The White Feather Killer

by R. N. Morris

  His mother had pleaded his case. Her most persuasive argument was that he might have something contagious which would infect other members of the congregation. It was decided that his mother should stay behind too, in case he wanted for anything. This almost scuppered his plans. But he had read enough Boys’ Own Adventures to know what to do.

  He told her that he thought the best thing was if he slept it off, so please not to trouble herself with looking in on him. If he needed anything he would call out. Then he stuffed some pillows and extra blankets down the centre of his bed. The effect was spiffing. With the curtains drawn and the light out it would fool anyone, particularly his mother, whom he took for something of a fool. And anyway, it was more than likely that she would be lying down in a darkened room herself with one of her famous heads.

  His mother was a good soul, too trusting by half. Good people were always easy to deceive, he had noticed.

  Admittedly, it was not as satisfying as getting one over on his father.

  It would not have surprised Adam to learn that his father was the Devil incarnate. That would be ironic, to say the least, as his father spent his life warning people against the Devil and all his works. The Devil laid snares for the unwary everywhere. In the moving picture shows, the music halls, in books and advertisements. It was the Devil’s way to entice you in with pleasures and idleness, to lead you off the path of righteousness, which was no easy path to walk. And before you knew it, you would find yourself burning in the fires of Hell, condemned to eternal damnation.

  The Devil this, the Devil that. It was all his father talked about. Adam would have laid money on it that he mentioned the Devil more than he mentioned God. Though naturally gambling was one of the things his father expressly forbade.

  It would be typical of the Devil if he had been masquerading as a Baptist pastor and Sunday school teacher all these years, attacking and condemning all the sins that he secretly approved of, and so tempting you into committing them by bringing them ever to your attention. Adam saw that this method worked particularly well in his own case. He hated his father. Inevitably he was drawn to disobey him. If his father had wanted to make a sinner of him, he could not have chosen a more effective way to do it.

  Back then, when he had gone to look at the airship that Sunday, his hatred for his father was not so firmly rooted. Adam thought of his father then simply as an obstacle to be overcome.

  So he improvised the decoy in his bed, tiptoed downstairs and let himself out of the house with a burglar’s finesse. It was typical of Adam – of the Adam of those days – that he gave no thought to how he would get back in without his adventure being discovered.

  All that mattered was that he got to the Scrubs in time to meet his pals and see the arrival of the fabled airship. Through a peculiar failure of imagination, he thought that the excitement he felt witnessing this historic event would somehow mollify his father’s rage.

  There had been men in the crowd, men there with their sons – indeed, some of his pals had their dads with them – men who outwardly looked every bit as respectable as his own father. Not low-class types or drunkards or degenerates or hooligans. But men with kindly faces and friendly smiles. Men who put their arms around their sons’ shoulders as they pointed out the approaching aircraft. Men who cheered and clapped and even threw their hats into the air.

  Surely his father would see that there was nothing wicked, let alone sinful, in this?

  His elation stayed with him all the way home, even after he took leave of his pals and their equally excited fathers.

  It stayed with him as he mounted the steps to the front door. Only as he was about to ring the front door bell did he remember that he was not supposed to be out at all. Not only that, he had lied to his father. Not only that, the lie had been told so that he could play the wag from church.

  He still felt a flush of shame now, not for having gone on the adventure, but for failing to think it through sufficiently. He should have left his bedroom window open so he could shimmy back in up the drainpipe.

  But perhaps the window was open after all? At any rate, he stood a far greater chance of success if he tried to gain entry from the rear of the house.

  The family lived at the end of the street. There was a side entrance to the garden through a wooden door in the wall. But the door was kept locked. Fortunately a large plane tree grew out of the pavement nearby, its branches hanging over into their garden. It was possible to clamber up between the wall and the tree.

  He let himself down carefully over the other side, hanging by his fingers before dropping the last three or four feet to the ground. A rhododendron plant broke his fall, and was flattened in the process.

  He stood glued to the spot for several moments, sure that someone must have heard the rustling of foliage. But the house was silent. His father and Eve must be back from church by now. He knew that he had been longer at the Scrubs than he had intended.

  A quick glance up at the back of the house revealed that his own window was closed. Not only that, no drainpipe or pipe of any kind approached it. But the window to the room next to his, his twin sister Eve’s room, was partially open, and a drainpipe passed right by it. Adam could not believe his luck.

  If Eve was not in her room, then perfect. No one need ever know about his transgression. But even if she was there, he felt sure that she would not betray him. True, she would then have a hold over him, which she was bound to exploit, but that would be a small price to pay to avoid his father’s wrath.

  He rubbed his hands and took a run at the drainpipe.

  Adam was wiry and strong, but also light. His was the perfect physique for shinning up drainpipes. So much so that he wondered why he did not do it more often. Above all, he was – or had been at that stage of his life – quite fearless. He was not daunted at all by the prospect of clinging on and hoisting himself up, hand over hand, feet testing for toeholds, shins squeezing tight to grip the pipe.

