by Gary Dolman
“Papa, that’s just not true,” Jennifer exclaimed indignantly. “I’ve told you over and over that Artie would make a perfect and very gallant Fusilier officer.”
Sir Hugh coloured.
“Magistratus Indicat Virum; ‘The office shows the man.’ The man must therefore be worthy of the office, Jenny. Artie quite simply is not. I will not be shamed; my mind is made up and it is immovable. Now let me be whilst I tell the Foxes something of the history of the fighting Lowthers.”
One full hour later, even Atticus was beginning to lose interest in the conversation. The arrival of thick, syrupy, Abyssinian coffee, which Sir Hugh explained he had taken a great liking to during his time in the Sudan, provided a welcome opportunity to change the topic.
“Whilst I remember, Sir Hugh,” Atticus ventured, “would you have any influence with the coroner in this case? Mrs Fox would like to go through Elliott’s post-mortem autopsy report tomorrow – assuming of course that one has been carried out. I imagine the cremation has not yet taken place so it would be helpful for her to examine the corpse too.”
“Your wife wishes to examine the Gypsy’s corpse?” repeated Sir Hugh incredulously.
“If that is possible, yes. It is an important part of our investigation and, as I said to you earlier, she has a far stronger stomach than I for such things.”
Sir Hugh looked bemused.
“I suppose it’s courageous of you to admit to it around the dinner table. Did you take note of that, Artie? But there really is nothing to fear from the dead, Fox; they have already paid their debts in full to the Fates.
“In answer to your questions; yes, I do have some little influence with the coroner and, yes, of course I’d be pleased to use it on your, or rather on your wife’s behalf. In fact she’s in luck, a warrant for an inquest has been issued but I don’t believe any autopsy has yet taken place.”
At that moment the door crashed open once again and Collier burst into the room with James at his shoulder. Propriety and affectations forgotten, they both wore identically horror-struck expressions that shrieked and shrieked that somewhere, something diabolical had happened.
Collier bent by the colonel and panted something into his ear.
“He’s dead? How do you know he’s dead?” Sir Hugh thundered.
“He is, sir.” James seemed to be struggling to speak. “I found him up by his chair at the Broomlee Lough. He’s been throttled to death with a piece of cloth and—”
“Who is it? Who’s been throttled to death?” Atticus barked.
“It’s Sir Douglas, the colonel’s father.” James’ss answer was no more than a croak. As he turned towards Atticus, the sunlight caught a dark stain, slick and wet across the shoulder and front of his cape-coat.
“Where is he now?” Sir Hugh was suddenly on his feet.
“We left him in the scullery, sir. I carried him back but Mr Collier didn’t think it wise to bring him through the house, not with the ladies here and all.”
“Show me,” Sir Hugh commanded and strode from the room.
Above stairs, Shields Tower was grand and imposing. Below them, it was dark, cramped and labyrinthine. Endless corridors twisted this way and that, more of a lair for monsters than a large, comfortable home. But James and Collier led them unerringly and all at once they had passed through a stricken, sobbing crowd of servants, into a billow of sudden heat and found themselves in the scullery.
It was a very large scullery, as was surely necessary to provide for the wants of such a grand house as Shields Tower. Or perhaps it was Grendel’s kitchen because the scene within was monstrous.
They gathered, silent but for Jennifer’s sobs, muffled by Artie’s shoulder, around a large, scrubbed-top table which stood in the centre like a sacrificial altar and stared at the offering upon it. It was what once must have been a man – an old man certainly, but a living, breathing human being nonetheless. Now it was a lifeless husk partly covered by a blood-soaked tablecloth, and the manner of its transformation must have been terrible.
Its glassy, lifeless eyes were protuberant, still bulging from the bloated, ruddy face. Two thick lines of blood, drawn from the nostrils, were coagulating and crusting above the mouth, a mouth that retched and gaped in a never-ending death scream.
