by R. N. Morris
Being on the even side of the street, the first of the possible houses he came to was number ninety-six. It was an imposing building. Inchball looked up bitterly at its four solid storeys, its cream stuccoed frontage immaculately maintained. But it turned out not to be the house he was looking for. He had to climb the steps to the front door before he discovered the discreet brass plaque announcing: The Huguenot Home for French Governesses.
Number 196 was on a similar scale but far less well-maintained. The front garden was overgrown. A long, untended ivy bush along the side fence obstructed the path. The stucco facade was cracked and streaked with coppery stains. A thick film of black grime dimmed the windows; the mismatched curtains were drawn in every one, even now in the middle of the day.
This had to be the place. No plaque, this time, Inchball noted with derision. He could see it now. The Perverted Home for Brothers of the Bum.
No, the people who lived here were not the sort to advertise themselves. Quite the contrary. They gave every sign of having something to hide.
He battled his way past the ivy, beating away its tendrils with his umbrella. It was as if he feared the touch of the plant as somehow contaminating. This fear of contact stayed with him after he had climbed the front steps. He aimed the tip of his umbrella at the bell button and pressed.
A shrill metallic scream sounded somewhere in the depths of the house. He kept his weight leaning on to the umbrella. No point being the shrinking violet.
The sound of the electric bell began to grate; its harsh, unnatural monotony grew hideous. It was as if someone had found a nerve beneath his skin and was holding the point of a needle against it.
He released the pressure on his umbrella, only to find that the tip had become lodged. The bell’s ugly peal continued. He tugged and wrenched the umbrella until it came away in a lurch. But still the bell sounded. It seemed he had jammed the button in.
The door opened against a chain, not far enough to reveal much of the person on the other side, but far enough to release the distinct whiff of the house’s interior, a vaguely vegetal ripeness. ‘There’s no need to keep ringing it. I’ve heard you!’ The voice was male, well-to-do, educated – the voice of privilege.
‘It’s jammed,’ said Inchball, repeatedly ramming the button with the tip of his umbrella, in the hope that the violent action would work it loose.
‘That isn’t going to help matters. Wait here while I fetch a screwdriver.’
The door closed again.
The bell kept up its shriek of artificial panic.
The door opened again, still on the chain. A screwdriver was passed out to him, handle first. ‘Here.’
‘And what am I to do with this?’
‘You can use it to release the button.’
Inchball could see that the button had been pushed beneath the rim of its brass surround. By loosening the four screws in the surround, he was able to ease out the button with the tip of the screwdriver. It was strangely satisfying to witness its pop of release. The clatter of the bell ceased abruptly. Inchball tightened the screws before returning the screwdriver. At the same time he lodged the toe of his boot, conveniently steel-capped, into the gap.
‘You’ve just had your doorbell fixed by the Old Bill,’ he said.
‘What is this about?’ The voice was brusque and imperious.
‘I’m looking for Mr Fanshaw. Mr Henry Fanshaw. Would that be you, sir?’
‘I know the law. I don’t have to let you in. Not unless you have a warrant.’
‘Now now, sir. Why should I need a warrant? I’ve only come here for a chat.’
‘Very likely.’
‘About a friend of yours. Mr James Neville is a friend of yours, ain’t he, sir?’
‘Jimmy? What about Jimmy? Has he got himself into trouble?’
‘You could say that, sir. If you call being dead trouble.’
‘Dead? What do you mean?’
‘Ain’t you heard? I thought it was common knowledge with you lot. Your friend Jimmy has only gone and got his throat slashed.’
‘Oh my God.’
‘Sorry and all that.’
‘Poor, dear Jimmy.’
‘Yeah, well, I dare say, and all that. Now listen, ain’t you going to let me in, so as we can talk about this properly? My job is to find out who done for him, you see.’
Inchball felt the door squeeze against his foot.
‘Kindly remove your foot so that I may close the door to release the chain.’
‘If you try any funny business, sir, you will regret it.’
