The Mannequin House (34 page)

‘It was what she wanted. She didn’t fight it.’

‘How did you manage the door? It was very clever of you to lock it from the outside, with a key on the inside.’

‘You’re the detective. You work it out.’

‘Oh, that was never any great mystery, as far as I was concerned. There are countless ways to achieve it, given the simple locks on the doors here. We were confused by the monkey. I dare say you were too, as you weren’t aware of its presence in the room when you killed Amélie. But the monkey, if I may say so, was always a red herring. The monkey had nothing to do with Amélie’s death. In fact, the poor fellow may even have tried to save her life, snatching the hairpin out of the tourniquet and throwing it on the floor. But it was too late by then. She was already dead.’

Miss Mortimer said nothing. Quinn looked over her shoulder. Coddington, Macadam and Inchball were at the door. Quinn held his finger up to his lips to silence them.

‘Do you have it in your pocket still?’ he whispered to Miss Mortimer.

‘What?’

‘The picture wire. The picture wire that you used to hang the prints in the hall. And also used to wind around the bow of the key so that when you pulled it from the other side of the door the key would turn and trip the lock. The wire unwound as you pulled it and you were able to draw it out through the gap between the door and the jamb. Isn’t that so?’

‘I read about it in a detective story. I didn’t believe it would work. But it did.’

‘It was the same picture wire you used to strangle Albertine – is that not so? But this time it was to punish him, wasn’t it? For the way he treated you in the garden. Oh, yes, you were going to make sure he didn’t get his hands on the next girl. You were going to break his toy before he had a chance to play with it. Just like you broke the music box he gave her.’

‘I saved her from him.’

‘Perhaps. But she paid a terrible price for her salvation.’

‘I hear they found her in a shop window. That’s what the girls are saying. How did she get there?’

‘You really don’t know, do you? Let’s try and recreate what might have happened. You killed her and rolled her up in the rug, then carried the rug outside, through the gap in the fence. It was easy enough. There was hardly anything to her, after all. She was another one who had half-starved herself, just like Amélie. What did you do then? Place the rug, with Albertine wrapped up inside it, into the incinerator, confident that the evidence would be destroyed next time the fire was lit?’

A slight pucker of Miss Mortimer’s lips suggested that Quinn was on the right lines.

‘You didn’t count on the workman looking inside and taking a fancy to the zebra-striped rug. Imagine his surprise when he found a corpse wrapped up in it. What kind of a man – you have to ask yourself – what kind of a man, upon making such a grisly discovery, does not immediately raise the alarm, but instead decides to – what? How can we describe what he does? Play a practical joke? Was that it, do you think? How much hatred, how much pent-up bitterness and hatred must have been required for him to seize that opportunity in that particular twisted way? To carry the rug with Albertine inside it through the store and dump her body in a shop window, before discarding the rug in the Rugs and Carpets gallery of the House of Blackley? Can you imagine how much he must have hated Mr Blackley?’

‘Yes. I can.’

Quinn signalled to Macadam and Inchball. One sergeant gently took each of her elbows and steered her round and out of the room.

‘So,’ said Coddington. ‘You worked it out at last. Not before time.’

‘At least I have delivered the suspect into custody alive. Indeed, I do not think that the deaths that have occurred in the course of this investigation can with any fairness be blamed on me. I wasn’t responsible for the riot at Blackley’s. And Edna Corbett was not, it turns out, killed because I had involved her in the investigation.’

Coddington seemed dissatisfied with Quinn’s justifications. Or at least his moustache made its dissatisfaction felt.

‘What shall we do about Blackley, sir?’ asked Quinn.

‘What do you mean?’

‘The rape.’

‘We can’t prove anything there, Quinn. It’s her word against his, and she’s dead. It’s hard to make a rape charge stick when we don’t even have a complainant.’

‘Amélie confided in Miss Mortimer. Mortimer killed her
because
of the allegations she was making against Blackley.’

‘Water under the bridge now. We’d better let his son go too, pronto. Big mistake you made there, Quinn, picking young Blackley up. He had nothing to do with any of it.’

‘He saw his father in the house. I believe he may have overheard the rape. Possibly he heard Amélie weeping afterwards.’

