by R. N. Morris
‘Oh, the Tsangi are wiped out. Completely wiped out. They can’t fight, you see. It was hopeless right from the start. The planet is stained red with their blood. That was it! That was the title. The Blood Planet! I knew it would come to me.’
‘So it is an argument against pacifism?’ wondered Quinn.
‘Well, not quite, you see. Because the thing is, once they had wiped out the Tsangi, the Zarians began to die off too. By utterly destroying their enemies, they destroyed themselves. It was not so much that they needed the Tsangi to feed on, rather that their enemies gave their lives purpose and meaning. The daily sacrifices were a symbol of their power over the Tsangi. But once the Tsangi were gone, their lives were empty.’
‘And so they just died out?’
‘Not quite. They began to devour each other. They formed factions, each demanding sacrifices from the others. Acidic slime secretions all over the place. Until all life on the Blood Planet was wiped out. In fact, there’s one last Zarian surviving, and he’s the creature who had eaten the space voyager’s female. And as it happens, the very same space voyager – the lover of the Tsangi female – is the only one of the human visitors left alive and in the big finale he encounters the last Zarian in a cave and blasts him with his sonic gun. After which, he returns to Earth, alone. It’s through his account that we know the history.’
‘What a load of tosh,’ commented Inchball.
But Quinn was not so quick to dismiss the story. ‘The book that Malcolm Grant-Sissons had out from the library, do you think it is a similar kind of story?’
‘Probably. From what I can gather, W.G. Portman seems to specialize in this sort of thing.’
Quinn had a mental image of Malcolm eagerly lapping up such adventure stories. It did not – yet – help him understand why he had thrown himself naked on to an industrial dynamo, but it did make him feel that he knew his half-brother a little better.
Macadam returned to searching the crudely stitched on patches that formed the pockets of the jacket. ‘Something here.’ He fished out a card, the size of a cigarette card, and held it up. It bore a crude illustration of a red hand, identical to the one Quinn had seen earlier.
‘Does it say anything on the back?’
Macadam turned the card over. ‘F.J.S.U. Seven.’
Quinn raised himself from his seat and retrieved the other card from the coroner’s file. ‘This was found in the clothes of the man who died at London Zoo.’
‘It’s the same,’ observed Macadam.
‘A clue!’ cried Inchball.
‘Although no such card was found belonging to the second man.’
‘Still, two out of three,’ insisted Inchball. ‘We’ve got the suits. The undressing. And the cards.’
‘There is something else. The first two men had small burns on their thighs. As well as indications of old scars. In the case of Malcolm Grant-Sissons, we do not know yet whether such marks exist.’
‘So,’ began Macadam. ‘All three men are linked by brown corduroy suits and undressing. First man and third man are linked by red hand cards. First man and second man are linked by burns and scars.’
‘The suits are the only thing linking all three of ’em,’ said Inchball.
Macadam put down the card and tipped out a handful of change from one of the trouser pockets. From the other he retrieved a ring with two keys on it. One appeared to be a house key; the other was smaller and perhaps opened a drawer or a box of some kind.
‘There were no keys found on the other two men,’ Quinn pointed out. ‘Or rather, in their possession. Which may suggest that they were vagrants.’
‘Maybe they were on the run from somewhere?’ suggested Inchball.
‘Why do you say that?’ asked Quinn sharply.
‘The uniform?’
‘Perhaps they belonged to some sort of irregular group?’ suggested Macadam. He picked up the card again and studied the image of the red hand closely. ‘The cousin I was telling you about, the Irish one. He belongs to a voluntary regiment in Belfast. All the men in it agree to wear the same style of pinstripe suit. Perhaps this is a similar thing?’ Macadam turned the card over and tapped at the reverse with the nail of his forefinger. ‘These letters. Perhaps they stand for the name of the unit. Indeed, U could be unit. Or Ulster. F could be federation. J – J is a tricky one. Judgement, perhaps. Or juvenile. They were all quite young, these men.’
‘But not juveniles,’ said Quinn.
