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

by R. N. Morris

  ‘What of it, Quinn?’

  ‘My own rank is Inspector, sir. I wonder if there isn’t an anomaly here.’

  ‘You’ve got the department back, Quinn. Don’t push it.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. And the Home Secretary? Can I count on his confidence?’

  ‘The Home Secretary is minded to let you continue. For the time being, at least.’

  ‘Do we have a new case, sir? Is that why Sir Michael was here?’

  ‘What my business was with Sir Michael Esslyn is none of your business, Quinn.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir.’

  ‘There is no specific new case, Quinn. Though you and your men are to be given what I might call a watching brief.’

  ‘With regard to what, sir?’

  ‘I take it you read the newspapers?’

  ‘I try to be selective, sir, in those I look at.’

  ‘Tired of seeing yourself depicted as some kind of penny dreadful villain, eh?’

  ‘I rather think I am generally seen as the hero, not the villain, sir. Either way, my brush with the gutter press has taught me not to believe everything I read in the papers.’

  ‘You are wise not to. You may be aware that some of the papers have been trying to whip up anti-German sentiments for years now. In the past, we might have taken the threat of the Kaiser invading our shores with a pinch of salt. Well, now it seems that the Admiralty is taking it seriously. Spy fever is nothing new, of course. But something has changed.’

  ‘What has this to do with Special Crimes, sir?’

  ‘“You too, be patient.” James, chapter five, verse eight.’

  A wash of well-being came over Quinn. Hearing Sir Edward quote the Bible, it seemed that the proper order of things had been restored. The world was back in balance.

  ‘Our masters wish you to keep an eye on German nationals.’

  ‘All German nationals, sir?’

  ‘That would be asking rather a lot, even of you and your redoubtable men, Quinn. The brief is to be alert for anything that seems suspicious, in connection with any German nationals who come to your attention.’

  ‘It seems a rather loose brief, if you will forgive me for saying so, Sir Edward.’

  ‘Nonsense. Go out there. Keep your eyes open. Ferret around. If necessary, infiltrate yourselves into the circles in which these individuals move.’

  ‘Are we to assume German identities?’

  ‘Do you speak German, Quinn?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Do any of your men?’

  ‘Not that I am aware, sir.’

  ‘Then I advise against that particular course of action.’ Another twinge of pain racked Sir Edward’s frame. Quinn recognized it as a sign that Sir Edward wished to draw the interview to a close. The commissioner gave a terse concluding nod, but was stayed by something he saw in Quinn’s expression. ‘You look perplexed, Quinn.’

  ‘It is merely that I am not sure how to go about this.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll think of something. “Be not dismayed.” Isaiah, chapter forty-one, verse ten. Or we might quote Jeremiah, chapter one, verse seventeen. You know that one, of course, Quinn?’

  ‘I … I seem to have temporarily forgotten it.’

  ‘“Thou therefore gird up thy loins, and arise.”’

  Quinn suddenly found Sir Edward’s fondness for biblical quotes less endearing than he had a moment earlier.

  Sir Edward closed the file on his desk and pushed it towards Quinn. ‘A sordid little case, that one. Too many people dead, as usual, Quinn.’

  ‘I cannot be …’

  ‘Don’t worry. I wasn’t blaming you. Not this time. We cannot always be held responsible if people insist on going around killing one another. But at least we can close the file on it now. Although there was one curious epilogue to the case that you may be interested to hear about. It signifies nothing, I am sure.’

  Quinn sat up sharply in his seat. ‘What has happened?’

  ‘Oh, it appears that the West Middlesex mortuary was broken into last night. One of the bodies was tampered with. By a strange coincidence, it happens to have been the body of the second victim in your House of Blackley case. Edna Corbett. Some ghoulish prankster, I’m sure. Of no significance, as I say.’

  ‘What do you mean by tampered with?’

  ‘A body part was removed.’

  ‘Which body part?’

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Quinn! If I had known you were going to react like this, I should never have told you.’

  ‘Was it an internal organ, sir?’

