The Dark Palace--Murder and mystery in London, 1914 (33 page)

The manager swallowed as if he was in danger of vomiting. But he managed to say, ‘I will see to it.' With that he rushed out of the bathroom.

Quinn continued to steer Eloise away from the grim scene. And she continued to resist, looking over her shoulder at Berenger. She was plagued by the old question: ‘Why? Why would he do this?'

‘We may never know.'

‘It must have been you … what you said to him.'

‘I made clear that it was not a serious matter.' Quinn caught Inchball's recriminatory eye again. ‘If anything, I made rather too light of the affair. It was to do with what happened in Cecil Court the other night. The business with the woman and … well, you remember the dog. Waechter claims that it was all a publicity stunt – and that Berenger was behind it all.'

‘Paul?'

‘That is what Waechter claims.'

Eloise shook her head slowly.

‘Perhaps these words are a confession? By perpetrating the hoax, Berenger considered himself to have betrayed his art?' Quinn's tone was absent. He was voicing his thoughts aloud rather than addressing Eloise.

Her head-shaking denial became more emphatic. ‘I do not believe Paul had anything to do with it.'

‘Then who?'

‘Waechter! Who else? He is the one who betrayed his art! Yes! Do you not see? He denied his responsibility for the act. It is as simple as that. And Paul … betrayed! The worst betrayal. Paul would not say anything against his friend. Would not contradict him. And so, this … Paul, dear Paul … he held Waechter in such esteem, such love … he could not recover from this betrayal.'

‘But why would Waechter try to blame Berenger?'

‘Because he is a coward. Even this trivial thing he does not want to be blamed for – after all the charges he faces in Austria. He does not want any more of the trouble. Not here. And, also, because he knew that Paul never would contradict him. He was relying on Paul's loyalty. He knew … he knew what Paul would do.'

‘You cannot believe he foresaw this and still accused his friend?'

‘You do not know Konrad Waechter.'

Quinn nodded. It was true. He did not know Konrad Waechter. But he felt that he was getting to know him a little better.

Q
uinn was pacing the corridor outside Eloise's room when Hartmann and Waechter arrived.

‘Gentlemen.'

‘What's going on, Inspector?' It was Hartmann who made the demand. He seemed both anxious and bullish.

‘I'm afraid I have some very bad news for you. Paul Berenger took his own life earlier this evening.'

Quinn watched Waechter closely. Was the director surprised? It was difficult to say. Certainly a kind of energy seemed to enter his expression, an energy that could have been taken for surprise.

Perhaps Waechter had not known that Berenger would go this far. At the same time, Quinn sensed that Waechter drew strength from what he had just been told. As if the outcome had exceeded his expectations.

Yes, now that he thought about it, that energy in his face could just as easily be interpreted as exultation.

Hartmann at least had the decency to be shocked. He held a splayed hand over his face and muttered something dark and anguished in German. Then he asked Quinn: ‘But why?'

‘He left a note, of sorts. A message written in the condensation on his mirror. It has gone now. But I wrote it down.' Quinn showed them the words.

Hartmann shook his head in bemusement.

Quinn thought he detected a twitch play across Waechter's lips.

‘Herr Waechter? Is something amusing you?' Quinn realized that he wanted to hurt Waechter. He wanted to make him feel responsible for Berenger's death. He wanted him to suffer pangs of guilt over it. As he had over Miss Dillard's.

Waechter's expression became duly solemn. He glared threateningly at Quinn. ‘
Off coursse
not.'

‘How did he do it?' wondered Hartmann.

‘He opened a wrist in the bath and bled out. We were waiting to talk to him about the allegation Herr Waechter made against him.'

‘Allegation? What is this, Waechter?'

Waechter waved a hand dismissively. It was nothing, he suggested. A trifle.

Quinn needed to keep the pressure up on Waechter. ‘Mademoiselle Eloise was able to translate the note for me.
A man who betrays his art betrays his soul.
Is that correct?'

Both men nodded confirmation.

‘What do you think he meant by it? Herr Waechter?'

