Summon Up the Blood (30 page)

I don’t defend my conduct. I explain it.

Quinn wondered if this was the murderer’s intention in quoting from
De Profundis
.

Oscar Wilde’s letter to Ross ended with a sentimental image:

On the other side of the prison wall there are some poor black soot-besmirched trees which are just breaking out into buds of an almost shrill green. I know quite well what they are going through. They are finding expression.

Again Quinn tried to relate this to the murderer’s intentions. Was he not also, through his crimes, finding expression? There was another sentence earlier in Wilde’s letter:

I need not remind you that mere expression is to an artist the supreme and only mode of life.

Did the murderer consider himself to be an artist, therefore?

And so Quinn came to the first line of the
De Profundis
itself, the words which Petter had identified in the inscription. As they appeared in the book, they were preceded by three points of ellipsis:

. . . SUFFERING is one very long moment.

Naturally, all Quinn could think about was what had been omitted from the text. This was the instinct of the detective: the solution, always, was in what was withheld. He turned the pages quickly and saw that the text was littered with such marks of ellipsis throughout. Turning back to the frontispiece, he could find no acknowledgement that the text had been abridged. Nor was there any indication in Wilde’s note to Ross that he wished for sections of his work to be excised before publication.

Quinn turned back to the beginning. Whatever had been taken out, those six words remained, the six words that were so close to the heart of a murderer that he chose to have them engraved on an object left in the pocket of one of his victims:

Suffering is one very long moment.

In the passage from which these words were taken, Wilde was evidently referring to a prisoner’s experience of time. But the killer’s meaning was not necessarily the same as Wilde’s.

But it was interesting to Quinn to see where Wilde took the idea. He spoke of time circling ‘round one centre of pain’. Given the crimes perpetrated on the four young men, this was a telling phrase.

Did the murderer in some way seek to suspend time through these atrocities? To create centres of pain around which time would circle, without ever moving forward? In Wilde, time’s immobility was presented as a negative concept. He spoke of ‘each dreadful day in the very minutest detail like its brother’. But if one read the words without any empathy for the experience that lay behind them, could they be taken as some kind of instructional handbook, a guide to harnessing eternity? Or to put it another way, to achieving immortality?

No doubt it required the reader to invest Wilde’s metaphors with a literal truth; to consider him more than just a disgraced writer: a god, or at the very least a prophet; and to look upon his literary self-justifications as holy writ. And to the question ‘What kind of man would do that?’ there was no meaningful answer other than ‘a madman’.

Quinn continued reading. It was not long before he came upon a phrase that reinforced his interpretation, which at the same time brought to mind one of the other inscriptions:

For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow.

The inscription he had in mind had said:

Where there is sorrow there is holy ground.

Quinn read on. Within a few pages, he had found the phrase itself. His heart beat violently as he read and reread the passage in which it occurred:

. . .
sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things. There is nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought to which sorrow does not vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation. The thin, beaten-out leaf of tremulous gold that chronicles the direction of forces the eye cannot see is in comparison coarse. It is a wound that bleeds when any hand but the hand of love touches it, and even then must bleed again, though not in pain.

Where there is sorrow there is holy ground. Some day people will realize what that means. They will know nothing of life until they do
. . .

That brief passage filled almost an entire page of the book. Quinn was able to tear through the pages in little over an hour. He was not reading it for Wilde’s meaning, but for the murderer’s. In particular, he was looking for the passages from which the other two inscriptions were taken.

He did not find them. He was forced to concede that
To be entirely free
and
Seek entrance to the House of Pain!
were not taken from
De Profundis
. At any rate, they were not present in the edition he had before him.

He turned to the front of the book, where he discovered that this was the eleventh edition, printed in 1908; the first edition was dated 1905. Some matter had undoubtedly been omitted, presumably on the grounds of public decency or for legal reasons. But how had the murderer had access to such material?

Quinn laid down the book. The empty Set tin was still on his desk. He regretted sharing his last few cigarettes with Inchball and Macadam. A Set cigarette was just what he needed, given what was required of him now: to imagine that he was the murderer, reading the book for passages that would inspire or affirm his sanguinary course.

As he read, he noted down passages that struck him.

Sorrow, then, and all that it teaches one, is my new world.

. . . the lessons hidden in the heart of pain.

Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask.

There is about sorrow an intense, an extraordinary reality.

. . . the voiceless world of pain . . .

. . . may beauty and sorrow be made one in their meaning and manifestation.

. . . he regarded sin and suffering as being in themselves beautiful and holy things and modes of perfection.

There were more, many more, along the same lines. Indubitably, it was a selective reading, which led to a distorted interpretation of Wilde’s argument. His meaning was twisted round – inverted, one might almost say. As far as Quinn could tell, Wilde’s theme was Christian repentance. His great idea – his ‘dangerous’ idea as he put it himself – was that sin and suffering were essential to Christian salvation and, in fact, central to the Christian experience. They were therefore beautiful in themselves. He insisted that suffering was not a mystery, as conventional clergymen might have it, but a revelation. One could not be a true Christian, unless one sinned, he seemed to be saying. And indeed, he came close to representing Christ as positively wanting us to be sinners. Another passage caught Quinn’s eye:

But it is when he deals with a sinner that Christ is most romantic, in the sense of most real. The world had always loved the saint as being the nearest possible approach to the perfection of God. Christ, through some divine instinct in him, seems to have loved the sinner as being the nearest approach to perfection in man.

This could almost be taken for a manifesto for sin, with a Christian justification. True, Wilde went on to acknowledge the necessity of repentance, but it was almost in passing. Given his emphasis on sin and suffering, it was easy to overlook this part of his thesis.

‘Will you be much longer, sir?’ It was Macadam. He and Inchball were at the door, ready for home.

