Death and the Chevalier

by Robin Blake

  ‘Oh, Mr Cragg,’ she said, as I ushered her into my inner sanctum. ‘I feel sure I should review my will. The savage Highlanders are coming to slaughter us all, so I’ve heard. Mrs Bryce insists they make human sacrifice and eat human flesh.’

  As always with Amelia Colley, her words were qualified by her tone. The lightness in her voice, that touch of irony, revealed she was far from overwhelmed by her friend Lavinia Bryce’s forebodings. But disbelief in the tale did not mean disapproval of it. On the contrary, Miss Colley was charged with pleasure. Her eyes were sparkling. There was nothing she loved more in real life than a drama, and the thought that people were openly talking of massacre and cannibalism greatly excited her.

  ‘I believe the provisions of your will are adequate, whatever the future may be,’ I told her.

  ‘But I have left all my money to my nephew Charles, and he is a sworn friend of the government in London.’

  ‘What is wrong with that? It will not make his flesh taste any sweeter to the clansmen.’

  She fluttered her eyelids.

  ‘Oh, no, Mr Cragg. Rather the opposite, I should think. No, I do not fear Charles will be roasted and eaten, but at this time of emergency I prefer my last wishes to be those of a neutral observer, do you see? I would not desire to be either condemned or rewarded for them. I wish to sit on the fence and enjoy the fun.’

  ‘What therefore do you propose?’

  ‘To divide my fortune equally between Charles and his cousin Henry, who lives in York and is a notorious Jacobite. They hate each other, of course. I can’t think of a better way to express my intense interest in this coming fight.’

  ‘Very well, Miss Colley.’

  I went to the door of the outer office.

  ‘Furzey! Come through, if you please. There is writing to be done.’

  TWO

  Some weeks later I was standing in a field on the edge of a windypit a few miles east of Preston. Beside me stood Dr Luke Fidelis and Samuel Norris, constable of the parish of Ribchester in the bounds of which the field lay, and Andrew Ambleside who farmed the field. It was cold at this early hour of the morning. Our out-breaths puffed as steam in the air, and white frost crisped the grass. We were looking down at the frozen surface of the pond, whose ice was spiked around the fringe with the spears of numerous reeds. Its centre, however, was occupied by the large, naked and ice-rimed corpse of a man: a corpse, moreover, without a head.

  Trying to describe the body’s attitude I wrote that night in my personal journal:

  Imagine the classical marble statue of a spear thrower, in the act of running up to deliver his weapon. The head has been knocked off. The legs are spread, the left before and the right behind, both crooked at the knee. The feet are flexed. Meanwhile, the right arm is bent high above the shoulders ready to deliver the shaft, while the other points forward in the direction of the throw. And now imagine this figure tipped over and lain down on the ground. This was how the body appeared.

  ‘Do we have any notion of who he is?’ I said.

  ‘Not one, Coroner,’ said Norris, glancing at Ambleside. ‘There’s been nobody gone missing round here as far as we’ve heard.’

  ‘So it’s not one of your men, Mr Ambleside?’

  The farmer pursed his lips and shook his head.

  ‘Nay. He’s none of mine.’

  ‘And it was you yourself that first spotted the body?’

  ‘Aye. I was out at first light and saw it as I rode cross-field.’

  ‘The primary question,’ said Luke, ‘is where was it brought from? There was no blood-letting here, or we’d see blood.’

  ‘What I want to know first off,’ said Norris, ‘is where’s his head?’

  ‘We know one thing at least,’ I said. ‘He was brought on a two-wheeler cart. The hoof prints and wheel tracks in the frost are clear. The cart entered by the gate from that lane over there, some time last night after the frost whitened the grass. It came up here to the pit and, after the body was thrown down, wheeled around and went back where it came from. Which I would wager is a neighbouring parish.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Norris.

  ‘Where are the parish boundaries, Norris?’

  The constable stood like a signpost pointing to the north with his right arm and south with his left. He extended his right forefinger.