The vaguely vegetal smell Inchball had noticed earlier came at him in a ripe, fruity waft as the door was opened fully. The man who was now revealed was dressed respectably enough in a tweed suit, his auburn hair neatly cut, his face impeccably clean-shaven. Aged in his late forties, he had something of the air of a schoolteacher. There was a certain fussy impatience to his movements, which was the only sign Inchball could detect of his sexual inversion. Because it was his job to remark such details, he noted the colour of the man’s eyes, a muddy, pond-water green.
Before he closed the door, the man peered out warily, as if he suspected the house of being watched.
The hall was wide but gloomy. Inchball remembered all the windows at the front were curtained. He speculated that the same must be true of the back. The house felt completely sealed off.
Inchball took out his notepad and pencil. ‘Just to be clear, sir. You are Henry Fanshaw? Can you confirm that for me, please?’
‘Yes.’ It seemed to pain him to make this admission.
‘And is there anybody else in the house at present?’
‘I don’t know. There may well be. The children come and go as they please. I don’t keep tabs.’
‘The children, sir? Children live here?’
‘Oh, I call them my children, but they are all adults, I assure you.’
Inchball sniffed the cloying air suspiciously and licked the end of his pencil. He squinted in an effort to distinguish the blank page of his notepad from the soft grey felt of the darkness. ‘Would it be possible to go somewhere with a bit more light, sir? I can hardly see the hand in front of my face.’
Neville’s landlord led him along the hallway, down some steps towards the back of the house and into a room furnished with a long dining table and chairs. The bayed French windows at the far end were not curtained, but obscured from the outside by the overgrown foliage in the garden. Some light seeped in, but was somehow altered by its passage through the dense leaves. Corrupted, was a word that came into Inchball’s mind.
The fruity smell was even stronger here. Inchball quickly ascertained the source. There was a stack of greengrocer’s crates against one wall. A pyramid of shiny red fruit with star-like stalks rose out of the box on the top.
‘Pomegranates!’ cried Inchball. ‘Takes me back. My old man was a porter in Covent Garden fruit market. He used to bring us a pomegranate every now and then. Strange fruit, ain’t it? All them seeds. But if you get a juicy one, it’s delicious. Very good for you . . . leastways that’s what my old man used to say.’
‘Indeed, we eat them mainly for their salutary qualities, though I do also enjoy their mythological associations. Some scholars believe that the forbidden fruit in the bible was not an apple but a pomegranate. And of course, we all know about Persephone.’
Inchball narrowed his eyes, as if he was wondering whether this Persephone was someone he ought to take in for questioning.
‘Is there enough light in here for you to make your notes?’
The long walnut table had seen better days. Its once highly polished surface was covered with scratches, chips and stains. It was also strewn with newspapers, some of which had been cut up. Ribbons of cuttings littered the floor. There were towers of newspapers waiting to be ransacked at one end.
The other man moved hurriedly to close a drawer that had been left open in an antique escritoire on one side of the room. He turned to face Inchball, b
locking his view of the escritoire. ‘Won’t you sit down?’
Inchball did not accept the invitation. Indeed, he had no intention of making himself comfortable in this house. But the business with the drawer intrigued him. ‘A cup of tea wouldn’t go amiss. I’m spitting feathers here. Thirsty work pounding the streets of London on the trail of a killer.’
His reluctant host frowned suspiciously. ‘I don’t employ staff here. For a number of reasons. In the first place, I believe in equality between the classes. In the second . . . well, suffice it to say that I have had some unhappy experiences with servants.’
‘But you do possess a teapot?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Excellent.’ Inchball crossed to the far end of the room, his boots resounding on the bare boards. ‘Don’t mind me. I shall read the newspaper while I wait.’
‘But they are all old.’ A note of alarm sounded in the protest.
Inchball picked up an edition of the Daily Clarion from four years earlier. He opened it and peered with one eye through an elongated gap where a column of type had once been. ‘I don’t mind that. Three sugars, there’s a good chap.’ Inchball winked through the vertical slot in the paper.
