Beneath London (10 page)

EIGHT

T
he way to Dr. Pullman’s house, with its morgue in the rear yard, led along the River Medway for a time, the water brown and high with the season and the tide, and then through the village, approaching the Chequers Inn over the very same road beneath which Mother Laswell’s murderous husband lay buried, his headless body long rotted away, but his memory still alive. Hasbro drove the chaise, and St. Ives looked up at the old inn, seeing what must be the window through which Mother Laswell, a comparatively young woman at the time, had watched the grisly business of the taking of the head. He was quite sure that she recalled that dark night all too perfectly, and that it haunted her dreams. The ghosts that remain in one’s memory, St. Ives had often found, are not often easy to lay.

They drove out across the old bridge now, the open sky above them dark with clouds, the fine weather a thing of the past. The air smelled of rain, calling up in St. Ives’s mind happily empty childhood days. He untied the lashings that secured the folding hood and raised it over their heads, and none too soon, for the rain began to fall in earnest when Hasbro turned up the road toward Dr. Pullman’s house, past occasional cottages that stood among bare orchards and fallow fields. Most of the cottages had small gardens, already showing the shoots of broad beans and onions and winter lettuce. There was something beautiful in autumn rain and in the autumn countryside, something that he had forgotten when the remnant of summer had appeared this morning and beguiled him.

“It’s a philosophical sort of day,” St. Ives said to Hasbro, raising his voice in order to be heard above the clatter and jingle of the cart and horse.

“Indeed it is,” Hasbro said. “It’s a philosophical season to my mind, a regretful season, just the opposite of spring. If it weren’t for Christmas, there’d be little joy in it, although there’s comfort in home and hearth when the air outside is full of flying snow.”

“I find myself somewhat gladdened by the changing season, which is apparent on such a day as this. If the world is turning toward winter, it is turning toward summer at one and the same time. There’s something to be said for looking ahead, at least in moderation.”

English oaks grew on either side of the road now, their nearly leafless canopies closing overhead, but blocking little of the rain. They came out under the sky again at the edge of Dr. Pullman’s property. The man himself, wearing a stained medical coat, sat on a bench on the veranda, watching the rain. He had a glass in his hand, and he raised it in a gesture of recognition when he saw who was coming along in the chaise.

St. Ives knew Pullman well enough, had visited on several occasions in the year and a half since he and Alice had moved to Aylesford, he and Pullman dissecting a gibbon ape that had died of apoplexy on one occasion. Pullman was much the superior anatomist, which was edifying for St. Ives, who valued the gaining of ready-to-hand knowledge. The ape’s body had been obtained from Mr. Marchand, a former zookeeper who lived in Maidstone and who still kept a variety of exotic animals on his considerable property. It had been Mr. Marchand who had sold Johnson the elephant to Alice.

Pullman rose and stepped down the several stairs, greeting them cheerlessly. “Will you take a glass of whiskey?” he asked, holding up his own glass again by way of illustration after leading them under the cover of the veranda and out of the rain.

Both men declined, and St. Ives said, “We’re here on an errand for Mother Laswell of Hereafter Farm. You know her, I believe. I’m afraid that she’s sadly distressed by the death of her friend.”

“Indeed I do know her. A very sensible, capable woman despite her eccentricities. I have no idea of her ghosts and fairies, but her struggle against what the poet referred to as ‘black, satanic mills’ has my entire sympathy. I assume you mean that she’s anxious about the particulars of the death.”

“Yes. I hope there’s something we can tell her that would be comforting, even in a small way.”

“There is not,” Dr. Pullman said. “It was foul murder of the most unnatural, cold-blooded variety. I’ve never seen anything like it, a senseless, unimaginable horror.”

“When did it occur?” St. Ives asked.

“Yesterday, in the morning to my mind.”

“What motive would a murderer have to kill an innocent woman in such a manner?” Hasbro asked. “Do you suspect a madman?”

“I’m not at all certain that I distinguish between murderous madmen and other varieties of murderer. From my point of view, cold, thoughtful murder is madness in any case, whether it be temporary madness or permanent. I can tell you, however, that if this man was literally insane – given that the fiend was a man and not a woman – he was also a skilled surgeon.”

He set his glass down on the little deal table next to the bench and said, “You won’t relish what you are about to see, if you choose to see it, but it’s the only way to convey the nature of the thing. But you already know that, Professor.”

“My knowledge is superficial, Doctor. We’re very keen to understand what sort of monster walks among us.”

Dr. Pullman ushered them into his modestly furnished home, which smelled of pipe tobacco, formaldehyde, and cooking grease. The wooden floors were covered with braid rugs, the place almost empty of needless decoration, but cluttered with shelves and shelves of books, many with Latin titles. Anatomical drawings papered the leftover wall space, and a wired-together human skeleton hung from a coat-rack in the corner, the hook behind it bearing an umbrella and a bowler hat.

The stove was lit in the small kitchen, the oven door standing open, no doubt in order to heat the house now that autumn had truly descended upon them. There was a broken disk of Stilton cheese atop a plate on the oil-cloth covered table, next to which a dead pelican shared a breadboard with half a loaf of bread, the bird’s breast cut open and its wings pinned back.

“I’ve been anatomizing over my lunch,” Dr. Pullman said. “One finds curious things in the bellies of sea birds.”

