A Gathering of Saints

by A Gathering of Saints (retail) (epub)

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, folding the sheet of paper and slipping it into his pocket. He gathered up the postcards as well. ‘You’ve been a great help.’

  ‘A pleasure, Inspector. God should hear you and favour you.’ The same blessing Black’s father had spoken the day he married Fay; words he hadn’t heard in years. And no longer believed in.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said again. He shook the old man’s hand and turned away. He took a few steps towards the door then paused. Garlinski had gone back to his chess problem, hunched over the board. Again Black heard the fear in Liddell’s voice, forbidding him to come to Coventry. ‘Zayde?’ he said, raising his voice slightly. Garlinski looked up from the board, surprised at Black’s use of the familiar term.

  ‘Yes?’

  ’Zayde, do you have friends, relatives in the country?’

  ‘My granddaughter, in Nuneaton.’ Garlinski frowned. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Perhaps you should pay her a visit.’

  ‘You’re not saying this idly, Inspector?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Am I in some danger from whoever it is you seek?’

  ‘No. Much worse than that, I think.’

  ‘I see.’ Garlinski looked at Morris Black, searching the younger man’s face. ‘And you think I should pay this visit soon?’

  ‘Immediately. This afternoon. You must believe me.’ Garlinski continued to stare at the detective. Finally he nodded. ‘Go with God, Inspector.’ He looked back to the chessboard.

  ‘And you, Zayde.’ Black could feel the sting of salt in his eyes. He gritted his teeth, nodded once, then turned away at last and left the shop.

  * * *

  Dr Charles Tennant sat behind the desk in the small office off the main hall of Scotland Yard’s Central Records Office, working his way slowly through the stacks of card file drawers on his left, occasionally making a note on the foolscap pad in front of him.

  It was just after five thirty and outside the office he could hear the faint sounds of the Records staff as they prepared to leave for the day. He had been in the office since before noon and he was still barely halfway through the card files he’d chosen to examine.

  He yawned, jaw cracking, and lit another cigarette. He’d stayed with Poppet until almost dawn and that, combined with six hours spent at Central Records, had made him bleary-eyed. Still, it was worth it, even considering the risks involved.

  Poppet, regardless of her strange sexual proclivities, had been a gold mine of information. Through three separate acts of talk-filled intercourse and two long tea breaks in between, she had innocently, and effusively, told him everything she knew about the murder investigations that were causing so much concern to Guy Liddell and MI5.

  Her information was remarkably complete, which wasn’t so surprising when you considered that she was Liddell’s favourite stenographer and had transcribed both the reports filed by Detective Inspector Morris Black as well as the original Scotland Yard case files concerning the first two murders.

  Five deaths were under investigation: the four ritual slayings that seemed directly connected to night bombing raids in London, Portsmouth and Southampton, and the fifth, apparently anomalous, murder of the WRN motorcycle courier, Jane Luffington.

  He was particularly interested in the Luffington death, both because she was the only woman and because of her association with British intelligence.

  According to Poppet, the WRN had two regular courier runs – one from Bletchley Park, a government installation outside London, to 55 Broadway Buildings, the headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service; and a second route from SIS to the cavernous halls of the Public Records Office in The City. Almost as intriguing was her romantic relationship with a young lieutenant commander in naval intelligence, a man named Fleming.

  A tangled web by the looks of it and connected directly to the other four murders by modus operandi; according to the post-exhumation autopsy performed by Bernard Spilsbury, she, like the other four, had died as a result of having her spinal cord severed neatly by a small, machine-tooled projectile, probably delivered by a compressed-air or spring-loaded weapon. Three of the four previous victims, all males, had been mutilated; Jane Luffington, the only woman, had not.

  An interesting enough case for any psychiatrist but doubly so for Tennant. By itself, ritual and multiple murder in the style of Jack the Ripper was a fascinating subject, albeit one that had little value in ‘normal’ psychiatric practice. As far as Tennant could tell from Poppet’s information, the death of Jane Luffington was less anomalous than it was prophylactic.

