Soutar picked up a page and briefly glanced at it.
‘We will investigate this in due course, but it is not why we’re here. You are being apprehended on suspicion of the murder of Dr Archibald Banks.’
SIXTY-EIGHT
hey marched him down the High Street through the crowds, a man either side. Amidst the chaos of the crowd, there seemed ample opportunity to run and disappear, but aside from his hands being bound, where would he go? Best that he remained cooperative and acquiescent, then he could calmly and rationally explain why the accusation was false.
He just wished he had heeded Dr Simpson’s advice in seeking to have McLevy owe him favours.
They passed Parliament Square, the police office coming up on the right-hand side. Raven noticed a policeman at the door gesture to Soutar with a shake of the head and a pointed finger.
They kept walking.
‘Where are we going?’ Raven asked. The police office had been a troubling enough prospect, but somewhere unknown was far worse. His fear was that he was being taken directly to Calton Jail, schoolboy tales of which had haunted his nightmares ever since.
‘No room at the inn,’ Soutar told him. ‘All of the holding cells are full. It’s been a busy old day. Often happens after a full moon. We are using the Night Asylum for the Houseless as an overspill.’
Raven was led past Gun Tavern and through a heavy door, where he was greeted with a sight akin to that which greeted Heracles on his errand to retrieve Cerberus. Behind a gate barred from floor to ceiling there had to be at least forty men confined inside a single chamber. From the fact that the smell of alcohol was strong enough to be detected over those of sweat and urine, it was evident that most of them were drunk.
A few sat on benches lining the walls, but most were milling around, conversing, laughing, arguing. They could have been in the tavern next door except there was no more drink to be had, and they could not leave. He saw several lying on the floor, unconscious, but not all from the drink. Some were out cold in puddles of vomit, others in puddles of blood. Somewhere in the gloom he could hear a sonorous, stentorian snoring, like some terrible beast was asleep in the dark. He could not see where.
Tommy undid Raven’s bonds while Soutar patted down his pockets, removing his Liston knife.
‘Better we take this from you than one of them. It would not serve the ends of justice were you to be gutted before we have the chance to hang you.’
Raven was surprised he didn’t take his money too. It seemed certain he would be relieved of it soon enough.
He was thrust through the gate by Soutar while Tommy pulled it shut again with a reverberating clang.
Raven turned to face his jailer.
‘On whose authority am I being held?’
Soutar turned his back and walked away.
‘On what evidence?’ he shouted as the policemen headed for the exit. ‘I demand to talk to McLevy.’
The door was opening as they approached it and he recognised the booming northern Irish accent before he saw the speaker.
‘You don’t get to make demands in here, Dr Raven.’
Raven gripped the bars as McLevy wandered over. ‘There has to have been some kind of misunderstanding, Mr McLevy. I was not even present in the house when Dr Banks passed away.’
‘You can prove you were somewhere else?’
‘It is well known where I was. Jarvis the butler knew to come and find me at number 7 Albany Street. I was tending to Mrs Banks, who had become ill.’
‘Tending to her?’ McLevy said with a knowing leer. ‘Yes, I am informed that you and Mrs Banks have become very close. I am also led to believe that Mrs Banks stands to inherit handsomely from her late husband. Furthermore, I am told that Dr Banks died from the over-inhalation of chloroform, an agent with which I believe you are particularly familiar.’
Raven saw it now.
‘You’ve been talking to Quinton. The man is a thief and his testimony cannot be trusted.’
‘My informant is a most respected and reliable individual. He tells me that not only were you indeed present at 52 Queen Street on the night that Dr Banks died, but that he saw you in an agitated and hurried state, impatient to lay hold of chloroform.’
‘I required the chloroform for a procedure I was carrying out at Albany Street.’
‘So you admit you just lied to me about being present.’
‘I was there but a few minutes.’
‘But a few minutes. And just how long would it have taken to render Dr Banks unconscious and then to pour the bottle over the sheets so that it appeared an accident? For Mr Quinton witnessed you the next morning discussing with Mr Jarvis how you wished to conceal the fact that chloroform had been responsible for Dr Banks’s death.
‘You have the reason, you had the wherewithal, and you had the opportunity, but even more than that, you sought to disguise what was wrought. There is no question that you will answer for this crime, Dr Raven. To me, the only doubt that remains is the extent to which Mrs Banks was party to this, and whether she is likely to hang too.’
SIXTY-NINE
aven slumped disconsolately to the floor, McLevy’s words winding him as surely as a punch to the gut. He squatted against the bars, fortunate to have dropped in one of the few spots not spattered by something that used to be inside someone else. He was reeling not merely from the words themselves but from the malevolent glee with which McLevy had spoken them. He knew Raven’s weak spot for sure.
What McLevy could not know was that they might not need the rope to finish Sarah, but certainly Raven could think of no greater horror than for her to survive only to be executed alongside him for a crime they did not commit.
