The White Feather Killer

by R. N. Morris

  ‘I don’t understand. What does that signify?’

  ‘The longer Felix Simpkins remained on the run from the police, the greater his guilt appeared. It was in the interest of the real murderer to keep Felix out of our reach.’

  ‘You really believe he did it.’ It was not a question. The words were a sign of her trying to come to terms with the new world that she found herself in, a world in which her husband might be the murderer of her child.

  ‘We are still in the process of gathering evidence. It goes without saying that there are some questions I would like to put to Pastor Cardew.’

  Mrs Cardew rose from her seat and crossed to a glass-fronted bookcase. ‘Why don’t you take his dictionary of theology? I don’t believe anyone else in this house has ever had occasion to turn its pages.’

  Quinn was on his feet too, as was Leversedge. The two policemen nodded to one another. That would do very well.

  Quinn left it to Leversedge to extract the book without contaminating it with his own prints.

  Her lips were tightly sealed as she showed them to the door, a long engrained habit that seemed to be her refuge. Then, at the very last moment, she blurted out, ‘But what will I say to Adam? He knows nothing of any of this.’

  She looked from one man to the other with a stark and desperate glare.

  FORTY-SIX

  They covered the one and a half miles to the Baptist church on Shepherd’s Bush Road at a brisk trot. Leversedge was again subdued, either from the exertion or because he was still processing the information that he had just taken in. He limited himself to one question, which was not so much a question as an objection, but he gave it an interrogative intonation to soften it. ‘You realize that even if his prints are on the bowl, it doesn’t prove anything?’

  ‘It will prove conclusively that it is their bowl. That it was taken from Wallingford Avenue and given to Felix. I realize that it does not prove that he was the one who took it there. But if his prints are on the milk bottle as well, it will be more incriminating still. I think it will at least be enough to persuade Felix to give him up. And if his prints are on neither, then he will be in the clear.’

  This last point seemed to forestall any further questioning, though judging from his frown of consternation, Leversedge was far from convinced.

  They gave themselves a moment to catch their breath before taking the fifteen or so steps up to the main entrance. For some reason, Quinn had expected the door to be locked, but it gave without resistance.

  They saw him as soon as they were inside. In truth, it was impossible to miss him.

  He was standing straight ahead of them, high up as if ascending to Heaven. It was a startling, incomprehensible sight until Quinn realized he was balanced on top of the balustrade of the gallery that ran around the church. His body swayed forwards and backwards as if subject to the buffeting of a strong wind. At first Quinn thought that he was engaged in some act of maintenance. Had he climbed up there to change a light bulb perhaps? But then Quinn noticed the rope. One end was looped around Cardew’s neck, the other was tied to one of the balusters.

  The sound of their entrance drew Cardew’s gaze down. It was as if he had been waiting for them.

  ‘Pastor Cardew, please, I beg you. Think of your son.’ Quinn knew well the impact of a father’s suicide on a son.

  ‘Nearer, my God, to thee!’ cried the pastor in a ringing voice, as clear as any sermon he had given.

  And then he jumped the short distance to the jolting snag of eternity.

  His body jerked and swung and spun. His limbs thrashed uselessly.

  Quinn was rooted to the spot. Leversedge tore off at a sprint to find the stairs up to the gallery.

  It seemed to take an age before the man on the rope was completely still. But it was not long enough for Leversedge to get him down alive.

  PART VIII

  The White Hart

  18 September–21 September, 1914.

  A THOUGHT FOR TO-DAY.

  Times of general calamity and confusion have ever been productive of the greatest minds.

  Daily Mirror, Saturday, 19 September, 1914

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Driscoll and his men were all over the church.

  Quinn and Leversedge stood watching the activity. It was that point in an investigation when police work becomes little more than purposeful milling about.

  ‘So that’s it then?’ asked Leversedge. ‘We are to take his suicide as an admission of guilt?’

