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

by R. N. Morris

  ‘One of my men wishes to investigate a German barber’s shop off the Strand. He believes that he has witnessed suspicious activity there.’

  Lord Dunwich shook his head discouragingly. ‘No, no. A classic mistake. That’s far too obvious. You must do better than that, I’m afraid.’

  Quinn wondered at the speed with which Lord Dunwich dismissed Inchball’s initiative.

  ‘You need to develop your instincts beyond the superficial.’

  It was interesting advice. Quinn’s instincts were suddenly telling him that he could not entirely trust this man. In fact, he was now more strongly inclined to back Inchball’s investigation than he had before.

  At any rate, he sensed that he would learn nothing more from continuing the interview. He nodded and rose from his seat. But before he could leave, Lord Dunwich cleared his throat. His voice when he spoke was hesitant and broken. ‘Inspector, what do you know about … green ink?’

  ‘Green ink?’

  ‘What does it say about a man if he uses green ink? It is not a colour of ink you see often, is it?’

  Quinn frowned. He had seen something written in green ink himself recently. The coincidence struck him as sinister. ‘Blue, blue-black and black are more common. But one does occasionally come across it. It may suggest an Irish connection.’

  ‘Interesting. Thank you, Inspector. Please keep me informed of how your investigation proceeds. You may write to me here.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I will have to get someone to show you out, I’m afraid.’ Lord Dunwich picked up a small brass bell which gave an effete tinkle. He then half-rose and offered Quinn his hand, although without looking him in the eye, Quinn noticed. It seemed that whatever was troubling his lordship deterred him from meeting the challenge of another man’s gaze.

  TEN

  The darkness was hot and damp and scented. He feared it at the same time as he surrendered to it. How stupid he had been, to walk into the enemy’s lair, to place himself utterly at the enemy’s mercy.

  He suspected the towels were infiltrated with some kind of narcotic drug. His face felt as though it was melting. The feeling of warmth and physical dissolution began to spread out. He had to keep his wits about him.

  How could he have been so careless? Allowing this man, this patent German, to stand over him with a cut-throat razor in his hand. How had it come to this?

  Inchball knew this end of the Strand well, from his days in the Vice Squad. Holywell Street was now demolished; the dealers in rare prints, specialist booksellers and suppliers of French goods were long gone. For years it had been the centre of the city’s pornography trade. In some of the upstairs ‘Show Rooms’ an even more dubious trade had been conducted. Inchball had a nostalgic sense of the street, just out of sight, always around the next corner, like a street you might look for in a dream but never find. He sensed too the ghosts of all the generations of men who had congregated there, crowding round the window displays and street wares, blocking the traffic and chesting each other out of the way in their tense eagerness to get to the front.

  Happy days, he might have said. You only had to reach out to feel a collar. The punters were so distracted by their appetites that they never saw you coming.

  A few echoing footsteps away from the ghost of Holywell Street, the alley in which Dortmunder’s barber shop was located had survived the swing of the wrecking ball. Inchball half-suspected that this was because the demolition team had not been able to find it, not because it didn’t deserve to be torn down. It was as dirty, dark, crooked and claustrophobic a passageway as any you might find in a medieval town. Once you passed through the whitewashed arch that separated it from the Strand, you entered into a squalid underworld begrimed with black soot, the pavement littered with dank scraps, and broken by great standing puddles into which it was unwise to venture, for fear that they might be bottomless sinkholes. Children dressed in little more than rags clustered in the rotten doorways. Too exhausted to beg, they eyed every intruder with sullen, lifeless suspicion.

  It was the shop’s location that had first attracted Inchball’s attention. Some of the clientele he had noticed frequenting the shop could safely be classified as ‘toffs’. Foreigners, admittedly, but toffs all the same. Why on earth should such men choose this shabby little barber shop in a god-forsaken blind alley? Unless they had some nefarious purpose in going there.

  Whatever the guv’nor might say about his plan, there was method to his madness.

  The shop front protruded in a bulbous bay, with an old-fashioned leaded window. The sign above it advertised: FRITZ Dortmunder, BARBER.

