The White Feather Killer Read online

  If only he could see one thing through. One bold deed. And enlisting in Kitchener’s army would be the most splendidly bold deed of all.

  The ranks of men waiting in line seemed to sense his cowardice. If they looked at him at all, it was with a quick dismissive glance, before they puffed out their chests and stood tall. In the glow of the warm, approving sunlight, they appeared cleansed, sanctified even. Whatever sins they had committed up to this point were wiped away. They stood immaculate and pure now.

  As he turned away, he felt the weight of a pitiless depression possess his heart.

  That afternoon, back at his desk in the sunless offices of Griffin Mutual in Holborn, Felix felt every heavy tick of the big clock on the wall like a hammer blow on the fragile carapace of his self-esteem. He did not even dare to lift his head to look around at his fellow clerks, their backs bent in meek and uniform compliance.

  It was partly shame that inhibited him. But also, he accepted bitterly, fear. If Mr Birtwistle caught any of them looking away from their ledger book he would come down on the slacker like a ton of bricks.

  He was destined to live out his life on that high perch, without once having done anything notable, not even having the courage to look up at the clock.

  He looked at his work without understanding it. The numbers jumped off the page and swam into a blur. He felt a balled wad of misery pushing its way up through his throat, his mouth clamped tightly to hold it in.

  His vision cleared for a moment, enough for him to see a drop of moisture land heavily on his page of workings. Instantly, a second drop landed beside it. And so, tears now! He allowed himself a sly glance at his colleagues on either side. They were as engrossed in their own work as he always imagined them to be. His humiliation was no less intensely felt for all that it was private.

  The shudder of a suppressed sob wracked his jaw. He took out his pocket handkerchief and dabbed the page, smudging the ink in the process. Of course! Was he stupid as well as pathetic?

  Heat flooded into his face. Mr Birtwistle was ever so particular about neatness. Felix tried to over-write the smudged numbers, but the nib of his pen churned up the soggy paper almost to the point of wearing a hole in it.

  By the time the bell rang at five o’clock, Felix had worked himself up into a state of dread and panic. It was just like that time in the third form when he had snagged his hand on the point of a 2H pencil he had sharpened with a scalpel to a dangerous acuity for Geometry. The pencil had broken his skin and he had become convinced that his blood had been poisoned with lead from the pencil. He had fainted in the middle of double Maths.

  He fled the office with his head down, into the tide of humanity on High Holborn.

  He had no clear idea where he was going, or where he wanted to go, except that he did not want to go home. He could not bear to face Mother. She had a damnable knack of making him feel worse about himself. And yet in many ways this was all her fault, for it was she who had effectively put the kibosh on his joining up. It was better if he didn’t see her just now. He couldn’t answer for the consequences if he did.

  Before long he found himself in the back streets north of Covent Garden. The day was still warm, drawing people out of their dilapidated lodgings, hungry for the last few hours of light – or for something more tangible. With a jolt of apprehension, he realized that he had wandered into the Seven Dials district.

  There was a dingy public house in the middle of the terrace. It looked more like a condemned ruin than a place of entertainment. A group of soldiers spilled out of it, taking the evening by storm. They attacked their beers with a grim determination, as if they had been ordered to get drunk. Their glee was a fierce, angry glee of shouted insults and threatening postures.

  They squared their shoulders and clogged the pavement with heedless arrogance. One or another might tap his mate to make way for a pretty girl, or any female actually. The manoeuvre would be effected with exaggerated courtesy. For the likes of Felix, of course, not one of them would give way, and so he was forced to navigate his way around them. He naturally gave them as wide a berth as possible.

  He marvelled at the women who launched themselves towards this glut of Tommies, responding to their loutish attentions with flirtatious smiles and encouraging remarks.

  Did they have no shame?

  He realized that quite possibly they did not. More than likely they were prostitutes. Certainly no decent girl would expose herself to such blandishments, in such a place. No decent girl would be seen in Seven Dials at all.

  It was then that it struck him. The reason he had been unable to sign up. He was a virgin. He did not want to die a virgin. It would be as if he had died without ever having lived.

  All he needed to do was go with one of them and then he would be ready to give his life for his country.

  He latched his hopes on to one girl in particular, whose face seemed kinder than the rest, as if she had not yet lost all potential for human sympathy. He thought he detected humour about her eyes, which were not quite so stupefied and avid as her fellows’. He could not guess her age. Perhaps she was not as young as she wished to appear. Or perhaps, he speculated with a thudding heart, she was younger than was strictly legal.

  He swallowed on a suddenly dry mouth. This was a new kind of fear.

  If he could go through with it, if he could approach her, proposition her and take her to some stinking alley to do whatever it was men did with prostitutes, if he could conquer this one fear, he could conquer anything.

  But he could hardly breathe now. He found himself panting like an overheated dog. He was a dog to be contemplating such an act.

  What would Mother say?

  It was this thought that decided him.

  He began to walk towards the girl.

  As he approached her, the signs of sympathy that he thought he had detected evaporated from her face. She was engaged in some kind of coarse badinage with a group of Tommies. There was nothing subtle or clever or charming about any of it. The laughter that it provoked was beastly.