  ‘I really don’t want to sit here while you engage in gruesome speculation. So I will tell you. It was one of the eyes.’

  ‘Should I look into it, sir?’

  ‘Look into the missing eye? I don’t see how you can, Quinn. No, put it from your mind. That case is over. Germans. That’s the thing. Keep your eye out for Germans.’ Sir Edward’s renewed grimace had about it the air of finality. Quinn felt himself dismissed.

  SIX

  There was no place Inti liked better than this. The soft red glow from the safety light was his whole world. Nothing existed beyond its quivering sphere. All pain and confusion were banished to the darkness beyond. There were no memories here. Only the sense of miracles forming in the chemically pungent darkness.

  Each time he entered the darkroom, he was reborn.

  He watched his uncle Diaz work with practised speed. Diaz was a wizard. In truth, Diaz was many things. But when it came to coaxing out the secrets he had trapped in the light-sensitive layer of emulsion on his strips of film, he was a wizard. It went without saying that Inti loved his uncle, with a fierce, unwavering love forged under a relentless sun, and in a heartless landscape. The natural bonds were strengthened by his awareness of all that Diaz had done for him. But the feelings he felt when he watched Diaz operate in the darkroom came close to awe.

  Diaz always did his own processing and printing. He had taught Inti that it was an essential part of the kinematographic cameraman’s art. Everything depended on the interaction between chemicals and time. Each part of that precarious marriage had to be carefully controlled. Minute adjustments could be made to produce particular effects; it was up to the cameraman, Diaz insisted, to make these decisions. They could not be surrendered to anyone else.

  The formulation of the developer was one of Diaz’s own devising. The exact proportions of active ingredients to water had evolved over years of trial and error, together with the temperatures at which they were mixed and subsequently maintained in the glazed earthen-ware trough.

  These were trade secrets which Diaz refused to impart to any of his friends, let alone a rival. But it was a sign of the bond that existed between uncle and nephew that he had passed his precious formulae on to Inti. Nothing was written down. Fully conscious of the privilege that had been bestowed on him, Inti had memorized the relative weights of metol, hydroquinone, soda sulphite, soda carbonate and potassium metabisulphite that had to be mixed to every thirty litres of water.

  Inti had also been initiated into the mysteries of the stopwatch. Today, as always, it was his job to keep his eye on the dashing second hand and call out the minutes to his uncle.

  First, though, Diaz opened the box of steel pins. In the darkroom’s sombre glow, they looked like fine shards dipped in blood. Diaz drew out two and pinned them to the lapel of his lab coat. Now he opened the take-up box that was lying on the work bench and teased out the end of the exposed film.

  Sometimes Inti felt his uncle would have been able to perform the operation blindfold. Certainly the necessity to do everything in that parsimonious half-light was no handicap to him. He must have had magical eyes in the tips of his fingers. From somewhere, a pair of scissors had appeared in one of his hands, their blades burnished with a ruby fire. He moved with an impressive combination of speed and precision to cut off two lengths of the exposed film, each of about fifteen centimetres. The hands shuffled in the darkness, returning the scissors to
their appointed place out of sight, closing the front of the take-up box, and – with a nod to Inti for him to begin the timing – plunging the two lengths of film into the bath of developer. It was all executed in one fluid motion.

  Everything took place in silence, apart from the occasional liquid plinking as Diaz gently stirred the development fluid. There was no need for instructions to be passed between them. They had worked together like this many times.

  When it came to other matters, it was not that they had nothing to say to one another, but rather that there were no words for the things that needed to be said.

  They limited themselves to banal exchanges. And never spoke of what was dearest and most troubling to them.

  Only once had his uncle referred to such matters. Diaz had perhaps caught something in his nephew’s expression. He had placed his hand on his nephew’s shoulder and said quietly and simply: ‘We shall make them see, Inti. One day we shall make them see.’

  Then he had nodded once and removed his hand from Inti’s shoulder.

  For such men, in such circumstances, it is good to have an absorbing task that requires intense concentration and can be carried out in near darkness.

