Murder as a Fine Art

by David Morrell

  “On my way, Inspector.” The constable hurried from the pavilion.

  Becker asked Father, “What about the names the women called to you? We know about Ann. But who are Jane, Elizabeth, and Catharine?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “But…”

  “I wrote about them in my work. The killer read about them and used them to hurt me. That’s all you need to know.”

  “He kissed his dead sister is what he did,” Doris said.

  “Be quiet!” Father shouted.

  “Lay on his neighbor’s dead girl’s grave, he did. Clawed at the ground for nights on end. The gentleman told us what you was. Told us not to feel sorry if we made you upset and worse by calling those names at you. Said you deserved it.”

  “Shut up!” Father raised his hands and made a pushing motion, as if shoving away apparitions. I have never seen him so agitated. “Damn you, not another word!”

  Abruptly the door opened, and the constable who’d gone for tea came back with four waiters carrying trays.

  “The biscuits! I don’t see the biscuits!” Doris complained.

  I turned toward Father, but he wasn’t there. He had left the pavilion, closing the door behind him.

  “Father.” I hurried out to him.

  He stared down at the gravel path. His hat was in his hands. The cold wind ruffled his short brown hair. Dark clouds covered the sky.

  “There is no such thing as forgetting,” he murmured.

  The door opened, Ryan and Becker stepping out.

  “De Quincey,” Ryan said.

  Father didn’t reply to them, either.

  The two men stood in front of him.

  “I’m sorry,” Ryan said. “I need you to explain why the names disturbed you.”

  “It isn’t your business.”

  “The killer made it my business,” Ryan persisted. “Whatever twisted connection he feels with you, I need to understand it.”

  “Leave him alone,” I said. In the woods, when I had recognized the names the women called out to Father, their horrid significance had become apparent to me—and why Father was so devastated. “You can see how this affects him.”

  “Miss De Quincey, surely you can understand,” Ryan insisted. “I can’t depend on your father for help if the killer is able to manipulate him. It jeopardizes the investigation.”

  “Once,” Father said.

  His voice was so faint that it took me a moment to realize what Father said.

  “Excuse me?” Ryan asked.

  “This time only,” Father said more audibly.

  He looked up at Ryan and Becker. His gaze was anguished and determined.

  “The killer manipulated me this time only. I won’t permit it to happen again. He’s twice the monster I imagined him to be. But now I’m prepared. Never again.”

  “And the names?”

  “To keep secrets,” Father said, “to push them down, to try to hide them is to be controlled by them. I have written about them, but I have never been able to speak about them. Why is that, do you suppose? I find an empty page friendlier than speaking to another person. I allow strangers to read my deepest troubles, but I cannot allow myself to disclose my troubles face-to-face.”

  Father removed his laudanum flask and drank from it.

  “You’ll kill yourself with that,” Becker said, repeating what he’d warned Father earlier.

  “There is more than one reality,” Father said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “And some realities are more intense than others. You wish to know about Jane, Elizabeth, and Catharine?”

  “Not wish to. I need to,” Ryan insisted.

  “Jane was my younger sister. She died when I was four and a half.” Father took a deep breath. “She was as bright as the sun, too young to be anything except innocent. How I loved to play with her. She contracted a mysterious fever and was hidden away in a sickroom. I never saw her alive again. My grief became more extreme when word traveled through our house that Jane’s vomiting had so annoyed a servant that the servant had slapped Jane to make her stop. Slapped a dying child. It is no exaggeration that I was overwhelmed by a revelation that the world of my nursery was not as it seemed, that evil existed, that the universe is filled with horror. Please tell them your middle name, Emily.”

  “It is Jane,” I said proudly. “In honor of Father’s dead sister.”

  “There is no such thing as forgetting,” Father emphasized. “By paying those pathetic women to call out Jane’s name, the killer wants me to remember the servant who slapped my dying sister. He wants me to know that he is slapping me.”

  Father’s words came faster, his torment pushing him.

  “And now for my sister Elizabeth. She was nine. I was six. She had a large head, which physicians believed was caused by hydrocephalus.”

  Ryan and Becker looked confused.

  “Water on the brain,” Father rushed on. “Perhaps her large head explained her amazing intelligence and sensitivity. Although I had two remaining sisters with whom I played, Elizabeth was my second self. Where she was, there was Paradise. We enjoyed endless games together. She read to me wonderful stories from The Arabian Nights. Sometimes the stories were so beautiful they made Elizabeth weep. In those cases, she read the stories to me a second time. I slept in the same room with her. I was secluded in a silent garden from which all knowledge of oppression and outrage was banished.”

  Father stared up at the darkening sky.

  “One Sunday afternoon, Elizabeth visited a friend at the nearby house of a servant. She drank some tea. As evening came, the servant escorted her home through a meadow. The next morning, Elizabeth had a fever. The illness grew rapidly worse. In a week, she succumbed. Was the water in the tea she drank contaminated? Was there something about the meadow through which she walked that made her sick? I can never know. The physicians thought that perhaps her large head had been the cause.”

