The Dark Palace--Murder and mystery in London, 1914 (36 page)

Grant-Sissons's hands stirred under the blanket. The bandaged right hand emerged. ‘And this … I inflicted this on her.' With his other hand, he worked away at the bandage and began to unwind.

‘Father, no.'

But Grant-Sissons was deaf to his son's entreaties. ‘To punish myself, for not loving her enough, for allowing her to take part in our work, I exposed my own hand to the same levels of radiation that she had received. It should have been me in the first place, after all.'

He continued to peel away the bandage, which was now discoloured with the seepages from his wounds. And now the bandage fell away together. A horrible discoloured dressing was revealed, clinging to his flesh. Grant-Sissons winced and teased the dressing away, discarding it on the floor.

He held up his hand as if it was a trophy, or a prize vegetable in the county fair. In the glimmering of the oil lamp, Quinn could see a glistening, misshapen mess of raw flesh. The skin was entirely missing. A number of angry, ugly tumours erupted from the surface, moist, suppurating yellowish clumps of mutated cells.

‘Look at it! Look at it, Inspector! Do you really believe that I could do what you accuse me of with this hand?'

The hand in question dropped. Grant-Sissons fell back on to his camp bed and closed his eyes. But he was still conscious, and he had more to say to Quinn. ‘If I were not determined to suffer everything that she suffered, I would ask you one remaining favour, Inspector.'

‘What?'

‘I would ask you to kill me. I know you have a reputation for being somewhat trigger-happy. I might have used your suspicions against me to provoke you to shoot me. But I have decided against that. It is a recourse that is not available to me. It would be an evasion on my part. A terrible act of cowardice and weakness. I must see this through to the end.'

‘I would do it, if you wish.'

‘I know you would. But I do not wish it. I do not deserve it. I do not deserve release. It would only serve to complicate your investigation, I fear. And I could not lay another death on your conscience. So I will ask you a different favour.'

‘Yes?'

‘After I am gone, will you look out for Malcolm? Keep an eye on him, for me. A brotherly eye, I might almost say.'

‘What do you mean? What is he to me?'

But Grant-Sissons's face was twisted into a sharp grimace. He was lost in his pain. And nothing other than his pain reached him or had any meaning for him.

Quinn turned to regard the young man whose care Grant-Sissons had apparently entrusted to him. They both seemed aware of the complications of the relationship that existed between them. At the very least, if what Grant-Sissons had said was true, Quinn's father had been in love with the younger man's mother. But with that ‘brotherly', Grant-Sissons seemed to be hinting at even more.

‘If you have any compassion in you, you would kill him now, while he sleeps.'

‘He asked me not to do it.'

‘But what about me? He wasn't thinking of me. Of what I will have to go through, seeing him suffer the torments of a horrible death.'

‘I cannot do it.'

‘That's cruel, you know.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘Do you believe what he said?'

‘I'm not sure what he said.'

‘That we are brothers. Half-brothers. I think his meaning was clear enough.'

‘Has he said anything of this to you before?'

‘He has hinted at it. In all honesty, he wasn't much of a father. But that was not because he didn't acknowledge me as his own. I even believed he loved me, in his own way. There was rather too much of duty in it. And he was always a little distracted, shall we say. But I believe he fought his battles on my behalf, to leave something for me. It all came to nothing, alas.'

‘I had never thought of myself as having a brother.'

‘That need not change. I don't require looking after. I'm not a child.'

‘What will you do?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘When he's dead.'

‘Carry on his work, of course. I have been working with him on a method of producing three-dimensional motion pictures. We have a patent pending.'

Quinn closed his eyes briefly, blocking out the chaos of the workshop. He imagined himself holding his gun to Grant-Sissons's temple and pulling the trigger. ‘I wish you luck,' he said.

O
skar Hartmann held the monocle up to his eye and squinted through it. He closed his other eye to hold it in place. The room flickered and darkened. The glass lens was coated with a layer of translucent grey tinting, as if it had been held in the smoke of a charcoal fire.

