The Butchered Man Read online

  “Sit, won’t you?” he said, indicating the chair opposite his green baize-covered writing desk.

  Felix hesitated. He felt he should say something and make some sort of excuse or explanation. So he gripped the back of the offered chair and attempted it.

  “Whatever Lord Rothborough might imply,” he said, “I mean to stay at least the two years we discussed in our letters.”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” said Vernon with a slight wave of his hand.

  “He may make plans for me,” Felix went on, “but they are not my plans.”

  “Yes, I quite understand. Now, do sit down, won’t you?”

  So Felix did as he was told and felt the Major’s disconcertingly clear eyes on him again. He was glad when the dog padded over and rested its chin on his knees.

  “Push her away if she bothers you,” said Vernon.

  “She doesn’t at all. What’s she called?”

  “Snow.”

  Felix ruffled her ears and smiled down at her.

  “It’s very interesting,” Major Vernon said. “There are some excellent reports here,” he said, tapping a file on the desk which presumably contained the testimonials that Felix had managed, not without some difficulty, to gather from the wreckage as the news that he had jilted Isabella Logan had spread around Edinburgh. “At least of your professional abilities. A gold medal for comparative anatomy. The Syme prize for an outstanding thesis on the variations of structure in the –” he glanced into the file, “the aortic chambers. Whatever that might be.”

  “The inside of the heart,” said Felix. “I was trying to establish the boundaries of what was normal and what might be considered abnormal.”

  “You spend six months dissecting hearts but you don’t care an iota about mine!” Isabella had sobbed that awful morning, when he had finally found the courage to tell her that he could not go through with it. Every argument he had put up in defence of his monstrous suggestion she demolished with her tears. “You think you know everything about everything but you know nothing. Nothing!” She had been right.

  “Might that be considered ambitious?”

  “Yes, well, I suppose so,” Felix said, pulling himself back to the present. “Yes. It was. Very.” It had been intended as his first step along the path to scientific glory. He had intended to publish it. He had managed to save some of the money required. He wanted to have full-colour engravings done. It would have been the making of his reputation, a handsomely-bound volume. “Carswell on the Heart.” But he had to give that money to Professor Logan, and then, most painfully of all, ask his father for the balance.

  He asked himself then, as he often did, why he could not have lied to her about his feelings. He might be in Edinburgh still, about to be wedded and bedded to a girl whom everyone told him was the prettiest, sweetest girl a man could hope to find. But that would have involved lying to himself, and that was what he could not bring himself to do. Not even for the sake of a brilliant career. And in the long run, it would have hurt her far more. She was suffering now, but it was nothing to how she would suffer to find herself married to man who did not love her. It had been brutal but necessary. And so here he was, in Northminster.

  “I received a great many applications for this post, and not one of them had anything to equal your honours, Mr Carswell. I think you are making a great professional sacrifice in choosing to come here. After all, the money isn’t that good, the hours will be irregular and I’ll expect a great deal of you. You won’t have much time or opportunity to build up a private practice and the society here is decidedly unattractive for a man of your age and talents. Yes?” Vernon smiled encouragingly at Felix. “It’s a little mysterious, I think.”

  Of course he would ask. It was to be expected.

  “Sir, I must be frank with you,” Felix said. “I left Edinburgh because I had to. I made an error of judgement – not medical judgement – but in a personal matter. I should have perhaps mentioned it my letters.”

  Vernon held up his hand.

  “You need not go into details. That is enough for me to know. I appreciate your frankness. It’s enough to say I have confidence in you professionally. I’d have been a fool not to take you on given the situation here.”

  “Which is?” Felix asked.

  “When I was appointed it was clear to me that I had to create an institution. From scratch. All we had here was a few old watchmen with lanterns. So what I had to do was make a modern police force to make this city feel safe. I wanted to create a model that other cities might follow. It is something of an experiment, and you are part of that experiment.”

  “How?”

