by Gary Dolman
“You may be the scribe then, Mr Fox,” Hickson called. “Just write down everything I say.”
Then, with solemn nods to Lucie and the mortuary assistant, Dr Hickson began.
“As we can both see… and indeed smell,” he chuckled, “the cadaver has entered the early stages of decomposition. Nevertheless, I note that the subject is a male whom I would estimate to be between forty and fifty years of age with a dark complexion, let me see… dark eyes and jet-black hair. His physical build is not possible to determine with accuracy since it has become somewhat distended with putrefaction but I should say it was slender but wiry, of good proportions and well-muscled.
“The heads sits separate from the torso on the examination table. He appears to have been neatly, in fact almost surgically decapitated by a single stroke to the neck. The wound is clean with little laceration or tearing indicating the use of a very sharp, heavy instrument; possibly a sword or a cleaver.
“I begin with the torso. Firstly we must carefully remove the clothing.”
He held out a hand towards the mortuary assistant who dutifully placed a pair of large, iron shears in his palm. With almost indecent efficiency, Hickson began to snip and peel away the clothing.
“You might like to note, Mr Fox, that the various cuts sustained by Mr Elliott’s clothing match exactly the wounds on the underlying surface of the body. To wit; a very deep slice-wound across the whole width of the upper abdomen just below the rib cage and a second, similar but more superficial wound intersecting the first at an angle of around forty-five degrees.”
“Is there also a stab-wound?” Atticus asked, quickly and breathlessly. It seemed to be devilishly warm and he was sweating profusely.
“Yes, I see it. The entry wound occurs slightly to the left of the sternum and directly over the heart which must certainly have been penetrated. The puncture is again clean and quite long and narrow in profile. I would declare it entirely consistent with having been made by an instrument such as a sword.”
“Consistent with the use of a sword,” Atticus repeated. “What are the precise dimensions of the wound, Doctor?”
“Good question, Mr Fox, let me see. The wound is around one and one-quarter inches in length and perhaps three-eighths of an inch wide. Please make a note that these are approximations only. You will bear in mind the condition of the skin on a body which has lain in a morgue for this long at the height of summer.”
Atticus took another long breath. “That is very curious. And is there a corresponding exit wound also?”
Lucie looked across at the mortuary assistant, who stepped forward eagerly to heave the torso over onto its front.
She thanked him and he coloured again.
“There is, Atticus. It corresponds in size and in orientation to the entry wound, but a little further towards the left side of the back. I would say that this indicates that the murderer’s thrust was made horizontally and from the victim’s right to his left.”
“And I would concur with that conclusion,” added Hickson.
“What are the orientations of the wounds, Lucie?”
“I would estimate, approximately thirty degrees to the vertical, clockwise.”
Atticus grunted and said: “How very interesting.”
The doctor chuckled. “Necropsies invariably are, Mr Fox. They always form the very highlights of my year.
“Mrs Fox, I applaud you on your shrewd observations, but please, to continue: there is the usual greenish discolouration around the middle of the abdomen, which has spread to the genitals with smaller areas of discolouration on the legs, neck and back.”
He turned to Lucie. “I have my private autopsy set on the side, Mrs Fox. If you would be so kind as to pass me the large knife and a bone-saw, we shall now inspect the internal organs beginning I would say with the heart. If we find it contracted and empty, we might assume that death was caused by loss of blood from his slash-wounds. If, as I suspect, it is still full of blood then it is likely he was killed by paralysis of the heart and therefore the stabbing blow would have been the fatal one.”
The steady, rasping sounds of the bone-saw rolled harshly around the tiled walls of the morgue and Atticus poured all of his focus into re-reading the words he had written, trying to transpose them in his mind into what must have happened on that hellish June morning.
The sawing stopped.
“Good Heavens above!” the doctor exclaimed.
“What is it?” Atticus asked, “Is it the heart; what does it tell you?”
