The White Feather Killer

by R. N. Morris

‘Can you leave that? Meet me outside.’

  ‘Now?’ The question was incredulous, almost hostile. But when he nodded, she consulted a silver pocket watch. ‘Let me see what I can do.’

  Ten minutes later they were standing on Victoria Embankment. Quinn was carrying a large brown envelope. Neither of them had put on their overcoats, though Quinn was still wearing his bowler.

  ‘What did you tell Sir Edward?’

  ‘I missed my lunch break so I told him I was faint from hunger. He took pity on me as I haven’t had a proper lunch break since this war began.’

  It came as a startling revelation to him to learn that she was working under such pressure. ‘Do you want to get something to eat? There’s a Lyons teashop on Parliament Street.’

  ‘Very well.’

  He told her what he knew while they walked.

  The Lyons teashop was filled with soldiers. Quinn was impatient to hear what she thought, but first they had to wait for a table to be cleared. Then she consulted the menu and gave her order – a toasted teacake – to the waitress.

  She got straight to the point. ‘So where is Felix?’

  ‘That’s a very good question.’

  ‘The most likely explanation is that he has joined up.’

  ‘It’s a possibility.’

  ‘Is he the soldier that Macadam saw?’

  Quinn pursed his lips critically. ‘Macadam was shot on Sunday the sixth of September. The day before, on the afternoon of Saturday the fifth, Eve Cardew gave Felix a white feather. At that time he was not a soldier. It is possible, I suppose, that he could have gone straight to a recruiting office and enlisted on the Saturday afternoon. But if that’s the case …’

  ‘Why did he kill her? He would have answered the taunt of the white feather by joining up. There was no need to kill her.’

  Lettice’s teacake arrived. They looked down forlornly at it. Not so long ago, the creamy butter would have been pooling as it melted. Not any more. The toasted surface barely glistened. If there was any butter on it, it was the merest scraping of a knife that had perhaps once been shown the butter pot. She took a bite of the teacake and washed it down with tea.

  ‘And then there’s the white feather in her mouth,’ she continued. ‘Why put that there?’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Quinn, delighting in her eagerness and intelligence.

  She answered her own question: ‘To teach her a lesson. To say, look, I’m not a coward. I’m a soldier now.’ She made short work of the first half of the teacake, and again rinsed it down with tea. ‘You have to find Felix.’

  He enjoyed watching her eat. She was utterly unselfconscious and, despite the skimpy buttering, was evidently relishing every mouthful. ‘At least now we have a photograph of him.’

  Lettice nodded towards the brown envelope that Quinn had placed on the table. ‘Is that it?’

  Quinn smiled. He took the photograph out and pointed at Felix. ‘That’s him.’

  ‘He’s just a boy.’

  ‘He is evidently old enough to enlist. That’s what his mother thinks he’s done.’

  ‘But he doesn’t look like a murderer, does he?’

  ‘What does a murderer look like?’

  ‘Not like a sweet young boy.’

  ‘Sweet?’

  ‘Yes. He looks sweet.’

  ‘You can’t tell someone’s a murderer just by looking at his photograph, you know.’

  ‘I know that.’

  Quinn looked down at the photograph. ‘Is he sweet? I don’t see it. But I don’t see that he is a murderer either. I just see a blankness. Nothing.’ Quinn stared fixedly at the image, as if he were willing more detail to appear where Felix’s face was. ‘I suppose if we prove him to be Eve’s killer, the telltale features of a murderer will appear. After all, he was not a murderer when this photograph was taken.’

  She held her teacup halfway to her mouth and paused to lick some food, a raisin perhaps, from her teeth. ‘Are you laughing at me?’

  ‘No, not at all. I often wish that I could.’

  ‘What? Laugh at me?’

