by R. N. Morris
‘Oh, do have a blinkin’ care!’ came from behind.
They sped through the wrought-iron gates of the St Thomas Street entrance. It was the sharpest corner the driver had yet taken. The rear end of the hearse swung wildly. There were no grumbles from the man in the back though. His eyes were closed and his mouth was clamped tightly shut. From a quick glance over his shoulder, Quinn had the impression he was either praying or trying not to vomit.
Quinn placed the two top hats on the passenger seat and nodded tersely to the driver. He was not inclined to offer anything more by way of thanks.
He ran into the hospital and asked the first nurse he saw for the Emergency Ward. He assumed that was where the man would have been taken.
He met Inchball and Macadam in the corridor outside the ward.
‘Who is he?’
‘We don’t know that yet, sir.’ Macadam winced, sensitive to Quinn’s disappointment. ‘He’s alive but unconscious.’
‘So what happened?’
Macadam provided what details they had. ‘Somehow he got himself inside the power station at Bankside. He may have stowed away on one of the barges bringing in coal, or he was just lucky. Timed his entry when there was a rush of activity, so he slipped in unnoticed. It seems he was trying to pass as one of the workmen.’
Inchball pulled a face. ‘Come on! Face it. We haven’t got a clue what was going through his head.’
Macadam carried on, undeterred. ‘One of the men at Bankside thinks he might have seen a fellow in a brown suit hanging around looking suspicious. Likely the bargemen thought he was a power station employee and the CLEL Company men thought he was with the barge. Next time our witness looked, he was gone.’
‘Did he not think to raise the alarm?’
‘It don’t look like it,’ said Inchball, shaking his head in contempt.
‘This sighting took place at five o’clock yesterday,’ Macadam continued. ‘We don’t know where he went or what he did between then and half past midnight when the accident occurred.’
‘Accident? It weren’t no accident.’
‘What exactly occurred?’
‘He entered a building to the west of the boiler rooms. This is where the generators are housed that produce the electricity for Fleet Street’s printing presses.’
‘Is that significant?’
‘We don’t know as yet what is or isn’t significant, sir.’
‘We don’t know nothing,’ added Inchball gloomily.
‘Go on, Macadam.’
‘He must have climbed to the top of one of the gantries in the engine room. His clothes were found discarded there. The brown corduroy suit, the grey shirt, et cetera. From the gantry he evidently threw himself on to a thousand kilowatt Allis Chalmers direct current dynamo, which was in motion at the time of contact. His body came in contact with a part of the machinery that was live and he was thrown into the air by the violence of the shock. He then, as ill luck would have it, landed on another generator, again touching live metal and being thrown from that on to the ground. The power supply to Fleet Street was disrupted as a result of the incident. The presses ground to a halt, which was not a happy outcome for the Company or its clients.’
‘Not a happy outcome for the poor fucker in there either,’ said Inchball, hitching his thumb towards the ward.
‘His right arm caught fire and he has sustained second to third degree burns over fifty percent of his body. He’s in a bad way.’
‘But he’s alive.’
‘For the time being.’
‘What’s happened to the suit?’
‘It’s being held at Southwark police station. I have instructed the local bobbies not to do anything with it until we have had a chance to examine it. I told them it was a SCD matter now. Did you discover anything of interest at the mortuaries, sir?’
Quinn ignored the question. ‘Very well. Shall we go in and see him?’
‘What are you men doing in here?’ A ward sister in a starched cap and a pinafore as sharp as a blade rushed towards them. Her crisp skirts crackled angrily. Her arms were brawny from hefting the incapacitated. She came to a stop in front of them, blocking their way, balled fists resting on her hips. If it came to a fight, you would not have fancied the three SCD men’s chances.
Quinn flashed his warrant card. ‘We’ve come to see the man you admitted from Bankside power station in the early hours. The electrocution victim.’
‘What on earth for? He’s unconscious. You’ll not get anything out of him.’
