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

by R. N. Morris

  Quinn had to accept the justice of this remark. He nodded for Mrs Ibbott to lead on. ‘Very well.’

  They came to the first landing. Mrs Ibbott tapped on Miss Dillard’s door. There was no reply. Mrs Ibbott pressed her ear against the door. Her eyes widened in alarm.

  ‘What is it?’

  Mrs Ibbott stood back, allowing Quinn to listen at the door. He braced himself for the sound of weeping. But that was not what met his ear. It sounded like someone was throwing furniture around. Or using the bed like a trampoline. If he had not known Miss Dillard better, he might have said she was entertaining a lover in a violent and energetic act of coitus. ‘Good grief!’

  ‘I don’t like the sound of that,’ cried Mrs Ibbott.

  Quinn rapped on the door. ‘Miss Dillard? Miss Dillard? Are you quite well?’ The thumping inside the bedroom intensified in speed and volume. Quinn tried the door. It was locked. He turned to the landlady. ‘Do you have a key?’

  She produced a large fob from her apron. Her hand shook as she held out a key. ‘I’m all fingers and thumbs.’

  Quinn snatched the fob from her and began trying the keys in the lock. It seemed an age before he had the door open.

  They were in the same room now as the thumping. It was like a heaving of the darkness. A giant hand pounding a box of springs. The bed: it was coming from the bed. It was the sound of the bed rattling and kicking against the boards. It was not quite rhythmic. There were pauses in it. Then it would come back with renewed force.

  ‘Give me the light!’

  Quinn held the candle out in front of him. Miss Dillard, wracked with convulsions, was throwing contorted forms of herself around on top of her bed. Her body would lie in a backward arch of tension and then spring upwards, clearing the mattress by an inch or so.

  ‘What’s the matter with her?’ cried Mrs Ibbott.

  ‘She appears to be having some kind of a fit,’ said Quinn. ‘Is she an epileptic, do you know?’

  Mrs Ibbott could not answer. She too was shaking now, uncontrollably. She held her hand out to a small dark bottle on Miss Dillard’s bedside table.

  ‘What is it? What’s in that bottle? Do you know? What has she taken?’

  The answer came from Mrs Ibbott in a shriek: ‘Strychnine!’

  That raised any number of questions, which would have to wait for now. ‘We must get her to a hospital!’ Quinn tried to hand the candle back to Mrs Ibbott, who seemed incapable of doing anything other than making a small, helpless whimpering sound. She stared at the candle, as if he was offering her the extracted spleen of her daughter. Eventually he was able to thrust it into her hands.

  Quinn then stooped over the convulsing woman, looking for a way to lift her. Her body shifted position constantly, arching and collapsing, closing down his opportunities to get a handhold.

  Her eyes were open, more than open, bulging starkly from her head. The pupils were fully dilated; the wonderful, miraculous pewter grey of her irises shrunk almost to a fine circle. For all their dilation, it was clear that she saw nothing.

  Her mouth was stretched back into a grimace of helpless agony. Flecks of foam appeared on her yellow and grey teeth, seeping out through the gaps between them. The flecks grew quickly to an abundant froth.

  He knew that the longer he hesitated the worse it would be for Miss Dillard.

  He touched her quivering frailty, and was repelled. This was a strange, unasked-for intimacy. The effect on Miss Dillard was catastrophic. Her convulsions redoubled in ferocity. It was as if she was trying to throw herself away from herself, to escape the misery of her existence by some final, doomed act of self-discarding.

  Her body, her flesh was patently present to his touch, a blazing heat beneath the delicate nightdress. She was on fire, it seemed. His touch wracked her like raging flames. He pulled her to him in a firm embrace, clinging to the muscular writhing of her body. Her convulsions were transmitted to him. He became convulsed too.

  At first he carried her like a groom bearing his bride across the threshold, but she was a bride who struggled every inch of the way. So much so that he was forced to swing her over his shoulder into a fireman’s lift.

  It shocked him to discover how little weight there was to her. She could have been made out of crumpled foil for all she weighed. No, it was not her weight that made her hard to carry; it was the tensioned kick of her body, every muscle wrought and spasming at once.

