Summon Up the Blood (35 page)

‘So where to, then?’ came from the front.

‘Very well,’ said Marjoribanks. ‘Limehouse.’

Venables smiled. ‘Limehouse? Blimey! I thought we’d go to yours.’

‘I keep a residence in Limehouse. For evenings such as this.’

The taxi lurched forwards and stalled. The driver cursed. ‘Beggin’ your pardon, gentlemen. I shall have to get out and start her up.’

‘Don’t mind us,’ said Venables. ‘Take all the time you need.’

But the hand he put up to Marjoribanks’ cheek was brushed roughly away.

When Quinn came out of the club he saw Macadam at the front of the taxi, readying himself to crank the starter; at least, that was what he was pretending to do. In fact, he was keeping an eye out for his guv’nor.

‘You managed to get a taxi, I see.’

‘Yes. Requisitioned it for the night from a pal of mine. It’s a Unic. French model. Takes a bit of getting used to after the Ford.’

‘We are fortunate you have so many pals, Macadam.’

Macadam raised his hands and formed circles with his fingers which he held over his goggles. ‘You’ve got a mask on, sir.’

‘Does he still wear his?’

‘Yes, sir. Black one.’

‘Then I will keep on this one.’ What this meant, of course, was that Quinn had not retrieved his bowler. Perhaps it was for the best.

Quinn moved round to the far side of the taxi and got in, sandwiching Marjoribanks between himself and Neville.

‘What’s this?’ cried Marjoribanks. ‘You?’

‘You left Phaedo in a bad way back there.’

‘Anything is permitted at the Panther Club. He knows that. He will have no complaints.’

‘If he lives.’

The taxi’s engine rattled into life.

Macadam got back in. ‘Sorry for the delay, gentlemen. Ah, I see you have gained an additional friend. Still Limehouse, is it?’

‘Limehouse?’ said Quinn. ‘Of course.’

The vehicle pulled away.

Quinn thought back to the beginning of the case, when Macadam had driven him east to Shadwell Police Station. He looked at Marjoribanks’ masked face. His attention focused on the other man’s mouth, which fell away weakly on one side. ‘You were the beggar who laughed at me.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Marjoribanks. ‘I sometimes don a costume, in order to move among the locals without arousing suspicion.’

‘You should have worn it when you went shopping for rope,’ said Quinn. Marjoribanks started in his seat.

The taxi headed east along the Strand and on to Fleet Street. Silas Quinn settled back. Marjoribanks seemed little inclined to talk, and so Quinn began a speculative monologue, trusting that Marjoribanks would interrupt him whenever he got a detail wrong:

‘When did it begin – the pain? When you weaned yourself off opium? How courageous an act that was, to let the pain back into your life? But oh, the toll that it must have taken on you. Not only did you allow yourself to suffer physical agonies once more, there were the memories too. Everything that had been numbed and buried in the years of addiction, now came rushing back into life.

‘And with your emergence from opium addiction came the realization of your loss. Your art! Utterly sacrificed! And for what? It all started when Sophie Armstrong fell pregnant with your child. You needed her out of the way, her and her unborn brat. No one could blame you for that. But fate had saved up a savage irony for you. Once you had accomplished your goal, you discovered you were no longer able to create. Your talent had deserted you. Such is the perversity of genius! Tell me, when was all this? Seventeen, eighteen years ago? It’s interesting to reflect – is it not? – that if the foetus had been allowed to go to full term and the child had been born – a boy, was it not, or so the quack who aborted him informed you – he would have been about the age of Jimmy Neville the day you bled him. Was it that unborn child you killed then, and killed again, repeatedly, with the three other victims? The child who had drained the life from your art . . . now you set yourself to drain the life from him.’

A groan of suffering was Marjoribanks’ only answer.

‘If art was your great ideal, then Oscar Wilde – the man who had attempted to turn his life into a work of art – was your hero. Somehow in the person of Jimmy Neville, the unborn child who had destroyed your creative impulses was merged with the shabby renters and the upper-class homosexual lover who had destroyed Oscar. And the pain, the pain that you had felt on ending your addiction – suddenly you found relief from it. As the blade went into Jimmy Neville’s throat, and his pain began, your pain eased. The techniques you had taught yourself practising on cats came into their own.’