  Felix thought of turning back, but steeled himself to stand about a pace to one side of her. But whatever words he had thought he would say deserted him.

  He could only stand there, as mute and useless as a boulder.

  At first she didn’t notice him. Then the soldiers she was with fell silent and nodded in his direction, pulling faces of exaggerated respect as they hid their smirks behind their pint pots. There was only the odd guffaw to give away their sarcastic intent.

  ‘Looks like you’ve got an admirer, miss!’ said one of them, to a round of sniggers.

  She turned at last to face him, making no attempt to hide her disappointment. ‘’Ere,’ she said. ‘Does your mother know you’re out?’

  The soldiers greeted this devastating witticism with ugly laughter. They were not laughing so much because they thought it funny; they were laughing because it insulted him. They were seeing him off with their laughter.

  Once again, Felix felt his face flood with heat. How shameful it was always to signal his humiliation like a girl.

  He turned sharply and hurried away from their mockery, tears pricking his eyes.

  FOUR

  DCI Silas Quinn stood once again on Victoria Embankment, looking up at New Scotland Yard.

  He was dressed in an overcoat, a brand-new ulster, and a bowler hat. The coat was his trademark. His last ulster had been taken from him and burnt at Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum. By that time it was in a terrible state anyway, filthy and ripped, no longer the symbol of a brilliant police detective.

  It was a warm day in late August. Despite the heat, it had seemed important to him to wear the ulster today. It would signal to his men that he was back and that he meant business.

  A group of uniformed bobbies came out of the entrance. They seemed cocksure and heedless, sealed off from him in their camaraderie. Quinn drew himself up self-consciously, expecting them to recognize him. They passed him by without a second glance.
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  The building had always inspired powerful emotions in Quinn. He knew the story of the 2,500 tons of granite that constituted its lower stories. It had been quarried and dressed by convicts. That seemed both fitting and cruel, as if criminals as a class were being co-opted into their own prosecution.

  His gaze swung upwards to the roof, where his own department was housed, in a single cramped attic room.

  What if his sergeants, Macadam and Inchball, greeted him with the same indifference that the bobbies had shown? No, he could not believe that of them. They had stood by him, for all the grounds he had given them to question his authority. At the thought of their loyalty he felt overcome by an emotion that threatened to unman him before he had set foot inside. He dabbed away the moisture that was welling in his eyes.

  He carried a rolled-up copy of the Daily Mirror beneath one arm. He opened it up and read the headline, as if to distract himself from his doubts:

  BRITISH MARINES PREPARE TO DEFEND OSTEND: “READY AND ANXIOUS TO MEET THE GERMANS.”

  The photograph below it showed men dug in, peering over a trench ‘on the lookout for Uhlans’ in the words of the caption. It was difficult to judge what each of the Tommies in the picture was feeling. One man’s expression was either resilient or apprehensive, Quinn could not decide. Whichever it was, it was certainly alert. The headline seemed to suggest that they were eager for the fight. And yet, one also had a sense of what was at stake.

  Of course, it was all a set-up. There were no Uhlans about to come over the horizon towards them just at that moment. The photographer would not be positioned where he was if an assault was expected any time soon.

  Even so, the headline and the photograph chimed with Quinn’s own mood – or at least with what he felt he should be feeling.

  The time that had been allotted to him for his recovery had come to an end. Therefore he had to assume that he was recovered. Certainly, he was bored of doing nothing. Reading daily in the papers about the massing troops and imminent battles had begun to convince him that the war was something more than just a bad dream. The reports had instilled in him a restless craving for activity of some kind.

  He folded the newspaper and tucked it under his arm.

  His footsteps echoed from above and below as he climbed the concrete steps to the Special Crimes Department. It gave the effect that he was both being followed and following another. He also had the sensation that the stairs would go on forever. He almost believed they had added another flight in his absence, a mysterious flight of infinite extent.

  By the time he reached the third floor, his calves were beginning to ache.

  The last investigation had taken its toll on him. What made it worse was that it all seemed to be for nothing.

  He had to shake off such thoughts. The long ascent helped him do that. He was climbing away from his old self, with its negative attitudes, towards a brighter future.

  He snorted contemptuously at the fanciful turn his thoughts had suddenly taken. Where did he get these ideas? he wondered.

  No brighter future awaited him. Just more of the same, three big men crammed into a room that was too small for them, too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter, banging their heads every time they stood up too sharply from their desks. The only good thing about the room was that it at least encouraged them to get out and do some real policing.

  More of the same, with the extra work that the war and the new laws brought in under the Defence of the Realm Act would inevitably entail. They had already questioned, before the war, whether they were becoming a branch of military intelligence. He was sure that that would be the case even more now. There was a war on. They all had to do their bit.

  The corridor in the attic was at the apex of the roof, so that it was possible, just, for a man of average height to walk along it without stooping. Most of the rooms off it were used as store rooms, stuffed with old administrative files that no one had looked at for decades or surplus equipment, forgotten and gathering dust. There were one or two civilian support offices up here. The only active service department was the SCD.

