The Red Hand of Fury

by R. N. Morris

  THIRTY-ONE

  The Dublin Castle pub on Camden’s Park Street was, as its name suggested, frequented by a largely Irish clientele. Most of the men who drank there were workers brought over to provide cheap labour for the railways. Many of them worked in the nearby Chalk Farm goods yard.

  It was a fair assumption that they were Catholics in their religion, nationalists in their politics, and Guinness drinkers in their saloons.

  Tonight the talk was all about the trouble in the Balkans. Would there be war in Europe? Would the English be drawn in? And if so, where would that leave the Irish?

  There was little enthusiasm for German militarism. The general feeling was that the Teutonic bullies should be taught a lesson. Fritz was a bloody menace, it was agreed, and someone had better stand up to him. The consensus was that if it came to war, the Irish would fall in step with the English, Paddy lining up behind Johnny to volunteer. Their own struggle would have to be set aside for as long as it took to defeat the common enemy.

  Hadn’t your man Asquith at least tried to do the right thing? It wasn’t his fault if the pig-headed Proddies chose to scupper the agreement. And if the nationalists showed themselves to be stalwart allies at England’s time of need, who could doubt that the Liberals would reward them with the great prize of independence once the war was over?

  Of course, there were some who scoffed at this and were rather of the opinion that the English were as bad as the Germans, if not worse, and could be trusted no further than they could be thrown.

  Which was all beside the point, as far as some young daredevils were concerned. They cared nothing for politics. They only craved adventure and weren’t afraid to don British khaki to find it.

  If it came to a scrap, they would not be found wanting.

  The discussion at the bar had reached such a point when the door flew open with the force of an attack. Some even suspected a bomb blast, until they saw the swaying figure of a man in the doorway. Ah, it was only another clumsy drunk misjudging the force needed to open a door.

  But there was something about this particular pish-head that didn’t seem quite right. The men of the Dublin Castle regarded him warily. He was a stranger for one thing, and strangers usually meant trouble.

  His eyes were the most unsettling thing about him. They were not, in all honesty, the eyes of a drunk. They did not wander and waver in the drunkard’s usual scatter gaze. No, this fella’s gaze was oddly focused and intense. He had the look of a fire and brimstone preacher.

  Most of them hoped he would quickly realize he had stumbled into the wrong pub and quietly slip away. But there seemed little chance of that. His eyes said that he had come there with a purpose and the purpose was to make trouble.

  The room fell silent and every head turned in his direction.

  He held out an accusing finger and opened his mouth to declaim to the whole pub. As soon as he did, it was clear he was no Ulster Proddie as some had feared, but an Englishman. ‘You are the key to it all! You unlock the whole mystery. I have been trying to work out how he did it, and it’s you. I do not know whether you are willing accomplices or unwitting tools. I hope to God that it is the latter. But perhaps he has won you over to his side with inducements. He promised you the earth, I do not doubt. But you must know you cannot trust him! He is the Devil! Satan! Today, he is killing English boys, poor sick-in-the-head unfortunates. But tomorrow, who can say that he will not turn his powers against your people? The very flower of your nation. He uses you as some kind of conduit. There is a force at work here. The red hand made me think of it. The red hand is the symbol of the Ulster Volunteer Force. It was when I realized that that I knew the Irish must be involved in some way. The red hand is somehow of great significance to the Irish. It is either a great provocation or a rallying banner. It’s all coming together in my head. Although … Can any of you explain the significance of the number seven to me? Is it a very Irish number?’

  This puzzling tirade was received in stunned silence until one old fella at the bar gave voice to what everyone else was thinking: ‘Will you shut the feck up, you crazy English eejit.’

  This provoked an outburst of raucous hilarity and the rest of the man’s words were drowned in laughter. He was soon dismissed as a harmless lunatic, as the regulars of the Dublin Castle turned back to their dark pints.

  The man would not be discouraged, however. He continued to give voice to his obscure ravings, even though no one was listening.

  Eventually, the landlord came out from behind the bar and frog-marched him off the premises, giving him an unceremonious shove out the door, to loud cheers from his customers.

  Enough was enough, he declared. ‘I wouldna minded, but the cunt didn’t buy a single fecking drink.’

  This was universally held to be the wittiest remark of the evening.

  Over the next several days a strange and solitary figure was repeatedly sighted around the environs of Camden.

  His appearance became increasingly unkempt as his behaviour grew more unpredictable and chaotic. Of course, not everyone noticed this; most people preferred to look the other way when he hove into view.

  There were those who had their eye on him, however.

  Most frequently he was encountered in one or other of the locality’s public houses. He attempted to enter the Dublin Castle on a number of further occasions, only to discover that he was now barred from the premises. And so he tried his luck in the other Castles around there, the Edinboro, the Pembroke and the Windsor, frequented by Scots, Welsh and English railway workers respectively. It wasn’t long before he was barred from those too.

  His message to each of these nationalities was similar to that he had delivered to the Irish. He believed them to be complicit in the crimes of an unnamed individual, whom he considered to be an incarnation of the very Devil. It fell each time on equally deaf ears. He took to accosting people in the street, demanding of them if they knew the meaning of the number seven, or had ever seen the sign of the red hand.

