Keeper of Pleas

by A. Wendeberg

  ‘The constable lost a skull on the way. He tried to retrieve it, but someone must have taken it,’ the doctor said rather cheerfully.

  Deep in his throat, Sévère produced a soft growl. Almost inaudible. Division H was a thorn in his side; it had been since he’d opened his solicitor’s practice. Most of the constables were sloppy, and Division H seemed to follow neither etiquette, logic, nor work ethics. Per regulations, witnesses and evidence belonged to the man who was first to arrive at the scene. In this particular case it was the coroner. Yet, the 2nd class inspector who’d arrived more than thirty minutes later had determined that the head of the household, a Mr Bunting, was to be taken into police custody at once. Division H inspectors chronically turned a blind eye in their own favour, and it was of no use informing the magistrates of this serious slip in protocol. Sévère would have to pay a visit to the Home Office and turn in an official complaint.

  Whenever he found the time.

  The usual case-solving-circus seemed to be that coroner, Division H, and the bunch of plainclothes detectives the magistrates called their own, were supposed to race each other. Whoever was the first to apprehend a suspect — whichever suspect — won.

  When Sévère was a young man, he’d clung to the naïve view that police work was truly about finding a culprit and keeping London safe (or comparatively safe), and not about gaining influence and power over the inner workings of the city.

  ‘Can you say anything about the cause of death?’ he asked the doctor.

  ‘Well…’ was the reply. ‘There might be signs of violence.’ Dr Baxter picked up a few vertebrae, arranged the individual pieces on his palm, and pointed at what appeared to be scratch marks.

  ‘And?’

  ‘It is impossible to tell if these injuries were inflicted ante-, peri-, or postmortem. The skeletons are all clean. There’s no soft tissue to work with. Not one bit of flesh or skin left. I’m guessing the infants died five to ten years ago.’

  Sévère took a step forward, leant his cane against the table and gingerly turned over the fragile bones. ‘How likely is it that someone collected nine stillbirths and buried them in flowerpots?’

  ‘The world is the strangest of places. However…’ The doctor held up a pencil, bent over the vertebrae in Sévère’s hand and pointed at a tiny discolouration. ‘Here we might have an indication for internal bleeding. Before the heart stopped beating, that is. Or it might be dirt. It’s impossible to tell. But this does smell of violence, doesn’t it? If I’m not entirely mistaken, these are all illegitimate children farmed out by their mothers soon after birth.’ The doctor shrugged. ‘An everyday occurrence. Ask the Thames Police Office. They are sick of infants floating in the river or lying on the banks.

  Sévère felt an itch at the back of his head. Baby farmers wrapped their dead charges in paper or rags, or sometimes they placed them into cardboard boxes. They threw these packages into dust yards, back alleys, the Thames. Baby farmers cared little about how they rid themselves of their charges as long as the “getting-rid-of” couldn’t be connected to them.

  His gaze touched on each small, planted grave, and each laid-out skeleton. There was accuracy, care. Baxter’s interpretation was simple and straightforward. But it did not fit.

  ‘I need a second opinion,’ Sévère said. ‘Mr Easy, would you be so kind as to send a message to the house surgeon of Guy’s Hospital?’

  ❧

  At four thirty in the afternoon, Dr Johnston of Guy’s Hospital alighted from the cab in front of the mortuary. Per the note he’d received at noon he was to wait for Coroner Sévère before he began his examination. This irritated him a little. Coroners were solicitors, their specialty was the law. Hence, they should keep their noses out of postmortems. But then, Dr Johnson respected every man who strove to increase his knowledge. Rumour had it that the newly-appointed coroner showed an unusual interest in all medical matters related to deaths caused by violence and neglect. If the police were only half as curious as that man…

  Dr Johnston was torn from his thoughts by the noise of shuffling feet. That, too, irritated him. The mortician had been fidgeting a lot these past minutes, his eyes firmly stuck to the infants’ laid-out remains.

  ‘Are you quite all right, Mr Easy?’ Dr Johnston asked without looking up.