  ‘No. Tell just by looking at them. But in my experience you cannot. Every murderer I encounter looks different from the last.’ Quinn wondered whether this was true. Superficially they differed, for sure. But was there not some quality to their faces that they all shared? He would not call it a haunted look. After all, some of them looked decidedly blithe and careless. Nor was it a look of particular malice, an inner coldness, what you might call evil. Some of them were quite affable creatures, and were even kindhearted in other respects than that they had killed. No, it was the mark of a line having been crossed. A look of knowledge, you might say. Of the most terrible knowledge there is. A burdened look. Was this the mark of Cain? If so, it would only become evident after the murder had been committed, and so his quip about the photograph had a grain of truth to it.

  ‘Do you think the killer is Felix?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I think the fact that he has gone missing is telling. I would very much like to talk to him. Until I have, I cannot really say very much about him. It may turn out that he has a watertight alibi.’

  ‘Then why run away?’

  ‘You cannot read too much into that. It may be entirely unconnected to Eve Cardew’s murder. It is dangerous to focus on suspects whom one cannot speak to. One is tempted to fill the gap with all sorts of speculations. But essentially, we have nothing. Until we can speak to him. For now, he remains simply someone we would like to talk to. If I were running the investigation, I would circulate his image in police stations and in the press. Someone will come forward with word of him eventually. However, DCI Coddington is in charge.’

  ‘And he has arrested this German butcher?’

  ‘William Egger is not German. He has – had – a German father. And if that is all that you look for in a suspect, then Felix qualifies on those grounds too. His mother is German.’

  ‘I never realized there were so many Germans living amongst us.’

  ‘Well, one tends to think more about that sort of thing now than one ever did before.’

  She dabbed her mouth with her napkin. The teacake was eaten. ‘Of course, it could be neither of them. It could be someone who has not come to light yet. A stranger whom she met on the day she was killed, right before she was killed. Just some man wandering about Wormwood Scrubs looking for a girl to kill. How can you catch someone like that?’

  ‘There is usually only one way to catch such a perpetrator.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘To wait for him to kill again.’

  Lettice’s eyes widened in horror. ‘Is that all you can do? It’s hardly a foolproof method, is it! I mean, what happens if he does not, and obviously I hope he does not … But if he does not then you never find him. And if he does, well, that’s worse, because someone else has died. And so you will have failed in your first duty, which is to protect the public.’

  ‘We are not miracle-workers.’

  ‘Well, I hope DCI Coddington has got the right man. At least then we know that the killer is behind bars.’

  ‘And if he has not, the real killer is still out there.’

  Lettice dabbed the crumbs from her plate with a damp fingertip. ‘What will you do next?’

  ‘There is very little I can do, officially. I am not leading the investigation. I am not even connected to it. I have asked Coddington to allow me to work with him on it, but he refused. If I were to go to Coddington with my theories, he would disregard them simply because they come from me. He has already disregarded the feather found in Eve’s mouth because it does not fit with his theory. It doesn’t incriminate Egger, so it is ignored. And probably it smacks of the kind of clue that I rely on, in his mind. A psychological clue. The only fact that would sway Coddington towards Felix Simpkins is his mother’s nationality, and it is the least relevant aspect of the case. In fact, it is not relevant at all. But why should he swap a man with a German father for one with a German mothe
r? It makes no difference to him which one swings for the crime, except that he favours the former because he is already behind bars, whereas the latter is nowhere to be found. A bird in the hand and all that.’

  ‘It makes a difference to you, though?’

  Quinn did not need to reply. He knew that she understood him, and that was enough.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Taxis were thin on the ground. Many had been requisitioned for military purposes. It was the same with buses. And of course, there were just fewer men to drive them. Whatever the reason, Quinn had to wait quarter of an hour on Victoria Embankment before he was able to hail one. In happier times, if he needed to go anywhere urgently, he would have had Macadam drive him there in the Model T that was allocated to the Special Crimes Department. What had become of that? he wondered. It rankled to think that it had been absorbed back into the fleet of police cars that were under Coddington’s command. It rankled even more that no one had thought to tell him.

  The driver was one of those cabbies who like to chat. He had two sons in the army, who were doing their bit for King and Country. This information was offered almost as soon as Quinn was in the taxi, in an aggressive, accusatory manner. As if to say, ‘And what are you doing not in uniform, you bloody shirker?’

