by R. N. Morris
There was another possible explanation. He had kept the letters because he really did love his wife after all. In his own flawed, failed way, but truly and honestly. The letters must have caused him pain. As Louisa herself had caused him pain. But they were hers – a record, in fact, of her happiness – and he clung on to them and treasured them as he clung on to and treasured everything that reminded him of her.
Quinn must have been distracted by his thoughts of the letters, because he did not exercise his usual caution in closing the front door behind him. He told himself that he had got into the habit of stealth out of consideration for the other residents. As a police officer, he was required to be on duty at all hours. So his comings and goings were hardly regular. There was a certain dishonesty in this explanation, because he contrived to be as quiet when he came home at six o’clock in the evening as he was at three in the morning.
But tonight he merely pushed the door to behind him. There must have been another door open at the rear of the house, because a through draft took hold of the front door and slammed it into its frame.
There was an excited shriek from the drawing room, and a moment later Mrs Ibbott came running out. ‘Ah, Inspector Quinn! It’s you! I did not think it would be you because you are usually so quiet.’
Quinn did not wholeheartedly welcome his glamorous elevation from plain old Mr Quinn to Inspector Quinn. ‘Forgive me, Mrs Ibbott. I did not mean to make such a racket.’
‘No, no, it’s quite all right. It’s very good to see you, in fact. We see too little of you. Oh, I know you work long hours, and your work is very important. But it’s important to have a home life too, you know, Inspector Quinn.’
She seemed to be making all together too much of the Inspector title. He gave a bland smile and nodded.
‘You’re always creeping upstairs without saying hello.’
‘I don’t want to disturb anyone.’
‘You’re not! Of course you’re not! Now, tell me, have you met our new guests, Mr and Mrs Hargreaves?’
‘No, I …’
‘Splendid! Then you must come in and meet them now.’
‘I’m afraid I …’ Quinn lamely tapped the cashier’s box under his arm.
‘Nonsense. I won’t hear it. Whatever is in there can wait, I’m sure. What is it, some murderer’s confession? You can come in and tell us all about it. Perhaps we can help you crack the case?’
‘No, I … that wouldn’t …’
‘I know, I know. I’m teasing you, Inspector.’
‘Please, there’s no need to …’
‘So that’s settled then. You’ll come in and say hello.’
The door to the drawing room was held open for him. There was no way to extricate himself. Indeed, Mrs Ibbott as good as pushed him into the room.
He came in at the climax of a lively exchange, to which Messrs Timberley and Appleby were loudly contributing, in their usual vying way. Quinn could understand their excitement. With them in the hot over-furnished room was a young woman, whose physical presence exercised an immediate and disconcerting effect on Quinn. He supposed she was beautiful, but in all honesty he found it difficult to look at her.
Her eyes glistened with a lively, sympathetic interest. Her smile was ready and warm, and revealed two rows of the most perfect teeth, small, white and evenly spaced. He was no aficionado of fashion, but to his eye at least her dress appeared perfectly judged. It was not showy, but it was elegant.
Mrs Ibbott had followed him in. She waited for the hilarity to die down before introducing him. ‘Well look who I found! Our very own police detective. The celebrated Inspector Quinn of the Yard!’
Quinn held up his free hand in demurral. He felt her gaze on him. Curious, interested, even perhaps a little in awe. He sensed her lean forward in the winged armchair in which she had been sitting back, as if his entrance had enlivened her, and drawn her out.
Mrs Ibbott continued the introduction. ‘This is Mrs Hargreaves. And Mr Hargreaves, of course.’
Ah yes, of course. Though it was only now that his attention was directed to the other man in the room that Quinn noticed him. They seemed a spectacularly mismatched couple. Hargreaves had a rather shifty, ferret-like look about him. He acknowledged Quinn with the merest upward tilt of his head. It was an arrogant, sneering gesture, to which his unprepossessing physicality did not entitle him.
