Summon Up the Blood

by R. N. Morris

Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask.

  There is about sorrow an intense, an extraordinary reality.

  . . . the voiceless world of pain . . .

  . . . may beauty and sorrow be made one in their meaning and manifestation.

  . . . he regarded sin and suffering as being in themselves beautiful and holy things and modes of perfection.

  There were more, many more, along the same lines. Indubitably, it was a selective reading, which led to a distorted interpretation of Wilde’s argument. His meaning was twisted round – inverted, one might almost say. As far as Quinn could tell, Wilde’s theme was Christian repentance. His great idea – his ‘dangerous’ idea as he put it himself – was that sin and suffering were essential to Christian salvation and, in fact, central to the Christian experience. They were therefore beautiful in themselves. He insisted that suffering was not a mystery, as conventional clergymen might have it, but a revelation. One could not be a true Christian, unless one sinned, he seemed to be saying. And indeed, he came close to representing Christ as positively wanting us to be sinners. Another passage caught Quinn’s eye:

  But it is when he deals with a sinner that Christ is most romantic, in the sense of most real. The world had always loved the saint as being the nearest possible approach to the perfection of God. Christ, through some divine instinct in him, seems to have loved the sinner as being the nearest approach to perfection in man.

  This could almost be taken for a manifesto for sin, with a Christian justification. True, Wilde went on to acknowledge the necessity of repentance, but it was almost in passing. Given his emphasis on sin and suffering, it was easy to overlook this part of his thesis.

  ‘Will you be much longer, sir?’ It was Macadam. He and Inchball were at the door, ready for home.

  Quinn took out his fob watch. It was six o’clock. ‘I still have more work to do here.’ As well as the De Profundis, Petter had provided Quinn with two other books by the same author, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories.

  ‘May we help you with anything?’ asked Macadam.

  Inchball gave a snarl that indicated how little he appreciated the offer made on his behalf.

  ‘No, no. You two may go. I must look at these myself.’

  ‘There’s always tomorrow,’ said Inchball.

  ‘Yes, tomorrow,’ echoed Quinn distractedly.

  ‘If you’re sure then, sir,’ said Macadam.

  ‘Quite sure.’ But as his two sergeants left the room, Quinn was overcome by a wave of panic. The task ahead of him seemed insurmountable. In that instant, all his confidence drained from him. He was left only with the empty fluttering of apprehension. He had latched on to these books, as if he were certain they would yield secrets crucial to the case. But really, he had no way of knowing.

  The solution could just as easily lie in evidence that was denied to him, like the ellipses in the text of De Profundis. And so the hours spent poring over the books would be wasted hours. In the meantime, the killer might even now be preparing to commit his next crime.

  Quinn looked briefly, longingly, towards the window. He imagined himself on the other side, heading back to the lodging house in West Kensington, one small figure among the multitudes. Perhaps tonight he would dine with the others. Ignoring the sniggers of Messrs. Timberley and Appleby, he would look more closely into the pewter-grey eyes of Miss Dillard. And in that moment, he would know that he was not alone.

  But he did not go home. He did not even cross to the window to look down upon his imagined self trudging into the settling dusk. He stayed at his post and felt his loneliness expand around him.

  The Wings of Thanatos

  The day began in a soft milky haze. Quinn stood at the window, flexing the hunched hours out of his spine. He looked down, as if he half-expected to see his imagined self scurrying back along the embankment into work. Flecks of silver were borne away on the river, a flotsam of cold brilliance. His capacity for imaginative identification, which served him so well in his work, stretched to the Thames itself. For a moment, he was a rolling weight of water, a blind, heedless force, impelled by a tidal compulsion.

  His stomach grumbled testily, reminding him he was a man.

  When he came back from the canteen, refreshed after a cup of tea and a toasted teacake, he found Macadam already at his desk. Inchball was hanging up his hat.

  ‘What’s the plan for today, sir?’ said Macadam.

  ‘Gimme a chance to get through the bloody door,’ complained Inchball as he took his seat.

