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

by R. N. Morris

  A ticket collector entered the compartment. Quinn recognized him immediately as the cavalry officer, although his beard was now trimmed into an imperial. Some nagging rationality questioned how he came to be here, dressed in a ticket collector’s uniform, but Quinn realized that he had to accept the logic of the motion picture. Things only had to be shown to be made possible. The literal consequence of events, one thing happening after another, was more persuasive than any notion of cause and effect. Nothing caused anything. It simply led to it.

  He was watching a dream, he realized. And if he accepted it as that, then whatever happened in the darkness made sense.

  For example, there was no point in asking, How was it possible that Eloise did not recognize the man she had once loved? By the conventions of the kinematic picture play, it was enough for a character to put on a false beard for him to become utterly unrecognizable.

  Of course, the real point, as Quinn instinctively grasped, was not that Eloise had once loved the cavalry officer, but that she still loved him. That she would always love him, no matter what he did. That was evident in the first frames of the film, those which showed her eyes in extreme close-up. It was also, by the logic of melodrama, the reason why her lover had had no choice but to strike her and precipitate their separation.

  All of this made absolute sense to Quinn.

  And it was not so surprising, really, that she didn’t recognize him. It wasn’t just that he had put on false whiskers. He had put himself into an entirely different class. He had donned the uniform of a working man. Of course she wouldn’t recognize him. She barely looked at him. He had become invisible to her.

  Naturally he knew who she was and so stared at her with a dangerous fixity that was underlined by a reprise of his theme from the band.

  She only noticed the ticket collector – with a vaguely troubled frown – when he refused to move on, long after he had examined their tickets. It took an interjection from her husband to prompt him to leave them in peace.

  By the time the police found the real ticket inspector in the mail carriage, stripped to his underclothes, trussed up and gagged, his imposter had long since jumped from the moving train.

  The couple honeymooned in Venice. Inevitably there was a scene on a gondola, and even more inevitably, the extravagantly mustachioed gondolier turned out to be none other than the former cavalry officer. If there were titters at the implausibility of this, Quinn did not hear them. It occurred to Quinn that, by virtue of the murders he had committed, the character had acquired a kind of mythical status, becoming almost a supernatural being, like a Hindu avatar. Or perhaps these scenes were merely the mirror images of those in which the murderer was haunted by the eyes of his beloved? That is to say, the former cavalry officer was not really there, it was simply that Eloise’s character saw him wherever she looked.

  When the couple dined in a restaurant, the waiter bringing them their food was the former cavalry officer. He stood over them, curling his lip, as they fed each other ice cream from tall glasses with long spoons. The friendly priest who pointed out the mosaics in St Mark’s Basilica – Quinn knew him immediately. The flower vendor in the Piazza di San Marco, the Carabiniere lurking on the Rialto Bridge, the attendant who showed them to their box at the theatre, the tenor on the stage, the dancer in the beaked Medico della Peste mask who led the masquerade through the midnight alleyways, the night porter who greeted them on their return to their hotel … they were all him. Of that Quinn had no doubt.

  So it was clear that the psychological explanation was the one that the film was forcing on the audience. Although she was on honeymoon with the Count of Somewhere or Other, Eloise’s character could not get the image of her former lover out of her mind. But just when Quinn persuaded himself to be satisfied with this explanation, he remembered the trussed-up guard on the express train.

  On the surface, Eloise remained untroubled by these visions, if indeed she was conscious of them. She dined and danced and visited the sights with her bridegroom. On her lips was always the happy smile of a new bride. But her eyes were a different matter. There was no doubt now that her eyes had a haunted quality to them.

  The director again chose to present an extended close-up of those eyes, just as he had done at the beginning of the film. As before, the camera’s viewpoint moved back to show her whole face. In contrast to the earlier sequence, a hand – her husband’s, presumably – came into the frame, this time though to caress her cheek with a loving touch. Tellingly, Eloise flinched away.

  A dramatic flurry of high, discordant intervals from the band underlined the significance of this gesture. Her husband’s expression was wounded. To repair the damage, she grasped his hand and held it to her cheek, her eyes closed longingly. She was wishing herself into love for this man. But Quinn knew that the truth was concealed behind those eyelids. Her eyes still desired the disgraced cavalry officer. This was clear the next time she opened them and the director once again treated the audience to an extreme, overwhelming close-up. Eyes were not meant to be seen so large, nor looked into for so long. Quinn became aware of how long she had held them open without blinking. He began to feel tense and uncomfortable. It was inhuman, almost cruel, to force him to continue looking into those eyes.

  The eyes themselves, once objects of beauty, became objects of terror. It was not just the melodramatic music that suggested this idea.

  There was horror in their gaze, a dawning realization of the tragedy and abasement that lay ahead. A despair so complete that it took away hope from all who gazed into them.

  By another of his clever camera tricks, the director revealed that the isolated eyes were looking down from a cracked plaster ceiling at the former cavalry officer, who was stretched out on the grubby mattress of an iron-framed bed. A metallic object glinted in his hands. Quinn recognized it as one of the long spoons with which the couple had eaten ice cream. And so, once again, he had to reassess his interpretation of what he was seeing. Was he to take it that the cavalry officer really had been the waiter in the restaurant, and therefore all the other manifestations?

