by R. N. Morris
Quinn’s hand involuntarily flicked up to his nose.
‘I’ll take it that is a no,’ said Inchball in a heavily resigned tone.
‘I visited the bookshops you had indicated, Inchball. I discovered that Jimmy was known at the first of these, the French bookshop in Wardour Street. It was outside this shop that I had my encounter with Tommy. Oh, and I bought this there.’ Quinn held up the brown paper parcel.
‘What is it?’
‘A book. Which book precisely, I don’t yet know. The bookseller wrapped it in secret and urged me not to open it until I had it home. And even then, not in front of my wife.’
A curl of disgust twisted on to Inchball’s mouth as he looked at the package.
‘He assured me that it was Jimmy’s favourite book. He described it as practically the story of his life.’
‘Don’t expect me to read it,’ said Inchball. ‘I wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole. That kind of filth is sickening.’
‘To be fair, we don’t know what kind of filth it is yet, Inchball. Or indeed, if it is any kind of filth at all.’ Quinn placed the book on his desk and sat down. He opened a drawer and took out a pair of scissors.
Inchball stood up sharply, cracking his head against the sloping ceiling. After an oath worthy of a man who had spent part of his career investigating prostitutes, pimps and pornographers, he said: ‘If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not be in the room when you open that. I’m likely to vomit.’
‘Good grief, Inchball. How on earth did you manage to stay in Vice for all those years?’ Quinn snipped the tensioned string, which sprang apart with an eager pop. He pulled away the brown paper to reveal a cheaply produced volume in dog-eared paper binding. The mustard yellow cover bore the title of the work, The Profession of Shame, together with a subtitle, Being the confessions of an unrepentant renter. The author was given as Anonymous, and the book was published by the Erotika Biblion Society of London.
Quinn experienced an irrational disappointment at the book’s title. He realized that he had been hoping, absurdly, for the solution to the mystery of the letters D.P. on the cigarette case.
Inchball had not yet fulfilled his threat to leave the office. Quinn felt his presence at his shoulder. The sergeant’s breathing was laboured. ‘I don’t want to worry you, but that’s not a new copy. Hands other than yours have touched it. Hands that are filthy in ways you cannot imagine.’
Quinn thought back to Tommy’s hand on his as he had lit his cigarette. What would Inchball have said to that? he wondered.
He gave a small shudder as he opened the book at random:
cock in both his hands and began gently frigging me. His lordship then placed the swollen bulb at the end of my cock into his mouth, continuing the action of pumping the shaft while sucking hard on the tip. He gradually increased the speed of his frigging.
‘Oh, my Lord!’ I cried. ‘I fear that if you continue in this manner you will before long take a mouthful of my discharge.’
No sooner had I spoke the words than I felt the rising surge of intense sensation that preludes ejaculation. I wound my fingers into the young lord’s hair and pushed his head further on to my bursting cock. But at the very moment of release, I pulled his head back, so that the hot pearls of my sperm sprayed over his lordship’s face.
Quinn found that he was undergoing a disturbing physical reaction: his face flushed with heat; sweat broke out on his forehead and on the palms of his hands. He closed the book hastily, tilting his head up for air.
‘See what I mean, sir?’
Quinn nodded.
‘You have to be very careful with books of that nature, sir. Contaminate the soul, they do. I’ve seen fine upstanding bobbies turn into nervous wrecks because of such filthy reading matter. Starts off they’re just reading it because they have to. It’s their duty. To find out what we’re up against. You can’t catch a criminal without apprising yourself of the nature of the crime. Fair enough. Before long they become addicted to it. It’s a kind of queer fascination takes them over. Very queer, if you take my meaning, sir. I’m talking about married men too. Married men with children. You’re not married, are you, sir?’ asked Inchball darkly.
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘I’m just saying, sir. Be careful. If you insist on reading it, do it here, in the department, with at least one of us present – Macadam or myself, or preferably both of us. On no account must you read it on your own, sir.’