“Atticus,” Lucie murmured and her tone was grim. “There is no heart. It’s gone.”
The seconds stretched out into eternity.
“Gone?” Atticus repeated. “How do you mean, gone?”
“She means it is gone, Mr Fox, gone in the plainest sense of the word.” Dr Hickson’s little, pointed nose seemed to be almost inside Elliott’s chest as he stooped over the body.
“There is nothing bar maggots in there now. It looks to me as if it was pulled out, with some considerable force too, down through the wound in the abdomen. What sort of heathen barbarian could have done this to a fellow man?”
It was a question neither Lucie nor Atticus Fox could answer.
The rest of the autopsy was conducted in silence and almost mechanically as the full horror of Samson Elliott’s death settled onto each of them. Heavy bruising on the right shoulder was the only other addition to their store of information and as Sir Douglas’s corpse was stretchered in and laid out on an adjacent slab, Dr Hickson and Lucie signed off Atticus’s record and gave the instruction to the mortuary assistant to sew what remained of Elliott’s body back together.
“And you’ll need to be quick-smart about it too,” Hickson added. “I hear the deceased’s brothers have been at the infirmary already today, clamouring to undertake his funeral.”
The assistant looked at the remains, distaste evident on his face. “Aye, I will, Doctor,” he promised. “Even for this place, it ain’t too bonny!”
They turned to the now familiar corpse of Sir Douglas Lowther. His eyelids had been slid over the reflections of Hell beneath them and his screaming, gaping mouth respectfully closed. He looked a little less monstrous, a degree more human than they remembered. Indeed, he appeared almost if he were smiling, perhaps in gratitude at their redoubled determination to find his killer.
“You saw him shortly after he was murdered as I understand it.” The inflection in Dr Hickson’s voice turned his statement into a question.
Atticus nodded to the writing desk and said, “Yes.”
“Rigor mortis had set in by the time the footman brought him back to Shields Tower,” Lucie added. “There were signs of throttling and obstruction of the gullet, and he has identical wounds to Elliott across his abdomen.”
“So I have read in Detective Robson’s notes. Then perhaps Sir Douglas will be missing his heart too. It was the heart of a lion by all accounts.”
Hickson went straight to work with his bone-saw and knife and it was quickly evident that his conjecture was entirely correct; the heart had indeed been torn from the lion.
“It’s damnably inconvenient,” he observed. “With injuries such as his, the heart would have told us more than any other organ.”
He hooked his thumbs pompously into the straps of his rubber apron.
“As your wife will no doubt be aware, there are essentially three modes of death, Mr Fox: asphyxia, syncope and coma. Our deceased friend here could conceivably have suffered any one of them. He may, for example, have died from asphyxia; either strangulation as a result of the ligature around his neck, or choking on that dried meat stuffing his gullet.
“He may alternatively have died from syncope; the failure of his circulatory system due to blood loss or indeed the forcible removal of his heart.
“Or finally, and we cannot ignore the possibility in a case such as this, he may have died from coma. That is defined as any cause effecting brain insensibility, which terminates in d
eath. He may have been poisoned by the meat, for example. We shall therefore need to remove the stomach, empty the contents into a dish and examine them for noxious substances.”
He smiled at the stricken expression on Atticus’s face.
But Sir Douglas Lowther had not been poisoned. And although the pulmonary artery, the venae cavae and the thick veins in his neck were gorged with black, venous blood, Hickson with an expression surprisingly akin to Atticus’s had recorded the mode of death as being syncope. It was a technical, medical term, which politely served to hide the horrific reality that Sir Douglas Lowther had died by having his very heart ripped out.
As they walked down the steps from the hospital into the stinking air that seemed now so fresh and reviving, into the everyday normality of the outside world, Lucie said: “At times, Atticus, even I wonder about the capacity in man for atrocity. Samson Elliott was killed stone dead by the first thrust to his heart yet the murderer ripped that heart out and sliced off his head. Sir Douglas…” Here, words failed even her. “Someone must be very cruel, or must have hated them both very deeply.”