But it was the throat above the crisp, starched collar that drew the stare of every person there. Bound tightly around it and banded above and below by broad, angry, purple stripes was a cloth. It was a golden-yellow cloth that had been twisted into a tight rope and knotted fast below the ear.
Lucie was the first to react. She bent to examine the tiny knot pressed deep into the flesh and then reached for a scullery knife. Cautiously and with infinite care, she sliced through the weave, peeled it free from the skin and laid it next to its victim. Carefully smoothed flat, it became a crumpled strip of golden silk, perhaps eighteen inches in length by three in breadth. It was finely woven and had in some inexplicable way a feeling of great age about it.
“Death by strangulation,” murmured Lucie, voicing the terrible thoughts of every person in the room and Atticus nodded.
She began to examine the head and the neck and the marks around the throat, frowning as she did so. After a little while she said, “Atticus, look at—”
“What is it?” Sir Hugh barked.
In answer Lucie pushed her fingers deep into the gaping mouth and pulled out a long strip of something hard and black that reeked of vomit.
Atticus turned away and wretched.
Lucie held it between her fingertips and it hung down like something unholy.
“What is it?” she asked.
James the footman answered. “I believe it is biltong, ma’am.”
Lucie peered into the corpse’s mouth.
“There’s more of it, lots more. Biltong did you say it was? What is biltong?”
“It’s meat, ma’am, dried and cured. We saw a lot of it when we were out with the regiment in Africa. Once it’s cured, it lasts almost forever.”
Lucie laid it onto the table top next to the silk strip. She carefully wiped her fingers dry on a corner of the table cloth that had been laid over the rest of the corpse and then lifted it back. As she did, she revealed completely the cause both of the mottling of blood across the middle of the white linen, and of the wet slick across James’ss cape-coat.
Sir Douglas Lowther had been cleaved almost in two below his ribs, the whitening flesh of his viscera clearly visible in the long, blood-soaked gashes across his waistcoat. The gashes were in the form of the flattened ‘X’ of a crux decussata.
“Just like Samson Elliott!” James hissed and Atticus retched once more.
“Pull yourself together, man. What the bloody hell is the matter with you?” Sir Hugh growled irritably.
Lucie glanced round, frowning. “Elliott had wounds like this?”
James nodded.
Sir Hugh took command once more.
“Collier,” he barked, “use the telephone on the wall of my study and call for the police. Tell them the madman has struck again. Do it directly.”
He pointed to the strip of biltong now part-covered by the folded table cloth.
“Years ago, Lucie, we used to send biltong meat up to the madman. It wouldn’t go bad if he didn’t eat it directly, do you see? Well, let me tell you something about that meat lying there: it is old – very old. In fact, it could easily be twenty years old…”
He left the sentence unfinished.
They stood in a silence broken only by an indignant crescendo of insect wings as Lucie turned to sweep away a cluster of blowflies that were crawling in the gashes. She bent close and began to examine the wounds minutely.
“How very curious,” she murmured, swatting away the insistent blowflies.
“How is it curious?” Atticus gasped his question out. The scullery was oppressively hot.
“In the position of these wounds for one thing; the deepest is right up against the ribcage, and it seems to have been struck fr
om below. It has quite cut through the diaphragm and carved open the lung cavity.”
“So Sir Douglas would have been lying on his back on the ground when he was attacked?” Atticus grimaced in apology to Sir Hugh, who stared back impassively.
Lucie shrugged. “That is what I first assumed too, but then it is the waistcoat below the wound that is soaked in blood. That would suggest he was upright when it was made – or perhaps sitting, if he was in a chair as Sir Hugh suggested. And then there’s this second wound; it’s much lighter – almost superficial.”
“Perhaps he tried to evade the first blow, and the superficial wound was all his attacker could manage to inflict,” Atticus suggested.
Lucie shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. It looks almost as if it was… as if it was drawn into the skin. Besides,” she pressed the lips of the deeper gash together, “it was made after the first, deeper cut opened him up – not before. Do you see how the line doesn’t meet when I press this wound together?”