Quinn took out his fob watch. It was six o’clock. ‘I still have more work to do here.’ As well as the
De Profundis
, Petter had provided Quinn with two other books by the same author,
The Picture of Dorian Gray
and
Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories
.

‘May we help you with anything?’ asked Macadam.

Inchball gave a snarl that indicated how little he appreciated the offer made on his behalf.

‘No, no. You two may go. I must look at these myself.’

‘There’s always tomorrow,’ said Inchball.

‘Yes, tomorrow,’ echoed Quinn distractedly.

‘If you’re sure then, sir,’ said Macadam.

‘Quite sure.’ But as his two sergeants left the room, Quinn was overcome by a wave of panic. The task ahead of him seemed insurmountable. In that instant, all his confidence drained from him. He was left only with the empty fluttering of apprehension. He had latched on to these books, as if he were certain they would yield secrets crucial to the case. But really, he had no way of knowing.

The solution could just as easily lie in evidence that was denied to him, like the ellipses in the text of
De Profundis
. And so the hours spent poring over the books would be wasted hours. In the meantime, the killer might even now be preparing to commit his next crime.

Quinn looked briefly, longingly, towards the window. He imagined himself on the other side, heading back to the lodging house in West Kensington, one small figure among the multitudes. Perhaps tonight he would dine with the others. Ignoring the sniggers of Messrs. Timberley and Appleby, he would look more closely into the pewter-grey eyes of Miss Dillard. And in that moment, he would know that he was not alone.

But he did not go home. He did not even cross to the window to look down upon his imagined self trudging into the settling dusk. He stayed at his post and felt his loneliness expand around him.

T
he day began in a soft milky haze. Quinn stood at the window, flexing the hunched hours out of his spine. He looked down, as if he half-expected to see his imagined self scurrying back along the embankment into work. Flecks of silver were borne away on the river, a flotsam of cold brilliance. His capacity for imaginative identification, which served him so well in his work, stretched to the Thames itself. For a moment, he was a rolling weight of water, a blind, heedless force, impelled by a tidal compulsion.

His stomach grumbled testily, reminding him he was a man.

When he came back from the canteen, refreshed after a cup of tea and a toasted teacake, he found Macadam already at his desk. Inchball was hanging up his hat.

‘What’s the plan for today, sir?’ said Macadam.

‘Gimme a chance to get through the bloody door,’ complained Inchball as he took his seat.

Quinn thought again what it would be like to be a river; in other words to live without the need for making plans and issuing commands. He rubbed his face vigorously, as if to pummel out his exhaustion. ‘It is going to be a busy morning.’ He felt the weight of everything they had to do suddenly pressing down on him. No amount of rolling his shoulders could dispel it.

By the afternoon, the rain had returned. There was a vengeful quality to its renewed persistence, as if it were punishing the world for enjoying its absence over the last few days. It was everywhere, inescapable; quickly drenching clothes, carried indoors in the damp, bedraggled auras of those taking shelter, dripping from eaves with a heavy patterned rhythm. As it fell, it swallowed up all the soot floating in the polluted air and threw it down in dirty gobbets. The spattered pigeons were outraged by the insult.

And it brought with it an unseasonal darkness. The intimations of spring were forgotten, summer’s promise mocked; the year had skidded forward several months to a wintry misery.

Beyond the black railings on Great Russell Street, in the forecourt of the British Museum, an unusually resilient crowd was gathered. But if anyone had paused to study those milling there, it would have soon become apparent that a high preponderance of them were dressed in the black capes and helmets of policemen. The rain bounced off them. They gave every impression of being men who had stood up to far worse.

The Special Crimes Department’s Ford Model T pulled up. The four men in it hesitated, a hunkered fixity rooting them to their seats. They looked out through the rain-streaked gloom towards the distant pagan glow coming from the museum interior.

‘If the rain don’t put him off, then the sight of all those bobbies will,’ muttered Inchball, who was in the back of the car with the artist Petter. ‘With respect and all that, sir.’

‘Stay in the car, Inchball,’ ordered Quinn without looking round. ‘Fetherstonhaugh knows you.’ Quinn seemed to be waiting for some signal, a change in the drumbeat of the rain on the canopy of the car, perhaps. At last, he must have heard whatever he was listening for. He adjusted the position of his bowler and checked the fastenings of his Ulster. ‘Mr Petter, Macadam. Let us do this.’

Quinn launched himself out into the rain without looking back to see if he was followed.

Under the portico he waited for Petter and Macadam to catch him up.

‘You know the disposition of the place, Mr Petter?’

‘I do.’

‘If you don’t mind, I would appreciate the opportunity to browse the Egyptian gallery briefly on our way.’

Quinn could not have said what he hoped to gain from such a detour. He did not, of course, expect to find the murderer there. But perhaps, in a room full of animal-headed gods, he would confront the forces that drove such a monster as they were hunting.

It soon became clear to him that what he was looking for was a sighting of the god Set.

He glimpsed sphinxes, a giant scarab, lion-headed goddesses, a divine baboon serenely flaunting an erection, as well as a strange fat-bellied creature carved from liver-spotted stone, which the accompanying card informed him was a pregnant hippopotamus. But there was no representation of the Egyptian god of chaos in the gallery that he could see. Instead, he sensed its presence stalking the rooms, a shadow moving at the periphery of his vision.

Quinn looked into the faces of the men and women wandering bemused among the outlandish statues. If one of them had snarled back at him with a dog-faced snout, or snapped shut a beak, he would not have been surprised.

They left the company of savage gods and stepped into a tableau of naked youths, their stony beauty only marred by the occasional missing body part.

Petter turned to Quinn expectantly.

‘So, this is where . . .’ Quinn cast a discreet glance around the gallery, ‘. . . where you come to draw?’