  The next scene showed the couple asleep in a hotel suite. The large window was open on a night dominated by an enormous full moon. Eloise stirred and woke as a shadowy figure appeared silhouetted against the moon, climbing in through the window.

  She did not cry out. She knew it was him. The man she had seen wherever she looked. He had come for her.

  She rose from the bed; they looked into each other’s eyes. And then threw themselves at each other.

  As they kissed, the Count of Somewhere or Other woke. He leapt from the bed with a cry, which the band did its best to convey musically. A struggle ensued between the count and the former cavalry officer. But the latter had come armed. A close-up showed a stiletto blade sinking into the count’s soft flank. He fell to the floor.

  The lovers confronted one another. Once again, Eloise’s eyes held and conveyed the entire meaning of the moment. The horror that had been nascent in them before bloomed into a deep revulsion. The former cavalry officer had to see that all was lost. Quinn certainly understood this.

  She hated him. There was only hatred in those eyes now.

  The next sequence showed the cavalry officer stealing away from the couple’s suite. The band rumbled ominously and then fell silent as the camera returned to the bedroom.

  There were now two bodies on the floor. The director went in for his favourite close-up. But where Eloise’s eyes should have been there were two black chasms.

  Quinn couldn’t say whether he was one of those who shrieked. But he certainly felt himself bodily leave his seat.

  Of course, he had seen worse in reality. But there was something about having such horrors depicted in art that he found more shocking than to discover them in the course of his professional life. Their representation signified some kind of acknowledgement. It opened a door.

  If it was only policemen and police surgeons – and the occasional accidental witness
– who were obliged to confront such crimes, they could be contained and prevented from contaminating the wider society. It was part of his job to take these things on himself. It was his responsibility. He thought of Sir Edward’s secretary, Miss Latterly. Her horrified reaction to the little he had inadvertently let slip about his work was perfectly proper. This was how the public ought to view such things.

  This wallowing in horror and violence, this fascination with gruesome and macabre spectacle, it was unwholesome. It was obscene. More than that, it was dangerous. Who knew where it would lead?

  But the film wasn’t over yet. Quinn could not imagine what else, what new horrors, the makers could have in store for the audience. But he sensed the eager anticipation in those around him.

  The murderer returned to his lair. It was not clear where this was, whether in Venice, or Vienna. It didn’t matter. It was a psychological place. It existed both as an idea in the murderer’s head, and – now that it had been filmed – as an external reality. It was inside all their heads now.

  He was hunched over something, a bundle in a knotted handkerchief, through which dark stains had seeped. The shape of the bundle, the suggestion of a double rotundity, left little doubt to its contents.

  The film showed the killer decant the eyes into a jar, which he topped up with a clear liquid before sealing. By chance, the dead eyes were looking out, suspended midway in the preserving fluid. He held up the jar so that the eyes were level with his own. He then addressed a bitter soliloquy to them, the gist of which was represented on a series of inter-titles. In short, he blamed the eyes for all the misfortunes that had befallen him. They had haunted him, given him no peace, driven him to murder. And worse. It was to rid himself of the spectre of those eyes that he had been forced to remove the eyes from the women he had killed. Women in whose faces he had seen her eyes.

  The camera then showed a close-up of the killer placing the jar on a shelf, the eyes still looking out into the room, and towards the audience. A wider shot revealed it was not the only such jar on that shelf. And that that was not the only shelf. In fact, the wall was lined with jar after jar, each containing a pair of eyes looking out.

  In the final frames of the film, as the killer moved out of shot, all the eyes in the jars swivelled to watch him go. The violins produced a suitably chilling glissando. The audience went wild, delighted and terrified in equal degree.

  SEVENTEEN

  The lights came up.

  The audience was wrenched away from another man’s shimmering dreams back into their own duller, if more solid, realities. But though the glow of the projector had died on the screen, its silver cast lingered in their minds. The glamour as well as the horror of what they had just witnessed enlivened them. They sprang to their feet and filed out of the auditorium in a state of heightened excitement, almost shouting their pleasure, laughing nervously at the memory of their earlier disturbed emotions. The horror they had felt had now abated. It was safe to make a joke of it.

  Their own attempts at lustre, the sheen on the top hats of the men and the cosmetic gloss of the women’s lips, struck Quinn as tawdry and counterfeit. An attempt to stave off the great unspeakable truth: their own mortality. The sour odours of too many bodies enclosed in a confined space were beginning to cut through. Whatever it was that had been sprayed over their heads, perfume or disinfectant, it was losing its efficacy.

  In contrast, the weightless entities spun out of the criss-crossing of light and darkness – Eloise and the mournful-eyed actor who played the cavalry officer – embraced the great unspeakable and in so doing transformed and transcended it. It was a kind of alchemy.

  Like every other mortal lumbering to his feet, Quinn felt the leaden tug of returning anxieties. For the first time since the lights had gone down, he remembered why he was there.

