by R. N. Morris
‘To draw the statues?’
‘To draw the statues, yes. But also to see the gentlemen. The most likely time to see the gentlemen. That’s what I’m especially interested in, you see. We can draw the statues any time. They don’t come and go. They stay put.’
And so it was that just as Inchball was returning with the tea, Petter was finally able to divulge: ‘Saturday afternoon. The last hour or two before closing. The galleries are especially popular then.’
‘Bugger me,’ said Inchball. ‘I should go out of the room more often.’
The Lady Draper
After lunch, Quinn took a stroll north to Wardour Street. He preferred to walk rather than take the omnibus or have Macadam drive him there, because it gave him a chance to collect his thoughts. Besides, he needed Macadam to get on with his own enquiries.
His route took him along Whitehall, past the great offices of state: the India Office, Foreign Office, Treasury, Admiralty, and the War Office. The imposing edifices loomed up around him, solid in their foundations, symbols of the unshakeable Empire. Of an enduring world, ordered and organized.
The day was fine. The pavements were drying out at last. Civil servants, errand boys, nannies pushing perambulators, ladies and gentlemen of leisure, tourists – all ventured forth with optimism and ease. Gone were the days of scurrying head-down between cloudbursts, it seemed.
He had placed the portrait Petter had drawn in a small gilt frame, which he felt weighing down the inside pocket of his jacket. His plan was to start his enquiries at one of the two bookshops Inchball had tipped him off about.
Inchball had spent some time ‘in Vice’. That was how he put it, as if Vice were a place. If it was, it was a place you never really left. Quinn recognized that his time working ‘in Vice’ had given Inchball an expertise that would be useful in the case. However, as the episode with Petter had illustrated, it had left him with an unsympathetic approach that was bound to alienate men they needed on their side.
The city grew distinctly more disreputable as he left Trafalgar Square behind him. Crimes that were unimaginable in Whitehall began to seem inevitable in the grimy backstreets through which he now wove.
With its French name – La librairie des amis de la littérature – it was little wonder that the bookshop had aroused the suspicion of a man like Inchball.
It was next door to a draper’s, into the window of which Quinn now pretended to gaze in order to observe the comings and goings at the bookshop for a moment or two before entering. He had not given a thought to the nature of the shop he had chosen as a decoy. But now it struck him that it was possibly odd for a man to appear so intently interested in the contents of a draper’s window.
Suddenly flustered, he looked beyond the bolts of cloth on display into the shop’s interior. He was surprised to discover that he was not the only male to evince an interest in drapery. In fact, the shop’s only customers were two men. They were standing very close to one another, so close that they appeared to be touching. They seemed to be engaged in feeling samples of cloth between thumb and forefinger. But some other business was being decided, he felt.
So, thought Quinn, this is what goes on in drapers’ shops.
Their faces were turned away from him, but it was clear that one of the men was considerably older, and stouter, than the other.
Quinn glanced uncertainly towards the bookshop, torn between implementing his original plan and exploring the potential new lead presented to him. Either of these men, the apparent renter and his likely client, might have been acquainted with the dead man.
He sensed an angry tension between them, despite the fact that their bodies were touching. Occasionally their gesticulations were angular and uncontrolled. It seemed increasingly likely that they were having an argument, albeit one conducted sotto voce; that what was being passed from mouth to ear in hot whispers was all recriminations, taunts and ultimatums.
He wanted to see their faces. His entrance, he thought, would precipitate a precautionary glance towards the door from them. It might also bring about their flight. If so, he would talk to the shopkeeper.
Somehow it did not surprise Quinn to discover, in the jangling of the shop door, that one of the two men – the older, stouter one – was the vociferous monocled baby he had seen at Count Erdélyi’s lecture. Pinky, he remembered the man had been called by his friends.
As he had anticipated, the men drew apart. Pinky fled the shop entirely. Quinn noticed that he was in tears. His face, which had shown a tendency to colour the previous night, was a lurid pink. That explains the soubriquet, thought Quinn.
