Seventeen Coffins

by Philip Caveney

  The handrail parted and McSweeny fell backwards. He dropped ten feet into the bubbling wooden vat below him, hit the soupy liquid with a dull squelch and disappeared under the surface. An instant later he thrashed his way back up again, spluttering and fighting to stay afloat. His entry into the liquid had released a great wave of acidic gas and Tom was obliged to cover his mouth and nose to prevent the gas from filling his lungs. McSweeny stared up at him in absolute hatred. And then he began to scream, clutching at his eyes, tearing at his face, thrashing around in agony. That was when Tom saw a single word chalked onto the side of the tub.

  Quicklime.

  He had to turn away then because McSweeny’s features were melting like hot butter, dissolving into the fluid all around him, and as much as he hated the man, he didn’t want to stick around to watch that. He dropped the club and hurried back along the gantry. McSweeny was still screaming as Tom pounded down the steps, but he’d stopped by the time Tom made it outside. Once there he drew gulps of fresh air into his lungs and began to walk away. He was horribly aware of a tide of nausea rising within him and after a few steps he began to retch. He leaned up against a wall and vomited the badness out of him and only when he had rid himself of every last bit of sickness did he walk on, moving in the opposite direction to Laird’s and heading for the only place where he thought he’d be safe. The McCallum’s.

  Twenty

  Even Mr McCallum couldn’t complain about taking in a boy in such a dire predicament. Tom was allowed to sleep on a temporary bed that Mary made up for him in the kitchen. Over the next few days Tanners Close erupted with the news of the grisly happenings at Laird’s Lodging House, which soon became widely known as the West Port Murders. Fraser kept going out and coming back with the latest information.

  Mrs Gray had done her duty and reported the strange goings-on she’d witnessed in Burke’s lodgings to the constables, although she claimed that shortly afterwards, Nell had sought her out and offered her a bribe of £10 a week to keep quiet about the matter. Mrs Gray told the constables that she’d seen Burke and Hare fighting in Burke’s room, but oddly, she made no mention of the cloaked and masked figure they were struggling with. She had, however, noticed the little matter of a dead body lying under the bed. Shortly afterwards, an anonymous tip-off had led the constables to Surgeons’ Hall where Mary Docherty’s corpse had been found lying on a trolley, only moments before Doctor Knox and his assistants were due to start dissecting it.

  Burke and Hare were promptly arrested, along with their common-law wives, Nell McDougal and Margaret Laird. Now the four of them languished in jail awaiting trial. The tally of victims quickly began to mount. Mrs Docherty, of course, was the first name to be confirmed, shortly followed by poor Jamie. Then Mary and Peggy Haldane. As the days unfolded, more and more mysterious disappearances were finally explained.

  It was Cat who came up with the idea.

  ‘All those poor helpless people,’ she told Tom, ‘Not one of them given a decent Christian burial. We can’t let that go unmarked. We have to do something.’ So Fraser’s little coffins were called into service and as the tally mounted, so he was obliged to make more and more of them, working late into the night to ensure there would be enough for all of the victims. However, even though Cat pointed out that many of the victims had been female, Fraser still stubbornly refused to allow her to dress any of them accordingly.

  ‘They’re still soldiers to me,’ he insisted, ‘and if you want me to help you, you’ll have to accept that.’

  In the end Cat had reluctantly agreed. She took extra care with one particular soldier though, dressing him in a white linen suit. ‘This one is Jamie,’ she told Tom, ‘and I’ve made him look like an angel, because I’m sure that’s what he must be by now.’

  Tom had nodded, but he knew only too well, that whatever Jamie Wilson had done in life, it certainly wouldn’t qualify him for angelhood.