She paused reflectively as she slipped her arm into her husband’s.
“Do you think our Detective Robson was being entirely honest when he told us he was baffled as to the killer’s identity? I mean he clearly resents our being here. I do wonder if he is a little more unwilling than unable to share his information with us.”
Atticus considered the question for a moment as they began to walk.
“That’s a very good point, Lucie. On balance, I think that the answer to it is, yes, he is being honest. I believe the police are still utterly confounded by it all. They no doubt strongly suspect that the murderer is Uther Pendragon or Michael Britton, or whatever you wish to call him, but with no evidence against him other than his supposed lunacy and his admitted possession of a sword, they can prove nothing beyond the reasonable doubt of a jury.”
“Despite what Sir Hugh thinks,” Lucie agreed.
“One thing that does worry me though is the fact that Sir Hugh has now added an element of competition for them – that element being us. Wittingly or unwittingly, he has made sure that they pursue their own investigations with an added, shall we say, vim and vigour. I sincerely hope that the race to find the killer’s identity, as a race it will inevitably become, doesn’t lead them to prosecute the wrong man. Hanged men rarely appeal their innocence.”
Lucie murmured her agreement and they walked on in silence. Then she exclaimed, “Do you see there, Atticus? Those must be two of Sir Hugh’s factories: ‘Lowther Hat Makers’ and ‘Lowther Tannery’ just beyond it.”
Atticus looked.
There, fronting the roadside a little way ahead was a pair of large, square mills. They rose austerely from behind a high, stone wall and it somehow reminded him strongly of the Old Gaol beside the police station. The wall was interrupted only by a single, cobbled gateway beyond which a North Eastern Railway delivery wagon was halted by the side of the road. The heavy horse that pulled it was dozing in its harness, head drooping in the heat and one hind leg resting on a vast, iron-shod toe. A stocky wagon driver, his bowler hat roosting on the back of his head, was rolling the last of a dozen or so large, wooden barrels down a pair of planks at the rear of the wagon to his mate below.
Nearby, a brace of workers from one of the factories, still in tattered, leather aprons leaned against the wall, looking on. As Atticus and Lucie approached, they could see that each of the barrels had the letters ‘AR’ seared black into its wooden staves and underneath, branded in smaller letters, they read: ‘Alkali & Reagent Chemical Co., Jarrow.’
The driver pulled his hat onto the top of his head and declared, “One dozen barrels of carrot juice and no kegs. You mad hatters have plenty to be getting on with now.”
Chuckling, he ran heavily down one of the bouncing planks to his mate.
One of the workers responded with an oath. The driver laughed derisively and nodded towards the Foxes. “You’d better ha’d your tongues now; there’s a lady a-coming.”
The four men fell into silence and stared as Atticus and Lucie walked by. As Atticus raised his hat and politely wished them a good day, one of the workers lifted a trembling hand to his mouth, a hand stained ochre to the wrists and leering baldly at Lucie, blew through his fingers. Instead of a wolf-whistle, a long stream of drool fell from his lips and clung in a glistening loop to his apron.
“There must be something in the water in this South Tyne Valley,” Atticus muttered icily. “Madness seems to be everywhere.”
Lucie could feel the eyes of the men burning on her back and the sniggers and the whispers turning the air malevolent behind them.
“Why would they need barrels of carrot juice, Atticus?” she asked when they were out of sight.
“It isn’t actual carrot juice in the barrels,” he replied. “It’s a chemical – an industrial chemical used by hat makers to soften the animal fur before it is made into felt. Carrot juice is a nickname because that is what it happens to look very much like.”
Lucie nodded. “I didn’t like the wagon driver. He was cruel to call the workers ‘mad hatters’ to their faces. I think it a horrible expression.”