  A small group of the other residents had been drawn by the commotion, including Messrs Timberley and Appleby. ‘One of you run ahead!’ shouted Quinn. ‘Flag down a cab on the Brompton Road. We have to get her to the infirmary.’

  But the two young men seemed incapable of movement, like the specimens they pinned at the Natural History Museum. ‘What’s the matter with her?’ asked Mr Timberley, his face contorted with distaste.

  ‘She’s dying. She will die, unless we get her to St George’s.’

  ‘Dying?’ Timberley regarded Miss Dillard with a scientist’s interest, as if he had always wanted to see someone die and this presented a rare opportunity.

  ‘For God’s sake, will one of you not go for assistance?’

  Timberley held a balled fist over his mouth and coughed. If the cough was forced, it soon turned into an uncontrollable hacking fit. He turned reluctantly from the interesting spectacle and began to make his way slowly downstairs, one hand on the wall to steady himself against the crashing waves of his coughing.

  ‘Hurry, will you! This is a matter of life and death!’

  Timberley waved a hand, an impatient gesture that seemed to convey that he was going as fast as he could. Quinn had to accept that he seemed like the wreckage of the man he had once been. He turned to Appleby and directed his gaze meaningfully towards the invalid.

  Appleby seemed to take the hint. At any rate, there must have been something in Quinn’s gaze that spurred him on. ‘I say, Timberley, wait for me. I’ll come with you.’

  ‘I suggest you run ahead,’ wheezed Timberley through his coughing. ‘I cannot run. My doctor will not allow it. Mr Quinn will have two corpses on his hands if I am forced to run.’ He was projecting this back over his shoulder. Clearly it was intended for Quinn’s benefit. ‘I am perfectly serious, you know. Perfectly.’ He pressed himself to the wall and allowed his friend to thunder past.

  By the time he got to Brompton Road, Quinn was staggering. Not under her weight. But under the certainty that he was too late. She was hammering against his shoulder, and her breath came in a rasping, strangulated whine. It was not the death rattle. It was something worse than the death rattle. It was the sound a body makes when it rebels against the action of breathing.

  Appleby was in the middle of the road, shouting and waving both arms to stop the traffic. At last something of the urgency of the situation seemed to have struck him. Timberley stood at the roadside and hung his head disconsolately. He cast sly, fascinated glances towards the heaving burden over Quinn’s shoulder.

  At last Appleby persuaded a motor taxi to stop. He screamed the destination at the driver, who when he saw the intended passenger seemed about to refuse the fare.

  ‘I am a police inspector,’ said Quinn. ‘If you don’t take us to St George’s I will kill you.’ He had meant to say ‘arrest you’, but the stress of the moment had added a certain bluntness to his words.

  ‘What’s wrong wiv ’er, guv? She ain’t gonna be sick in me cab?’

  ‘You had better hope that she does not die in your cab.’ Quinn was bandying death around like loose change, in the hope that it would get things moving.

  It was a hard job getting her into the back of the taxi. Her arms were flailing everywhere, her feet kicking out. Quinn received a punch to the eye and a knee in the groin that fair took the wind out of him. The blows landed so expertly that if he hadn’t known better he would have said she had aimed them. At one point, one of her legs locked itself in an acute angle around his thigh. Eventually, he and Appleby together managed to prise it loos
e. They put her in head first and laid her down on the back seat. Quinn went round the other side and eased himself under her now freakishly juddering length. He nestled her wracked and quivering head against his chest and tried to soothe away her spasms by stroking her hair. Her feet kicked rhythmically and violently against the door. The driver’s anxious glances back weighed his concern for his taxi against his fear for his life. In the event, the latter won out. He said nothing.

  ‘Hudge up!’ said Appleby, squeezing himself in beside Quinn. It meant somehow rotating the angle of Miss Dillard’s rigid body closer to the vertical. Timberley peered in with a forlorn expression, like a child deprived of a treat.