  But it was strangely appropriate, this silence of theirs. A mute conjuring of silent, flickering ghosts from out of the coiled void.

  Inti watched the hurtling of the second hand, knowing that the moment was approaching when he would have to break the silence.

  ‘Cinco.’

  The announcement served as a marker. It gave them the measure of infinity.

  Sometimes, as now, while they waited for the tiny images to form in the test strips, other images came unbidden to Inti. These were not memories. The darkroom was where he came to escape the past. A past he barely understood, but which held him in its grip nonetheless. No, these were images of a future in which he found release. He saw the promise of his uncle’s words fulfilled. He saw the moment when, at last, the world was made to see.

  ‘Diez.’

  This was the crucial marker. He always added, with a note of firm, but good-humoured command, his uncle’s name: ‘Diaz.’

  And Diaz always smiled the same indulgent smile as he lifted out the first of the strips of film to rinse it in the running water of the washing bath, before transferring it to the final bath, containing fixer.

  It didn’t matter to Inti what the film depicted. If he was honest, he wondered why his uncle squandered his talents working for that disgusting Austrian. For Diaz, the perfection of his craft was all that mattered. Inti understood this. The beauty that Diaz was able to create, the masterful interplay of dark and light, the bold compositions, the instinctive understanding and faultless control of movement and depth … these were all things that existed independently of Waechter’s tawdry melodramas. And they were all the things for which Diaz was responsible. They were also, incidentally, the elements for which Waechter, as the director, received the most lavish praise.

  It all came down to light and dark and time and chemicals. These comprised his uncle’s stock in trade. And no one understood them better than Diaz. Was it possible to hope that Inti too would one day reach a similar level of familiarity?

  In the meantime, he had better keep his mind on the task in hand.

  ‘Quince minutos.’ He didn’t know why, at fifteen, he always felt the need to make explicit exactly what it was that he was counting out.

  Diaz took the developed strip out of the fixer and pegged it to the darkness. The line that traversed the darkroom was hardly visible, just a single silken thread cast out by a bloodthirsty spider.

  Diaz turned to Inti, as he always did at this point in the proceedings. The muted, coloured light fogged the circular lenses of his spectacles. Diaz’s gaze was unwavering; watchful, but not appraising; accepting, a little solicitous, but respectful. Inti was well aware of the high regard in which his uncle held him. It weighed heavily on him at times. He was not sure that he was capable of living up to it.

  There was something, too, in the nature of an invitation embodied in his uncle’s facing him. Inti sensed the openness there. It was as if his uncle was saying to him, ‘You know, if there ever is anything you want to say to me, you may say it to me any time.’ Or, at its simplest, ‘I am here for you.’

  But the only answer Inti ever gave to this invitation was, ‘Veinte.’

  Diaz pegged up the second test strip. Brilliant white light swamped the room, chasing out the lambent gloom.

  The sudden glare struck Inti as harsh and unwelcome. There was no comfort in it, nowhere to hide. It was almost as if the pain came looking for him.

  Inti could see that each strip was now divided into six or seven frames. He was eager to have a closer look at the frames, but it was his uncle’s prerogative to examine the test strips first. Diaz opened up a folding brass eyeglass and held the first of the strips up to the light. When he was satisfied, he passed it on to Inti without comment.

  Inti already had his own magnifying glass at the ready.

  Barely visible against a grey field of tone, a dark spherical object was repeated in each frame. A smaller, lighter-toned disc was just emerging from the centre of the sphere.

  ‘What do you think?’ said Diaz.

  Inti shrugged without committing himself. He held out his hand for the second test strip.

  The same repeated image, but this time the contrast between the now black sphere and paler background was clearer. The lighter-toned detail in the centre of the sphere was bleached to white, and lacked any internal detail.

  Inti gave the strips back to his uncle. ‘First one not enough. Second one too much.’

  ‘What about the exposure? Is the exposure correct?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because you shot it, Uncle.’

