The White Feather Killer

by R. N. Morris

  Sir Edward gave the impression of being swayed by these last two remarks. ‘I’m closing down SCD.’

  Quinn was surprised by the strength of his own reaction. He felt like an adolescent raging against the unfairness of the world. ‘You can’t …’

  ‘I already have.’

  ‘What about my men?’

  ‘Macadam and Inchball have been absorbed into CID.’

  Thompson, under whose jurisdiction the CID came, gave a terse nod.

  ‘I have persuaded Assistant Commissioner Thompson to accept you too as an officer under his command.’

  ‘But I answer directly to you, Sir Edward.’

  ‘Not any more. That was an anomaly. An indulgence on my part. The time for indulgences has passed. We must bring you back into the fold, Quinn. Greet you like the prodigal son. With a fatted calf and all that. There shall be much rejoicing. You know the verse. Luke, 15:7. “Joy shall be in Heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance.”’

  ‘What of my special warrant?’

  ‘That is terminated. You will operate within standard command structure from now on. You will do as you are told, in other words.’

  Sir Michael Esslyn drew deeply on his cigarette with evident satisfaction. ‘Now that is settled, we should get on with the matter in hand.’

  Quinn felt that nothing had been settled. But he calculated that he had no allies here and that the game was already lost. He had too much pride to give them any further indication of the extent to which they had hurt him. Besides, he was curious. What, precisely, was the matter in hand?

  Sir Edward affected a conciliatory tone. ‘Do you know Major Kell, by the way?’

  Kell looked up with a mildly pained expression. The man had the face of the more intelligent type of professional soldier. Reassuring in its rugged decisiveness, but not without the capacity for imagination or sympathy. It was the face of an adventurer, or possibly even a soldier-poet. But there were signs of conflict and even suffering there.

  ‘You’ve heard of MO5(g) Section?’ continued Sir Edward.

  Quinn gave a slow, uncertain nod. He had heard rumours.

  ‘The major basically runs the show.’

  Quinn was not immune to the heart-quickening thrill that came from any brush with the intelligence services. He was aware of the privilege of being admitted to such a conclave. Secrets would be revealed and he would keep them, that went without saying. But it made him complicit too.

  ‘Kell?’

  The intelligence officer accepted Sir Edward’s invitation to continue with a distracted nod. He seemed to be gathering his thoughts. But after a moment, Quinn realized he was struggling to gain control of his breathing. The faint rasping sound he had heard when he came in was Kell’s asthmatic wheezing. Kell took one final drag on his medicinal cigarette. His speech was punctuated by frequent breaks as he tried to catch his breath. ‘Thank you, Sir Edward. I’ll keep it … brief. This war will not just be fought on the fields of Belgium and France. Our enemies are here … in this country, in this city, right now as I … speak. They are determined to use every means within their power to defeat us and destroy us. They do not all speak with thick German accents, eat sausages and wear … lederhosen. Some of them are born in this country and may have half-English parentage. It is not even beyond the bounds of possibility that they have recruited English … men to their cause. Their influence is … everywhere … invisible but … felt. We cannot say that they do not have their stooges placed in the highest positions within our major institutions, the judiciary … the Church, the fourth estate, the civil … service, military command, even … here.’

  ‘I say,’ objected Sir Edward.

  ‘Present company excepted, of … course. Their first priority is to commit acts of sabotage and violence. Beyond that, they have a wide-ranging remit to spread fear and … despondency wherever they can. Their aim is to undermine public morale so that there is pressure on the government to … sue for peace.’

  ‘And so? What has this to do with …’ Quinn stopped himself saying ‘Special Crimes’, ‘me?’

  Esslyn’s aristocratic drawl came out from the misty obscurity that was his face. ‘For the duration of the war, the entire policing of the capital falls under the overall direction of military intelligence.’

  ‘Everything? Even moving on tramps and collaring pickpockets?’

