Summon Up the Blood (8 page)

‘I – he gave it to me.’

‘Indeed. And why would he do that?’

‘He seemed to have a premonition that something bad was about to happen to him. He had had this portrait done by a street artist. He wanted someone to remember him as he was now.’

‘Why you?’

‘I don’t know. I can’t explain it. It is one of those things that cannot be explained. He was drawn to me for some reason. I asked the same question. But he ran off, without giving an answer.’

‘Very, very dangerous,’ decided Inchball.

‘What name did he give you?’ wondered Macadam.

Quinn hesitated. It was a good question. Suddenly he had the answer. ‘Daniel.’

‘Why Daniel?’ asked Macadam.

‘I don’t know. That was just the name . . .’ Instead of saying
that came to me
, Quinn said, ‘. . . he gave me.’ It was as if he was already beginning to believe in the details of his lie.

‘I don’t like it,’ said Inchball. ‘I don’t like it one bit.’

‘It’s not a bad name,’ said Macadam.

‘I don’t mean the bleeding name. I mean the whole thing. I don’t hold with all this subterfuge and pretence. We should go in as who we are. Straight up. Coppers. Making enquiries about a dead renter. Round them all up and throw them in the cells, if necessary. If they don’t like it, tough. One of them will squeal eventually.’

‘That is one approach,’ said Quinn. ‘And I do not rule it out entirely. However, before we resort to such measures, I feel it would be useful for me to familiarize myself with the world of our victim.’

‘What do you want
us
to do, sir?’ asked Macadam. ‘Stay on your back?’

‘Steady!’ said Inchball.

‘No. We simply do not have the resources for all three of us to be engaged in the same operation. Finish reviewing the files to see if our victim shows up as having any form. Then I want you to talk to tobacconists. Which ones stock opium-soaked Egyptian cigarettes? Who are their customers? Do they recognize the cigarette case? Also, try silversmiths and jewellers. It must have come from somewhere. And someone must have made that inscription.’

‘Perhaps the murderer is skilled in engraving?’ suggested Macadam. ‘It may seem unlikely, but I myself once took an evening class in metal engraving. It’s not that difficult, if you have a reasonable dexterity and are used to working with tools.’

‘Blimey!’ interjected Inchball. ‘Is there anything you haven’t taken an evening class in?’

‘It became quite a passion of mine, at the time. I thought it would be a good way of earning a few extra bob. Still have the burin at home somewhere.’

‘The
what
?’ snapped Inchball.

‘The burin. It’s what you call the tool. The graver. Haven’t used it for years. I could bring it in if you’d like to see it?’

Quinn found Macadam’s boyish assumption that others would share his enthusiasms touching. He did not have it in him to be discouraging. ‘As you wish, Sergeant.’

Inchball evidently felt no such compunction. ‘I’ll show you what you can do with your bloomin’ burin.’

‘Macadam’s theory is plausible,’ cut in Quinn. ‘The killer would naturally wish to limit the number of people he involved in his activities. A man may teach himself all manner of skills.’

As he made the observation, Quinn drew himself up self-consciously. He imagined himself at the centre of a crowd of strangers, all of whom had their gaze fixed upon him. The image was a premonition. He would go amongst a group of men whose lives he had often wondered about but never experienced. He would go amongst them to investigate them. And yet – the image seemed to be saying to him – he would find himself the object of their scrutiny.

And somewhere in that crowd of phantoms, one man closed his hand around a cutthroat razor.

Before he left for the evening, Quinn wrestled the telephone from Macadam one more time to make a call.

‘Am I speaking to Doctor Bugsby?’

‘You are. To whom am I speaking?’

‘You are speaking to Detective Inspector Quinn of the Special Crimes Department.’

‘Good evening to you, Inspector Quinn. How may I help you?’

‘You recently conducted a post-mortem examination of a body found at the London Docks in Shadwell.’

‘Ah, yes. The exsanguinated corpse. A very nasty business.’

‘May I ask you, did you make any test for opium poisoning?’

‘Why would I do that? It was obvious how the victim died. Massive haemorrhaging caused by a deep wound at the neck, which severed the external carotid artery.’