  Another sign, over the door, read: HAIR CUTTING, SHAVING, SHAMPOOING, SINGEING.

  The shop was tiny. If you entered it hoping for relief from the narrowness of the alley, you would be disappointed. However, it was certainly spruce inside. The floor was freshly swept. Every surface was spotless. Gleaming implements were arranged in impeccable order. Mirrors glinted. The metallic components of the adjustable chairs shone as if they had just been polished. The air was scented with talc, hair oil and incense, no doubt burning to disguise the inescapable smell of damp and sewer gas.

  There were two chairs in the shop. Yet in all the years he had been casually keeping an eye on this place, he had only ever seen one barber working in there, the man he presumed to be Dortmunder. The surplus chair added to the cramped atmosphere. The shop seemed full even before a single customer entered.

  Dortmunder was seated in one of the chairs reading a newspaper when Inchball entered. It was an English newspaper, the Clarion. Inchball couldn’t decide whether this was more or less suspicious than if he had found him reading a German newspaper.

  Dortmunder folded the paper away and sprang to his feet, dusting the cracked leather seat of the chair with a cloth. He then bowed to Inchball and gave what might have been a slight click of the heels. ‘Please be seated, good sir.’ He gestured to the chair he had just vacated. ‘I was keeping it warm for you!’ The man betrayed barely a hint of an accent; it was more that there was something uncertain and alien about the cadence of his speech. This in itself was deeply suspicious.

  The man’s obsequious joviality did nothing to reassure Inchball. He had read enough spy literature to know that this was precisely the tactic these individuals adopted to put their victims at ease.

  Physically, Dortmunder was a dapper little man, dressed in an immaculate apron and wearing silver wire-rimmed glasses. It was perhaps as well that he was no bigger than he was, otherwise he would not have fitted in his shop. His hair was dark and cut in a severe short back and sides, which Inchball thought of as being particularly Germanic. The extraordinary crispness of the cut at first inspired confidence, but then led Inchball to speculate on the question of who barbers got to cut their own hair, or whether they somehow contrived to do it themselves. He half-remembered a riddle, something to do with choosing between the only two barbers in a village. One had an excellent haircut, the other had a terrible one. Of course, the answer was you chose the man with the bad haircut. Which meant that Dortmunder’s own hair was no recommendation at all. It was simply some kind of trick.

  ‘You speak very good English,’ Inchball commented as he lowered himself gingerly on to the seat. Inchball was enough of a detective to disguise the suspicion in the question. He made it sound like a compliment.

  Dortmunder shook out a dark blue sheet and threw around Inchball, fastening at the back of his neck. ‘Of course. My parents brought me to this country when I was a boy. It has been my home all these years. Now, sir, what can I do for you?’

  ‘Just a trim.’

  ‘Very good, sir. And after that, perhaps, hot towels and a shave? It is a speciality of the house.’

  ‘I don’t think so. Not today.’

  Dortmunder started on the haircut, wielding the scissors with convincing dexterity. If he was not a professional barber, he had pretended to be one for long enough to more than pass muster. ‘But today, the
re is no charge. I think it is your first time in my shop, is it not?’

  Inchball nodded. The scissor blades snapped eagerly over his head, sending tiny dark sparks flying.

  ‘Yes. Very well, as it is your first time here. And I am not busy. I will give you the full treatment for no extra charge. If you like it, you will come back. And next time, it will not be free. Perhaps you will become a regular customer. But is it really your first time here?’

