‘It won’t take a moment.’
‘Tell me where I can find you. When I am ready, I will come to you.’
Again, his one visible hand probed his coat, on the other side this time, his left hand bending back into the left breast. It was evidently too difficult for him to achieve this manipulation. His right hand involuntarily came round to help. Quinn saw that it was bandaged. With both hands, Grant-Sissons was able to fish out a card. He withdrew the bandaged hand from sight immediately. ‘This is my workshop. I am often there. When I am not … elsewhere.’
Quinn declined the offered card. ‘What happened to your hand?’
‘It is an old injury. In fact, a skin condition for which I must seek regular treatment. I have just had it dressed at the hospital. So you see, I did not come here with the intention of looking for your girl. It is simply a coincidence that I happened to be here.’
Quinn endeavoured to communicate his deep mistrust of coincidences through some complex fluctuations of his brows. At last he deigned to take the card. It bore an address in Clerkenwelclass="underline" 3, St John’s Passage.
‘I will be in touch.’ Quinn heard the reassuring insistence in his own voice, as if it were more important to Grant-Sissons to tell him what he knew than to Quinn to hear it.
‘You cannot bear it, can you? You cannot bear the truth.’
‘I must find the girl,’ said Quinn. But even to his own ears it sounded like an excuse.
TWENTY-NINE
Scudder was trapped inside the darkness. He couldn’t move at all. The darkness struck him against the snout whenever he tried to spring out of it. And when he scratched his paw against the darkness, it was hard. Not like the darkness through which he was used to scampering, navigating with his twitching nose across the trade routes of scents. In this darkness, his feet tapped and scraped without him getting anywhere. And the only scent was that of his own fear.
All he could do was open his jaws and let the fear and the rage snap and whine in the tensioned sinews of his throat.
He turned and twisted in the tiny black corner of darkness. There had to be a way out. There was always a way out. If you pushed with your snout or scratched with your paw, whatever was in front of you would eventually yield.
But there was no yielding in this darkness. This darkness held him in its jaws. This darkness held his howls too, and the smell of his fear. And the smell of his fear made him more afraid.
There were moments when the darkness rattled and seemed about to fall apart. But then the darkness boomed terrifyingly. He cowered down and back, away from the heavy pounding on the top of the darkness.
All he could do was scratch and snarl and whine. But the darkness was not touched by anything he did. The darkness held him.
The darkness filled and echoed with his whining. His whining wrapped itself around him. His whining pierced his ears. His hairs stood up and a shiver took hold of him. His shiver set the darkness rattling.
Then the deafening boom-boom-boom sent him cowering into the corner of the hard darkness.
THIRTY
‘So … what do we know?’ Quinn straightened tentatively. He was standing in the highest part of the attic-room headquarters of the Special Crimes Department. He knew that he should have been able to reach his full height here without cracking his head, but, even so, a habit of caution cramped his movements.
Inchball yawned and blinked. His eyes were red with exhaustion. Even the soft reflected glow from the blank wall that faced the skylight seemed to be too much for him. He held his hands in front of his face, rubbed vigorously into his aching sockets, then glared, a bewildered, ravaged wreck of a man. ‘We know where Hartmann lives. I followed him after that shindig to an address in Forest ’Ill.’
‘Forest Hill?’
‘Yeah, Forest bloody ’Ill. I will need you to sign off the taxi fare, guv. Four shillings and sixpence.’
‘Of course.’
‘I waited outside the ’ouse all bleedin’ nigh’ and then followed him back into town this morning. Fortunately, he took the train and I was not obliged to splash out on another bleedin’ taxi. I would have been in a pickle otherwise, I can tell you. I can also tell you that he did not return to Cecil Court. He took the train to London Bridge, and from there he proceeded on foot – my poor achin’ legs! – across the river to an address in the City. On St Swithin’s Lane, to be precise. You want the number, do ya?’ Inchball sighed monumentally. He then tried each of his pockets in turn until at last he found his notebook. His bemused expression seemed to suggest that he had been unaware of the very existence of that particular pocket until that moment. He leafed through the pages. ‘A ’undred and nineteen, St Swithin’s Lane. A number of businesses is located at this address.’ Inchball read from his notebook. ‘Palgrave ’Oldings. Jacobs and Jacobson, Solicitors.’ Inchball paused as if he was going to make a comment but thought better of it and continued reading the list. ‘Imperial Trading Consortium. London Nitrate Company. The Colonial Financing Corporation. The Panamanian Investment Syndicate – parenthesis London, close parenthesis. The England and Continental Finance Bank. That’s it.’
‘And which of these offices did he enter?’
Inchball rolled his eyes at Quinn’s question. ‘Do me a favour, guv! Ain’t it enough I got all this for you? I ’ad ’a be careful, you know. Din’ want him to see me. I couldn’ afford to go breathin’ down ’is neck or nuffin’. By the time I got through the front door, ’e was nowhere to be seen.’
‘Of course, Inchball. I understand. This is excellent.’
‘The way I see it, he either went into one of the offices on the ground floor, which would be the Panamanian Investment Syndicate – parenthesis London, close parenthesis – or the England and Continental Finance Bank. Or, ’e went into the office what was on the second floor, that is to say, the London Nitrate Company.’
‘How do you figure that out?’ asked Macadam.
‘I ’eard the lift come to a halt above. I took the stairs and found it on the second floor. Where this London Nitrate Company is.’
‘It is more likely that he had business with the Finance Bank on the ground floor,’ suggested Quinn. ‘I imagine that the Panamanian Investment Syndicate …’
‘Parenthesis London, close parenthesis,’ added Inchball.
‘I would imagine that they are concerned largely in raising investments for Panama specifically, and perhaps for Central and South America more widely. It is possible that Hartmann has business interests there. But if his film production business is legitimate, as it seems to be – he has after all produced at least one film that I saw with my own eyes – then he will need to raise finance from time to time.’
‘We can’t assume that any of these set-ups is legitimate, guv,’ objected Inchball. ‘Any one of ’em could be a cover for his nefarious activities.’
Quinn remembered his conversation with Lord Dunwich the night before. The peer had been at pains to impress upon Quinn Hartmann’s bona fides. He had also let slip that he had business interests in common with the German. It was likely these interests went back a long way. Perhaps some of these interests were tied up in one of the companies on St Swithin’s Lane.
Quinn sensed his sergeants watching him expectantly, like pupils awaiting instructions from their teacher. They would have to wait. There was a tangle here and Quinn set himself to tease it apart.
Dunwich had tried to steer them away from the barbershop. Perhaps this was out of loyalty to his friend Hartmann, whom he perhaps knew to be connected to Dortmunder. Dunwich’s robust defence of Hartmann last night could be put down to a self-protective reflex. If Dunwich was in hock to Hartmann, or his associates, that made him vulnerable, not to say suspect. He would naturally wish to divert attention away from an object that had the potential to blow up in his own face. Not only that, the connection meant that Dunwich would be a tool that the German could employ when he needed to. Quinn had a sense of Herr Hartmann as a very patient individual indeed. He suddenly remembered the sinister package that Lord Dunwich had been sent. ‘Did anything come for me from Lord Dunwich?’