Blood and Water and Other Stories

by Patrick Mcgrath

  • • •

  Ambrose Syme was standing in front of a blackboard as before him toiled his class of boys, their clever, impertinent faces nodding negligently over their Ovids; and some demon asked: and what use was Ovid in your hour of gravest temptation? And the answer came back: none. Ambrose Syme saw in his mind’s eye then the figure with the probing tool etched sharp and black against the sky, and he shuddered. He left the class in the charge of a prefect and made his way rapidly through the east wing to the cloistered gallery giving onto the quad. As he passed the rector’s study the old man was still bent over his breviary. He glanced up, frowning, as Ambrose rushed by, then rose and followed him.

  Ambrose Syme, bareheaded and without umbrella, reached the cloisters and dashed across the rainy quad, and as he had feared, the man with the ladder had made steady progress along the east wall and clearly would soon be unblocking the drainpipes of the towers. It was into the tower to the left of the main gate that the wet and panting priest now let himself, entering a musty hallway, dimly lit and festooned with cobwebs, at the rear of which could be discerned a spiral staircase. He was quickly on the first metal rung of the staircase and ascending the great twisting shaft, his eyes as wild as his mind and blazing furiously in the gloom. Reaching the top of the tower, he ignored the door to his own small room and instead clambered up a steel ladder fixed to the wall of the landing and pushed open a trapdoor in the ceiling, whence he heaved himself into the attic. He glanced about the cluttered and neglected chamber for a moment; then, seizing up a wooden fishing rod from amongst a pile of ancient cricket bats and billiard cues, he crossed the room, ascended a shallow flight of wooden steps to a metal trapdoor the bolts of which he pulled back, and with the great steel flaps rising slowly on either side of him emerged onto the battlement of the tower. He crossed the battlement and peered over the side onto the slate roof below, then began carefully to maneuver the fishing rod into the trough that ran along the top of the wall. But the mouth of the drainpipe lay beyond the reach of his rod, so as the rain drizzled down upon his gaunt black form and the wind plucked at his hair and his wings and the skirts of his cassock, he climbed over the edge of the battlement and gently lowered himself onto the wet roof, where, with one arm hooked about the outcrop of stone, he crouched upon the slates probing at the dark mouth of the drainpipe with his rod.

  Father Mungo had by this time reached the cloisters and scampered across the quad with an umbrella hastily requisitioned from the east-wing boot room. On reaching the main gate, however, he did not follow Ambrose Syme up his tower. Instead, he stood transfixed beneath the great clock on the arch between the towers and observed a most curious procession emerging from the mist upon the driveway. For Holmes and Bird were returning not by the muddy lane behind the school but by a paved road that gave onto the driveway. Holmes, the prefect, held in his arms the limp body of a dead child, and Bird, beside him, was wheeling the bicycle, and thus they approached the priest beneath the clock like a figment of some ancient myth, knight and squire mournfully bearing the dead, violated virgin child; for this limp body was the body of Tommy Blackburn, youngest son of the present tenant. His misfortune it had been to absorb the shocking violence of Ambrose Syme’s fall from grace.

  Meanwhile, high above the astonished old man the frantic Syme still fished for the incriminating little fetish he had so foolishly carried with him back from the bog; which fetish he had flung from his window in fear and guilt in the night, and seen land in the guttering of the roof below. Now he frenziedly flicked up sodden lumps of dead leaves, aware only that if he did not find it before the man on the ladder did, he was lost – as if he were not lost already! And now he had slithered down the roof, digging and probing with the rod, and below him a sheer drop to the flagged terrace of Ravengloom’s front. Holmes and Bird plodded on towards the school, the rain plastering little dead Tommy’s clothing to his small pale limbs, his thick green jersey and his stout gray flannel short trousers; and Father Mungo stepped forward to meet them. At the sound of his feet on the gravel Ambrose Syme at last looked up; and in that moment, as he gazed with horror upon the sorry procession, the soles of his great black brogues began to slip forward on the wet slates, and he clutched for the battlement to which he had been clinging — but he had slipped too far. Waving the fishing rod wildly and emitting a scream that seemed for a moment to swirl about the roofs of Ravengloom like some horrible banshee curse, he turned, still sliding, onto his front, to clutch at the slates and flap with the fishing rod against the slope. No fingerhold could he catch, and his feet, then his legs, slid off the edge of the roof and into the void. His fingers scrabbled furiously at the roof and somehow managed to fasten onto the eavestrough, and thus was his descent arrested. He came to rest dangling by his hands from a trough of old tin. The strain upon his arm sockets was terrible, and the tin cut agonizingly into his fingers. He doubted he would have the strength to hang there many minutes.