  ‘Drive as quickly as you can, without occasioning undue shocks,’ directed Quinn.

  The taxi lurched off. It was soon apparent that the driver wanted them out of his cab as quickly as possible. Quinn’s admonition for caution was largely ignored.

  The strangulated sound at the back of Miss Dillard’s throat tightened. Her hands became claws, clutching at their own pain. One somehow lodged on to Quinn’s forearm and again he was astonished by the strength hidden away in this frail, ruined woman.

  He clung on to her as tightly as she clung on to him. He was trying to close down her convulsions with the firm press of his embrace. But also, he was aware that he was trying to hang on to the life in her. That if he let go of her, he would lose her.

  The high pointed tower of the St George’s Union Infirmary, with its arched windows and weather vane, gave the building the appearance of a massively enlarged church. No doubt its vaguely religious architecture was meant to inspire hope. Now it was just a looming shape in the darkness. A shadow within a shadow.

  Appleby sprang out and ran towards the great cathedral of medicine.

  Quinn extricated himself more carefully. As he laid down her head, her body was wracked by its most violent convulsion yet. The foam at her mouth had blood in it now. There was every chance that she had bitten through her tongue.

  In the dark, he could not see her eyes. He was unable even to imagine the beautiful shimmering grey of her irises. It was as if the blackness of her hugely dilated pupils had spread out and swamped everything. He felt a wrench at his heart at the thought that the beautiful pewter grey was lost forever. If only he could see her eyes, that grey, she would live. Everything depended on his being able to see her eyes. He wanted to call for a lamp, or a torch, to shine into her face. To dispel the blackness that had seeped into everything.

  Her legs gave a final double kick against the inside of the cab, then stiffened. Her arms formed jagged shapes, and held them, as sharp and permanent as the branches of petrified trees. The strangulated gurgling in her throat was no more.

  FORTY

  The next day, inside the curtained house, he could not dispel the blackness from the corners of his vision. He looked for the gleaming pewter grey of her eyes everywhere. But the only grey was the dour cheerless grey of an empty English Sunday. A godless, lifeless grey.

  There were murmured consolations, though why it was felt that he needed consoling more than anyone else he could not grasp.

  The other lodgers wanted to discuss why she might have done it. They sat in the front parlour drinking tea. The question came to their lips as regularly as the bone china.

  ‘But why, that’s what I cannot understand?’ Clink.

  ‘Why would she do such a thing?’ Clink.

  ‘What on earth could have possessed her?’ Clink.

  And all the other variations of why? punctuated by the chinking of cup against saucer.

  The question was never answered, except by a furtive, meaning look in Quinn’s direction.

  Were they placing her death on his conscience? But how could it be his fault? All he had done was offer to pay her rent until she was in a better position to pay it herself. How could that be the reason she had killed herself?

  Mrs Ibbott distracted the attention from him somewhat by blaming herself, not without some justification, Quinn felt. But the focus of her self-recrimination was entirely on the means by which Miss Dillard killed herself, rather than her motivation. It seemed that the strychnine had been given to Mrs Ibbott years ago by a male cousin who was a gamekeeper on a Suffolk estate. At the time, there had been a problem with rats in the cellar. The bottle had remained at the back of the scullery cupboard ever since. How Miss Dillard had known about it, or whether she had simply gone looking for some suitable substance to achieve her goal, was a matter of speculation.

  Betsy, the maid, was distraught. She was the last to have seen Miss Dillard alive, leaving the kitchen with something concealed in her hands. She had thought at the time that it was a crust of bread or an apple, perhaps. But it now seemed clear that it was the bottle of strychnine. ‘If only I had said something … It’s all my fault …’

  ‘No.’ Quinn was watching Timberley and Appleby as he spoke. He noticed that for once they had little to say for themselves. Perhaps they sensed that their characteristic facetiousness would be out of place. Or perhaps it was a sense of guilt that inhibited them. Quinn continued: ‘You were not to know. You said nothing out of kindness, because you feared it would embarrass her if she had taken something to eat. You mustn’t blame yourself.’ His words were meant for Betsy, but he continued looking at the two young men.

