The Red Hand of Fury

by R. N. Morris

  Inchball pulled at his collar. He was a big man and it didn’t take much for his body to overheat. He hated being cooped up behind a desk at the best of times, but today he felt like a lobster in a slowly boiling pot. He had tried opening the windows, but a high breeze had played havoc with their papers. ‘Where is he then?’

  Macadam looked up quizzically from the brown corduroy jacket he had spread out on his desk.

  ‘The guv’nor,’ said Inchball.

  Macadam shrugged.

  ‘What’s his game?’

  ‘He’s pursuing a line of enquiry.’

  ‘What line of enquiry?’

  ‘Something to do with his brother, I think.’

  ‘That’s fishy, ain’t it? This one being his brother. What do you make of that?’

  ‘It’s …’ But it seemed Macadam was unable to say what he made of it.

  ‘I tell you what I make of it. It’s fishy. That’s what I make of it.’

  ‘So you said.’

  ‘You don’t think so?’

  ‘These things happen.’

  ‘These things happen! Three geezers stripping off and killing themselves – or trying to. I ain’t seen nothing like this happen before.’

  ‘I meant connections between investigating officers and those involved in cases. And besides, it’s not as if Inspector Quinn is particularly close to his brother. He did not even know he existed until recently, or so I believe.’

  ‘Yeah, so we believe. I mean, we only have his word on that, don’t we?’

  ‘I see no reason to doubt him.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘What reason?’

  ‘It’s right in front of your nose.’

  Macadam looked down. ‘This jacket?’

  ‘The suits, yes. The three identical suits. Which he says is nothing that need concern us.’

  ‘I must admit, it is a little peculiar. He did seem to be most interested in the suits, and then suddenly he decided they were no longer pertinent.’

  ‘And when did he change his mind, do you remember?’

  Macadam answered Inchball’s question only with a confirmatory nod.

  ‘That’s right, after he clapped eyes on that Grant-Sissons fellow in the hospital. After he realized that one of the men mixed up in this was a relative of his.’

  ‘You think the suits are important then, after all.’

  ‘Of course they blinkin’ are! It’s obvious, ain’t it?’

  ‘Well, yes, we agreed that, I think. They could be the uniform of an irregular paramilitary unit.’

  ‘That don’t make no sense.’

  ‘You don’t think so?’

  ‘Nah! What kind of army has its soldiers strip off before they top themselves? Nah, there’s only one type of person who goes in for that kind of applesauce.’

  ‘And that is?’

  ‘Loonies!’

  ‘Loonies?’

  ‘That’s right. Certifiable lunatics. That’s what we’re dealing with here.’

  ‘And the suits?’

  ‘You ever been in a loony bin?’

  ‘No, I can’t say that I have.’

  ‘Well, I have. When I was a PC. There was this fella. Went completely doolally, he did. His family were at their wits’ end. He was terrorizing the whole neighbourhood. In the end, they had no choice. They had to have him certified. I was the accompanying officer at his admission. Took him to Hanwell we did. And the loonies there, the ones I saw at any rate, the men all wore brown suits.’

  ‘Like these? Why didn’t you say so?’

  ‘Keep your hair on! They weren’t exactly the same. The ones I saw were tweed. Not corduroy. But it’s the same principle.’

  Macadam fell into a thoughtful reverie.

  Inchball couldn’t resist a joke. ‘You’re in a brown study!’

  Macadam gave no indication of having heard it. ‘But still, why did you not say something before?’

  ‘I was waiting for the guv’nor to say something.’

  ‘How would he know if he hasn’t been inside an asylum, as you have?’

  ‘Well, maybe he has. There are plenty of coppers as have. It seemed to me he had a pretty good idea what the suits signified. Only … he didn’t want to say as much.’

  ‘Why would he not?’

  ‘Well, his brother!’

  ‘Half-brother,’ corrected Macadam.

  ‘It’s all the same, ain’t it? Same father. Same blood. Same mad blood.’

  ‘Inchball!’