‘You can’t expect him to testify against his own father.’

‘I think the pressure of being detained, the possibility that he might be charged with the offence himself . . . these may weigh upon his mind. He might be persuaded . . . We should at least talk to him.’

‘Let it go, Quinn. I’m sure Mr Blackley has learnt his lesson. He’ll be more careful now in his dealings with his young female employees, I’m sure. I’m more concerned about this workman who put the body in the shop window. Why the hell didn’t you arrest him when you had the opportunity, Quinn?’

‘In all honesty, I have only just now worked out his involvement in it all. My priority was to pursue the murderer.’

‘We can have him for Perverting the Course of Justice, at the very least. What’s his name?’

‘Kaminski.’

‘Foreigner, is he?’

‘A Pole.’

‘Agitator, no doubt. I’ll get one of the uniforms to pick him up. As for Mr Blackley, you’d better get round there right away and apologize in person for all the inconvenience you have caused. You can tell him that he is no longer under suspicion and that we are releasing his son from custody forthwith. I hope you know how to grovel, Quinn. The last thing we need is Blackley coming after us with some kind of writ for wrongful arrest or police harassment.’

‘Perhaps it would be better coming from you, sir?’

‘Not likely. I don’t want to be anywhere near the firing line when Blackley finds out what a monumental cock-up you’ve made.’

‘I understand, sir.’

‘And I shall expect your report on my desk first thing in the morning.’

‘Tomorrow is Sunday, sir.’

‘Yes. First thing Sunday morning. Criminals don’t rest on the Sabbath, Quinn. We can’t afford to either. You should know that.’

Quinn looked down at the music box in his hand, before unconsciously pocketing it. ‘Very well, sir.’

‘How did you . . .’ Coddington cleared his throat, swallowing back the question that he had been about to blurt out. It obviously cost him too much to voice it.

Quinn looked up enquiringly. ‘How did I work it out?’

‘What made you suspect
her
? If I hadn’t heard her confess, I wouldn’t believe it, I have to say. That trick with the key was quite ingenious. I wouldn’t have believed a woman capable. Not a woman of low intelligence such as Miss Mortimer.’

‘Miss Mortimer is not as stupid – or crazed – as she pretends to be. She has quite a practical bent. You heard what Kathleen said about the broken teapot. And when Arbuthnot came round, she was in the middle of hanging pictures on the wall. When I found out about the—’ Quinn broke off. He had been about to mention the striations on the key that had figured in Charlie Cale’s report. ‘Again, it was a question of deduction. When I tried to think of how one might trip a key on the opposite side of a closed door, it occurred to me that one possible method might be to wind wire around the bow, or handle, so that it would turn when the wire is pulled through. The fact that Miss Mortimer had been handling picture wire at around the time of the murder naturally brought her under suspicion. If there had been scratches around the bow of the key, I might have got to the solution quicker. I would also have expected Cale to have found traces of a second type of brass on the key – most hanging wire is made from brass, I believe, but it is of a more flexible consistency than the brass of a door key.’

Coddington’s moustache gave an uneasy twitch. ‘Was there nothing else?’ he asked quickly, evidently keen to steer the conversation away from Cale’s report.

‘When I learnt that she had put poison out for the monkey, I realized she was a woman capable of anything. You may remember that time in the garden, how violently Shizaru reacted to both Miss Mortimer and Blackley. I had always believed that the monkey’s significance would be as a witness, rather than a perpetrator. I think that Miss Mortimer’s desire to kill the monkey was a belated reaction to that incriminating outburst. You will remember how delighted she was that the monkey got away. But she also feared its return, I think.’ Quinn moved to the window at the back of the room. ‘She was watching for it earlier from this very window.’

Quinn half-expected to see a flash of grey moving through the branches of the cherry tree. But, of course, he did not.

‘And the monkey? Where is the monkey now?’ Behind him, Coddington’s voice was sharp and insistent.

Quinn shrugged. ‘He remains at large. We have to accept that some loose ends simply cannot be tied up.’ He continued to stare at the top of the fence, where Miss Mortimer claimed to have last seen Shizaru. But despite the fixity of his wishful concentration, the monkey refused to materialize.