  Quinn thought again what it would be like to be a river; in other words to live without the need for making plans and issuing commands. He rubbed his face vigorously, as if to pummel out his exhaustion. ‘It is going to be a busy morning.’ He felt the weight of everything they had to do suddenly pressing down on him. No amount of rolling his shoulders could dispel it.

  By the afternoon, the rain had returned. There was a vengeful quality to its renewed persistence, as if it were punishing the world for enjoying its absence over the last few days. It was everywhere, inescapable; quickly drenching clothes, carried indoors in the damp, bedraggled auras of those taking shelter, dripping from eaves with a heavy patterned rhythm. As it fell, it swallowed up all the soot floating in the polluted air and threw it down in dirty gobbets. The spattered pigeons were outraged by the insult.

  And it brought with it an unseasonal darkness. The intimations of spring were forgotten, summer’s promise mocked; the year had skidded forward several months to a wintry misery.

  Beyond the black railings on Great Russell Street, in the forecourt of the British Museum, an unusually resilient crowd was gathered. But if anyone had paused to study those milling there, it would have soon become apparent that a high preponderance of them were dressed in the black capes and helmets of policemen. The rain bounced off them. They gave every impression of being men who had stood up to far worse.

  The Special Crimes Department’s Ford Model T pulled up. The four men in it hesitated, a hunkered fixity rooting them to their seats. They looked out through the rain-streaked gloom towards the distant pagan glow coming from the museum interior.

  ‘If the rain don’t put him off, then the sight of all those bobbies will,’ muttered Inchball, who was in the back of the car with the artist Petter. ‘With respect and all that, sir.’

  ‘Stay in the car, Inchball,’ ordered Quinn without looking round. ‘Fetherstonhaugh knows you.’ Quinn seemed to be waiting for some signal, a change in the drumbeat of the rain on the canopy of the car, perhaps. At last, he must have heard whatever he was listening for. He adjusted the position of his bowler and checked the fastenings of his Ulster. ‘Mr Petter, Macadam. Let us do this.’

  Quinn launched himself out into the rain without looking back to see if he was followed.

  Under the portico he waited for Petter and Macadam to catch him up.

  ‘You know the disposition of the place, Mr Petter?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘If you don’t mind, I would appreciate the opportunity to browse the Egyptian gallery briefly on our way.’

  Quinn could not have said what he hoped to gain from such a detour. He did not, of course, expect to find the murderer there. But perhaps, in a room full of animal-headed gods, he would confront the forces that drove such a monster as they were hunting.

  It soon became clear to him that what he was looking for was a sighting of the god Set.

  He glimpsed sphinxes, a giant scarab, lion-headed goddesses, a divine baboon serenely flaunting an erection, as well as a strange fat-bellied creature carved from liver-spotted stone, which the accompanying card informed him was a pregnant hippopotamus. But there was no representation of the Egyptian god of chaos in the gallery that he could see. Instead, he sensed its presence stalking the rooms, a shadow moving at the periphery of his vision.

  Quinn looked into the faces of the men and women wandering bemused among the outlandish statues. If one of them had snarl
ed back at him with a dog-faced snout, or snapped shut a beak, he would not have been surprised.

  They left the company of savage gods and stepped into a tableau of naked youths, their stony beauty only marred by the occasional missing body part.

  Petter turned to Quinn expectantly.

  ‘So, this is where . . .’ Quinn cast a discreet glance around the gallery, ‘. . . where you come to draw?’

  ‘Y-yes.’

  ‘And you have your sketchpad with you today?’

  Petter withdrew a small pad and graphite stick from a pocket.

  Quinn glanced around. His eye was caught by the damaged figure of a winged youth, much like a Christian angel, which seemed to be emerging from a massive block of stone. It was described as a sculpted marble column drum from the fourth century BC, found at Ephesos. The figure was not an angel, but Thanatos.

  Quinn nodded decisively. ‘I think you should sketch this.’

  ‘Do you want me to draw it as it is, or to reconstruct the missing part?’

  Quinn spent a moment considering the time-ravaged form. ‘Imagine it as it once was. Perfect.’

  ‘What shall I do, sir?’ asked Macadam.

