The White Feather Killer

by R. N. Morris

  ‘That’s good for us,’ said Quinn. ‘It means we’re more likely to find what we’re looking for.’

  ‘What exactly are we lookin’ for, guv?’ asked Willoughby.

  ‘We won’t know until we find it.’

  Leversedge hiked a bemused eyebrow at Quinn before turning slowly to Willoughby. ‘A diary would be useful. Any correspondence, particularly from foreign nationals, by which I mean Germans. His mother is German, so he has German cousins and uncles, etc. If you could turn up a railway timetable, that would be most useful, particularly if it has one of its destinations underlined.’

  ‘Underlined, you say?’ asked Inchball ironically.

  ‘Circled would be acceptable too.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  Inchball set to with a focused energy that verged on brutal. He pulled out the drawer from a small desk and tipped its contents on to the floor, then knelt down to pore through them. The drawer itself was discarded carelessly. Quinn stepped around him, placing his feet fastidiously like a cat, to get to the wardrobe. Leversedge turned his attention to the chest of drawers, while Willoughby looked under the bed. There was hardly enough space for the four of them in the room, so they were forced to move with an almost choreographed consideration for each other. The meaty smell of male hormones hung in the air, to which the policemen’s exertions contributed.

  Quinn rifled through the clothes hanging up, his fingers blindly probing the pockets and linings of every jacket and pair of trousers. It wasn’t long before he found something. To the touch, it was a strange combination of opposite attributes: it was soft but also spiky, yielding but resistant too, if he allowed his fingers to approach it from another direction. Its core was firm but it seemed to dissipate quickly into fibres of nothingness.

  From the pocket of Felix’s Sunday-best suit jacket, Quinn extracted a white feather, about three inches in length. ‘I think I’ve found it. The thing that we were looking for.’

  The other men stopped what they were doing and turned to him eagerly. When they saw the feather he was holding out to them, their expressions clouded. ‘This changes everything,’ said Quinn.

  Leversedge didn’t look so certain. ‘Does it tell us where Felix Simpkins is?’

  ‘No. It tells us something even more important than that.’

  ‘Do you still want us to carry on looking?’ There was a note of disappointment in Inchball’s voice, as if he was afraid he might be denied a privilege that he had been looking forward to.

  ‘Yes, turn the place upside down.’

  Quinn pocketed the feather and left the others to it.

  He crossed the dark, narrow hall to the door behind which Felix’s mother had disappeared. He knocked gently and went in without waiting for a response.

  She was lying on the bed, fully clothed, her back to the door, facing a window across which the curtains were drawn. A feeble light seeped through them. There was a stale smell in this room too, though predominantly of mothballs. It was tidier than her son’s room, which was not saying much, but the tidiness had a sterility to it. The wallpaper was a watery yellow colour, with a mottled design to suggest marble perhaps, though it put Quinn more in mind of aspic.

  ‘Mrs Simpkins?’

  There was no sound or movement from the woman on the bed. Quinn wondered if she was asleep and walked round to look at her from the other side. Her eyes were open, staring blankly into space.

  ‘Mrs Simpkins,’ he repeated. She did not look up at him. ‘It’s DCI Quinn.’

  Even that revelation did not produce a response.

  ‘Can you hear me, Mrs Simpkins?’

  At last she stirred. It was the merest upward movement of her head. Something like a dismissive snort sounded in her throat. For some reason, Quinn thought of his own mother. The movement was similar to a disdainful mannerism of hers that she had adopted whenever he tried to speak to her of his father after his death. A glacial bitterness had gripped her, more scorn than grief. At the time, knowing nothing of his father’s longstanding affair with another woman, Quinn could not understand, or forgive, her attitude. She gave the impression that she knew something that he did not know, something that she could never be induced to tell him, though she hinted at its significance often enough. Whatever it was, this secret knowledge was supposed to justify her seeming lack of compassion, not to mention her self-pity. But such was his faith in his father that he was compelled to believe she was mistaken. Worse than that, he began to hate her for what he perceived to be her disloyalty.