Q
uinn blinked in the sunshine, feeling like some subter–ranean creature bursting unexpectedly out of the ground. The sudden pulse of birdsong struck him as angry and raucous. So much that he had not noticed until now: that the sky was a veil of fine thin blue, smeared here and there with the sparsest of chalk thumbprints. That he was hungry. Devilishly hungry.

He discovered he was in no hurry to let Blackley off the hook. So he took the long way round to the store, stopping off along the way at a cheap restaurant on the Earl’s Court Road for a very late and hearty breakfast: eggs, bacon, sausages, liver, black sausage, fried bread and endless cups of tea. The feast restored him. He was nearly ready for his meeting with the great commercial genius.

First, however, there was one more restorative visit that he wished to pay.

Sunlight flooded into the little yard, to be caught and refracted in the leaves of the lime tree; the full force of the light, however, fell squarely on to the front of the church, setting the honey-coloured bricks aglow. It was a benign effect, as if the building was beaming with pleasure at the sight of him.

He pushed the door open and voiced a soft ‘hello?’ that reverberated shockingly in the empty church. He followed the call with echoing footsteps. He had reached halfway down the aisle when the door to the sacristy opened and the cassocked figure of Father Thomas emerged.

‘Oh, it’s you.’

‘Yes.’

‘Lovely day, isn’t it?’

Quinn nodded vaguely.

‘How may I help you, Inspector?’

‘How do you manage to believe . . . to continue to believe . . .?’

‘My goodness, I wasn’t expecting that particular question!’

‘In the goodness of God. In God. Can you know anything of what really goes on in the world? If you had seen what I had seen . . . would you be able to believe?’

‘I know more of the evil that men – and women – are capable of than you imagine. Far from undermining my faith, that knowledge is what makes faith essential to me. Without a belief in God, I would be overwhelmed by the chaos.’

‘At times, I am.’

‘Then I feel deeply sorry for you, Inspector.’

‘As I came up to the church, I had the feeling that it was smiling to me in welcome.’

‘Perhaps it was.’

‘It was just the sunlight playing on the front of the church.’

‘You will always be welcome in my church, Inspector.’

‘I’m not a Catholic.’

Father Thomas gave an unconcerned shrug. ‘These things can be rectified.’

Quinn was more explicit: ‘I don’t believe in God.’

‘Don’t worry. He believes in you.’

Quinn was disappointed in the priest’s answer, which struck him as glib. ‘He has no idea who I am and of what I am capable.’

‘He knows you are a man, and therefore capable of anything.’

Quinn grimaced his dissatisfaction.

‘It would help you to open your heart to Him. To confess your sins. You will find that He will not turn from you. He will continue to believe in you. Continue to love you. No matter what you confess to. And then you will find it impossible not to believe in Him. That is the great beauty and strength of the Catholic Faith.’

‘The idea of confession does have its appeal. Is Peter Spiggott here?’

‘What do you want with him?’

‘We’ve made an arrest. The housekeeper at the mannequin house, Miss Mortimer. She has confessed to killing Amélie Dupin, and another girl too. A friend of Amélie’s called Edna Corbett.’

‘What about
that man
?’

‘Mr Blackley?’

The priest nodded, evidently unable to bring himself to say Blackley’s name.

‘He had nothing to do with either death.’

‘But he raped her?’

‘We believe so. We cannot prove it.’

‘And so he is getting off scot-free?’

‘There is not sufficient evidence to secure a conviction. No one will testify to his presence in the mannequin house that night. There is no complainant to press charges against him. We have no choice.’

‘You had better let me break it to Peter.’ Father Thomas was for a moment lost in his own thoughts. ‘He will take it badly.’

‘Men like Blackley always come up smelling of roses.’

‘The Devil looks after his own.’

‘Doesn’t it shake your faith in God a little?’

‘You must understand, Inspector, if I entertain, for one moment, the possibility of a godless universe, then I am lost. I would be part of the chaos. The chaos would enter into me. There would be nothing to prevent me – any of us – from committing the very worst of crimes. We would all be as black as Blackley.’

‘I hope, then, that you continue to believe.’

The two men shook hands. The priest clung on to the policeman’s with both of his, as if he feared what would ensue if he let him out of his sight, out of his church.