Pinky’s young friend received his departure with a loud peal of laughter. He looked Quinn up and down before leaving at a languid dawdle, his laughter more brazen and loutish than ever.
Quinn found he had the shop to himself. There was a bell-push on the counter top. Its tart ping eventually produced an extraordinarily tall woman, somewhat overdressed for shopkeeping. She had long, glistening locks, which Quinn suspected of being a wig. She viewed Quinn haughtily through a lorgnette, but said nothing.
‘Good afternoon. I wonder if you can help me.’ Quinn paused, suddenly losing all confidence in the cover story he had concocted. It was too late, however, to come up with anything else. ‘I . . . this is a little embarrassing . . . it may sound strange. I hope you will forgive me, madam.’
The lady rippled her rather heavy brows indulgently.
‘I’m looking for a friend. An acquaintance, really. A gentleman I met . . . at the British Museum. I was in the Greek and Roman galleries.’
She nodded for him to go on.
‘He told me his name was Daniel but . . . I’m not sure he was telling the truth.’ Quinn smiled affectionately at the memory of a moment that had never happened. ‘We rather hit it off. But . . . he had to go. He seemed in some distress. He took his leave of me as if . . . Well, as if he was taking his leave of his oldest friend. Not of a stranger. For I was, really, a stranger to him. He said that I might look for him here. At your shop.’ Quinn ventured a brave smile.
The lady draper contracted her brows quizzically.
‘I confess I was curious. I wondered if there really was a draper’s shop at this address, or whether it was a fabrication. I began to think I had dreamt the whole encounter. When I happened to find myself in the area and caught sight of your shop, well, I determined to call in and satisfy my curiosity. For some reason, I have not been able to get the thought of that strange young man out of my head.’
The woman nodded, as if this was only to be expected.
‘And so, here I am!’
‘Daniel, you say?’ The voice was remarkably low, in a register more usual for a man than a woman.
Quinn hoped that he kept his surprise to himself. ‘That’s what he said.’
‘I don’t know no Daniels.’
‘Oh . . . I thought as much. We were standing in front of a frieze of lions. And when I asked him for his name, he hesitated. Then he caught sight of the frieze and grinned. “Daniel”, he said, just like that. I thought it was a little strange at the time.’
The draper shrugged.
‘I’m not surprised he lied to me. I had no right to ask for his name in the first place. But before he ran off, he gave me something.’ Quinn produced the portrait.
The draper took it and glanced at it quickly. She then regarded Quinn with a slower, more suspicious gaze through her lorgnette.
‘I had the impression that he was in trouble. That he believed that something terrible was about to happen to him. He said that he wanted someone to remember him as he was now. I don’t know why he gave it to me. It doesn’t make any sense, I know.’
‘His name isn’t Daniel.’
‘You do know him!’
The draper thrust the portrait away, as if she wanted nothing more to do with it. She turned her head away from Quinn, though she kept her lorgnette pointed in his direction.
‘Who are you, mister?’
It was disconcerting to be addressed by a lorgnette. ‘I . . . my name is Sallis. Quentin Sallis.’ It was the false name Quinn always used, an anagram of his own with the addition of the letters TEL. As Quinn’s middle name was Terence, which is frequently shortened to Tel, he found the pseudonym both satisfying and memorable. ‘I . . . just want . . . to know . . . that he’s all right. The young man. I felt I could have done more to help him. He ran off before I had a chance.’
‘Why did you want to help him?’
‘I don’t know . . . I was . . .’
The draper turned her head back towards Quinn, so that her eyes were on him again, enlarged by the lenses of the lorgnette.
Quinn looked down at the picture. ‘I felt that we could have been friends.’ He was surprised at the tug of wistful heartache in his voice. ‘I know what you’re thinking. If he didn’t give me his real name, why should you? But he did tell me to look for him here. I think that he wanted me to find him. Perhaps it was a test. He didn’t want to give . . . his friendship to me too easily, perhaps. That’s the only explanation I can think of.’