Waechter shrugged, as if he couldn't possibly imagine. ‘Berenger
vanted
to be a great artist of the stage. He did not view the kinema as true art. It has to do with that perhaps?' He hardly sounded convinced by his own theory.

Hartmann was suddenly distraught on behalf of his female star – a delayed reaction, but one which hit him hard. ‘But Eloise? My dear Eloise was there?'

‘I'm afraid so. I couldn't prevent her. Perhaps you should both go and see her now. There is nothing to be gained from viewing the body. The living are more in need of your attention than the dead.'

And now Quinn felt his own lips twitch. He was playing his own game, out-manipulating the arch-manipulator. He knocked on Eloise's door.

Somehow Quinn managed to engineer it that Waechter went in first. It was not so difficult to arrange. The director appeared to be in a hurry to see her. Indeed, his eagerness was practically unseemly. Quinn's intervention, which came to him unprompted, was to push in front of Hartmann and close the door behind him, excluding the producer.

He wanted to see Eloise's reaction to Waechter alone.

She greeted him with a howl. It was a ferocious explosion of inarticulate recrimination.

Quinn's eye was on Waechter. Again he had the sense of an energy entering the man. He seemed to be absorbing the force of Eloise's uninhibited emotion. But instead of being chastened by it, he was himself enlivened. Enlarged. It seemed that this was what he lived for, for moments like this, moments of raw, violent, powerful emotion, viscerally expressed.

He basked in her outburst. He held his head at a provocative angle, inviting her slap. And when it came, he smiled appreciatively.

It occurred to Quinn that if the Austrian really was responsible for the incident in Cecil Court, everything he had done had been designed to lead to a moment such as this. He recognized in Waechter the same motivation as he had observed in certain homicidal maniacs, who commit their crimes in order to create and experience the emotional reverberations.

Perhaps Waechter's original crime was trivial. A theatrical deception. Arguably a victimless crime, unless one counted those who had been hoodwinked: Quinn himself, and the public who had fallen for the illusion through the accounts in the papers. But it had led to the death of one man. And had caused the suffering that streaked and tenderized Eloise's face.

Her pain brought to mind thoughts of Miss Dillard again. The feel of her taut convulsions as he had carried her over his shoulder had entered his muscles. It was more than a memory. It was part of him now.

He decided that there were a number of offences under which he could charge Waechter, including perverting the course of justice, conspiracy to effect a public nuisance and effecting a public nuisance. He could probably think of more. Someone had broken into a morgue and stolen a body part. He mustn't forget that.

He wondered if his own remorse – tears held back in an unacknowledged throb in his throat, a stinging hypersensitivity in his eyes – was influencing his decision to make Waechter pay for what he had done.

In the meantime, Hartmann was hammering at the door for admittance. The banging, together with Eloise's continued railing, was making it hard for Quinn to concentrate.

W
ith the Courts of Justice at one end and the dome of St Paul's overshadowing the other, Fleet Street seemed to exist as a thoroughfare between two opposing systems of morality. However, critics of the industry that dominated the street might argue that it served rather as a moral bypass, a place where the moral compass simply failed to function. It was perhaps appropriate that the presses were most often rolling at night, when both the church and the judiciary tactfully withdrew from sight.

The offices of the
Daily Clarion
occupied three floors of a grand five-storey building closer to the legal end of the street. An advertising agency and a magazine publishing company, both also owned by Harry Lennox, had the other floors.

The mighty printing presses themselves were on the ground floor, throwing their iron weight behind the flimsy ephemeral stories that their human collaborators spun upstairs. They were, in fact, visible from the street, as Lennox had had the idea to open up the front of the building and fit vast sheets of plate glass, which extended the full height of the first storey. He also kept the printing presses floodlit through the night. It was a stroke of marketing genius on his part, symbolizing the
Clarion
's role as a Beacon of Truth that could never be extinguished. Lennox was inordinately proud of those plate-glass windows and insisted on their being cleaned twice a day. Every time he entered the building, he checked the glass to ensure that they matched the standards of cleanliness that he required. Not a speck or smear could be allowed to get in the way of this vision of industry and integrity.