  ‘Yes, thank you. I’m all right. Might have caught a cold, though. Or something.’

  ‘Hum,’ said Johnston. He tapped his fingers on the table, extracted his watch from his waistcoat pocket and grumbled, ‘I can’t wait forever.’

  He rolled up his sleeves and began to methodically examine the flowerpots.

  ❧

  Rubbing his left elbow, Alexander Easy watched Johnston work. Easy’s arm had been aching for days. For how long precisely? he wondered, but couldn’t recall when it had begun. Perhaps I should see my physician. Yes, I just might. After Christmas, perhaps? Better yet, after New Year’s Eve. Less clients to attend to, once the annual wave of holiday suicides was over.

  His attention meandered back to the remains of nine tiny human beings. He couldn’t seem to pull his eyes away from them. And slowly, creepily, he felt something inside him begin to unfurl. There was a heaviness in his stomach and a clenching of his ribcage he couldn’t quite explain. Neither could he explain why these nine corpses disturbed him so. He was a mortician. He laid his hands on dead bodies every day.

  ❧

  ‘My apologies, I’m late.’ Sévère stepped through the antechamber and into the viewing room. ‘Dr Johnston, thank you for coming. I know you are a busy man.’

  ‘Hum,’ said Johnston, sorting through potting soil with nimble fingers. He didn’t spare the coroner a glance or even a nod.

  Sévère positioned himself at the mortician’s side, and both men watched Dr Johnston examine every crumb, every square inch of clay pot surface, every fibre of root, every twig, and every bone.

  When, finally, Johnston pressed his hands onto the table and huffed, Easy and Sévère leant forward.

  ‘Well,’ Johnston said. ‘Complicated.’ He brushed the soil off his palms. ‘Let me begin with the facts: We have, as you’ve written in your message to me, nine small bodies in seven flowerpots that have been found on the only balcony of all of Whitechapel Road. One skeleton has recently been disturbed, allegedly by the housekeeper of the household with the balcony in question. The skull of that same skeleton went missing owing to the carelessness of a constable of Division H. This means we have eight bodies that have not been disturbed for one growth season. What might have happened to them before spring of this year is mostly based on conjecture.’

  Sévère cleared his throat. ‘You believe they have been relocated?’

  ‘Most definitely. You see, here.’ Dr Johnston grabbed a sapling and ran his fingers along its roots. ‘The saplings were grafted three, perhaps four years ago. Judging from the development of the roots, they were replanted in spring this year. You may wish to have an expert confirm this. You can see that some of the roots have retained the shape of a smaller pot, while the newly-formed roots are stretching out through the entire space of the new, larger pot. A few of the roots are touching the neonates. Er…the newborns. Hence my conclusion that the saplings were repotted in spring this year. You will notice that the original pots must have been too small to contain any of these bodies. Whoever repotted the trees, moved the bodies from somewhere to here.’ He waved at the pots.

  ‘Now, I can’t tell you much about the original burial ground of the neonates, but I can tell you where they have not been buried.’

  ‘Go on,’ Sévère said.

  ‘Let me breathe, lad, and I will pour out all that I am able to glean from the little you’ve given me.’ Johnston tut-tutted, one eyebrow raised at Sévère.

  He took his time to indicate the surface of each skull and each eye socket while explaining, ‘Only a few of the fresh root filaments have grown into the cavities or cracks, which tells me something about how much time the bodies have spen
t in these particular pots. However…’ Johnston exhaled, sending a cloud of condensation into the cold air. ‘Next time, do me a favour and summon me before Baxter-the-Axter gets his hands on the evidence.’

  ‘I will. And I greatly appreciate your offer.’

  ‘But I must warn you, Sévère. Should you ever call me in for a trifle, I will establish a routine of first attending to all of my patients before I attend to your enquiries. Which might take me several days.’

  ‘Understood.’

  ‘Very well then.’ Johnston turned back to the table. ‘All the neonates are skeletonised…meaning all bones are pretty clean. Only here and there are small bits of ligament. Especially on these two.’ He indicated a pair of skeletons on the far left of the table.