  Somewhere along the line the killer of the four previous victims had made a mistake that left him vulnerable to the Luffington woman. There was no doubt in Tennant’s mind that she had been murdered for practical reasons and was not part of the killer’s ritual.

  To Tennant, it was her intelligence associations, and MI5’s interest in the slayings, that were the most important. From what Poppet knew, Queer Jack, as he was being called, represented the distinct possibility of a major security leak.

  Originally this worry had stemmed from the murderer’s apparent powers of prophecy in predicting exactly when and where bombing raids would occur; this had now been reinforced by the death of Jane Luffington. Queer Jack obviously had some kind of access to extremely sensitive intelligence information.

  By definition, the fact that he knew when raids would occur meant that British intelligence also knew – the ‘other source’ referred to so casually by Masterman after Tennant’s brief role as a captured Luftwaffe pilot. The obvious conclusion was that SIS had a highly placed agent somewhere in the German High Command who reported regularly on Luftwaffe bombing plans. Somehow Queer Jack not only knew who he was but also had access to the information he was sending to British intelligence.

  Tennant stubbed out his cigarette. Poppet, of course, had made none of these associations; she had neither the intelligence to do so nor the interest. But examined on a broader plane, it all fit very neatly, especially when you considered Jane Luffington’s main route from Bletchley Park to SIS.

  Bletchley, as virtually everyone knew, was the new headquarters of the Government Code and Cipher School and the central location for much of the British intelligence establishment’s cover radio traffic. To Tennant it was obvious – the listeners at Bletchley were picking up the coded signals sent from their agent in Germany, decoding them and sending them on to SIS. If Tennant could somehow find out who Queer Jack was, discover his source of information and inform Schellenberg and Heydrich, the British war effort could be dealt a mortal blow before the almost inevitable entry of the United States into the war.

  But how to do it and do it before the ubiquitous Morris Black? Poppet seemed to think that the Jew’s investigation was leading nowhere but the psychiatrist wasn’t so sure. A call to Smith, his contact in Special Branch, and a vague reference to an ongoing research project about the criminal mind had given him access to the Central Records Office Criminal Index and even the most cursory examination of Black’s arrest record over the years showed that he was far more successful than better known members of the force like Robert Fabian or Reginald Spooner. Given that record and his seniority, it appeared that his lack of political friends within the Metropolitan Force, together with his Jewishness, were the only things preventing his promotion to detective superintendent or even deputy commissioner. Regardless of his rank and religion, Morris Black was relentless, stubborn and extremely intelligent; Tennant had no intention of underrating his abilities.

  Charting Black’s career was only a minor part of the psychiatrist’s presence at Scotland Yard that afternoon and evening. His convoluted conversations with Poppet, both in and out of bed, had given him the germ of an idea.

  Morris Black’s investigations were hamstrung by a century of firmly entrenched procedure and the narrow limits of the law. The rules and regulations governing his work were straightforward and inflexible, based on the Metropolitan Police Act and
standard texts like Smith and Fiddes’ Forensic Medicine as well as dusty tomes like Gross, Adam and Kendal’s Criminal Investigation, which still contained serious warnings about gypsy confidence tricksters. Tennant had no such restrictions, either on his thinking or his actions.

  Years before, at the Institute in Vienna, the psychiatrist had run into a visiting American psychoanalyst named Walter Langer. At the time Langer had been convinced of the great value of hypothetical psychological case histories of important political figures as well as of criminal personality types. Hopefully a reasonably accurate ‘crystal ball’ would be created to predict patterns of behaviour and even identify criminals before their crimes were committed. Ironically, much of Langer’s theorising used Jack the Ripper as an example. The American had dubbed his scientifically dubious process ‘profiling.’