‘Nevertheless,’ began Quinn. It seemed a little prurient to admit that they just wanted to look at him. ‘He may be known to us. There’s a chance he’s someone we have encountered in the course of our investigations. So far as I believe, his identity has not yet been ascertained. Somewhere there may well be family members, a mother, a wife perhaps, who are desperate for news of their missing loved one. Perhaps children.’ Quinn was discovering that he had quite a talent for inventing families.
The ward sister frowned dubiously. ‘If he should come round …’
‘Is there a chance that he may?’
‘One never knows. But if he should, you must not excite him. No questions. Indeed, you may not speak to him at all. You may only, briefly, look at him.’
She led him to a bed that was surrounded by a screening curtain. As the ward sister pulled aside the curtain, a faint smell of bleach came up from the bed.
His arms, legs and much of his trunk were wrapped in dressings. His face, however, was exposed, apparently undamaged by the massive electrical charges he had sustained. He lay with his eyes closed. There were some abrasions to his forehead, but nothing that would have prevented anyone who knew him from identifying him.
Macadam, ever sensitive to his chief’s moods, must have noticed the change that came over Quinn.
‘What is it, sir? Do you know him?’
Quinn’s heart pounded so heavily that, for a moment, he could hear nothing else. ‘I believe … that is to say … I think … he is my brother.’
‘Brother?’ said Macadam. ‘I did not know you had a brother.’
‘Gorblimey!’ added Inchball, with feeling.
Quinn turned to the ward sister, who was now regarding him with a mixture of wonder and sympathy. ‘He will … I mean to say … he will be all right, won’t he?’
‘One never knows.’ She said it almost brightly. But perhaps she felt that had offered too much hope, so she repeated it with an ominous finality. ‘One never knows.’
And in her refusal to meet his eyes, he knew he had his true answer.
ELEVEN
Macadam drove, staring fixedly ahead. He was paying attention to the road with more than his usual concentration.
Inchball fidgeted next to him. Quinn could tell he was itching to ask questions, but a stern glance from Macadam earlier had warned him off. Still, discretion did not come easily to Inchball. The only way he knew to show his feelings was to bark bullish questions until he reached some kind of understanding.
Quinn sat in silence in the back, slumped into a corner, as if he wanted to merge with the interior of the car.
In truth, he did not know how he felt to discover that the man in the hospital bed was Malcolm Grant-Sissons, whom he had recently been told was his half-brother, the fruit of a secret affair that his father had once had. His face felt numb. His hands, cold. His feet, sore. And his heart – his heart felt number, colder, sorer than any other part of him.
The two of them had met only once, just a few months ago, and had barely spoken a word to each other at the time. A man called Hugh Grant-Sissons claimed to know Quinn’s father. He claimed that they had both loved the same woman, Grant-Sissons’ wife, Louisa. Malcolm’s mother. It was Hugh Grant-Sissons who had told Quinn that his father had killed himself because of the guilt he bore over Louisa’s death.
As he told him all this, Hugh Grant-Sissons lay dying. Virtually the last words that the man had said to him were: ‘Look out for Mal
colm … Keep an eye on him, for me. A brotherly eye …’
But Quinn had walked away and not given Malcolm Grant-Sissons a second thought. There was no proof that they were brothers. The idea seemed to be as unwelcome to Malcolm as it was to Quinn.
There was a squeak of brakes. The car rocked on its suspension. Macadam ratcheted on the handbrake but kept the engine running.
Quinn looked out. They were outside a police station.
He saw Macadam nod to Inchball, who nodded back and got out of the car.
‘Where’s he going?’
‘It’s Southwark police station, sir. He’s going to get … uh … your brother’s things.’
‘We don’t know that he is my brother. It’s what I was told but … I have seen no proof of it.’
‘If you don’t mind me saying, sir, once you mentioned that he could be related, I couldn’t help looking at him, you know, to see if there was any family resemblance, and you know, well …’
‘What?’
‘I wouldn’t have said it before, but once you mentioned it …’
‘What?’