“But why throttle him, and choke him, and then inflict injuries like those?” Atticus regarded the gash with horror. “Any one of those would have been sufficient to kill him. Why kill him thrice over?”
“I have really no idea, Atticus.” Lucie gently tried to move Sir Douglas’s hands across towards his belly. They were stiff and unyielding. “Perhaps the autopsy will reveal something.”
Atticus nodded, relieved that Lucie was almost finished here. “Let’s hope so.”
He reached over and carefully lifted the crumpled strip of golden cloth by one of its corners.
“This is an unusual material, Lucie.”
“Yes it is. It’s very old, tablet-woven silk.”
“I’ve never heard of it,” he admitted.
“Tablet weaving was a technique, very popular in medieval times, that was used to produce narrow strips of cloth.”
“So you believe that this might be medieval?”
Lucie nodded. “It is very old. Yes, I believe that it could very well be.”
Atticus pondered on the import of her words. “Then it’s another link with this infernal business of King Arthur. Which means it is highly likely that the deaths of Sir Douglas and Samson Elliott are linked, and that they were murdered by the same person… or persons.”
Collier was suddenly standing by Sir Hugh’s shoulder.
“Well?” the colonel barked.
“I’ve spoken with the police superintendent, sir. He sends his condolences and his compliments and asks that you keep the body safe until first light. He intends to come over then.”
Sir Hugh bristled like a bulldog. “Do you see?” he roared. “Do you see? Now you know why we sent for you both, Fox. The Hexham police couldn’t catch the pox in a whore-house.”
Chapter 12
The scene that confronted Atticus and Lucie Fox as they left Shields Tower shortly after dawn the next morning was surreal, almost phantasmic.
They stepped down from the great carved doors and waded into a low shroud of amorphous white mist that completely smothered the ground and seemed almost to glow as it was illuminated by the low, flat rays of the early morning sun. It might have been that they were angels walking through the clouds of Heaven but for the fact that here and there, the veil was ruptured by bushes and by trees and by the malevolent presence of the grotesques as they stood up erect out of its mass to cast long, dark shadows over its surface.
Atticus straightened a twist out of the leather shoulder strap of his investigations bag as he and Lucie rounded the corner of the great South Wing and felt their faces probed by the warm rays of the rising sun.
There was no sign yet of the police superintendant from Hexham but the relentless swelling of the dawn meant that they could wait no longer. They began to retrace their steps of the previous day along the curving road to the stables and beyond, intending to return first to the moor-side field where the horrors of Samson Elliott’s nightmares had taken form and substance and so brutally overwhelmed him. After that, James had described in detail how they might find the lakeside spot where Sir Douglas Lowther had met his own equally bloody and violent end.
By the time they reached the field adjoining the lunatic’s little white cottage, all vestiges of the dawn mists had been burnt away leaving only a sprinkling of dew on the turgid, yellow leaves of the stunted wheat.
They found the guilty, dark stains once more on the short, lusher grass of the headland. Atticus crouched low, hanging for support on the thick, pewter handle of his walking cane. He squinted across the surface of the ground, towards the great, square stones that footed the dry stone wall.
“Aha,” he exclaimed triumphantly. “Do you see here, Lucie?”
He waited until his wife had stooped next to him.
“With the sun still so low, it is much easier to see the marks and indentations in the ground.”
He pointed.
“Do you see that line of footprints leading from the style in the wall? They are huge. They must have been made by someone of enormous size.”
“Good gracious me,” Lucie gasped. She stood and stepped towards the nearest of them. “They are an odd shape though, Atticus, don’t you think? Very long and narrow. Shall we see if there are more on the other side of the wall?”
“Presently, if you please, Lucie,” Atticus replied. “First, if I am able, I’d like to try to take a cast of one of ’em.”
