instinctively sought out a place on the periphery, slipping away into the welcoming gloom.

A tide of bobbing bowler hats had closed behind him. He had found a spot at the end of the platform, peering expectantly into the black abyss of the tunnel. He was in fact at the closest point to that abyss that it was possible for him to be without falling into it. A spot of light appeared, signalling the approach of the next train. Almost simultaneously came the first stirring of the air. And then the distant rattle that grew into a scream. The light expanded as it hurtled towards him.

He had entered the train by the gate at the rear of the last car. And – or so he thought – he had been the only one to do so. Was it possible that he had missed the entrance of this other man, who had somehow slipped on after Quinn but before the gateman closed the gate and rang his bell?

Or was it all in his head? Was this sensation of being looked at of a piece with the sensation of being followed?

Quinn turned his head. The man was seated on the opposite side of the car, just to Quinn's right. And he was staring fixedly at Quinn. There could be no mistaking it.

The blinking of the carriage lights grew more insistent. The intervals of blackness increased in duration. Then all at once, the lights died completely, all along the length of the train.

There was a collective groan and a rustle of protest from the newspaper readers. But a moment later, the groan became a cry of anger tinged with alarm as the train came to a screeching, grinding halt.

It was strange how calm Quinn felt. After all, if the man was going to kill him, now was his opportunity. In fact, Quinn felt that he would be disappointed if there was not some attempt made on his life.

The darkness cloaked the movement of his hand. And hid the sleek steel object that weighted it with death. He held the gun out straight in front of him, then turned it slightly to his right. If the man got up to attack him, he would walk straight into the barrel. At which point, Quinn would squeeze the trigger.

There was risk involved in this strategy. The man might not mean him any harm. He might simply be an odd cove. Also, someone else might get hurt. The innocent bystander so beloved of newspapers, although Quinn doubted the existence of anyone who was wholly innocent.

Nevertheless.

He imagined the screams and panic that would ensue once the lights came back on and he was discovered holding a revolver out in front of him. That was bad enough. It would be worse still if the gun had been discharged and some harmless old buffer lay stretched out on the floor, blood pooling around him. He had seen enough violently slaughtered men to know it was not a good way to start the day.

Quinn returned the gun to its holster. There was a leather tightening around his chest. His heart beat harder, glad to have it back.

The brief outing of fatal metal had gone unwitnessed in the darkness. And no one saw now which of their number gave out a burst of sharp, nervous laughter. No one could mistake it for the sound of amusement. It was the sound of a man on the edge of losing control. A dangerous hilarity.

But this had gone on long enough, seemed to be the consensus in the compartment. Voices cried out, ‘
What the devil
…
?
' They disapproved of the loss of power. They were affronted by that laughter. The door to the carriage opened and a yellow beam projected from the gateman's electric torch. As the beam licked wanly at their faces, Quinn saw that the man opposite was still looking at him. The direction of his gaze had not changed one iota. In the brief play of light across the man's features, Quinn formed an impression of his age and character. He was not a young man. No. He was more or less the age Quinn's father would have been, had he lived. Had he not taken his own life, that is to say. There was something set and determined about the face. As if it was held in the grip of a great and unchanging emotion. The torch beam moved on. The face sank back into darkness, but Quinn was haunted by it. A deep, perpetual frown was cut into the forehead. The lips were pressed together in a grim, tense clench. The emotion he had seen on the man's face was unspeakably bitter. And for some reason it was directed at him.

Quinn had the sense that if he shot the man now in the darkness, he would be doing him a great service.

Steadfastly ignoring all enquiries, the gateman walked the length of the carriage and pulled down the window to communicate with the gateman in the next carriage. It was decided that he would do the same, so that a chain of communication could be established with the driver.

Quinn had the sense that the darkness was enjoying itself now. And that the game it was playing was with him personally. Only he and the darkness knew the nature of that face. Only he and the darkness knew about Quinn's careless gun-wielding.

And only the darkness knew where both these secrets might lead.

As unexpectedly as they had gone out, the lights flickered back into life. Newspapers were snapped back up in front of faces. Eyes flitted to find the points they had focused on before.