  Those who had their eye on him noticed that his demeanour appeared increasingly frantic, as he was met with repeated incomprehension and rebuff. The residents of Camden began to cross the street to avoid him. There was something dangerous about the mad vagrant who had suddenly appeared in their midst. He threatened not simply their civic peace, but also their personal sanity. He had brought the prospect of madness into their lives, revealing it as something frighteningly close to home.

  ‘He’s bloody good at this,’ one of those watching him observed to his companion.

  ‘Too bloody good.’

  It was getting close to the time for them to intervene.

  As far as anyone could tell, he was sleeping in the open, on the towpath by the canal. Often he was seen standing at the side of the canal, shouting argumentatively at the water. At these moments he was not concerned with the unnamed criminal, or the mysteries of the number seven and the red hand. His beef with the canal seemed to be over a woman. ‘She doesn’t love you!’ he screamed, while making a wild gesture with one hand.

  Other times he would be found huddled beneath one of the bridges, weeping for hours at a time.

  Anyone who had the misfortune to get close to him could smell how far gone he was in degradation. His face was dark with stubble and grime. His hair matted, his clothes soiled and torn. His fingernails were long yellow claws.

  One night he took off his shoes and threw them at the moon.

  Each of his shoes fell with a discreet plop into the canal. Even though he had not disturbed the perfect, infuriating circle of the moon, he must have found some relief in the act. He laughed about it for a long time afterwards.

  From then on he went about barefoot. Soon his feet were filthy and blooded. He stopped roaming the streets, and spent almost all his hours camped out on the towpath, without even a newspaper to shelter him from the elements.

  He often relieved himself where he stood, or sat, or squatted, or lay. Like a baby, he had no understanding
of what he was doing.

  A signal passed between the two men who kept an eye on him. ‘I’ll get the doctor,’ one of them said.

  ‘Find a bobby, too,’ the other answered with a nod. He then started to move towards the vagrant, who at that moment lay on the ground, soaked by a light but persistent drizzle of which he seemed to have no inkling. His body shook with great, heaving tremors, as if he was lying on top of a small earthquake. His eyes stared straight up into the grey sky. His mouth gaped open to gulp down the rain.

  As fast as he drank the liquid in, it leached from his eyes.

  The man who had been keeping an eye on him crouched down. The stench of the other man hit him, bringing tears to his eyes. He had to force himself to lean closer to the other man’s face to whisper: ‘It’s Macadam here, sir. Can you hear me? We’re going to take you in now.’

  Silas Quinn stared into his sergeant’s face but gave no indication of recognizing him. ‘Bubble. I popped him like a bubble.’ He stabbed a finger weakly in the air.

  THIRTY-TWO

  He had never been away.

  That life he thought he had lived, just a dream.

  A strange dream. As absurd as all dreams are.

  And now he was trying to remember it. He was in that first moment of waking, in the moment when you pass from one life to another, from a life of bizarre wonders and uncomfortable truths, a life that makes perfect sense while you are caught up in it, a life that grips you with its urgency and moves you with its pathos and shocks you with its terrors.

  But a life that begins to fade the moment you open your eyes.

  What details he could remember only convinced him of its unreality. Had he really believed himself to be a policeman of some kind? Employed where? In something called the Special Crimes Department?

  Ha!

  The tricks the mind plays on us.

  And what were they called, the two men who worked there with him? Such odd names they had.

  No … gone.

  It would come back to him.

  Or perhaps not.

  Perhaps he should let it go. Stop trying to remember.

  It was too exhausting. All he wanted to do was sleep. He would sleep and dream another life, and the life he dreamed this time would fade on waking just the same.

  It didn’t matter. He could dream as many lives as he liked.

  And with each successive life he dreamt, that one life, the life that had felt more real than the others, receded further from his mind’s grasp.

  And had he really stood beneath a full moon and thrown his shoes into a canal? What had he been thinking?

  There were more Jews in here than he remembered. As if each time he fell asleep – each time he lived another life – they brought more Jews in. All he could say was it must be especially stressful to be a Jew today, particularly injurious to one’s mental health.

  There were so many of them now that they had their own wards, one for Jewish men, and one for Jewish women. Another patient, a man with deep-set eyes and a face as pale and round as the moon, told him that the Jews had all been placed in wooden huts. One night, the huts had been set on fire while the Jews slept. All the Jews had been killed. It had been done deliberately to keep the numbers down, according to his informant. But there were so many mad Jews in the world that it wasn’t long before numbers were up again and they had to build more huts for them.

  Some of the people he encountered he remembered from the last time he had been here. If it was right to speak of a last time, and it was not, as he suspected, one continuous stay interrupted by a long and peculiarly intense dream.

  He learnt to recognize those who expected nothing of him, whether staff or fellow inmates. It was not that he consciously sought them out. But some natural affinity drew them together; he expected nothing of them either.

  They did not chide him if he sat all day in the same chair, quietly weeping.

  At times it was suggested that he should play cards with some of the others. Or go outside into the gardens. Or help on the farm. But there was never any real expectation that he would. No approval was given if he did, nor disappointment registered if he didn’t. It was all the same to them.