  He felt the pipe shift, just as his head drew level with the windowsill. He clenched his muscles and held on even tighter to pull himself up the last few feet. The gap in the window was not big enough to squeeze through and it would be tricky opening it without help from inside.

  Adam extended his right arm and swung the other arm out to clutch the windowsill. It gave him the chance to look inside and see if his sister was in her room.

  She was. But so was his father.

  They were sitting on the edge of the bed. Their heads were bowed as if in prayer. But they were not praying. He knew this because their palms were not pressed together. In fact, it was not clear at first what their hands were doing. One of his father’s hands was out of sight. It seemed to be thrust into Eve’s dress, which was bunched up around her thighs.

  His other hand … Adam could not process what his other hand was doing. Because before he could think about what his father’s other hand was doing, he had to first confront the sight of that part of his father that he had never thought to see. That part he had been taught to abhor and deny in himself. But his father was not abhorring it or denying it. He had it out in the open, exposed and sticking up, in the state of sticky-up-ness that that same part of Adam was most mornings, and the very existence of which brought only shame and mortification.

  And now he realized with horror what his father’s other hand was doing. It was enveloped around Eve’s hand, pulling it towards that part of him which must be denied and abhorred. And that part of his father was twitching horribly.

  Now Adam really was going to gag in earnest.

  But he could not look away. Why could he not look away?

  It was only when his sister’s hand gripped that part of his father that he had never thought to see, and had gripped it in such a way that suggested she knew what was expected of her, it was only then that he could no longer look.

  It was then that his muscles had given up their clenched clinging on to hope, sanity and the windowsill.

  The impact of the fall was b
arely felt. Whatever pain he experienced would eventually pass. It was nothing next to the indelible damage caused by seeing.

  After a moment of dizzy blackness – if only it had been an eternity! – he came round and vomited all over himself. He had a thumping headache, and the knowledge that one ankle at least was completely shot.

  Adam remembered little of what happened in the immediate aftermath of his fall. His mother’s screams drew his father out. And the horror and disgust and rage that his father focused on him meant nothing to Adam.

  He merely closed his eyes to block it out.

  From that day, his father lost all moral authority over him. Let him punish Adam all he wanted, let him spew forth spittle from his bloodless lips, let him thump the black Bible with a clenched fist, let him lay the same fist across Adam’s ear, let him strike him with the bone-handled cane that he used for such purposes … it made no difference to Adam.

  Perhaps that was why he came back to the Scrubs, every day after school if he could. It was to go back to that time before. To a time of innocence, when the world was still capable of being enlivened by the appearance of such a prodigy as an airship, like a harbinger of hope, as if hope were still a possibility.

  Adam looked back to the bush to see it shiver as the small striped bird took flight from it.

  It was the opportunity he had been waiting for. He began his lurching step over to the bush. His broken right ankle had never properly healed. It was slightly crooked and nagged him with a continual twinge, which was worse when he walked. It was his penance. God’s punishment, his father called it, for the sins of mendacity and defying the Sabbath. And what about your sins? he had wanted to scream back. But never did.

  He had never said a word about what he had seen to anyone, let alone his sister. To talk of it would have been to acknowledge the reality of it.

  But it was simpler than that. He could not imagine what he would say to her. In some moments, he blamed her. His anger was as much for her as his father.

  But in a deep part of him, he knew that she had not been a willing participant in what had been enacted within the frame of her bedroom window. Then his anger was all against himself. Because he had not had the courage to intervene and save her.

  The pain was ringing like a small bell by the time he reached the bush. That was manageable. It was when it went off like Big Ben that he really felt it. Would his gammy ankle keep him out of the army? It was something he worried about often. There was no question that he would enlist when he was old enough, if the army would have him. He had heard of chaps lying about their age. But he did not want to give the recruiting sergeant any other excuse to turn him down.

  Adam pulled back a branch and peered inside the scrubby bush. There it was, the nest. And there, sheltering within it, four pure, perfect eggs, tiny and fine, like bubbles of chalk. They were the colour of the sky on a tremulous spring day, but speckled like a young girl’s eye.

  It turned him about inside to look at them. It almost healed him.

  He picked one up, holding it lightly between forefinger and thumb. His hand trembled at the delicacy of the shell protecting the life within.

  Dare he take it home, to compare it to the pictures in J. L. Bonhote’s Birds of Britain and Their Eggs? But he knew that the colours in that book were not quite natural. Any picture there would be an insult to the weightless miracle he was holding.

  Even just to hold it was a feat of virtuosity akin to walking a tightrope.

  Something welled within him. It was a wordless emotion, as heavy as a bag of wet sand, as hard as a stone.

  He felt it in the tensing of his forefinger and thumb as he crushed the innocent egg between them.

  He looked down at the viscous mess on his fingers. The fine strands of an aborted creature smeared like something he might have picked from his nose.

  He felt no grief, no guilt, no shame. Only amazement at the vast emptiness of his heart.

  NINE

  For a moment, Mrs Ibbott seemed startled by his appearance on her doorstep. He could have sworn her eyes even bulged in their sockets.