Without expounding on the matter, he led them out of the back door, down the stoop, and back out into the rain. They hunched across a patch of weedy grass to a stone building with a slate roof. A ladder leaned against the side of the building. On the ground below, a heap of broken slates lay piled beside a bucket that was black with tar, the brush stuck in it. Inside the operating room, however, there was a sense of organization and cleanliness: plaster walls with wooden cabinetry along the length of the room, drawers both large and small, framed anatomical depictions, jars containing various human organs and fetal animals. At one end of the room, beneath a window that let in afternoon light, was a broad basin with water taps above. The room reeked of carbolic acid. Mingling with the chemical odor was the smell of death, the summer-like heat earlier in the day having hastened the process of decay within the body that lay covered in a stained sheet upon the operating table. Dr. Pullman raised the end of the sheet and drew it from the corpse of Sarah Wright, folding it across the dead woman’s shoulders.

“Even though the murderer evidently meant to kill her, he removed her head after subduing her with chloroform,” Dr. Pullman said. “He wanted an unconscious but living patient. Lord knows why. The result, as you know, was a bloody mess.

“A skilled surgeon, you say?” St. Ives asked.

“A surgeon’s assistant might have committed the atrocity, although competent, surely, and willing to take great care with scalpel and saw. As you can see, the flesh has been neatly incised and the spine divided between the third and fourth vertebrae. The carotid and cervical arteries were severed last, to my mind, in order to put off certain death until the last moment. The body, of course, pumped out a tremendous amount of blood in its final seconds.”

“There is certainly more to be discovered,” Hasbro said. “The motivation could not have been mere deviltry. This is too systematic, too careful.”

“Indeed,” Pullman said. “There has been a spate of murders in London recently that involved surgeries – adrenal and pineal glands taken, brains entirely removed from the skull. Heads removed in much this same matter. London is full of vagabonds and orphans whom no one would miss, and such crimes are rarely solved. So this murder is not untypical, gentlemen, except that in this case the murderer traveled into Aylesford and thence into the heart of Boxley Woods in order to find a cottage that few even know exists.”

“Just so,” said St. Ives. “It was clear that the cottage had been thoroughly investigated – furniture upended, cupboards emptied onto the floor, floorboards prised up, holes dug in the ground beneath. Evidently there was something else they were searching for. Was there no evidence that they’d found it? Constable Brooke is looking into the mystery, I take it.”

“In his usual… careful manner, yes. In the cottage he found a great deal as regards the crime, but very little as regards the criminal.”

“Does he have any idea what might have been found beneath the floorboards, then?”

“He does not. He would have told me if he had. Perhaps the fiends found what they were looking for and took it with them, along with the poor woman’s head.”

St. Ives was abruptly conscious that rain was drumming against the slates of the roof, and he found that he was sick of the smell of carbolic and decaying flesh. He considered revealing Mother Laswell’s fears about her long-dead husband to Pullman, and of the man’s head being taken, but he rejected the idea. She had asked to remain in the shadows, and in the shadows she would remain. “Can you discern any similarity between the death of Sarah Wright,” he asked, “and that of the old sexton who passed away some few days ago?”

“Yes,” Pullman said. “Now you’ve hit upon something odd.” He drew the sheet over the corpse, and they walked out onto the covered stoop and into fresh air, the rain falling on three sides of them like a curtain. “The ingestion of henbane was common to both of them,” he said. “The smell of it was upon Sexton Peattie’s mouth and in a glass that had a small amount of gin in it. It was the probable cause of the old man’s death, although there was no autopsy, he being upward of ninety years old. I thought it odd, however, until I discovered in my reading that henbane is in fact steeped in various liquors as a flavoring, which satisfied me at the time that his death was at worst accidental, or that he was a self-murderer, which is no concern of mine.”

“But you discovered that Sarah Wright had been dosed with it also,” Hasbro said, “and your opinion changed?”

“I detected it in a teacup sitting on the windowsill in her cottage. The strong tea left in the bottom of the cup masked the smell somewhat. If I hadn’t been thinking of the Sexton, I would not have remarked upon it. It is now my suspicion that someone wanted something similar from both Sarah Wright and Sexton Peattie – information – and that they used a heavy decoction of henbane to promote truth-telling. It’s quite possible that they succeeded with Sexton Peattie, who sent them into the wood where they treated Sarah Wright in a similar manner. Perhaps she resisted when they compelled her to drink the poisoned tea. A certain amount of it had splashed over her clothing.”

“Perhaps they found nothing beneath the floorboards,” Hasbro said, “and so tried to compel her to say where the thing was hidden.”

“Perhaps,” said Pullman, “although I’m not happy with assumptions. There was one other odd thing, gentlemen. I found this lying on the floor some distance from the body. It lay hidden by a broken section of floorboard.” He reached into his vest pocket and took out a flat piece of thin glass, round on the unbroken edge – evidently a piece of a lens of some sort. “Look through it,” he said, handing it to St. Ives, who held it up to the sky.

“Distinctly purple,” St. Ives said. “A twilight purple, if you will.” He handed it to Hasbro, who also peered through it.

“It’s quite dark,” Hasbro said. “It would inconvenience a person to wear them.”

“That it would,” Dr. Pullman said, “if in fact that person were walking about. I believe, however, that I know what such goggles are meant to do, although their existence on the floor of the cabin makes not a jot of sense to me. Have you heard of the work of Walter John Kilner, Professor? He’s a medical electrician at St. Thomas’ Hospital, Lambeth?”