  “I am taking as my model the regimental system. Of course, some would argue against that, that the police ought in no way to resemble the army. But I know the virtues of the system. It is the best way to bind men together and make them do an unpleasant task. Now in any decent regiment the surgeon is a key officer. He represents in the most tangible way the importance of the physical welfare of the men, which we, as officers, have as an almost sacred responsibility. If you have a good surgeon your men are confident. And if he sees to their wives and families too, then their sense of safety and well-being is increased. Of course it’s a benefit in kind for them, an incentive, like the uniform and the boots, but its effect is greater. They feel cared for and that’s important for a working man asked to do a difficult job – and I do demand a great deal of them. However, I had the devil of a job to convince the Watch Committee that we needed to retain a full-time medical man. But I did manage it eventually. Your qualifications impressed them. They liked the thought that they were getting a first class Edinburgh man for so little money. But I’m talking too much!” he said. “Let’s get you settled in your quarters.”

  He got up, and Snow trotted over to his side and leant against him.

  “I shall do my best,” said Felix. “I shouldn’t like to ruin an experiment.”

  “Good,” said the Major. “Now, I’ve addressed your responsibilities in more detail here,” he said, handing Felix a paper. “You can absorb that at your leisure. But I realise there is something I’ve missed.”

  “Yes?” said Felix, glancing over the paper. The Major had immaculate handwriting.

  “You must call on the Bishop,” he said, “or we will both have hell to pay.”

  Felix grimaced, folded the paper and put it in his coat pocket.

  There was a urgent knock at the door.

  “Come!”

  “Sorry to interrupt, sir, but you’ve got to come at once. Constable Reever has just found a body in a ditch!”

  Chapter Two

  Felix was glad of the broad brim of his objectionable hat as he crouched over Constable Reever’s ditch. The rain had turned into sleet.

  They were no longer in Northminster proper, Major Vernon pointed out, for the ditch lay just outside the ancient city walls. It was a squalid sight, to say the least. To Felix’s eye, it could never have been a very prosperous quarter and now it seemed to be rapidly degenerating. The tangled streets wound through a confusion of old houses in parlous repair, apparently crammed to the attics with those unfortunate souls who could afford no better. A few streets away he could see the grim mess of factories and mills that had mushroomed up in the last twenty years along the banks of the river. This place lay lost between that and the slightly more salubrious world within the walls: a depressing non-entity of a place, betwixt and between.

  The ditch was part of a collapsing house that was in the process of being properly demolished, presumably in order that a cheap new dwelling house might be thrown up in its place. A gang of men had been employed to clear the rubble, and they had been hard at work until they uncovered a large, suspicious sack. When one of them had seen an elbow poking through they had raised the alarm.

  Balancing uncomfortably on a muddy ledge, Felix took out his knife and cut through an accessible piece of the sacking. He could not simply fold it back or pull it clear because of the way the
body was lying, twisted up in the sacking.

  He peered down. It was human flesh all right. Pale, hairy and quite well muscled. He guessed he was looking at a leg, but he couldn’t be certain. He could hardly see a thing in the cascading sleet.

  “I can’t make much sense of this here,” he said. “It will have to come out.”

  The Major, who was making rapid notes in his pocket book, nodded and went to give orders to the constables.

  It took three of them to haul out the body and get it onto a handcart. Felix clambered up the bank after them, and would have fallen back in himself had not the Major stretched out his hand to him.

  As they wheeled the cart away, the foremen of the gang shouted, “Right lads, back to work!”

  “No,” said the Major. “No-one is to touch the site.”

  “What do you mean, sir?”

  “Find your men some other work to do. This area is closed.”

  “On whose say-so?”

  “The Chief Constable’s – which should be quite enough for you. Reever, make sure no-one approaches this area, from the fence post to the back wall. And Sergeant White, get that ditch covered – a tarp and some planks ought to do it. We’ll come back and have a proper look at it when the weather calms down, Mr Carswell.”