The Scrapbook
As soon as he was alone, Inchball dropped the paper on the table and opened the drawer in the escritoire. It contained a thick scrapbook. Inchball pulled the drawer out to its full extent, so that he was able to lift the cover. As he flipped through the pages, it became quickly apparent that the general theme of the scrap collection was ‘Crime’. There were accounts of bodies found, of premises burgled, of city frauds and criminal gangs, of rapes and assaults, common and indecent, crimes of passion, of poverty, greed and desperation; together with narratives of the subsequent arrests made, of the trials, the imprisonments and occasional executions. As far as Inchball could tell, in this necessarily cursory review, there seemed to be a preponderance of stories about guardsmen arrested in Hyde Park. A number of photographs pasted in had a certain familiar uniformity to them. They were head and shoulder shots showing the subject either from the front or in profile. The pose was always formal to the point of rigidity.
Sometimes, of course, the crimes lacked any sequels of justice and punishment, as the perpetrators were never caught.
The theme was only loosely held to. In amongst the editorials and accounts were advertisements, notices and reviews for plays, books, lectures, artistic exhibitions, music hall performances, and moving picture shows. Only some of these could be said to have any clear connection with crime.
The scrapbook began in 1888. The first case for which articles had been collated – the case that seemed to have triggered the collection – was that of the Whitechapel murderer commonly known as Jack the Ripper.
A large portion of the scrapbook was given over to the various trials of Oscar Wilde. The section began with a short clipping pasted beneath the heading HOW THE WORLD WAGS. The clipping itself was brief:
The Marquess of Queensberry was on Saturday last charged at Marlborough Street with libelling Mr Oscar Wilde by leaving for him at a club a visiting card on which were words imputing serious misconduct. The defendant was remanded on bail.
He thumbed the pages, turning the scrapbook on its side to consider the front page of the Illustrated Police News for Saturday, May 4, 1895, which had been pasted in whole. It showed an artist’s impression of THE CLOSING SCENE AT THE OLD BAILEY in the final trial of Oscar Wilde. There were contrasting sketches of Wilde at the height of his success on a lecture tour in America and now as a prisoner in Bow Street.
A little further on, the torn-out page from a book was pasted in. Beneath the heading DE PROFUNDIS, Inchball read:
. . . SUFFERING is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain.
Inchball quickly flicked the pages to the last entry: an advertisement for a talk. The title of the lecture, Killing the Dead, drew Inchball’s attention but made little sense to him. Before he was able to read more, he heard footsteps in the hall.
He pushed the drawer closed and turned as the other man came back into the room. The bone-china cup rattled in its saucer.
‘Thank you. That’s most kind. You don’t know how much I need that. Just put it on the table for me, will you? That’s a good feller.’
The other man gave a surly look but complied. The saucer was swilling with a beige reservoir of tea. Inchball smacked his lips and looked longingly at the cup. It had not been his intention to drink it. In fact, the thought of letting something that a queer had prepared pass his lips filled him with a visceral revulsion. He had merely wanted him out of the room.
But now he found that the mere presence of the cup induced a thirst that he could not resist.
The tea was weak and sugary and the strong smell of pomegranates in the room seemed to overpower its flavour. Inchball took a second, deeper quaff. As he placed the cup down, he noticed an astringent aftertaste.
‘Now then, let us get back to the matter in hand. When did you last see James Neville?’
‘About a week . . . ago? Perhaps more.’ His tone was distracted, uncertain.
‘Can you not be more precise than that, sir? It may turn out to be important.’
The other man frowned as he tried to recollect. But he seemed more intent on watching Inchball closely. ‘It was a Saturday, I think. Because I went to the British Museum. I often go to the British Museum on Saturday afternoon. I am interested in antiquities, you see. I take a particular interest in the Classical Greek period.’
‘I expect you do, sir.’
‘Jimmy sometimes went there too. But it was not there that I saw him that day. It was at the house before I left.’
