As they kissed, the Count of Somewhere or Other woke. He leapt from the bed with a cry, which the band did its best to convey musically. A struggle ensued between the count and the former cavalry officer. But the latter had come armed. A close-up showed a stiletto blade sinking into the count’s soft flank. He fell to the floor.
The lovers confronted one another. Once again, Eloise’s eyes held and conveyed the entire meaning of the moment. The horror that had been nascent in them before bloomed into a deep revulsion. The former cavalry officer had to see that all was lost. Quinn certainly understood this.
She hated him. There was only hatred in those eyes now.
The next sequence showed the cavalry officer stealing away from the couple’s suite. The band rumbled ominously and then fell silent as the camera returned to the bedroom.
There were now two bodies on the floor. The director went in for his favourite close-up. But where Eloise’s eyes should have been there were two black chasms.
Quinn couldn’t say whether he was one of those who shrieked. But he certainly felt himself bodily leave his seat.
Of course, he had seen worse in reality. But there was something about having such horrors depicted in art that he found more shocking than to discover them in the course of his professional life. Their representation signified some kind of acknowledgement. It opened a door.
If it was only policemen and police surgeons – and the occasional accidental witness – who were obliged to confront such crimes, they could be contained and prevented from contaminating the wider society. It was part of his job to take these things on himself. It was his responsibility. He thought of Sir Edward’s secretary, Miss Latterly. Her horrified reaction to the little he had inadvertently let slip about his work was perfectly proper. This was how the public ought to view such things.
This wallowing in horror and violence, this fascination with gruesome and macabre spectacle, it was unwholesome. It was obscene. More than that, it was dangerous. Who knew where it would lead?
But the film wasn’t over yet. Quinn could not imagine what else, what new horrors, the makers could have in store for the audience. But he sensed the eager anticipation in those around him.
The murderer returned to his lair. It was not clear where this was, whether in Venice, or Vienna. It didn’t matter. It was a psychological place. It existed both as an idea in the murderer’s head, and – now that it had been filmed – as an external reality. It was inside all their heads now.
He was hunched over something, a bundle in a knotted handkerchief, through which dark stains had seeped. The shape of the bundle, the suggestion of a double rotundity, left little doubt to its contents.
The film showed the killer decant the eyes into a jar, which he topped up with a clear liquid before sealing. By chance, the dead eyes were looking out, suspended midway in the preserving fluid. He held up the jar so that the eyes were level with his own. He then addressed a bitter soliloquy to them, the gist of which was represented on a series of inter-titles. In short, he blamed the eyes for all the misfortunes that had befallen him. They had haunted him, given him no peace, driven him to murder. And worse. It was to rid himself of the spectre of those eyes that he had been forced to remove the eyes from the women he had killed. Women in whose faces he had seen her eyes.
The camera then showed a close-up of the killer placing the jar on a shelf, the eyes still looking out into the room, and towards the audience. A wider shot revealed it was not the only such jar on that shelf. And that that was not the only shelf. In fact, the wall was lined with jar after jar, each containing a pair of eyes looking out.
In the final frames of the film, as the killer moved out of shot, all the eyes in the jars swivelled to watch him go. The violins produced a suitably chilling glissando. The audience went wild, delighted and terrified in equal degree.
SEVENTEEN
The lights came up.
The audience was wrenched away from another man’s shimmering dreams back into their own duller, if more solid, realities. But though the glow of the projector had died on the screen, its silver cast lingered in their minds. The glamour as well as the horror of what they had just witnessed enlivened them. They sprang to their feet and filed out of the auditorium in a state of heightened excitement, almost shouting their pleasure, laughing nervously at the memory of their earlier disturbed emotions. The horror they had felt had now abated. It was safe to make a joke of it.
Their own attempts at lustre, the sheen on the top hats of the men and the cosmetic gloss of the women’s lips, struck Quinn as tawdry and counterfeit. An attempt to stave off the great unspeakable truth: their own mortality. The sour odours of too many bodies enclosed in a confined space were beginning to cut through. Whatever it was that had been sprayed over their heads, perfume or disinfectant, it was losing its efficacy.
In contrast, the weightless entities spun out of the criss-crossing of light and darkness – Eloise and the mournful-eyed actor who played the cavalry officer – embraced the great unspeakable and in so doing transformed and transcended it. It was a kind of alchemy.
Like every other mortal lumbering to his feet, Quinn felt the leaden tug of returning anxieties. For the first time since the lights had gone down, he remembered why he was there.
The audience was streaming out through two exits. He had them both covered, so he should not have been overly concerned. But he had just seen a film in which a man managed to pass himself off as a series of different individuals. Admittedly, that was fiction. But still it mooted a possibility. If Hartmann changed his appearance in some way, it might be enough for him to get past Macadam at least, who had only had one brief look at him.
No, it was preposterous. Hartmann had no reason to believe himself under observation. He was there at a social occasion, and from what Inchball had said, he was mixing with the film people. If there was a celebration afterwards, there was every chance that he would be part of it. He would be leaving through the front entrance, in the full glare of the newspaper photographers’ flash guns.
Quinn began to relax as he drifted with the crowd. He allowed himself to take in his surroundings. The interior was done out like someone’s idea of the tea salon of a fashionable hotel, with potted palms trees, reproduction statues on pedestals, and burgundy drapes and plush on the walls. Moulded details, no doubt bulk purchased at an architectural wholesalers, were stuck on to add decorative interest. None of it bore up to close examination, but Porrick’s customers did not go there to look at the walls.
As Quinn came out on to Leicester Square, he caught Inchball’s eye but kept his distance.
Inchball was an experienced officer. He contrived to acknowledge Quinn’s presence without signalling any obvious connection between them. To a casual observer, they might have appeared as two strangers warily sizing one another up before going their separate ways. But such was the excitement after the picture show that it was unlikely that anyone would have registered the two men at all.
The crowd was still voluble, communicating largely in shouts. No doubt this was due in large part to the emotional agitation caused by the film. But perhaps, also, it was a reaction to their enforced silence of the last hour or so.
As a police officer, Quinn could not help considering the dangers of the new medium from the standpoint of public order. Its capacity to incite as well as excite was evident all around him.
Even more worrying for Quinn, given his unique insight into a certain kind of criminal mind, he believed the graphic depiction of violent crime provided an example that some individuals might wish to emulate. It opened a door in more ways than one. The general public was exposed to horrors that would cause them needless anxieties. Whereas the admittedly much smaller but nonetheless significant constituency of the depraved would take from it a licence.
Perhaps it was because his mind was alert to these potential risks that Quinn was so quick to sense a different category of agitation impinge on the mood of the crowd. He became aware of one man shouting, not in pleasurable enthusiasm, but in what seemed like genuine panic. Terror, even. Turning to the source of the noise, he saw the man running towards them at full pelt.