  AC Thompson strode over to stand in front of Quinn. ‘It’s quite simple.’ He pointed his pipe at Quinn. ‘You must look for the hidden hand behind everything.’

  ‘That is the essence of my method.’

  Thompson grunted sceptically.

  ‘Just to be clear,’ said Esslyn. He gave the word a brittle emphasis that suggested shattering glass. ‘The hidden hand that you are to look for – and find – is the hand of the enemy. German spies and agents.’

  ‘But isn’t that rather to predetermine the outcome of an investigation before even a crime has been committed?’

  ‘Are you doubting that our enemies will try to harm us?’

  Sir Edward cut in, leaving Sir Michael Esslyn’s question unanswered: ‘I want you, Quinn, to act as liaison officer between CID and MO5(g). You will receive briefings from Major Kell or his proxy and, in consultation with the assistant commissioner, you will ensure that they are efficiently executed by the appropriate officers. You will report back daily to MO5(g) on the progress of these cases.’

  ‘Liaison officer?’ Quinn could not keep the contempt out of his voice.

  ‘It is a job of vital national importance. That should be enough for you.’

  So that was it. They had taken away his department and hemmed him in behind a desk. The purpose of the whole charade became clear to him. Sir Edward could have delivered the coup de grâce without the others present. They were there simply to see that it was done, knowing that the commissioner had a weak spot when it came to Quinn. It was not a confidential briefing at all. It was a private audience to a knifing, and he was the victim.

  At last the smoke cleared in front of Sir Michael Esslyn’s face. He was smiling, the thin, lipless smile of a snake.

  FIVE

  A fine-grained summer dusk was slowly seeping down over the sky.

  Felix could hear the piano through the open sash window: Bach’s Sonata in F Major played with the usual mixture of enthusiastic attack and wishful imprecision. It brought back unhappy memories of his own childhood. How many years had Mother persisted in her project to make a musician of him, standing over him as he willed his fingers to find the right keys? All those hours of practice, all those sunny afternoons that he had missed out on, wasted. His fingers always let him down.

  Eventually, she had given it up as a bad job. She must have known the truth, that he had no talent, right from the beginning, but such was her confidence in her own powers as a teacher that she had persevered long beyond the point where either of them were getting anything from it.

  He had progressed to Grade 6 in the Trinity College examinations, but no further, and never achieved anything higher than a Merit. He was capable of a certain mechanical proficiency, but that seemed to upset her more than his mistakes. He had no touch, she complained. No feeling. No soul.

  He remembered the time his tears had dripped on to the keys, causing his sweaty fingers even more trouble than usual. It was soon after that that she had relented. She had made it clear that she was releasing him from the torture of continuing with the piano because it was too painful for her to listen to him play. What he wanted did not come into it.

  Mother’s voice cut through, silencing her pupil’s uncertain performance with three heavily accented syllables: ‘No, no, no!’ The pained exasperation, the angry incredulity that anyone could be so incompetent, was all too familiar to Felix.

  He felt for the young musician, but at the same time was relieved that someone else was bearing the brunt of her displeasure.

  He descended the steps t
o their front door, passing the partially subterranean window, and let himself in, closing the door behind him as quietly as he could.

  Felix and Mother occupied five rooms in the basement of a large house on Godolphin Avenue, off the Goldhawk Road. It was just the two of them. His father, who was never spoken of except to be held up as an example of male perfidy, had run out on them when Felix was a baby. Felix could not remember him at all. There was one photograph on the mantelpiece in the piano room of Mother and his father together on their wedding day. Mother kept it for social and professional reasons, as evidence of her propriety. When asked about ‘Mr Simpkins’, she would assume an expression of infinite sadness and regret. If her interlocutor took from this that her husband was dead, she did not disabuse them. She invariably dressed in black, giving further credence to the myth of her widowhood.

  For all Felix knew, his father was dead. Never once had the man tried to contact him. Or if he had, the letters had not reached him.