He took the monocle away from his eye and examined it. It was now that he noticed the hairline crack running through it.

Why would anyone send him such an object? A cracked monocle. It was possible that it had been damaged in transit. He examined the padded envelope it had been sent in. His name was written clearly in green ink. There was no note, or invoice enclosed. The sender's address was not given on the outside.

He looked through it again. The glass disk had no refractive effect on what was observed through it; that is to say, it was not a functioning lens, just plain glass, apart from the colour. So the purpose of it was presumably to protect a single sensitive eye from the effects of bright sunlight? Hartmann himself suffered from no such condition, and could say with certainty that he had not ordered the object on his own account.

And yet there was something satisfying about squinting at the world through it. The layer of colour softened the harshness of existence somewhat, provided a barrier between the observer and the observed. Today, of all days, he felt the need for such a boundary.

He wondered if it were something Waechter had ordered. Perhaps he was thinking of exchanging his eye patch for a shaded monocle? Was that a lesser or a greater affectation? Hartmann could not decide.

Hartmann did not object to Waechter using the Visionary Productions' office as a postal address, but the use of his name, without having first asked, caused him some mild annoyance. Did this now mean that Hartmann could expect a bill for the article in the next post?

Of course, he would overlook it, as he did all of Waechter's misdemeanours. One had to indulge a genius. The expense would not be great, and it was possible the object was intended as a prop in some future film. In which case, it was perfectly valid to order it through the company. But he would ask him about it when he next saw him. He had a duty to do that at least.

At any rate, with the flaw running across it, it was useless, whatever purpose Waechter had in mind for it. It would have to be returned.

But of course, Waechter had other things on his mind at the moment.

He had left his director at the Savoy last night. The scene with Eloise had been upsetting for them all. His priority, once that fool of a policeman had let him into the room, was to get the two of them apart. He had escorted Waechter to the bar, although it pained him to leave Eloise on her own. Fortunately, he had run into Diaz and his nephew, who had come to the Savoy in expectation of meeting Berenger. The actor had always demonstrated a commendable sympathy for the world's downtrodden. He no doubt discerned some quality of oppression in the Chileans' eyes and been drawn to them. In Hartmann's view, it made him something of a soft touch. Perhaps it had even contributed to his unfortunate demise.

At any rate, Diaz and his nephew's appearance was fortuitous. He could send them upstairs to be with Eloise until he had calmed Waechter down.

Of course, it was a terrible blow for them all, Berenger's death. They were a family. Hartmann had worked hard to foster that feeling, to keep them together. But Waechter might be expected to bear it more heavily than anyone. He and Berenger went back a long way. The actor had starred in all of Waechter's films, and had even worked with him as a mime in the theatre in Vienna. It was impossible to think of a Waechter film without Berenger in it.

And yet, he had to admit it, there had been something that unsettled him about Waechter's reaction. The gleam in Waechter's eye was not the dewy film of grief. But a self-absorbed, chilling excitement.

Hartmann held the monocle up to his eye once more. The world was dark enough without viewing it through a tinted lens, he decided.

L
ight filled the room. Quinn stood with his back to the window, as if he didn't have the courage to face it. But in truth it took more courage to confront the wall in front of him.

At the top left-hand corner he had pinned two enlargements of frames taken from Waechter's
Totentanz
, showing respectively Lyudmila Lyudmova and Heinrich Klint. Next to them was a police photograph of the partially chewed eye he had retrieved from Cecil Court.

A pathologist's report concerning the eye had just come in. In short, the medical opinion was that the eye had ceased to be a part of a living organism several days at least before Friday, 17 April. The pathologist even ventured to suggest the possibility that the eye had been removed from a cadaver. This was consistent with Waechter's version of events, namely that the incident was a hoax. Who was responsible for that hoax had yet to be decided. A photograph of Berenger slumped in a tub of dark liquid raised the possibility of his culpability. Quinn had to admit, Waechter was a far more likely culprit. Quinn's instinct was to bring him in and hold him. But Sir Edward had not yet reached a decision on what they should do with Herr Waechter.