  ‘You will notice that each skeleton appears a little darker than its left-hand neighbour. The bodies on the left are the freshest, the ones on the right have been buried the longest: not only does the dark brown colour of the bones indicate that they have spent an extended period of time underground, the bones also show a higher degree of degradation.’ He pointed to hands and feet that lacked fingers and toes.

  ‘In my opinion, the soil dissolved the small bones of the hands and feet. Look, here.’ Johnston picked up part of a pelvis and brushed his index finger over its brownish surface. ‘It’s rough. Slightly acidic soil is found in most of England and Scotland. Bones, especially those of neonates, will dissolve — slowly, but surely. However, you’d find the pelvises disarticulated either way, as the ossification centres haven’t fused yet. Er…the parts of the… Never mind. It simply means you’d find three separate bones for each innominate and five separate elements for the sacrum. If there is ligament remaining, it may hold the five separate centres that form the sacrum together — as you can see in two of the nine neonates, but the pelvises would still be found as three separate bones for each innominate.’

  Sévère scribbled furiously in his notepad. ‘Don’t you think rats might have carried away the small limbs?’

  ‘Rodents will take what they can gnaw off, but there are very few scratch and bite marks on these bones. And here comes my first gift to you, Sévère: these neonates were not buried in London. They spent considerable time in a less populated area before they were taken on a journey together with the apple trees. The ones on the right, the darkest ones, must have been buried for a period of about ten years. Perhaps more. If they’d spent ten years in London soil, there would be nothing left for me to examine. The rat population is rather high in the city.’

  Sévère huffed. ‘My list of suspects has just increased dramatically: most of England and Scotland, excluding large cities.’

  The doctor tut-tutted. ‘Sévère, you must learn to be patient. Let the old surgeon give you one bit of information at a time, else your brain might explode. Now, here comes my second gift to you: Someone has taken great care to protect the bodies. Someone might have loved these children.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’ Sévère found himself surprisingly undisturbed by the fact that Guy’s house surgeon had thrown aside etiquette and taken to calling him “lad” and “Sévère.” He wasn’t sure if this was an indication of disrespect, but decided to ponder the question later.

  ‘Mr Easy, are you quite all right?’ Johnston asked.

  Sévère turned to the mortician who’d been quite invisible to him these past minutes. The man looked pasty.

  Mr Easy blinked. ‘Uh. Yes. Thank you. I’m just…a little tired. It has been a long day.’

  ‘Indeed it has. Is. Anyway.’ Johnston turned his attention back to Sévère. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if these were all siblings. They were buried soon after their death and exhumed a few years later to be carefully buried again. Not a single one of the larger bones has gone missing. Except, of course, for the skull the good constable lost. The two pairs buried together might be twins: they show almost identical signs of ageing. But this is a tad too wild of a guess for my taste. These infants were cherished; I’m absolutely certain of it. There is, however, the unfortunate evidence of their violent deaths.’

  He picked up a row of vertebrae from one of the freshest skeletons and pointed to three fine lines carved into the bone. ‘These are cuts. Their appearance indicates that the cutting was done around the time of death. Adjacent to these cuts, the discolouration differs from the darkening of the entire skeleton, the latter resulting from the soil it was buried in. By the way, I’ve found three different types of soil — you might want to consult an expert on these. But this discolouration, here, where the cuts are, is different. It’s blood.’

  ‘But…’ Sévère pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to summon his limited medical knowledge. ‘A surgeon once told me that when a body lies on its back, that’s where the blood pools. Couldn’t the same thing have happened with these children? That they were born dead, the cuts were inflicted after birth for whatever reason, and that they were placed on their backs allowing blood to stain the bones of the neck?’

  ‘How long does a birth typically take?’ Johnston asked with a patient smile, the same he applied to his students.

  ‘Several hours?’

  ‘How quickly does blood congeal?’

  ‘Ah, I see.’

  ‘Precisely. If what you have theorised were true, then all of these must have died in the birth canal only minutes before their throats were cut. Now, who cuts the throat of stillborns? Really, Sévère!’