  Dortmunder pinched tufts of hair between outstretched fingers and made a cut of surgical precision. Inchball watched him in the mirror. The German’s technique matched that of any other barber he had visited. He worked carefully but swiftly, gently tilting Inchball’s head with his fingertips each time he needed to adjust his angle of attack. There was something mesmerising about the deftness of his touch. Inchball seemed to fall into a light trance. It was some time before he answered the question that had been left hanging: ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘Your face seems familiar, somehow. I have a good memory for faces. I study them in the mirror, you see.’ And at this point the two men exchanged a look in which each seemed to challenge the other to frankness. And if the meaning of Inchball’s look was Are you really a barber? then equally, the meaning of Dortmunder’s was Can you really be a customer? But of course, neither man gave voice to whatever suspicions they might have been harbouring, except obliquely, perhaps with an edge of mischievous sarcasm, Dortmunder said, ‘Are you a star of the moving pictures? I do like to go to the kinematograph shows. Perhaps I have seen you in one of the films? Playing a detective perhaps?’

  ‘No. I’m not in films.’

  ‘But I have seen your face, upon my life. Are you sure you have not been to my shop before?’

  ‘I have walked past a couple times. And looked in.’

  ‘And now you have plucked up your courage to come in. So, you are entitled to hot towels and a shave at no extra charge. What do you say to that?’

  ‘I don’t really …’

  ‘Good, it is settled! Now, please, good sir. You will sit back and relax and allow me to perform the services for which I am justly famous. And if you like what I will have done, you may tell your friends, no?’

  So it was that Inchball came to sink back into the barber’s chair and consented to have his face covered in what he had every reason to believe were narcotic-infused hot towels.

  Immersed in a fragrant, seductive darkness, he found that it was not such a bad place to be after all. Dortmunder was massaging the crown of his head and speaking to him in a low, constant murmur.

  ‘It is good, no? The steam from the towels, it opens up your pores and relaxes your skin. Close your eyes, please. You may go to sleep if you wish. You are in my safe hands.’

  The gentle teasing pressure on his scalp was an elusive, strangely ambiguous pleasure, at times not a pleasure at all, but never, quite, unpleasant. It made him think of birds alighting. As soon as he thought of this, the sensation ceased. He found that he instantly missed it.

  Let’s not get bleedin’ carried away, he said to himself.

  At least he was still conscious, which led him to conclude that the towels were not drugged as he had feared.

  But what was that smell, the scent of the darkness? If only he could identify it he would know what he was up against.

  The smell brought back bad memories. It wasn’t so long since Inchball had been drugged and trussed in a house in Camden, a house that stank of pomegranates, of all things, by a man even more repulsive than the German. Then, he had panicked and wet himself. Embarrassing, when Macadam and the guv’nor found him. Still they had been decent enough not to mention it.

  The stench of those pomegranates would never leave him. He smelled it in his sleep, as it infiltrated his dreams with its cloying perfume. One thing he could say for certain was that the smell he was inhaling now was not of pomegranates.

  It might just be that the fiend had used a milder drug than Inchball had imagined, one capable of inducing a feeling of well-being and wooziness, without knocking him out. One that would make him susceptible to suggestion, and might even cause him to lower his defences.

  Just let the bastard try something!

  He was determined not to allow himself to be tied up this time. And whatever happened, he would not wet himself.

  By the sound of it, the man was stropping a razor, somewhere to Inchball’s right. So, the moment was approaching. The moment when a German spy would place a razor against his throat.

  Inchball heard the shop door open, a reprieve.

  There were voices. Dortmunder’s and another man’s. Both speaking German.

  Inchball lifted his right hand and pulled a flap of towelling away from his eye. He swivelled slightly in the chair and looked out towards the door. Dortmunder had his back to him. Over his shoulder he could see, on the threshold of the shop, a large man with an absolutely bald head, his face clean-shaven apart from a well-groomed handlebar moustache. Dortmunder and the other man were engaged in a low, intense discussion. Suddenly, the man must have noticed Inchball’s eye peeping out at him. He nodded to Dortmunder, who turned to look at Inchball.

  ‘I will be with you in a very short moment, good sir. Please, relax, enjoy the soothing vapours of the towels.’ Dortmunder stretched out a hand – the shop was so small he could reach Inchball from where he was standing – and replaced the damp cloth over his eye. In the last moment before darkness returned, Quinn noticed that Dortmunder was holding a large envelope in his other hand. He wasn’t able to make out the address, which looked foreign to his eye. One thing he did notice was that it was written in green ink.