  The foreman turned back to his gang with a shrug.

  “You heard the man. No more work here to today!”

  “Hey, gaffer, you promised us a day’s work!” one of the gang protested.

  “And it’s too late to get anything else now. What are we going to do for bread?”

  “Don’t ask me,” said the foreman. “Ask him.” He flung his hand in the Major’s direction.

  “Who’s your employer?” Vernon asked the foreman.

  “Joseph Sutcliffe – and he won’t thank me if I pay out for men to be idle. I shall lose myself over this business. I don’t know what the fuss is about. There’d have been a load of spoil in there given half an hour and no-one would have been the wiser – or poorer. You had no damn business sending for a constable, Fredericks, none!” he finished, yelling at one of the gang.

  “If he hadn’t, you’d be facing the magistrate for unlawful burial,” Vernon said. “Take this man’s name and particulars, Sergeant. Your men did the right thing when they called for the constable.”

  “Constables!” said the foreman contemptuously. “Since when did free born Englishmen need constables spying over them? It’s all wrong. And let me tell you something, sir – there’s a reason for a man being chucked in a hole like that. A good reason – it’ll be some filthy half-wit in that sack who don’t deserve a proper burial. That’ll be it.”

  “There’s a nice example of charity in a hard winter,” Vernon murmured to Felix when he returned to his side. Then he turned to Constable Reever. “Which one of them found the body?”

  “Young fellow on the right, sir.”

  Vernon went over to speak to them and Felix saw him dig in his pocket and distribute some coins among them. After a few minutes he returned with one of them, a young man.

  “Can you read and write, Mr Fredericks?”

  “A little, sir.”

  “I want you to come back with us and one of my sergeants will take down a statement from you. You can read it back and sign it. You may be asked to give evidence to the coroner as well, do you understand?” The man nodded. “On another matter, have you ever considered joining the force? It’s steadier work than this, with a chance of promotion for a man if he works at it. You’re obviously an observant, responsible fellow. You should think of it.”

  “All he needs is the King’s shilling to offer him,” Constable Reever said to Felix.

  “Perhaps not. You and I joined without it,” Felix said.

  “That’s very true, sir,” said Reever. “The Major has that effect on a man. That fellow will be signing up, you can be sure of it.”

  ***

  As they walked back up the hill towards The Unicorn by the Castle, Giles Vernon pondered where they should put the body. Housekeeping decisions of this sort seemed to occupy a great deal of his time. However, there had not been a situation quite like this in the two years since he had been in Northminster. A man had died in the street after a brawl but there had been no mystery about that. There had been no anonymous corpses before, thank God. Nothing so unsettling. This matter would have to be carefully and discreetly managed. There were already enough rumours about Chartist agitators and their supposedly terrible deeds washing about the town.

  It had been useful, to say the least, to have a medical man on hand. Carswell’s arrival could not have been more timely, and Giles felt all his arguments to the Watch Committee to be thoroughly vindicated. He checked himself: it was hardly a time for gloating when some poor soul had been disposed of so callously, with nothing more than a filthy old sack for a shroud.

  Glancing now at Carswell, as they trudged up the hill, Giles could not help observing how young he seemed, more like a schoolboy than the experienced man recommended by his professors. He did not look old enough to wield a razor, let alone a lancet. Still, Lord Rothborough wore his years lightly, so perhaps it was something in the blood, much as the Vernon blood ran to long legs and cragginess.

  He decided that the old carriage house would make as good a temporary mortuary as any. It had a solid lock on the door, was presently empty and had a skylight. Given that Carswell would be performing a post mortem in there, it also had a flagged floor that could be sluiced down afterwards. He gave an involuntary shiver – he could not prevent an ancient revulsion about such things, but he was annoyed at himself for his weakness.