‘But I thought you refused to stay in the room when it was being read?’
‘I have realized that I have a duty of protection towards a fellow officer, sir.’
‘I think you’re rather overstating the dangers. Besides, I am not convinced the book has any direct relevance to the case. It is not the book I was looking for. We mustn’t get sidetracked. As far as I can see, its only usefulness lies in its limited capacity to afford us an insight into the mentality, and to a lesser extent the life and habits, of Jimmy, our victim. What I was looking for was an insight into the mind of the murderer. Of the man who chose to inscribe To be entirely free on the inside of a cigarette case he placed in the jacket of a bloodless corpse.’
‘Did you have any joy there, sir?’
‘Not much, Macadam, I confess. The other bookseller you mentioned, whom I visited after the French bookshop, was able to suggest a number of titles to me all of which involved words beginning D.P. However, the first of these words was invariably “domestic”. Let me see if I can remember. There was Domestic Peace. Oh, and I seem to remember Domestic Problems. And I think Domestic Pleasures came somewhere in between. He also recommended a children’s book called Dumpy Proverbs. However, none of his suggestions struck me as likely candidates for the textbook of a murderer.’
‘Square one, then, sir. As in, back to.’
‘It would seem so, Inchball.’
Quinn looked down at the book on his desk. The emotion that he felt was unfamiliar to him. He thought that it was most akin to fear, though there was a strong undercurrent of revulsion mixed in.
‘It is a strange world into which we are being drawn. We must pick our way through it with caution, never losing sight of the fact that we are investigating a murder. We may shrink in repugnance from the lives and habits of men like Jimmy. But it is our duty to pursue justice on his behalf. And to serve and protect other men like him who may find themselves endangered by his killer. If it helps, let us think of them as sick – sufferers of a morbid and diseased psychology. Yes, they are sick. But the man who did this –’ Here Quinn pointed to the photographs that were still tacked to the wall, showing the gaping wound on Jimmy’s neck. ‘The man who did this is a monster. We must concentrate our energies on tracking him down. We cannot rest until we have done so.’
Quinn folded the brown paper once again around the book. The air felt lighter and cleaner now that it was out of sight. But he could not get out of his mind what he had read, and the images it had conjured up. Had the contamination Inchball warned him about begun?
The Strange Capital
Quinn closed the front door behind him with tensioned care.
Tonight he had more reason than usual for not wanting to draw the attention of Mrs Ibbott. He was conscious of his throbbing nose. He was confident it wasn’t broken, and the arnica tablets Macadam had given him seemed to be keeping the bruising down. But still, the last thing he wanted was the solicitude of his landlady.
God knows where that might lead! thought Quinn.
He pictured her calling out to Miss Dillard to come and see the terrible state of Mr Quinn’s nose. Perhaps Mr Timberley and Mr Appleby would come too, and perform an impromptu skit on it.
In all his years of sneaking in, he believed he had only ever been able to suppress the door’s shrieking exuberance once. The satisfaction it had afforded was something like that felt by a cricketer playing a perfect stroke.
Tonight he very nearly pulled it off, producing only a quick stab of protest
in the air.
Standing motionless in the hallway, a brown paper parcel clutched to his chest and concealed behind his bowler, he strained to listen to the voices from the dining room. There was no disruption to the flow of conversation. As far as he could tell, he had got away with it.
He could make out Messrs Timberley and Appleby’s boisterous, competitive ribbing, as well as the predictably aghast reactions it provoked from the other lodgers: the older men’s rumbling basses; the shriller piping of the women. In Miss Dillard’s bewildered warble he discerned a pathetic cadence. Without being able to make out her words, he knew that she had somehow contrived to miss the point spectacularly. Mrs Ibbott calmly sought to restore order, her reasoned remonstrations only slightly edged with impatience. All the time, her daughter’s flirtatious giggle undermined her efforts.
He took it all in and was thankful he had avoided that particular hour of torment.