  ‘Who in his right mind would do this to nine children?’ Mr Easy whispered, his voice a hoarse croak.

  —Brothel—

  Alexander Easy locked the door to the mortuary. His hand paused on the iron handle. He did not notice the icy cold creeping into his palm. His gaze travelled up to the patterned tiles that ran all around the small building, the same patterns that could be found on the gateposts of St George’s Gardens. Again, he tried to identify their meaning. Again, without success. He stretched his shoulders, rubbed his elbow, exhaled a cloud into the cold evening, and turned his back to his working place one final time.

  On Cable Street, he climbed aboard an omnibus and sat down next to a gentleman with thick glasses and a red necktie. He smelled of fish and wet dog.

  At Commercial and Brushfield he alighted. His knees were aching. He walked thirty-nine paces and opened the door to his home. He climbed twelve steps to the first floor, the keys in his hands clinking, the stairs creaking a protest under his weight. His breath shortened the farther he ascended. When he unlocked the door to his rooms, the housekeeper — who’d kept an eye on the street for the past half hour — stepped out into the hallway to greet him.

  ‘Mr Easy, sir, nice to see you back. I expect you wish to take your supper now?’

  ‘Yes, thank you, Mrs Dobbins. But…’

  ‘The water. Certainly. Certainly.’

  This exchange had been identical for nearly six years.

  Mr Easy washed and dressed in fresh clothes, then sat down to roast of mutton with Brussel sprouts and potatoes. It smelled delicious. He gazed at the meat and couldn’t muster the energy to stick a fork into it.

  Sighing, he leant back and shut his tired eyes. Before he knew it, his head fell into his hands, and he wept until his shoulders trembled and his cuffs were soggy.

  For nearly six years now, Mr Easy’s evenings had been quiet and uneventful. Tonight, though, he felt as if his chest might explode should he stare at Agnes’ empty armchair for a moment longer. So he did something entirely unexpected: Alexander Easy dashed the tears off his cheeks and left the house.

  Mrs Dobbins couldn’t believe her ears when she heard Mr Easy’s boots descending the stairs, the door to the house opening and snapping shut, and boots clacking down the stone steps and onto the street.

  For perhaps the hundredth time that day, she pushed aside the lace curtains. Just the smallest crack. Believing herself unseen, she and her cracked curtain were yet wonderfully conspicuous to all in her neighbourhood.

  Her eyes followed Mr E
asy, and she wondered if he’d finally gotten over his wife’s passing. Yes, that must be it. Surely, he’s courting a young woman.

  ‘Thank the Lord,’ she whispered, and in her mind’s eye, chubby children were already tramping up and down the stairwell. She frowned, told herself to be less nosey and more patient, and poured herself a gin.

  ❧

  He wasn’t quite sure where he was going. Outside, away, was all he could think. Those nine bodies… Someone had cherished them, the doctor had said. And yet, killed them. What man or woman could have done such a thing? Alexander’s belief in mankind had been rattled deeply. For ten, twelve years he and Agnes had tried to have children of their own. Five times she’d given birth to a dead girl, once to a dead boy. Then she had perished, slowly, steadily, unstoppably from under his loving hands like a cut-off lily.

  A tear skidded down Alexander’s cheek as he stumbled blindly through the streets. Where was he, anyway? He looked up and found that he was drifting toward the mortuary. He dug through his mind and found that there was only one proper thing to do: bury the children in sacred soil. Lay them to rest. Yes, someone had to do it and he was just the right man. But something niggled at the back of his mind, telling him that he had to wait, they had to wait. The inquest was to take place the following day. The bodies were to be viewed by the coroner, both doctors, all witnesses, and the jury.

  Alexander came to a sudden halt in an unlit street. With a shudder he realised that this was not a place to cross, or, God forbid, to dawdle. He set off again, at a faster pace. His view swam as he thought of Agnes and her children, his children, theirs. And the nine he’d seen today. He stumbled and was close to stepping into something that looked suspiciously like a very flat rat.