Naturally, despite his antipathy to the man, Quinn held out his hand. Hargreaves did not rise from his seat to take it, but reached up in a lackadaisical manner which struck Quinn as bad form.
‘Very nice to meet you. Both,’ he added with a bow to Mrs Hargreaves. ‘I do trust you are settling in?’
‘Oh, yes!’ she said with a bright smile. ‘Everyone has been so welcoming. And now that we have met you … well, we have heard so much about you.’
‘You have?’ Quinn was rather alarmed by this.
‘All good, believe me. We heard how you …’ But Mrs Hargreaves caught a swift shake of the head from Mrs Ibbott which seemed to throw her off her stride. ‘How you … how kind you were … to the lady who …’
‘Steady on, Cissy,’ warned her husband.
Quinn felt his face flush with ridiculous hot embarrassment. So, they had been talking about him and Miss Dillard. ‘If you will forgive me, I must go upstairs now. I still have some work to do this evening.’ He fled the room.
He did not blame her. How could he? Indeed, the fact that she had brought it up attested to her goodness and candour. He blamed Appleby and Timberley, to whom everything, even Miss Dillard’s death, was one great joke.
He bounded up the stairs. On the landing outside Miss Dillard’s old room, he paused and closed his eyes.
He was trying to conjure up the image of Miss Dillard’s pewter-coloured irises.
But the image of a tongue teasing a nipple into playful pertness was all that came to mind. He opened his eyes in horror. It was himself and Mrs Hargreaves he had been thinking of.
Like father, like son.
The thought came to him as he sat in his room with the final letter in his hand. He was in the armchair next to the bed. His head was heavy with weariness.
The letter was still in its sealed envelope. Perhaps he would never read it. Perhaps he didn’t need to. Or perhaps it would be better if he didn’t.
The curtains were open, and light came in from the street lamps outside. He had not switched on a light in his room. He could take out the letter and still not be able to read it. But he baulked at doing even that.
It wasn’t always necessary to know the truth. Nor desirable.
That seemed a strange thing for a police detective to admit. It went against all his instincts and training. He lived his life in the belief that he had a duty to uncover the truth. Whomever it hurt.
But he found that that duty was not so easy to perform when the person hurt was himself.
Without absolute evidence for a given hypothesis, it was always possible to entertain an element of doubt towards it. It was looking increasingly likely that his father had committed suicide. But part of him could still cling on to the old consolation that he had been murdered. It couldn’t be definitively ruled out.
Not until he opened that letter.
Quinn’s hand relaxed and the letter dropped on to his lap.
He let his head fall back and sank swiftly into a welcome oblivion.
The next day was wet again.
Quinn’s ulster was speckled with dark spots as he hung it on the hatstand in the attic room.
Even though he had his back to Macadam, he could sense his sergeant’s excitement. Instead of turning directly to face him, he flashed an ironic questioning glance at Inchball, who merely shrugged in return.
‘Well?’ Quinn finally asked as he looked up from behind his desk.
‘We’ve had the results in, sir. Of the fingerprint analysis of the three cards.’
Quinn nodded for him to go on.
‘It’s messy, and not conclusiv
e. But it seems that none of their fingerprints was found.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean none of the men who had the cards touched them. Which makes it seem like someone slipped the cards into their pockets, perhaps without them knowing.’
‘I see. Anything else?’
‘Yes, as it happens. A few rogue prints have been ruled out as belonging to coppers. Yours included, sir.’
‘I was most careful to handle the cards by the edges.’
‘I’m sure you were, sir. Which is why yours were ruled out.’
‘Please get to the point, Macadam.’
‘Oh, he loves to drag it out, don’t he!’
‘The point, sir, is that one set of prints – excluding yours – was found on all the cards. The same thumbprint, quite clearly and decisively identifiable.’
‘I see.’
‘The same person put the cards into the clothes of these three men.’