Who was the flirtatious giggle for? he wondered. Appleby or Timberley?
Never for him, that was for sure. It was inconceivable under any circumstances that she would direct such laughter towards Quinn. The depth of his bitterness at such a reflection shocked him at first, until he had absorbed it and added it to his mounting stock of similar feeling.
He wondered if he had divined the cause of Mr Timberley’s emotional disturbance of the previous night. Was there a rivalry between the two friends over Miss Ibbott’s affections? And had the matter been decided in Mr Appleby’s favour?
As he stood eavesdropping on the people who shared the house in which he lived, he was taken back to another time, and to another young girl’s laughter.
The prickly sweat of remembered shame broke out beneath his clothes. He felt it first on his back. But within seconds he was sure that it covered every square inch of his skin. How could something that happened so long ago still have the power to reduce him to this hot, drenched wretch?
Quinn heard the scrape of a chair against boards. Fearing discovery, he bounded towards the stairs. Now preferring speed over stealth, his steps thundered at his ascent. The door to the dining room – also a creaker – groaned open below him. He had turned the corner at the first landing before he heard his name called out questioningly.
Once inside his room, he stood for a moment with his ear against the door. He thought he heard the dining-room door close once more, a little more disconsolately than it had opened. Poor Mrs Ibbott, he thought. He hated to bring disappointment into her life. She deserved better from him. But it could not be helped.
Quinn inhaled decisively through his nostrils and moved away from the door. He dropped the parcel on to his bed, immediately regretting placing it there but feeling that to move it would compromise him even more in the eyes of an imaginary observer, the function performed now as it usually was by Sergeant Inchball.
For a moment undecided, Quinn at last placed his bowler hat on top of the object.
Released from the book’s thrall, he threw himself down into his armchair. He tapped his left breast. Petter’s portrait of Jimmy was still there in his pocket. From another pocket he produced the tin of Set cigarettes.
He studied the picture of the Egyptian deity distractedly.
Just before leaving the Yard for the evening Quinn had managed to secure an interview with Sir Edward Henry. He had wanted to put in a request for extra men to watch the Librairie des amis de la littérature. In order to strengthen his case, he had taken the book, so that Sir Edward would be in no doubt what kind of establishment they were dealing with. He had also taken the cigarettes so that Sir Edward might be reassured that they were making progress.
Sir Edward certainly seemed shaken by the character of the material on sale at the French bookshop. However, he did not find that Quinn had established a strong enough evidential link to warrant the expense of a surveillance operation, not to mention the strain this would place on other manpower requirements. In Sir Edward’s words, the whole thing had about it ‘the whiff of a wild goose chase’.
And so it was that Quinn came to have in his possession at home the book and the cigarettes.
It was an accident, in other words.
He took out one of the cigarettes, his pulse accelerating at the strange husk-like emptiness of its mass. He held it to his nose and inhaled the aroma, potent and laden with unnerving promise even though unlit.
Quinn placed the cigarette in his mouth and took in a breath of tobacco-flavoured air. He decided there was no reason why he should not light it. Retrieving the box of England’s Glory from his pocket, he thought back to the moment he had lit the cigarette for the renter Tommy earlier that day. He experienced the same tremble in his hand when he lit his own cigarette now.
He breathed in the heavy smoke and felt it form a hand that gripped his heart.
The cigarette left him feeling nauseous and over-stimulated. But it was necessary for him to have smoked at least one of the noxious things in private, before he attempted to pass for a habitual smoker of Set cigarettes.
His room appeared stranger than ever to him now. The haze of smoke lay over it like a fine gauze. The objects of his room – the dark wood furniture, the cold ceramic ornaments, sharp-edged picture frames and metallic light fittings – softened as if they were on the verge of melting. He became convinced that if he tried to pick up the jug on his washstand, his hand would pass right through it.
He rose from the armchair, dipping at the knees, testing the solidity of the floor.