  At last, Appleby looked up and caught his eye. Colour rushed to his cheeks.

  ‘Mr Appleby, would you step outside the parlour and speak with me for a moment.’ Quinn voiced it as a command, not a question.

  In the hallway, he closed the door with quiet precision on Mr Timberley’s anxious, inquisitive face.

  ‘How may I be of service?’ Appleby whispered.

  ‘She overheard you. You and Timberley, speaking of a matter that related to me. What did you say?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘What did you and Timberley say to each other?’ There was a quality to the sudden firmness of Quinn’s voice that was consistent with the moment he had threatened to kill the cabbie last night.

  Appleby must have sensed this. ‘We … we may have talked about the fact that you had offered to pay her rent. Mary – Miss Ibbott – told us.’

  ‘And she heard you? Miss Dillard heard you?’

  ‘I don’t know. How can we know? We were on the landing. Her door was ajar. And then it closed.’

  ‘It closed. Can you remember exactly what had been said just before the door closed?’

  ‘It wasn’t anything. Not anything that could have precipitated … this.’

  ‘What did you say? What were the exact words?’

  ‘Exact words? I don’t know. You can’t expect me to remember the exact words. One of us might have said something about you taking pity on her.’

  ‘Pity?’

  ‘Yes. Well, isn’t that what it was?’

  Quinn narrowed his eyes but did not answer.

  ‘At any rate, I cannot see the harm in that. How could that induce her to take her own life?’ Appleby even had the effrontery to add: ‘You mustn’t blame yourself, old chap.’

  But Quinn was thinking only of her eyes, trying to remember the exact quality of their metallic hue. It was there, in them, that Miss Dillard was beautiful.

  ‘I say, it wasn’t more than that, was it? It wasn’t more than pity?’

  Quinn wondered if he should try to explain it to Appleby. But first he would have to explain it to himself and he was not sure that he could. He did not know why he had offered to pay Miss Dillard’s rent, but he did not think it was out of pity. It was rather because he had found the thought of never seeing her eyes again unbearable.

  FORTY-ONE

  Quinn got out of the Model T in Harley Street and looked up. His gaze deliberately sought out the sun. The effect was as he knew it would be. The white orb turned black. The blackness spread out from it, contaminating the milky sky.

  An all-encompassing darkness descended.

  He had brought this darkness on himself
, because today he could not bear the sight of the world, the pitiless cruelty of its renewal.

  In many ways Miss Dillard’s death had come as a release from the intractable difficulties of her life. It was all very sad and unnecessary, but he should not reproach himself. He had done all he could for her. Of course, all he could was not enough to save her life. But that was not the same as to say that he was to blame for her death.

  Her younger, married sisters had turned up yesterday. They filled the house with sniffles and whispers and husbands. These were tall, silent presences, who made no comment but held their heads at sympathetic angles.

  The question – why? – was brought out again and aired, like a wound from which the dressing was removed, while those present peered at it with a mixture of curiosity and distaste. Quinn knew from his own experience that it was a question that the living would never tire of asking, but to which no adequate answer could ever be found. Because the only one who had the answer was dead.

  The fog of his temporary blindness lifted partially, enough to allow him to make out the dark rectangle of Dr Casaubon’s door. He perceived it as black, though whether that was its true colour, he could not remember. He pushed against the field of blackness, this time without ringing the bell first. It was within the hours of Dr Casaubon’s surgery, and the doctor was expecting him.

  Now the self-imposed darkness was absorbed into the drapery-imposed darkness of Dr Casaubon’s surgery. The voice of that darkness had just asked him a question about his father’s suicide.

  ‘Once again, I did not come here to be psychoanalyzed by you.’ But the question of why he had come to Dr Casaubon was only vaguely answered in Quinn’s mind. He might justifiably say that it was to do with the investigation. But even he sensed that was a pretext rather than a reason. Was it possible that it was to do with Miss Dillard’s suicide? If so, it was strange that Quinn was scrupulous in avoiding any mention of what had happened at the lodging house.