‘I was merely wondering whether the victim might have been drugged before he was bound and cut. And whether he was conscious or unconscious when he met his fate?’

‘It doesn’t make a difference to the cause of death.’

‘No. However, it may have made a difference to his sufferings. I have another reason for asking, however. We found a cigarette case, in which there were traces of opium-soaked tobacco. I wonder whether it is possible to tell if the victim may have smoked opium-soaked cigarettes.’

‘Impossible to say. All I can say for certain is that I saw no obvious signs of opium poisoning. However, given the extraordinary state of the cadaver, that is perhaps not surprising. And anyhow, the post-mortem changes in cases of opium poisoning are not marked. We might look for some turgidity in the cerebral vessels. But in this case, the almost entire lack of blood in any vessel would have confounded any such observation. Occasionally we see some subarachnoid effusion of serum at the base of the brain or around the spinal cord. There was none. You should know that there is no direct chemical test for the presence of opium and the only indirect test we have is highly unreliable. Certainly, the amount of the drug absorbed from smoking a cigarette would be too small to be conclusively detectable. Neither would it have been enough to render the victim unconscious, though it may have altered his perception of the experience.’

‘I see. Thank you, Doctor.’

‘Was there anything else, Inspector?’

‘When I examined the body, I was struck by the depth of the indentations left by the rope.’

‘Yes. He was tightly bound.’

‘I wondered if you recovered any material from those wounds.’

‘Material?’

‘Fibres, for example, such as might help us to identify the type of rope used to bind the victim.’

The line crackled emptily. Either the doctor’s answer had been swallowed up by the interference, or he had said nothing.

‘Doctor?’

‘That would be useful to you, would it?’

‘It may prove to be. One cannot be sure.’

‘Very well, I shall go back and look again at those wounds. I confess that the focus of my previous examination was on the numerous atypical features that the corpse exhibited. Perhaps I allowed myself to be distracted by them.’

‘If you discover anything, please be so kind as to send it to the forensics laboratory here at New Scotland Yard.’

‘Of course.’

‘Doctor, have you ever seen a case like this before? I mean, the blood. The draining of the blood.’

‘No. I have not.’

‘Do you have any expertise in criminal psychology, doctor?’

‘I know enough to say that you are dealing with a madman.’

‘My feeling, Doctor, is that one victim will not be enough for him.’

‘That is my feeling too, Inspector.’ There was another long crackle of static. At the end of it, Quinn heard: ‘. . . luck, Inspector.’ The line went dead.

S
ilas Quinn lived in a four-storey lodging house just off the Brompton Road. It was a respectable house in a pleasant location, close to Hyde Park and Exhibition Road. Quinn saw enough unpleasantness in his professional life; he wanted his home to be somewhere good, clean and wholesome.

On Saturday afternoons, if his duties allowed, he would sometimes visit one or other of the museums. His favourite was the Natural History. In truth, these days his duties rarely did allow. He vaguely had it in his head that it was months since he had last browsed the mineral galleries, or craned his neck at the giant fossils. It was, in fact, years.

From time to time, he wondered if it was strictly the call of duty that kept him away. Or rather, if his willingness to answer that call came from the fact that he simply found his work more absorbing than his leisure. A pastime, after all, is ultimately an empty activity. It lacks the point of a task, and falls far short of the purpose of a mission.

No doubt it is pleasant if one has the company of a friend, particularly a young and pretty friend of the female sex. But Quinn lacked such a resource. His visits to the museum were always solitary. He invariably left there more alone than when he went in, even if he had managed to consume an afternoon, and treated himself to tea and cakes in the tea room. The public scale of the buildings had a desolating effect.

Aware of his tendency to solitude, and wishing to guard against it, Quinn made heroic efforts at the house to forge relations with his fellow lodgers.

What was the point,
he said to himself,
of clearing the streets of killers and criminals, if he could not hold down a polite conversation with ordinary, decent people?

He made sure that those ordinary, decent people knew nothing about the nature of his work. To his fellow lodgers, he was simply Mr Quinn. He did not know if they speculated about what he did for a living. None of them had ever taken enough interest in him to ask.