‘But his friendship is something you truly desire?’
‘Oh, yes. Truly.’
‘Jimmy. His name’s Jimmy.’
‘Ah, Jimmy. Thank you. You don’t happen to know . . .?’
The draper thrust her lorgnette forward, as if to parry further questioning.
‘Where I might find Jimmy? Where he lives?’
She shook her head forbiddingly.
‘Well, thank you, madam. I’m extremely grateful to you for your help. Jimmy. I can’t express to you how much it means to me just to know his name. Jimmy . . .’ Quinn returned the portrait to the inside of his jacket. ‘You wouldn’t know his surname too, would you?’
The draper shook her lorgnette in an agitated flurry.
Quinn bowed. ‘I am indebted to you.’
‘You could at least buy something! This is a draper’s shop, after all. Not an information bureau.’
‘Of course. I . . .’ Quinn cast about him hopelessly.
‘A gift for Jimmy, for when you renew your friendship.’
‘What an excellent idea! Thank you. What do you recommend?’
‘Some silk, perhaps?’
‘I’m entirely in your hands, madam.’
Now she handled her lorgnette rather as a scientist might a microscope, to observe an interesting specimen trapped in a glass slide. A smile that could only be described as flirtatious skipped across her lips. The low pitch of her voice disturbed Quinn. But that smile terrified him.
He heard the resonating rasp of the pinking shears against the cutting table. The blades swept through a sea of shimmering colour. Quinn felt a pang of longing and loss at the richness and complexity of the fabric’s hues.
The lorgnette spun on a chain around the draper’s neck, as if dizzied by the intoxicating vision. ‘This’ll be perfect,’ growled the draper. ‘Jimmy’ll love you for it.’
La librairie des amis de la littérature
With the length of cloth enclosed in brown paper, as if its colours were too dazzling and rare to be revealed to public view, Quinn left the draper’s and ventured next door to the bookshop.
The relief he felt at no longer being subjected to the lorgnette-refracted gaze of the draper gave way to a new confusion.
The interior of the bookshop seemed like any other, apart from the preponderance of yellow-jacketed books on the shelves. At first glance, even a bookshop serving the needs of libertines will appear respectable enough. Reading, after all, is an activity engaged in by the educated classes. And the few, exclusively male, customers he could see browsing the shelves certainly gave every appearance of being gentlemen.
What confused and disturbed Quinn was the fact that he blended in so easily with them. They accepted him as one of their number without demur.
And yet he knew that Inchball would not have sent him to this shop without reason. He sensed the presence of other customers, lurking out of sight, hidden behind the stacks. These would be the depraved monsters his imagination required.
Quinn scanned the spines of the books erratically, his concentration shot. His education at a minor public school had equipped him with a passable proficiency in reading French, though he was less confident in his ability to speak it. He knew the names of a number of French authors. As a boy, he had particularly enjoyed, though in translation, the works of Alexandre Dumas, whose name was the first to jump out at him from the shelves. He pulled down an edition of Les Trois Mousquetaires.
He turned the uncut pages distractedly. He had not come here to read Dumas. And yet there was something comforting and wholesome about the stirring tale of adventure, something he could not quite tear himself away from.
The book represented the lost innocence of his boyhood, a time when his father was still a hero to him, when the dream of being a doctor himself had not yet been poisoned. When the notion of love between a man and a woman could still be conceived of as a romantic ideal, rather than the frustrating clash of mis-communicated desires. Or, as Quinn had experienced it, a sickness.
To his mind, the world in which he was planning to immerse himself was the extreme antithesis of the novels of Dumas père. The dangers it held were far more threatening to him than any faced by d’Artagnan. This bookshop, stacked with innocuous-looking volumes, was part of that world.
Quinn replaced the Dumas and approached the counter. To his dismay, the bookseller did not rise to his feet. In fact, he steadfastly refused to glance up from his book.