‘Jokers?’ Inchball’s suggestion was met with silence.
‘What about jumpers?’ said Macadam. ‘They all jumped. The first into the bear enclosure. The second off Suicide Bridge. The third … I mean to say, your brother, sir, he jumped from the gantry on to the generator, did he not?’
Quinn shook his head discouragingly.
But Macadam was not to be deterred. ‘The S could be for secret. That gives us Secret Unit, at the end. Or perhaps special. Special Unit. Or society. Society of Ulstermen. The Something Something Society of Ulstermen.’
Inchball was having none of it. ‘Fat and jovial? The Fat and Jovial Society of Ulstermen.’
Quinn decided that the best way to neutralize Inchball’s joke was to take it seriously. ‘None of them were fat, and the fact that they took their own lives, or attempted to, suggests that they were not jovial.’
Inchball frowned and shook his head. ‘It may as well mean that as anything Mac has said. I mean, it’s all guesswork. It gets us nowhere.’
‘F could be Fenian,’ persisted Macadam.
‘Malcolm Grant-Sissons isn’t Irish,’ objected Quinn.
‘First? Foremost? Flying?’ Macadam was clutching at straws.
Inchball kept up his mockery: ‘Friendly?’
‘Free!’ cried Macadam triumphantly. ‘Or freedom. All these armies claim to fight for freedom’s sake.’
‘Very well, but what about the J?’ said Quinn. ‘You still don’t have anything plausible for J.’
‘Jew?’ blurted Inchball. ‘Is it some kind of secret Jewish army?’
‘Is … could …’ Macadam was having difficulty overcoming his tact. ‘Is it possible that Malcolm Grant-Sissons is Jewish?’
‘Not on his father’s side,’ said Quinn.
‘Do we have to keep an eye out for the Jews now?’ said Inchball glumly.
‘It could be a German word?’ said Macadam, a little more brightly. ‘Lots of German words begin with J, do they not? What about Junkers? Junkers means something, doesn’t it? Isn’t it some kind of officer or nobleman?’
Inchball shook his head. ‘No, no, no, we’re barking up the wrong tree here. Even if it is some kind of special unit, or secret political grouping, the question is why? What purpose is served by all these young men topping themselves in such weird and wonderful ways?’
‘It draws the public’s attention,’ answered Macadam. ‘In the same way that a bomb blast might, but without the associated loss of innocent life. They are sacrificing themselves to make a political point. Perhaps they are militant pacifists? There was that leaflet found on the first of them, remember. The Fellowship of the Gracchi, wasn’t it? Perhaps they were all members of that group? If we can get a list of members, we can find out whether Malcolm Grant-Sissons was on it. And we can check the names on the list to find out if any of the members are missing.’
‘Sounds like a lot of work,’ grumbled Inchball. ‘For a wild goose chase.’
Inchball looked like he was about to offer an alternative theory but Quinn cut him short: ‘It is an interesting theory, Macadam. We will work with it for now.’
What Quinn didn’t tell his sergeants was that the reason he liked the theory was not because he believed it to be true, but because it drew them away from a line of enquiry that he was far from eager to pursue. From Inchball’s frown of dissatisfaction, it seemed he had more than an inkling of what that might be.
TWELVE
Wilfred George Portman stood on the balustraded balcony of the Grahame-White watch tower,
looking out over the airfield at Hendon Aerodrome. His aviator’s goggles were pushed up on to his forehead. His leather helmet sat loosely on his head, the chinstraps as yet unfastened. For something that was designated a tower, the building was modestly low. For the most part it was a solid two-storey brick construction, from the centre of which the observation tower itself projected. The tower’s pyramid-shaped roof gave the whole thing the appearance of a modern ziggurat, tiered and upward yearning. A staging post to the heavens.
It was a fine, clear day. The uninterrupted sky beckoned. Portman sniffed the air, and breathed in the scent of the future, heavy with machine oil and churned mud. The guttural thrum of an aircraft engine somewhere overhead was the sound of the future.