  ‘You have familiarized yourself with what our suspect looks like?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Then keep an eye out, Macadam.’

  Macadam wandered off, with that tremulous drifting gaze that was typical of a highly alert police detective feigning inattention. Quinn cast his eye over the preliminary marks that Petter had made. He nodded approvingly and left the young artist to it.

  As Quinn moved among the statues, he thought of the long-dead youths who had modelled for these placid remnants; of the passions and humours that had stirred their living limbs, of the blood that had coursed through their veins. The smooth, immovable stone stood for warm flesh that had once been caressed, perhaps by the hands as well as the eyes of the sculptor.

  He knew how it was in those days and thought he understood why men like Fetherstonhaugh came here. Indeed, how it would be difficult for them to stay away. It was not simply for the aesthetic – or even sensuous – pleasure of gazing on sculptures of muscular young bodies. He supposed there had to be a kind of nostalgia in play too. Could a man feel nostalgic for an age he had never known? But for men of that type, Athens of the classical period – with its well-known acceptance of love between males – represented a lost homeland. Their longing for it would be all the stronger because they had never known it.

  Quinn found himself in front of a semi-clad male figure holding a lyre. The loose robe was carved with great skill. It was frozen in the course of slipping from the otherwise naked body, suspended eternally at the top of the thighs, revealing a tantalizing glimpse of the penis. Although he had left Inchball in the car, he felt his disapproving presence at his shoulder. He could almost hear what he might say: I bet they love that, the fucking queers.

  Quinn felt suddenly embarrassed. He wondered if he would be taken as a connoisseur of antiquities, or a pervert. He turned his attention to the placard at the base of the statue. He read that the statue apparently depicted a hybrid of two gods, Apollo and Dionysus.

  ‘It represents the reconciliation of the two opposite sides of our nature, does it not?’

  Quinn half-turned, reluctant to show his face to the man who had addressed him. It was enough to see not Inchball but a top-hatted Sir Michael Esslyn standing at his shoulder. Quinn turned his gaze quickly back to the statue. It was some time before he realized that he was looking directly at the god’s penis.

  Sir Michael went on: ‘The supremely rational and the wildly irrational. The intellect and the passions. The Apollonian and the Dionysian.’

  Quinn wondered if Esslyn knew who he was. The first time he had seen the mandarin, he had not thought that Esslyn had noticed him sitting outside Sir Edward’s office. And there had been no flicker of recognition after Count Erdélyi’s lecture.

  Quinn preferred to think that Esslyn was merely addressing casual remarks to a stranger. But then it occurred to him that if that were the case he had to accept the rather shocking possibility that Sir Michael was attempting to pick him up.

  ‘Rather a sophisticated idea, is it not? We tend to think of earlier civilizations as more primitive than our own, but this rather belies that, do you not think? Not simply in the excellence of the craftsmanship, which is the equal of anything by Michelangelo, but also in the psychological acuteness of the conception. What truth! What depth! What beauty!’

  Quinn muttered that he did not know anything about that. When he risked a second glance in Sir Michael’s direction, he saw that he had gone.

  Now Quinn moved away from the statue, scanning faces for any that might be Fetherstonhaugh’s. Inchball had confirmed that the photograph they had for reference was relatively recent; hairstyle and facial grooming were up to date. It was easy to discount the women. He then discounted any men who were too obviously old or young; Inchball had said that Fetherstonhaugh was around forty. Inchball had further briefed them on hair and eye colour. Hair colour could be changed, so Quinn looked first at the eyes. Inchball had described Fetherstonhaugh’s irises as ‘murky green’. Of course, it was a subjective description, but it did enable Quinn at least to eliminate faces whose eyes were remote from green on the spectrum.

  Quinn walked the length of the gallery, at least pretending an interest in the classical nudes. One, of a boy removing a thorn from his foot, genuinely engaged him. The boy’s absorption in his task was timeless. It was a glimpse of a human moment that cut across the centuries. As far as Quinn was concerned, you could take the prancing satyrs, the headless goddesses and eternally poised athletes; he would swap them all for this one boy poring over his foot.