He spent some minutes in examining and comparing each of the footprints they had discovered. Once he had satisfied himself that he had identified the sharpest and most complete of them, he reached into the open mouth of his bag and lifted out a tin-plate box. It was full of very fine plaster of Paris powder. Carefully adding water scooped from a puddle in the sodden ground around the base of the wall, he vigorously mixed the plaster before slowly, and with great care, pouring it into the deep cavity of the footprint.
“The plaster has an orange tinge to it,” he remarked as he studied its smooth, creamy surface. “It can only have come from the puddle water. There are little bubbles of gas forming in it too. How bizarre! I hope it’s not so dirty the plaster doesn’t set properly.”
He shrugged.
“Well it’s done now anyway; no doubt we shall see when we return.
“Now, Lucie, we have some time to pass while it cures so let us investigate whether these footprints do indeed continue beyond the wall, and if they do, to where.”
Countless generations of ancient Northumbrians had spent their lives labouring to spread the vast network of dry stone walls across the breadth of their county, often advancing no more than a stride each day. It was brutal, exhausting work which kept them as lean and spare as the land they worked. Those men could never have imagined that one of their cohort might ever grow fat and Atticus needed to lift himself up onto his toes to squeeze through the narrow style. He jumped heavily down to the other side and turned to offer his hand to his wife. Lucie slipped through with ease.
They didn’t need the sun to find the same narrow and peculiarly long footprints pressed deep into the sodden, yielding turf on this side of the wall. The trail led directly and blatantly in the direction of the little cottage where, to the Foxes’ frustration, they melted away as the turf yielded way to the rock of the Great Whin Sill.
“Atticus, look!” Lucie grabbed his wrist. “The door of the cottage. It was open a moment ago but when I glanced over, it shut tight. There was a face at the gap; I’m sure of it. Atticus, the lunatic – I think he’s seen us.”
“Has he indeed.” Atticus stared at the door. He hoped Lucie couldn’t feel the pounding of his pulse as she gripped his wrist. “He’s up at a good, early hour. That is very convenient. We had better take full advantage.”
With that, he took Lucie’s arm, grasped the handle of his cane and strode beside the trail of footprints towards the madman’s cottage.
As they approached and the nails in Atticus’s boots began to click on the bare whinstone, something on the door itself caug
ht their eye. Amidst the shabby, peeling paint clinging to the timber planks was the profile of a large, vividly red dragon with wings outstretched. It had been painstakingly painted across the full breadth of the door. Several large, black flies crawled across its surface and they were both reminded sharply of the bloodstained grass in the field beyond the wall. Atticus exchanged a quizzical glance with Lucie and then rapped sharply on the wood with the metal top of his cane.
There was no reply. The cottage remained silent save for the sudden buzzing of the flies and the lazier drone of a bumble bee foraging somewhere near to them.
From a distance, the little heather-thatched cottage nestled snugly on the cusp of the moors had seemed quaint and pastoral, almost like the pictures on the chocolate boxes Lucie used for her keepsakes. Close-to, however, they could see that it was mean, neglected and shabby. The lime-wash on the rough, cobble walls was cracked and flaking and the thatch on the roof, old, thin and bleached almost white by the sun. Its only concession to luxury was a short length of rusted, iron gutter fixed just over the door on which a large, black raven was perched, regarding them inquisitively.
Atticus knocked again, harder this time. The raven sprang, croaking in alarm into the blue of the sky and a single flake of rust fluttered down to their feet.
Lucie put her hand on Atticus’s arm and gestured towards the grimy lattice that served as a window. Atticus looked and as his eyes began to interpret the shapes and shadows within, he distinguished the outline of a man beyond the thick mottling of dust on the glass. He was a very tall and slender man and he was standing quite still, facing the windowless wall opposite. His arms appeared to be wrapped tightly around his head.
Atticus stepped up to the window and peered through. He rapped gently on the glass with the tips of his finger. The man started violently and peered round at them. His expression might have been that of a poacher caught at the end of a gamekeeper’s shotgun.