  When he was younger, from time to time he had found himself standing in front of the photograph staring into the black pinpricks that represented that unsmiling stranger’s eyes. He was trying to will an authentic memory of the man into being. But there was nothing. He couldn’t even recognize himself in his father’s face, not even as he grew older. The man in the picture had a thin face, almost ascetic – or the secular equivalent of ascetic, put-upon. His own face was puffy with plump cheeks quick to blush, a small mouth, weak chin, protruding forehead and slightly bulging eyes that gave him the look of a baby with wind.

  He wondered, had he known his father, whether they would have had anything in common at all. They seemed to share the same solemnity of expression. Something shifty and distrustful about the eyes. Even on his wedding day, his father looked like he was casting about for a way out.

  Of course, according to Mother, Felix had inherited a host of negative attributes from his father, his stupidity, his laziness, his deceit and, most of all, his selfishness. Mysteriously, he had failed to inherit any compensatory virtues from her.

  What had brought his parents together, Felix could not imagine.

  The couple had never divorced and, despite her contempt for him, Mother had kept her husband’s surname. At least it served her well now, disguising her German origins.

  The door to the parlour was closed. Behind it, the young pupil was having another run at the phrase that had earned Mother’s opprobrium. This time, in response, she barked a sharp, ‘Better!’ Felix acknowledged a pang of jealousy. He did not think, in all his life, in any endeavour he had set himself to, he had ever been able to earn a ‘Better’ from Mother.

  He took off his shoes and padded softly to the kitchen at the back of the house. He tested the weight of the kettle before lighting the gas ring beneath it. There was a loaf of bread on the table. As always, he was hungry when he came in. He cut a slice and buttered it, devouring half of it in a few quick bites. He held the rest of the bread in his mouth as he put a spoonful of tea in the teapot. Then he took off his suit jacket and hung it on the hook on the back of the door. Mother would have something to say about that. It spoilt the line of his jacket not to use a hanger. But what was he to do? She didn’t like it when he hung it over the back of a chair either, as it made the place look untidy.

  As soon as he heard the lesson ending, he would retrieve his jacket.

  The kettle began to whistle. Still with the bread between his teeth – it was getting precarious now and could break at any moment – Felix took the tea towel drying on the range to lift the kettle over to the teapot.

  Just at that moment, the kitchen door opened.

  ‘Felix! What are you doing?’

  The remnant of bread dropped from his mouth into the open teapot. He fished it out with one hand as quickly as he could, splashing hot, buttery tea everywhere. The steaming kettle was still in his other hand. He crossed back to the range to put the kettle down, but the soggy mess he carried in his other hand fell apart and dropped all over the kitchen floor.

  ‘You imbecile.’

  ‘Sorry, Mother.’ Felix used the tea towel to wipe the slops up. ‘I didn’t hear the lesson finish.’ In fact, he could still hear the piano being played.

  ‘Leave it! Leave it! Leave it!’ Mother was screaming at him now. He bent his face away from her, unable to look at her.

  Felix stood up, unsure what to do with the soiled tea towel in his hand.

  ‘You make everything worse. You make a bad thing, then you make it worse.’

  ‘Sorry, Mother.’

  ‘Sorry, Mother.’ Her mimicry brought the heat to his face.

  Felix fixed his gaze on the floor, as if he might find some scraps of sympathy there between the bare wooden boards. He still could not bear to look at Mother. Besides, he knew too well what he would see. Mother was small and birdlike in her frame and face. But she was not delicate in the way birds were normally thought to be. Birds, Felix knew, were wild, untameable creatures. They had savage claws and pointed beaks that could peck out your eyes. They ate bugs and worms. Their song was not the sentimental accompaniment to Nature’s splendid tableaux, but a fierce, self-driven cry for survival.

  Birds were just another thing that Felix was afraid of.

  No, there was nothing delicate about Mother. The smallness of her body had often struck him as the result of distillation. She had been reduced to her essence. And that essence was bitterness.

