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.

‘Police! Quick! For God’s sake, someone fetch a doctor! There has been an horrific crime committed!’

EIGHTEEN

Quinn gave a brief, commanding nod to Inchball for him to remain at his post, and went with the fellow.

He was led at a half-run – ‘Please, hurry!’ – out of Leicester Square, across Charing Cross Road and into a dimly lit alleyway, one of the two passages through to St Martin’s Lane. Quinn glanced at the street sign, which told him it was Cecil Court.

There were voices ahead of him, and a horrible, high-pitched wailing. It was the sound of shredded flesh. The cries of a tortured animal. Although there was something in it that enabled him to identify its source as human, and probably female.

Quinn made out a huddle of crouching men. A light went on in one of the shop windows, which was filled with kinematographic cameras and lighting equipment. It seemed that some of these lights had been activated, and their beams directed towards the scene unfolding in front of the premises. Whether this was to aid the actions of the men in the alley, or to provide illumination for filming, Quinn could not be sure.

His escort cried out for them to be let through. The handful of men rose and parted as one, turning towards Quinn as though they had been waiting for him. There was a peculiar solemnity to their movements that seemed almost choreographed. Perhaps in these circumstances some instinct takes over, and affects all men in the same way. It seemed that everyone knew what to do.

A young woman lay on the ground, writhing and gasping for air so that she could keep up her savage keening. She held both hands to her right eye. Blood seeped out through her fingers and was smeared across her face. Her hair appeared to be matted with it too and there were bloodstains on the pavement.