The Dark Palace--Murder and mystery in London, 1914

by R. N. Morris

  The servant bowed. ‘Will there be anything else, My Lord?’

  ‘No, thank you. That will be all, Etherington.’

  Lord Dunwich waited until the man was out of the room, then cast sidelong looks at his neighbours in the breakfast room. All the other members were thoroughly engrossed in their morning newspapers. No one appeared to pay him any heed, at any rate.

  The package was heavier than he expected it to be. He held it to his ear and shook it. There was an audible rattle. He felt the contents shift minutely within the tight constraint of the box. It was a single object, he reckoned. Solid, hard, possibly spherical. Not photographs, then. That was cause for some relief.

  Lord Dunwich took out his pipe knife and opened the blade. The sun flared in the unsheathed steel. The string on the package popped as he cut it. He pulled the brown paper away, revealing a white cardboard box, a cube of approximately two inches along each side.

  No card enclosed. And nothing written on the box.

  Lord Dunwich could not imagine anything more sinister than this plain, white box.

  The hand holding it began to shake, once again rattling whatever was inside. The only way to quell his fear, he realized, was to confront it. He lifted the lid.

  A gleaming white eye, its iris a circle of blue, grey and brown flecks, stared up at him.

  With a cry that startled the other occupants of the breakfast room, he threw the box away from him. The eye bounced and rolled along the carpet, before coming to a stop.

  The beautiful, fascinating iris was fixed in his direction.

  THREE

  Quinn opened his eyes, tearing himself away from the darkness, as if from urgent business. The day was already established. The April sunshine intruded into every corner of his room, an unwanted busybody. No wonder spring was always associated with cuckoos.

  He pulled aside his bedding and sent one foot out to test the reality of the floor.

  He pulled his green candlewick dressing gown together over striped flannel pyjamas and tied the cord protectively, before venturing out of his room. He was never anything less than aware of the proprieties. At least here at the lodging house. Some might say he was less scrupulous in his professional life.

  As he descended the stairs, he rubbed his Adam’s apple, half-remembering the dream he had just woken from. Something to do with his time in Colney Hatch asylum. He had been lying down in a darkened room, recounting a sordid dream to an unseen doctor. But he could not remember any details of that dream within a dream.

  He reached the landing below and paused. His heartbeat hardened into a muscled pounding. One of the doors had been left slightly ajar.

  One of the doors!

  He realized immediately how disingenuous – how downright deceitful – was his initial reluctance to acknowledge which door. Or rather, whose door.

  It was the door to Miss Ibbott’s room.

  He stood and tensed, straining to listen. Was she in there? Or had she gone down to the bathroom herself, beating him to it? Perhaps he could justify his standing there outside her door on the grounds that he was merely trying to settle that one, perfectly reasonable question.

  It certainly could not justify what he did next, not even to himself.

  He moved closer to her door, lifting and placing his slippered feet with deliberate stealth. He put his ear to the inch-wide gap.

  His heart, his pummelling heart, must give him away! Its tocsin clamour surely filled the house. Certainly it made it hard for him to ascertain whether she was in her room or elsewhere.

  But if she was in her room, why would she leave the door ajar? At this time of day, she would no doubt be engaged in her toilet, perhaps combing her hair before her mirror. Or perhaps she was still in bed, rousing herself drowsily from whatever dreams girls like her experienced. Not wholly innocent dreams, he speculated. But perfectly natural ones. Dreams, perhaps, coloured by cruelty and spite.

  Whatever she was about, it would be of an intimate nature. She would brook no intrusion. And yet this door-ajar business, did it not have about it something of the aspect of an invitation? Or if not that, an expectation?

  The question was, an invitation to whom?

  Not Quinn, that was for sure. A man more than twice her age. Leaving aside all his other disadvantages.

  More likely it was either Appleby or Timberley, the two young male lodgers who made it their life’s work – or perhaps their sport – to vie for her fickle affections. Who was in the ascendancy at the moment, he wondered.

