The Resurrection Fireplace

by Hiroko Minagawa

  “What did you speak of when you met?”

  “Nothing of consequence.”

  “He told you that he wanted to be buried in a churchyard, as I recall. Was this wish so strongly expressed that you felt obliged to make his death appear to be murder, even if that meant amputating his limbs?”

  “It was not a wish he expressed on one isolated occasion. One sensed it in the things he said.”

  “Severing limbs to simulate murder. This is not a notion that would come naturally to many.”

  “Severing the forearm was necessary to hide the wound on his wrist,” said Professor Barton. “Yet if only the forearm were removed, suicide might still be suspected, and so all four limbs were amputated. An entirely natural idea.”

  “I remember telling Nathan inwardly as I was doing it: ‘This stigma of yours shall soon be gone.’”

  “The ink on his chest—why was that there?”

  “As I mentioned earlier, I do not know.”

  “Sir John,” said his assistant. “Forgive the interruption, but our examination revealed a discolouration on the fingers of Cullen’s right hand.”

  “Describe it for me in detail.”

  Anne Moore peered at the hand in the jar of preserving fluid. “The index finger, middle finger, and ring finger are faintly stained at the tip,” she said. “A light blue… . Lighter, I suspect, than it was originally, the colour having faded in the preservative.”

  “Really?” asked Edward, taking the jar from her to see for himself.

  “You failed to notice this, Mr. Turner?”

  “Well, I was doing the legs, so—” he began, then stopped.

  The magistrate took up the thread at once. “You were doing the legs. Who was doing the forearms? Nigel Hart, I think.”

  “Yes.” This came from Nigel himself, who had entered the room just at this point. “It was I. I undertook the deception. Edward only assisted me.”

  “What are you doing?” hissed Edward.

  “It will be all right,” murmured Nigel.

  “You have to…”

  The others could not catch the end of the sentence.

  “Don’t worry.”

  “There was no need for this!”

  “But…”

  “Shall I remain outside?” called Abbott through the open office door.

  “You may enter,” said Sir John. “Close the door after you. You returned more quickly than I expected, Abbott.”

  “I ran into Mr. Hart just outside. He had come to present himself rather than wait to be summoned.”

  “I just cannot let all the blame fall on Edward,” said Nigel.

  The latter gave him a look of marked disagreement.

  “Mr. Hart,” said Sir John. “What was your reason for disguising the death as murder?”

  “Because suicides are not permitted burial in a churchyard.”

  “But false homicides have my officers waste their efforts searching for a culprit who does not exist, leaving them no time for the violent crimes that do occur. Others involved are made uneasy and anxious. Did you not consider this?”

  Nigel mumbled an apology, eyes lowered.

  Edward put his arm around his shoulders. “The sign on his chest,” he whispered to him, “was not meant for you. It had a different meaning.”

  “Sign on his chest?” said the magistrate sharply. “A different meaning?”

  “I fear this is a matter that only the three of us—Nathan, Nigel, and I—would understand,” Edward said. “Are you conversant with heraldry, Sir John?”

  “As much as the average man, I suppose.”

  “The book that Nathan lent me when we first met was an illustrated treatise on heraldry. It became a sort of private knowledge between us. An oval, for example, is called a ‘roundel.’”

  “There is nothing arcane about that. The word is perfectly common.”

  “A silver roundel is called a ‘plate.’ A gold one is a ‘bezant.’”

  “And a red roundel is a ‘torteau,’ I believe.”

  “Yes. A green one is a ‘pomme.’ When I found Nathan’s body—”

  “Edward,” interrupted Barton. “What you tell Sir John now had better be the whole and accurate truth.”

  “I was the first to discover Nathan,” said Nigel. “His wrist was cut deeply, and he had immersed it in a basin of water to prevent the flow of blood from stopping. His body had lost its warmth. And…”

  “And?”

  “On his chest was a blue roundel.”