‘I have allowed you to spout your slanderous lies,’ said Marjoribanks through clenched teeth. ‘But I have admitted nothing.’

‘Lies? Why deny your genius? Remember, whatever is realized is right. You took that as your moral as well as your artistic code. What else was it that Oscar Wilde said? “To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.” Do not deny your soul, I beg you!’

‘What do you want from me?’ The question was wrung out from deep within Marjoribanks. It seemed that at that moment he was afraid of Quinn.

Quinn remained silent for the rest of the journey.

They left the main road behind, and with it any street lighting. The moon shivered above, as white as a bone.

The beams of the taxi’s headlights severed the darkness, calling into being the desolate landscape of the area, the endless brick fields, dotted with ghostly ruins, like giant bottles half-buried in the ground. The acrid aftertaste of chemical processes hung in the air.

It seemed impossible that any human being could live here. The empty factories and looming chimneys that flashed momentarily into vision were themselves the residents, wraithlike and retiring.

Marjoribanks directed Macadam into a street of grim houses, some with broken windows, others boarded up. The taxi juddered to a stop with a small explosion, behind the looming shape of a parked motor van.

‘Is that what you used to transport the bodies?’ asked Quinn. ‘It was your intention to place them in locations that would mock the foundations of the Empire, was it not?’

‘You are wrong about that,’ said Marjoribanks quietly. ‘Quite wrong. The purpose was to fortify. To strengthen the country’s institutions for what is to come.’

The house appeared to be derelict. It no longer had its original front door, but instead was secured by a crude board, roughly hinged and fastened with a massive padlock. Marjoribanks struggled with the key and swung the board open. He gestured for Quinn and Venables to enter first.

They stepped into an impenetrable blackness. It seemed to hold within it invisible fingers that groped their faces and probed their eyes. It held something else too: a foul and pervasive stench.

There was the scrape and flare of a match. Marjoribanks lit a lantern. Then he pulled the board closed, and secured it from inside with the same padlock.

He turned to face Quinn. ‘The final mystery is oneself,’ he said.

Quinn recognized it as a quote from Wilde.

‘Here is where I keep the mystery of myself.’

Quinn looked around, frowning.

‘It is here that I keep the blood,’ explained Marjoribanks.

‘The smell?’ enquired Quinn.

‘Blood is organic matter. It goes off.’ Almost as an afterthought, he added: ‘Oh, and I have a boy downstairs, draining.’

‘Will you show him to us?’

‘Of course.’

Marjoribanks became suddenly self-conscious, almost shy, as he shone the light down into the cellar. His movements seemed constrained by a kind of reticent pride. Quinn realized that this was a momentous occasion for him. He was like an artist about to unveil his masterpiece, half-afraid that it was not the great work he believed it to be, perhaps even more afraid that it was.

‘Be careful. Some of the steps are missing.’ The solicitude of a murderer is strangely touching, Quinn realized.

Venables descended first, now utterly cowed. There had been no bursts of loutish laughter for some time. Quinn followed, his feet cautiously questing the darkness beneath him, arms outstretched so that he could feel the clammy, crumbling brickwork on either side.

Each step took him deeper into the stench of rotting blood.

The lantern was little use, its beam blocked out by his own back. Whenever he reached a missing step, he always felt as if he was falling into an infinite abyss, that the next step would never come, and that he would fall forever through the enveloping blackness.

But at last, with a final lurch, he reached the ground, which was gritty and loose under foot.

Venables and Quinn instinctively huddled together as they waited for Marjoribanks to join them. They looked up into the beam of his lantern, not daring to look behind them at whatever might be lurking in the darkness. The only indication of what that might be was an irregular dripping sound that echoed coldly.

Marjoribanks stepped between them and held the lantern high. They could not resist looking in the direction of its beam.

The body was naked, suspended upside down by the ankles above a metal pail.

Quinn confronted the blood-streaked face. ‘Petter,’ he murmured.

Marjoribanks must have misheard him. ‘Yes. It is better! Better that I should have his blood, his energy. That the power that is released by killing him is harnessed in me to bring about the new age of Set, the age of chaos and destruction that will make the world anew.’ Marjoribanks moved the lantern and showed them the pails of dark liquid that stood around the edges of the room. ‘That is my work now. That is my art. My life.’

