by R. N. Morris
‘You must understand, as the only male resident of the mannequin house, suspicion naturally falls on you.’
‘But . . . but I loved Amélie . . . as a sister. I would never do anything like that. It’s not in my nature!’ Leversage’s eyes implored Quinn to understand the full meaning of his emphatic denial.
‘Very well. Let us accept that you did not. But some other man did. Do you still maintain that Mr Blackley was not in the mannequin house that night?’
‘Mr Blackley?’ Again that strange, hesitant stalling that Quinn had noticed the last time he had asked Leversage about Blackley’s presence in the house.
‘He was there, wasn’t he? Come on, admit it, man! It’s either that or be charged with the rape yourself.’
‘But that’s . . .’ Leversage’s look of outrage crumpled quickly into one of defeat. He was suddenly bereft of all illusions and hope. ‘Mr Blackley wasn’t there. That is to say, Mr Benjamin Blackley, the owner and founder of the House of Blackley, wasn’t. His son, Benjamin Blackley Junior, the young Mr Blackley, he was in the house that night. He spent the night in my room.’
Even Quinn had not seen this coming. ‘Good God.’
‘You’re bleedin’ jokin’, ain’ ya?’ said Inchball.
‘It was not anything like that, not what you are thinking. If you are thinking what I think you are thinking. There is nothing between young Mr Blackley and myself – except a certain antipathy. However, I agreed to help him because . . . well, because he had acquired certain information regarding my past which he was threatening to make known to his father – which, if he had, could have made things extremely difficult for me here.’
‘Criminal convictions?’ guessed Quinn.
Leversage closed his eyes and nodded once.
‘So you helped him. To do what, exactly?’
‘To spy on his father.’
‘His father was there, then?’
‘No. Young Mr Blackley wanted to discover if his father was having an affair with one of the mannequins. Mr Blackley had announced his intention to his wife to work late at the store that night. Young Mr Blackley suspected that this signalled Mr Blackley Senior’s intention to visit the mannequin house. You know that people call it his harem, don’t you? And so young Mr Blackley spent all night listening at my door. Well, in truth, all I can say for certain is that he was listening at the door when I fell asleep. When I woke up in the morning he was gone.’
‘Where will we find young Mr Blackley now?’
‘He will be downstairs. In the basement. He keeps an office down there, next to his father’s.’
‘Thank you. Oh, one other thing. You haven’t seen that damned monkey around, have you?’
But Quinn did not wait to see Leversage’s confused frown at the unexpected bathos of this parting question.
Quinn led Inchball past a sign that read Members of staff only to descend a grubby staircase. Unlike in the store itself, the electric lights here were of low wattage. They gave off a gloomy, parsimonious glow. One or two bulbs flickered, the evidence perhaps of faulty wiring. Below stairs, evidently, no effort was made to match the impression of opulence and welcome of the store itself.
They passed a row of booths like rabbit hutches, where the back-room workers were busy at their tasks: accounts clerks examining their ledger books, fabric buyers feeling sample books, tea tasters slurping from deep tasting spoons.
At the end of a dim corridor they reached two doors: one marked Mr Blackley, the other Mr Blackley Jr. A male secretary at a desk outside served as sentinel to both. He looked up at them enquiringly, leaping to his feet in protest as Quinn rushed past and opened the door to Mr Blackley Jr’s office.
There was no mistaking whose son was the young man seated behind the large oak desk. True, he lacked the distinctive mutton-chop whiskers, and instead of an affable smile he wore a look of pinched resentment; but here was the image of Benjamin Blackley, though thirty or so years his junior. To look at him at least, he was a chip off the old block.
‘May I help you gentlemen?’
‘You are Benjamin Blackley Junior?’
‘Yes . . . I . . . What’s this about?’
The secretary was at Quinn’s back, remonstrating. ‘You can’t go in there. Begging your pardon, Mr Blackley.’
‘We are police officers,’ said Quinn. ‘May we come in?’