  ‘I’m not saying that. But I reckon that was what he was thinking.’

  Macadam fell silent again. After a long, pensive moment, he wondered: ‘What do we do?’

  ‘What do we do? We do what we always do. We do what we’re told. We’re good boys, ain’t we?’ But he gave a wink that went some way to belying his claim.

  Before they could discuss the matter further, the door to the office opened and Inspector Quinn came in. He was carrying in one hand a tin cashier’s box, which he placed on his desk before taking off his ulster and bowler hat, which he persisted in wearing despite the warm weather. Inchball couldn’t help noticing that the overcoat seemed even grubbier than the last time he had seen it.

  ‘What you got there?’ Inchball nodded at the box.

  ‘I found it at Malcolm Grant-Sissons’ residence.’

  ‘Ah, so that’s where you were,’ said Inchball pointedly.

  ‘I’m sure I told you that was where I was going.’

  Both sergeants shook their heads.

  ‘Anything interesting in it?’ demanded Inchball.

  Quinn thought for a moment before replying. ‘Yes. The overdue library book.’

  Macadam sat up excitedly. ‘Ooh, the latest W.G. Portman novel? Splendid! I’ll read it for you if you like.’

  ‘No, thank you. I can read it myself.’

  Inchball waited for Macadam’s disconsolate face to turn towards him, before treating him to a provocative leer.

  ‘Sir, may I at least see it?’

  Inspector Quinn unlocked the box with the small key that Macadam had found in Malcolm Grant-Sissons’ pockets. He took out the book and held it over his desk.

  ‘Do you think it’s significant?’ asked Macadam as he rose to take a closer look at the book. In his eagerness, he banged his head on the sloping ceiling.

  ‘People read books. All kinds of books,’ came Quinn’s illuminating answer.

  There’s no doubt about it, thought Inchball. The guv’nor’s in one hell of a mood.

  Quinn thought about the story Kibblewhite had told him, of the boy sucked into the induction pipe at Bankside. He rose from his seat and crossed with stooped head to Macadam’s desk. ‘I hope you’re not getting these suits muddled up.’

  Macadam looked up from the Portman book. ‘No, sir. Of course not. I am most meticulous.’

  ‘Which are the second man’s clothes? Suicide Bridge.’

  Macadam put both hands on the side of the middle box in front of him. Quinn took it and carried it over to his own desk.

  As he took out the jacket, he felt Inchball watching him closely. ‘What is it?’

  ‘So you think the suits are significant, after all?’

  Quinn was not inclined to answer. Indeed, he could not think of an answer that would satisfy Inchball that he was prepared to give. At last, he said, ‘We must look into everything very closely.’

  True to his word, Quinn methodically probed every pocket with his fingers. He found what he was looking for in the inside breast pocket: a hole through to the lining. He held the jacket by the collar and shook it down, then felt along the bottom hem. There it was. A small rectangle of something resistant, about the size of a cigarette card.

  He teased the shape up to the hole in the pocket and worked it out, brandishing by the edges a third card printed with a crude illustration of a red hand. Turning it over, he read F.J.S.U. Seven. ‘It’s time, I think, that we should
have these cards examined for fingerprints.’

  ‘I’ll see to it, sir,’ said Macadam, rising eagerly. He gave Inchball a pointed nod, the meaning of which Quinn could not decipher. But from the buoyancy of Macadam’s step and the enthusiasm of his tone, Quinn guessed that the discovery of the card had gone some way to restoring him to the position he had formerly occupied in his sergeant’s estimation.

  He heard Inchball mumble something about needles and haystacks.

  That evening Quinn chose to eat alone at the Lyons teashop on Parliament Street, the nearest one to the Yard. He was in no hurry to return to his lodgings, at least not until he could be sure of making it up to his room without encountering any of the other occupants. The couple who had taken over Miss Dillard’s room unsettled him. He had not seen them yet, but he had heard their laughter.

  Quinn had no hankering for the company of his colleagues either, which was why he was avoiding the canteen, and why he chose a teashop over any of the local public houses, where coppers were more likely to be found. Any police officers who came here were undoubtedly loners like him.