‘A Saturday, very good, sir. Which Saturday would that be? Last Saturday?’
‘No. I didn’t go to the British Museum last Saturday. It was the Saturday before.’
Inchball counted on his fingers. ‘That would be the fourteenth?’
‘If you say so. I don’t have a calendar in front of me.’
‘So the fourteenth of March was the last day you saw James Neville alive?’
Inchball’s blunt statement struck a fresh blow. The other man let out a sob and held on to the back of a chair. ‘Are you sure it was Jimmy? There can be no mistake?’
Inchball screwed up his face in dismay. ‘Blimey, I nearly forgot. That business with the doorbell clean put it out of my mind. That and the pomegranates.’ He reached inside his jacket. ‘I was supposed to show you this.’
Neville’s landlord clamped a hand to his mouth and closed his eyes.
Inchball took another mouthful of tea, swilling it round his teeth noisily before gulping it down. ‘That the feller?’
‘Poor Jimmy.’
‘I’ll take that as a yes.’
‘I warned him.’
‘You warned him, you say? What about?’
‘To be careful. But Jimmy knew better. He wouldn’t listen. He didn’t need anyone. It was Jimmy against the world. I told him . . . that there is strength in fellowship, in brotherhood . . .’
‘Brotherhood?’ Inchball raised an eyebrow.
‘I don’t expect you to understand.’
Inchball saw the other man’s expression change from one of anguish to distaste in the sweep of a glance. ‘Are you saying that you believed Jimmy was in some kind of danger?’
‘Of course! We are all in danger.’
‘We? What do you mean by we?’
‘You know what I mean. Men like Jimmy.’
‘Men like Jimmy and you, you mean? Queers, you mean?’
‘What do you expect me to say to that? I will not incriminate myself.’
‘You needn’t worry about that. I’ve been instructed to leave you alone about that. Now then, why did you think you was all in danger?’
‘Jimmy and I, we are members of
a brotherhood. Jimmy wouldn’t acknowledge it, denied it in fact, but it doesn’t make any difference. He was still a member. You do not choose to be a member of this brotherhood. You are born to it. He was born to it.’
‘What brotherhood is this, sir?’ Inchball couldn’t quite believe it was the brotherhood he had in mind.
‘I’ve said too much already.’
‘Do you want us to find out who killed your friend?’
‘If only it were as simple as that. Jimmy is dead. It’s too late for him. I must think of the countless others who are still alive.’
‘Very well,’ said Inchball, snapping shut his notepad. He drained his teacup in a series of greedy swallows. ‘Can’t say I didn’t try. If you don’t wish to help me, I can’t force you.’
The other man allowed a bitter smile of vindication to shape his lips. ‘You’re not interested in helping us. You’re just going through the motions. We have always had our enemies. Those who wish us harm. Who wish us dead, even. We must look to ourselves for protection, drawing our strength from the love that draws us together, as did the Sacred Band of Thebes in former times. We can expect no protection from the authorities. Indeed, it would not surprise me if it turned out that this crime had been perpetrated by an agent of the law.’
‘What a load of rot. Agents of the law do not go around killing people. Not even queers.’
‘Of course you would not admit it. You may not even know it. There are agencies within the police of which even the police are not aware.’
‘But we ain’t got no reason to!’ objected Inchball forcibly.
‘I can think of many reasons. The murder has brought you here, has it not? Asking your questions. Worming your way into my confidence.’
‘Let me tell you, I have no desire to worm my way into anything of yours. I am here because I have a job to do. And the quicker I can get it done and get out of here, the better.’ Inchball put a hand to his face, to rub away a sudden weariness. Despite what he had just said, he pulled out a chair and took a seat. The earlier effort of pounding the streets was at last making itself felt in his legs. ‘And another thing I can tell you, though I probably shouldn’t. It was very likely one of your own kind what killed your friend. How do I know that? Buggery. The doctor said your friend Jimmy’s arse was in a very sorry state. Do you seriously expect me to believe that a policeman would do such a thing?’