‘One of her eyes was forcibly removed from her head.’

‘The newspaper said that, did it?’

‘The woman in question was taken from the scene – it was assumed to hospital – by a man who claimed to be a doctor. Indeed, he gave his name – to me – as Doctor Casaubon. That is why I have come to see you today.’

‘You believe I was the doctor who took her away?’

‘No, it was not you. It was someone else. I apologize for wasting your time.’ But Quinn made no move to get up from the chaise longue.

‘Rest a while. Before you press on with your investigation.’

‘I don’t have time.’ Quinn swung his legs up and lay back on the chaise longue.

‘There is always time to tend to the needs of the soul.’

‘It was after my father died,’ said Quinn suddenly. He was aware of feeling slightly surprised that he had blurted out this confidence. It had been the last thing he had wanted to divulge. He was puzzled as to how the doctor had managed to induce him to confess it, merely by urging Quinn to tend to the needs of his soul. Perhaps that was a technique he could apply when interrogating suspects.

‘Your father’s death affected you badly?’

‘The inquest verdict was death by misadventure. But there were rumours that he took his own life. That was certainly what my mother believed.’

‘And you did not?’

‘Not then.’

‘And now?’

‘There’s a man, who claims he knows the truth about my father’s death. I … I ran away from him, from finding out the truth. I had always thought of myself as a seeker of the truth. And yet, when presented with the opportunity to find out the one thing that I most desired to know, I … ran away.’

‘If you don’t know the truth, you can make it be whatever you want it to be.’

‘They write about me in the newspapers.’

Quinn heard the doctor’s pen scratch excitedly in the dark.

‘They have begun to call me Quick-Fire Quinn.’

‘How does that make you feel?’

‘I don’t like it.’ But Quinn wondered if this were true, even as he said it.

‘There is no truth in it?’

‘No … well, it is true that some of the suspects I have hunted over the years have … died at my hands. But it has been necessary. These are invariably dangerous men. I have a duty to protect the public, and my men.’

‘And yourself.’

‘Is that so wrong?’

‘Not wrong at all. You do what you have to do.’

‘But today, I thought … on the way here to see you … the thought occurred to me … What if I kill them for the same reason that I ran from this man? Because I don’t want to know the truth. I am afraid of the truth! After all these years in the force!’

There was a long pause. Eventually Dr Casaubon coughed, as though in some embarrassment. ‘You really are a policeman, aren’t you?’

‘Of course.’

‘I believe I can help you. If you wish to be helped.’

‘I don’t need that kind of help.’

‘And yet you came here today.’

‘As part of my investigation.’

‘Of course. That’s how the unconscious works. It always provides a plausible specious reason – a rational explanation – alongside the true reason.’

‘What are you saying? I had no idea what kind of doctor you were before I came here. And I had no control over what name that man last night would give. My unconscious has played no part in bringing me here.’

‘I wasn’t talking about your unconscious especially. The world has an unconscious, you know. You may call it God, if you wish. Although sometimes it seems more like the Devil. In point of fact, it is both. In psychoanalysis, opposing forces are reconciled. The polarity of good on the one hand and evil on the other becomes resolved into a unity in which both good and evil coexist. For instance, it was undoubtedly an evil that this poor girl was attacked. And yet some good has come of it. It has led you here to me, and perhaps to your psychic salvation.’

‘It’s just a coincidence.’

Dr Casaubon chuckled, as if the notion of a coincidence was the most ridiculous thing he had ever heard. ‘The unconscious is cunning. It always allows us that explanation too. It is consistent with the polarity I have touched upon. It presents us with the path to our own healing, but at the same time provides us with the excuses for not taking it.’

‘With respect, Doctor, this all sounds like mumbo-jumbo.’

‘Yes. That is how you feel about it now. I expect you will change your mind. At any rate, you have found me once. You may find me again.’

In the shadowed gloom of the doctor’s surgery, Quinn was momentarily disorientated. There was some quality in Casaubon’s voice that took him back to an earlier time in his life, to a place he had long believed he had left behind for good: the Colney Hatch Asylum. Indeed, so intense was the sensation that he wondered if he had ever left there.

THIRTY-FOUR

Quinn noticed the gleam of a familiar excitement in Macadam’s eye as soon as he stepped back into the department.

‘There’s been a development, sir. They’ve found her. A girl with one eye missing. We’re to go to an address in Soho. Shall I fetch the Ford?’

‘How … how is she?’

‘She’s dead, sir. It’s a body they’ve found.’

Of course, he had known right from the start that that was what Macadam would say. He knew it as soon as he saw that gleam in his eye.

PART THREE

Death

THIRTY-FIVE

Quinn was aware of a ticklish apprehension, a sense of inevitability and dread. He had the feeling that they were moving under a cloud of spreading blackness, towards something very black indeed. And yet the day was bright enough. The blackness was of entirely psychological origin.

His encounter with the second Dr Casaubon had unnerved him. And the fact that the girl had now apparently turned up dead depressed him. It was another death that could be lain at his door. He had permitted the man who had called himself Dr Casaubon to take her away. Impressed by the man’s natural air of confidence and authority, and the superficial evidence he gave of medical knowledge, he had failed to ask for any credentials. But had instead surrendered a vulnerable, wounded girl to a complete stranger.

And now it seemed possible, if not likely, that this man was her attacker come to finish off what he started. If he had been wearing a mask at the time of the attack – a devil’s mask perhaps, in keeping with the woman’s insistence that she had been attacked by the devil – she would not have recognized him. Even more chillingly, perhaps he was a second predatory individual. One more violent than the original attacker, one drawn to the acts of horror that others had initiated, but prepared to take them to their ultimate conclusion. Prepared, in other words, to kill, whereas the first attacker had only maimed.

Macadam drove them north to Dean Street. A couple of uniforms on the street signalled the door they were looking for. Inside, Quinn’s psychological darkness was almost equalled by the gloom of the narrow stairway. Male voices, and the clumping of boots on boards, drew them up to the first-floor landing.

A door was open on to a small rented room. It was even darker in there than on the landing, as the curtains were still drawn from the night before. Hard to see what was what, especially as a wall of burly backs filled the threshold, screening the scene of crime from Quinn’s view.

Macadam took umbrage at this cluster of detectives from the local Great Marlborough Street nick. ‘What’s all this? Come on, out of the way, out of the way! Don’t you lot know anything about forensics? You can’t go clodhopping all over the place like this.’