  In truth, his mother had maintained a scrupulous display of loyalty to her deceased husband, but Quinn had always suspected that that was done for the sake of appearances rather than because she felt his father deserved it. The last thing she had wanted was people gossiping about her marriage. The only complaint that she occasionally let slip was that her husband had abandoned her, which Quinn had always taken to be a reference to his death rather than anything else. And so, the truth had been suppressed, which had created that area in which Quinn’s own obsessions could take root and grow, fertilized by his conviction that his father had been murdered by a mysterious conspiracy of malign forces.

  ‘On my sixteenth birthday, Mumie presented me with the gown that I was to wear for my performance.’ Mattilde’s voice was deep and husky. It trembled with a sense of awe, as if she was struck not so much by the momentousness of what she was saying, but of speech itself. ‘It came in a big box tied up with a silk ribbon, and layers and layers of tissue paper inside. I knew what it was, of course; there was no surprise, because I had been to Frau Ganz’s atelier to be measured for it. She had a tiny room on the fourth floor of a building on Hausvogteiplatz. There was no lift. We had to climb the stairs. They smelled musty and damp and were very grubby. I remember thinking this is not very nice, not what you expect from a dressmaker who serves the cream of Berlin society. It was a long way too. But I did not mind really because I was so excited. I flew up those stairs, my feet barely touched them! Mumie chose the fabrics for me. The bodice was crushed velvet in midnight blue. The skirt was a cascade of black taffeta. The neckline was very low! Shocking! Though it was covered with a fine gauze of lace. “Mumie!” I said. “You are not a child any more,” she said. “You are a woman now. You must make an impression when you walk out on to that stage.”

  ‘I loved that dress. Even though I had not chosen the fabrics, had had no say in its design, I loved it. I loved the feel of it against my skin as I plunged my arms into the box. I wanted to dive into it. To drown in it. I had never seen anything so fabulous. If I played well, Mumie said, I would get more gowns like this. As many as I wanted!

  ‘I put the gown on and looked at myself in the mirror. I had become a different person. But it was the person I was always meant to be. I turned for Vati to see me. He looked me up and down, so slowly and strangely, like I had never seen him look at me before. And then I saw that his eyes were glistening. A tear, a single tear, ran out. But he was smiling too. “No,” he said, “you are not Vati’s little girl any more.”

  ‘The day of the concert came. I had such butterflies in my stomach. In the morning, I was sick. “It is a good omen,” Mumie said. But I could not eat a thing all day. As I waited in the wings to go on, I held my hands out in front of me; they were shaking. Shaking shaking shaking. We had been told that a great impresario was in the audience. Herr Lieberstein was his name. I had heard Mumie and Vati talking about him with great excitement in their voices. This man had the power to make our fortune! But Vati came up to me and he said, “Forget about Herr Lieberstein. Forget about the audience. Forget about them all. Just play, just play for your Vati.”

  ‘At last it was time to walk out on to the stage and take my place at the piano. As soon as I held my fingers over the keys, the shaking stopped. I played as I had never played before. I did not play for the impresario. I did not play for the audience. I played for Vati.

  ‘At the end, as I took my bow, the audience erupte
d in applause. They stamped their feet and cheered. Calls of “Brava! Brava!” I was even required to play an encore. They would not let me go without an encore! But Herr Lieberstein, we discovered, had already left. He did not stay to pay his compliments.

  ‘After the concert, Vati kissed me tenderly on each cheek and told me that I had played exquisitely. Professor Friedrich Kiel himself described my interpretation of the first movement of Beethoven’s Sonata No. 2 as a revelation. But evidently it was not good enough for Herr Lieberstein.’ She swallowed heavily, momentously. ‘There would be no more beautiful gowns.’

  ‘Mrs Simpkins, there’s something I need to tell you.’