He took some solace from knowing that someone capable was caring for her right now. To his shame, when Martha volunteered to stay with her while he went to Warnock’s Close, it had crossed his mind that she was not as sought-after as her sister, and he had wondered if this reflected upon her abilities as a nurse. He could almost laugh. She was less sought-after than the sister who murdered her patients. Could there be a greater indictment of the value of reputation in this town?
Actually, yes. The word of a thief and forger could be beyond question because he had gone to Oxford and was ostensibly respectable. Quinton had sealed Raven’s fate in order to protect himself and conceal the truth of his deeds from Simpson. And a man as caring as Simpson could be falsely accused of killing a patient, purely to satisfy the slighted honour of lesser men.
Raven now knew what had really happened to Mrs Johnstone, but Mary Dempster was dead, and he did not know what would become of her confession. Soutar could be using the pages as firelighters, for all he knew.
Still the snoring thundered from somewhere in the gloom. He wished for the same oblivion. Raven cradled his head in his hands, elbows on his thighs. He felt like all had been for naught. All was lost.
‘When do we get something to drink in here?’ someone shouted, though there did not appear to be a police officer present to answer.
‘This piss pot is full,’ a voice replied. ‘You can drink that.’
As he heard this, it occurred to Raven how thirsty he was, and how long it had been since he last drank anything. This called to mind an image of the empty glasses and the gin bottle on the floor in Warnock’s Close.
Two glasses.
His mind raced, suddenly alert. All in that room had not been as it appeared.
Raven began to reassess his memories of what he had seen, things that in his alarm and excitement might not have been apparent.
She had gone to the room to write her confession, and then to kill herself. In what vessel then had she brought the poison that she drank? Was it the gin bottle? If so, where was the bag or box in which she had brought it, along with the paper, the ink, the pen, the food, the glasses?
The two glasses.
Someone else had been in there and left again. Someone else had arranged the scene.
In chasing his new disease,
Raven had seen only the evidence that suited him, only the evidence he had wanted to see. In that room, he had seen only the evidence someone else wanted him to see. It was a tableau, though not one intended to be presented to him, but to Martha.
Was it possible someone else sought to pin the blame for their deeds on Mary Dempster, leaving her poisoned body and her confession to be found by her sister? If so, how could the confession be in her words, her hand? Yet it had to be, he reasoned, for if it was not, Martha would have been able to tell instantly, and she was the one who had been summoned. So, if Mary had truly written her confession and killed herself, who had been in that room with her, sharing a bottle of gin?
He pictured the corpse, its face eaten away by rats, only her nurse’s dress to identify her. Raven had once learned in the most painful manner not to make assumptions about who was inside a set of clothes.
He belatedly saw the truth of it. The other woman in that room had not been Mary Dempster’s killer, but her latest victim: some prostitute of the West Port, lured there and poisoned, dressed in Mary’s clothes and left alongside Mary’s confession. A substitute left in her place so that Mary could abscond and those who had discovered her crimes would assume the author of them dead.
If that were so, he reasoned, she would have to move on, assume a new identity.
Then it dawned on him that she already had.
The Night Asylum fell silent, the noise of the other prisoners fading into the background until Raven was the only person in there, briefly alone with the most terrible discovery.
He knew the answer to the question of why Mary spared Martha.
She hadn’t.
That nurse’s dress: dark blue with braiding on the cuffs. He had seen it in Mary’s bedroom at the cottage. Martha had been anxious when she found him looking in there, even though her sister was not home. Why, he had wondered, would Mary have the grand master bedroom, when it was Martha’s inheritance that paid for them to stay there?
Because only one person lived in that house.
Martha’s words echoed in his head: It amused us down the years how often people would say we had a resemblance while they thought we were true sisters. Introduce an idea into someone’s head and they will soon start to paint a picture around it.
She knew Raven had seen her as Mary, albeit briefly, and had suggested a plausible explanation should he notice a similarity.
He was right: Martha had been useful to Mary. But only in death. After Mrs Dempster died, they had moved from Canonmills to Lochend: somewhere isolated, where nobody would know or recognise them. At some point after that, Mary had killed Martha, then assumed her identity; and with it not only her money, but the status and respectability her name conferred. But she separately retained the identity of Mary, having a professional reputation to trade upon: a means by which to gain access to patients.
She switched between accents and must have switched between appearances too. That was why Martha always seemed so insipid: she was a cypher, a mockery. That delay in answering the door, after Sarah spied someone in the window: she had seen unexpected visitors and needed a few moments to transform herself, then further time to ensure nothing was on display that shouldn’t be.
Believing he was speaking to Martha, Raven had told Mary directly that she was under suspicion, and subsequently he had kept her informed of everything he had discovered about her. Then she had fed him evidence of her own guilt, intending to shed her compromised persona like a snake its skin.
Mary was Martha. Martha was Mary. And Raven had left Sarah with her, utterly defenceless.
SEVENTY
er memory was fractured. What used to be a path connecting moments had become a random series of discrete fragments. She remembered walking back from Stockbridge, the conversations she had that day jumbled and out of sequence. She remembered feeling weak, collapsing at her door. That was when what used to be linear had become splintered, the stained-glass windows of her mind shattered and transformed into a kaleidoscope.