‘Yes, I gathered that, Macadam.’
‘That is a breakthrough, is it not, sir?’
‘Do we know to whom this thumbprint belongs?’
‘Well, no. Not yet, sir.’
‘Then I fear it is too early to talk of breakthroughs.’
Macadam said nothing. He merely bowed his head slightly in acknowledgement of Quinn’s judgement.
EIGHTEEN
The ticking of the office clock sounded like a tiny hammer driving fine nails into an infinite coffin.
It was the most frustrating investigation that Inchball could ever remember being involved in. He was not even sure it was an investigation.
Even Macadam’s announcement of a definitive thumbprint did little to convince him that they were not wasting their time. ‘It’s a needle in a bloody haystack!’ It was his favourite analogy whenever discussing fingerprint evidence.
The rain didn’t help. A fine, cold, needling rain that seemed not so much to fall through as fill the air. It was hard to believe that only the day before they had been baking away in stifling heat.
But even with the rain, he would rather be outside pounding the streets, knocking on doors, dragging suspects in than … well, than whatever it was he was supposed to be doing here.
‘What am I supposed to be doing again?’ he even asked at one point.
Quinn offered him no answer to that question, but just stared at him with an outraged expression. Was it Inchball’s imagination or was there also a glint of fear in the guv’nor’s eyes?
He began to wonder if his boss wasn’t losing the plot.
When Quinn left the room, Inchball vented his frustration on Macadam. ‘What’s the matter with you, man? You’ve got a face like a smacked arse.’
‘Not at all.’
‘So you’re happy then? Happy with the way his nibs is handling this?’
‘It’s not my place to question Inspector Quinn’s methodology. Nor yours neither.’
‘Don’t make me laugh!’
‘What would you have us do?’
‘We need to follow up the suits.’
‘We have the fingerprint lead. The suits may turn out to be irrelevant.’
‘You are assuming that the fingerprint belongs to a known criminal. And that we can identify him.’
‘That’s true but …’
‘It could turn out to be a wild goose chase.’
‘Well, yes, but I don’t see what else …’
‘What else? The suits, I tell you!’
‘What about the suits?’ It was Quinn, returned from wherever he had been. He stood in the doorway like the spectre at the feast.
Inchball exchanged a glance with Macadam and swallowed once. ‘You ever been in a loony bin, guv?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, once I had to take this fella into Hanwell. You know, the big asylum. I got an eyeful of all the loonies there. They all wore the same suits. Which as it happens were brown tweed. They looked a lot like these ones. Only these are corduroy. But apart from that, they was the same. So, me and Mac, we was wondering, whether these three fellas might have come out of a loony bin? Maybe we should look into that, guv?’
Inchball watched Quinn closely. He was sure of his ground. But there was something going on with the guv’nor and no mistake. He had a theory of his own, most likely. Sometimes even the best coppers could have blind spots. But Inchball was determined to put his case firmly and not give ground until the guv’nor gave him an answer one way or the other. It was time to have it out.
He knew what they thought of him. He was the muscle. Brawn not brain. Handy for putting the fear of God up a suspect, but not the sharpest tool in the toolbox. Not to be trusted with all that deduction business. Leave that to them. That’s what they thought. But he knew what he knew. And he knew that, for once at least, Mac agreed with him.
Quinn could deny it all he liked, but the suits were a lead.
Quinn’s face was suddenly drained of colour, his lips clenched. A hand came up to conceal his eyes. Inchball saw a spasm of distress shake the detective’s entire body. Both his hands reached out to steady himself in the frame of the open door.
He lurched over to his desk and slumped down heavily behind it, pretending to busy himself with some papers.
It started as a barely perceptible tremor but grew into a convulsion that shook both arms, rattling the desk. Quinn gave a high-pitched whimper as the piece of paper in his hands ripped apart. He shook the fragments of paper away from him and placed one hand over his eyes again. This time when he removed it, Inchball saw the moisture pooling.