  In his scented darkness, Inchball strained to pick up a word that he could understand or that might be useful to him. A name. The name of a coastal town, perhaps. Or something that sounded like an English battleship. All that he was able to make out was Dortmunder clicking his heels in apparent military subordination and hissing, ‘Sehr gut, Herr Hartmann.’

  Inchball heard the door close. The sound of razor against strop resumed. The other man – Herr Hartmann, it seemed – was gone. And whoever Hartmann was, it was clear that he was Dortmunder’s superior.

  Dortmunder removed the towels, his face beaming with ersatz bonhomie. If he had been rattled by Inchball’s seeing Hartmann, and overhearing their conversation, he was determined not to show it. As Inchball knew from experience, that forced cheerfulness was the clearest indicator of guilt.

  Well, the guv’nor would eat his words now. This had been far from a wasted trip. He had witnessed the handing over of suspicious documents and he had a glimpse of the man who really did seem to be the spy master of Dortmunder’s cell.

  And if the scent of the rich, warm foam that was being worked into his cheek was anything to go by, he was about to have a very good shave indeed.

  ELEVEN

  The camera arrived the following Monday. Quinn had to admit he was amazed. In the normal run of things, procurements took longer than this.

  Macadam, of course, was beside himself with pleasure as he unpacked the camera. To Quinn’s eye, the Empire Number Two was a rather unprepossessing object: a plain-looking oblong box made of some indeterminate wood with a number of metal fittings. ‘Ooh, there’s some weight in that.’ There was a note of personal pride in Macadam’s voice as he hefted it, as if he had played some part in making the camera so heavy. ‘That’s the quality of the manufacturing for you.’ He proceeded to demonstrate at some length the numerous virtues of the camera, opening and closing its various compartments, pointing out the precision of the engineering, looking through the eye piece, turning the crank, adjusting whatever knobs would allow themselves to be adjusted.

  Quinn caught Inchball’s eye at the height of its exasperated roll.

  ‘You see, sir, focusing is done from the front and the back. The lens is a Zeiss Tessar, with a focal ratio of F6.3, which should serve us well in the conditions under which we shall be using it.’

  ‘What d
id you say?’ Inchball sat up sharply. His tone was dark and laden with suspicion. His brows contracted in a watchful frown. This was a man alert to every danger the nation faced.

  ‘F6.3. It’s commonly known as the f-number, although I prefer to call it the focal ratio.’

  ‘No, before that. The lens. Wha’ did you call it?’

  ‘A Zeiss Tessar.’

  ‘German, is it?’

  ‘Well, the lens is, yes. The Germans manufacture excellent optical equipment. Zeiss lenses in particular are considered to be the very best available. Rather more expensive than other lenses, but considering the importance of the work we will be undertaking, I felt that it was worth it.’

  ‘I don’t trust it.’

  ‘What?’ Macadam flashed a look of appeal towards Quinn, which Quinn did his best not to notice.

  ‘Get rid of it,’ insisted Inchball.

  ‘You are joking!’

  ‘It’s unpatriotic. We should have an English lens on there. Besides, what if it’s a dud?’

  ‘What on earth are you talking about? How could it possibly be a dud? Zeiss lenses are the best in the world.’

  ‘The Germans, righ’, they’re plannin’ to invade us, righ’? So … no, hear me out … there’s all sorts of things we get from Germany. These lenses is jus’ one example. But wha’ they do, righ’, is deliberately send over ’ere a load of substandard merchandise. A load of crap, basically. Not jus’ these lenses. Everythin’. Bicycles, motor cars – I dunno. You name it. Tyres.’

  ‘Tyres?’

  ‘Yeah, tyres. That would be your main one, that. So … righ’ … when the moment of truth comes, and we need to use any of this stuff we’ve bough’ from them, it all breaks down. All the tyres go flat. Nothin’ works – nothin’ we got from Germany. So while we’re all distracted tryin’ ’a fix it all – that’s when they strike. Get us at our weakest. It’s all part of their plan.’