Summon Up the Blood (26 page)

He concentrated again on the salient fact: the killer had chosen to reclothe the bodies of his victims. It was as if he was trying to restore them to how they were before the blood had been drained from them. As if it was only the blood he was interested in, only the blood he wanted from them. Once he had what he wanted, he put them back in the world, more or less as they were.

Quinn looked again at the pile of clothes. He could not shake off the impression that there was something missing from it.

The killer had put them back to spread the word for him. That was the important thing: the message. The words in the cigarette cases. He did not want anything to detract from his message.

The dead youths, they were his messengers. His angels.

Another possibility suggested itself to Quinn. The killer covered the pallor because he felt it was too precious – too sacred – to be shared with the vulgar crowd. The expression ‘pearls before swine’ came to mind. The young bodies, perfected by exsanguination, became pearls.

But it was not just blood that the killer wanted from them. It was blood and buggery.

He took their blood and gave them his seed – his spending – in return; although in fact the spending must have come first. Did the killer believe that he was engaged in some kind of transaction with these youths? That the pearls of his semen were the currency with which he paid for the shedding of their blood?

Quinn would need Yelland to confirm that the same act had been committed in the case of the three new victims. But his suspicion was that it had.

If it was an exchange, an act of commerce, then it was hardly a fair one. Unless the killer believed himself to be giving something so remarkably precious that he held those few ounces of spending to be equal to every last drop of blood in another man’s body.

If so, it was an act of monstrous arrogance. Without doubt, arrogance would turn out to be the defining characteristic of this individual, the feature that drove him. He clearly considered himself to be above all laws, divine and man-made. Equally, his sense of his superiority to other men was shockingly clear.

By a similar token, perhaps he believed that he was conferring a signal honour by taking the blood. The victims should consider themselves privileged in having been chosen. In the killer’s mind, these acts signified his great generosity, his magnanimity not his cruelty.

He would expect them to be grateful!

Quinn wondered, then, how he went about choosing his victims. Were they known to him already or was there some test that led to their selection?

And what of the cleansing? To achieve that spotless luminosity, every spatter and spill of blood had been wiped from the body. Were they being cleansed to make them more worthy of their role as disseminators of his message, as harbingers? Or was it simply a question of gathering every last drop of the spilled blood, because it was the blood that the killer coveted?

Quinn imagined the moment of the blade severing the artery, the spray of blood. The killer must have been bathed in the hot rush, the victim’s own rather more costly ‘spending’. And for the killer, perhaps, the blood itself was cleansing. Not literally, but ritually. This was a kind of baptism. A purification.

A bath tub. You could fit such a quantity of liquid in a bath tub. And bathe in it.

Or in flagons, which you could draw upon as your thirst dictated. Or if not thirst, some darker appetite.

Quinn thought he remembered that one of the new inscriptions Sir Edward had shared with him had contained the word ‘holy’. It would have been a simple matter to check, as he still had the sheet of paper on him. But at that moment Dr Yelland was working away at the translucent veil of skin, lifting it slowly away from the torso.

It was impossible for Quinn to look away from that. Indeed, he could not consider doing anything until that was completed. His very thoughts were frozen.

At last the young man was opened up at the chest and abdomen, the undersides of skin lying in slack folds around the wide placid wound inflicted by the surgeon’s scalpel. Quinn’s gaze rushed in upon the confused mystery revealed, like water sucked into a drain. He had seen enough dissected bodies to know immediately that something was amiss. The predominant colour was a sapped grey, not the usual drenched red. Only the bones held on to their customary pink tinge.

It is difficult to drain a bone,
concluded Quinn.

His mind resumed its work, churning macabre speculations, until such time as a rare, startling insight should float to the surface.

He came back to the idea that the killer believed himself to be engaged in some form of religious rite. The cleansing of the bodies had suggested it originally. But now he considered the possibility that the blood was imbibed in an act of unholy communion. It was the wine of a hellish Eucharist. The semen he had delivered stood for the flesh, taken through the fundament rather than the mouth. A perversion of everything holy. Blasphemy added to atrocity.

The dark taboo at the heart of the dead youth continued to be explored. What the murderer had begun, the good doctor was completing.

Bittlestone’s words came back to him yet again:
I don’t know how I would feel to watch it. Perhaps I ought to find out.

Had the killer said something similar to himself?
I don’t know how I would feel to kill him
. . .
Perhaps I ought to find out.

But if it was only about that, then why repeat the act?

Because he discovered that he liked the way it felt.

Was it even possible that Bittlestone was the killer? Quinn had seriously entertained the question for the first time in the car, when he had seen the journalist light his Set cigarette. Was it not curious that he had come forward when he had, providing them with the identity now of three of the victims, and only withholding the identity of the one with whom he knew Quinn had had dealings?

What was his game?

Of course, it made no sense that the killer would take such a risk. Unless his arrogance was even greater than Quinn had suspected.

To have three bodies come to light while he was in the office of the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, what a delicious thrill that must have given him! Had he somehow engineered the situation to create that moment?

What fools he must take them for, to dare to play such games.

He was impatient too. What had he said in Quinn’s office that time?
‘Your investigation has come to a grinding halt.’
And so he provided them with information to move the investigation on.

Certainly he had all the necessary arrogance to be the killer.

It was as if he were giving them a head start, so confident was he that they would not be able to catch him.

But no, he could not quite fit Bittlestone into the silhouetted shadow he was hunting. He suspected that the distaste he felt towards the man’s sexual habits was clouding his judgement.

Leaving aside the evidence of sodomy, it was far more likely that the killings were perpetrated by someone who shared Quinn’s disgust at men like Bittlestone, a disgust that Quinn felt all the more sharply now that he had read more of
The Profession of Shame
.

The murders were a judgement meted out on them.