  Fraser certainly had his work cut out. When the murdering duo’s first victim came to light, he turned out to have been an old lodger called Donald who had died of natural causes nearly a year before, owing Will rent. It had been then that Billy and Will had first hit on the idea of selling the body to the surgeons for dissection. They’d received the sum of £7.10s for their trouble. After making such easy money, they hadn’t felt inclined to wait for nature to take its course again and instead had started picking off easy targets – preying on the homeless, the unloved, those who simply wouldn’t be missed. In the end, of course, it had been Jamie who had proved to be a step too far for Burke and Hare. He was too well-known to be swept under the carpet. Mary Docherty’s corpse was simply confirmation of their crimes, but questions had already begun to be asked when a student at Surgeons’ Hall had recognised Jamie’s corpse.

  Doctor Knox was too distinguished and too wealthy to ever be convicted of anything, but the general feeling was that he must have known there was something suspicious about the steady supply of fresh bodies Burke and Hare had supplied him with. He had either ignored his suspicions or simply hadn’t cared. People muttered darkly about him in pubs and shop doorways and referred to him as ‘Knox the butcher.’

  Eventually, after Burke had made a full confession, Fraser had his final count. Seventeen innocent victims dissected under the cold, sharp knives of the Edinburgh surgeons. There was some discussion about whether old Donald should be afforded a coffin of his own as he wasn’t technically a murder victim, but Cat had insisted.

  ‘He was dissected like the rest of them,’ she said. ‘And he had nobody to stand at his grave and mourn him. We can’t leave him out.’ So he too was added to the list. In the end, Tom was needed to help with the work and made three coffins himself, though he would have been the first to admit that he didn’t make quite so neat a job of it as Fraser. As he worked, he couldn’t help but think how amazing this was. He was working on a set of coffins that would be on display in the National Museum of Scotland in the 21st century. When he had first set eyes upon them he had no idea that he had actually made some of them. Part of him longed to tell Cat and Fraser about it, but he realised that there was only so much they could accept. So he worked on in silence.

  Finally, one day in January, everything was ready. Tom, Cat and Fraser set off for Arthur’s Seat, wrapped up tight against the cold and carrying the tiny coffins, carefully wrapped in a knapsack. They took with them a couple of trowels and a sharp knife. They spent some time searching for the best spot and finally found a small opening on the north-eastern slopes, a natural recess which Fraser and Tom hollowed out a little more with their trowels, clearing out the soil and lining the sides with pieces of slate. It soon became clear that the opening wasn’t wide enough to lay out all the coffins in a single row so Fraser found more pieces of slate and cut them roughly to size to construct two tiers of eight coffins each, with Jamie’s coffin given pride of place on its own at the very top. Once they had everything in place they blocked up the opening with carefully selected stones and placed sods of earth over them. Then Cat said a prayer, speaking the words clearly and respectfully, her eyes brimming with tears.

  When they had finished Fraser announced that he needed to get back to hear the latest news on Burke and Hare and he left Cat and Tom standing by the coffins’ hiding place.

  ‘It’s good to think that they’ll be here for ever, looking down on the city,’ said Cat.

  Tom didn’t have the heart to tell her that they would be discovered in just eight years time and that more than half of Fraser’s carefully constructed coffins would be destroyed by a gang of stupid boys who would spend their time throwing them at each other. He supposed that when the coffins were found, she might hear about it herself and he wondered why she and Fraser had never come forward to claim ownership of them. Perhaps they’d simply decided that a good mystery was worth preserving. He would have have liked to tell Cat that some of the coffins, Jamie’s amongst them, would end up in the National Museum of Scotland where future generations of people wo
uld come to view them; that students of history would speculate about their meaning and about who put them into the little hiding place on Arthur’s Seat.

  They stood on the hillside and looked out over the city, Tom thinking about how what was little more than a village would grow steadily over the years into the great, grey stone capital that he would visit in the twenty first century. He’d been feeling strange all morning, a woozy, rushing sensation in his head, and he wondered if something weird was going to happen. He was beginning to feel as though his time here was rapidly running out.

  ‘It’s great up here,’ he said. ‘You can see pretty much the entire city.’

  But Cat seemed to want to talk about something else. She took his hands in hers and held them tightly as she looked at him, the tears still in her eyes.

  ‘Tom,’ she murmured. ‘With everything that’s been going on, we’ve lost sight of something.’