  “Someone had drawn it there?”

  “A blue roundel is called a ‘hurt,’” Edward said, clasping Nigel’s shoulders to encourage him. “The spelling and pronunciation are not the same as Nigel’s surname, but similar. Nigel believed it was a message to him, blaming him for his suicide. I told him that it may have meant just the opposite—a last sign of affection—but he continued to blame himself.”

  “Why should he do that?”

  “If I could only have been of greater help… ,” Nigel murmured.

  “We suspected,” said Edward, “that Nathan chose death after his poetry went unrecognised and he became destitute. There was the shame of prison, too. Had we noticed earlier, perhaps we might have helped him. Nathan’s self-regard was too strong to ask for pity directly, I think. Our own lives are far from luxurious, but we could at least have shared with him what bread we have… . At any rate, since his death was supposed to be treated as a case of murder, any evidence implicating Nigel was unwelcome. However, we had no time to wipe it off. As a quick solution, I poured ink over it.”

  “Only moments ago you said you knew nothing about the ink.”

  “I was afraid of implicating Nigel by revealing what I knew. Now, however, I know that the sign did not have that import. I apologize for lying and shall not do so again.”

  “Are inkpots kept in the dissection room?”

  “They are.”

  “Nathan Cullen, therefore, began by drawing a ‘hurt’ on his chest, then prepared a basin full of water, lay down on the dissecting table, and slit his wrist?”

  “We thought so too initially, which is why I concealed the roundel with more ink, but in fact this cannot have been the case. Miss Moore, pray tell Sir John again what the tips of Nathan’s fingers look like.”

  “The tips of three fingers are stained.”

  “Are the balls of the fingers stained too?”

  “They are not.”

  “An unnatural result indeed,” observed the magistrate, moving his fingers across his chest as if drawing an oval there. “They ought to be stained to the upper knuckle, at least. Most inkpots have a narrow opening which would admit only one finger at a time. To ink in a rounded area, it would be faster simply to use one finger in a spiral motion. To judge by the discolouration on his fingers, however, he used three—but only the tips. Mr. Turner, earlier you said that he was not accusing Mr. Hart, and that the sign had a different meaning. Pray elaborate.”

  “If Nathan sought to mark his chest using the tips of three fingers, the easiest thing to draw would be three parallel lines.”

  “What would that mean?”

  “If the fingers were moved up and down slightly as the line was drawn,” Edward said, demonstrating on his own chest, “the symbol would become waves. Sir John, you know what that is called in heraldry, I think.”

  “A roundel with blue and silver waves is a ‘fountain,’ as far as I remember,” he said with a smile. “Remind me—which of us is making these inquiries?”

  “Pardon my presumption.”

  “Cullen might have drawn a ‘fountain,’ then. To what end?”

  “I believe it would have been a message to Nigel and myself.”

  “A testament could more easily have been written with pen and paper.”

  �
��Nathan would be telling us who his murderer was.”

  “Anne, examine the wound on Cullen’s left wrist.”

  “The wound is a deep, straight line in the flesh.”

  Professor Barton peered into the jar from beside her. “The artery has been opened remarkably well.”

  “If it was opened by another, Nathan must have been immobilized,” Edward said. “Most likely with ether. The murderer rendered him senseless, cut into the artery, placed his wrist in a basin of water to keep the blood flowing, and then left. A murder made to appear a suicide. In that case, however, Nathan would not have died at once. When the effects of the ether wore off and he returned to his senses, he would have realized his situation. That was when he drew the ‘fountain’—to identify his killer.”

  “Why not simply write the killer’s name?”

  “Two possibilities occur to me. The first is that he was already very near death. Lacking the strength to write the name itself, he chose the simplest way to convey it. The other possibility is that he did not know his murderer’s name. He could have written in blood, but he chose blue ink instead. He had to, or the sense of ‘fountain’ would not have been conveyed.”