  ‘I would prefer a note,’ remarked Quinn. He thought of the letter his father had written that he had read in his cheap hotel room in King’s Cross. Would it be easier to read another father’s suicide note?

  ‘If there’s one here, these chaps will turn it up. I’ll get some other men over to Wallingford Avenue.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘We’ll also look back at the old registers for the Sunday school, see if there’s a Millicent Jones. I doubt it but you never know.’

  Quinn shifted impatiently. He felt nervous acuity tingling through him. ‘Yes. Thank you for reminding me. I would like to do that now.’

  Leversedge held out a restraining arm. There was an uncertain, almost wary, look in his eye. ‘All in good time, guv. I’ll have Willoughby go through them. Eagle-eyed that boy is.’

  Quinn frowned. He recognized the brimming of a manic energy that he had not experienced since his own father’s death all those years ago. He breathed deeply through his nostrils. ‘If you think that would be better, then of course.’

  ‘There is one thing I don’t understand, guv.’

  Quinn raised his eyebrows questioningly.

  ‘The feathers. The white feathers. From the outset you were convinced that the feather in her mouth was significant. When Willoughby put forward his theory about the feather, you were very taken with that, if I remember rightly. The feather was the key, you said. But if the feather was so important, doesn’t that make Felix Simpkins the killer, not Eve’s father?’

  ‘The turning point was when I found the feather in Felix’s jacket. That proved that he had not placed his feather in Eve’s mouth as I had originally believed. He had not made her eat her words. Therefore, he was not her killer.’

  ‘So was the feather nothing after all, just like old Codders said?’

  Quinn started in alarm at the notion that Coddington might have been right about something. ‘No, the feather was significant. It must have been. But just not in the way we understood.’

  ‘In what way then?’

  Quinn frowned. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps if we find that note, it will explain it for us. Or maybe we shall never know.’

  Leversedge’s expression grew sceptical.

  Quinn understood. He could not shake off a flat, empty feeling himself. It was not unusual in the wake of an investigation, particularly if the prime suspect insisted on dying before Quinn had a chance to take a conclusive statement. Although often, it had to be said, the death in question was meted out by Quinn’s revolver, rather than being inflicted by the criminal’s own hand. But even when the perpetrator was taken alive, he did not always provide the resolution that a good detective might hope for. Some of them would insist on denying everything and making life difficult for all concerned.

  And so Quinn was used to loose ends that refused to be tied up, gaps that could only be filled with speculation. But a peculiarly tenacious sense of dissatisfaction nagged him now. True, if the pastor’s prints were found on the bottle and the bowl, as he was certain they would, there would be one more piece of the jigsaw in place, but it would still not be a complete picture.

  He would have dearly loved the opportunity to speak to Cardew one last time. But this final act, his suicide, was arguably the most eloquent statement he could have given.

  Sometimes, you just had to close the file and move on.

  Quinn narrowed his eyes and nodded decisively. It was the kind of look that passed between a senior police officer and his subordina
te every day. It implied a degree of trust, mutual respect even.

  Quinn turned sharply and, without further word, left the church.

  As he stood at the top of the steps looking down on Shepherd’s Bush Road, he wondered if he really did trust Leversedge now.

  He remembered the old saying. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

  He descended the steps to look for a taxi.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  Someone had left a copy of the Clarion on his desk. The front page was all about the action along the Aisne. The account was written in a jaunty tone that left a bad taste in Quinn’s mouth. He had no doubt that it had been cobbled together from War Office releases and news agency dispatches sent down the wire by some journalist sitting in a cushy London office, someone who knew no more about what was going on at the Front than he did. He understood that the purpose of news now was to keep the nation’s spirits up. In his own small way he sometimes shaped the news, and so he had his part to play in that, or so Kell would have him believe. But still, the writer’s chirpy optimism struck a false note with him. It was unearned, to say the least. Every day now there were growing lists of casualties published. It was all too easy for journalists to pay tribute to the noble heroism of these men who had made the ultimate sacrifice for their country. Such platitudes rolled off the pen, or typewriter, or whatever it was these fellows used to write their jingoistic propaganda, all too easily. The deaths they catalogued in their addenda had no meaning for them.

