The Mannequin House (31 page)

‘But Mr Yeovil can be more than discreet. He can ensure that others are discreet too.’

A smile of grim acceptance flickered on to Blackley’s lips. ‘You’ve worked so much out, Inspector.’ He fixed Quinn with a steady, pleading look. His voice was once again raised. He was playing to the gallery. ‘Can you not work out who is doing this to me? Who is attacking me in this way? Not even you can believe I was responsible for putting that girl in my own shop window.’

‘To be frank, Mr Blackley, the difficulty I face is that you have made so many enemies. I just now saw you assault a member of your staff in Umbrellas and Parasols. There have been others, I believe. Didn’t I once read about you taking a cane to a man for yawning?’

The ladies tut-tutted their disapproval at this. One or two cried ‘
shame!
’.

Blackley grew irritable, sensing that he was losing their sympathy. ‘My people know where they stand when they enter my employ. There are rules. The rules must be obeyed. They sign a contract to that effect. I cannot be blamed if I hold them to it.’

‘They don’t sign up to being beaten, I rather suspect.’

‘I am firm but fair!’ protested Blackley. ‘And even if what you say is true, does that really give some bugger the right to do this? To murder a poor defenceless girl, just to get back at me for a little heavy handedness? Is that what you’re saying happened, Inspector?’

It was a point well made. Blackley had won his audience back over. Quinn sensed heads bobbing in approval around them.

Quinn’s shrug was more of a convulsion of exhaustion, as if he was trying to slough off the worries of the case. ‘I am beginning to fear that we will never know the truth of what happened.’ His words sounded defeated even to his own ear.

‘Remember my offer, Inspector.’ Blackley drew himself up as if he had sensed the issue swing in his favour. His old confidence seemed to return to him, along with his habitual smile. ‘Yeovil . . . Yeovil can help you.’

‘Don’t worry. I shall be speaking to Mr Yeovil soon enough.’

The ladies of the tea room seemed satisfied with the outcome of the exchange. They were more intent now on their own chatter, which was no doubt energized by the scene they had witnessed. They had experienced a frisson of outrage, the hint of scandal, but somehow the universe had been restored. When it came down to it, it seemed that most of them approved of Blackley’s approach to staff discipline; or at least did not object to it strongly enough to forgo the privilege of shopping at his store.

Quinn could not help but feel a strong sense of anticlimax. The brief look of contrition that Blackley had let slip was the closest he would come to an admission of guilt over the rape. A guilty look was not enough to secure a conviction in a court of law. In such crimes it invariably came down to a question of the man’s word against the woman’s. Even if Amélie had lived it would have been difficult enough to prove, especially with a man of good standing and character such as Blackley. Furthermore, given Blackley’s power over her, there was no guarantee that Amélie would have made an accusation; far more likely, in fact, that she would have kept quiet. Despite what Dr Prendergast had said in his report about the association between rape and murder, the motive for Blackley to kill Amélie simply wasn’t strong enough.

It was not only Blackley’s failure to own up to his misdeeds that frustrated Quinn. His disappointment went deeper than that. He remembered the idea that had come to him as he had ascended the floors of the Grand Dome: that he was chasing not Blackley but another less than perfect father.

‘What is the matter, Inspector? You look as if you have seen a ghost.’

‘My father killed himself, you know.’

‘What has it to do with me?’

‘You think that you are protecting yourself when you hold on to these secrets of yours. But it’s quite the opposite, Mr Blackley. Secrets put you at great risk. They expose you to blackmail and extortion. And they drive a wedge between you and those who could love you, and whose love could truly save you. My father was killed by his secrets. I’m imploring you not to make the same mistake that he made.’

‘I am not your father.’

‘I don’t care whether you tell
me
the truth or not. I’m used to people lying. But please, I beg you, be honest with Ben.’

‘Have you quite finished, Inspector? I am a busy man.’

Quinn nodded a reluctant release. Whatever resolution he had hoped for, it was clear that Blackley would not provide it.

The lift attendant pulled the latticed gate to with a nod of satisfaction. ‘Find what you were looking for, sir?’

Quinn ignored the question. He looked the man squarely in the eye but could not penetrate his permanently ironic manner. He became convinced the man was another of Blackley’s spies. And so he couldn’t help feeling that he was now Blackley’s prisoner; in other words, the prisoner of the man he had set out to catch.