  She gave out a squawk that a parrot would have been proud of. ‘What is your coat doing on the back of the door?’

  ‘I am sorry, Mother.’

  ‘Will it pain you so much to keep your jacket on until the lesson is finished? What if my pupil had seen you, or his parent? Did you think of that? I have come in here now for a glass of water for the boy. What if I had sent him in to fetch it himself?’

  Felix couldn’t see what was so bad about a boy seeing him without his jacket on. But he knew to keep this thought to himself.

  ‘You have no idea! How hard it has been for me to keep house, to keep this, our life, together. How hard I have had to work to pay the rent.’

  He might have objected that this was rather unfair. Since he had found his position at Griffin, he had contributed to the household expenses. He also knew that she had some income from investments that her father had set up in her name.

  She seemed to sense which way his mind was running. ‘It is my name on the paper. It is my house. While you live here you will obey my rules. We must show people we are respectable. They will not bring their children here if they do not think I am respectable.’

  ‘Yes, Mother.’

  ‘And why do you not use a plate when you eat bread? Have I brought you up to be a savage?’

  ‘I was hungry.’

  ‘Greedy savage. Imbecile. So like your father. And look at this mess that you have made.’

  ‘I’m sorry. It was an accident.’

  ‘Will you clean it up? Of course you will not. You are a man. You are like all men. You are useless and dirty and good for nothing.’

  ‘I will clean it up, I promise.’

  ‘No! You will make it worse. You always make it worse. Leave it! I will clean it later.’

  She took a glass from the dresser and ran the tap. Felix stood with his head hanging, his hands behind his back.

  ‘How I ever let your father touch me, I will never know. All my problems have come from that. If I knew then what I know now – no! It is poison! The male sperm is poison. It is the root of all the evils that afflict womankind. If it was not for male sperm we would not have menstruation. You are a vessel filled with poison. You disgust me. You must keep it in! You must keep the poison in. If ever you infect another woman with your poison, I will never forgive you. Why can you men not keep it in? Tell me you will never do it. It is disease and it is death. And the women who would let you do this, they are traitors to their sex. They are whores. Worthless whores.’

  At last, her tirade came to an end and the wate
r was switched off. But only when he heard her footsteps recede and the door to the parlour open and close did he dare to look up.

  SIX

  Quinn found himself in the midst of a large, busy department, surrounded by men whose days were driven by a purposeful energy in which he could not share. A thick masculine scent permeated the room. It was the smell of men under stress. There was camaraderie, but it was camaraderie shot through with a merciless instinct for survival. Every joke had at its kernel a brutal and wounding truth.

  From time to time he caught sight of his former sergeants across the vast floor of the department. As far as he could tell, they had been split up. But they threw themselves into their new roles with admirable vigour. Each of them had welcomed him back in their own way: Sergeant Macadam with the heartfelt assertion that Quinn was a better detective than any other man in the CID and it was shameful the way he had been treated; Inchball with the simple monosyllable ‘Guv’, accompanied by a terse nod.

  The echoing clamour around him made it hard to concentrate. But then it struck him that he didn’t really have anything much to concentrate on. Meetings took place without his being invited. The promised briefings from MO5(g) seemed to bypass him entirely. If he were to spend his days doing nothing, he felt that there would be no one there to hold him to account. In fact, he rather got the impression that everyone would prefer it that way.

  One lunchtime he joined the queue in the canteen behind two plain-clothes detectives, who were otherwise unknown to him.

  ‘He always was a mad bugger,’ he heard one say.

  ‘God knows how he got away with it for so long.’

  ‘The commissioner gave him too much rope.’

  ‘You know what they say. Give a man enough rope …’

  ‘We might see that yet. His old man …’ But at that point, his companion nudged him with a sly nod in Quinn’s direction.

  ‘No, please, go on,’ said Quinn. ‘I’m interested to know what you have to say about my father.’

  ‘What makes you think we was talking about you?’ asked the nudger.