‘I’ll not go back there.’ Quinn spoke so quietly and intently that at first Inchball couldn’t be sure he had heard him right. He cast a questioning glance at Macadam, whose minute shake of the head cautioned restraint.
Quinn let out a deep sigh. His body was still quaking. The extended murmur he was now emitting sounded much like sobbing. It wasn’t long before it became the real thing. And it was appalling to witness. Fragmented jags of sound gurgled in his throat. His chest heaved. Tears flooded his face.
Then came the snot, streaming and bubbling out of both nostrils, without any decency or self-control.
That was the worst of it, for Inchball watching. Not the distress itself, though that was bad enough. But Quinn’s total surrender to it. He was beyond himself. Heedless of his own degradation. Shameless, because shame no longer meant anything to him.
Inchball wanted it to stop, more than anything. He wished to God that he had never seen it. At the same time, he could not tear his eyes away.
He was too horrified, too alienated by what he was seeing, to have sympathy.
Quinn’s teeth began to chatter. Inchball realized he was trying to speak.
Quinn began to strike his forehead with the heel of his hand. Then he struck his head with startling force down on the desk.
When he raised his head, his eyes were pink, and the flesh around them puffy.
But he was calmer.
‘It’s not Hanwell,’ he said. ‘The suits don’t come from Hanwell. They come from Colney Hatch.’
A red mark on Quinn’s forehead mushroomed into a lump before their very eyes.
‘It was all a long time ago.’ Quinn wiped his face with a large white handkerchief. He studied the inside of the handkerchief for a moment as if he expected to find the solution to a mystery there.
‘Sir, you don’t have to …’ Macadam broke off.
Quinn frowned at him, not in anger or confusion, but almost in regret. He knew that he owed his sergeants an explanation. ‘There can be no excuse for the outburst to which I have just yielded. It is beyond reprehensible. I would not blame you, men, if you decided to take the matter above my head to Sir Edward Henry himself. I would not blame you if you called for my replacement.’
‘No,’ said Inchball decisively. ‘They’ll put some blithering idiot in charge of us like they did last time.’
‘Coddington?’ Quinn shook his head ruefully. ‘You have a right to be l
ed by a senior officer worthy of you. A man who has earned your respect.’
‘You have, sir. You have our respect,’ insisted Macadam.
‘No. There can be no question of that. After … after what I have just subjected you to.’
‘We all …’ But Macadam, who had begun so brightly, couldn’t complete his thought.
‘No, Macadam, we have not all, we have never all.’
‘We all have our moments, sir. That’s all I was going to say.’
‘You’re very good, Macadam. Too good. But the fact is, you need to know that you can rely on me. It’s a question of trust, and I do not feel that you can trust me any more.’
‘Begging your pardon, guv,’ said Inchball. ‘But that ain’t for you to decide.’
‘Do you think I would allow either of you men to remain in this department if you had just indulged in such behaviour? For your own good, for your own safety, for the safety of the department, I would insist on …’
‘But it ain’t us, it’s you. And you ain’t going anywhere. We ain’t having that Coddington again.’
‘Not Coddington, no. I agree with you there. But someone. There are other men. Better men.’
‘No one better than you,’ said Inchball quickly.
‘You saw how my hands shook! Imagine if I had been holding a weapon, covering one of you men as you were about some perilous business. Imagine my finger had squeezed the trigger by accident!’
‘It didn’t happen,’ said Macadam.
‘It ain’t gonna happen,’ said Inchball.
‘It could,’ insisted Quinn.
‘There ain’t nobody like you with a gun in his hand.’
‘Oh, Inchball! Inchball, Inchball,’ murmured Quinn, with his eyes closed.
‘Let’s put it to the test.’
Quinn’s eyes opened in surprise. He looked at Inchball to see if he was joking. He didn’t seem to be.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Hold out your right hand. Your gun hand.’