  ‘That way’s Goosnargh parish. And the other way’ – he pointed with his left hand – ‘that’s Whalley parish. It’s even nearer.’ He pointed to the west. ‘And our nearest neighbour over there is Preston.’

  ‘So we’re right next to the boundaries with three other big parishes, none of which would particularly like the bother of a dead body and the cost of an inquest, or so I’m guessing. So did one of them remedy the matter by removing the offending corpse by dark of night to a neighbouring parish – this one? I’ve seen it before. Illegal, but effective as long as you don’t get found out.’

  We heard horse snorts and a squeaking axle. Three men from Ambleside’s farm had arrived with a cart.

  ‘What shall us do wi’ him, master?’ one said.

  ‘You’ll have a look over him, Luke?’ I said. Fidelis was my unofficial adviser on the practical aspects of death. For a coroner to employ a medical assistant was unorthodox, certainly, but I had long found Fidelis’s insight into the state of a corpse invaluable preparation for an inquest.

  Fidelis walked over and cast an eye over the body.

  ‘Get him under cover,’ he said. ‘I’ll want the frost off him before I take a proper look.’ He turned back to Ambleside. ‘Is there a barn where he’ll be safe?’

  The farmer nodded and walked across to give the order to his men, who immediately went down to the pond to drag the rigid body to the shore and then up to the rim of the pit, where they heaved it with a thud on to the bed of the cart. As they handled it, I caught a glimpse of the severed neck – a hole between the shoulders clogged with coagulated blood.

  ‘I’m going in search of his head,’ I said to Fidelis. ‘Without it I can do nothing. I doubt the law will allow me to inquest a headless corpse. The thawing out’ll take time, so why don’t you come with me?’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘We’ll take the lane towards Simmy Nook. If Mr Headless was carted here from some part of the Whalley side, it was likely from somewhere like Simmy Nook, or if not, it came through it. Abraham Pilling’s the constable for that part, and not only does he live in Simmy Nook, but he’s idle and corrupt enough to lay off any corpse he stumbles on to the neighbouring parish, if he can. And I’ll tell you something else: Pilling is a thatcher. He’ll use a horse and cart every day of the week.’

  ‘Is he indeed?’ said my friend with interest. ‘We must certainly go and see him.’

  It was a ride of half a mile to the boundary with the parish of Whalley, and another half to the village of Simmy Nook. Pilling’s house – a well-maintained cottage, whose roof was testimony to its owner’s craft – stood across the street from the village inn, a run-down establishment called the Black Cat. Pilling’s cart was tipped up with its shafts leaning up against the side wall of his house. His old horse chomped grass in a small neighbouring patch of field. Pilling had evidently not yet begun this day’s work of roof-making.

  We dismounted and I knocked at the door while Fidelis strolled towards the side of the house where the cart was propped. No one answered my knock, so I turned away and looked up and down the street. A fellow bent under a loaded sack was making his wobbly way towards me.

  ‘D’you know where I’ll find Constable Pilling?’

  He may have been deaf or mute, or simply a churl, but he went straight past me without breaking stride.

  ‘I said, have you seen Abe Pilling?’ I called after him.

  ‘Try the Cat.’

  I crossed the road to the inn. Pilling was the only customer, sitting in his work clothes over a pot of ale. His breakfast, no doubt.

  ‘Mr Cragg!’ he said. ‘Whenever I clap an eye on you, I know by d
ay’s end I shall regret it.’

  ‘They’ve found a naked man over in Ribchester parish, lying on the ice in a windypit.’

  ‘Drunk, was he?’

  ‘No, dead.’

  Pilling raised an eyebrow, then sniggered. He was a small wiry fellow and thin in every way except for the roundness of his belly.

  ‘Dead drunk maybe, if he fell in a windypit and cracked his noddle on the ice.’

  I heard a horse galloping away and glanced out through the grimy window. I saw the back end of Fidelis’s horse as he rode off in the direction we had come from.

  ‘Noddle, you say?’ I asked. ‘What noddle is that?’

  Pilling looked at me boldly.

  ‘His own.’

