Free Summon Up the Blood by R. N. Morris Page A

Brompton Road. It was a respectable house in a pleasant location, close to Hyde Park and Exhibition Road. Quinn saw enough unpleasantness in his professional life; he wanted his home to be somewhere good, clean and wholesome.
    On Saturday afternoons, if his duties allowed, he would sometimes visit one or other of the museums. His favourite was the Natural History. In truth, these days his duties rarely did allow. He vaguely had it in his head that it was months since he had last browsed the mineral galleries, or craned his neck at the giant fossils. It was, in fact, years.
    From time to time, he wondered if it was strictly the call of duty that kept him away. Or rather, if his willingness to answer that call came from the fact that he simply found his work more absorbing than his leisure. A pastime, after all, is ultimately an empty activity. It lacks the point of a task, and falls far short of the purpose of a mission.
    No doubt it is pleasant if one has the company of a friend, particularly a young and pretty friend of the female sex. But Quinn lacked such a resource. His visits to the museum were always solitary. He invariably left there more alone than when he went in, even if he had managed to consume an afternoon, and treated himself to tea and cakes in the tea room. The public scale of the buildings had a desolating effect.
    Aware of his tendency to solitude, and wishing to guard against it, Quinn made heroic efforts at the house to forge relations with his fellow lodgers.
    What was the point,
he said to himself,
of clearing the streets of killers and criminals, if he could not hold down a polite conversation with ordinary, decent people?
    He made sure that those ordinary, decent people knew nothing about the nature of his work. To his fellow lodgers, he was simply Mr Quinn. He did not know if they speculated about what he did for a living. None of them had ever taken enough interest in him to ask.
    It rather amused him that they might imagine him to be a clerk or a shopkeeper, or possibly a commercial traveller, given his irregular hours and occasional absences.
    His landlady was a Mrs Ibbott. She had a daughter, Mary, who occupied his thoughts from time to time, in a manner of which he was not all together proud. It was a dangerous situation, very similar to one that had got him into trouble as a young man, about the time of his father’s suicide.
    Perhaps that was why he had chosen this particular lodging in the first place. Not for its proximity to Exhibition Road, or its generously proportioned rooms, but because it reminded him of the most humiliating and miserable time of his life. It was the emotional equivalent of a dog returning to its vomit.
    Of course, Mrs Ibbott and her daughter knew nothing of the episode in question, and he was determined that they never would. Was he taking a risk in living under their roof, or was he proving to himself, daily, that all that was in the past?
    He opened the door to a familiar homely smell. The walls had soaked up the vapours of countless meaty reductions. So that now the aroma of food was permanent. For once, he was back in time for dinner. Usually, the lingering ghost of it was all that was left to him.
    The hinges creaked – as they did every night – as he closed the door. Mrs Ibbott herself peeped out from the kitchen to see who it was. ‘Mr Quinn! I wondered if it was you.’
    ‘Good evening, Mrs Ibbott.’ Quinn defensively clutched the furled newspaper he had bought from a vendor on the way home, as if he were intending to beat his landlady away with it. He held his bowler in the other hand, out in front of him like a shield.
    ‘And will you be joining us for dinner?’
    ‘Thank you. I will eat in my room tonight, I think. I have some important work to prepare for.’
    He saw the honest disappointment in her face, the measure of her goodness. ‘But we see so little of you, Mr Quinn. We’re all worried that you are working too hard. Miss Dillard mentioned