Summon Up the Blood

by R. N. Morris

  Behind all this was his anxiety over Miss Dillard. To begin with, he was embarrassed about being made to look as though he had run away from dinner on her account the other night.

  Far worse was the fact that he had allowed himself to use Miss Dillard’s name in his exchanges with the renter last night. Not only that, he had given the impression that there was some sort of understanding between himself and Miss Dillard. An understanding of the worst sort.

  Quinn felt the through-rush of shame. All his attempts at any kind of interrelationship with members of the opposite sex seemed to be configured by it.

  He felt that he owed her some sort of apology. But how could he apologize for something he could never admit to? My dear Miss Dillard, I do apologize but I happened to mention to a renter who was trying to pick me up that I had no need of his services because all my sexual requirements were taken care of by you. I hope that’s all right. I know we don’t have such an understanding, so I really shouldn’t have said it – and perhaps I shouldn’t have said it even if it were true. But for some reason, your name was the first that came into my head. I can’t think why. Please be assured that I really have no desire for such an understanding with you – you need have no fear on that front. So I really am at a loss to explain why it was your name I thought of. I could have said Miss Latterly, or Miss Ibbott, because – to be honest – those are the ones about whom I really do entertain thoughts of that nature. The human mind is an unfathomable mystery. I feel sure I must have read that somewhere, but even so . . .

  The door to the front parlour opened and the lady herself came out, dressed as always in a dated and much-repaired gown. For one horrifying moment, Quinn thought he must have spoken aloud his strange monologue of apology. But her face was as mild and unassuming as ever, and as hopelessly unmoving to him.

  Her gaze dipped modestly when she saw it was him, pathetically self-effacing. No, it was not true to say that her face didn’t move him at all. But the only emotion it inspired was pity. He could not say what colour her eyes were. He did not dare look into them for long enough to find out. He had a vague impression of wateriness there. And about her face, a certain bloated slackness, as of a balloon that was beginning to deflate.

  What saddened him, sickened him almost, about all this was that he was capable of entertaining such ungentlemanly thoughts.

  You’re no oil painting yourself, Quinn, he told himself.

  Do you think your Miss Latterlys and your Miss Ibbotts would ever look twice at the likes of you?

  Perhaps Mrs Ibbott was right to point him in the direction of Miss Dillard. Or perhaps all she was doing there was steering him away from her daughter. He couldn’t blame her. In her shoes, he would do the same.

  ‘Mr Quinn?’ said Miss Dillard, with a note of surprise in her voice.

  ‘Good evening to you, Miss Dillard.’ Quinn removed his hat and gave a slight bow.

  ‘You are late this evening. I was just going up.’

  ‘Yes . . . we are very busy at the office at the moment.’

  ‘At the office, yes. One day you must explain to me exactly what it is you do at that office of yours, Mr Quinn.’ Miss Dillard smiled slyly and lifted her eyes. He flinched away from her look of timid enquiry just as it turned into one of alarmed solicitude. ‘Good heavens! What have you done to your nose?’

  Her hand rose protectively towards his face, only to shrink back as she became aware of the involuntary and revealing gesture.

  Quinn had forgotten entirely about his injury. It had not troubled him for some time, and thanks to Macadam’s arnica tablets the bruising was almost entirely gone. Only someone who took an obsessive interest in the state of his face could have noticed the slight heightening of colour at the tip of his nose. ‘Oh, it’s nothing. A little accident.’

  ‘You must take more care of yourself, Mr Quinn. We all worry about you, you know.’

  Quinn found it hard to imagine Messrs Appleby and Timberley expressing any concern on his behalf, unless it were to do so ironically. And Miss Ibbott? He would have dearly liked to know if she was included in Miss Dillard’s circle of worry. Even Quinn realized he could not ask the question directly, certainly not of Miss Dillard. He settled for a sceptical: ‘All?’

  ‘Oh yes, I am certain the others share my concern for your welfare.’