  For the first time she looked up at him. Her gaze was stripped of pretence, but also of hope. ‘That day, the day of my sixteenth birthday, it was the best day of my life. There has never been a day to match. Nothing that has happened to me since then has made me as happy as the gown that my mother presented to me on my birthday. Nothing has moved me like my father’s tears when he looked at me and saw me as a beautiful young woman for the first time. My whole life was ahead of me. I had so much promise. I was to play at the Stern Conservatory before an invited audience. The famous impresario Herr Lieberstein himself would be there.’ All at once, her voice lost its wistfulness and grew as hard and sharp as a pointed stick. ‘What did I do to deserve this? A son who is a murderer!’

  ‘That’s just it, Mrs Simpkins. I don’t believe Felix killed Eve Cardew.’

  ‘What does it matter? He has abandoned me. As his father before him abandoned me. I am alone in a foreign country. I have no one. He is worse than a murderer to me. He is a boy who does not love his mother.’ Her voice wound itself up into a high-pitched, self-pitying whine.

  There was a tap on the door. Quinn turned to see Inchball scowling distastefully at the woman on the bed. ‘Got a minute, guv?’

  It was a relief to get out of that bedroom. The atmosphere created by the yellow wallpaper, the dim light and Mattilde Simpkin’s cloying nostalgia was suddenly unbearable to Quinn. The colour of the wallpaper particularly distressed him, as it put him in mind of a nasty medicine he had been forced to take as a child. He could not remember what it was for. Only how he had gagged when the spoon was held to his mouth.

  Inchball held out a dog-eared sheet of paper, torn from an exercise book. It was criss-crossed with well-worn folds, along some of which it was falling apart. Large looping letters in a child’s clumsy hand filled the page. ‘I found it in that desk of his. Inside a book.’ Inchball managed to imbue the last word with suspicion.

  Dearist Felix,

  Meet me in the Scrubs at 4 o’clock. There is a plase near where the airships land where my brother and his pals have bilt a den out of branches and things. For we must run a way. A Great Evil has come in to my life you would not believe. I will tell you all later. You are my Saviour. We will live in a cottige with flowers and hens. I can do sewing. No one will find us. I love you and will love you forever. You are my only hope. If you do not come I will kill myself.

  Your Darlin Eve

  Judging by the handwriting, Eve must have been about eight or nine when she wrote it. Perhaps even younger. If that was so, it was a startlingly precocious letter. There was the odd spelling mistake but Quinn had seen more wayward efforts written by adults. For example, she had had no trouble with the difficult words ‘Saviour’ and ‘believe’. Her father’s influence, no doubt. There was a touching naiveté about the sentiments, but an unsettling intensity too. It had evidently made an impression on Felix Simpkins, who had kept it safe all these years.

  Quinn folded the paper along its creases and handed it back to Inchball. ‘Get the others.’ He spoke quietly, without any urgency or excitement in his voice. But the steady gaze and barely perceptible nod with which Inchball greeted the command showed that he grasped the significance of the moment.

  FORTY-FOUR

  It was strange to sit in the back of a Model T police car and be driven by someone other than Macadam. But Willoughby seemed a capable enough chauffeur, despite his youth, if a little heavy-handed with the horn. In fairness, Quinn couldn’t criticize him for that. Macadam had at times shown the same tendency. If anything, Macadam was a more reckless driver, taking corners at speed and pulling out into oncoming traffic. Quinn had thought nothing of it at the time. But now, when he compared it to Willoughby’s more cautious approach, it seemed a miracle that they had ever arrived at their destination in one piece. And yet it was now that he had the greater sense of being driven towards catastrophe.

  The other vehicles on the road appeared lumbering and backward, like great mastodons that should have become extinct aeons ago. It was either that or they were engaged in a widespread conspiracy to frustrate Quinn at every turn.

  As they drove along Wood Lane, the White City came into view on the left. It was like something out of a dream, a construct of imagination and wish-fulfilment. It reminded Quinn of an archaeological site, like the forum of Rome or the Acropolis of Athens, except that these were monuments of the future, not the past. Even so, there was an empty desolation to the site. The buildings there were not ruins, not yet, but seemed to hold within their shallow grandeur the ghost of their own dilapidation. The White City stood as a symbol of aspiration, but it was bereft of purpose. Except that now, like many buildings of uncertain status, it had been co-opted into the war effort. A space that had grown out of a vision of humanity coming together, of peace and harmony between nations, of the friendly rivalry of games, was now being used to plan and manufacture more efficient ways for one group of humans to inflict destruction on another.