Young Mr Blackley nodded. ‘It’s all right, Petherington. You may go back to work.’
Quinn closed the door on the secretary. ‘I am Detective Inspector Quinn and this is Detective Sergeant Macadam. We’re investigating the death of Amélie Dupin.’
‘Ah, yes. Of course. A terrible business.’
‘Why have you not come forward before now, sir?’
‘Come forward?’
‘You were in the mannequin house on the night of Amélie’s death. Therefore, we naturally want to speak to you as a witness.’
‘I was there . . . it’s true. But I saw nothing.’
‘You were there to spy on your father, is that right?’
Young Blackley hesitated, momentarily abashed. ‘Yes.’
‘You suspected him of having an affair with one of the mannequins?’
‘One of them? Everyone knows he takes his pick from them all!’
‘If everyone knows it, why was it necessary to spy on him?’
‘There had been this fellow . . . making trouble.’
‘Spiggott?’
Young Blackley gave a slight frown of surprise. ‘Yes. He’d been round to the house. Upsetting Mama.’
‘He was trying to blackmail your father?’
‘Oh, it wasn’t that! If it was just that we would have bought him off.’
‘What was it then?’
‘He claimed . . . he claimed that the old man was his father! Claimed that he’d seduced his mother when she worked here as a shop girl years ago. That he had even promised to marry her. And that Father’s rejection of this slut had led to her subsequent alcoholism and death. He was threatening to go public with this whole sordid story. He was demanding a share of the company. Equal shares with me and my brother and sister, for God’s sake! With Daddy’s real children.’
‘Why did this make it necessary for you to spy on your father?’
‘Mama was at the end of her tether. She’s put up with a lot over the years, you know. We had just begun to hope that the old man was over all that. Of course, this was ancient history, but it reopened an old wound. We had a family meeting. Father promised that it was all in the past.’
‘But you didn’t believe him?’
‘Mama deserved to know the truth.’
‘She asked you to spy on your father?’
‘Good God, no! I did it on my own initiative. Mama knows nothing about it.’
‘And what did you discover? Did your father make an appearance in the mannequin house that night?’
Young Blackley’s brow furrowed in momentary consternation. ‘No.’
‘You may wish to reconsider that answer, sir. We have evidence that Amélie was raped before she died. If your father wasn’t responsible then you become our most likely suspect.’
‘Raped? No. That’s not possible.’
‘Was your father there, Mr Blackley?’
‘No. I swear on my mother’s life that he wasn’t.’
‘Then you place us in a difficult position. We may be forced to charge you with the rape of Amélie Dupin.’
‘Do you really think I would rape a girl my father had slept with? What kind of a monster do you think I am?’
‘I don’t think you’re a monster at all. I think you may well be the son of a monster. Which creates within you . . . divided loyalties, shall we say? A confliction of emotions. You love your father. At the same time, you hate him for what he has done to your mother. And for what his past misdemeanours threaten to do to you. You must be worried that the arrival of this illegitimate son on the scene will diminish your inheritance. God knows how many o
ther bastards there might be waiting to come out of the woodwork. How many more could he still create if he carries on with this behaviour? You want to rein him in, but you don’t want to destroy him. You’re prepared to confront him with evidence of his peccadilloes in the hope of controlling him. But it’s another thing to expose him to public scandal. Be careful, Mr Blackley. One can understand your reluctance to destroy him. When all’s said and done, he is your father. The danger is, if you’re not careful, he may well end up destroying you.’
Quinn took out a business card and handed it across the desk. He smiled encouragingly as Blackley Jr accepted the card. ‘Perhaps you have forgotten quite what you saw or overheard at the mannequin house on Tuesday night. Perhaps you need some time to go over it again in your mind. If anything comes back to you, please do not hesitate to get in touch.’
At the door, Quinn turned back to Blackley Jr, shaking his head in gentle remonstration. ‘Your mother’s life? Really, Mr Blackley? Your mother’s life is worth less than your father’s preservation?’