“I remember reading about it somewhere. It seems that it was used long before there ever was a hat-making industry. Back in Anglo-Saxon times, ‘mad’ meant ‘angry’ and an ‘atter’ was an adder. So, to be ‘as mad as an ‘atter,’ was actually to be as vicious as a snake.”
“He scarcely meant it that way though, Atticus.”
She mused for a moment. “But you’re right when you say madness is everywhere. And this place is so wild and so vast. I can easily understand why the detective superintendent refused Sir Hugh’s request for him to search the moors for Uther’s sword. With just four constables and a sergeant, they could search and search for years and still find nothing.”
Atticus agreed. “Notwithstanding that,” he added, “after what we’ve just seen at the autopsies, I believe that we do need to find that sword to solve this riddle and make no mistake, Lucie, we need to do that at the very earliest opportunity.”
Chapter 17
It was hot and it was airless in the railway compartment on the short return journey to Bardon Mill. Neither Atticus nor Lucie had thought to open any of the windows of the carriage and instead they sat side-by-side in complete silence, each gripping the hand of the other and birstled.
It seemed that it was only as they were carried away from Hexham and its Infirmary and after they had left the frantic distractions of the town behind that the full horrors of what they had learned in the mortuary room settled onto them. It settled onto them as the coils of an adder might settle around its prey.
Over the years they had read, in fact they had devoured everything they could find about the notorious multiple murderers; Leather-Apron, Burke and Hare, Mary Ann Cotton and the like. But now they were part of a story as real and as diabolical as any of them. Their names and everything they chose to do in the coming hours and days would be printed in black and white and sent round the Empire. And as a result of Mr Stead’s ‘new journalism,’ those newspapers would not only be reporting the ‘when’ and the ‘how,’ they would also be asking the ‘why’ and, even more worryingly, the ‘why not.’
This was no Lippincott’s Magazine where the facts of the case were packaged and presented in convenient monthly serials, to be discussed and examined over coffee and dainty-cakes. There was a real flesh-and-blood murderer at large somewhere out beyond the glass of the carriage windows and they had no way of knowing where or when he might strike again.
Mercifully the tortured procession of their thoughts was interrupted by the shriek of the locomotive as it approached the village, and the familiar station buildings began to slip past their window, slower and slower and slower until they stopped.
Atticus and Lucie remained where they were, fingers entwined, utterly spent of emotion, staring through the window.
&nb
sp; “I suppose we ought to get out, Atticus,” Lucie muttered as the Station Master caught sight of them and politely raised his hat.
They stepped down wearily onto the platform where he was waiting. He looked as if he might have a hundred questions for them but in the end he only wished them a good afternoon before he sent a porter scurrying ahead to retrieve their bicycles from behind the station post office.
After picking at a lunch at the Bowes Hotel in the main street, (where Atticus insisted on paying a bemused but delighted landlord in full for their unoccupied room), they made their way back up the steep hillside to Shields Tower, intent on next examining Samson Elliott’s tiny, tied cottage.
Chapter 18
‘Whosoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god.’
There is a part of all men that is both bestial and divine. It is to be expected therefore for every man to seek out a place where he might be alone.
The low, overgrown outcrop, its fissured face a mosaic of moss and lichen, was such a place. It had become over the years his special place to be as alone as he could ever be.
He came here each and every day. And each time he did, through a marshy hollow that seemed to have been scooped out of the fell with a pudding spoon, he always took care to keep his mind busy. He busied it with thoughts of his love sleeping peacefully in the cool, silent vault hidden deep within it; he busied it by remembered the great dishonour she had brought upon him and he busied it with thoughts of his sworn oath to the Fates.
He allowed these thoughts to consume his mind utterly, for if he allowed it to wander, if he let down his aegis for just a moment, such was the power of the place that the demons of the past would pour into his mind, horde upon terrible horde. The demons of the past would come upon him and they would drag him back to Hell.
Today, the harsh cry of a raven fills the hollow and interrupts his thoughts. Today, Hell is ruptured and today, great hordes of demons reach out to torment him.