  ‘Ah! But his noddle was off, Pilling. And it was missing, you see. Do you know anything of this, such as its whereabouts?’

  He maintained his lofty assurance.

  ‘How would I, Mr Cragg? I am not informed of evil happenings that go off at Ribchester, or anywhere else outside this parish. My duty is only here, as you well know.’

  ‘I wonder, however, if you perceive your duty as including the removal of dead bodies from your parish to avoid the expense of an inquest.’

  He did not blink but looked me steadily in the eye.

  ‘But that would be contrary to the law, Mr Cragg.’

  The flat tone of his voice and his impervious demeanour told me there was no purpose in continuing the conversation. I went outside, wondering what had taken Fidelis away in such a hurry. His actions were often impulsive and abrupt when he conceived a particularly clever idea, though perhaps in this case he had simply gone back to Ambleside’s farm to proceed with his examination of the corpse. I returned to my horse, mounted and set off by a more direct route across the fields, thinking I might get there before him.

  With the wide eyes of child as she tells a ghost story, one of the milkmaids at Ambleside’s explained how to find the stone barn where the headless corpse had been taken to thaw out. As I rode towards the building, which stood at the end of a cart-track a half mile away, I saw three or four farmworkers standing around the door. Before I could reach them, I heard a horse catching me up from behind. It was Fidelis.

  ‘I have it,’ he said, holding high a bulging hempen sack.

  ‘What have you?’

  ‘The errant head, of course.’

  ‘Good God! That was fast work. Where did you find it?’

  ‘A ditch. It wasn’t hard. The track was potholed, and Pilling’s cart had no tailgate, you see. All I had to do was go back looking for a bump in the road big enough to dislodge it.’

  ‘It rolled off the back of the cart, you mean?’

  ‘Exactly. Heads roll. This one did so a quarter mile after he left Simmy Nook.’

  ‘You’re sure the cart was Pilling’s?’

  ‘There were scrap ends of thatching stuck to the body, which it must have picked up from lying on the bed of the cart. I noticed them when they brought it up out of the frozen pit. There was even some lodged in the crack of his bottom. I was certain it was his cart as soon as you mentioned Pilling was a thatcher, though I can’t say if Pilling himself did the driving.’

  ‘I’ll stake my best wig on it. He must have tried to find the head on his way back after leaving the body, but couldn’t see it in the dark. He may have thought he had plenty of time to retrieve it in the daylight this morning – more fool him. Shall we reunite it and find out how he died?’

  ‘That will not be easy. The body has no visible sign of any wound, and nor has this head.’

  The men made way for us a little fearfully as we went into the barn. A wintry light was admitted to it by a single window, feebly helped by the flames of a fire someone had lit in the hearth. A table had been fashioned by resting an old door on some straw bales. A sheet of sailcloth had been stretched across it, underneath which lay our naked and beheaded corpse. Fidelis approached and drew away the covering. The body, no longer iced, lay on its back as if finally at ease. Fidelis drew the severed head from the sack and, placing it face upward, laid it down in such a way that its neck was aligned with that of the body.

  ‘Now that is curious,’ said Fidelis in a wondering way. ‘And it explains the absence of any wound.’

  Without explaining himself further, he took a candle-stump off a shelf attached to the wall and lit it while I crouched and peered at the dead face. It was that of a young man who had been about twenty and no doubt good-looking in life. His fair hair, plentiful on the crown, sprouty on the cheeks and chin, was matted with dirt, and possibly with dried blood. The eyelids were closed. As Fidelis brought the flickering candlelight to bear, the features seemed less rigid, less dead. I put my thumb on one of the lids and drew it up: the eyeball glittered in the light. The iris was blue.

  ‘What is curious?’ I said at last, unable to stop myself.

  But Fidelis seemed not to have heard. He was passing the candle over the body, paying particular attention to the legs.

  ‘These knees also have much to tell,’ he said.

  I looked closely. The knees seemed to be of a darker colour than the skin of the thigh and of the shin.

  ‘They’re muddy,’ I said. ‘But you just remarked that you knew why there are no visible injuries. Please tell.’