The young man dipped his head.
Sanctuary
The very first time Quinn had glimpsed the arched opening on Kensington Road he had felt drawn towards it. A breach in the facade of Blackley’s dominion, it seemed to promise revelations and discoveries. There had been something personal, too, in the fascination it held for him. As if what he would discover when he ventured through it would have significance for him outside of the case he was investigating.
As he approached it now on foot, he felt that it held the promise of benign mystery. After the pressures of his last case, together with the catastrophe of the previous day, there was something more than inviting about the entrance. It exercised a powerful, attractive force.
‘A church?’ said Inchball; there was a note of disappointment, almost disgust, in his voice.
They stepped through into a paved courtyard. A single mature lime tree towered over a park bench, its abundant foliage more than enough to fill the space with leafy calm. At some deep level of his being, Quinn felt an impulse to linger. Although the courtyard was narrow, there was comfort in the seclusion it offered. More than that: hope of some kind of restitution, or at the very least of refuge.
‘This case has just taken a turn for the darker, Sergeant. And in truth, it was dark enough already.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘Think of the young man, Spiggott. He was in love with Amélie. Imagine the impact on his psychic and emotional stability on discovering that she has been sleeping with his natural father – or the man he believed to be his father. Furthermore, we cannot rule out the possibility that Amélie had slept with both Blackley and Spiggott. Or that one of them had forced his attentions on her. And in that case, imagine the impact of that on her once she discovered the connection between the two men!’
‘What you sayin’? You think she could have topped herself, after all?’
‘Doctor Prendergast raised it as a possibility.’
‘I thought he said it warn’ possible?’
‘Well, yes, granted. On the evidence we have so far, it is impossible. There may be something we have overlooked.’
‘And you think we’ll find it here?’
‘Amélie was a Catholic. According to the Irish maid, Kathleen, she attended Mass here. If there was something troubling her – something of this magnitude – it’s reasonable to speculate that she might confide in her priest, is it not?’
Inchball gave a noisy dismissive sniff. ‘’Ere, what about this bleedin’ monkey though? Ain’ we supposed to be looking for that?’
‘Ah, yes. Shizaru. It would be rather nice to find him for DCI Coddington. Where would you go if you were a frightened fugitive, Sergeant?’
Inchball shrugged and looked up at the ecclesiastic facade ahead of them. ‘A church?’
‘It can’t do any harm to look, can it?’
‘But I ain’ a monkey!’
‘The reality is he may have gone anywhere. Which surely gives us licence to conduct our search anywhere, does it not? And if, while we look for him, we ask the people we meet questions regarding other matters that are of interest to us, no one can object to that, can they?’
Inchball gave a small smirk of appreciation and nodded for Quinn to lead on.
The door closed with an echoing boom, which was quickly swallowed into the prevailing hush.
The scale of the church’s interior was the first revelation: surprisingly grand, given its narrow frontage. Quinn thought in passing how it must have rankled with Blackley to have had this prime commercial plot withheld from him. In truth, the impression of scale came mainly from the building’s height. Stone arches drew the gaze up to a vast space beneath the vaulted ceiling. Quinn didn’t know much about church architecture, but he recognized that the building was not as old as it aspired to be. It was done in an ancient style, but the fabric of the structure, as revealed in the bare stone walls, was suspiciously pristine. An example, he imagined, of Victorian Gothic revival.
Christened in the Church of England, Quinn had been brought up notionally as a churchgoer; that is to say, he was dragged along now and then, mainly during his early years, and in a desultory fashion. Neither of his parents had been particularly religious: his father, not enough to prevent him from taking his own life; his mother, not enough for her to receive any consolation for that dire event. As far as Quinn knew, she never set foot in a church again after her husband’s funeral.
At the time of crisis in his own life Quinn had tried to make sense of the world by the exercise of extreme rationality. He was a medical student and considered himself a scientist. He had not sought solace. He had not turned to prayer. He had simply tried to get to the bottom of the mystery of his father’s death. And the attempt had almost driven him mad.