  ‘Inspector Quinn! What a pleasure it is to see you looking so well!’

  Quinn knew a lie when he heard one. ‘There’s no need to call me Inspector.’

  ‘Are you not with the police any more?’

  ‘I am, but … I’m not here on police business.’ He could have added, and besides, it’s Chief Inspector, but thought better of it. ‘I wrote to you? I think you must have received my letter because I believe you wrote back? I have it here, your letter.’ He reached into a pocket.

  She waved the letter away. ‘Of course, yes! Come in, come in!’

  But Quinn hesitated, as if he wanted to give her one last chance to slam the door in his face. ‘You said that it would present no difficulties to you – nor anyone else – if I were to call. And so …’

  ‘Oh, Inspector. I said more than that, I think. I believe I said it would be a pleasure to see you. That we all were very anxious on your behalf and that we wanted nothing more than to see you again.’

  At last her expression caught up with her words. Her smile was touched by a genuine if troubled sympathy.

  Quinn frowned. He found it difficult to believe her words, or accept her sympathy. And he was troubled by that ‘all’. Had they all been talking about him? Given the circumstances of his departure from the lodging house, it would be absurd to imagine that they had not.

  ‘I wanted to apologize …’

  ‘Please, do come in, I insist.’ There was an urgency to Mrs Ibbott’s voice. She cast a nervous glance over Quinn’s shoulder, then settled an imploring look on him.

  His former landlady was a stout but tidy woman, who kept her person as impeccably as she kept her house. She dressed in dark, sombre colours that suggested a deep respectability, but which failed to hint at the essential amiability of her personality.

  Quinn nodded.

  Mrs Ibbott seemed to become suddenly self-conscious as she stepped aside to let him in. ‘You’ll have to forgive us. I have given Betsy the day off.’ It was as if the oddness of her opening her own front door needed an explanation. ‘Her brother has enlisted and she wished to see him before he goes off to join his regiment.’

  ‘If it would be more convenient for me to come back another time …?’

  ‘Not at all! I didn’t mean that … I merely meant, you must forgive us.’

  The house was just off the Brompton Road. He had lived there for the last six years. It must have suited him. It was strange to step across the threshold now as a visitor rather than a resident. So many times he had sneaked in like a thief. It wasn’t always out of consideration for the other residents. He had to admit that he had got into the habit of solitude, and so his clandestine ways were to avoid being invited in to join the other lodgers in the drawing room. One of the things Mrs Ibbott liked to do was bring her guests together for social evenings. Quinn had a horror of such occasions.

  She led him into the drawing room, where her daughter Mary was reading a novel. Mary looked up and flushed red to the roots of her hair when she saw Quinn.

  ‘Hello, Mary,’ said Quinn. He did not attempt a smile.

  Mary sat open-mouthed, unable to answer him. The novel dropped from her hands on to the floor.

  ‘Mary, make yourself useful, my dear. Go and make us some tea, will you? Bring some fruit cake too.’

  ‘Why do I have to do it?’ Mary Ibbott could not take her eyes off Quinn. She was watching him like she might watch a large spider, or some other unpleasant and unpredictable creature.

  ‘Well, you know we have no Betsy today. So unless you wish to stay here and entertain Inspector Quinn while I go …’

  Mary ran from the room as if from mortal peril.

  ‘There’s really no need to go to any trouble,’ said Quinn.

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Mrs Ibbott, bidding him sit down with a gentle tilt of the head.

  After a moment of constrained silenc
e, they both began speaking at once.

  ‘I wanted to say …’

  ‘You gave us quite …’

  Quinn gestured for his landlady to go on. She demurred.

  ‘Very well,’ said Quinn. ‘My behaviour was unforgivable.’

  Mrs Ibbott cut him off. ‘We understand that you were ill, that you have been ill. That you were not in control of your actions.’

  ‘No. My apparent breakdown was part of an investigation I was conducting.’

  ‘I don’t pretend to understand. But I think you are not being honest with me, with yourself.’

  It was Quinn’s turn to be startled. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I think there was nothing apparent about it. You suffered a genuine collapse. If I did not think so, I would not now allow you in my house.’

  Quinn stood up. ‘Then I must go, immediately. I will send for my things when it is convenient to you.’

  ‘Sit down, Inspector. I don’t care what you say happened or what you think happened. I know suffering when I see it. And you were suffering. Just like a typical man, you cannot admit it, so you have invented some story about I don’t know what. You prefer to claim that you were pretending to have a breakdown, rather than admit that you actually had one. That’s … well, I hope you will forgive me, Inspector, but that is utter poppycock!’

  ‘I cannot forgive myself for what I said …’

  ‘Exactly! If you were to admit that you were genuinely out of … that is to say, that your mind was … that you were ill … then you would be obliged to forgive yourself, as we all have forgiven you.’

  ‘All? You have all forgiven me?’

  ‘I am sure I speak for everyone.’

  ‘I don’t see how you can. Mrs Hargreaves …’

  ‘Mrs Hargreaves forgives you.’

  ‘And Mr Hargreaves?’