  Ah! His image of the occupants of the lodging house seated round the table earnestly sharing their anxieties over him evaporated.

  ‘You must place a cold compress on it. If you like, I can . . .’

  ‘No, no. That won’t be necessary.’

  Miss Dillard winced at the speed and sharpness of his rejection. ‘I was only going to say I could speak to Mrs Ibbott about it. I am sure she has a compress somewhere that you can use.’

  ‘It won’t be necessary, I assure you.’ Quinn endeavoured to soften his tone. ‘It’s very kind of you. Very kind.’ The sense that he owed her something – if not an apology, something – suddenly overwhelmed him.

  Slowly, deliberately, he directed his gaze towards her eyes.

  Grey. So that was it. Grey.

  The least he owed her was to look into her eyes and acknowledge the strangely beautiful pewter grey of her irises.

  He could not say that he detected any great intelligence in those eyes. But he felt their compassion, and that was perhaps the quality he valued most of all.

  ‘You are very kind,’ he said, the focus of his gaze still locked on to her eyes. ‘But really, it isn’t necessary.’

  She smiled, and for once he did not feel that her smile was pathetic and pitiable. He realized that when he looked into Miss Dillard’s eyes, when he dared to do that, she made perfect sense to him. She was complete. She was not ridiculous at all, he realized. She was human.

  The first thing he saw as he closed the door to his room was the brown paper package on his bed. He couldn’t believe he had left it in the open like that. Someone – anyone – could have come into his room, slipped the string, pulled apart the wrapping and seen the book inside. The offence of trespass would have been nothing compared to the opprobrium that would descend on him as one who read such material.

  Betsy had clearly made the bed and replaced the book more or less where he had left it. Was there something pointed in this? A vile pornographic novel borne up on the homely neatness of a well-made bed? It struck him as a critical – perhaps even satirical – juxtaposition.

  It was as if she was saying, I know what you’re up to, mister.

  But no, it was impossible to conceive of Betsy opening a private package belonging to one of the lodgers, especially one of the gentlemen lodgers. For one thing, she hadn’t the time. Mrs Ibbott kept her far too busy. But more than that, Betsy was a good sort.

  He looked at the inert package with loathing. Even when he turned from it, he felt its presence in his room, a kind of challenge. Dare you read me? it seemed to be saying to him.

  He left it where it was and crossed to his table. The tin of Set cigarettes transmitted a similar mute message: Dare you smoke me?

  Quinn had no eagerness to accept either challenge. The thought of the yellowish cigarette papers left him feeling physically nauseous. It brought to mind the deeper yellow cover of the book. The connection troubled him. It was as if there was some conspiracy at work here. He began to distrust the colour yellow. Although he had never thought so before, it seemed poisonous at its essence. He felt that the mere sight of the book would cause his mouth to flood with saliva, and his throat to begin the gag reflex.

  As if to test himself, he picked up the tin and confronted the strange Egyptian figure depicted there. He could almost believe that this impossible being with a human body and animal head was the killer he was looking for, such was the antipathy it generated in him.

  He remembered how the smoke from the cigarettes had estranged him from his room and himself. He had become someone else, under its drug-laden influence. Was it possible, he wondered, that it had a similar effect on the mur
derer? When the spirit of the cigarettes, the sinister Egyptian deity, entered that unknown person, did he become a creature capable of cutting and bleeding a young man till he died?

  If that was the case, it was Quinn’s duty to do what he had little stomach for. The enquiry demanded it.

  He opened the tin, took out one of the fat yellow cigarettes and lit it.

  Clearly, not everyone who smoked Set cigarettes became a murderer. But he knew from his own experience that they had a disorientating effect. It was more than that. They tended to loosen inhibitions. Perhaps this was why it was so common for inverts to smoke them. The great line that had to be crossed in order for them to commit their acts together required a virtual abandonment of inhibitions.

  If your inner nature was that of an invert, then Set cigarettes would serve to bring it closer to the surface.

  If your inner nature was that of a killer, then the same principle would apply.