  Quinn had recently observed in Timberley signs of stress and upset – tears, in short. Quinn could think of nothing guaranteed to make a man less attractive to a woman than emotional weakness.

  And so, he speculated that the door was left ajar for Appleby. Was this to be the moment he would finally snatch the coveted prize? A kiss from Miss Ibbott? And all before breakfast.

  But was she even in there? The more he thought about it the less sense it made. Would they risk a liaison at this time of the day, when lodgers such as himself were trudging up and down the stairs? There had to be some other explanation. Either she had left the door open by accident. Or she had indeed slipped out of her room. If the latter were the case, she could return at any moment and catch him there in what could only be described as a compromising position. Not only that, by such carelessness she was laying herself open to the risk of burglary. Or, if she was in the room, to the risk of assault.

  He knew better than she did what men were capable of. Any man; all men. The criminals he hunted down all lodged somewhere. The fact that she was the landlady’s daughter was no protection.

  He now realized that it was his duty as a policeman to settle the question of her whereabouts once and for all.

  ‘Mr Quinn?’

  Quinn pulled the door to hurriedly and spun away from it. He held his head bowed, eyes averted from Miss Dillard’s. For it was Miss Dillard, coming up the stairs to return to her own room, who now challenged him, her voice edged with confusion and fear.

  No, he could not bring himself to look into those eyes. Not now. Not after this.

  ‘I was just … I … I couldn’t help noticing that Miss Ibbott had left her door open. I thought it wise to close it for her.’

  ‘I see.’ But her voice was reproachful, as well as hurt. And no, he still wouldn’t look at her. He refused to face the same reproach, the same hurt, in her eyes.

  ‘One cannot be too careful. Even in a respectable house such as this.’

  ‘Of course.’

  And then Quinn remembered that he maintained the fiction that none of his fellow lodgers knew the nature of his work. ‘Well, no, not that. But … you never know. Mr Appleby and Mr Timberley.’

  ‘What about them?’ There was genuine alarm in her voice now, panic almost.

  Quinn realized that he had made a tactical mistake. ‘Nothing! I say nothing against them. I know of nothing against them. Fine fellows, they are, I’m sure. We can all agree on that. But young. Youth, you see. Mischief and youth. You cannot rule it out. Young men such as them … not them, no … quite explicitly not them. But young men such as them might see her open door as …’

  ‘As what?’

  He could not say an invitation; that would seem to put Miss Ibbott at fault. ‘A provocation,’ he settled for.

  Miss Dillard let out a little shriek. It was an unfortunate word to choose.

  ‘You must understand,’ protested Quinn. ‘I know of nothing specific against them. Nothing at all, in fact. But you cannot blame me for taking precautions.’

  At that moment, the controversial door opened and Miss Ibbott herself peered out. From what he saw of her shoulders, Quinn conjectured that she was in a state of deshabille.

  ‘What do you want? What’s going on? Did you shut my door?’

  ‘Ah, good morning to you, Miss Ibbott. Yes, indeed, as I was explaining to Miss Dillard, I did indeed shut your door. A mere precaution, you understand. For your own safety. One can never b
e too careful. Did you, in fact, realize that it was open, I wonder?’

  ‘Betsy must have left it like that when she fetched me my hot water.’

  ‘Ah, there you are! Mystery solved! Betsy left it open. Careless girl. But good-natured. A careless but good-natured girl, I think we can all agree on that. Or perhaps not, as regards carelessness, at least. Not careless, no. Too harsh. Just overworked perhaps? No, that won’t do, implying as it does criticism of your good mother, the irreproachable Mrs Ibbott. I will not hear the word overworked used in this house. Worked to just the right, proper and above all proportionate extent of her capabilities and … and duties. As your maid. As maid to us all. An onerous but worthy calling, no doubt. So, what are we to make of the door being left ajar? A simple mistake, it turns out, which I, in my foolish, fond – one might even say innocent … In my solicitude, at any rate … closed. On your behalf. For you. But no harm done, I’m glad to say.’