  He liked the food at Lyons teashops. It wasn’t imaginative, but it was consistent. And it tasted of what it needed to. The mutton pie was meaty and salty and solid and satisfying. So although he often went into the place with the intention of trying something new, he invariably reverted to mutton pie at the moment of ordering. Tonight, as a concession to the warmer weather that seemed to be on the way, he had also ordered a Russian salad and some lettuce hearts.

  He welcomed the transience and anonymity of the place, although he suspected that the waitresses recognized him as a regular. Sometimes he had the sense that they had already written his order down before he had given it. But no matter how many times he ate here, he steadfastly refused to look them in the eye.

  He had with him the tin cashier’s box he had found at Malcolm’s house.

  Quinn sipped from his teacup and pretended to be staring dreamily into space. In truth, he was carefully scoping out the room. It was not inconceivable that he was being watched, whether by the idly curious, the professionally jealous or the covertly hostile. Maybe some newspaperman who was on the lookout for the next Quick-Fire Quinn story. Or one of those grey men of the shadows of dubious loyalty and obscure purpose who made it their business to know what the department was up to.

  You could never be too careful.

  The likeliest suspect would be the least likely looking. The blatantly theatrical gentleman in the silk coolie jacket poring over The Stage. The Norland nanny pouring tea for her two young charges. The elderly couple with nothing left to say to one another, chewing their teacakes like cattle chewing the cud.

  Quinn had chosen a corner table at the back of the room. He sat with his back to the wall, with the whole of the floor in view.

  He took out the small key and opened the tin, lifting the lid so that it partially obscured the contents from any onlooker.

  A scent of something was released with the opening. Of dust, of paper brittled by age, of sadness and tears, and most faintly of all, of lavender, as if the letters had been kept for decades locked in a drawer next to the potpourri. Which in all likelihood they had.

  Quinn sat for a long time staring down at the bundle of letters. It was as if he feared them, in the same way that another man might fear a scorpion. Instinctively, viscerally, for reasons of self-preservation.

  Did he really dare to do it? To read the love letters that his father had written to another man’s wife? It felt as though he would be breaking a fundamental taboo. And yet, of all the mysteries that he had been called upon to investigate in his career, his father remained the most unfathomable. Here at last before him on the pristine white table cloth was, possibly, the solution to that enigma.

  He picked the bundle up by one end of the ribbon that tied it and teased it out of the tin.

  Laying the bundle on the table before him, he pulled now at both ends of the ribbon. Released from their confinement, the pile of letters crackled gently as they expanded. Quinn even imagined he could hear them heave a sigh of relief.

  At that moment the waitress brought him his dinner, and he was obliged to sweep the letters to one side. He might have expected to feel a jolt of electricity as he touched them. But in fact they felt exactly like what they were: a bunch of old letters.

  First he would eat his dinner, slowly savouring each solid mouthful. He even asked for a helping of bread and butter to prolong his main course, and then ordered a rum baba.

  The dessert came far too soon. And was eaten far too quickly.

  He could delay reading them no longer.

  My dearest, darling L,

  You say I must not declare my love for you as to do so will only hurt us both. But how can I not declare it when to remain silent is torturing me? You say our love will hurt others who are blameless and good. What do I care about the blameless and good? I do not want to be blameless and good. I want only you. Do not misunderstand me, my dear, I do not desire to hurt anyone only for the sake of causing pain. I am not a sadist. I will not cause pain needlessly. But our love is not needless. Our love trumps everything else. Any sacrifice that our love demands must be made, however painful. It will pain me never to see my son again but it will pain me more to be separated from you. But this is more than a question of balancing pains and losses, or rights and wrongs. We have a duty, dearest. It is not to those good and blameless others. It is not even to ourselves. It is to love. The highest duty that we owe is to love. We are not sinners, we are lovers, and in loving we cannot sin. Whatever we do in love, for love, and because of love, is necessarily good. Whatever love asks of us, we must obey its command. Love demands first and foremost that we declare it. Therefore my dear I will declare it now and I will declare it forever and I will never tire of declaring it: I love you. I love you passionately and fiercely and dangerously and tenderly. I love you with all my heart and soul and body. With every sinew of my muscles, every fibre of my bones, every cell of my flesh. You are everything to me, Louisa, and I would give up everything for one moment in your arms. Without regret.

