Quinn remained silent for the rest of the journey.
They left the main road behind, and with it any street lighting. The moon shivered above, as white as a bone.
The beams of the taxi's headlights severed the darkness, calling into being the desolate landscape of the area, the endless brick fields, dotted with ghostly ruins, like giant bottles half-buried in the ground. The acrid aftertaste of chemical processes hung in the air.
It seemed impossible that any human being could live here. The empty factories and looming chimneys that flashed momentarily into vision were themselves the residents, wraithlike and retiring.
Marjoribanks directed Macadam into a street of grim houses, some with broken windows, others boarded up. The taxi juddered to a stop with a small explosion, behind the looming shape of a parked motor van.
'Is that what you used to transport the bodies?' asked Quinn. 'It was your intention to place them in locations that would mock the foundations of the Empire, was it not?'
'You are wrong about that,' said Marjoribanks quietly. 'Quite wrong. The purpose was to fortify. To strengthen the country's institutions for what is to come.'
The house appeared to be derelict. It no longer had its original front door, but instead was secured by a crude board, roughly hinged and fastened with a massive padlock. Marjoribanks struggled with the key and swung the board open. He gestured for Quinn and Venables to enter first.
They stepped into an impenetrable blackness. It seemed to hold within it invisible fingers that groped their faces and probed their eyes. It held something else too: a foul and pervasive stench.
There was the scrape and flare of a match. Marjoribanks lit a lantern. Then he pulled the board closed, and secured it from inside with the same padlock.
He turned to face Quinn. 'The final mystery is oneself,' he said.
Quinn recognized it as a quote from Wilde.
'Here is where I keep the mystery of myself.'
Quinn looked around, frowning.
'It is here that I keep the blood,' explained Marjoribanks.
'The smell?' enquired Quinn.
'Blood is organic matter. It goes off.' Almost as an afterthought, he added: 'Oh, and I have a boy downstairs, draining.'
'Will you show him to us?'
'Of course.'
Marjoribanks became suddenly self-conscious, almost shy, as he shone the light down into the cellar. His movements seemed constrained by a kind of reticent pride. Quinn realized that this was a momentous occasion for him. He was like an artist about to unveil his masterpiece, half-afraid that it was not the great work he believed it to be, perhaps even more afraid that it was.
'Be careful. Some of the steps are missing.' The solicitude of a murderer is strangely touching, Quinn realized.
Venables descended first, now utterly cowed. There had been no bursts of loutish laughter for some time. Quinn followed, his feet cautiously questing the darkness beneath him, arms outstretched so that he could feel the clammy, crumbling brickwork on either side.
Each step took him deeper into the stench of rotting blood.
The lantern was little use, its beam blocked out by his own back. Whenever he reached a missing step, he always felt as if he was falling into an infinite abyss, that the next step would never come, and that he would fall forever through the enveloping blackness.
But at last, with a final lurch, he reached the ground, which was gritty and loose under foot.
Venables and Quinn instinctively huddled together as they waited for Marjoribanks to join them. They looked up into the beam of his lantern, not daring to look behind them at whatever might be lurking in the darkness. The only indication of what that might be was an irregular dripping sound that echoed coldly.
Marjoribanks stepped between them and held the lantern high. They could not resist looking in the direction of its beam.
The body was naked, suspended upside down by the ankles above a metal pail.
Quinn confronted the blood-streaked face. 'Petter,' he murmured.
Marjoribanks must have misheard him. 'Yes. It is better! Better that I should have his blood, his energy. That the power that is released by killing him is harnessed in me to bring about the new age of Set, the age of chaos and destruction that will make the world anew.' Marjoribanks moved the lantern and showed them the pails of dark liquid that stood around the edges of the room. 'That is my work now. That is my art. My life.'
'And what of your fiancee?'
'She would approve. When I was in New York I met certain individuals, initiates in the highest order of an esoteric society. Jane was one of their number. Their high priestess, you might say. Some held her to be an avatar of Isis. We talked about many things and undertook magical operations that were preparatory to those I have performed alone.'
'She does not know about this?'
'Not yet. I have performed all this on my own initiative. It was necessary to maintain absolute secrecy, in order not to jeopardize the operation. When she finds out, I have no doubt that she will celebrate my acts.'
Quinn looked back towards the suspended corpse. He saw a red droplet fall from the wound and join the bucket of blood below.
'Sin and suffering,' said Marjoribanks. 'Beautiful, holy things.'
'Modes of perfection,' added Quinn.
'This is the most profound, the most perfect symbol ever created,' remarked Marjoribanks.
'But the smell,' objected Quinn. 'And these foul surroundings. Do they not rather mar the perfection?'
'But the smell is central to what I am seeking to create!' cried Marjoribanks. 'It is the stench of corruption. The body is cleansed and perfected by the draining of the blood, it becomes an object of art, rather than life. And the driving force of life is revealed to be a stinking mess of corruption.'