The composing room and some commercial offices took the first floor, while the editorial offices were on the second. Content was sent down through the boards in vacuum-driven tubes by the sub-editors to be turned into copy by the compositors on the copy-desk. The constant clack and tap of the linotype machines sounded like the beaks of countless mechanical birds pecking the ground for grains of news.

The edition of Monday, 20 April 1914, had already gone to press when Bittlestone restored the telephone receiver to its stand. His hand was shaking, so it took him several attempts to jab it into the holder. As he leapt up from his desk, he was already shouting, ‘Stop press!'

Finch was in his office with his feet on his desk, about to light his customary cigar to celebrate putting another edition successfully to bed. He viewed Bittlestone's intervention with sour suspicion, as if he believed the journalist was motivated merely by a desire to prevent him enjoying his smoke. ‘What did you do to your eye?'

Bittlestone's hand went self-consciously up to his face. He had forgotten that he had taken off the dark spectacles, as they had made it difficult for him to work. The editorial offices were not as well illuminated at the printing presses on the ground floor.

‘Nothing … I … Look, didn't you hear me? We have to stop the presses.'

‘This had better be good, Bittlestone. No – it had better be better than good. It had better be
sensational
.'

‘I've just had a call from a source of mine. A bell hop at the Savoy. Paul Berenger, the motion picture actor, has been found dead. It appears to be suicide. He climbed in the hot bath tub and opened his wrists. The place is in uproar.'

The editor was on his feet now. ‘What are you waiting for? Get over there!'

Bittlestone took the stairs two at a time, rushing towards the thundering rumble of the presses. Finch's remark about his eye prompted him to feel for his dark glasses in his jacket pocket. He must have left them on his desk. No matter. The story was more important than his vanity, although there was perhaps a practical consideration. He knew from experience that the less obtrusive he made himself the more likely he was to get the story. His wound would only draw attention. He hesitated at the bottom of the stairs and was on the verge of going back for the glasses when the sight of the brilliantly illuminated, constantly turning rollers spurred him to go on.

The explosion happened as he walked across the foyer in front of the presses. There was no warning. No premonitory change in the air pressure. No sound of running footsteps. There was just a blinding flash, a boom so loud that it seemed to hollow out his ear drums, and a deep shooting pain burrowing into his eyes. He felt himself lifted by the blast. As if the sound of the explosion had formed a giant hand capable of taking hold of a man and throwing him off his feet. A rain of fine shards fell around him and into him. The strange thing was the unaccountable thing: there was no smoke.

The weight of the world came up to hit him on the back of the head as he landed. Then everything went black.

M
acadam kept the motor ticking over as he waited for a gap in the traffic. But the Strand was for the moment packed with vehicles, their headlights piercing the darkness with questing impatience, their horn blasts like the bleats of tethered animals.

Quinn felt the throb of the Model T's engine in every joint of his bones. He was thinking of his father. He peered out into the night, expecting at any moment to see Grant-Sissons. Lurking beneath a street light perhaps, or sinking back into a shop doorway. It was truer to say he was willing the man to appear.

Two suicides in three days. It was as if the universe was forcing him to confront his past. And Grant-Sissons was the nearest he had come in years to finding answers to the questions of the past.

‘You let him go, guv?'

Quinn turned to face Inchball's question. ‘For now, yes.'

‘So he's to get off scot-free for making a bleedin' monkey of us all?'

‘I would hardly describe the reception he received from Mademoiselle Eloise as scot-free.' But Quinn knew this was disingenuous. Eloise's rage was meat and drink to Waechter. He had lapped it up. ‘At any rate, I need to confer with Sir Edward. He might wish for the whole Cecil Court affair to be swept under the carpet. We did not exactly cover ourselves in glory over that. Pressing a prosecution would only bring a dubious episode back into the public eye. In addition, it would serve to increase Waechter's notoriety.'