The future was everything for Portman. It was not simply the days not yet reached in the calendar, or that part of the countryside concealed around the next bend in the road. Nor was it just the direction in which the arrow of time was flying. It was something real and concrete. It was a dynamic force, an energy that was capable of converting the present into a new reality. It was that which a man forged out of the raw material of the present.
As for the past, he had no time for it. He experienced it as a desolate, sterile wasteland. Nostalgia, the allure of the past, was hateful to him. Whenever he felt its weighted hooks pulling at him, he suffered the most fearful depression.
He refused to forget. But he would not seek to remember. He would live only with one foot in the present, and the other striding out towards the future.
He sometimes wondered if it was to escape the tyranny of the past that he had turned to aviation.
He heard his name called. ‘Billy.’ And turned to see a young woman dressed in pale diaphanous layers draped over an ankle-length skirt. One hand held a silk parasol, open behind her head, the handle resting on her shoulder. She held her other hand out towards him, as she executed a smile of half-rebuke and half-enticement. ‘There you are. I might have known.’
‘Reg, old girl.’
He saw her wince at his familiar shortening of her name. He was the only one who called her that now. She had been Reg at school, but her parents – well, her mother at least – had always preferred Gina. To her father, these days especially, she remained steadfastly Regina.
His smile was designed to win her over, and there was every sign it succeeded. She allowed herself to be pulled towards him and kissed.
A moment ago, he had been thinking only of the flight he was about to make in the Type XV. But that thought was in the past now. Now Reg was here with him, her body coming out to meet his, her softness a cushion for his sudden tension, her lips parting to allow the questing of his tongue, her scent rushing through his veins. A new future had been made. A future of sensuality and pleasure. And it was towards that that his being hurtled now.
The parasol clattered to the floor. Both her hands were on him now, pulling him even closer, as if merely touching were not enough, would never be enough.
But then she pulled away from him and tilted back her head, gulping in a deep draft of air. ‘Darling! Someone might see.’
‘What do we care?’
She looked nervously behind her, into the observation lounge. Portman suspected that although she affected otherwise, she cared really quite a lot. At heart, she was nothing more than a petite bourgeoise – for all her radical sentiments, which she claimed to have inherited from her firebrand father.
Portman wondered if he had tired of her in that very moment. Was it possible that one could attribute to such minuscule, seemingly trivial incidents, the catastrophic swings of the pendulum of human emotion?
She turned from him to retrieve her parasol. He studied her stooped form with a detachment that almost chilled him.
Certainly he believed he had gained an insight into something at that moment. He saw clearly that a political position – he was thinking of a left-leaning one – may easily be nothing more than sentimental posturing. Was it all fake then, the whole cause? And what of her father, Oscar Villiers, one of the founders of the movement? The aristocrat who had given up his title for the sake of his socialist principles. Was all that just a pose too? After all, Villiers disapproved heartily of his daughter’s affair with Portman. When it came to sexual morality, Oscar Villiers was as conservative as any of the stolid shopkeepers who had sat on the district council with Portman’s father, the town pharmacist.
And was it some kind of joke that the great republican socialist had given his daughter the most regal of names? Or was that how he saw himself, as the father of a future Queen? Perhaps he didn’t object to the institution of monarchy at all, merely to the accident of birth that had precluded him from being King.
Reg turned back to face Portman with a conciliatory smile. A promise of delights to come. Her eyes sparkled. Tonight!
Could he wait that long? He wanted the future, whatever future it was, now.
Theirs was an affair across the class divide. He wondered if that was the only attraction in Reg Villiers for him. And if he offered a similar but opposite attraction to her. He was a social-climber in the bedroom. She was a posh girl slumming it.
The thought made him grin at her. And she inevitably misinterpreted his grin.
He was her bit of rough. Oh, a well-educated, prodigiously clever, really quite famous bit of rough. But with his Black Country accent and chippy swagger, he still was and always would be a bit of rough to her.