‘He’s the spit of you, sir.’
‘Nonsense.’
And yet Quinn felt a kind of easing of tension throughout him. He recognized the truth of what his sergeant said, though he had not acknowledged it when he first met Malcolm. But now he accepted that he had seen it and known it from the first.
‘Not the spit.’
‘Very well. Not the spit. Perhaps he takes more after his mother in some respects. Did you know the lady?’
‘No I did not!’
‘I beg your pardon, sir. I meant no offence.’
The rear door across from Quinn opened and Inchball deposited a cardboard box on the seat.
‘Did you look inside?’ asked Quinn.
‘I thought I would leave that for you, guv. Seeing as how you have eyeballed the other geezers’ clobber.’ He slammed the door and got in the front.
Quinn lifted the flaps of the box, revealing the brown corduroy material of the suit.
‘Same?’ Inchball grunted over his shoulder.
Quinn nodded silently.
‘What do you think it means, guv? Some kind of uniform?’
Quinn said nothing. It was his practice when he did not know the answer to a question.
‘The last time you saw your brother,’ began Macadam. ‘Back in April, wasn’t it? When we were looking into all that business with the moving picture people. Was he wearing this suit then?’
‘Stop calling him my brother,’ said Quinn. ‘But no. I don’t believe he was. And I think I would have noticed if he had been.’
‘You wouldn’t necessarily, sir. I mean to say, you wouldn’t have appreciated the significance of a brown corduroy suit at that time.’
Quinn was on the verge of pointing out that he most certainly would have, but let it go.
‘Back to HQ?’
‘We need to call in at Hackney Mortuary first. The effects of the other two are there, together with the case files. I didn’t take them with me to the hospital.’
Macadam released the handbrake and pulled the car out. ‘Funny isn’t it, sir. If only you’d let me drive you, as I’d suggested …’ He gave a little chuckle to himself and shook his head.
Quinn felt a surge of feeling rise in him. It wasn’t irritation. Nor was it grief. It was a sickening and oppressive anxiety, the sense that things were closing in on him, and an almost overpowering desire to leap from the moving car and run.
Back in the attic room of the Special Crimes Department, Quinn had the three cardboard boxes placed side by side on his desk. He opened the one containing Malcolm Grant-Sissons’ clothes, and looked down at the rectangle of brown corduroy revealed.
Inchball was standing at his shoulder. Quinn moved half a step away from his sergeant as he felt himself begin to tremble.
‘Ain’t ya going to take it out?’ Inchball peered down into the box.
Macadam joined them. ‘It can’t be called a coincidence,’ he said brightly. ‘Not now that we have three men wearing the same suit. Or rather not wearing it. What about brand labels? Were any found in the suits, to indicate where they were made or bought?’
‘No.’ Quinn said the word as if it gave him satisfaction.
‘Does it appear that such labels have been removed? Or were they never there?’
‘I do not feel that the suits, the provenance of the suits …’ Quinn felt his two sergeants watching him anxiously. ‘It need not concern us.’ He did not add the reason why he said this. Because he knew full well where the suits came from and what they signified.
Quinn stood for a long moment, swaying slightly on his feet, as he had done once before that morning. And then, without warning, he plunged his hands down into the box and drew up the jacket.
The texture of the cloth was both shocking and familiar. For a moment he was transported back to a place and a time that he had long ago expunged from his memory. The echoes of screams and other sounds, doors slamming, keys turning, the snores and whimpers of a dormitory night, came to him down an infinitely long corridor. The smells of that place – dominated by the stench of human waste – filled his nostrils once more. Quinn gagged.
He let the jacket drop back into the box.
‘Guv?’
‘What’s wrong, sir? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
‘Look like a ghost, more like.’
What tormented him, he realized, was not just the memory of being in that place, but also the idea of Malcolm being there. It was not out of any great sympathy for a man he hardly knew. But because it seemed to prove their kinship. They were related by madness, it seemed, which proved their blood relation. They had inherited their madness from the same suicidal father.
