by R. N. Morris
‘Are you aware, Doctor, that another body was found in Shadwell? I wonder whether the Whitechapel police surgeon’s report was made available to you?’
‘Another body? That’s four!’
Quinn could find no fault with the doctor’s arithmetic. ‘Would it be helpful for you to see the other report?’
Yelland was unexpectedly – and reassuringly – decisive. ‘No. It might prejudice my own conclusions.’
‘As you wish.’ Quinn was prepared to believe he had misjudged the doctor. He saw that the flush had drained from his face. He seemed calmer too.
Perhaps, thought Quinn, it is the living that unnerve him, not the dead.
‘I suppose you want to watch?’
The question took Quinn off his guard. ‘I had not . . .’ Suddenly it all came back to him: the lifeless shiver of an excised organ poured into a steel vessel, the choking fumes of formaldehyde and disinfectant, the scalpel shaking in his hand as it probes the shrivelled skin, searching out the suctioning darkness of taboo within. These were the flickering remnants of his once broken mind, snatches of memory, mangled dream fragments, pulsating with a febrile energy.
‘Very well. But you must go up into the viewing gallery,’ continued Dr Yelland, who naturally assumed Quinn’s answer to be in the affirmative. ‘It is strange. I have no desire to watch other men go about their work. A labourer dig a trench, for example. Or a policeman pound his beat, for that matter. And yet, there is no end of people who wish to watch me carve up cadavers.’
‘It is rather gruesome,’ said Bittlestone, with a shudder of macabre excitement. ‘I don’t know how I would feel to watch it. Perhaps I ought to find out.’
‘No,’ said Quinn sharply. ‘I am afraid I cannot allow it. I must insist that you go back to the Yard and await your instructions from Sir Edward. Sergeant Macadam will drive you there. Kindly tell him that I shall make my own way back.’
‘You intend to stay?’ Bittlestone’s tone was resentful.
‘I do.’
‘And observe the post-mortem?’
‘That is my intention.’
‘Why should you watch it and not I?’
‘Because I am the detective in charge of the police investigation and you are . . .’ Quinn hesitated as he ran through all the possible ways he might describe Bittlestone in contradistinction to himself. ‘Not.’
Bittlestone opened his mouth as if to voice an objection but thought better of it. ‘No matter. You have saved me from myself. I ought to be grateful to you.’
Quinn watched him out of the room before turning to Yelland. ‘One of the victims – the one on the furthest table to the left – was alive on the night of the twenty-fourth. That may help with a time of death.’
‘I see. How do you know that?’
‘I spent some of the evening in his company.’
‘You know him?’
‘No. I would not say that. I met him in the course of my investigations.’ Quinn glanced over to the third table. He remembered the young man’s hand in his own, his breath on his face, his touch against his cheek. It was almost as if, by superimposing these memories on the body, he sought to will it back to life; just as – in his dreams – his father had been able to reanimate those other nameless dead. ‘I should have warned him. I didn’t even try to warn him.’
‘You weren’t to know.’
Quinn was startled by the voice. He had forgotten about Dr Yelland. He was thinking of his father. It was to his father that he had addressed his self-accusing remarks. He looked Yelland up and down thoroughly, as if searching for some small speck of his father on him. ‘If I had warned him, he might still be alive.’
‘I must get on with the examination,’ said Yelland, who had evidently reached the limit of his capacity for consolation. His gaze kept flitting over to the cadavers, as if he were impatient to join them.
Angels
Yelland started with the body of the young renter who had propositioned Quinn. The first thing he had to do was remove the clothes.
Quinn thought of what Bittlestone had said before he had dismissed him. I don’t know how I would feel to watch it. Perhaps I ought to find out.
Was that the only reason he was sitting there now, forcing himself to observe this act of legitimized violation?
No, the case required it. It was his duty as lead investigating officer to attend the medical examination of the victims’ bodies, wherever possible.
The killer had dressed these young men. He had been the last one to gaze on their naked bodies before enclosing them in their own immaculate clothes. Quinn told himself that to witness the reversal of that process somehow took him closer to the killer. As Dr Yelland slowly peeled away the layers of material, Quinn could not help thinking that it was a more respectful and patient undressing at a stranger’s hands than any they had been used to in life.
Quinn felt a sudden revulsion at his own detachment. How could he make such a cynical observation, even in the privacy of his own mind? But it wasn’t long before he began to doubt the revulsion as counterfeit.
The fact was that he continued watching.
The doctor had the jacket open now and was carefully shifting the inert body to work the shoulders loose. Next, Yelland untied the necktie and removed the collar. How careful and seemingly loving were his ministrations. It was as if he believed the body was a sleeping baby who might awake if his movements were too abrupt.
Had the killer exercised a similar tenderness when dressing him?
The doctor folded each article of apparel and placed it in a pile on a table to one side. And so the undressing was infinitely drawn out, an act of measured patience as the doctor moved unhurriedly between the two tables.
As the pile of clothes grew on one table, more and more flesh was exposed on the other.