At the washstand, he became distracted by the looking-glass. He was interested to see whether the same change had been wrought in his face.
Certainly the face he confronted was as distant and removed from him as the other objects in the room. The bruise on his nose was hardly noticeable, laughably insignificant. He could not put his self-estrangement down to that.
The fact was, he felt that he had aged immeasurably since he had checked his reflection on the way out that morning. But it was not simply a question of ageing. He looked intently into the eyes in the mirror and could not for the life of him fathom what lay behind them.
He retrieved his bowler from the bed and looked again into the mirror. Unnervingly, the effect of the hat was to make him even more unrecognizable to himself.
He smoked a second Set on the open deck of the number nine omnibus, the heady smoke mixing with the dusk as it trailed off behind him. The night was warm and clear. He looked down at Hyde Park and saw a dance of shadows along Rotten Row. Isolated figures came together and separated. Some moved constantly. Others held their ground and drew clots of other shadows around them. Occasionally something sparked in the gloom. The amber tip of a burning cigarette; the glint of a brass button on a military uniform.
The steam-engined omnibus drew him away from these mysteries and bore him towards the blazing lights of Piccadilly.
The darkness thickened above him, pouring into the void of Green Park. At the same time, the street lamps and shop windows dazzled him with their brilliance. He had the sense that the great thoroughfare existed in its own dimension, independently of the rest of the city. He felt that it was taking him not into the centre of London, but deep into the heart of a strange and exotic capital in some unnamed foreign land.
They passed the Ritz Hotel, at its entrance a restless swarm of evening-suited men and expensively dressed women. As they laughed, their teeth flashed in competition with their diamonds. If they were prostitutes, they were the best that money could buy.
Quinn felt a vague and angry heartache and got to his feet. He would smoke the rest of his cigarette on the boarding platform.
He threw the stub out into the night and then jumped after it. He timed his jump badly. His legs shook as he landed and he had to run with flailing arms to regain his balance. The thump at his heart from the shock of physical danger chased away the woozy effect of the drug-infused smoke.
The illuminated signs of Piccadilly Circus served as a reminder of why he was there. Jimmy had been found beneath a
similar sign, though in a place so different it felt like another country, another world. The invented brand names – BOVRIL, PROSET – seemed like coded words, clues that might hold the secret of Jimmy’s death, if only he could unravel the puzzle of their meaning.
His hand pushed forward on the revolving doors at the entrance to the Criterion, the momentum drawing him inside.
He was quickly immersed in the din of countless overlapping conversations echoing beneath the glittering tiles of the coved ceiling. His entrance caused hardly a ripple. No doubt there were glances cast in his direction, but he had the sense that he was quickly discounted. And the sense too that, for all their braying gaiety, those gathered here were engaged in something urgent, something which would brook no interruption.
All the brilliance of Piccadilly was refracted into the interior of the Criterion. Here was the heart of that strange capital he had imagined earlier. The vaguely oriental styling of the decor, with its pillared walls and arched recesses, suggested somewhere in North Africa, a place he had never visited, except in his imagination.
The Long Bar itself was crowded, exclusively with men. Some wore lustrous top hats, others brushed bowlers. Some were bearded or moustachioed, others clean-shaven. Some were middle-aged or even old; others were young – barely more than youths. Some swaggered and preened, others hung back warily.
Yet all had some unnameable quality, a secret kinship discernible in the subtle ways they interacted. A hand held too long on another’s arm. One body pressed too intimately on to the next. A smutty tone in the laughter provoked by a whispered indelicacy.
At the sight of one man lighting his companion’s cigarette, his hand held steady in the other man’s tender grip, Quinn spun on his heels.
No, it was too much. He couldn’t go through with it. Even though its yellowish paper suggested the cigarette was a Set.
The glint in their eyes betrayed a fierce hunger that sickened him. He needed fresh air again.
As he was ineluctably turned out by the revolving doors, another party burst boisterously in.