Summon Up the Blood by R. N. Morris Read Free Book Online Page B

cadavers. He had felt it as a medical student, and perhaps it had contributed to his precipitous abandonment of that career. The nightmares he had experienced in the immediate aftermath of his breakdown were peopled with the dead.
    His father was among their number, of course; in these dreams he had been both dead and not dead. The great healer had used his talents to bring himself back to life. He had also been able to reanimate anonymous corpses based on the cadavers Quinn had seen in the dissecting room. In some cases, the reanimation was extremely limited, the twitch of a hand, the swivel of eyes, the upheaval of swallowing in the throat. One or two raised themselves to sitting position. At which point, Quinn’s father would turn to him, the glare of defiant pride in his eyes.
    The dreams did not end there. How could they? They were born out of mental illness and collapse. And so he was denied the usual relief of waking at the worst point of the nightmare.
    Quinn turned his gaze to the other side of the street, as if he were looking away from the morbid images of his old dreams. The Limehouse Liberal and Radical Association presented an innocuous, even respectable, facade. It brought to mind the agitation of the living rather than of the dead, the complex, compromised struggles of political aspiration.
    They passed Limehouse Town Hall and turned right into Three Colt Street, Macadam gratuitously sounding the horn as he made the manoeuvre. The sound disrupted Quinn’s thoughts. He was about to rebuke Macadam but relented. Perhaps his thoughts needed disrupting. They had been drifting away from the case.
    He kept his gaze fixed on the looming, soot-blackened tower of St Anne’s church, as if its sinister, almost fantastical presence held the key to the mystery he was investigating. What strange rite had been performed in the sacrifice and bleeding of that unknown young man? The sergeant at Shadwell had pointed the finger at the Jews. No doubt the man was an imbecile, but Quinn had an idea that the method of slaughter insisted upon under Jewish law placed emphasis on the removal of blood.
    Dangerous, dangerous
,
thought Quinn, as he watched the church recede. He remembered Sir Edward’s vague warning about foreign influences and precarious balances in the East End. He would have to tread carefully, there was no doubt.
    Before long they had turned into Limehouse Causeway. Quinn noticed the increase in Chinese names on the shop fronts. The mysterious strokes and dashes of the alien language fascinated him. He mistrusted the innocuous English translations that appeared alongside: Grocer’s, Laundry, General Stores.
So where were the signs for the opium dens and gambling houses?
he wondered.
    Like the sailors he had noticed earlier, the Chinamen he saw were dressed in the uniform of the English labouring poor. There were no long ponytails, no silk tunics or straw coolie hats; just black serge and cloth caps.
    Chinatown continued across the West India Dock Road into Penny Fields. It ended as abruptly as it had begun as that road turned into Poplar High Street.
    The Poplar Coroner’s Court was a recently constructed red-brick building with stone-mullioned windows, a compromise between the nostalgic romanticism of the architect and the parsimony of the local borough council. The front entrance on Poplar High Street was a somewhat grandiose affair, studded doors in a vaguely medieval style set into an arched doorway.
    The mortuary was a separate building at the rear, connected by a covered way. The styling was more functional: most of those who entered by the rear were beyond being impressed by architectural gestures.
    Macadam parked in the alley that ran along the side of the building, close to the entrance to the yard.
    Quinn passed the file over to him. ‘I suggest you familiarize yourself with the details of the case while you wait for me.’
    Unlike some of the crude sheds and improvised dead-houses Quinn had visited, the