‘Which floor?’ said the attendant, holding and reciprocating Quinn’s steady scrutiny.

‘Ground.’

The attendant nodded and pressed a button. Somewhere wheels shifted, machinery rumbled. The lift shuddered and sank. Quinn’s sense of confinement intensified.

He could not help voicing his thoughts. ‘How do you bear it, just going up and down all day? Do you not feel caged in?’

The man shrugged. ‘It makes me appreciate the horizontal all the more when I am able to enjoy it.’

They picked up more passengers on the next floor, a young couple with a gaggle of children of various ages. They filled the lift car with noise and heat. Quinn looked up at the empty shaft above, concentrating on the greased cable and grimy brickwork to take his mind off his present discomfort.

As the lift shuddered into descent, he became aware of a series of sharp blows dealt repeatedly to his shins. He looked down to see one of the children, a boy of about seven, determinedly kicking at his legs. The boy was looking up at Quinn to monitor his reaction. Quinn couldn’t help noticing that he was wearing a sailor suit that reminded him of the one hanging in the dead child’s bedroom at the Sledges’. He wondered if the Sledges’ son had been a shin-kicker, and whether that had contributed to his early, violent death in any way.

Quinn tapped the boy’s father on the shoulder. ‘I say, your son is kicking me in the shins.’

The man’s expression was doleful, but not apologetic. ‘Well . . . he doesn’t mean any harm.’

‘Can’t you get him to stop?’

The man sighed. ‘Archie, do you mind awfully stopping that for a moment, old sport?’

‘For a moment?’ Quinn was incredulous. ‘I rather want him to stop it for good.’

‘Stop it, Archie. There’s a good fellow.’

Archie gave one final crack with his shoe, just on the edge of the bone. When Quinn looked down, the boy’s expression was utterly unabashed; it seemed to suggest that the blow was no more or less than Quinn deserved.

At last the lift attendant drew back the gate on the ground floor. Quinn’s torturer and his innumerable siblings burst out with an explosion of screams. Their mother called after them ineffectually: ‘Children! Children! Oh, do be careful.’

Quinn was glad to see Macadam bounding towards him with an eager, excited step. He knew what his sergeant was going to say before he opened his mouth: ‘We have him, sir. Yeovil. He’s in the back of a Black Maria outside.’

‘Good work, Macadam.’

Less enthusiastically, Macadam added: ‘Sergeant Inchball is with him. He seems to think that he can soften him up in anticipation of your interviewing him, sir.’

‘Take him round to the mannequin house. Mr Blackley has offered us Mr Yeovil’s services. I see no reason not to avail ourselves of them.’

‘Sir?’

‘I’m interested to see just what he is capable of. How great his powers really are. That will allow us to form an opinion on a crucial head.’

‘What do you have in mind, sir?’

‘An experiment, Macadam. To find out whether Yeovil is capable of persuading a young, impressionable girl to take her own life.’

‘Are you sure this is a good idea, sir? I am afraid it may end unhappily. Perhaps we should wait to talk to DCI Coddington . . .’

‘It’s all right, Macadam. I know what I’m doing. You’ll need to gather up the rest of the mannequins too. They should still be in the Costumes Salon. You can bring them round in the Black Maria with Yeovil. I shall see you there, at the mannequin house.’

It was unfortunate that at just that moment Quinn’s exhaustion from the night’s surveillance operation got the better of him, causing a violent and prolonged spasm to ripple the soft sac of flesh beneath his eye.

Macadam’s expression clouded with dismay.

Q
uinn crossed the dispatch yard, watched all the way by Kaminski. He pushed the swivelling panel and emerged in the garden of the mannequin house.

A shape moved in the small window of the rear room, someone backing away as soon as Quinn came through. The flare of sunlight on the glass made it difficult to identify who had been looking out. It was enough, for now, to know that someone had.

They had been watching from the spare room. Blackley’s room.

Quinn entered the house through the scullery. Kathleen was at work, wringing damp clothes through a mangle. She rubbed at an itch on the side of her nose with the knuckle of a red raw hand.

‘Where’s Miss Mortimer?’ said Quinn.

The maid seemed to shrink into herself, cowering away from the question.