  The previous year Tennant had heard through the psychiatric grapevine that Langer, with the backing of the United States government, had embarked on a project to divine the inner thinking of Adolf Hitler, presumably so that Roosevelt would have some idea of which way the wind was blowing if he allied himself with the British cause.

  Tennant had thought that the possibility of such predictive analysis was a trifle fanciful but even then he had been interested in the possibilities. Much about what he remembered of Langer’s theories he was now applying to Queer Jack. The initial results of his very preliminary thinking, combined with the small amount of information he had culled from the Central Records Office files, were intriguing and a sketchy ‘profile’ of the killer was now beginning to emerge.

  Some elements were obvious: the multiple nature of the killings, the nudity of the victims and the mutilations were almost a sure sign of sexual psychopathy. The fact that four out of the five were men pointed towards a homosexual nature. Tennant could also assume that the killings had been triggered by the first serious bombings of London and probably coincided with Queer Jack’s first access to information concerning the raids.

  These facts, combined with Tennant’s readings of the clinical literature, his professional experience with the criminally insane at the Sheffield Lunatic Asylum and the historical evidence contained in the Scotland Yard records led him to believe that he could safely guess Queer Jack’s approximate age.

  Of the cases he had examined in the CRO files, all had involved murderers between thirty and fifty-five years of age. This coincided with his own experience. In a normal man, frustration with his declining sexual abilities and increasing ennui with a marital partner might lead to the use of prostitutes or possibly the favours of a younger mistress.

  To a man consumed by the dual evidence of the psychopath and the homosexual, the use of prostitutes, male or female, would hardly be of value. Murder, often brutal and of a ritual nature, was often a solution. Thus he could reasonably conclude that Queer Jack had been born sometime between 1890 and 1910, with a median birthdate of 1900. The man’s obvious freedom of movement also supported this and made it highly unlikely that he was a member of the military, which in turn meant he was over the age of conscription.

  He could also assume that his quarry was not a professional. Psychopathic behaviour seemed almost invariably to stem from frustration and a sense of failure, often compounded by an inability to get along with other people. Such behaviour also tended to have a crippling mental effect and of the cases he had examined today almost all of the murderers had either shown signs of mental instability at a young age or had been previously confined to a mental institution of some kind.

  This had also been one of Walter Langer’s key points in describing the man most likely to have been Jack the Ripper. Of all the named suspects, Kosminski the Pole was by far the most likely. He had been incarcerated in an asylum prior to the Whitechapel murders and the prostitute killings had come to an abrupt end immediately following his return there. It seemed obvious enough to conclude that a madman might commit mad acts.

  On the other hand, it was also probable that Queer Jack was extremely intelligent, whatever the nature of his lunacy. The strange murder weapon was a clear indication of that; according to Poppet, the autopsy reports from Spilsbury’s office referred to the small, barbed instruments as ‘brilliantly lethal.’ At the very least Queer Jack was familiar with sophisticated metal fabrication – a skilled technician or engineering assistant perhaps silently railing against the more educated men he worked for, his resentments growing, day by day, until they eventually exploded into violent life.

  His year at the Sheffield Asylum had also taught Tennant that the majority of those deemed criminally insane seemed to come from large urban areas, most probably because early signs of deviant behaviour would be much more visible in a rural setting; it was much easier for a madman to remain anonymous in a place like London than a small village or a town. Once again, the CRO files bore this out: of the cases he’d gone through, almost all had been centred in London or other large cities.

  Although he had no sure evidence, Tennant was almost certain that the killings that had taken place in the last few months had come about as the result of a major trauma in the killer’s past. He’d had half a dozen ‘lunatic killers’ under his care at Sheffield, and from what he’d learned, their sudden, seemingly unprovoked acts of violence had their roots in the distant past, most often in early adolescence.

