‘Poor fellow. He seems to have borne the brunt of it. Did he say anything to you about what he saw before the lights went out?’

‘He remarked particularly on their being no smoke.’

‘No smoke, you say?’

‘That’s what he said. Is it possible?’

‘Oh, yes, if the explosive material used was guncotton.’

‘I see.’

‘It’s very popular in mines, because of the lack of smoke, you see. If you’re working in a confined space you don’t want it filling with smoke.’

‘Is there anything else you can tell me about the cause?’

‘Judging by the damage, it was a relatively small device, designed to make a point rather than wreak widespread destruction. Enough to blow the glass in and scorch the frontage, but no structural damage that I can see. It doesn’t look like the work of the Fenians. If they’d been behind it, there wouldn’t be anything left of the building.’

‘That’s not likely.’ Quinn pointed Lennox out. ‘The owner is himself Irish. And a nationalist.’

The fireman nodded as if this was consistent with his own theories. ‘The direction of the shatter – given that all the glass was blown inside the building – suggests the bomb was placed here in the street, in front of the window. We’ll look for residue, of course. The guncotton must have been placed in something. Possibly a length of pipe or a tin box of some kind. Don’t worry, guv. Whatever it was, we’ll find it.’

‘And you are …? In case I wish to speak to you again?’

‘Captain Alexander Hotty, of the Cannon Street Fire Station.’

‘Hotty?’

‘Yes, that’s right. Hotty. Two Ts and a Y.’

‘I will remember that, I think.’

Captain Hotty frowned, as if he could not for the life of him understand why his name was worthy of comment.

There was an awkward moment. Quinn wondered about trying to explain the joke to him. Thankfully, one of the firemen who had gone into the building broke the tension by approaching his superior. His protective mask was pulled up to reveal his face. He was carrying a circular tin container of shallow depth and about a foot in diameter. He turned it over in his hand, revealing the outside to be battered and dusty, and the inside completely blackened.

‘What do you have there, Stoker?’

‘Looks like this here’s your bomb,’ said Stoker. ‘Or one half of it. He must have packed it with explosive, rigged up some kind of fuse and left it outside the window. This half got blown inside. Reckon we’ll find the other half in the street somewhere.’

Quinn held out his hand to take the flimsy tin. He held it to his face and inhaled the charred interior.

‘It’s one of them film cans, ain’t it?’ said Stoker. ‘I once got called to a fire in a picture palace when I was stationed in Islington. Saw a lot of them about the place, we did.’

Whether it was the smell from the film can or the information he had just been told, Quinn felt his heart kick viciously as if his system had just been infiltrated by an intoxicating stimulant.

FORTY-EIGHT

Macadam drove them north to Clerkenwell. Quinn still had the card that Grant-Sissons had given him. He remembered the man’s bandaged hand and the wince he had been unable to conceal.

‘An old wound, that’s what he had said.’

‘What’s that, guv?’

‘Grant-Sissons.’

‘This feller you fancy for the bomb outrage?’

‘His hand was bandaged when I saw him at the hospital. He said it was an old wound. But what if it was fresh? What if he had sustained it while attacking Dolores Novak? It’s perfectly possible that she would have tried to defend herself.’

‘So you fancy him for that too?’

‘Let us moot the hypothesis that he is waging some kind of vendetta against the film industry. He is a failed inventor who nurses a great grudge. He claims he invented the motion picture camera and believes that he has been robbed of his share of the profits of every film made.’

‘But why attack that newspaper?’

‘Harry Lennox, the proprietor of the Clarion, is an investor in Hartmann’s production company.’

‘There’s more to it than that, sir,’ put in Macadam from the front. ‘You know that I am a subscriber to the Kinematograph Enthusiast’s Weekly. The editorial address of that publication is the same as the Daily Clarion. It is printed on the same presses and is owned by Lennox too.’

‘So he is not just an investor in the film industry; he is an active promoter of it,’ concluded Quinn.

The Model T’s headlamps picked out a crenellated arch suspended over the road: the grey nocturnal ghost of St John’s Gate. The car slowed as it passed under, a shadow slipping through a shadow.

Macadam pulled up in St John’s Square. All three policemen got out of the car.

‘I think it’s better if I speak to him alone,’ said Quinn. ‘He knows me.’ Quinn was thinking of his own unfinished business with Grant-Sissons. He had no desire for his sergeants to hear whatever Grant-Sissons had to say about his father. Quinn felt his left breast, touching the hard metal where his pistol was holstered. ‘You need not fear for my safety. I am armed.’

He sensed Macadam and Inchball exchange an uneasy look.

‘With respect, sir …’ Macadam did not press his point.

Inchball was less tactful: ‘It ain’t your safety we’re worried about.’

‘I understand perfectly. And it is precisely for that reason that I should go in alone. If he sees the three of us, he may well panic and therefore do something stupid, in the face of which I may be forced to take self-defensive action. Besides, we have no concrete evidence to place him at either scene. At the moment, we are acting on nothing other than conjecture.’

‘Is there something you’re not telling us, guv?’

‘He knew my father. I hope to use that to our advantage. It will be easier to do so if I am alone. I want you two to position yourselves at either end of St John’s Passage, in case he tries to make a run for it.’

‘What if he’s not there, guv?’

‘Then I shall wait for him. If he returns, don’t try to apprehend him. Leave him to me.’

Quinn turned abruptly from his sergeants, and from further discussion.

He entered a tight passageway with high brick walls on either side, a channel of night cut into the city. The stench of urine marked it as a stopping place for drunks. Quinn stood for a moment, allowing his eyes to adapt to the gloom. A spill of light from the square seeped along the walls, and there was a light in a window at the end of the passage. It was enough for Quinn to make out two doors set side by side into the wall. The second door was the one he was looking for.

He balled his fist and pounded the door. Somewhere, a dog barked in response.

A dark figure approached from the square. From the body shape, he guessed it was Inchball. The two men did not exchange a word as they squeezed past one another. Inchball’s footsteps receded as he took up position at the far end of the passage.

For a moment, Quinn felt as though this bleak forgotten place was all that was left in the universe. He did not believe in the square beyond Macadam, or the workshop behind the door, or whatever now lay at Inchball’s back. He felt as if all that was good and all that was evil in the world, all the hope and all the fear, was being channelled through that narrow alleyway with a policeman at either end and one in the middle. He knew from experience that things could go either way now. He might get what he wanted from Grant-Sissons, a confession, resolution of the crimes he was investigating, and perhaps of even more. The truth about his father. Another outcome was conceivable: that the night would end in death, either his own or Grant-Sissons’s. Possibly both.

But it was too late to back out. That had never been an option.

He was about to resume his pounding, when a crack of light appeared at one side of the door. The crack widened to reveal the face of a man peering out. It was not the face of Grant-Sissons but there was something familiar about it, a resemblance to someone whom Quinn could not for the moment place. It was the face of a young man who must have been about the age Quinn was when his father died. Perhaps it was a strange way to frame the matter, but after all he had come to see a man who had promised to tell him about his father’s death. And so, it was not so eccentric that his mind should run in this direction. He even wondered if the resemblance he detected was to himself as a younger man.