Malcolm’s sojourn in Colney Hatch must have been brief. Presumably it had been brought on by Hugh Grant-Sissons’ death, and the discovery that the man he had thought was his father was not.
‘Macadam, will you look through the pockets of this suit, please?’
‘Of course, sir. Do you want to sit down?’
‘I think I will, thank you.’
‘A glass of water? Or perhaps Inchball would be kind enough to fetch you a cup of tea from the canteen?’
Inchball did not even bristle at Macadam volunteering him for the errand.
‘No, that won’t be necessary.’ But Quinn’s throat was all at once unbearably parched. ‘Although perhaps a glass of water, after all.’
A brief nod passed between the sergeants before Inchball dashed off.
Macadam busied himself searching the pockets of the suit. The first item to come to light was an envelope, which had already been opened. Macadam showed Quinn the address: M. Grant-Sissons Esq., of 3, St John’s Passage, Clerkenwell.
‘This is your brother?’
‘Yes. Malcolm. Malcolm Grant-Sissons.’
‘Yes, I remember now. We went to St John’s Passage together. You went in alone. You didn’t tell us …’
‘I had other things on my mind. We were in the middle of an investigation. It was not relevant.’ Why did Quinn suddenly feel that his sergeant was interrogating him? His answer sounded suspect, even to his own ears. ‘Is there a letter?’
Macadam took out a brief typewritten note from Finsbury Public Library concerning an overdue library book, A Furious Energy by W.G. Portman. There was a fine of two shillings and threepence to pay. ‘He must be a slow reader,’ observed Macadam.
‘Or perhaps he was unable to return the book due to …’ But Quinn broke off his speculation, uneasy about where it led.
Macadam studied the letter. ‘I’m sure I’ve read something by this Portman fellow. Can’t remember the title. I don’t think it was this one. He writes rather fantastical adventures. The one I read was about a space voyage to Mars. A race of fearsome red-devil type creatures was found to inhabit the interior of the planet, while peace-loving beings of a more human appearance dwelt on the surface. The r
ed devils, who are actually more like giant ants or cockroaches, I think … They have these horrid twitching antennae. They demand daily sacrifices from the surface dwellers otherwise they will wipe them out in a wholesale planetary massacre.’
Inchball came back into the room and handed Quinn a glass of water. He stood watching Macadam with a look of open-mouthed stupefaction.
‘The surface dwellers are innately unable to fight, you see. They’re pacifists! So the space voyagers live happily among the surface creatures. One of them even mates with a female. It’s all very idyllic and wonderful. Until the devil cockroaches take this fellow’s mate. And, uh, well you know … eat her. As is their way. First they dissolve her in this acidic slime that they secrete. Not very pleasant at all. And her space voyager lover witnesses all this, you see. So then, well, you can probably tell where this is going …’
Inchball shook his head vigorously.
‘The space voyagers tell the surface dwellers that they really shouldn’t stand for this sort of thing and fire them up to fight against the … the … now what were they called? The red-devil insect creatures? They had a name. The Zarians! That was it. The Zarians … How do they think of this stuff? That’s what I wonder. So anyhow, the space voyagers, led by Captain Thomas, persuade the surface dwellers. They were the … uh … the … oh, it will come to me … They were the Tsangi! That’s it! With a T. Tsangi. They were sort of African, if you ask me. Like an African tribe, very noble and primitive. But utterly, utterly incapable of warfare. They don’t even have a word for “weapon” in their language. And their skin’s red, not brown.’
‘What the buggeration is he going on about?’
Quinn held up a hand to silence Inchball. He nodded for Macadam to go on.
‘So, urged on by the space voyagers, the Tsangi go to war with the Zarians. Captain Thomas and his men teach them about warfare and show them how to manufacture spears and bows and arrows. And all that sort of thing. And they also have these guns that fire sonic waves which they brought with them on their space ship. But there aren’t enough of those to go around, obviously.’
‘And? What happens?’ demanded Inchball belligerently.