Quinn nodded slowly, as if in dawning comprehension. And perhaps he had finally understood the extent of Lord Marjoribanks' insanity.
'Do you approve of what I have done?'
'More than that. I am in awe of it.'
'Do you remember what you said? That it is not easy to kill someone. You must understand how hard it has been for me to do this. You must understand what I have suffered to bring about this work.'
'I do.'
'You asked for my help.'
'Yes.'
'I will help you. I will show you how to do it. How to kill.'
There was a bench against one wall. Quinn noticed a stack of bowler hats. He realized now what he had sensed missing from the victims' clothes that day in the Golden Lane mortuary.
Marjoribanks crossed to the bench and put down the lantern. Something metallic glinted in the light.
Quinn looked uneasily towards Venables. 'Him?'
Marjoribanks smiled strangely. He took down a brown bottle and a rag from a high shelf. With the absorption of a creative artist, he unstoppered the bottle and tipped some of its contents into the cloth. A twist of ether worked its way into all the other smells of the cellar. He held the cloth out for Quinn to take.
Venables' eyes flashed alarm; Quinn sought to reassure him with a look of his own that he hoped inspired trust. But by now, Marjoribanks had gripped the young man from behind. Venables' struggles petered out as Quinn held the cloth over his face. Marjoribanks eased his inert body to the ground.
'Shall I undress him?' said Quinn.
'This has nothing to do with him,' answered Marjoribanks. 'This is between you and me. And for what is about to pass between us, there can be no witnesses.'
Marjoribanks began to undress.
His hand enclosed the object that had flashed in the lantern beam. 'A cutthroat razor. Like the one you once tried to wield against your fellow-lodger. Now is the time for you to overcome your fastidious nature and to discover what you are capable of.'
He came towards Quinn as if he would attack him, with the lithe athletic spring of a hunter. But at the final moment, he stopped and held the razor out, the handle towards Quinn. As Quinn took the weapon, Marjoribanks threw back his head, making his throat as large as he could. 'Add my blood to the blood of my victims. Perfect me, as I perfected them.'
'You? But why?'
'The pain always returns. The blade goes in, the pain eases. But it always returns. You will end the pain forever. It is the last act in the operation. Perform this and the new age of Set will begin. Chaos and destruction on a scale not known before.'
'But what of Jane Lennox? What of your plans to marry?'
'She will understand. More than that, she will rejoice.'
Quinn reached out and took the blade to the other man's throat. But the intimacy of the moment, the man's nakedness before him, the startling immediacy of his eyes, the soft, dark pleading of those eyes, robbed him of his courage.
'Must I make you practise on him first?' murmured Marjoribanks, his lips barely moving.
Quinn looked once more at Petter's savagely inverted body. Like a long-lost friend rushing to embrace him, the rage flooded through his veins and fortified his sinews. He felt it enter the tips of his fingers. He tensed the muscles of his whole arm as he tightened his grip on the razor. And then he pushed with all his gathered strength.
The blade must have been exceedingly sharp. It found the soft dip between the thyroid cartilage and the hyoid bone, and burrowed into it. Quinn drove the blade deeper with a slicing motion. Something dark spurted from either side of it, and he felt a sense of immeasurable release.
There was a gurgling cry from the man at whose throat he was working, and then his body buckled and he fell forward. Quinn took the weight of his fall, and the brunt of his blood. He held the man with one arm and lowered him gently to the floor. With his other hand, Quinn kept the blade pushed into Marjoribanks' throat.
The dying man's eyes looked up at him and seemed to hold a smile.
In less than a minute the violent shuddering of deep shock took hold. Seconds after that, he was dead.
There was a groan from the floor behind him. Quinn eased himself away from the dead man and turned his attention to Venables.
The young man's eyes swam as he came round. The moment they settled on Quinn, panic bulged in them. Venables tensed and backed away.
'It's all right,' said Quinn. 'He's dead. He attacked me with the razor, but I managed to overpower him. We got a full confession. The case is closed. You did well.'
'I feel sick,' said Venables.
'That will be the ether. I'm sorry about that. But I felt it best to go along with him for as long as possible. As a precaution, I turned the cloth in my hand, so that you did not inhale the full force of the fumes. I would never have let you come to any real harm, you know.'
Venables seemed to pout, and then vomited over himself, an appropriate response to Quinn's reassurances.
Quinn stood and held the razor up to examine it. He sniffed the fresh blood, which had a sharpness to it that cut through the foul atmosphere of the cellar.
For the first time in a long time, he felt at peace.
The Silas Quinn Series.
SUMMON UP THE BLOOD *
The Porfiry Petrovich Series.
THE GENTLE AXE.
A VENGEFUL LONGING.
A RAZOR WRAPPED IN SILK.
THE CLEANSING FLAMES.
* available from Severn House.