  • • •

  In the time that remained to him, Ambrose Syme became quite lucid. He reflected on his life and judged it, on balance, ironic, particularly the freezing of his libidinal fluids in middle childhood. He turned then to the sin itself, and to his surprise found no remorse springing up in his heart, nor any thought of God, with whom he had ceased to have intercourse after several minutes with Tommy. Instead, he felt that old familiar stirring beneath his trouser buttons, and by force of long habit he began to compose:

  Peccavi! Libido non potest curari,

  Sed semper ministrari. Ego, perditus sum . . .1

  And then the guttering creaked ominously and sagged beneath his fingers, and he abandoned both verse and hope. In front of his eyes, upon the old pocked stones of the front wall, a patch of discoloration formed the exact configuration of the map of Africa, its heartland colonized by a clump of lichen and a thin stream of rainwater dribbling down the eastern side like a perversely backward-flowing Nile.

  ‘Ecce Nilus retrofluens,’ murmured Ambrose Syme; and that made him think, as the pain in his fingers became almost intolerable, of Father Mungo, who was still remembered with awe and affection by the natives of the Zambesi Basin. The awful weight depending from his fingers was now too much to bear; yet such is the tenacity of Eros that he would not let go. The fishing rod had slithered into the trough close by, and far below, the rector – ‘African Mungo’ as he had once been known – was seeing to the body of the boy while Holmes and Bird ran for the ladder of the man in the black oilskin.

  Finally, though, he dropped. He fell straight as an arrow down half the wall, wings and cassock billowing out about him, and then he began to tip, every limb rigid as ever, and he landed badly on his left knee. Death came instanter, thankfully; then, as the shattered body settled on the flags like a pile of broken sticks, a drainpipe hard by belched softly and discharged a soggy mess of rotten organic material in which could be detected a little balled-up clump of something white.

  The rain eased soon afterwards, and a few minutes later a buzzard was aloft and circling the area. From on high it spotted the tiny figures of an old bald priest, two boys, and a man with a ladder and a probing tool, all gathered about the black-clad body of Ambrose Syme. Off to the left, stretched out upon the grass by the driveway, lay the body of little Tommy Blackburn; and close to the foot of the tower unnoticed in the voided lump of sodden muck, the spot of white cotton that had once been his underpants.

  • • •

  The mystery of the two deaths was never solved. Father Mungo and the rest of the community, suspecting no evil, found none. Little Tommy Blackburn was buried in the village graveyard, and Ambrose went home to Cork, and there, we may hope, his soul found the peace that at the last eluded him in life. His long bones lie there to this day – moldering gently in the rich soil of Cork.

  * * *

  1. I have sinned! The sexual urge cannot be cured,

  But it can always be managed. I myself am ruined . . .

  THE ARNOLD CROMBECK STORY


  * * *

  ONE OF THE MOST memorable events of my long journalistic career was the series of interviews I conducted with Arnold Crombeck, the infamous ‘death gardener’ of Wimbledon, England, shortly before he was hanged in the summer of 1954.1 was a young woman then, fresh from Vassar, and I’d been sent over by a big New York daily to cover the tennis. Sportswriting held little interest for me in 1954, and it holds even less today, so when a call came into the office from Mr Crombeck’s lawyer saying that his client was eager to meet with the American press, I quickly volunteered for the assignment. Crombeck’s appeal had already been turned down, and his execution was fixed for the morning of July 17 – less than two weeks away.