  Miss Ibbott offered no comment on Quinn’s outburst, unless shutting the door in his face is to be considered a comment.

  He could not look at Miss Dillard. He wondered if the consolation of her pewter-grey eyes was denied him forever now, their startling beauty an unreliable memory he struggled to conjure.

  FOUR

  The lights in the carriage flickered in time with the clatter and sway of the Tube train, the darkness reasserting its presence.

  Quinn had entered its realm voluntarily, lowering himself into it in a shuddering cage. Today he was shunning the daylight. Dipping his face away from its intrusive glare. Something to do with the awkward episode on the landing, no doubt. He had wanted the ground to open up and swallow him. Taking the Tube was a practicable alternative.

  Under normal circumstances, Quinn rarely took the Tube. But at least on the Tube he didn’t have to meet anyone’s eye. Most of his fellow travellers hid themselves away behind their newspapers. If they did not, they stared fixedly at a chosen point. A spot on the carriage wall. An arbitrary word in an advertisement. A cigarette stub caught between the wooden slats of the floor. Occasionally they might look away to catch the eye of one of the pale ghosts riding the darkness outside, mournful, perplexed, perpetually excluded. In that moment they understood: how incomprehensible we are to our own reflections. To ourselves.

  Quinn could not say when he had first been aware of the man looking at him. But his sense was that the whole reason the man was there was to look at him. There was a purpose to his staring. Being a policeman, Quinn might have said it was premeditated.

  The fellow must have followed him on to the platform and into the train carriage. That meant that he must have been waiting outside the lodging house for Quinn to leave that morning.

  Yes, he had registered something out of the corner of his eye, or at least in hindsight he believed he had. A blur of movement configured by intent. Resolving itself into a human form shadowing him. Footsteps moving in time with his own.

  He had thought nothing of it. Or very little. He had registered the sensation and dismissed it. No, not quite dismissed it. He was a policeman, after all. Over the years he had put away more than his fair share of villains, and dispatched another quota to face a higher justice. The former would have grudges of their own against him, which they would nurture and fatten as they served out their sentences (if they had not paid the ultimate price); many of the latter would have left behind associates who might be presumed to have sworn oaths of vengeance on their behalf.

  It was a plain fact that there were people in the world who were out for Quinn’s blood.

  He accepted this, but the thing was not to become obsessed by it. No doubt the day would come when he would find himself face to face with a man who would calmly aim a revolver between his eyes and fire. In the meantime, he couldn’t go around jumping at shadows.

  And so, he had registered the sensation of being followed and pushed it to the back of his mind. It was most likely a coincidence. Someone else on their way to Brompton Road Tube Station, whose footsteps would naturally follow Quinn’s.

  It occurred to him that this sensation of being followed was simply a fact of modern life. This is how it feels to live in a crowded metropolis at the beginning of the twentieth century, he realized. To notice it, to become preoccupied with it, disturbed by it, was perhaps the sign of a man at odds with his existence. There was danger in that. The danger of alienation, and madness. Quinn knew enough about that to recognize the signs. It was something he in particular needed to be on his guard against.

  On the platform, he had felt sufficiently invisible to put the sensation from his mind. The brown and green tiles seemed to suck the life out of the feeble electric lights. It was a space that fell away at its soft dark edges. He had instinctively sought out a place on the periphery, slipping away into the welcoming gloom.

  A tide of bobbing bowler hats had closed behind him. He had found a spot at the end of the platform, peering expectantly into the black abyss of the tunnel. He was in fact at the closest point to that abyss that it was possible for him to be without falling into it. A spot of light appeared, signalling the approach of the next train. Almost simultaneously came the first stirring of the air. And then the distant rattle that grew into a scream. The light expanded as it hurtled towards him.

  He had entered the train by the gate at the rear of the last car. And – or so he thought – he had been the only one to do so. Was it possible that he had missed the entrance of this other man, who had somehow slipped on after Quinn but before the gateman closed the gate and rang his bell?