  Carswell approved the mortuary and went off to get his tools. Giles sent the others for trestles and planks, straw, sheets and lamps and then stood in lonely vigil with the handcart and the corpse, waiting for their return. He pulled back the little part of the sacking that Carswell had cut open and saw that the body appeared to have been stripped naked. The dead man’s clothes were probably already on sale in the busy rag market that filled the lane behind St Luke’s church. Giles hypothesised that someone had found a dead man (who had probably died of some natural cause), removed his valuables and clothes and then disposed of the body in a ditch in the collapsing house. It was, most likely, nothing more sinister than that.

  Carswell returned with the men and the trestles were set up. He was excited as a terrier about to run down a rabbit hole. He threw off his coat and began to roll up his sleeves as the constables heaved the man up on to the table. He brought out a pair of tailor’s shears from his bag and was soon snipping away at the sacking. He pulled the folds of coarse cloth away, and suddenly the victim lay there, revealed, vulnerable and no longer anything but a tragedy.

  Giles covered his mouth. One of the constables swore under his breath and the other turned away.

  Steeling himself, Giles stepped forward and forced himself to look properly at it. He knew now they were not looking at a natural death.

  It was like looking at the work of a fiend.

  The face had been scored across with a blade, with deep crosses across each eye and the lips, making grotesque patterns. The chest and abdomen had been repeatedly attacked with great ferocity, this time with a piercing blade, with an almost mechanical quality to it, like a seed drill attacking the frozen earth. But the worst of it was the gaping absence of the genitals, the force with which they had been sliced away all too evident from the wound that remained.

  “This goes no further,” Giles said, at last breaking the silence that had possessed them all. “Do you understand?” The constables nodded, still too shocked to speak. “No-one comes in here except Mr Carswell and myself. Hinton, go and tell Sergeant Fleming to put someone to watch the door.”

  “But what do we say, sir, about... it?” stuttered Hinton.

  “We’ve got a dead man, that’s all. Nothing more.”

  “I need more light,” said Carswell.

  “Go and see to it,” Giles said. They went, Hi
nton shaking his head after one last glance at the body.

  Giles shut the door behind them and set down the latch.

  “I don’t want wild talk going around the town,” he said, and turned back reluctantly towards the body. He knew he would prefer to leave and busy himself with lamps and orders rather than stay to confront this desecration, but face it he must.

  Carswell stood motionless, staring at the body, his arms clasped across him, one fist pressed to his lips, his brow furrowed.

  “It’s very odd,” he said, after a moment. “I can’t be sure about this, but these wounds on the thorax –” He pulled a hand lens from his pocket and peered hard through it. “From the appearance of these wounds, I’d hazard a guess they were inflicted post-mortem. There’s something too neat, too regular about the pattern, don’t you think?”

  Giles nodded. He had seen men stabbed in fights and the wounds were all over the place, wherever the assailant could get a blade in.

  “Are you saying that if he’d been struggling the wounds wouldn’t be so neat?”

  “Amongst other things,” said Carswell.

  There was a knock at the door. It was Fleming with the lamps. Giles threw a sheet over the dead man and let the Sergeant in.

  They set out a variety of candles and lanterns so that the room glowed like a ballroom. When Fleming had left, Carswell drew off the sheet again and bent over the body.

  “Ah, yes, look at that, sir, look.” He handed Giles the glass. “Do you see how little coagulated blood there is about the wound? How little swelling and gaping. I reckon that once I’ve dissected him, we’ll see no blood in the tissues.”

  “Which is what you would see if he were alive when he’d been stabbed?”

  “Correct.” Carswell was now feeling the man’s head. “No sign of any wounds to the skull. No-one coshed him, at any rate.” He reached out and pinched back one of the mutilated eyelids. “That’s a mess – I can’t see the state of the eye.”

  “Could he still have died of a natural cause?”

  “Quite possibly.”

  “So either he died of natural causes and was then butchered,” Giles said, “for want of a better expression. Or he was killed by some other means, as yet unknown and then mutilated. Yes?”