  One of those who fell into this category was a young man called Henry Hicks.

  Hicks was an undernourished individual, whose brown corduroy suit, several sizes too large, hung loosely off him. He had a permanently frightened face, an expression that was exacerbated by unruly straw-like hair that stood up in all directions. Henry Hicks never looked anyone in the eye and responded to any stimulus like a timid kitten.

  How he knew that the young man was called Henry Hicks, he couldn’t say, for the young man himself had never volunteered his name. Indeed, Henry Hicks rarely said anything, and when he did speak it was in a strange incomprehensible language, which sounded suspiciously made-up.

  ‘Ackle pash, capple maddle hash,’ was no language he recognized. And yet, somehow he had a sense, if not of meaning, then certainly of an emotional content.

  There were times when he almost convinced himself that these pronouncements were the most profound utterances that any human had ever made. They represented the decay and redundancy of language and seemed to be the only rational reaction to the situation they found themselves in.

  They usually came at the climax of a crisis, and invariably eased whatever tension had been building.

  There was always something both inevitable and utterly unexpected about them. They were almost redemptive. He found their concise, aphoristic certainty particularly satisfying.

  ‘Malakit por danakit.’

  And it was only when he spoke that Henry Hicks seemed to break free of his fear.

  There were those who clearly did expect something of him, who had some purpose in which he played a part. It goes without saying that he did not understand either their purpose or his part in it. It was never explained to him. It was some kind of test, a game to them perhaps, in which he had to work out what to do based on the reactions that his behaviour provoked. For example, if he did something that resulted in pain, then he must try to make sure that he did not do that thing again. Although first he had to work out what he had done that had provoked the pain, which was not always easy.

  It was a confusing and frustrating game, and he was not very good at it. As much as he was able, he tried to avoid these people. But the purpose that they entertained towards him was so strong that they often came looking for him.

  Foremost among these was Mr Ince, but there were others to whom he delegated his dispensations. With so many patients in the asylum needing his attention, he could not always be expected to administer his treatment to every lunatic personally.

  It was hard to know what Mr Ince wanted from him. He always strived to comply with whatever command he issued, and was never wilfully disobedient. Even so, he would feel the brunt of his custodian’s key fob.

  Mr Ince took umbrage at his very existence, it seemed.

  A seemingly more benign presence, who nonetheless entertained expectations towards him, was Dr Pottinger. That first day, after he had been cleaned and dressed and fed, he was taken to Dr Pottinger’s office. The superintendent had greeted him if not warmly then certainly eagerly. Not so much as an old friend, as a bon viveur returning to a favourite restaurant.

  ‘Well, Silas, here you are again! We have been following your career with some interest, you know. It has been quite remarkable to see your rise to celebrity, when I think back to the young man who came to us all those years ago. Not to put too fine a point on it, you were a nervous wreck, my friend!’ Dr Pottinger beamed indulgently. ‘Afraid of your own shadow, you were. And yet, you left this place to become a fearless and famous police detective, did you not?’

  Silas frowned doubtfully, although he did not say which part of Pottinger’s assessment he was unsure about.

  ‘We are quite looking forward to getting to work on you. Dr Leaming – I don’t think Dr Leaming was here the last time you vis
ited us – yes, Dr Leaming is doing some outstanding work with nervous men. That is to say, men who are crippled by their fears and anxieties. Most of the subjects he works with are somewhat younger than you, but I think he might be persuaded to add you to his programme. Your work as a policeman has surely strengthened your constitution to a robustness that could withstand the rigours of his therapy. It is physically demanding, but entirely safe. And I feel that it could benefit you enormously. You were always a very responsive patient, Silas. I have high hopes for you. We put you together once before. I am sure we will be able to do it again. I shall talk to Dr Leaming. Would you like that? Excellent.’

  Some days he was dogged by the sense that there was something he should do. A reason he was there.

  There were moments when it nearly came back to him. He would glance down at his own implausible body and the brown corduroy suit he had been dressed in. Something would stir in his memory.

  As he groped to remember he realized it was something to do with that other life, the life he had dreamt.

  The life of the man called Silas Quinn.

  It made no sense and wearied him unspeakably.

  He could not hold on to his train of thought. And so he let it go.

  But it would always come back to him. He would be wandering along the endless corridors, beneath the honeycombed tiles of the ceiling. He would be gripped by the sense that he was looking for something – for the answer to a question he had forgotten. It was not a pleasant sensation, both urgent and elusive at the same time.

  As if everything depended on him solving a mystery that had not been revealed to him.

  Then one day, minutes, hours, days, weeks after his admittance, a man sat down next to him on a bench overlooking a gently sloping lawn. The man was dressed in a loose gardener’s smock over his brown corduroy suit. He stared straight ahead as he spoke. ‘You came. I knew you would. After all, I summoned you.’

  THIRTY-THREE

  The voice. He knew the voice immediately. It was not so different from any other adult male voice. Quite neutral, in fact. The kind of voice that a man who hailed from Woking, or Basingstoke, or even Godalming, might speak with. At the same time there was nothing ordinary about it.