Summon Up the Blood (25 page)

Quinn nodded in appreciation. ‘And the third one?’

‘Perhaps you should take a look at the third one, Inspector.’

Quinn frowned at the journalist’s ominous tone. He craned over Bittlestone’s shoulder towards the dissecting tables. ‘Why can you not simply tell me whether you recognize the third body or not?’

Bittlestone stood to one side.

Quinn realized that he could not postpone the moment any longer. He approached the tables, his heart beating hard, his legs trembling, a feeling of nausea rising in his throat.

The third of the bodies was the renter who had approached him outside the Criterion the night before last.

The man came into the room tentatively, as if he was expecting – or hoping – to be denied access. Seeing Quinn and Bittlestone there already, his face flushed a deep red and he hesitated at the threshold, as if the whole situation – the three dead bodies in the room – was a cause of great embarrassment to him. His eyes stood out strangely pale, drawing the gaze with their quivering panic. They seemed to have been formed from the same marble that had been used in the slabs on which the bodies rested.

If it hadn’t been for the fact that he was wearing a surgeon’s apron, Quinn might have challenged his presence. As it was, he introduced himself. ‘Ah, good day. I am Inspector Quinn of the Special Crimes Department. I presume you have come to conduct the post-mortem examination?’

The man nodded. It seemed an involuntary movement, more of a shudder that almost took over his whole body. ‘I am Doctor Yelland, acting police surgeon. Doctor Farqueharson is on leave.’

‘He has picked a good time,’ said Quinn.

Yelland swallowed noisily.

Surely he is not going to be sick?
thought Quinn. ‘Is everything quite all right, Doctor Yelland?’

‘Three,’ said Yelland. He shook his head. ‘
Three!
’

‘Yes.’

Yelland glared at Quinn as if the excessive number of victims was his fault.

Of course, the man was out of his depth. Who wouldn’t be? They all were.

Balding and grey, the doctor at least had age, and presumably also experience, on his side. But perhaps that made it worse. In all his long career, he could never have encountered anything like this. His faltering manner did not inspire confidence; there was about him the ingrained humility of a man who knew himself to be a mediocrity. The test he had been dreading all his life had finally come, and he knew in advance that he would not be equal to it.

‘Who is this?’ Yelland pointed at Bittlestone. Like many insecure people, Yelland expressed himself with a gauche abruptness that bordered on rudeness.

‘This gentleman has been able to identify two of the bodies.’

‘Two? Good God.’

Bittlestone held out his hand. ‘George Bittlestone, of the
Daily Clarion
.’

A journalist in attendance was unlikely to put the doctor at his ease. The tremor of locked-in panic Quinn had noticed in Yelland’s eyes earlier intensified.

‘A journalist?’

‘Mr Bittlestone is not here in that capacity. He is here as a witness.’

Yelland seemed unconvinced. ‘A journalist is a journalist. I suppose it is only to be expected.’ He shook his head again. ‘Three! Three?’ It seemed he could not get past the numbers, as if their abstract simplicity was the only comprehensible thing about the case. Or perhaps it was more that the numbers had become a focus for his horror. ‘There can be no keeping three out of the papers.’

‘Are you aware, Doctor, that another body was found in Shadwell? I wonder whether the Whitechapel police surgeon’s report was made available to you?’

‘Another body? That’s four!’

Quinn could find no fault with the doctor’s arithmetic. ‘Would it be helpful for you to see the other report?’

Yelland was unexpectedly – and reassuringly – decisive. ‘No. It might prejudice my own conclusions.’

‘As you wish.’ Quinn was prepared to believe he had misjudged the doctor. He saw that the flush had drained from his face. He seemed calmer too.

Perhaps
,
thought Quinn,
it is the living that unnerve him, not the dead.

‘I suppose you want to watch?’

The question took Quinn off his guard. ‘I had not . . .’ Suddenly it all came back to him: the lifeless shiver of an excised organ poured into a steel vessel, the choking fumes of formaldehyde and disinfectant, the scalpel shaking in his hand as it probes the shrivelled skin, searching out the suctioning darkness of taboo within. These were the flickering remnants of his once broken mind, snatches of memory, mangled dream fragments, pulsating with a febrile energy.