  Father trembled.

  “You don’t need to do this,” I said.

  “Inspector Ryan says he requires an explanation,” Father answered bitterly. “When a nurse told me about Elizabeth’s death, I could not take it in. Six years old, I literally felt as if I had been knocked unconscious. During her rapid illness, I had not been allowed to see her, but when I learned that her corpse had been laid to rest in an upstairs bedroom, I could not stay away. At one in the afternoon, when the servants were eating and everyone else was resting, I crept up the back stairs and stared at the door to the room. It was locked, but the key had mistakenly been left in place, so I used it to open the door. Hearing the voices of the servants downstairs in the kitchen, I entered and closed the door behind me so softly that no echo ran along the hallway.

  “The front of the bed obscured my view. I stepped forward, slowly bringing Elizabeth’s body into sight. Dear sweet Elizabeth. The frozen eyelids, the marble lips, the rigid hands crossed on her chest—they could not possibly have been confused with those of anyone alive. Only her large noble forehead was the same. The window was open. Gorgeous sunlight streamed in, and yet a wind seemed to blow, mournful, a wind that swept the fields of mortality for a hundred centuries.”

  Father braced himself and continued.

  “A vault seemed to open in the blue sky beyond the window. I was taken away as if flying. Frost surrounded me, making me shiver. At once, I was back in the room, realizing that a long time had passed, that I was standing next to Elizabeth’s corpse. I suddenly heard a footstep outside the door. In a rush, I kissed Elizabeth on the lips, then waited for the footsteps to pass, and crept from the room without being discovered.

  “The next day, the physicians arrived with a surgeon, who cut Elizabeth’s magnificent head open, believing that a defect in her brain had caused her death. I know this because I was able to sneak into the room again and saw the bandages that concealed what the surgeon had done to her skull. I dreamed many times about the opening that lay under those bandages, th
e gateway to what used to be her mind. I later heard that the surgeon described Elizabeth’s brain as being the most beautiful he had ever seen.”

  “Dear God,” Ryan murmured.

  “And now Catharine,” Father said, more determined. “She was William Wordsworth’s daughter. William was my idol. As a youth, I wrote him letters of admiration. To say that his poems transported me is an understatement. His belief in the freedom of emotion, of opening ourselves to new perspectives, seemed to me the only way to conduct my life. He answered my letters and even suggested that I visit him in the Lake District. Twice I made the journey there, but each time, my insecurity prevented me from knocking on his door. Only much later, accompanied by Coleridge, whom I also befriended, was I able to muster my resolve to meet him. I soon established a residence in the area and frequently visited Wordsworth at Dove Cottage, the home he rented. How quickly circumstances changed. When William decided that he needed a larger home, I rented Dove Cottage. I wanted to sleep in the room where he had slept, to eat in the room where he had eaten.

  “But unfortunately idols turn out to be imperfect. William could be petty and was maddeningly indecisive about the details of a project that I agreed to help him self-publish. We sometimes argued, and our disagreements affected my relationship with his wife, Mary, and his sister, Dorothy. What kept the friendship going was the affection I felt for his three-year-old daughter. Her name was Catharine. I spent as much time with her as I possibly could. We played for entire afternoons, just the two of us at Dove Cottage. The killer wants to make something evil of that, but my affection for Catharine was simply a version of the love that I felt for my dead sister Jane and my dead sister Elizabeth. With Catharine, I was a child again. I was in the nursery garden of my boyhood from which all oppression was banished.

  “I received a note from William’s sister, Dorothy, which I remember to this day. ‘My dear friend, I am grieved to the heart when I write to you, but you must bear the sad tidings. Our sweet little Catharine was seized with convulsions on Wednesday night. The fits continued till a quarter after five in the morning, when she breathed her last.’ ”

  Father paused.

  “Breathed her last. Like Jane and Elizabeth. After Catharine’s burial in a churchyard near Dove Cottage, I went there every night and lay on her grave and did indeed claw at the earth as the diseased woman in the pavilion told you I did. I would have died to bring Catharine back. And Jane and Elizabeth. Truly I would have given my life to bring them back—and Ann, I grieved for Ann. I grieved for all the losses of my life.

  “Again and again, I wrote about each of them. I revealed my anguish on the page in a way that I never until now allowed anyone to hear from my lips. Until Catharine’s death, I drank opium only sparingly to alleviate my stomach and facial pains. But afterward, it became the extreme that I wrote about in my Confessions.”

  Ryan and Becker didn’t express any reaction for several seconds. But the looks on their faces made clear how stunned they were.

  Father stared at the dark sky and then at the bare tree branches, which now were motionless.

  “The wind stopped,” he said. “I thought perhaps a storm was coming, but now it appears”—he pointed to the north—“that the fog is forming early over the Thames.”

