Vices of My Blood

by Maureen Jennings

  “If a family is refused help, what would they do?”

  “Oh, believe me, Mr. Murdoch, they find somewhere. Hunger is a strong motivator. And as I say, these are people who prefer to drink and live off the charity of others rather than work.” He tucked his hands under his beard like a man accustomed to giving interviews. “It is my duty as superintendent to be frugal with public money. We can accommodate about a hundred permanent residents in the House itself, mostly elderly, decent folk who have ended up friendless and alone and no longer capable of fending for themselves. However, our primary work is with outdoor relief. Last year, we gave out relief to more than eleven thousand persons, men, women and children, at a total expense of thirteen thousand five hundred dollars. That works out to one dollar eighteen cents per head.”

  “Economical for sure.”

  Laughlen missed the irony in Murdoch’s voice or chose to ignore it. He was warming to his subject, a man who took pride in his work.

  “Our volunteers are mostly men of the cloth, but we do have two or three laymen; one is an eminent lawyer, one a grocer who is a respected elder of his church. We could not afford to do our work without their contribution.” Another head patting. “Our biggest headache continues to be the casuals. You’re probably more used to calling them vagrants. Men for the most part, although I have seen an unfortunate woman or two.” He shook his head sadly at those particular daughters of Eve. “These men have no home, some of them have come into hard times through no fault of their own and those men I am only too glad to help, but too many in my opinion have chosen a life outside that of normal men where they have no responsibility and subsist through the good nature of others. You must know the kind of man I am referring to, Mr. Murdoch. You’ve had to arrest a few of them, I’ll warrant.”

  Murdoch nodded. The question of vagrancy was a bone of contention at the different police stations. The law said any man thought to be a vagrant had to be charged and brought before the magistrate. In the winter, the cells were frequently clogged with men on their two-week sentence, glad to be out of the cold in spite of the discomfort of the jail. They invariably brought bedbugs and lice with them to the cells. Most officers wanted the House of Industry or the religious House of Providence to house the men instead. Murdoch agreed with that. In his experience, the majority of these vagrants were too beaten down by poverty and drink and their attendant ills of malnourishment and disease to be true criminals. But they were a nuisance, begging for money from respectable citizens when they dared or were desperate enough.

  Laughlen patted his head again in a search for hair. “Of course, since we instituted the labour test, we have been able to weed out the corrigible from the incorrigible. We show compassion to the elderly and the infirm but not to the lazy. Any man that refuses to work is, by the same token, refused another night’s lodging. If we are looking for criminals, there would be a place to start. Many of them take actual pleasure in defying society’s rules.”

  “Would Reverend Howard have had anything to do with the casuals?”

  Laughlen pursed his lips. “He had no need to. Other volunteers manage the casual poor and the Visitors are not required to come to the House. Once a month, I gather up the applications and send them over to them.” “So he would not necessarily have known any of the casuals or they him?”

  “That is correct. They come here by five o’clock in the evening for a bed for the night. During the day, after the work is complete, they are not allowed to stay here. You never know where they are wandering. They go to another institution, most likely. There is the House of Providence that the Sisters of St. Joseph run. Apparently they insist that the receivers of their charity stay for prayers. We are non-denominational so the men usually come here first. You’d be surprised how ungodly many of these people really are, Mr. Murdoch. Some of them avoid prayer as much as they avoid water. But it is not inconceivable that one of them would know of the pastor’s habits and go there to dun him. It would fit your picture of somebody he’d let into his study.”

  “Do you have a list of those men, sir?”

  “Yes, we have a register. I’ll get the porter to make a copy for you. Not that it will help that much. They are not allowed to stay more than three consecutive nights in the casual ward and when they leave here, we have no way to trace them. Almost three-quarters of our tramps are not from Toronto and none of them have proper addresses. They are like sharks that I believe never rest. Homeless, friendless, they wander the land searching for who knows what. Are they Christ among us, Mr. Murdoch? Come to test us? Sometimes I wonder about it.”

  A little surprised by such a poetic turn of phrase from this practical man, Murdoch could only nod.

  Chapter Twelve

  MURDOCH WAS LATE getting to Humphrey’s Funeral Home and Dr. Ogden made it clear she was not happy at his tardiness. He muttered his apologies. Cavendish, the police photographer, was standing with his tripod at the ready. He looked uneasy, but then he always did. An older, spry-looking man with a notebook open on his lap was perched on a high stool close to the examining table.

  Dr. Ogden waved her hand. “This is my father, Dr. Uzziel Ogden. He has offered to serve as both a second medical witness and our clerk.”

  The man hopped off his perch and held out his hand to Murdoch. “Good day to you, sir. Nasty business this.” His cheery tone belied the words and his blue eyes actually twinkled. He was enjoying himself. His daughter must have inherited her stature from her mother because she was a good seven or eight inches taller than her father, although she did have his keen blue eyes and rather sharp nose.

  “I didn’t know the poor fellow personally, but Julia did and I thought I could come along and make sure she didn’t miss anything in the shock of it all.”

  Dr. Ogden smiled briefly and Murdoch couldn’t tell if she was offended by this remark or not. He had the feeling she wouldn’t take kindly to women being considered the weaker sex.