  Now, a woman reporter really had to prove herself in those days, otherwise all she’d get to write about was fashion and tennis. I was ambitious; I was eager to show that I could handle hard news as well as any man – this was why I’d jumped at the Arnold Crombeck story. But how to approach it? I decided that the human-interest angle was the one to go for here. Accordingly, I became curious about the state of mind of a man who, having murdered quite promiscuously for a number of years, was about to find himself on the receiving end. What must it feel like? I asked myself. I thought the folks back home might be curious too, if I served it up the right way. And so, armed with pencils and notebooks and cigarettes and questions, I made my way to Wandsworth.

  This is one of the big London prisons, built like a fortress, and you feel nervous about going in; you can’t help thinking they might not let you out again. They were quite gruff with me. No institution likes the press inside its walls, and to make matters very much worse, I was a woman, and an American. But the paperwork was in order, and in due time I was cleared. A dour man in a black uniform and black peaked cap led me off through the prison on what seemed an interminable journey, broken every few yards by locked doors. At last we reached a visitors’ room with a tiled floor and a small barred window set high in the wall. There was a stout wooden table scarred with cigarette burns, and a chair on either side of it; nothing else. There I was told to wait.

  I laid my notebook on the table. I lit a Chesterfield and watched the smoke swirling through the bars of bright sunshine that came streaming through the window. The room was painted a drab green to within a few feet of the ceiling, at which point it unaccountably turned off-beige. A twisted fly-paper dangled from the electrical cord; it was black with insects, many of them still struggling in their last agonies. Then the door clanged open, and I was in the presence of the ‘death gardener’ himself.

  Arnold Crombeck was a small man, bald, and wearing round, horn-rimmed spectacles. His prison clothes – gray shirt, gray trousers – were immaculately clean, and freshly pressed. The man himself wore an expression I can only describe as ‘owlish’. He peered at me with an intensely eager expression, then advanced smartly across the room, shook my hand, and sat down. The guard took up his position with his back to the door, and fixed his eyes on a point high on the opposite wall.

  Now, I hadn’t as yet decided quite how I should present Arnold Crombeck to the American public. I thought, if I start by telling them everything he’s done, then they’ll see only the monster, and not the man. But if I show the man first, and then tell them what he’s done — well, that’s altogether the more interesting approach. So I took careful note of my first impressions.

  I suppose I’d expected that someone capable of the crimes Arnold Crombeck had committed would be coarse and stupid. I was surprised, then, to find not only that this little man could speak with wit and erudition on a wide range of topics, but that he had made precisely the same assumptions about me – simply because I was American! That first meeting, then, was one in which we quietly corrected each other’s preconceptions.

  I asked him how he found prison life. Quite tolerable, he told me; he’d always been a voracious reader, he said, and they’d allowed him some of his books. His only complaint was that there were no plants. He was, he said, with no trace of irony, a keen amateur gardener, and not to have green, growing things around him was torture. They wouldn’t even let him have a vase of flowers. This struck him as a pretty callous piece of bureaucratic indifference. He was going to be hanged, after all; he was going to pay his debt. Why, then, he should be deprived of the comfort of a few green things in his last hours he failed to understand. ‘A bunch of lupines would brighten the cell nicely,’ he said.

  He then asked me where I was from, and on hearing the word California he became quite excited. He was familiar with newspaper accounts of the last hanging carried out in San Quentin, and they apparently confirmed that Americans were no good at hanging people. It was just as well, he said, that ‘you’ve gone in for gas chambers and electric chairs instead’. He himself was fortunate in that he was going to be hanged by the English method, and in an English prison. All this he told me with a bright smile, his spotlessly clean hands laid flat on the table. There’s an art to hanging people, he told me. You have to watch for two things: (a) — and here he placed the tip of one index finger on the tip of the other – that death comes instantaneously; and (b) – index on middle finger – that it leaves as few marks on the body as possible. ‘You people could never manage it,’ he said. ‘You always tore the bloke’s head off. I’ve read Mencken on the subject. Know your problem?’

  I didn’t.