It rather amused him that they might imagine him to be a clerk or a shopkeeper, or possibly a commercial traveller, given his irregular hours and occasional absences.

His landlady was a Mrs Ibbott. She had a daughter, Mary, who occupied his thoughts from time to time, in a manner of which he was not all together proud. It was a dangerous situation, very similar to one that had got him into trouble as a young man, about the time of his father’s suicide.

Perhaps that was why he had chosen this particular lodging in the first place. Not for its proximity to Exhibition Road, or its generously proportioned rooms, but because it reminded him of the most humiliating and miserable time of his life. It was the emotional equivalent of a dog returning to its vomit.

Of course, Mrs Ibbott and her daughter knew nothing of the episode in question, and he was determined that they never would. Was he taking a risk in living under their roof, or was he proving to himself, daily, that all that was in the past?

He opened the door to a familiar homely smell. The walls had soaked up the vapours of countless meaty reductions. So that now the aroma of food was permanent. For once, he was back in time for dinner. Usually, the lingering ghost of it was all that was left to him.

The hinges creaked – as they did every night – as he closed the door. Mrs Ibbott herself peeped out from the kitchen to see who it was. ‘Mr Quinn! I wondered if it was you.’

‘Good evening, Mrs Ibbott.’ Quinn defensively clutched the furled newspaper he had bought from a vendor on the way home, as if he were intending to beat his landlady away with it. He held his bowler in the other hand, out in front of him like a shield.

‘And will you be joining us for dinner?’

‘Thank you. I will eat in my room tonight, I think. I have some important work to prepare for.’

He saw the honest disappointment in her face, the measure of her goodness. ‘But we see so little of you, Mr Quinn. We’re all worried that you are working too hard. Miss Dillard mentioned it only yesterday. She said the strain was evident in your eyes.’

‘Miss Dillard said that?’ The name provoked a wave of sadness in Quinn. He relaxed his grip on the newspaper. Now the wrong side of forty, and by some margin, Miss Dillard had once supported herself by working as a children’s governess. But that was many years ago. These days she was entirely reliant on the small income left to her upon the death of her parents. It barely covered the rent for her room, the smallest in Mrs Ibbott’s house.

As the years slipped away from her, and her hopes with them, Miss Dillard had fortified herself against disappointment by occasional recourse to spirituous liquor, her favoured tipple being gin. Her private income could not meet the combined expense of both alcohol and food. Being human, she naturally prioritized the former. Some months, if she ate at all, it was entirely due to the charity of Mrs Ibbott. From time to time, she drank herself into a tearful, stinking state, from which she was rescued by the appearance of her three married sisters (all younger than her) who would cram themselves into her tiny room for several days, nursing her back to health.

There had once been a suitor, or so the gossip went. The affair itself had been conducted so discreetly that it was practically invisible. The gentleman had been one of the other lodgers. A Mr Newlove, appropriately enough. In fact, Quinn rather believed that it was his name more than anything that poor Miss Dillard had fallen for. But it was not to be. One day, Mr Newlove disappeared, taking himself out of her life without a word of explanation.

That had precipitated the first of her alcoholic crises.

After she had recovered, she began to look at Quinn with something approaching sympathy. He was terribly afraid that she saw in him a kindred spirit; even more afraid that she might be looking to him as a replacement for Mr Newlove.

He found the possibility terrified him more than the prospect of confronting any murderer.

He also found that he had never quite believed in Mr Newlove, his name least of all. He had known from the outset that it would end badly. If people would only refrain from trying to forge these hopeless bonds of affection, they would spare themselves a deal of pain.

But tonight, somehow, he found himself strangely touched by Miss Dillard’s concern.
How nice of her to notice
, he thought. He also told himself that the period in which she had entertained romantic hopes on his account had long since passed. By now she must have realized that there was no reciprocal interest.

‘On second thoughts, Mrs Ibbott, I think I will come down to the dining room. It will do me good to have some company this evening.’

Quinn heard a voice in his head, Inchball’s:
Dangerous
.