Quinn watched in grim fascination. He could not tear his eyes away from the spreading pallor. And so he discovered that he had moved through horror. He had reached a point where he waited eagerly for each new expanse of whiteness to be uncovered. He welcomed it, wanted it – was soothed by it.
He thought of how he had acquired a taste for Set cigarettes. And the thought induced a craving for one now. How decadent it would be to smoke an opium-soaked cigarette while watching the post-mortem dissection of a young renter!
Was it this easy to become corrupted?
Quinn felt a tingling sensation around his crown. He reached a hand up to his head, half-expecting to find his hat in place. It was a stupid thing to do, as he could see his hat resting on his knees.
Somehow the sensation, which was not dispelled by brushing his fingers through his hair, called him back to himself. He resisted the urge to light a Set, though he did find it calming to know that he had the tin in his pocket, should he need it.
And now the doctor was peeling the last item of clothing, a sock, from the body. The pallor was complete, unmitigated. It seemed to vibrate with menace and potential. Quinn’s gaze drank it in.
Why did the killer choose to cover this up? Surely the natural instinct would be to flaunt it? To exult in an act of fierce candour? See what I have done!
Yes, there was no necessity for the bodies to be dressed at all, if one thought about it. It would in fact require a great deal of effort to clothe a dead body. You would have to struggle against the weight of the corpse, without the compliance or cooperation of the one being dressed. If the killer took such pains, he must have had good reason.
Was it a failure of nerve at the last, a sudden fear of what he had unleashed?
But Quinn could not believe that anyone capable of creating that terrible pallor would have baulked at displaying it. If he chose to dress the bodies, it was because he wanted them clothed. There was undoubtedly some significance in the act.
The pile of clothes was complete, at least in the sense that there was nothing else to be taken from the body and added to it. And yet Quinn could not shake off the sense that something was missing.
; Quinn watched as Yelland conducted his external examination of the body. The doctor walked slowly around the dissecting table, from time to time holding a magnifying glass to an area of the epidermis. He lifted a hand and peered into the wound at the wrist. Then, taking a pair of tweezers, picked at the wound, extracting something invisible which he shook into a glass container. He repeated the process on the other wrist, then on each of the ankles.
At last the time had come for the doctor to turn the body. So vibrant was that pallor, a force or energy in its own right, that it seemed almost as though it would be able to turn itself. All it wanted was a tap on the shoulder from Dr Yelland.
But no. The doctor had to heave and pull at the dead weight of it, rolling it like an awkward log over itself. When the turning was done, Yelland cast a questioning glance up towards Quinn, as if he were demanding applause.
It’s not that, thought Quinn. He’s seen the lack of external hypostases.
Indeed, the unbroken pallor extended to the back of the body. Yelland pored over this with his magnifying glass, like a historian who has discovered a rare and ancient document. Quinn tried to imagine what the doctor must be experiencing: the strange, dark thrill of being confronted by something that should not be.
Yelland looked up at the gallery again, but now his expression was one of outrage.
You knew about this? was what the angry glare of his eyes transmitted.
Quinn had tried to warn him, by discreetly offering to share the findings of the previous police surgeon. But Yelland had wanted to discover it for himself. Perhaps that was the way it had to be.
The doctor rolled the corpse back over. And of course the front of the body was more unnerving than the back, more of a confrontation that one wanted to shy away from.
One practical consideration, in terms of the killer’s clothing of the bodies, was simply that the clothes provided the vehicle in which the killer’s messages were transmitted. Without clothes there would have been no pockets. And without pockets, where would he have put the cigarette cases?
But there were other ways the words could have been conveyed.
Quinn watched as Dr Yelland made the first incision in the dead youth’s skin.
That was one method. The words could have been carved into the flesh. Quinn had seen that done before, a bloody scrawl of wounding words.
Once again Quinn tried to conjure up a sense of self-revulsion, this time at his capacity for macabre speculation. He came nowhere close to succeeding.
He put it to himself that it was his job to engage in macabre speculation.
He concentrated again on the salient fact: the killer had chosen to reclothe the bodies of his victims. It was as if he was trying to restore them to how they were before the blood had been drained from them. As if it was only the blood he was interested in, only the blood he wanted from them. Once he had what he wanted, he put them back in the world, more or less as they were.
Quinn looked again at the pile of clothes. He could not shake off the impression that there was something missing from it.
The killer had put them back to spread the word for him. That was the important thing: the message. The words in the cigarette cases. He did not want anything to detract from his message.
The dead youths, they were his messengers. His angels.
Another possibility suggested itself to Quinn. The killer covered the pallor because he felt it was too precious – too sacred – to be shared with the vulgar crowd. The expression ‘pearls before swine’ came to mind. The young bodies, perfected by exsanguination, became pearls.
But it was not just blood that the killer wanted from them. It was blood and buggery.
He took their blood and gave them his seed – his spending – in return; although in fact the spending must have come first. Did the killer believe that he was engaged in some kind of transaction with these youths? That the pearls of his semen were the currency with which he paid for the shedding of their blood?
Quinn would need Yelland to confirm that the same act had been committed in the case of the three new victims. But his suspicion was that it had.