  So there it was – his vague, still cloudy image of Queer Jack. A man in his mid-thirties to early forties, secretly homosexual, a lone wolf, socially inept and perhaps painfully shy. A skilled man who took pride in his vicious but ‘brilliant’ instruments of death, born in London and possibly having a history of mental illness, perhaps carrying the weight of some awful, traumatic secret from the past.

  A man who saw the war, and the nightly visitations of the Luftwaffe bombers, as the perfect, insane environment in which to act out his monstrous rituals. And most bizarre of all, a man who had somehow come into possession of knowledge that had MI5 terribly worried.

  Tennant nodded to himself, gathered up his notes and stood up. Not very much. Not yet. But a beginning. He smiled. He’d have Queer Jack and he’d have him before Detective Inspector Morris Black of Scotland Yard.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Thursday, November 14, 1940

  5:45 p.m., Greenwich Mean Time

  6:45 p.m., European Standard Time

  Morris Black emerged from the glass-doored call box in the Coventry GPO office, grinning from ear to ear. By an astounding stroke of good fortune the first name on Garlinski’s list had been the right one – Brian Trench, 24A Cherry Street, Radford. A few moments’ conversation with Mildred Trench, his wife, had proved that he was the man Black was looking for. According to Mildred Trench, her husband was indeed a member of the Correspondence Chess Association and was due to meet with an out-of-town member that evening in one of the local pubs.

  ‘God knows what it’ll be after that. With my Brian it’s always one thing or another. This chess business, the Society. You’d think he didn’t have things to do here at home.’ If Black wanted to catch him beforehand it was likely that he was still at work. Work, as it turned out, was Fry’s Butcher Shop in the market off West Orchard Street.

  The post office was located partway down Greyfriars Street, less than a block away from Garlinski’s shop. Black walked quickly back to the blacked-out High Street and hailed a cab but the driver told him that it wasn’t worth the fare since the market and West Orchard Street was only a few hundred yards away. The cabbie gave Black directions, pointing him up Hertford Street.

  A few minutes later the detective reached the small market square and found Trench, still dressed in a bloody apron, winding up the awning as he prepared to close up shop, whistling happily to himself in the darkness. It was Mozart, which seemed out of character for a butcher’s assistant, but then again so was correspondence chess.

  ‘Mr Trench?’

  ‘Sorry, sir, we’re closed, I’m afraid.’

  Black took out his warrant card and held it up. ‘
I’m not here to buy anything, Mr Trench.’

  ‘Scotland Yard?’ Trench peered at the card, frowning.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Bit far from home, aren’t you?’ Trench tied off the awning with a complicated knot looped over a wrought-iron cleat and turned to face Black fully.

  ‘I’d like to ask you a few questions.’

  ‘Christ! Not another one of the black-market investigations!’

  ‘No, nothing like that.’

  ‘What then?’

  Black told him, making it as vague as he dared. He was investigating a serious crime. Evidence pointed towards the man Trench was scheduled to meet at the pub. He would appreciate Trench’s cooperation.

  ‘What do you mean by cooperation?’

  ‘Point the man out to me. I’ll do the rest.’ It was insane of course. What he should have been doing was bringing in the local Coventry constabulary but he was afraid of scaring off his quarry.

  ‘I can’t point him out to you. I’ve never laid eyes on him.’

  ‘How were you to recognise him?’

  ‘I was supposed to wait for him at the chessboard.’

  ‘Chessboard?’

  ‘The one in the Stump.’

  ‘That’s the name of the pub?’

  ‘The Magpie and Stump is the proper name. We all call it the Stump.’

  ‘Where is the chessboard?’

  ‘At the far end of the bar. Inlaid right into the wood.’ Black frowned, thinking hard, and then he had it. There’d been a table like that at the Mandrake in London. He could feel a tightening in his chest; it was all coming together now, down the sharp, gleaming point of a needle.

  ‘Sounds like he knows the place,’ said Black.

  Trench shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Who suggested it as a place to meet?’

  ‘He did, now that you mention it.’