  Quinn inhaled. And closed his eyes. Strangely, he did not feel nauseous. He was becoming used to the effect of the cigarettes. Welcomed it now, even.

  He crossed to the looking-glass on the washstand and confronted himself. The sense of estrangement was less than he had experienced the night before, as if he was becoming reconciled to the idea that his reflection did not match the image of himself that he carried in his head. Or perhaps it was more that the outer and the inner Quinn were growing closer together. Was that the power of the cigarettes, then?

  He took a second, deeper inhalation of smoke. His pulse raced. The room swam a little, shifted from its moorings in the universe before being pulled back into place.

  Quinn went to the bed and picked up the book. It seemed lighter than he remembered it. Perhaps the Set cigarettes gave the smoker strength too? Quinn had an uncle who was prone to sleepwalking, who had single-handedly moved a mahogany wardrobe laden with clothes, watched by his incredulous wife. In the morning, he had been unable to restore it to its original position. The wardrobe had to be completely emptied of clothes before the two of them together were able to shift it an inch.

  Relating these observations back to the killer, it was conceivable that when he smoked the cigarettes he believed himself capable of anything. Physically, he might be able to make short work of hefting a body, for example.

  Quinn took the package over to the armchair. It was harder than he had imagined to remove the string, almost as if it were jealous of what it bound. Then he remembered that he had tied the knot, so all it really represented was his own desire to keep the horrid secret of the book hidden from prying eyes.

  He lifted away the paper calmly, as if he wanted to prove – to that imaginary observer again? – that he was in no hurry to see what lay beneath. That he could take it or leave it, in fact.

  When finally it lay revealed on his lap in its nest of brown paper, the yellow of the cover still struck him as an unpleasant lurid hue. Its stridency still offended, like a hysterical scream in polite company. Quinn took this as a good sign. The cigarettes had not so poisoned his mind that he was capable of looking on such a book with anything other than disgust.

  He opened it with a grimace, the Set cigarette held between his teeth as he drew on it.

  Merely the sight of the type on the page induced a strange breathlessness, accompanied by a feeling like butterflies in the pit of his stomach. His body felt hollowed-out and volatile.

  He read short passages at random, flicking the pages whenever he encountered a repulsive word:

  cockstand

  spendings

  frig

  arsehole

  buttocks

  prick

  mancunt

  pego

  balls

  Such words recurred with monotonous frequency. As he might have expected, the book lacked any literary merit whatsoever. Even on this cursory examination, he noticed numerous spelling mistakes and examples of slapdash punctuation. Coupled with its monotony of vocabulary and style, as a novel it was let down by its excessive repetition of incident. It was little more than a catalogue of the sexual encounters of the narrator. Of course, the power of the book lay in the shocking nature of these encounters. And, for Quinn, that power was deeply disturbing.

  He remembered Inchball’s warning. At the time, he had thought his sergeant was overstating the case. Inchball’s fondness for blunt-speaking sometimes stepped over into gratuitous sensationalism. It seemed he relished the pleasure of shocking through his words.

  But now Quinn realized that his dark hints of contamination, of policemen corrupted by such reading matter, were not without foundation.

  If the human mind was an unfathomable mystery, as he had observed to an imaginary Miss Dillard, then the human body was a peculiar machine. He found himself, despite his deep disgust at what he was reading, sexually aroused.

  Perhaps if one reads the word cockstand often enough, he thought, one’s cock is inevitably induced to stand. Whether one wills it or not.

  In his brief time as a medical student, he had been introduced to the physiological basis of sexual function. A cockstand, as the writer insisted on calling an erection, was caused by blood engorging the penis. Remarkable how the presence of a liquid could result in something so solid.

  And so it was a matter of scientific fact that there was a link between sex and blood. A similar link seemed to be present in the murder of James Neville.