It almost seemed as if the darkness had brought them together. Some level of communal feeling had been allowed by it. Now that light was restored, every man fled back into himself, as if from an unseemly spectacle.

Quinn refused to look at the man. He stared at the dim reflection of his own face in the window opposite. It was blurred and hollow, almost featureless. The idea of a ghostly outrider came back to him.
We are haunted by ourselves
, he thought.
And also sealed off from ourselves
.

If we cannot understand ourselves, what hope do we have of understanding one another?

The gateman in the next carriage returned to pass on a message to their own gateman. Whatever the news was he seemed little inclined to share it with the passengers, and carried on a gloomy exchange with his colleague.

One of the pushier examples of the City type demanded to know what was going on.

The gateman turned to him with a sour, almost insubordinate eye. Weighing up his options, which for a moment seemed to sit between personal insult and social revolution, the gateman at last remembered the uniform he was wearing and touched the peak of his cap in deference. He sniffed noisily, deeply, as if the shifting of snot in his nose would imbue his words with more authority. ‘We're being held at a signal.'

From another quarter came the question, ‘Why did the lights go out?' To which he merely replied, ‘They're back on now, in't they?'

How easy it was for him to say that, thought Quinn. He had not nearly killed a man in the darkness.

To forestall any further interrogation, the gateman took himself back out on to his platform.

At last, the train lurched back into motion. Before long it was pulling into the next station. After the darkness of the tunnel, even the subdued platform lights appeared dazzling. Quinn rose to his feet. It was not his stop. But he could not bear the thought of sitting in the same carriage as that face for a moment longer.

Q
uinn switched carriages at Knightsbridge. At Piccadilly Circus, he took the Bakerloo Railway south. He was not aware of anyone following him.

When he emerged into the daylight at Charing Cross Embankment station, the sensation of being followed returned.

Quinn paused at the entrance to the station. The man emerged from the lift after the one Quinn had taken. If he was following Quinn, he was doing so in a manner that was both haphazard and conspicuous. It was far more likely that there was nothing to it.

Quinn waited for the man to pass him. If the man betrayed no sign of emotion or interest as he did so, and went purposefully on his way, it would show that Quinn had been mistaken. He would be able to dismiss the stranger's earlier fixed stare as mere eccentricity. Perhaps the man had stared at Quinn as he might stare into space. The bitterness of his expression was entirely unconnected to Quinn. And how did he know, really, that it was bitterness that was written in those features? He could not look inside the man's heart. Perhaps that was simply the expression his face assumed when in repose.

But as the man reached the threshold of the Tube station, he turned decisively towards Quinn. His face was lit up in the cold glare of the sun. That same bitter expression was in place, as if it had been sculpted into his features. There was no mistaking it. This was a deliberate provocation. Quinn felt the heat rise in his face.
Who was this man? What did he want with him?

He noticed the man was wearing brown leather gloves. For some reason the detail struck him as sinister. It was not a particularly cold day. To his policeman's mind, the only reason a man might don gloves on a day like today was to commit a crime.

He watched the man cross the Embankment and then lost sight of him behind a London plane tree. The only possible conclusion was that he was hiding – waiting for Quinn to make a move before following him.

Quinn conjured up an image of the man's face and mentally ran through the archive of his memories to see if he could find a match. He could only think that the man had some connection to one of his old cases. His age would suggest a case from the distant past. The bitterness was consistent with long years wasting away behind bars.

Quinn tried to deduce his way to the man's identity. He had obviously not received a capital sentence, which meant he was not a murderer. Some lesser but still serious crime. Manslaughter, perhaps. The gloves, perhaps, were worn from habit: the habit of the professional housebreaker. And yet the peculiar ravage of his face suggested a ruined reputation. Was he, perhaps, the perpetrator of serial frauds? Something snagged, an emotional memory that went back further than Quinn had expected, to a time before he had become a policeman. But he could not translate it into a precise recollection.

What he ought to do was confront the man. But all at once a strong sense of repugnance came over him. Whatever it was that had carved that expression on to the man's face, it was not something Quinn wanted to get to the bottom of.