  Each death that Quinn had ever investigated, each death that he had witnessed, even the deaths for which he had been responsible, which had earned him his ridiculous moniker in the papers, each and every one of them had carried its own weight of emotion as it had snagged itself on to his memory. So that now he sometimes felt as though he were subject to a different gravity to other men.

  And today another weight had been added to his soul. He imagined the deaths as lead weights suspended from his flesh by fish hooks. Such weights would not only slow you down, they would distort you. He was being pulled out of shape by them.

  He had seen a man plunge to his death at the end of a rope. Even if that man was in all probability a murderer and certainly an incestuous child-rapist, he could take no pleasure in even that death, could find nothing either glib or sententious to say about it. Could only wonder, with a kind of depressed dread, what newspapers like the Clarion would make of it, and how they would represent his role in it. He had not delivered the narrative that Kell had demanded. There was no German involvement in Eve’s murder, after all. It was just a sad, sordid family tragedy, or so it seemed. And to make things worse, her apparent murderer was a pillar of the community who was well known for his patriotic support of the war. No, it would not play well with Kell at all, nor with Sir Michael Esslyn and his fellow War Office mandarins.

  Perhaps only Sir Edward would appreciate his efforts. He had not delivered a narrative, that was true, but he had followed the evidence, even when it took him to places he had no wish to go.

  Quinn turned the page. What he saw there did nothing to lift his depressed mood.

  SECOND MURDER IN WEST LONDON.

  BOSCH BUTCHER FROM BUSH RELEASED BY POLICE. BODY FOUND SOON AFTER.

  QUICK-FIRE QUINN IN CHARGE.

  The piece had been filed by the crime reporter George Bittlestone, known to Quinn from previous investigations. Of course, he did not blame Bittlestone for reporting the news of Millicent Jones’s murder. But the implication of the crudely juxtaposed headlines was clear. William Egger was the murderer and it was Quinn’s fault that he had been allowed to kill again. Quinn scanned the first paragraph of the account. Just in case anyone was still in any doubt, it was pointed out that a meat cleaver, similar to the kind used by William Egger, was found near the body. There was no mention of white feathers.

  Quinn felt a sullen rage rise up in him.

  Bloody journalists. If Quinn had his way, they would never tell them anything. Or at the very least, everything that was told to them would go through him. Because the only thing worse than journalists were the coppers who leaked information to them.

  This had to have been fed to Bittlestone by someone on the team, someone who was trying to make Quinn look bad and reassert Coddington’s interpretation of the case. Of course, it had been done before the suicide of Pastor Cardew had signalled his guilt. Events had taken over and disproved Coddington’s theory more conclusively than Quinn could have. But still, the damage was done. His credibility was undermined. The public were stubborn as well as stupid. They would remain convinced that Egger was the murderer, especially as they had obtained no written confession from Cardew.

  It could even be argued that Cardew had killed himself out of grief at losing his daughter, not because he was her murderer. And perhaps that was true. Was Quinn any better than Coddington? He had latched on to a theory and moulded the facts to prove it.

  No. All his instincts told him that Cardew had killed his daughter because she threatened to expose him. The mask he presented to the world, of virtue and saintliness, was about to be ripped off. Yes, she was his daughter. And it was a terrible crime for a father to kill his own daughter. But he had committed horrendous crimes against her before. Quinn knew from what Cardew’s wife had said that he considered himself above the law, above morality. As a true believer, he could do no wrong. That was all very well, that was something he could square with his conscience and his God. But for his congregation to find out what kind of a man he was, that was something else. That was something he could not allow. He would do anything to keep his secrets hidden.

