Summon Up the Blood (21 page)

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.

I
nchball 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 of 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.

Being on the even side of the street, the first of the possible houses he came to was number ninety-six. It was an imposing building. Inchball looked up bitterly at its four solid storeys, its cream stuccoed frontage immaculately maintained. But it turned out not to be the house he was looking for. He had to climb the steps to the front door before he discovered the discreet brass plaque announcing:
The Huguenot Home for French Governesses
.

Number 196 was on a similar scale but far less well-maintained. The front garden was overgrown. A long, untended ivy bush along the side fence obstructed the path. The stucco facade was cracked and streaked with coppery stains. A thick film of black grime dimmed the windows; the mismatched curtains were drawn in every one, even now in the middle of the day.

This had to be the place.
No plaque, this time
, Inchball noted with derision. He could see it now.
The Perverted Home for Brothers of the Bum.

No, the people who lived here were not the sort to advertise themselves. Quite the contrary. They gave every sign of having something to hide.

He battled his way past the ivy, beating away its tendrils with his umbrella. It was as if he feared the touch of the plant as somehow contaminating. This fear of contact stayed with him after he had climbed the front steps. He aimed the tip of his umbrella at the bell button and pressed.

A shrill metallic scream sounded somewhere in the depths of the house. He kept his weight leaning on to the umbrella.
No point being the shrinking violet
.

The sound of the electric bell began to grate; its harsh, unnatural monotony grew hideous. It was as if someone had found a nerve beneath his skin and was holding the point of a needle against it.

He released the pressure on his umbrella, only to find that the tip had become lodged. The bell’s ugly peal continued. He tugged and wrenched the umbrella until it came away in a lurch. But still the bell sounded. It seemed he had jammed the button in.

The door opened against a chain, not far enough to reveal much of the person on the other side, but far enough to release the distinct whiff of the house’s interior, a vaguely vegetal ripeness. ‘There’s no need to keep ringing it. I’ve heard you!’ The voice was male, well-to-do, educated – the voice of privilege.

‘It’s jammed,’ said Inchball, repeatedly ramming the button with the tip of his umbrella, in the hope that the violent action would work it loose.

‘That isn’t going to help matters. Wait here while I fetch a screwdriver.’

The door closed again.

The bell kept up its shriek of artificial panic.

The door opened again, still on the chain. A screwdriver was passed out to him, handle first. ‘Here.’

‘And what am I to do with this?’

‘You can use it to release the button.’

Inchball could see that the button had been pushed beneath the rim of its brass surround. By loosening the four screws in the surround, he was able to ease out the button with the tip of the screwdriver. It was strangely satisfying to witness its pop of release. The clatter of the bell ceased abruptly. Inchball tightened the screws before returning the screwdriver. At the same time he lodged the toe of his boot, conveniently steel-capped, into the gap.

‘You’ve just had your doorbell fixed by the Old Bill,’ he said.

‘What is this about?’ The voice was brusque and imperious.

‘I’m looking for Mr Fanshaw. Mr Henry Fanshaw. Would that be you, sir?’

‘I know the law. I don’t have to let you in. Not unless you have a warrant.’

‘Now now, sir. Why should I need a warrant? I’ve only come here for a chat.’

‘Very likely.’

‘About a friend of yours. Mr James Neville is a friend of yours, ain’t he, sir?’

‘Jimmy? What about Jimmy? Has he got himself into trouble?’

‘You could say that, sir. If you call being dead trouble.’

‘Dead? What do you mean?’

‘Ain’t you heard? I thought it was common knowledge with you lot. Your friend Jimmy has only gone and got his throat slashed.’

‘Oh my God.’

‘Sorry and all that.’

‘Poor, dear Jimmy.’

‘Yeah, well, I dare say, and all that. Now listen, ain’t you going to let me in, so as we can talk about this properly? My job is to find out who done for him, you see.’

Inchball felt the door squeeze against his foot.

‘Kindly remove your foot so that I may close the door to release the chain.’

‘If you try any funny business, sir, you will regret it.’

The vaguely vegetal smell Inchball had noticed earlier came at him in a ripe, fruity waft as the door was opened fully. The man who was now revealed was dressed respectably enough in a tweed suit, his auburn hair neatly cut, his face impeccably clean-shaven. Aged in his late forties, he had something of the air of a schoolteacher. There was a certain fussy impatience to his movements, which was the only sign Inchball could detect of his sexual inversion. Because it was his job to remark such details, he noted the colour of the man’s eyes, a muddy, pond-water green.

Before he closed the door, the man peered out warily, as if he suspected the house of being watched.

The hall was wide but gloomy. Inchball remembered all the windows at the front were curtained. He speculated that the same must be true of the back. The house felt completely sealed off.

Inchball took out his notepad and pencil. ‘Just to be clear, sir. You are Henry Fanshaw? Can you confirm that for me, please?’

‘Yes.’ It seemed to pain him to make this admission.

‘And is there anybody else in the house at present?’

‘I don’t know. There may well be. The children come and go as they please. I don’t keep tabs.’

‘The
children
, sir? Children live here?’

‘Oh, I call them my children, but they are all adults, I assure you.’

Inchball sniffed the cloying air suspiciously and licked the end of his pencil. He squinted in an effort to distinguish the blank page of his notepad from the soft grey felt of the darkness. ‘Would it be possible to go somewhere with a bit more light, sir? I can hardly see the hand in front of my face.’

Neville’s landlord led him along the hallway, down some steps towards the back of the house and into a room furnished with a long dining table and chairs. The bayed French windows at the far end were not curtained, but obscured from the outside by the overgrown foliage in the garden. Some light seeped in, but was somehow altered by its passage through the dense leaves.
Corrupted
, was a word that came into Inchball’s mind.

The fruity smell was even stronger here. Inchball quickly ascertained the source. There was a stack of greengrocer’s crates against one wall. A pyramid of shiny red fruit with star-like stalks rose out of the box on the top.

‘Pomegranates!’ cried Inchball. ‘Takes me back. My old man was a porter in Covent Garden fruit market. He used to bring us a pomegranate every now and then. Strange fruit, ain’t it? All them seeds. But if you get a juicy one, it’s delicious. Very good for you . . . leastways that’s what my old man used to say.’

‘Indeed, we eat them mainly for their salutary qualities, though I do also enjoy their mythological associations. Some scholars believe that the forbidden fruit in the bible was not an apple but a pomegranate. And of course, we all know about Persephone.’

Inchball narrowed his eyes, as if he was wondering whether this Persephone was someone he ought to take in for questioning.

‘Is there enough light in here for you to make your notes?’

The long walnut table had seen better days. Its once highly polished surface was covered with scratches, chips and stains. It was also strewn with newspapers, some of which had been cut up. Ribbons of cuttings littered the floor. There were towers of newspapers waiting to be ransacked at one end.

The other man moved hurriedly to close a drawer that had been left open in an antique escritoire on one side of the room. He turned to face Inchball, blocking his view of the escritoire. ‘Won’t you sit down?’