  “Cullen drew the symbol knowing that you and Mr. Hart would interpret it correctly, then.”

  “I believe so.”

  “And can you, in fact, interpret it correctly?”

  “I do not know who might have committed the crime. All I can say is that it would seem he had some connection with Matthew’s, the coffee-house. Matthew’s stands in a small square, facing a fountain.”

  “Anne, you are recording this?”

  “I am.”

  “I can hear your pen. In that case, Mr. Turner, who changed the ‘fountain’ symbol to a ‘hurt’?”

  “The murderer, surely.”

  “Hoping that Mr. Hart would be blamed instead?”

  “That I cannot say. Perhaps the killer returned to confirm that Nathan was dead, and noticed the fountain symbol then. I would not venture to guess whether he realized that it pointed at himself, but he would have judged it too hazardous to leave it as it was. Not having time to clean it off, he quickly drew an oval around the waves and coloured it solid blue.”

  “Creating a design which you would see later and drown in ink, thinking that it indicated Mr. Hart.”

  “Yes.”

  “I fancy that Cullen would have had difficulty sitting up in his weakened state. Where in the dissection room was the inkpot?”

  “Nathan always had his writing implements with him. He must have had an inkpot on his person.”

  “Was that the one you used?”

  “No, I used one kept in the room. The murderer would have taken Nathan’s with him. It was not in the area around the dissecting table.”

  “Mr. Hart.” The magistrate addressed him gently. “The dissection room was closed for the summer. Why did you enter it?”

  “I am a light sleeper,” Nigel said. “A noise in the middle of the night woke me up. Had I gone downstairs then, I might have been in time to… I was cowardly. I feared coming face-to-face with an intruder.”

  “What time was this?”

  “I do not know.”

  “Did you not consider waking Mr. Turner and going downstairs together?”

  “Edward was sleeping soundly. I did not want to disturb him. The noise might have been my imagination.”

  “Which is another of his reasons for blaming himself,” said Edward. “But it was not his fault. I have often chided him for his anxiety over inessentials. As a result, he would have felt reluctant to ask me to come with him.”

  “I should have gone straight downstairs,” Nigel muttered.

  “I told you to put that behind you.” Edward’s voice was harsh. “Stop behaving like a helpless child! How many times would you have me say that you were not to blame?”

  “I am sorry… .”

  “Every time you say it was your fault, it forces me to blame myself as well. ‘If only I had woken up!’”

  “I, too, did not notice anything,” Barton added then. “I slept deeply until morning—never imagining what my two pupils were doing below.”

  “Did that dog of yours fail even to bark?” asked Moore.

  “Charlie? As a guard dog, he is far from ideal. Too old and feeble.”

  “His leg will never heal now, either,” mumbled Nigel.

  “Nigel,” said the Professor. “Was it you who proposed discarding Cullen’s legs?”

  He met his teacher’s gaze with a startled look. “Why do you ask?” he said, almost in a whisper.

  “Well, Cullen detested the scars from his leg irons. They were a stigma. Discard the legs, and his spirit would be free of the memory of suffering in prison. Edward claimed that these were his reasons for disposing of them, but the emotive language he used struck me as distinctly unlike him. You, on the other hand, might put things just that way.”

  “It was me,” Nigel said, looking down. “The scars were monstrous. To treat someone young, and blameless, in such a cruel way! And so, when I heard that Edward was to take the limbs to Sir John, I asked him to dispense with them. I did worry whether doing so was also wrong, however. They say, after all, that on the Day of Judgement dismembered bodies will not be those that rise from the dead.”

  “Mr. Hart, pray continue your account of actual events,” said Sir John.

  “I could not get back to sleep, so I lit a candle and went downstairs. Finding nobody in the main dissection room, I went to the students’ one. Subsequent events were as I have reported.”