  He looked at her puzzled. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘If what you told me is true . . . and I believe it is, about you coming from the future and everything, then you’re going to be leaving us one of these days. And I don’t know if I can stand to lose you.’

  He smiled at her. ‘I don’t really have any control over that,’ he said. ‘To tell you the truth, I’m feeling kind of like it might happen sometime soon.’

  Her eyes widened. ‘I hope that’s not true,’ she said.

  ‘Right now, if I had a choice, I wouldn’t want to leave.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ she asked him.

  ‘Because I’ve found something worth staying for,’ he said.

  And he took her in his arms and held her tightly.

  It was only a short time later, as they began to descend the slope, that the drifting, swirling feeling within him began to grow stronger. He was looking out at the world, but it was beginning to look transparent, as though he was barely there. He called Cat’s name. She was walking the narrow trail ahead of him and she looked back in alarm.

  ‘Tom?’ she cried. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I don’t know . . . I . . . I think . . . it’s happening’

  She rushed back to hold him in her arms. ‘Not yet,’ she pleaded. ‘Please, don’t go. Stay a little longer.’

  But she was already fading from his sight. He tried to pull her to him and she crumpled beneath his hands like confetti, blown in the wind. Then he was falling and this time he knew he was going back and there was nothing he could do to stop himself.

  Twenty-one

  ‘Tom! Tom, are you all right? Say something!’

  Slowly, painfully, he opened his eyes. At first he saw nothing but a meaningless blur of colour swimming in front of him. Then his mother’s face came into focus. She was leaning over him and she looked scared.

  He realised that he was back in the museum. He was sitting propped against a wall and his head hurt really badly. He glanced down at himself and saw that he was dressed in his own clothes although they were grubby and torn, but Mum didn’t seem to have noticed that for the moment. A figure moved into view behind Mum. Hamish. But it was 21st century Hamish, dressed in his anorak and jeans and he looked contrite.

  ‘I didn’t mean to hurt him,’ he said. ‘I was just . . .’

  Mum turned on him. ‘You get away from him,’ she snarled. ‘Haven’t you done enough damage for one day?’

  ‘I only meant to push him,’ insisted Hamish.

  ‘You’re drunk,’ said Mum. She turned back to Tom. ‘Shall I go and get help?’ she asked him.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m all right.’ Leaning his weight against the wall, he managed to pull himself upright. He lifted a hand to the back of his head and his fingers came away red with blood.

  ‘I really didn’t mean to do that,’ insisted Hamish. ‘I’ve had a few drinks, but I’m not drunk. Not really.’ He was wringing his hands, clearly dismayed by what had happened. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Catherine.’ He stepped forward and put a hand on Mum’s shoulder, but she shrugged it away.

  Tom gathered his senses around him. He took a step forward and pushed Hamish in the chest, making him take a step back. ‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘It’s time we had a talk. I know who you are. I know what goes on in your head.’

  Hamish’s mouth dropped open. ‘What are you . . .?’

  ‘I said listen. You’re going to shape up. You’re going to stop messing Mum around. If you don’t, she’ll leave you and then where will you be?’

  Hamish looked flustered. He tried to protest. ‘You can’t just . . .’

  ‘Yes, I can,’ interrupted Tom. His head was still throbbing but he was determined to say his piece. ‘Mum deserves better than this. So you’re going to stop the boozing and you’re going to treat her properly or you’ll have me to answer to. Understand?’

  Hamish gasped like a fish out of water. ‘I . . . you’re just a kid, you can’t . . .’

  Tom lifted a hand to silence him. ‘You’re done,’ he said. ‘Now get off to your stupid football match and leave us in peace.’

  There was a long silence. Hamish stood there, gazing back at Tom and it seemed as though his face flickered momentarily. Just for a second, a leaner, meaner face glared back at Tom, but then it was gone, replaced by its more hapless modern equivalent. Hamish nodded. He seemed to accept what had been said. He looked at Mum. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said and it sounded genuine. He turned and walked away and kept going until he reached the swing doors at the top of the room. He pushed through them and was gone.