  Quinn offered the gratitude of the nation, but that didn’t seem to satisfy the driver, who had served at Mafeking but was too old for active service now, otherwise he would have been the first in line at the recruiting office. Any man would, he claimed. Any man with an ounce of honour in his bones.

  The conversation dried up after that.

  It was a relief when they at last pulled up on Hammersmith Road, outside the West London Hospital. Once again, a convoy of ambulances was parked up, with soldiers fresh from the Front being taken out on stretchers or in wheelchairs. Quinn and the cabbie watched in respectful silence as the wounded were ferried inside. Even the garrulous cabbie seemed cowed by the sight. Quinn sensed the other man’s dread, as if he expected at any moment to see his sons among the muddied and bloodied human wreckage. For Quinn, the spectacle was even more shocking than on his first visit. It gave the impression of the war being some endless and ruthless industry for the manufacture of broken men. Was this happening every day, every hour even? The immense scale and destructive power of the war struck home, and the sense of it being beyond the control of any human agency or government. Something monstrous had been unleashed, in the face of which there were no words.

  In the corridor outside Macadam’s room, he encountered the same matron he had seen on his first visit. She frowned at him critically. ‘Can you people not leave the poor man in peace?’

  It was unfortunate that he had not had the photograph of Felix Simpkins in time to give it to Inchball for his visit earlier, but that was the way it went with police work. Sometimes you had to go over the same ground twice. Besides, he wanted to look in on Macadam himself.

  Quinn conferred with the MO5(g) soldier on duty. ‘Anything unusual to report?’

  The soldier stifled a yawn as he shook his head.

  Macadam was propped up in exactly the same position as before, as if he had not moved a muscle since Quinn’s last visit. A flicker of surprise opened up his face and he strained to sit up. ‘Guv? I wasn’t expecting you! Inchball didn’t say.’ His speech was breathless and wheezy. He winced at the effort of movement.

  Quinn held up his hand in demurral. ‘No need to get up, old chap.’ He took a seat next to the bed. ‘How are you doing?’

  Macadam collapsed back with some relief into his former position. He closed his eyes to recover his strength. ‘It’s not so bad. I’m bored out of my skull is the worst of it. I’ll go crazy if I have to stay in here much longer.’

  ‘You can’t rush these things.’

  A smile tweaked at Macadam’s lips. ‘Next you’ll be telling me I had a lucky escape.’

  ‘It’s true.’

  Macadam’s eyes sprang open, and Quinn saw a weariness there, a look of defeat almost, that he did not recognize in his sergeant. ‘Maybe. But I’m no more use than a corpse lying here like this, am I?’

  ‘That’s not true. You’re the only one who’s clapped eyes on the chief suspect.’

  Macadam pulled a face. ‘Some use that was. You should have seen the sketch the artist did. I mean, it sort of looks like him, but then again, it sort of don’t. It sort of looks like a thousand other blokes.’

  Quinn took the photograph out of the envelope and handed it to Macadam. A new intent came into Macadam’s eyes as he scanned the image, a purposeful energy. It wasn’t long before a look of recognition lit up his face as if a flare had gone off. ‘That’s him! There!’ He pointed to the last figure on the right of the back row.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘One hundred per cent.’

  ‘The quality of the photograph is not great.’

  ‘Nevertheless, I’m sure it’s him.’ Macadam smiled and held on to the photograph as if he were reluctant to relinquish it. ‘Who is he?’

  ‘His name’s Felix Simpkins.’

  ‘How did you find him?’

  ‘A witness, two witnesses in fact, came forward. They saw Eve Cardew give him a white feather at the Purity Meeting.’

  ‘What does Coddington have to say about that?’

  ‘I haven’t taken it to him yet. I wanted to be sure. But at least it gives us a name. The next thing to do is to check with the Royal Fusiliers. Simpkins left home on Monday the seventh, the day after he shot you. He failed to turn up for work. So either he is with the regiment or he has gone into hiding. A telephone call to regimental headquarters should be enough to settle that question.’

  ‘He won’t be there.’