  ‘They don’t match.’

  ‘What don’t match?’

  ‘The head and the body. They belong to different individuals.’

  ‘Surely not! How can you tell?’

  ‘For one thing the hair colour isn’t the same: on the head it’s more fair, on the body more ginger. But there is another much more definite sign that these are two people.’

  He pointed to the truncated neck below the head.

  ‘Do you see the thyroid cartilage, here? That’s the Adam’s apple to you.’

  ‘Yes, I see it.’

  He moved his finger round so that it pointed to the shorn-off portion of neck above the torso of the body.

  ‘Strangely, there’s one here also. So, unless this man was born a freak, equipped with a brace of Adam’s apples, I’m saying we have before us the remains of two different men.’

  I looked back and forth between the two severed necks. The evidence could not be contradicted.

  ‘Can you tell how they died?’

  ‘By having their heads cut off would be a strong possibility.’

  ‘Shall you make an examination to decide the matter?’

  ‘With the greatest of pleasure, but I will have to do the job outside. There is not enough light here.’

  Calling for the men to come in, he directed them to remove the human remains, and the makeshift table, into the open air. While they did this, he fetched the leather bag that hung from his horse’s saddle and drew out the roll of canvas in which he kept his surgical knives and bone-saws. Then he took off his coat and rolled up his sleeves, at which Ambleside’s men exchanged bashful glances and began to edge backwards until there was a safe distance between themselves and the operating table.

  ‘As you mentioned, Luke, there is still much to do,’ I said, ‘and I must go about it. The most pressing matter is to question Pilling again, and I fancy I might find him in the lane looking in vain for what you have already found. Will you give me your report later in town?’

  I found Abraham Pilling, as expected, walking his horse and cart slowly along the verge of the lane while staring fixedly into the passing ditch.

  ‘Have you lost something, Pilling?’

  He eyed me biliously.

  ‘Nothing to concern you, Mr Cragg.’

  ‘On the contrary, since I know you’re searching for the same missing head as I mentioned earlier, which you told me you know nothing about. That very much concerns me.’

  Quite suddenly, the fight went out of the man as air from a punctured bladder.

  ‘Aw, Mr Cragg,’ he implored, ‘I were only tidying up. We are a poor enough parish without having to stand the cost of your inquest court landing on us.
’

  ‘You will pay more dearly than that if you don’t tell me exactly what happened last night prior to your taking that head and body away to the next parish.’

  ‘All right, Mr Cragg. This is how it was.’

  Pilling told how the corpse had simply appeared in the dark of night, deposited by persons unknown on the ground between the road and the door of the Black Cat Inn. One of the inn’s customers, Jerome Wharton by name, had come out late in the evening the worse for ale, and seeing the head lying there in the dark of a moonless night, he mistook it for a football and gave it a mighty kick, which unbalanced him and he tottered sideways and toppled over the naked headless corpse, the fright of which left him crying and jibbering for some time afterwards. Coming out of the Black Cat in response to Wharton’s cries, Pilling and other customers put their heads together and concluded that the man had been killed outside the parish, as no one in Simmy Nook had seen anything or could name the fellow. They determined that the remains must be carted away immediately to avoid the taint and expense of an enquiry, and that no one would say a word about it thereafter. They all agreed that the dead man had surely been brought across the parish boundary by the men of Ribchester, and that he should therefore be returned to them.

  The thatcher had carried out this task alone – somewhat resentful that no one would assist him – and had reached Ambleside’s field before he discovered he had lost the head in transit. Leaving the body on the ice of the windypit, he had made unavailing efforts to find it on the road back before deciding he had better wait until daylight when he would be sober and able to make a more effective search of the ditches.

  I gave him a stern talking-to. I said that unless he could provide me with information about the origin and identity of the remains – I didn’t let on that they came from two bodies – he would face the task of organizing an inquest. I added I would be making a full report to the magistrates with regard to any criminal conduct on his part. I left him with an expression on his face like that of a ship’s mutineer watching the rise of a desert island on the horizon.