‘Very well. But you must go up into the viewing gallery,’ continued Dr Yelland, who naturally assumed Quinn’s answer to be in the affirmative. ‘It is strange. I have no desire to watch other men go about their work. A labourer dig a trench, for example. Or a policeman pound his beat, for that matter. And yet, there is no end of people who wish to watch me carve up cadavers.’

‘It is rather gruesome,’ said Bittlestone, with a shudder of macabre excitement. ‘I don’t know how I would feel to watch it. Perhaps I ought to find out.’

‘No,’ said Quinn sharply. ‘I am afraid I cannot allow it. I must insist that you go back to the Yard and await your instructions from Sir Edward. Sergeant Macadam will drive you there. Kindly tell him that I shall make my own way back.’

‘You intend to stay?’ Bittlestone’s tone was resentful.

‘I do.’

‘And observe the post-mortem?’

‘That is my intention.’

‘Why should you watch it and not I?’

‘Because I am the detective in charge of the police investigation and you are . . .’ Quinn hesitated as he ran through all the possible ways he might describe Bittlestone in contradistinction to himself. ‘Not.’

Bittlestone opened his mouth as if to voice an objection but thought better of it. ‘No matter. You have saved me from myself. I ought to be grateful to you.’

Quinn watched him out of the room before turning to Yelland. ‘One of the victims – the one on the furthest table to the left – was alive on the night of the twenty-fourth. That may help with a time of death.’

‘I see. How do you know that?’

‘I spent some of the evening in his company.’

‘You know him?’

‘No. I would not say that. I met him in the course of my investigations.’ Quinn glanced over to the third table. He remembered the young man’s hand in his own, his breath on his face, his touch against his cheek. It was almost as if, by superimposing these memories on the body, he sought to will it back to life; just as – in his dreams – his father had been able to reanimate those other nameless dead. ‘I should have warned him. I didn’t even try to warn him.’

‘You weren’t to know.’

Quinn was startled by the voice. He had forgotten about Dr Yelland. He was thinking of his father. It was to his father that he had addressed his self-accusing remarks. He looked Yelland up and down thoroughly, as if searching for some small speck of his father on him. ‘If I had warned him, he might still be alive.’

‘I must get on with the examination,’ said Yelland, who had evidently reached the limit of his capacity for consolation. His gaze kept flitting over to the cadavers, as if he were impatient to join them.

Y
elland started with the body of the young renter who had propositioned Quinn. The first thing he had to do was remove the clothes.

Quinn thought of what Bittlestone had said before he had dismissed him.
I don’t know how I would feel to watch it. Perhaps I ought to find out.

Was that the only reason he was sitting there now, forcing himself to observe this act of legitimized violation?

No, the case required it.
It was his duty as lead investigating officer to attend the medical examination of the victims’ bodies, wherever possible.

The killer had dressed these young men. He had been the last one to gaze on their naked bodies before enclosing them in their own immaculate clothes. Quinn told himself that to witness the reversal of that process somehow took him closer to the killer. As Dr Yelland slowly peeled away the layers of material, Quinn could not help thinking that it was a more respectful and patient undressing at a stranger’s hands than any they had been used to in life.

Quinn felt a sudden revulsion at his own detachment. How could he make such a cynical observation, even in the privacy of his own mind? But it wasn’t long before he began to doubt the revulsion as counterfeit.

The fact was that he continued watching.

The doctor had the jacket open now and was carefully shifting the inert body to work the shoulders loose. Next, Yelland untied the necktie and removed the collar. How careful and seemingly loving were his ministrations. It was as if he believed the body was a sleeping baby who might awake if his movements were too abrupt.

Had the killer exercised a similar tenderness when dressing him?

The doctor folded each article of apparel and placed it in a pile on a table to one side. And so the undressing was infinitely drawn out, an act of measured patience as the doctor moved unhurriedly between the two tables.