  ‘In which case, we will put out his photograph and start a manhunt.’

  ‘Can you do that without Coddington?’

  ‘With your positive identification of Felix Simpkins, even Coddington must be able to see that he has the wrong man. Especially if you are able to positively state that William Egger is not the man who shot you.’

  Macadam pursed his lips. ‘I wouldn’t put anything past Coddington. He’d say I was mistaken, or I fingered this Simpkins chap to please you. That’s how it works with his officers, so he probably reckons it’s the same with us.’

  Quinn held one hand over his eyes and drew the palm down slowly until it covered his mouth. He sat like that for a long time, as if forbidding himself from saying whatever was on his mind.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Back at the Yard, Quinn made a point of walking straight up to Inchball. Coddington was in his office with the door open. He had a clear view of most of the CID room, including Inchball’s desk.

  Inchball tensed nervously and looked over his shoulder, his eyebrows raised quizzically.

  ‘I’ve just got back from seeing Macadam.’

  ‘I thought I was doing that, guv? I got the sketch an’ all. Took it to the regiment. They said it looked like every single blighter who’s enlisted in the last month. Unless we have a name for them, they can’t help us.’

  ‘Felix Simpkins.’ Quinn placed the photograph on Inchball’s desk and pointed to Felix Simpkins. ‘That’s the man who shot Mac. Can you check again with the Royal Fusiliers to see if they had anyone of that name? A telephone call will suffice. We need to get this resolved as quickly as possible. Also, take it to the print office and get some copies made.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Let’s say a thousand for now. Have them run up some Wanted posters while they’re at it. Wanted, Felix Simpkins for the murder of Miss Eve Cardew. You know the sort of thing. We need to get his mugshot out to as many police stations as we can. And not just Metropolitan. He may have left the capital by now.’

  Inchball nodded and picked up the receiver to the telephone on his desk. In this respect, CID was better equipped than the Special Crimes Department, where the three of them had had to share one telephone.

  As Inchball spoke to the operator, Quinn h
eard the scrape of a chair and became aware of a flurry of movement out of the corner of his eye. There was a long, high-pitched shout, which seemed to get closer the more it continued. Quinn left it to the last possible minute to turn towards it, by which time Coddington was upon them.

  Coddington snatched the receiver out of Inchball’s hand and slammed it back in its cradle. His face was red with rage. Quinn could feel the heat from it as it was pushed right up to his own. He could smell the sourness of the other man’s breath. An eighth of an inch closer and he would have felt Coddington’s moustache tickle him.

  ‘No, no, no, no, no! This isn’t how it works! You don’t tell my men what to do. You’ve gone too far this time, Quinn.’

  ‘You don’t understand, Coddington—’

  ‘Oh, I don’t understand, do I? Am I too stupid to understand? Is that it?’

  ‘There’s been a new lead. We know who shot Macadam.’

  ‘I have him, the suspect, the prisoner, the guilty one, the villain, the … the … the …’

  ‘Murderer?’

  ‘The murderer, thank you. I don’t need you to tell me the word, I know the word. The murderer. You don’t get to be a Detective Chief Inspector without knowing the word for someone who murders.’

  ‘You have the wrong man.’

  ‘I have the wrong man! Of course I have the wrong man! Because I am stupid! Of course I am stupid. Because I am stupid DCI Coddington! Not ever-so-clever DCI Quinn. Yes, how stupid of me not to be you! But what would you say, DCI Ever-So-Clever Quinn, if I told you that he has confessed! Yes! Would you still say I have the wrong man?’

  ‘You have a confession?’

  ‘Yes, he has confessed! Put that in your pipe and smoke it!’

  ‘To killing Eve Cardew?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘More or less? What does that mean? He has either confessed or he hasn’t, surely?’

  ‘He has confessed to wanting to kill her. That he had the intent to kill her.’

  ‘It’s not the same thing at all.’

  ‘It won’t be long before he goes the whole hog. He’s working up to it. We just need a little more time with him. He’ll crack soon. We’ll get a full confession then. We have a partial one now, that’s enough to show that we have the right man, all right.’