  A sexually impotent man was one whose penis failed to engorge successfully with blood. The evidence of anal intercourse on the victim suggested that the murderer was not impotent, unless, of course, a third party had been involved. That was logically possible, though chilling. The idea that Neville may have been the plaything of two men had not occurred to Quinn before now. He preferred to discount it, at least for the time being.

  Even so, the blood may still have been taken from Neville because of its association with ideas of potency. Just as a cock is steeled by the inrush of blood, so too, perhaps, the killer hoped to steel himself by summoning forth the blood of his victim. It may not have been simple sexual potency he sought, but something beyond that.

  Quinn lay the book aside and stubbed out the cigarette. No longer aroused, queasy once again from the over-stimulation of the tobacco, he felt suddenly exhausted. He laid back his head where he was sitting and closed his eyes.

  But images from the book would not let him be. He needed something else to take his mind off them. Remembering another book he had recently bought, Quinn stirred himself from his armchair. He withdrew from his bookshelf his copy of Lázár Erdélyi’s ethnological study, Killing the Dead: The Folk Beliefs and Rituals of Transylvania.

  The House of Pomegranates

  Inchball looked up and scowled. The sky hung heavy with low grey cloud, promising another downpour. He had taken the precaution of setting out with an umbrella and his shoes were in good repair. His sour expression had nothing to do with the weather forecast.

  The thought of the type of person he would encounter at the house in Adelaide Road made his skin crawl. The way they looked at him, sizing him up with their filthy eyes, imagining him in the buff, no doubt, licking their disgusting lips at the thought of their filthy hands all over him.

  It was enough to make any decent man vomit.

  If it rained, good. It might wash him clean afterwards. Perhaps God would even send a thunderbolt to burn the place down. After Inchball had got out of there, of course. That was a thought – what if God decided to punish the perverts while he was still in there interviewing them?

  Bloody typical, he decided that would be. Bloody typical of my luck.

  So it was just as well he didn’t believe in God. Not when you got down to it. Not when you thought it through, good and proper. You see if your God existed, that’s precisely what he would have done already. He would have smote them all down. As far as Inchball was concerned, the fact that your queer existed proved that your God did not.

  It wasn’t just your queers. Your queers were the least o
f it. Some of the things he’d seen working Special Crimes with Inspector Quinn, well, it fair made your blood curdle, it did. It was hard to hold on to a belief in a good and powerful God after you’d dug up the body of a nine-year-old girl who’d been raped and strangled by her own father.

  Let it rain, was what he said. Let it rain on them all. And let the thunderbolts fall.

  Fat chance.

  Inchball looked around at the villas of Adelaide Road. His scowl deepened. It wasn’t just that your God let your queers and suchlike exist. He set them up in neighbourhoods like this. By the looks of some of these houses, it would take more than one thunderbolt to raze them to the ground.

  It was enough to make you spit. When he thought about the little jerry-built cottage in Hornsey that he and the missus could just about afford to rent. An honest copper like him, working practically every hour God sent. Wearing out his shoe leather. And his knees. Oh, yes. And all them queers had to do was frig some toff and they could live it up in a mansion in Primrose Hill for the rest of their days.

  As the governor had suspected, James Albert Neville turned out to have form. He’d served a month’s hard labour in Pentonville for offences relating to the 1898 amendment of the Vagrancy Act. For soliciting, basically. Nothing worse, though that was bad enough in Inchball’s book. He knew from his time in Vice how hard it was to nail these sods with anything more serious, such as gross indecency or sodomy. For that, you either had to catch them in the act, or get one party to inform on the other. The former had been known to happen, though it required surveillance of suspected premises, which was costly in terms of manpower and didn’t always produce results. The latter was unlikely, for obvious reasons. To level such an accusation was by definition self-incriminating, unless you were talking about indecent assault, which was another matter.

  There was a photograph in the file, which confirmed that the James Neville with a criminal record was the same James Neville whose body had been dumped in the London Docks. As far as an address was concerned, at the time of his arrest this was given as ‘No Fixed Abode’. So any hope of saving his shoe leather proved vain.