  It seemed ironic too that the site that had been chosen for it was so close to a prison, next to which there was a workhouse and an infirmary. These somewhat less noble buildings came briefly into view, as a sobering reminder of where you could end up if you failed to find a place in the great and glorious vision that had been decided upon for mankind’s destiny.

  Willoughby steered the car sharply towards the verge and pulled up. They were on Scrubs Lane, the road that ran between Wormwood Scrubs and Little Wormwood Scrubs, alongside the railway. The car gave a short squeal as Willoughby yanked the handbrake on, then shuddered noisily in the dying of the engine.

  Quinn looked out at the fence that ran along the park perimeter. ‘It was here, wasn’t it, where Macadam was shot?’

  ‘That’s right, guv.’ Leversedge avoided Quinn’s eyes as he answered the question.

  Quinn reached inside his jacket beneath his trademark herringbone ulster and felt the cold, unyielding metal of the service revolver holstered there. He felt the constriction of the holster harness around his chest, as if it were a disease that limited his ability to breathe. He did not take the gun out yet. But something of its steely presence entered him and enabled him to get out of the car.

  Leversedge led them into the park through a gate. Ahead of them was the giant hangar of the Royal Navy Air Service base. Quinn stood for a moment to take it in. The sheer scale of it pulled him up short. He felt a sliver of doubt enter him. Perhaps he had been too hasty to dismiss the possibility that the case had something to do with the war, after all. He felt a burning curiosity to know what went on inside that hangar. How much more keenly must the agents of the enemy have felt it?

  The angry clacking of an agitated blackbird drew his gaze to a line of scrappy bushes. Leversedge armed a swathe of branches to one side, to create a way through. Quinn bowed into an enclosed space, hidden away from the main park. A sudden chill entered the air, which hung stagnant and bated, as if the ground was holding its breath. Quinn instinctively knew that this was where Eve had been killed.

  Leversedge pointed wordlessly at the crude assemblage of wood and corrugated iron at the apex of the space.

  Quinn reached inside his jacket, and this time he withdrew his service revolver.

  They spread out into a fan, and paced with slow, noiseless steps towards the den, their bodies sitting lower than they woul
d if they were walking naturally. There was something self-conscious about their gait, as if they were concentrating hard to perform the steps of a complicated dance. Their faces were grimly deadpan, grey with tense anticipation. If it were not for the fact that the man leading them in their dance was holding a gun, they would have appeared ludicrous.

  Inchball was on Quinn’s left; beyond him, Willoughby. Leversedge was on Quinn’s right. As they approached the den, they drew closer together. Quinn drew a circle in the air with his free hand. The other men took up positions around the den.

  The entrance to the den was a flap of tarpaulin covering a crawl hole low to the ground. Quinn sank to his haunches and began to edge the tarpaulin slowly to one side. The heavy cloth cracked at the movement. A cascade of dirt and debris fell from its rigid folds. Spiders scuttled out of the way, light-starved insects flexed their antennae. The precarious structure above shifted dangerously.

  Quinn kept his head to the side of the gap he had opened up and peered inside. The first thing he saw were the soles of the man’s boots, one on top of the other, right there in the entrance. He was lying on his side. His face was obscured by the focused gloom of the den’s interior. Quinn could not be sure, but if he had to guess, he would have said that he was asleep.

  He saw the glint of the gun lying on the ground in the lee of the man’s huddle. He felt an aching tremble in his reaching arm as he stretched to retrieve it. He held the revolver behind him for one of his officers to take.

  When that was done, he let the tarpaulin fall and holstered his own weapon. Then he pulled the tarpaulin all the way across and shook the sleeping man by the leg. ‘Come on, Felix, wake up.’ He kept his voice low and calm, as if he was a father waking his son on a school day. The young man stirred groggily and lifted his head, blinking. ‘It’s time to come out,’ said Quinn.