  ‘Bad noose. For a quick, clean hang, what you want is not the old “hangman’s knot”. We don’t use it.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Running noose,’ he said. ‘Absolutely essential. A metal ring is woven into one end of the rope.’ He made of his thumb and index finger a circle. ‘The other end is passed through to form the loop. Makes for a faster drop, you see. The ring is placed under the angle of the left jaw’ – he indicated the place on his own jaw — ‘so the chin tilts back, and the spinal cord’ – he put his fingers on the back of his neck — ‘is ruptured between the second and fifth cervical vertebrae. Death’ — he snapped his fingers — ‘is instantaneous. No blood to the brain, you see.’ He looked at me expectantly, as if to say, even an American can appreciate that, surely.

  All this, he said, would happen to him next week. He’d be taken into the shed and stood over the drop. He planned to refuse the cap. ‘A lever is pulled,’ he said. ‘The bolts slide back, the trapdoors fall – and down I go! Then, with a crisp snap!, my descent is arrested forever. The whole thing,’ he added, ‘should take about fifteen seconds, handled competently.’

  It was hard to know quite what to say. But Arnold had not finished. After that, he said, his heart would maintain a gradually diminishing beating for perhaps ten or twelve minutes. ‘My legs will draw up a bit,’ he said, ‘but not violently. I hope to God there’ll be no urine spilled, and no seminal emission. Above all’ – he grinned at me — ‘no erection. I have to be buried in these trousers!’

  I grinned back, rather weakly. ‘The prospect of dying doesn’t alarm you?’ I managed to say.

  ‘Dying? Good Lord no.’ He shook his head. ‘I deserve it, oh, I richly deserve it. I’m Arnold Crombeck, after all,’ he said, with a twinkle. ‘I’m the mild-mannered monster of Wimbledon!’

  At this he rose and gave me his hand. ‘Miss Kennedy, it’s been a pleasure,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we can talk again in a few days?’

  I said that would be fine.

  ‘Good. Shall we say Friday, then? Same time?’

  I left Wandsworth in a state of mild shock. Nothing had prepared me for the sprightly charm of this macabre little man. I found it necessary to reread the newspaper accounts of the trial, just to remind myself that I was dealing with a cold-blooded killer, a psychopathic personality, a man said to be brutal, remote, and indifferent to the plight of others. I found myself dreading the next meeting, but at the same time looking forward to it with a perverse sort of fascination. It was with a particularly delicious thrill of horror that I remembered his concern about the state of his trousers in the immediate aftermath of his execut
ion. The man was vain about his own corpse!

  There was, I remember, some kidding at the office, not all of it good-natured, about my Arnold Crombeck story. Some of the men were disturbed that I wasn’t sticking to fashion and tennis. I realized then that it was crucial that I see this one through, and make a good job if it, Fortunately, my editor was supportive. After I’d filed the first installment he told me that the response had been good. There was plenty of space that summer, he said, for a grisly yarn about a loony Limey. I returned to Wandsworth on Friday feeling briskly optimistic.

  And once again I had to wait in the front office for forty-five minutes for clearance; and then the long trek down corridors and stairwells, with a silent, disapproving man in a black uniform beside me, the whole grim trip punctuated by the jangle of big keys, the opening and closing of thick doors, and the intense stares of the men we passed — men who looked as if they hadn’t seen a woman in ten years, and probably most of them hadn’t. And so to that dingy little visitors’ room at the heart of the prison, with its gently twisting flypaper and its bars of hot, bright sunshine.

  Arnold was, again, crisp and alert. He seemed delighted to see me. His eyes gleamed behind his spectacles, and he sat down, as before, with his hands laid flat on the table and his cigarettes and matches between them, lined up perfectly perpendicular to the edge of the table.

  ‘How did you feel, Mr Crombeck,’ I began, ‘when the police caught you?’

  And then something rather dreadful happened. All the pleasure drained from Arnold’s face. The gleam in his eye turned glassy. He said, in a very icy voice: ‘The police did not catch me, Miss Kennedy, I thought you were familiar with my case.’