Quinn squeezed the package he was carrying. The crisp crackle of fresh brown paper at last drew the bookseller’s attention. A balding middle-aged man with a sour expression that only just fell short of a sneer, he looked at Quinn with obvious disdain. ‘Oui?’
‘To be entirely free?’ said Quinn.
‘Pardonnez-moi?’
‘To be entirely free. It’s a quotation, I think. It came into my head. But I can’t remember where I read it. I was hoping you might be able to help me.’
‘I’m sorry, monsieur. We only stock French books in the original.’ He spoke good English, but with a stubborn accent, giving certain words their French pronunciation. ‘No English books. No translations.’
‘Are there perhaps some other books that you have, that you keep in the back room possibly, or under the counter, shall we say? Books that you have not yet put out on display? Or indeed, that you are not intending to put out on display, because their contents are such as cannot be exposed to the common view? Not because there is anything wrong with their contents. But because they are too . . . sophisticated for the average reader to understand.’
‘Monsieur?’
‘If a gentleman were bold enough to reveal to you an interest in a certain kind of literature . . . literature of a highly specialist taste. A refined taste. A particular taste. One might almost say, a peculiar taste. If such a gentleman were to be so bold, I trust you would greet his revelation with discretion and sympathy?’
‘Monsieur?’
‘Do you have any books that deal with the subject of . . . the love . . . that . . . I believe the expression is . . . the love that dare not . . .’ Quinn trailed off, not daring to complete the phrase.
The bookseller made no attempt to come to his aid.
From somewhere behind Quinn came a snigger. It had something of the loutish quality that he had detected in the laughter of Pinky’s friend. Not all the amis des littérature were such gentlemen as all that, it seemed.
Quinn glanced around. All eyes were on him. And they were so far emboldened that they did not shrink from his challenging glare. The young man whom he had seen in Pinky’s company in the draper’s was leering at him from around the corner of one of the book stacks.
‘I have made a terrible mistake,’ said Quinn to the bookseller. ‘I beg your forgiveness. I was under a misapprehension regarding your premises. A friend of mine had told me that I might find such books here. Ji
mmy. Perhaps you know him?’ Quinn took out the portrait and offered it to the bookseller.
‘You are a friend of Zhimé’s?’
‘Yes.’
‘I ’ave never seen you with him.’
‘Well, you know Jimmy. He has a lot of friends. One cannot hope to know them all.’ Quinn did not hurry to return the portrait to his pocket. Instead, he brandished it rather ostentatiously.
‘That is true.’ The bookseller closed his book and placed it on the counter. ‘You have a . . . particular book in your mind, monsieur?’
‘There was one that Jimmy mentioned. I can’t remember the title though. I think it began with D. D-something, P-something, perhaps? I should have written it down.’
‘I do not know of that book. But I know the kind of book that Zhimé likes. I think that also you will like it.’
The bookseller disappeared into the back room. Quinn gave another glance around the shop. The other customers appeared once again engrossed in their browsings. Pinky’s young friend had disappeared.
A moment later, the bookseller returned with a second brown paper package for Quinn. ‘Do not open it until you get home. Do not open it in front of your wife, if you have a wife. You will not be disappointed. I recommend it very much to you. It is Zhimé’s favourite. It could be the story of his life.’
Quinn hesitated before taking the parcel off the bookseller, as if he was afraid it would burst into flames in his hands. When he finally did accept it, he discovered it was disappointingly cool and neutral to his touch.
Quinn was aware of someone on his heels as he left the bookshop. He spun round on the pavement to see Pinky’s companion from earlier. The young man pushed the pale brown bowler back on his head and grinned.
‘What do you want from me?’ asked Quinn.
‘What do you want from me?’ parroted the young man, weighting the emphasis with a challenge.
‘What makes you think I want anything from you?’
‘I’ve seen you looking at me.’
Quinn could think of no answer to that.