  I am yours,

  Only yours,

  Q.

  SEVENTEEN

  It was dark when he got back to the lodging house.

  He had sat in the tearoom reading his father’s letters, long after the other diners had left.

  The letters told the complete story of his father’s love affair with Louisa Grant-Sissons, from the first dawnings of their mutual feelings, through the physical consummation of the affair, to Louisa’s pregnancy, the birth of their son, Louisa’s sickness and rapid decline. There were no dates on any of the letters, though the events they referred to clearly took place over several years. It also appeared that Hugh Grant-Sissons knew about the affair and turned a blind eye to it. He seemed to have been a man driven by other passions. From his own experience of Grant-Sissons, Quinn would have described him as a monomaniac. Possibly he considered his wife’s amour with his business partner as a blessing in disguise, relieving him as it did of the tedious responsibility of attending to her happiness himself.

  Perhaps he had even encouraged it.

  Quinn had found one letter unopened, and it remained unopened even now. It was one thing to tip letters out of already cut envelopes. Quite another to breach a virgin envelope himself. It seemed an intrusion too far, almost a violation.

  But there was more to it than that.

  His father’s suicide all those years ago had precipitated a mental breakdown in Quinn. He had reacted to it the only way he knew at the time. He suppressed his emotions and allowed the rational part of his mind to take over.

  In short, he saw it as a puzzle that needed solving, through the exercise of logic. But that logic soon became distorted. His a priori assumption was that it was inconceivable that his father had taken his own life. Logic demanded that he posit certain dark forces, malign agents and byzantine plots to explain what had happened. His father h
ad been murdered, and his murder had been made to look like suicide. This was the only explanation that Quinn could accept.

  All he had to do was prove it. He had to prove it to redeem his father, not only in his own eyes, but to the world; most of all to his mother. Her tight-lipped coldness in the face of her husband’s death had been inexplicable to Quinn at the time.

  He had set out to prove the unprovable. And, as seemed likely now, the patently untrue. No one had murdered his father. He had taken his own life.

  The attempt to prove otherwise had cost Quinn his sanity.

  Quinn now believed that this one last unread letter held the secret of his father’s death. He speculated that it had been sent to Louisa after her death, which was the reason it remained unopened. There was a very real possibility that it was his father’s suicide note.

  Reading the details of his father’s love-making had inspired a particular species of queasy horror. He could not now get out of his mind those descriptions of his father’s tongue flicking Louisa’s nipple into playful pertness, his lyrical appreciations of his lover’s pubic hair, and worst of all his raptures at feeling his stalwart manhood buried deep within her warm enfolding flesh, and the joyous explosion of his love as she gasped her simultaneous ecstasy and clawed his back with her fingernails.

  But to read his father’s justification for taking his own life would be a different level of horror again. Especially as it had been written to a woman who was already dead, and who had died in the most horrible circumstances – one of those hands with the very nails that had clawed his father’s back having been amputated to stop the spread of a ravenous cancer.

  Quinn held the tin box tucked under his arm. He felt that its weight came entirely from that single letter that he had yet to read. It had its own morbid gravity. He felt it pulling at his heart.

  It was strange, he reflected, how Hugh Grant-Sissons had respected his wife’s privacy in not opening this last letter. He couldn’t help wondering if he had read the other letters, and what he had made of the more explicit passages.

  And why had he kept the letters at all? Perhaps out of some perverse, masochistic wallowing in his own humiliation. Or perhaps he enjoyed a different kind of perversion, that of voyeurism. Maybe the letters gave him a vicarious thrill, as he read about the physical satisfaction that his wife had enjoyed with another man?