‘And what of your fiancée?’

‘She would approve. When I was in New York I met certain individuals, initiates in the highest order of an esoteric society. Jane was one of their number. Their high priestess, you might say. Some held her to be an avatar of Isis. We talked about many things and undertook magical operations that were preparatory to those I have performed alone.’

‘She does not know about this?’

‘Not yet. I have performed all this on my own initiative. It was necessary to maintain absolute secrecy, in order not to jeopardize the operation. When she finds out, I have no doubt that she will celebrate my acts.’

Quinn looked back towards the suspended corpse. He saw a red droplet fall from the wound and join the bucket of blood below.

‘Sin and suffering,’ said Marjoribanks. ‘Beautiful, holy things.’

‘Modes of perfection,’ added Quinn.

‘This is the most profound, the most perfect symbol ever created,’ remarked Marjoribanks.

‘But the smell,’ objected Quinn. ‘And these foul surroundings. Do they not rather mar the perfection?’

‘But the smell is central to what I am seeking to create!’ cried Marjoribanks. ‘It is the stench of corruption. The body is cleansed and perfected by the draining of the blood, it becomes an object of art, rather than life. And the driving force of life is revealed to be a stinking mess of corruption.’

Quinn nodded slowly, as if in dawning comprehension. And perhaps he had finally understood the extent of Lord Marjoribanks’ insanity.

‘Do you approve of what I have done?’

‘More than that. I am in awe of it.’

‘Do you remember what you said? That it is not easy to kill someone. You must understand how hard it has been for me to do this. You must understand what I have suffered to bring about this work.’

‘I do.’

‘You asked for my help.’

‘Yes.’

‘I will help you. I will show you how to do it. How to kill.’

There was a bench against one wall. Quinn noticed a stack of bowler hats. He realized now what he had sensed missing from the victims’ clothes that day in the Golden Lane mortuary.

Marjoribanks crossed to the bench and put down the lantern. Something metallic glinted in the light.

Quinn looked uneasily towards Venables. ‘Him?’

Marjoribanks smiled strangely. He took down a brown bottle and a rag from a high shelf. With the absorption of a creative artist, he unstoppered the bottle and tipped some of its contents into the cloth. A twist of ether worked its way into all the other smells of the cellar. He held the cloth out for Quinn to take.

Venables’ eyes flashed alarm; Quinn sought to reassure him with a look of his own that he hoped inspired trust. But by now, Marjoribanks had gripped the young man from behind. Venables’ struggles petered out as Quinn held the cloth over his face. Marjoribanks eased his inert body to the ground.

‘Shall I undress him?’ said Quinn.

‘This has nothing to do with him,’ answered Marjoribanks. ‘This is between you and me. And for what is about to pass between us, there can be no witnesses.’

Marjoribanks began to undress.

His hand enclosed the object that had flashed in the lantern beam. ‘A cutthroat razor. Like the one you once tried to wield against your fellow-lodger. Now is the time for you to overcome your fastidious nature and to discover what you are capable of.’

He came towards Quinn as if he would attack him, with the lithe athletic spring of a hunter. But at the final moment, he stopped and held the razor out, the handle towards Quinn. As Quinn took the weapon, Marjoribanks threw back his head, making his throat as large as he could. ‘Add my blood to the blood of my victims. Perfect me, as I perfected them.’

‘You? But why?’

‘The pain always returns. The blade goes in, the pain eases. But it always returns. You will end the pain forever. It is the last act in the operation. Perform this and the new age of Set will begin. Chaos and destruction on a scale not known before.’

‘But what of Jane Lennox? What of your plans to marry?’

‘She will understand. More than that, she will rejoice.’

Quinn reached out and took the blade to the other man’s throat. But the intimacy of the moment, the man’s nakedness before him, the startling immediacy of his eyes, the soft, dark pleading of those eyes, robbed him of his courage.

‘Must I make you practise on him first?’ murmured Marjoribanks, his lips barely moving.

Quinn looked once more at Petter’s savagely inverted body. Like a long-lost friend rushing to embrace him, the rage flooded through his veins and fortified his sinews. He felt it enter the tips of his fingers. He tensed the muscles of his whole arm as he tightened his grip on the razor. And then he pushed with all his gathered strength.