If it was an exchange, an act of commerce, then it was hardly a fair one. Unless the killer believed himself to be giving something so remarkably precious that he held those few ounces of spending to be equal to every last drop of blood in another man’s body.
If so, it was an act of monstrous arrogance. Without doubt, arrogance would turn out to be the defining characteristic of this individual, the feature that drove him. He clearly considered himself to be above all laws, divine and man-made. Equally, his sense of his superiority to other men was shockingly clear.
By a similar token, perhaps he believed that he was conferring a signal honour by taking the blood. The victims should consider themselves privileged in having been chosen. In the killer’s mind, these acts signified his great generosity, his magnanimity not his cruelty.
He would expect them to be grateful!
Quinn wondered, then, how he went about choosing his victims. Were they known to him already or was there some test that led to their selection?
And what of the cleansing? To achieve that spotless luminosity, every spatter and spill of blood had been wiped from the body. Were they being cleansed to make them more worthy of their role as disseminators of his message, as harbingers? Or was it simply a question of gathering every last drop of the spilled blood, because it was the blood that the killer coveted?
Quinn imagined the moment of the blade severing the artery, the spray of blood. The killer must have been bathed in the hot rush, the victim’s own rather more costly ‘spending’. And for the killer, perhaps, the blood itself was cleansing. Not literally, but ritually. This was a kind of baptism. A purification.
A bath tub. You could fit such a quantity of liquid in a bath tub. And bathe in it.
Or in flagons, which you could draw upon as your thirst dictated. Or if not thirst, some darker appetite.
Quinn thought he remembered that one of the new inscriptions Sir Edward had shared with him had contained the word ‘holy’. It would have been a simple matter to check, as he still had the sheet of paper on him. But at that moment Dr Yelland was working away at the translucent veil of skin, lifting it slowly away from the torso.
It was impossible for Quinn to look away from that. Indeed, he could not consider doing anything until that was completed. His very thoughts were frozen.
At last the young man was opened up at the chest and abdomen, the undersides of skin lying in slack folds around the wide placid wound inflicted by the surgeon’s scalpel. Quinn’s gaze rushed in upon the confused mystery revealed, like water sucked into a drain. He had seen enough dissected bodies to know immediately that something was amiss. The predominant colour was a sapped grey, not the usual drenched red. Only the bones held on to their customary pink tinge.
It is difficult to drain a bone, concluded Quinn.
His mind resumed its work, churning macabre speculations, until such time as a rare, startling insight should float to the surface.
He came back to the idea that the killer believed himself to be engaged in some form of religious rite. The cleansing of the bodies had suggested it originally. But now he considered the possibility that the blood was imbibed in an act of unholy communion. It was the wine of a hellish Eucharist. The semen he had delivered stood for the flesh, taken through the fundament rather than the mouth. A perversion of everything holy. Blasphemy added to atrocity.
The dark taboo at the heart of the dead youth continued to be explored. What the murderer had begun, the good doctor was completing.
Bittlestone’s words came back to him yet again: I don’t know how I would feel to watch it. Perhaps I ought to find out.
Had the killer said something similar to himself? I don’t know how I would feel to kill him . . . Perhaps I ought to find out.
But if it was only about that, then why repeat the act?
Because he discovered that he like
d the way it felt.
Was it even possible that Bittlestone was the killer? Quinn had seriously entertained the question for the first time in the car, when he had seen the journalist light his Set cigarette. Was it not curious that he had come forward when he had, providing them with the identity now of three of the victims, and only withholding the identity of the one with whom he knew Quinn had had dealings?
What was his game?
Of course, it made no sense that the killer would take such a risk. Unless his arrogance was even greater than Quinn had suspected.
To have three bodies come to light while he was in the office of the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, what a delicious thrill that must have given him! Had he somehow engineered the situation to create that moment?
What fools he must take them for, to dare to play such games.
He was impatient too. What had he said in Quinn’s office that time? ‘Your investigation has come to a grinding halt.’ And so he provided them with information to move the investigation on.
Certainly he had all the necessary arrogance to be the killer.
It was as if he were giving them a head start, so confident was he that they would not be able to catch him.
But no, he could not quite fit Bittlestone into the silhouetted shadow he was hunting. He suspected that the distaste he felt towards the man’s sexual habits was clouding his judgement.
Leaving aside the evidence of sodomy, it was far more likely that the killings were perpetrated by someone who shared Quinn’s disgust at men like Bittlestone, a disgust that Quinn felt all the more sharply now that he had read more of The Profession of Shame.
The murders were a judgement meted out on them.
Quinn was forced to consider the possibility that the murderer was not a natural sodomite. That he did what he did for a purpose other than sexual gratification. If this were so, what aroused him was not the excitement of a sexual act with a man; it was the power that he had over the life and death of another human. It was the thrill, the exultation of slaughter.
He became a god. A god like Set, the animal-headed monster on the cigarette tin. A being capable of anything; utterly amoral, unfettered by the considerations that restrained other men. In the words of the first inscription, entirely free.