The editor was on his feet now. ‘What are you waiting for? Get over there!’
Bittlestone took the stairs two at a time, rushing towards the thundering rumble of the presses. Finch’s remark about his eye prompted him to feel for his dark glasses in his jacket pocket. He must have left them on his desk. No matter. The story was more important than his vanity, although there was perhaps a practical consideration. He knew from experience that the less obtrusive he made himself the more likely he was to get the story. His wound would only draw attention. He hesitated at the bottom of the stairs and was on the verge of going back for the glasses when the sight of the brilliantly illuminated, constantly turning rollers spurred him to go on.
The explosion happened as he walked across the foyer in front of the presses. There was no warning. No premonitory change in the air pressure. No sound of running footsteps. There was just a blinding flash, a boom so loud that it seemed to hollow out his ear drums, and a deep shooting pain burrowing into his eyes. He felt himself lifted by the blast. As if the sound of the explosion had formed a giant hand capable of taking hold of a man and throwing him off his feet. A rain of fine shards fell around him and into him. The strange thing was the unaccountable thing: there was no smoke.
The weight of the world came up to hit him on the back of the head as he landed. Then everything went black.
FORTY-SEVEN
Macadam kept the motor ticking over as he waited for a gap in the traffic. But the Strand was for the moment packed with vehicles, their headlights piercing the darkness with questing impatience, their horn blasts like the bleats of tethered animals.
Quinn felt the throb of the Model T’s engine in every joint of his bones. He was thinking of his father. He peered out into the night, expecting at any moment to see Grant-Sissons. Lurking beneath a street light perhaps, or sinking back into a shop doorway. It was truer to say he was willing the man to appear.
Two suicides in three days. It was as if the universe was forcing him to confront his past. And Grant-Sissons was the nearest he had come in years to finding answers to the questions of the past.
‘You let him go, guv?’
Quinn turned to face Inchball’s question. ‘For now, yes.’
‘So he’s to get off scot-free for making a bleedin’ monkey of us all?’
‘I would hardly describe the reception he received from Mademoiselle Eloise as scot-free.’ But Quinn knew this was disingenuous. Eloise’s rage was meat and drink to Waechter. He had lapped it up. ‘At any rate, I need to confer with Sir Edward. He might wish for the whole Cecil Court affair to be swept under the carpet. We did not exactly cover ourselves in glory over that. Pressing a prosecution would only bring a dubious episode back into the public eye. In addition, it would serve to increase Waechter’s notoriety.’
Inchball glumly pointed out a more serious obstacle. ‘We can’t touch him for it. Don’t have no evidence, do we? Unless he confesses. Or we find that one-eyed bitch an’ she tells us who put her up to it.’
There was a disapproving sound from Macadam in the front.
‘Well, it’s true, ain’t it?’
‘More serious is the question of the connection between Waechter’s irresponsible prank and the murder of Dolores Novak.’
Macadam seemed to have given up trying to pull out into the Strand. ‘Do you think Waechter could have killed the Novak woman, sir?’ he asked.
‘The murder of the victim and the removal of eyes suggests an escalation from the first attack. But if the first attack is not an attack at all – as it appears not to be – but simply a stupid stunt, well, then … what are we to make of that? It is not an escalation. It may actually be unconnected, except thematically. And the theme of vision – the fixation with eyes – that could have been taken independently from Waechter’s film by a particularly disturbed spectator.’
‘It could be anyone!’ cried Inchball in dismay.
‘Not anyone. Someone linked to the film. Possibly someone who was present at the party. That is the line I would encourage us to pursue.’
His sergeants nodded in unison.
And then they heard it. A distinct boom, followed by the tinkling of glass, a sound more refined than the piano in the Savoy.
‘Good God!’
‘Wha’ the bleedin’ ’ell?’
‘It came from that direction,’ said Macadam, pointing east. ‘What shall I do, sir? Back to the Yard, or …’
‘We should go and investigate. By the sounds of it, it was very close.’
‘Fleet Street, I reckon,’ said Inchball. ‘We could leave it for the City of London Force. Technically speaking, it’s none of our bleedin’ business.’
‘This is beyond police jurisdictions, Inchball. It could be the beginning of some kind of attack on our national interests. On our freedoms. An attempt to cow us before open hostilities are declared.’
Inchball nodded. A note of admiration seemed to have entered his voice. ‘How very Bismarckian.’
The traffic on the Strand began to move. Macadam eased his way into it.
The sign above the devastated window read: H AIL C ARION.
Quinn struggled to make sense of the letters, until he at last made out the fire-blackened T, E, D, Y and L. And now he struggled to make sense of the coincidence.
The target of the bomb blast was the Daily Clarion. Quinn remembered the last time he had seen Harry Lennox: at the offices of Visionary Productions in Cecil Court, moments after the hoax attack, and shortly before the murder of Dolores Novak. What was the connection? Was there a connection? It didn’t seem possible.
Lennox was now walking towards him, his shoes crunching on the fragments of glass that littered his foyer like brittle confetti. An expression of bewilderment and betrayal was directed at Quinn, almost as if Lennox blamed him for what had happened. But no – it was simple incomprehension.
Quinn could imagine well enough what he was thinking. How could this have happened? To him, to Harry Lennox? Fortune’s favourite.
For Quinn, the more interesting question was why.
It was strange, he had to admit, how the confusion and destruction focused his mind. The air was filled with shouts. Men ran in every direction, with the purposeless energy of panic. But Quinn felt himself to be calm. The disarray of others clarified his thoughts.
Quinn recognized this as one of those moments that do not come often in a man’s life, unless he happens to be a policeman. A moment when a man is tested and his true mettle revealed, by whether and how well he keeps his head. If Quinn had a talent, he believed it was to think clearly in these situations. To carry on thinking, even when he did not know he was doing it.
Lennox came up to the empty space where his window had been and held a hand out to it tentatively, as if he still expected it to be there.
The newspaperman’s mouth dropped open. A faint, pathetic croak escaped, as if the explosion had blown away his faculty of speech.
Quinn looked past Lennox to a man lying on the floor, his face completely red and glistening. It was as if, instead of blacking up like a Negro minstrel, he had daubed bright-red stage make-up all over his face. The man was moaning quietly. Quinn could not help noting that Lennox had walked past the injured man to gawp at his missing window.
Quinn rushed in to kneel down beside the man on the floor. He saw now that it was the reporter, Bittlestone.
‘You’re going to be all right,’ he told him. He could hear the sirens of the London Fire Brigade approaching. He trusted that an ambulance would come too.
‘I can’t see,’ said Bittlestone. ‘My eyes … There’s something in my eyes … It’s so … it’s so bloody painful.’
Quinn could see that Bittlestone’s eyes were as red as the rest of his face, which was covered in countless cuts, a palimpsest of crimson cross-hatching beneath the wash of blood.