Quinn was forced to consider the possibility that the murderer was not a natural sodomite. That he did what he did for a purpose other than sexual gratification. If this were so, what aroused him was not the excitement of a sexual act with a man; it was the power that he had over the life and death of another human. It was the thrill, the exultation of slaughter.

He became a god. A god like Set, the animal-headed monster on the cigarette tin. A being capable of anything; utterly amoral, unfettered by the considerations that restrained other men. In the words of the first inscription,
entirely free
.

The youth lay like an unwrapped parcel on the dissecting table. A gift; the killer’s gift to the world.

Quinn had seen enough. As he stood up to leave, he felt something fall from his lap. Looking down, he saw his hat roll away from his feet.

H
e felt the dryness in his throat before he came to.

He felt it as a painful contraction of the darkness in which he was suspended. In fact, the tightness intensified at various points of his dimly growing awareness of himself. He felt the pain before he knew who he was. Or where he was. Or how he came to be there.

He felt himself trapped by the heaviest weight he had ever borne: some part of the darkness that had the weight of infinity bearing down on it. Some part of the darkness that was inside him. He mustered his strength to move this great weight but was defeated by the effort.

The darkness punished him. It pinched and bit him. It forced its invisible claws into him and scratched.

It pressed down on him from above. Beneath him, it formed itself into something solid and unyielding, a cold, hard, uncompromising otherness against which he began to sense the edges of his being. There was no comfort in this burgeoning awareness. Only pain.

He tried to swallow but could not. He realized that the great weight he had struggled to move was his tongue. But there was something else pushing down on that. Something in his mouth.

He opened his eyes. The darkness changed, became edged with the possibility of light. But it was still darkness.

He wondered if he were dead. The pain suggested he was not.

No, it was simply that he had been blindfolded. And when he tried to move a hand to pull the blindfold away, he discovered that his hands had been bound behind his back.

He was lying on his side, he realized. He felt the boards against his cheek. His left arm was numb, trapped under the weight of his body. The other arm was twisted round uncomfortably by the binding.

His knees were pulled up. Straightening his legs, he realized that he had been bound at the ankles too.

He rolled over on to his back. He tried kicking his legs apart. Put all his tensioned strength into the effort. His body rocked blindly in a great upheaval of writhing, but caused barely a ripple in the darkness. His bonds had been tightly knotted.

He was trussed up good and proper. The queer snob had got the better of him, all right.

It was then that Inchball gave some thought to the acts that might have been perpetrated on him while he had lain unconscious. It almost seemed as if he felt the fellow’s hands all over him now. So vivid was the sensation that it was inconceivable that it was anything other than a memory.

His writhing became violent and convulsive, as if an electric current was being passed through him.

He opened his mouth to give voice to the revulsion that racked his body. But a soft spreading weight pressed down on his tongue and sucked the moisture from his palate, making it impossible for him to utter anything other than a few stifled cries.

The darkness remained undisturbed.

Quinn spread the morning’s newspapers across his desk. Despite its neutral tone and scarcity of detail, the press communiqué jointly issued by Sir Edward and Sir William Nott-Bower, the commissioner of the City of London Police, had resulted in some predictably lurid headlines.

FOUR DEAD IN GHASTLY MURDERS ACROSS LONDON

GHASTLY SERIES OF MURDERS HITS CAPITAL

FOUR GHASTLY MURDERS! POLICE BAFFLED!

There was no mention of exsanguination, unless the frequent use of the word
bloodthirsty
was to be taken as a reference to it. The
Clarion
had managed to work it into a headline:
BLOODTHIRSTY MURDERER WREAKS HAVOC IN GHASTLY TRAIL OF DEATH.
given the method of dispatch, this was unexceptionable. However, Quinn baulked at their description of the victims as ‘pallid youths’.

At least they did not attempt to make any coded allusions to unnatural sexual practices – not so far as Quinn could detect, at any rate. However, there seemed little doubt now that there was a homosexual aspect to the crimes. Dr Yelland’s report had arrived on Quinn’s desk first thing that morning. The presence of seminal deposits in the rectums of the three latest victims confirmed that they too had been recently sodomized.

Even without these details, the accounts were shocking enough: four violent deaths visited upon the city in close propinquity. It was deemed especially disturbing that the victims had had their throats cut. Quinn reflected that it was undoubtedly unpleasant to be murdered by any method, but the cutting of throats always seemed to release a peculiar frisson. Nightmares, haunted by razor-wielding phantoms, could no longer be contained in sleeping minds; they leached out on to the streets to fill the shadowed doorways.

Some of the papers speculated that the murders might have been carried out by criminal gangs. The cutthroat razor was held to be a favoured weapon of such types. There were dark hints about the putative criminality of the deceased in an attempt, no doubt, to reassure decent, law-abiding folk that they had nothing to fear. If it was a case of the criminal fraternity turning on itself, these events could be safely dismissed. It was almost as if they had taken place in another city, on the other side of the world.

It was made clear that little was known about the victims other than their youthfulness. No names were given, on the grounds that the police had not yet been able to establish their identities beyond doubt.

The
Clarion
wondered whether it was in fact a razor that had caused the fatal wounds. Could it not be a
dao
or a
kris
, or some other bladed weapon of eastern origin? For that matter, was it not well known that the Tribe of Israel used sharp knives in their ritual sacrifices?

The locations at which the bodies had been found seemed to have captured the collective imagination of Fleet Street. Certainly, it inspired the hacks when it came to the question of giving the murderer a name. The proximity to the Thames led the
Daily Mail
to dub him The Riverside Ripper. Quinn winced at that one. Could this killer really be described as a Ripper? Nothing had been ripped out. Slasher was more accurate, which was the word the
Daily Express
favoured, to whom the killer was The City Slasher.