She knew Raven had been there, but it felt like he was behind a gauze. Sometimes she was aware he was close by, but it was as though she could not break the surface to reach him. At other times, she felt his presence, but would open her eyes and find only Mrs Sullivan, or Martha.
She had heard him, but she was not always sure she had spoken in reply. She could not distinguish between words she had merely thought and what had issued from her mouth. Raven seldom answered her, merely told her to rest. Had she only dreamed her questions, or was there something he did not want to say?
She had been given chloroform, after that perhaps morphine, but she knew enough to understand that it was more likely infection that was addling her mind. She had felt the wound, touched the stitches. Raven had cut her open, and she knew why. She had been working for the Professor of Midwifery after all. That was how she knew she was dying. Raven had gone into her abdomen, an action of last resort. He had done whatever he could in order to save her, but she understood that it would not be enough.
Martha had been here too, off and on. She was here now, seated by the bed. Sarah had wondered why, until at one point the kaleidoscope turned and she remembered that Martha was a nurse. She felt grateful for her kindness, and from somewhere she summoned the strength to speak.
‘I lost the child,’ she said.
‘It was in the wrong place,’ Martha replied, matter-of-factly. ‘In one of the tubes. Dr Raven had to act.’
‘Does Archie know?’ she asked.
Archie had been the blank in the frame, the missing fragment, his very absence like a presence in itself. Was he too weak to make the journey? Or were they keeping the news from him because he was so ill?
Martha wore a look of surprise, which Sarah could not read.
‘Of course not,’ she replied. ‘Dr Banks is dead. He passed away the same night you fell ill.’
Though she lay on a bed, the bed she had shared with her husband, Sarah felt as though she had fallen from a great height, landing crumpled and broken on the ground. She had known it was inevitable, and yet as the truth of it enveloped her, she understood how little she had been prepared to accept it. The same was true of any fall: knowing the ground was rising to meet you did not lessen its impact.
In the agonising unknowing of the recent weeks, she had sometimes thought that when finally Archie died, she would feel a measure of relief. Instead, she belatedly discovered that uncertainty was so much better than resolution.
She wanted to see him again more than she had ever wanted anything, but not merely to say goodbye. She did not want one more day with him. She wanted a lifetime.
She wept, deeply. Though every shaking sob hurt where she was stitched, she wept. She wept for Archie. She wept for herself. She wept for the life together that they had lost and the life they would never have. The child they would not have.
Somewhere in the fog of grief, she found clarity in a question. Why was she only learning this now?
Part of the answer she knew instinctively: Raven was protecting her. He would not want her to know until she was strong enough, and if he feared she would not live, what would it profit her to learn such news on her own deathbed? But that being so, a more troubling question required an answer: why would Martha take it upon herself to break such news?
Then she saw the reason, through the mist of her tears.
Martha was intent upon her: not merely observing or even vigilant, but utterly rapt, so much so that she did not even appear to be aware that Sarah was looking back. Her face seemed transformed. She no longer wore the same benign, empty expression, as though apologising for herself. Instead there was a focus to her. An alacrity.
She was enjoying Sarah’s grief.
SEVENTY-ONE
aven leapt to his feet and began banging on the bars.
‘McLevy! Soutar!’ he shouted. ‘You need to act – someone is in danger!’
‘Aye, you if you don’t pipe doon,’ someone said.
Raven
ignored him. ‘McLevy! Soutar! This is urgent!’
A man on the floor to Raven’s left looked up blearily from his puddle of vomit.
‘Haud your wheesht. There’s folk trying to sleep in here.’
Raven became aware that the stentorian snoring had stopped. He endured a moment’s concern that he might have incurred the wrath of whoever had been responsible for it, but it was far from the greatest of his cares. He resumed his hammering and shouting.
‘Hey,’ said another voice, to his right. He ignored that too.
‘Hey! I’m talking to you.’
There was an aggression to the tone that his instinct told him not to ignore. When Raven turned, he saw that he had unwittingly attracted the wrong kind of attention. There before him once again was the thief who had threatened him in Warnock’s Close. He had been apprehended too, perhaps having tried the same thing with a policeman nearby.
‘Aye. Me,’ he said, acknowledging Raven’s recognition. ‘And I would wager that you don’t have that fearful knife any more. But I wonder what remains in your pockets that you denied me before?’
Raven stood tall, bristling. For the second time that day, this cur had chosen the wrong time to cross him, for he was truly of a mind to beat a man with his fists.
‘Why don’t you come and take it from me then, you worthless wee skitter.’
His eyes locked on those of the thief, ready to read the signal that he was about to attack, whereupon Raven was felled by a blow from behind. Deliberately distracted by the man in front of him, an unseen confederate had caught him unawares from behind. There was a flash of light and pain as he took a blow to the back of the head, followed by a knee to the face as he fell. He was rolled onto his back and felt a heel to his ribs, then the thief was straddling him, rifling his pockets. He produced Raven’s pocket watch, holding it up on its chain for a moment before slipping it into his trousers. Then he produced his grotty little knife.
The Art of Dying Page 31