  It had to be. And yet there were loose ends that did not fit Quinn’s theory either. For one, the bloody meat cleaver. Even if the Sunday school registers did turn up a link between Millicent Jones and Cardew, that did not prove that he had murdered her, or what his motive was. Perhaps Eve had confided in Millicent. Or perhaps Millicent had been subject to Pastor Cardew’s perverted attentions too. It was possible that he had conceived the idea of silencing anyone whom he had molested. And that something had caused him to back away from this madness and take his own life instead. Even if you accepted all that, why was the meat cleaver there? Was it possible that Cardew had killed Millicent deliberately to direct the trail away from him and back towards Egger?

  In that case, why did he kill himself?

  Or was the meat cleaver simply irrelevant? A coincidence, dropped there by accident by God knows who? Now he really was turning into Coddington, disregarding the meat cleaver in exactly the same way Coddington had disregarded the feather in Eve’s mouth.

  No, the case wasn’t over. It was natural to think that Pastor Cardew’s death had brought it to some sort of conclusion. But there were still too many unanswered questions for that.

  The candlestick telephone affixed to Coddington’s desk – Quinn’s desk now – burst into startled life. Quinn glowered at it as if he suspected it of playing a part in the conspiracy he was beginning to imagine aligned against him.

  He grabbed the receiver and leaned forward to snarl into the mouthpiece: ‘Quinn.’

  ‘Oh, thank goodness.’

  He heard a woman’s voice, at once both intimately familiar and strangely unplaceable. It was always the same with the ghostly crackles that came to him down the telephone line. So much of what was essential to identifying the speaker was stripped away. You did not have the person in front of you. But you seemed only to receive a fraction of their voice too. All emotion was stretched out to an infinitesimal thinness that could be fitted inside the wires that connected one telephone to another.

  Even so, the panic in the woman’s voice was unmistakable. The words tumbled out of her, tripping over themselves: ‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you all day. Your phone was ringing and ringing. And then I spoke to someone who was very rude. And then no one knew where you were. And when I told them what it was about they said I was not to worry, this sort of thing happens all the time. Happens all the
time? It may happen all the time to other people but not to us. And how am I supposed to not worry? I’m going out of my mind with worry! My little girl! My little girl is missing. And then he said, this fellow I spoke to, a policeman it was too, if you can believe it, he said … well, I won’t repeat what he said, but he made the most vile insinuations. Simply vile, I tell you.’

  ‘Is this Mrs Ibbott?’

  ‘Of course it is, who else would it be?’

  ‘Mrs Ibbott, has something happened to Mary?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, Mary. It’s Mary. I don’t know where she is. She went out this morning and didn’t come back in time for lunch. I have called on all her friends and no one has seen her. And now Mr Timberley has taken it into his head … Oh, Mr Quinn, I’m dreadfully afraid.’

  ‘What about Mr Timberley?’

  ‘Well, it was in the newspaper, wasn’t it? All about that butcher. Oh, Mr Quinn, what were you thinking?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If he’s the murderer, why did you let him go?’

  ‘He isn’t the murderer.’

  ‘But they found that poor girl. And now my Mary has gone missing. Mr Timberley is convinced, convinced I tell you. And now he’s gone too. “If Quinn won’t do his duty, I will.” That’s what he said. Oh, Mr Quinn …’

  ‘Where has Timberley gone?’

  ‘To save my Mary, God bless him.’

  ‘But where?’

  ‘Oh, Mr Quinn, what have you done? He’s got my Mary now, my poor Mary.’

  ‘Who has?’

  ‘That awful Bosch Butcher, of course! I only hope that Mr Timberley isn’t too late!’

  ‘Don’t worry, Mrs Ibbott. Everything will be all right. Stay calm and wait at the house for Mary to return. She will come back, we’ll get her back. I promise you that. Thank you for calling me. You did the right thing.’

  Quinn nestled the receiver carefully back on to its cradle. The moment demanded action, but Quinn needed to think first. He pinched his bottom lip between thumb and forefinger. He had just made a promise that it was not within his power to keep. And worse still, that he had no idea how to go about keeping.