And then there was the question of the eye itself. It seemed likely that it was the eye stolen from the body of Edna Corbett. Was it a coincidence that she was a victim in a case Quinn himself had investigated? Or had everything been designed from the outset to draw Quinn in? But into what?

If this was the case, was Waechter really behind it? Or was he merely the instrument of other, more sinister agents?

Quinn's eye was naturally drawn to a photograph which occupied the centre of the wall: of Dolores Novak's body on the bed in the rented room.

‘Penny for 'em, guv?'

Quinn's brow rippled with annoyance at Inchball's invitation. To be asked to share one's thoughts was inevitably a disruption to thinking. However, it was often by talking through a case with his sergeants that he was able to make progress. ‘When do we get the full medical examiner's report on Dolores Novak?'

‘Should be this week sometime, I reckon.'

‘I want it today.'

‘I have a pal at the morgue, sir.' Macadam had a pal everywhere, it seemed. ‘I shall see if anything can be done.'

‘You think it can tell us anythin' we don' already know? She 'ad 'er throat cut and 'er eye plucked out. There's your cause of death, guv, with respec'.'

‘It might tell us something about the weapon. Or weapons. Presumably a different implement was used to cut her from that which gouged out the eye. They found no eye at the scene of crime?'

‘No, guv.'

Quinn looked at a photograph of Novak. ‘And there has been no sighting of Novak?'

‘Nothing as yet, sir.'

‘I would like some scene of crime photographs from last night's bomb outrage. And can we not get our hands on a photograph of Lennox?'

‘Do you think the bomb blast is connected to Dolores, sir?' asked Macadam.

‘And what's it all got to do with bloody German spies?' Inchball shook his head dubiously.

‘Possibly nothing,' said Quinn. ‘It doesn't matter that we were looking for spies and found …' Quinn gestured to the wall. ‘This. Last night Lennox told me he received an anonymous missive containing a damaged playing card. The eye of the Jack had been poked through. The address was written in green ink. If we are looking for connections, we have one here. Two men receive anonymous deliveries written in green ink. Both attend the party at Visionary Productions. Two disconnected violent acts occur as the sequels to these events. It was at the party that Lord Dunwich met and left with Dolores Novak. So if there is some link between Lord Dunwich receiving the billiard ball and the murder of Dolores Novak – if it is the same person behind both acts – then it is someone who was at that party and saw them together.' Quinn thought back to his own impressions of Dunwich's behaviour that night. ‘There was something about the way he looked at her. A gleam in his eye that was more than desire. Almost, you might say – someone observing them might have concluded – that Lord Dunwich had fallen in love with her.' Quinn turned to Macadam. ‘Have you finished your review of the names on the list Hartmann sent over?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘And?'

‘Nothing. No known criminals. I am just now cross-checking them with the companies in St Swithin's Lane.'

‘Very well. Get on with it.'

‘What do you want me to do, guv?'

Quinn looked uncertainly at the wall, avoiding Inchball's questioning gaze. He had no clear idea how to answer his sergeant. ‘Connections, Inchball, connections. That's what we must find. The question we must ask ourselves is this: what links the death of Dolores Novak and the bombing of the
Daily Clarion
?'

‘Sir?'

‘What is it, Macadam?'

‘I think I may have found something.'

Quinn turned from the wall and bent his head to avoid cracking it on the sloping ceiling.

‘The London Nitrate Company. According to the Stock Exchange Yearbook, Lennox and Lord Dunwich are both board members. Hartmann is given as the chairman. The other directors are all foreigners too, judging by their names.'

‘Nitrate?'

‘It's used in the manufacture of explosives, sir. Guncotton. If a war is coming, the control of nitrate supplies could prove decisive. Perhaps Hartmann is trying to frighten his board of directors in some way, so that they withdraw from the company and control passes to him, or to other men of his choosing? That is to say, fellow German nationals, or other foreign types. He could effectively cut off this country's access to nitrate and channel it all to Germany.'