Or maybe it was even worse than that. It was all about her father, the great Oscar Villiers. Somehow they were both testing the old man. With their affair they were saying to him: do you really believe in that socialist rot? Very well, how do you like it when your daughter takes a grammar school upstart to her bed?
The truth was, he didn’t like it one bit.
Reg sealed her promise with a peck on the cheek. With it, she reminded him of her scent. And with the press of her body against him, of her softest flesh. Oh, what did it matter? What did any of it matter?
Was the only valid stance utter selfishness? Sometimes Portman believed he could swing to the political polar opposite without compunction. He felt himself to be a pendulum in everything. Perhaps that was because he feared his true nature, which he suspected to be that of an unconscionable cad, or worse, an uppity shopkeeper’s son.
But again, what did it matter? What did any of it matter? All that mattered was the ineluctable flight into the future.
The door to the balcony opened again and Gus from the flying school poked his head out. ‘Mr Portman, the Type XV is ready for you.’
‘I’m on my way.’
Behind his head, the Gnome eighty horsepower rotary engine snarled and rattled as it shredded the air. It was a ‘pusher’ engine, placed to push the craft ahead of it, rather than draw it in its wake. It was like having a tethered beast squatting at your back, one that was capable of far more savagery than any creature of nature.
The Grahame-White Type XV aircraft resembled an oversized box-kite in appearance, or perhaps several box-kites tacked together. It shivered and bobbed on the spot, as if the energy of the engine would shake it apart before there was any chance to become airborne.
The Type XV was a two-seater. Portman occupied the front seat of the open nacelle. Claude Grahame-White himself – by his own account, the greatest aviator of his age – was in the instructor’s seat behind. The great man eschewed aviator’s helmet and goggles, preferring to fly in his trademark cloth flat cap, broad as a plate.
The din of the engine made any verbal communication between the two men practically impossible. Portman felt Grahame-White’s hand on his shoulder, his signal to open the throttle and start the takeoff run.
It was always a thrilling moment. More than thrilling. There was dread and power and elation, and a nameless sense of being on the cusp of something. His heart would fall into exact synch with the revolutions of the rotary engine. And his bones would vibrate at the frequency of dissolution.
Even stationary, the cra
ft had within it the potential for flight. It looked so flimsy and light that you felt the lightest gust would lift it off the ground. Add forward motion, and you immediately felt the uplift whip into the wings as the crisscross of wires between the stanchions snapped taut.
There was no going back. No room for prevarication. Something bigger, stronger than mere human will had gripped the craft. It was out of Portman’s hands. Not that he wanted to back out. Not that he wanted anything other than this headlong lurch into the future.
The craft bounced and rocked as it traversed the ground. He felt every bump and rut of the runway. Then, for a split second, the course was unbelievably smooth, as the aircraft skipped excitedly, skittishly, but prematurely. It felt like the whole world was holding its breath. Before the shuddering thump of coming back down to earth.
He kept up the acceleration. The engine’s snarl was angry and impatient now.
Soon, soon now …
And there it was. The leap. The leap that stretched into ascent. The very sky took hold of him and pulled him to it.
His goggles protected his eyes from the raw whip of the wind, which he felt across his cheeks and in his quivering moustaches. Even so, his eyes filled with tears.
It was a paradox he could not fathom. At the very moment that he rose to meet the future, the past he sought so desperately to escape came grabbing at him, like a surge of gravity threatening to nosedive the aircraft.
He was thinking of the boy. He would have been seventeen now. He had kept track of every birthday. He was thinking how splendid it would be to take the boy up in an aircraft. If only he had lived.
And now he was thankful for the relentless clatter of the Gnome engine, drowning out the sobs that he howled into the oncoming blast.
The engine had settled into a deep, contented thrum, the tethered beast grown companionable. The wires were in full voice now, singing their eerie high-pitched hymn to flight. The unruly emotion that had wracked Portman at takeoff had receded. He settled back into that sense of untethered freedom known only to aviators and possibly birds. His heart still raced a little. He could never be entirely calm piloting an aircraft.