He had Macadam drive him.
They were silent in the car. There was nothing to be said. Nothing that could be altered by words.
Macadam was focused on the shifting pool of road picked out by the beams of the car’s headlights. It felt like something unspooling, the flickering image of a strangely monotonous moving picture show.
Quinn saw the tension in Macadam’s shoulders, could sense his jaw clench and grind. He could take a guess at the other man’s thoughts. It would be something to do with the arguments they had had over who should drive. He had finally got his way, he would ruefully, bitterly be thinking. And it would afford him no satisfaction.
Quinn knew his sergeant well enough to bet that he would forego driving ever again if it would bring his fallen comrade back. He could imagine Macadam growing to hate his once-beloved Model T, because each time he drove it would be a reminder that Willoughby was dead instead of him.
They had called in at the Yard on the way, to get the details of Willoughby’s next of kin from his employment file. The file contained a copy of a letter of commendation from Willoughby’s previous commanding officer. The words were warm. They spoke of the young man’s courage and intelligence, of the invaluable contribution he made to the team, and the bright future he no doubt had ahead of him.
They might have provided some comfort to Willoughby’s parents, if they had not been written by DCI Coddington.
Quinn had dropped the letter as if it were contaminated. It lay in the folder, a thin, tawdry thing, devalued and miserable, all the sadder because it must once have been a source of pride. Quinn closed the file on it.
He would find his own words to say to Mr and Mrs Willoughby.
Quinn felt the car’s vibrations in his joints. The engine chugged and rattled unfeelingly, as if they were on an unremarkable journey into a perfectly ordinary darkness. They were going, in fact, to Deptford. But place names had lost their meaning now. There was just this part of the universal darkness – and this part, and this part – each an indistinguishable atom of chaos.
It was some time after eight when he knocked on the door of the terraced house, Macadam shivering uncontrollably at his side. The curtains were drawn, but a faint light showed. The street was quiet. The urgent hammering of the knocker must surely have told those inside the whole story.
A stirring inside. The slow, reluctant surfacing of dread. Footsteps circling. Muted voices, panic-edged.
Somewhere in the distance a drunk began to sing.
The door was opened by a girl aged about sixteen. She looked at them fearfully and pulled a woollen shawl tighter across her shoulders. A middle-aged woman, as comfortably round as a dumpling, materialized at her back.
A look of mild concern suddenly hardened into one of pinched grimness.
‘Steve, fetch your pa.’
As she spoke, Quinn knew immediately where Willoughby got his quick, relentless intelligence from. She had taken in the situation immediately. There was no illusion in her eyes. They did not flinch from confronting that which had to be confronted. He sensed she had been bracing herself for this knock at the door for a long time.
A quick slither of boyhood slipped out between them and hotfooted it towards the drunken singing.
Quinn removed his bowler and clutched it in both hands in front of him. He sensed Macadam do the same.
‘Mrs Willoughby, may we come in?’ Quinn did her the honour of meeting her fierce gaze directly.
‘You’d better had,’ she said, and turned her back on them.
She led them into a stuffy, overheated parlour. Red coals glowed cosily, unfeelingly, on the hearth. The room was hung with home-made paper decorations. A Christmas tree stood in one corner, a box of decorations open beside it. Quinn was shocked by this reminder of the coming festivities.
She nodded for them to sit down, and in that nod was acknowledgement of what they had come to say to her. She sat down too, primly, quickly, decisively, as if to say they had better get this over. ‘It’s Martin, isn’t it?’
Her daughter stood watching at the door, her mouth a small circle of fear.
‘I’m afraid so. I’m very sorry, Mrs Willoughby.’ Quinn left it there. It was enough. Enough to say that and continue to meet her gaze. (No, he would not look away. He would not turn from her in her moment of grief.)
The cry in her throat, the flesh of her throat tensed and straining, a grating of flesh, a taut, high, trembling cry. Agony. Agony to hear. Agony given voice. Agony quivering in her throat, finding its voice, feeling its range.
The girl threw herself towards her mother, her own grief catching in her throat as if she were trying to cough it up.
And now another noise crashed into this, doors thrown open, the thunder of boots, all hard-edged and brutish, as Willoughby’s father burst into the room.
Disarrayed by drink he might have been, but now something else had undone him utterly. His eyes stared wildly as he tried to take in the scene. A bedraggled moustache jumped and writhed as his mouth twitched with questions he could not bring himself to ask.
Quinn and Macadam rose to their feet, as if they had been caught out doing something they shouldn’t have.
‘Mr Willoughby?’ Quinn tensed his lips together, as if he was determined to hold in the terrible news it was his duty to share. ‘I’m Detective Chief Inspector Quinn, Martin’s commanding officer. I’m afraid I have some bad news. Martin is dead. He was shot in the line of duty earlier today. We don’t as yet know who killed him, but please be assured that we are doing everything in our power to apprehend his murderer. There will be an inquest, of course.’
The father stood stupefied, uncomprehending, as if he could not grasp it, not even after Quinn had spelled it out so bluntly. But no, that was unkind. It was simply that he could not take it in, or more likely refused to. Quinn suspected that, unlike his wife, he had not prepared himself for this moment at all.
The boy, dead? It was impossible. He had seen him only that morning, and he was as alive as any of them.
Such were the thoughts Quinn imagined rushing through the father’s head.
Willoughby senior shook his head in vigorous denial. An unvoiced no, no, no, repeated and repeated and repeated.
His face darkened, incomprehension making way for rage. Rage, surely, against the men who had brought this hard word – dead! – to his door, and had smuggled it into his parlour and smeared it about, defacing the walls of the little house his wife kept so neat and tidy. It was a credit to her, really it was.
There was no place for such words in here.
He shook his head, still, silently gainsaying the news they had brought.
Any minute now, Quinn thought, he will start shouting.
The rage will be too much for him. And the drink, the drink will have him shouting.
But no. Instead he turned his face to the wall, so that they could not see what havoc was being played with it now. There was a groan, a deep, suffering groan, then the man’s whole body seemed to quake. A vein bulged on his neck. His right arm tensed. Quinn watched in horror as he threw a punch. There was a sickening crack. The man’s fist crashed through the flimsy lath and plaster partition. The smell of plaster dust. Forever, now, Quinn would think of it as the smell of grief.
Willoughby’s father began to whimper, as he stood there with his broken knuckles half-buried in the wall.
It was strange to see them so isolated from one another in their pain. The mother, cleaving to her daughter for comfort. The father, lashing out at the very fabric of his ruined home, as if he would tear it down around them.
Quinn and Macadam exchanged a look and slipped away.
The boy Steve stood in the hall, outside the room, looking in, awestruck by his parents’ emotions.
Quinn reached out as if he might tousle his hair. He stopped himself just in time, his hand hovering uselessly between them.
‘Can you make your ma and pa a cup of tea, Steve?’
The boy nodded.
‘Then do that, why not. Do that for them. Make it sweet, very sweet, if you have sugar. They’ve had a shock, a terrible shock.’
Quinn nodded, then bowed his head as he charged out into the waiting darkness.
In the distance, the drunken singing continued.