  The door was unmarked. Those who needed to find it knew where it was. But strangely, now, after his prolonged absence, he began to doubt his memory. Was this really the right door? Was there even an office there at all?

  The doorknob felt alien and resistant in his hand.

  Neither Macadam nor Inchball were at their desks. The room was airless and dusty.

  Quinn noticed that the coat-stand was missing. The chair had gone from behind Macadam’s desk. All the desks, including his own, were piled up with files and folders. Someone was already beginning to use the room as a dumping ground.

  Perhaps his sergeants had been seconded to another unit in his absence. That would make sense. But still, that was no excuse to start treating the room as if he were never coming back.

  He would get to the bottom of this.

  He pushed the files off his desk, letting them spill their contents as they fell to the floor with a startling din. Whoever had put them there could sort them out.

  He sat down behind his desk and reached for the telephone. But before his hand got there, it started to ring.

  He put the earpiece to his ear and heard a female voice: ‘Sir Edward will see you in his office immediately.’

  It was her voice, Lettice Latterly’s. He recognized it despite the thinness of the signal and the crackles that overlaid it. That was all she said before hanging up. She gave him no opportunity to respond.

  There was a world of recrimination and disappointment in her simple message.

  ‘How are you?’

  She did not look up from her typewriter at his tentative enquiry. ‘You’re to go straight in.’

  ‘Is there something wrong?’

  ‘There is a war on. Is that not wrong enough for you?’

  ‘No, I meant … with you.’

  ‘We don’t have time to discuss this now. He’s expecting you.’

  At last she looked up, but did not meet his eye. She took in his appearance and frowned. ‘Aren’t you hot in that?’

  ‘In what?’

  ‘Your coat.’

  ‘Someone took my coat-stand.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about that.’

  ‘And there are files and all sorts of rubbish in the office.’

  ‘Nothing to do with me.’

  ‘I don’t know where Macadam and Inchball are.’

  At last she looked at him properly. Her look was not unkind. ‘You had better go in. You can leave your coat with me if you like.’

  ‘It’s all right. He will have to take me as I am.’

  ‘Oh but he’s not alone.’

  ‘He’s not?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Some chap called Kell.’

  ‘Who’s he?’

  She shrugged. ‘And the assistant commissioner.’

  ‘Thompson?’

  ‘Yes.’ She gave him just enough time to take all this in, then added: ‘And Sir Michael Esslyn.’

  Esslyn was a Whitehall mandarin whom Quinn had once encountered in a previous investigation. His brush with this powerful man, although it had not resulted in any charges against Esslyn, had been enough to earn his enmity. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘I told you. A war.’

  ‘It’s gone way past that, I tell you!’

  Pale light flared in the clouds of tobacco smoke that filled Sir Edward Henry’s office, partially obscuring the face of the man who was speaking as Quinn came in. He recognized the voice, however, as Sir Michael Esslyn’s.

  Quinn could detect the sickly narcotic scent of Esslyn’s brand of opium-laced Egyptian cigarettes, which he had once smoked experimentally himself.

  But there were other smells too, pungent and noxious, and more smoke in the room than could have been produced by one cigarette. He could also hear a faint rasping sound, which came and went in regular waves.

  ‘Ah, there you are, Q
uinn.’

  Through the smoke, Quinn was able to make out the silhouette of Sir Edward Henry, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, seated behind his desk. Two men were seated in front of the desk. He recognized one as Esslyn. The other was a man in beribboned khaki, with the green band of an intelligence officer on his cap. He too was smoking a cigarette, although his seemed to have a vaguely medicinal smell. This must be Kell. Assistant Commissioner Thompson stood by the window, looking out at a view of the Thames and puffing away determinedly on a briar. He turned at Sir Edward’s greeting and blew a lungful of grey smoke towards Quinn as if to blot him out. Kell did not look up. He seemed to be absorbed in weighty thoughts. Quinn could not be sure whether Esslyn was looking at him or not. It was a disturbing sensation.

  The only one of them not smoking was Sir Edward. He looked distinctly green about the gills.

  Sir Edward gestured impatiently for Quinn to sit down. There were two vacant seats. One next to Esslyn, the other facing him and Kell. Either Quinn would align himself with these men, or place himself in opposition to them.

  He preferred to remain standing, identifying himself with the other man of action in the room.

  Sir Edward’s brows contracted in disapproval, as if this were further evidence of Quinn’s incorrigible eccentricity. ‘The feeling is, Quinn, that you have been operating rather too independently of late.’

  ‘With respect, sir, the SCD is an independent unit. You set it up that way yourself.’

  ‘Circumstances have changed. There’s a war on, in case you hadn’t noticed.’

  ‘So people keep telling me.’

  ‘Well, then. We all have to pull together. There have been times, Quinn, when your independence has bordered on insubordination. You have jeopardized other operations with your disregard for procedure. We all know what happened with your last investigation.’

  ‘Fiasco, more like.’ Esslyn tapped the ash from his cigarette pointedly.

  Assistant Commissioner Thompson shook his head, a gesture of incredulity as much as anything. ‘You’re a loose bloody cannon, Quinn.’