As the pile of clothes grew on one table, more and more flesh was exposed on the other.

Quinn watched in grim fascination. He could not tear his eyes away from the spreading pallor. And so he discovered that he had moved through horror. He had reached a point where he waited eagerly for each new expanse of whiteness to be uncovered. He welcomed it, wanted it – was soothed by it.

He thought of how he had acquired a taste for Set cigarettes. And the thought induced a craving for one now. How decadent it would be to smoke an opium-soaked cigarette while watching the post-mortem dissection of a young renter!

Was it this easy to become corrupted?

Quinn felt a tingling sensation around his crown. He reached a hand up to his head, half-expecting to find his hat in place. It was a stupid thing to do, as he could see his hat resting on his knees.

Somehow the sensation, which was not dispelled by brushing his fingers through his hair, called him back to himself. He resisted the urge to light a Set, though he did find it calming to know that he had the tin in his pocket, should he need it.

And now the doctor was peeling the last item of clothing, a sock, from the body. The pallor was complete, unmitigated. It seemed to vibrate with menace and potential. Quinn’s gaze drank it in.

Why did the killer choose to cover this up? Surely the natural instinct would be to flaunt it? To exult in an act of fierce candour?
See what I have done!

Yes, there was no necessity for the bodies to be dressed at all, if one thought about it. It would in fact require a great deal of effort to clothe a dead body. You would have to struggle against the weight of the corpse, without the compliance or cooperation of the one being dressed. If the killer took such pains, he must have had good reason.

Was it a failure of nerve at the last, a sudden fear of what he had unleashed?

But Quinn could not believe that anyone capable of creating that terrible pallor would have baulked at displaying it. If he chose to dress the bodies, it was because he wanted them clothed. There was undoubtedly some significance in the act.

The pile of clothes was complete, at least in the sense that there was nothing else to be taken from the body and added to it. And yet Quinn could not shake off the sense that something was missing.

Quinn watched as Yelland conducted his external examination of the body. The doctor walked slowly around the dissecting table, from time to time holding a magnifying glass to an area of the epidermis. He lifted a hand and peered into the wound at the wrist. Then, taking a pair of tweezers, picked at the wound, extracting something invisible which he shook into a glass container. He repeated the process on the other wrist, then on each of the ankles.

At last the time had come for the doctor to turn the body. So vibrant was that pallor, a force or energy in its own right, that it seemed almost as though it would be able to turn itself. All it wanted was a tap on the shoulder from Dr Yelland.

But no. The doctor had to heave and pull at the dead weight of it, rolling it like an awkward log over itself. When the turning was done, Yelland cast a questioning glance up towards Quinn, as if he were demanding applause.

It’s not that
, thought Quinn.
He’s seen the lack of external hypostases.

Indeed, the unbroken pallor extended to the back of the body. Yelland pored over this with his magnifying glass, like a historian who has discovered a rare and ancient document. Quinn tried to imagine what the doctor must be experiencing: the strange, dark thrill of being confronted by something that should not be.

Yelland looked up at the gallery again, but now his expression was one of outrage.

You knew about this?
was what the angry glare of his eyes transmitted.

Quinn had tried to warn him, by discreetly offering to share the findings of the previous police surgeon. But Yelland had wanted to discover it for himself. Perhaps that was the way it had to be.

The doctor rolled the corpse back over. And of course the front of the body was more unnerving than the back, more of a confrontation that one wanted to shy away from.

One practical consideration, in terms of the killer’s clothing of the bodies, was simply that the clothes provided the vehicle in which the killer’s messages were transmitted. Without clothes there would have been no pockets. And without pockets, where would he have put the cigarette cases?

But there were other ways the words could have been conveyed.

Quinn watched as Dr Yelland made the first incision in the dead youth’s skin.

That was one method. The words could have been carved into the flesh. Quinn had seen that done before, a bloody scrawl of wounding words.

Once again Quinn tried to conjure up a sense of self-revulsion, this time at his capacity for macabre speculation. He came nowhere close to succeeding.

He put it to himself that it was his job to engage in macabre speculation.