  He turned toward Ryan and Becker. “The killer wants me to identify him with the servant who slapped my dying sister for her uncontrolled vomiting. My work is not vomit. It is my attempt to understand the pain that made me who I am, just as I hope my readers will understand who they are. The killer perverts my work to suit his foul intentions, and by God, I will make him pay for that as much as I will make him pay for brutally stealing the lives of those five poor souls on Saturday night.”

  “And probably even more lives to come,” Ryan found the voice to say.

  8

  The Year of Revolution

  DURING THE 1600S, a mallet-and-ball game known as pall mall was so popular in the Westminster district that a street where it was played acquired that name. By 1854, Pall Mall—located to the north of St. James’s Park—acquired a reputation for something quite different, a series of luxurious gentlemen’s clubs where men of similar views could share a meal, have a drink and a cigar, enjoy quiet time in the library, and even find lodgings. While some used their club to avoid their families in the evenings, the bigger appeal was gambling.

  Clubs existed for political parties, religious groups, actors, writers, artists, just about any common interest for which approved-only members were willing to pay a 20-guinea initiation fee and a 10-guinea yearly assessment. The denomination of payment indicated the exclusivity of the membership, for while guineas had once been actual coins, they no longer existed except as a concept used for professional fees and luxurious items. If someone requested a guinea, he would receive two coins—one pound and one shilling—the implication being that a guinea (which didn’t exist) was a cut above the common currency of the pound.

  On Pall Mall, as many as four hundred gentlemen’s clubs catered to various interests. As a consequence, it wasn’t difficult for some clubs to become anonymous, avoiding attention among their neighbors. In addition, members who preferred not to be seen arriving and departing could take advantage of curtained tunnels that some clubs erected between the street and the entrance. A coach could pull up, its occupants could step into the tunnel, the coach could pull away, and no one on the street would know who had arrived.

  This happened at 2 P.M. on Monday, when a coach that looked no different from any other (but the interior of which was well appointed, complete with cigars and brandy) pulled away from the Royal Agricultural Club and disappeared into Pall Mall traffic. A sign in front of the club announced, CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS.

  Three men stood within the curtained tunnel: Lord Palmerston; his security chief, Colonel Brookline; and a member of Brookline’s team. The last remained in the tunnel and watched the street while Brookline approached a man whose uniform indicated that he was the club’s doorman but who in fact was another member of the security team.

  “Nothing out of the ordinary, Colonel,” the man reported.

  Brookline entered the club, surveyed its polished marble lobby, and noted the strategic positions of two other security operatives, both of whom nodded that everything was under control. Apart from them, the lobby had no occupants.

  “Ready, Your Lordship,” Brookline said.

  Palmerston stepped inside and proceeded past an abandoned counter, the clerk for which had been instructed to remain at home.

  The stained-glass door of a bar beckoned on the left while a restaurant invited straight ahead. But Palmerston and Brookline turned to the right and climbed a marble staircase. Despite his seventy years and heavy frame, Palmerston moved with the confidence of immense political power.

  He walked purposefully along a hallway and stopped at the second door on the right, where he waited for Brookline to knock three times, then once.

  When the door was opened, an attractive young woman in a beguiling dress stood before them.

  “Thank you, Colonel,” Palmerston said. “Return in ninety minutes.”

  “Very good, Your Lordship.”

  Palmerston smiled to the young woman, stepped inside, and closed the door.

  PALMERSTON’S PASSION FOR female companionship was so well known that gossip about it had spread from the upper class until it became the topic of ribald jokes in the poor sections of London. The Times gave him the nickname Lord Cupid.

  It was a reputation that Palmerston encouraged, using it as a way to disguise his other activities. On this particular afternoon, the woman in the room—an actress recruited by Colonel Brookline—had allowed herself to be seen entering the club’s curtained tunnel. Brookline took for granted that the club was under surveillance. The arrival of the actress in a men’s club closed for renovation would be a sufficient explanation for Palmerston’s own arrival five minutes later. Even the security guards had been deceived about the reason for Pa
lmerston’s arrival. If an unfriendly observer managed to identify the actress, so much the better. It would reinforce Palmerston’s reputation for preferring exotic liaisons.

  The moment Palmerston locked the door, he gave the actress a slight bow. “You are well?”

  “Thank you, Your Lordship, yes.”

  “You have something to amuse you?”

  “A script for a new play I need to study.”

  “Is there plenty of blood in it?”

  “Yes, Your Lordship. A stabbing in a pool onstage. And two explosions.”

  “I look forward to attending.”

  Palmerston left her in the sitting room and proceeded to the bedroom. He locked the door and slid a wardrobe away from a wall, exposing stairs that led to the next floor.

  At the top, he entered a room that had a long table. Six men sat at it, three on each side. Each had taken care that he wasn’t followed to the building. They were all dressed in laborer’s dusty clothes and had arrived separately at the servants’ entrance at 7 A.M., carrying bags of tools, presumably the workmen accomplishing the renovations that the sign announced outside the club.