‘It’s one of them film cans, ain’t it?’ said Stoker. ‘I once got called to a fire in a picture palace when I was stationed in Islington. Saw a lot of them about the place, we did.’
Whether it was the smell from the film can or the information he had just been told, Quinn felt his heart kick viciously as if his system had just been infiltrated by an intoxicating stimulant.
FORTY-EIGHT
Macadam drove them north to Clerkenwell. Quinn still had the card that Grant-Sissons had given him. He remembered the man’s bandaged hand and the wince he had been unable to conceal.
‘An old wound, that’s what he had said.’
‘What’s that, guv?’
‘Grant-Sissons.’
‘This feller you fancy for the bomb outrage?’
‘His hand was bandaged when I saw him at the hospital. He said it was an old wound. But what if it was fresh? What if he had sustained it while attacking Dolores Novak? It’s perfectly possible that she would have tried to defend herself.’
‘So you fancy him for that too?’
‘Let us moot the hypothesis that he is waging some kind of vendetta against the film industry. He is a failed inventor who nurses a great grudge. He claims he invented the motion picture camera and believes that he has been robbed of his share of the profits of every film made.’
‘But why attack that newspaper?’
‘Harry Lennox, the proprietor of the Clarion, is an investor in Hartmann’s production company.’
‘There’s more to it than that, sir,’ put in Macadam from the front. ‘You know that I am a subscriber to the Kinematograph Enthusiast’s Weekly. The editorial address of that publication is the same as the Daily Clarion. It is printed on the same presses and is owned by Lennox too.’
‘So he is not just an investor in the film industry; he is an active promoter of it,’ concluded Quinn.
The Model T’s headlamps picked out a crenellated arch suspended over the road: the grey nocturnal ghost of St John’s Gate. The car slowed as it passed under, a shadow slipping through a shadow.
Macadam pulled up in St John’s Square. All three policemen got out of the car.
‘I think it’s better if I speak to him alone,’ said Quinn. ‘He knows me.’ Quinn was thinking of his own unfinished business with Grant-Sissons. He had no desire for his sergeants to hear whatever Grant-Sissons had to say about his father. Quinn felt his left breast, touching the hard metal where his pistol was holstered. ‘You need not fear for my safety. I am armed.’
He sensed Macadam and Inchball exchange an uneasy look.
‘With respect, sir …’ Macadam did not press his point.
Inchball was less tactfuclass="underline" ‘It ain’t your safety we’re worried about.’
‘I understand perfectly. And it is precisely for that reason that I should go in alone. If he sees the three of us, he may well panic and therefore do something stupid, in the face of which I may be forced to take self-defensive action. Besides, we have no concrete evidence to place him at either scene. At the moment, we are acting on nothing other than conjecture.’
‘Is there something you’re not telling us, guv?’
‘He knew my father. I hope to use that to our advantage. It will be easier to do so if I am alone. I want you two to position yourselves at either end of St John’s Passage, in case he tries to make a run for it.’
‘What if he’s not there, guv?’
‘Then I shall wait for him. If he returns, don’t try to apprehend him. Leave him to me.’
Quinn turned abruptly from his sergeants, and from further discussion.
He entered a tight passageway with high brick walls on either side, a channel of night cut into the city. The stench of urine marked it as a stopping place for drunks. Quinn stood for a moment, allowing his eyes to adapt to the gloom. A spill of light from the square seeped along the walls, and there was a light in a window at the end of the passage. It was enough for Quinn to make out two doors set side by side into the wall. The second door was the one he was looking for.
He balled his fist and pounded the door. Somewhere, a dog barked in response.
A dark figure approached from the square. From the body shape, he guessed it was Inchball. The two men did not exchange a word as they squeezed past one another. Inchball’s footsteps receded as he took up position at the far end of the passage.
For a moment, Quinn felt as though this bleak forgotten place was all that was left in the universe. He did not believe in the square beyond Macadam, or the workshop behind the door, or whatever now lay at Inchball’s back. He felt as if all that was good and all that was evil in the world, all the hope and all the fear, was being channelled through that narrow alleyway with a policeman at either end and one in the middle. He knew from experience that things could go either way now. He might get what he wanted from Grant-Sissons, a confession, resolution of the crimes he was investigating, and perhaps of even more. The truth about his father. Another outcome was conceivable: that the night would end in death, either his own or Grant-Sissons’s. Possibly both.
But it was too late to back out. That had never been an option.
He was about to resume his pounding, when a crack of light appeared at one side of the door. The crack widened to reveal the face of a man peering out. It was not the face of Grant-Sissons but there was something familiar about it, a resemblance to someone whom Quinn could not for the moment place. It was the face of a young man who must have been about the age Quinn was when his father died. Perhaps it was a strange way to frame the matter, but after all he had come to see a man who had promised to tell him about his father’s death. And so, it was not so eccentric that his mind should run in this direction. He even wondered if the resemblance he detected was to himself as a younger man.
The other man said nothing, but stared at Quinn with a distracted hostility.
‘I am looking for Grant-Sissons. I am Detective Inspector Quinn of the Special Crimes Department.’
‘I am Grant-Sissons.’
‘I was looking for an older man.’
‘You want my father.’
‘Is he here?’
‘Yes. But he’s resting.’
‘It’s very important.’
‘Who did you say it was?’
‘Quinn. Inspector Quinn. He will be expecting me, I’m sure.’
The door was shut in Quinn’s face.
An enquiry came from Macadam’s end of the passage. ‘Is everything all right, sir?’
‘He’s here,’ said Quinn.
The door began to open once more.
The workshop was lit by an oil lamp that hung from a hook in the ceiling. It cast a feeble yellow wash over what appeared to be a cave hollowed out inside a mountain of scrap metal and general refuse. Grant-Sissons lay on a camp bed, a coarse, grubby blanket pulled up to his chin, his hands hidden from view beneath it. His bed was like a raft floating on a sea filled with the least buoyant flotsam and jetsam imaginable: rusting cogs, the skeletons of obscure machines, industrial coils of copper wire and other electronic components, a detritus of useless parts and tools. The inventor’s face had a sickly tinge to it that Quinn had not noticed before. He felt instinctively that he was in the presence of a dying man. Perhaps now at last that unusually persistent bitterness made sense.
With every step, Quinn’s foot either came up against a new obstacle or came down on something that crunched or scraped or buckled under his weight.
‘So.’ Grant-Sissons’s voice was weak and worn-out. ‘You have come to find out the truth about your father.’
‘I am more concerned, at this present moment, with a current investigation.’
‘If this is about that girl, I’ve told you, Waechter is behind it …’
‘It is likely that that attack was a hoax. However, another woman has been attacked and killed, and unless you know of a way to bring corpses back to life, I fear that this will not prove to be a hoax.’