  Quinn felt the sense of something about to happen. At first he thought it was related to the statue, which was so imbued with life that he was almost surprised not to see the boy twitch and fidget as he yanked his leg into a better position. He was eternally on the verge of coming to life.

  After a moment, Quinn realized the source of his intimation was a commotion coming from the next gallery. Raised voices intensified into shouts. He ran towards them.

  Macadam had the arm of an auburn-haired man of about forty years, dressed in a tweed suit, twisted up behind his back.

  The other visitors to the gallery took the disruption in their stride. There were no shrieks. It was simply that the crowd parted around the grappling men, suddenly more interested in grappling centaurs.

  Quinn looked into the eyes of the man Macadam had in a tensioned hold. ‘Mr Fetherstonhaugh, I presume? I am Inspector Quinn of the Special Crimes Department. I was hoping I might run into you today.’

  Fetherstonhaugh called out to the room: ‘Murderers! These men are murderers!’

  ‘Now now, sir, calm down. We’re policemen, not murderers.’

  ‘The police are waging a war against the love that dare not speak its name. The love between a man and a man. They are slaughtering those that love that way. They are seeking to purge society of us. Those they do not kill they seek to cow into submission. If you are here as a male lover of men, run for your life, I say. I am Henry Fetherstonhaugh. If you read about my death in the paper you will know that I am right!’ Fetherstonhaugh gave out a sharp yelp of pain as Macadam twisted his arm further up his back.

  ‘Enough of that! We only want to ask you some questions.’

  ‘You can kill me, but you will never kill the love that dare not speak its name!’

  ‘We ain’t gonna kill you,’ said Macadam. ‘Wherever did you get that idea?’

  ‘Four young men brutally murdered. The coroner’s inquests held behind closed doors. No public, no press. Why else would the authorities do that unless they have something to hide?’

  ‘Mr Fetherstonhaugh,’ said Quinn. ‘Your theories are interesting. May I suggest we discuss them back at the Yard?’ To Macadam, he added: ‘Get the cuffs on him then take him to the car. I shall just tell Pett
er we are finished here.’

  Quinn retraced his steps. The marble column drum came into view. There was no sign of Petter. Quinn felt a fluttering sensation, like a muscle going into spasm. Then the ripples hardened into the fierce hammering of a heart overwhelmed by the chemicals of panic.

  He told himself that the artist might have been overtaken by a call of nature, or that he had grown bored of sketching that particular artefact and had moved on to something else. But the crowd in this gallery had thinned as everyone had rushed into the next room to view the fracas with the police. It was easy to see that Petter was not there.

  Quinn noticed a discarded leaf from Petter’s sketchpad, lying in a crumpled ball on the floor near the figure he had been sketching.

  He straightened the paper to see a reasonable rendition of the winged figure of Death, perfected by the artist’s imagination. Beneath it was written in a hurried scrawl:

  to bring terrible events to a terrible issue

  The Paul Reynolds Edition

  Quinn pinned the sketch of Thanatos to the wall, as if he were putting up a child’s picture for admiration.

  ‘It doesn’t mean he has been abducted by the murderer,’ said Macadam. ‘He could have just got bored. Or scared. You can’t trust his type.’

  But Quinn’s pinched, bloodless lips brooked no reassurance.

  ‘We cleared the galleries, one by one,’ said Inchball. ‘No sign.’

  Quinn glanced at the map of London. ‘I thought he might be intending to leave a body outside the museum. I did not consider the possibility that he would abduct his next victim from there. I ought to have.’

  ‘Why did he choose Petter?’ asked Macadam.

  Quinn thought back to the moment he had directed Petter to sketch the figure of Thanatos in its pristine form. Had an unacknowledged part of his reasoning been the consideration that if he were the killer, he would prefer to see Death immaculate?

  ‘What I mean,’ continued Macadam, ‘is that perhaps it is someone known to Petter. Petter knew we were going to the British Museum. He may have mentioned it to one of his . . . friends. Why else would he go off with this individual, unless it was someone whom he knew? It is hard to imagine that he was forcibly abducted from a gallery in the British Museum in the middle of the afternoon.’