  Mum stared at Tom, as though he’d just pulled off the most amazing magic trick in history. ‘He . . . he did what you said,’ she gasped. ‘And he’s been drinking.’

  Tom shrugged. ‘He needs to get his act together,’ he said. He felt totally in control if the situation.

  ‘You know, don’t you, that he’s not always like that?’ argued Mum. ‘It’s only when he’s had a few drinks. The rest of the time, he’s a pussy cat. Honestly.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ said Tom. ‘You can’t let him mess you around any more. You need to tell him what you want and he has to agree. Otherwise, tell him to go to hell and find somebody else. And then, maybe you can move on with your life.’ He fixed her with a look. ‘Dad’s moved on and you’ve got to do the same.’

  They stood there looking at each other in silence for a moment. Then Mum said. ‘Are you sure you’re ok?’

  He nodded. ‘I’m good,’ he assured her. And he meant it. He had never felt more positive, more in control of his life. He looked at the display cabinet that held the tiny coffins and noticed a smear of blood on one corner of it. He reached up his sleeve to wipe it clean. He was glad to see that the three coffins he’d made had, against all the odds, survived. He could pick them out instantly by the rounded corners. Better still, Jamie was still there, dressed in his all-white suit of clothes. Tom smiled. ‘Angel Jamie,’ he muttered, remembering something that Cat had said. Mum’s shrill voice alerted him to the fact that she’d finally noticed that something was amiss.

  ‘Tom . . . your clothes!’

  ‘Hmm? What about them?’

  ‘I didn’t notice before that they were so . . . dirty.’ She leaned forward and sniffed at him, then made a face. ‘They need to go in the washer.’ She studied him. ‘Actually, that jacket looks like it should go to the charity shop.’

  Tom looked down again. Proof, he decided. Proof that he really had been sleeping rough in a filthy stable at Laird’s Lodging House. He thought of something else. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his mobile phone. The battery power was exactly as it had been when he’d arrived at the museum. Weird. He hit the camera icon and looked at his most recent pictures. There they were, three new shots of Edinburgh. Mum was looking at them over her shoulder. ‘When did you take those?’ she asked him.

  ‘Oh, just the other day,’ he told her. The first shot was the best. It showed Jamie, looking quizzically at the camera, his mouth open as though he was asking a question.

  ‘Who’s th
at?’ asked Mum.

  Tom smiled. ‘Just somebody I met,’ he told her. The other two shots, one of the street and one of the castle, he realised, could pretty much have been taken at any time in history. There was nothing there to date them. He quickly emailed the first photograph to himself, hoping against hope that when he opened the image back on his computer in Manchester it wouldn’t just be a plain grey rectangle like it had been last time.

  Mum sighed. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘if you’re absolutely sure you don’t need to see a doctor or anything . . .’

  ‘I’m good, really,’ he assured her, but when he thought of his final moments back in the 19th century, it was with a sense of sadness. He could see Cat, reaching for him, calling his name.

  ‘You were telling me before Hamish turned up that you were hungry,’ said Mum. ‘You want to go and eat something?’

  ‘Sure.’ He ran his hand across the top of the glass cabinet one last time and whispered, ‘Bye, Jamie.’ And he thought he would get a big slab of chocolate cake with his coffee and he’d think about Jamie while he ate it.

  He was about to start walking away when something caught his attention. A large oil painting hanging on the far wall, something that he was fairly sure hadn’t been there before. ‘Just a minute,’ he said. He crossed the room, threading his way between the glass cabinets until he was standing directly in front of the painting. It was a portrait of a middle-aged woman, dressed in 19th century clothing, her blonde hair arranged in an elaborate coiffure. She was good-looking rather than pretty, with strong features and a confident smile. The green eyes were exactly as he remembered them. She gazed out of the picture across the centuries and Tom felt that she could somehow see him, back here, where he really belonged. Even though she must have been twenty or thirty years older than when he’d last seen her, he’d recognised her instantly. The picture had a small plaque beneath it.