  Diaz smiled and cuffed his nephew affectionately. He waved one of the strips. ‘This one is not much under. Thirteen minutes should do it. No, say thirteen and a half minutes. Do you agree, Inti?’

  Inti nodded unhesitatingly. Diaz laid the test strips on the winding bench next to the pin-frame and consulted a notebook. This was his shooting record. In it he had written down the length of the shots to be processed and the lighting conditions for each one. In fact, today it had been a simple shoot. One sequence. A stationary object for a detail that Waechter wanted to insert at the last minute into the film they had believed was finished. The lighting had been constant throughout. That meant the film could be processed in one piece, instead of having to be divided up into separate scenes, each needing its own tests and separate times in the development bath.

  Inti had been there at the shoot, working as Diaz’s assistant, turning the camera crank whenever Diaz needed his hands free to pull the focus or move the camera on its tripod. But there had been little that was technically demanding today. They had simply shot the prop from a number of different angles and distances so that Waechter would have a choice when he came to editing.

  The light in the darkroom was switched back to safety. Diaz lifted out the complete reel of film and folded over the end, securing it with one of the pins from his lapel. He fastened this loop of film over one of the central pins on the pin-frame. He nodded for Inti to begin winding.

  And now Inti was the spider, spinning a web of celluloid. When he had spun out the entire length of film, Diaz plucked the other pin from his lapel and created a second loop at this end to fasten the film securely on to the frame.

  Diaz immersed the frame in the bath of developer. Inti began the stopwatch.

  As he watched the second hand in its frantic dash to nowhere, he pictured the images forming in the bath of chemicals.

  A single unblinking eye placed on a table top, endlessly repeated.

  SEVEN

  Thick clouds squatted over the city, shutting out the infinite and stifling hope. The sun was nowhere to be seen. They had to settle for a dim, filtered pallor and call it daylight.

  It seemed that sp
ring had ventured out but quickly lost heart and thrown in the towel. An existential chill filled the vacancy. Quinn donned the herringbone Ulster once again and hunkered down in it as if he never intended to come out. Even when it wasn’t raining, you felt that it soon would be. The day was something hostile on the other side of a fragile pane.

  Now that the usurper Coddington had been banished, Quinn felt a need to reassert his right to the trademark garment. He wore it not so much to stay warm and dry, rather to confirm his identity, and even to proclaim his triumph. I am the man who wears the herringbone Ulster, he seemed to be saying.

  Inchball took to the assigned task – of monitoring suspicious German nationals – with a peculiar ugly relish that seemed to match the weather. As soon as Quinn had briefed his sergeants, Inchball announced that there was a German barber’s off the Strand that he had had his suspicions about for some time. Quinn attempted to divert his sergeant from what seemed to be an irrational fixation with this particular barber by instructing him to draw up a list of all German businesses, associations and institutions in London. He had some idea that the exercise might enable Inchball to put his suspicions in context, and lead him to an understanding of their arbitrariness. Sifting through various volumes of Kelly’s London Directory and Post Office directories certainly served to reinforce Inchball’s xenophobia. But the focus of it was still directed almost exclusively against the hapless barber.

  ‘All these bleedin’ Germans ’ave to get their ’air cut somewhere, don’ they? Stands to reason. I’ll bet you anythin’ they all go to this feller off the Strand. Dortmunder. That’s ’is name. Fritz Dortmunder. I mean. Summink like that. I ask you. If that ain’t the name of a German, I don’t know what is.’

  ‘I don’t doubt Herr Dortmunder is German, Inchball,’ said Quinn. ‘The question is, is he a spy?’

  ‘He’s more than that! He’s a bleedin’ spy master. See, all the other spies come to ’im to get their ’air cut, don’ they! I’m certain of it. It’s the perfect cover. People comin’ and goin’ all the time without drawin’ suspicion. Chattin’ away in that lingo of theirs. Who knows what they’re talkin’ about? Coastal defences in Kent? The Royal Navy’s new submarine design? Inland lines of communication? Could be anythin’. We don’t know. That’s the point. Why don’ you let me go there, guv? I’ll find out what he’s up to.’