His illness had cut short his studies. But it had also awoken in him what might be called the detecting instinct.
He had failed to solve the mystery of his father’s death – failed, because the only solution acceptable to him was that his father had not taken his own life. That was a solution that the available facts refused to allow. His way out of this impasse was to believe that there were circumstances as yet undiscovered which would provide the solution he craved. He could not see that this was an act of faith, every bit as irrational as the belief in God that he had come to reject.
He had come to trust in the idea and act of detection, that there were solutions to mysteries, and that they were discoverable, given time and patience. It had felt like a vocation. He had entered the police.
Of course, this church was subtly different to the one he had been taken to as a boy. But as soon as he was attuned to the difference, the signs of its Roman denomination leapt out at him. The abundant flash of gold, the flickering of candles. Rich hanging drapes and ornate crucifixes. The quiet, but inescapable opulence everywhere.
The walls were crowded with paintings, not just of Christ but of obscure saints with gold leaf haloes. Mary, too, was much in evidence, both in paintings and statuary. The most prominent piece was a painted statue of her holding an infant Christ. Quinn felt an inexplicable knot of emotion at his throat as he considered it.
The altar was like a massive elaborate sideboard, a priest’s magic box, both ridiculous and impressive. The glinting candelabra seemed like levers waiting to be pulled to operate the machinery of faith.
From somewhere the parish priest had appeared, dressed in the cassock favoured by Roman Catholic clerics. Quinn was surprised by the man’s unassuming appearance. His mildly enquiring face, myopic eyes blinking behind wire-framed glasses, was the sort that was easily forgotten, if it was noticed in the first place. If Quinn’s reaction was anything to go by, the tendency was to look at the robe rather than the face, to be impressed by the office not the man. He was short too, which added to a general sense of physical negligibility. In point of fact, he was a little on the plump side.
‘May I help you?’ He was softly spok
en but not timid. His smile was gently encouraging, eyes unafraid as they stared searchingly into Quinn’s. In that steady gaze Quinn glimpsed a surprising strength. He wondered whether there was more to the offer of help than he had first assumed. He felt that the strange little priest could see the trouble in his heart. He experienced an unfathomable urge to reach out and hold on to the man as if his life depended on it.
‘We are police officers. This is Detective Sergeant Inchball and I am Detective Inspector Quinn of the Special Crimes Department. We’re investigating the death of Amélie Dupin. I believe she was a parishioner of yours?’
The priest nodded. ‘I wondered how long it would take you to get here.’
‘You were expecting us?’ said Quinn.
‘Yes, of course. He’s in the sacristy. I’ve spoken to him. Prepared him. He’s ready to talk to you.’
‘Who is?’ For one absurd moment, Quinn thought the priest was talking about Shizaru.
‘Peter.’
‘Peter who?’
‘Peter Spiggott. I presume that’s who you’re here to see?’
‘Spiggott is here?’
‘Yes.’ The priest caught the preparatory bristling in Inchball’s stance. ‘Don’t worry, he won’t go anywhere.’ He glanced towards a doorway in the side of the church, towards the rear. ‘He can’t get away without coming through here. I’ve locked the other door.’
‘Is he a Catholic?’ Quinn was not quite sure why he felt the need to ask this question, or why it came out in such an incredulous, almost angry tone. It seemed as appropriate a way to express his amazement as any other.
‘No. Not yet. I’m working on it, of course. What he is, is a hater of Mr Blackley. That we have in common. It’s not the only thing that has drawn us together. We both loved Amélie. I, as her priest and confessor. He . . . well, his relationship with her was problematic, shall we say?’
‘Guv,’ Inchball cut in. ‘Shouldn’t we . . .?’ He angled his head towards the sacristy door, the movement tense and minimal.
Quinn nodded.
Slowly, silently, with infinite care, Inchball withdrew a revolver from inside his jacket.