Quinn went through into the kitchen. Miss Mortimer wasn’t there either. He met her in the hall. She was coming downstairs.

‘What do you want?’ demanded the housekeeper.

‘Has anyone told you about Edna?’

‘We use their French names in here. Mr Blackley insists on it.’

‘Albertine.’

‘What about her?’

‘She’s dead.’

Miss Mortimer showed no sign of emotion. Quinn wondered if she had heard.

‘I said she’s dead. We found her body in a shop window at Blackley’s.’

Now the colour drained from her face. She seemed to lose her balance for a moment, reaching out a hand to the wall to steady herself. Quinn had never seen a more spontaneous – and, it seemed to him, unfeigned – display of shock.

‘No! But that’s not possible!’

‘I’m afraid so.’

After a moment’s more consideration, Miss Mortimer seemed to regain her composure. She was able to stand up without support. ‘Does Mr Blackley know?’

‘Yes.’

Quinn was surprised by the vehemence of the sob that escaped from Miss Mortimer at this point. Even more surprised when she put a hand to her mouth and fell to her knees. ‘Oh . . . this will break him.’

Quinn’s natural instinct was to recoil from the unexpected display of emotion. At the same time, it fascinated him. Reluctantly, as if he feared that emotion could be communicated by touch, he approached her and helped her to her feet. ‘On the contrary, Miss Mortimer. He claimed it would take more than this to hurt him.’

Miss Mortimer looked at him sharply.

‘Now, I need to look in Albertine’s room.’

‘In Albertine’s room?’ The woman had reverted to the obstructive repetition of questions that Quinn had noticed the first time he had interviewed her.

He gestured impatiently for Miss Mortimer to lead the way upstairs.

The door to Albertine’s room was locked. Miss Mortimer produced her great fob of keys from her housekeeper’s apron. Quinn half-expected the keyhole to be blocked by a key on the other side, but Miss Mortimer was able to unlock the door without any obstruction.

There was something very different about the room, but Quinn couldn’t, at first, work out what. Undoubtedly it had a forlorn, abandoned air to it. But there was more to it than that.

Was it just his sense of loss at Edna’s death? Or was there something else missing from the room, other than a girl’s life?

Quinn breathed in deeply through his nostrils, as if he believed he would be able to sniff out the solution to the mystery. Did he half-expect to inhale the smell of death there? He detected a far sadder scent: the sickly mixture of stale perfume and unwashed body odours that formed Edna Corbett’s ghost. The image of the grieving girl on the bed came back to him, her last days both unhappy and unhealthy.

Quinn was aware of Miss Mortimer watching him. He held a challenging finger towards her. ‘I saw you. At the back of the house just now. Looking down from the spare room. From Mr Blackley’s room. Why were you in there?’

‘I go in all the rooms. It’s my job. I have to tidy them up. Get them ready.’

‘Did someone sleep in that room last night? Was Mr Blackley here?’

‘I have to go into all the rooms.’

‘Why were you watching from the window? Who did you expect to see come through the fence? Mr Blackley? Were you expecting Mr Blackley to sleep in the room tonight, perhaps? You were getting the room ready for his visit tonight?’

‘I’ve seen that monkey again.’

Quinn frowned at the abrupt change in the conversation. ‘You have?’

‘I’ve put poison out for it.’

‘Is that strictly necessary?’

‘Dirty little beast. We can’t have a monkey running wild.’

‘Where did you see it?’

‘On the fence. Looking at us. Cheeky bugger.’

‘Just now?’ Quinn had not noticed the monkey when he came through. Perhaps the woman was deluded.

‘Before.’

‘You hoped to see it again? That’s why you were watching?’

‘I want to see it eat the poison.’

Quinn began to feel sorry for the animal. ‘Why do you want to kill it?’

‘Hasn’t it done enough harm?’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘There was no trouble here before it came along. Never should have been in the house in the first place. Mr Blackley wouldn’t have allowed it.’

‘Would it surprise you to learn that it was in fact Mr Blackley who gave Shizaru to Amélie as a gift?’

‘He shouldn’t have done it. It’s against the rules.’

‘But doesn’t Mr Blackley make the rules? He can do what he wants, surely?’

Miss Mortimer shook her head emphatically. ‘No he can’t.’