  The audience was streaming out through two exits. He had them both covered, so he should not have been overly concerned. But he had just seen a film in which a man managed to pass himself off as a series of different individuals. Admittedly, that was fiction. But still it mooted a possibility. If Hartmann changed his appearance in some way, it might be enough for him to get past Macadam at least, who had only had one brief look at him.

  No, it was preposterous. Hartmann had no reason to believe himself under observation. He was there at a social occasion, and from what Inchball had said, he was mixing with the film people. If there was a celebration afterwards, there was every chance that he would be part of it. He would be leaving through the front entrance, in the full glare of the newspaper photographers’ flash guns.

  Quinn began to relax as he drifted with the crowd. He allowed himself to take in his surroundings. The interior was done out like someone’s idea of the tea salon of a fashionable hotel, with potted palms trees, reproduction statues on pedestals, and burgundy drapes and plush on the walls. Moulded details, no doubt bulk purchased at an architectural wholesalers, were stuck on to add decorative interest. None of it bore up to close examination, but Porrick’s customers did not go there to look at the walls.

  As Quinn came out on to Leicester Square, he caught Inchball’s eye but kept his distance.

  Inchball was an experienced officer. He contrived to acknowledge Quinn’s presence without signalling any obvious connection between them. To a casual observer, they might have appeared as two strangers warily sizing one another up before going their separate ways. But such was the excitement after the picture show that it was unlikely that anyone would have registered the two men at all.

  The crowd was still voluble, communicating largely in shouts. No doubt this was due in large part to the emotional agitation caused by the film. But perhaps, also, it was a reaction to their enforced silence of the last hour or so.

  As a police officer, Quinn could not help considering the dangers of the new medium from the standpoint of public order. Its capacity to incite as well as excite was evident all around him.

  Even more worrying for Quinn, given his unique insight into a certain kind of criminal mind, he believed the graphic depiction of violent crime provided an example that some individuals might wish to emulate. It opened a door in more ways than one. The general public was exposed to horrors that would cause them needless anxieties. Whereas the admittedly much smaller but nonetheless significant constituency of the depraved would take from it a licence.

  Perhaps it was because his mind was alert to these potential risks that Quinn was so quick to sense a different category of agitation impinge on the mood of the crowd. He became aware of one man shouting, not in pleasurable enthusiasm, but in what seemed like genuine panic. Terror, even. Turning to the source of the noise, he saw the man running towards them at full pelt.

  ‘Police! Quick! For God’s sake, someone fetch a doctor! There has been an horrific crime committed!’

  EIGHTEEN

  Quinn gave a brief, commanding nod to Inchball for him to remain at his post, and went with the fellow.

  He was led at a half-run – ‘Please, hurry!’ – out of Leicester Square, across Charing Cross Road and into a dimly lit alleyway, one of the two passages through to St Martin’s Lane. Quinn glanced at the street sign, which told him it was Cecil Court.

  There were voices ahead of him, and a horrible, high-pitched wailing. It was the sound of shredded flesh. The cries of a tortured animal. Although there was something in it that enabled him to identify its source as human, and probably female.

  Quinn made out a huddle of crouching men. A light went on in one of the shop windows, which was filled with kinematographic cameras and lighting equipment. It seemed that some of these lights had been activated, and their beams directed towards the scene unfolding in front of the premises. Whether this was to aid the actions of the men in the alley, or to provide illumination for filming, Quinn could not be sure.

  His escort cried out for them to be let through. The handful of men rose and parted as one, turning towards Quinn as though they had been waiting for him. There was a pecu
liar solemnity to their movements that seemed almost choreographed. Perhaps in these circumstances some instinct takes over, and affects all men in the same way. It seemed that everyone knew what to do.

  A young woman lay on the ground, writhing and gasping for air so that she could keep up her savage keening. She held both hands to her right eye. Blood seeped out through her fingers and was smeared across her face. Her hair appeared to be matted with it too and there were bloodstains on the pavement.

  Drawn by an irresistible urge to know what lay behind her hands, Quinn swept forward and stooped over her. The lights from the shop window were directed unflinchingly on her face. Quinn gazed on her gaping lips as a lover might on his beloved. He reached out a hand and gently touched hers. The shrillness of her screams intensified.

  ‘Please, it’s all right. I’ll not hurt you. I’m a policeman. I’m here to help.’

  The woman seemed not to understand him. Certainly she showed no sign of being reassured by his words. The one eye that was visible bulged with renewed fear.

  ‘What happened here?’ Quinn addressed his words to the men at his back. But when he turned, he saw that they had all gone. No doubt it was the word policeman that had seen them off.

  The only one who remained was the man who had raised the alarm.

  ‘She needs a doctor,’ said Quinn.

  He heard the clatter of a horse-drawn cab pulling up. A moment later, as if responding to a cue, a tall clean-shaven gentleman in evening dress presented himself. The man was probably in his late thirties. He walked with the brisk upright confidence born of authority. ‘I am a doctor.’ His accent was foreign, but its precise origin was unidentifiable, at least to Quinn.

  Quinn moved to one side and allowed the doctor to attend to the injured woman.