  Or was it all in his head? Was this sensation of being looked at of a piece with the sensation of being followed?

  Quinn turned his head. The man was seated on the opposite side of the car, just to Quinn’s right. And he was staring fixedly at Quinn. There could be no mistaking it.

  The blinking of the carriage lights grew more insistent. The intervals of blackness increased in duration. Then all at once, the lights died completely, all along the length of the train.

  There was a collective groan and a rustle of protest from the newspaper readers. But a moment later, the groan became a cry of anger tinged with alarm as the train came to a screeching, grinding halt.

  It was strange how calm Quinn felt. After all, if the man was going to kill him, now was his opportunity. In fact, Quinn felt that he would be disappointed if there was not some attempt made on his life.

  The darkness cloaked the movement of his hand. And hid the sleek steel object that weighted it with death. He held the gun out straight in front of him, then turned it slightly to his right. If the man got up to attack him, he would walk straight into the barrel. At which point, Quinn would squeeze the trigger.

  There was risk involved in this strategy. The man might not mean him any harm. He might simply be an odd cove. Also, someone else might get hurt. The innocent bystander so beloved of newspapers, although Quinn doubted the existence of anyone who was wholly innocent.

  Nevertheless.

  He imagined the screams and panic that would ensue once the lights came back on and he was discovered holding a revolver out in front of him. That was bad enough. It would be worse still if the gun had been discharged and some harmless old buffer lay stretched out on the floor, blood pooling around him. He had seen enough violently slaughtered men to know it was not a good way to start the day.

  Quinn returned the gun to its holster. There was a leather tightening around his chest. His heart beat harder, glad to have it back.

  The brief outing of fatal metal had gone unwitnessed in the darkness. And no one saw now which of their number gave out a burst of sharp, nervous laughter. No one could mistake it for the sound of amusement. It was the sound of a man on the edge of losing control. A dangerous hilarity.

  But this had gone on long enough, seemed to be the consensus in the compartment. Voices cried out, ‘What the devil …?’ They disapproved of the loss of power. They were affronted by that laughter. The door to the carriage opened and a yel
low beam projected from the gateman’s electric torch. As the beam licked wanly at their faces, Quinn saw that the man opposite was still looking at him. The direction of his gaze had not changed one iota. In the brief play of light across the man’s features, Quinn formed an impression of his age and character. He was not a young man. No. He was more or less the age Quinn’s father would have been, had he lived. Had he not taken his own life, that is to say. There was something set and determined about the face. As if it was held in the grip of a great and unchanging emotion. The torch beam moved on. The face sank back into darkness, but Quinn was haunted by it. A deep, perpetual frown was cut into the forehead. The lips were pressed together in a grim, tense clench. The emotion he had seen on the man’s face was unspeakably bitter. And for some reason it was directed at him.

  Quinn had the sense that if he shot the man now in the darkness, he would be doing him a great service.

  Steadfastly ignoring all enquiries, the gateman walked the length of the carriage and pulled down the window to communicate with the gateman in the next carriage. It was decided that he would do the same, so that a chain of communication could be established with the driver.

  Quinn had the sense that the darkness was enjoying itself now. And that the game it was playing was with him personally. Only he and the darkness knew the nature of that face. Only he and the darkness knew about Quinn’s careless gun-wielding.

  And only the darkness knew where both these secrets might lead.

  As unexpectedly as they had gone out, the lights flickered back into life. Newspapers were snapped back up in front of faces. Eyes flitted to find the points they had focused on before.

  It almost seemed as if the darkness had brought them together. Some level of communal feeling had been allowed by it. Now that light was restored, every man fled back into himself, as if from an unseemly spectacle.

  Quinn refused to look at the man. He stared at the dim reflection of his own face in the window opposite. It was blurred and hollow, almost featureless. The idea of a ghostly outrider came back to him. We are haunted by ourselves, he thought. And also sealed off from ourselves.