  “I also awoke, suddenly,” Edward volunteered. “I heard a noise—it may have been the noise that woke me. I noticed that Nigel was gone. When he failed to return, I became concerned and went downstairs. The noise I heard was Nigel laying out the tools for dissection. What happened next I have already stated.”

  “I wonder, Mr. Hart, if you remember the name of the publisher to which Cullen intended to show his manuscripts.”

  “No, I do not.”

  “Mr. Turner, permit me one further question. I understand from Mr. Barton that the faceless cadaver was not found on a dissecting table but at the bottom of the fireplace flue.”

  “I appreciate your concern on my behalf, Edward,” said the Professor, “but I thought it best to be frank with Sir John.”

  “Very well. It is as Professor Barton says. The cadaver was in the fireplace. Nigel and I had gone into the flue to retrieve the body of the pregnant woman we had concealed there, and we stumbled upon it then. As for your next question, I know it already: why did we keep this secret from you?”

  “As I recall it was you who assured me that you all found the man’s cadaver ‘quite unexpectedly’ on a dissecting table.”

  “Yes. I did so of my own accord, and I explained my reasons to Professor Barton and the others later. The structure of the fireplace is known only to a select few. We would all have become suspects at once. I wanted the investigation to proceed without any such prejudice.”

  Sir John sighed and smiled ruefully. “Well, this is a problem. You are too shrewd for your own good, young man.”

  “Professor Barton also allows as much, at times.”

  “But that quality is exactly what makes Edward capable of great ingenuity,” said his teacher.

  “Very well, then: who does know the structure of your fireplace?”

  “We five do—his pupils. The Professor himself was unaware of it. As long as it warmed the room, he had no interest in how it was made. The servants do not know either, I believe. Only a chimney-sweep would voluntarily crawl into a flue. In fact, even a chimney-sweep would be unlikely to clean so far inside.”

  “Confound it all,” said the magistrate. “You and Mr. Hart have both hampered our inquiries into this matter with your unwanted interventions and conceal
ment of important facts. Are you aware that to intentionally obstruct a criminal investigation is itself a crime?”

  Barton was visibly shocked. “Sir John! None of it was done out of malice. They acted only for the sake of others. I beg you, do not treat these promising young men as wrongdoers.”

  “Mr. Turner, how did you know the way in which the fireplace was constructed?”

  “How? Well, the baffle is hinged half-way down. Once I saw the way it could swing forward and back, the rest was obvious—I had read about Prince Rupert’s fireplace before.”

  “Gentlemen. If you remember the name of either the house at which Cullen was boarding or the publisher with whom he left his writings, send word to me. In fact, do all you can to remember them. The development of the investigation depends upon it. We are unable yet even to inform Cullen’s family of his death, and with only ‘Shoreditch’ to go on, progress will be slow.”

  “What a long day it has been,” sighed Barton as they left the magistrate’s office.

  “You must be tired, Professor,” said Nigel. “Shall I look for a sedan chair?”

  “Oh, I am not that far gone,” he said, forcing a smile. “At forty-two I may not have the strength I did at twenty, but I fancy I am haler than you all the same. You look exhausted.” He clapped his hands together. “Let us sup in a tavern.”

  “As your guests, Professor? That would be much appreciated,” said Nigel, forcing enthusiasm into his voice.

  “We live-in pupils must stretch our meagre wages as far as we can,” agreed Edward in a similar tone.

  Usually, the two of them had to fend for themselves at suppertime. They might buy something ready-made at the market, or perhaps dine at a cheap eating-house.

  “My sincere apologies for the meagre wages.”

  “I jest, of course.”

  The sun had not quite set, but their shadows stretched long on the road.

  A rafter of noisy turkeys wobbled towards them. The birds were raised just outside London in Essex or Kent and herded to market. During their journey they were shod in tiny leather boots to protect their feet.

  A gaggle of geese followed close behind. Geese lacked the docility of turkeys and rejected any attempt to fit them with boots, so their feet were painted with tar instead.