  “Well, I’m ready to begin,” she said. “Would you like an apron, Mr. Murdoch? Father?”

  She was wearing a heavy brown holland pinafore. Murdoch remembered Sister Regina had worn something very similar when she’d conducted her natural science classes. Not that she’d cut up anything more fleshy than mushrooms.

  Dr. Ogden pulled back the canvas cover, revealing the grey, stained body. Murdoch had seen corpses before, but they never failed to jolt him. The utter absence of life where there had so recently been one was always troubling. Howard’s clothes had been removed, but the body hadn’t been washed and the blood had turned black around the side of his face and where it had spilled down his shoulder and chest from the stab wound. Dr. Ogden took a sponge from a dish on the nearby table and wiped away the congealed blood from his neck. Her father handed her a measuring stick with which she checked the wound.

  “Seven-eighths of an inch across,” she said and he wrote it down. “It was not a sharp instrument so the skin and flesh around the area are depressed and bruised. There is a torn fragment of his shirt visible in the cut.” She pulled it out with a pair of tweezers and placed the fragment on a dish. Uzziel wrote a label. Murdoch noticed the pastor’s body was quite hirsute and rather flabby, which was consistent in a man of his age and sedentary profession. His male member was a good size.

  Dr. Ogden sponged away the blood from the side of the face. “The orbital bone is fractured, the eyeball crushed, and the cheekbone is depressed. I’m sure we will find it is fractured in more than one place. The cause of these injuries was a blunt instrument and we have a rather clear imprint here on the cheek.” She took the stick and measured the marks carefully, calling out the numbers to her father. “It is roughly in the shape of a crescent, the bruising is uniform, so I would agree with you, Mr. Murdoch, that it is likely caused from a vicious kick. I think we can safely assume that the blows to the eye and the eye socket were also from kicks. You can see the eyeball has been pushed down slightly to the left, which would be consistent with the victim being prone
and on his back at this point. Would you agree?”

  Murdoch didn’t particularly want to examine the bloody mess of an eye, but he peered more closely and agreed with what Dr. Ogden had said.

  “Now, I can’t say with any certainty whether the boot was worn by a man or a woman. The mark is definitely rounded rather than pointed, which would rule out a woman’s fashionable boot, but as far as I can tell the mark could indicate either male or female ordinary footwear. What do you think, Mr. Murdoch? Have a look through the magnifying glass. And, father, perhaps you could offer an opinion as well.”

  Murdoch took the glass and bent forward to see. “It’s hard to say. Could be either.”

  “I’d say that was a man’s boot that did that,” Uzziel said. “A woman couldn’t have used that much force.”

  Julia made no comment, but she glanced at Murdoch.

  “I think a healthy woman in a state of extreme rage would have been able to inflict such an injury,” he said.

  “Ah, you are probably right, you’re the detective after all,” Uzziel said.

  Dr. Ogden lifted and rotated both of Howard’s arms so she could examine them.

  “No sign of bruising on either arm, which suggests that he had no chance to defend himself. The nails on each hand are intact. This dark splotch between the index finger of the right hand appears to be ink. Had he written a letter recently?”

  “It would seem so, ma’am, but I haven’t found it yet.

  I am pursuing the matter.”

  “Well that’s your province, not mine.”

  Dr. Ogden walked slowly to the end of the table, making a close observation of the body.

  “He is clean and well nourished.” Suddenly, she leaned forward and pinched at something on the chest hair. “He has, however, acquired lice.” She went back to examine the hair on Howard’s head, parting the strands carefully. “I don’t see signs of bites, so I assume this louse is a recent guest.”

  “Are we going to mention the louse?” asked Uzziel.

  “It doesn’t seem significant. He was a minister. He probably had some parishioners of the poorest kind.”

  She continued with the external examination. “There is a scar on the right thigh reminiscent of a chicken pox scar, otherwise the body is unmarked.” She moved aside the flaccid penis. “Testicles intact and normal size. Penis uncircumcised.”

  She took some long swabs from a jar on the movable table. “I’ll check his orifices. Will you label the appropriate bottle, father?”

  She went back to the head of the table and inserted the swab into Howard’s right ear, removing it and sniffing it. “No infection.” She dropped that swab into one of the clean jars that Uzziel had at the ready, then wiped out the other ear and, with a fresh swab, inspected Howard’s nose and mouth. “He was fond of snuff I see and he was just getting over a bad cold, but there is no blood in the mucus, which suggests there was no concussion. The kicks to the side of the head, although severe, were not the coup de grâce; most likely, he would not have died from them if he had not been stabbed. The cause of death was undoubtedly the massive bleeding from the carotid artery. Will you help me turn him over, Mr. Murdoch? No, it’s all right, father. We can do it.”

  Murdoch took hold of one arm and leg and pulled, as she simultaneously pushed from the other side and they rolled the body onto its stomach.

  “Other than lividity staining, there are no marks.” She took another swab and inserted it into the anus.

  “There was a loosening of the bowels and the bladder, but that is to be expected.” She wiped her hands on her apron. “Let’s reverse him again, Mr. Murdoch.”

  They did so.

  She nodded over at Cavendish. “Will you take your photographs now, Mr. Cavendish, before I begin the dissection. I’d like three or four pictures of the head wound as close up as you can get it and the insertion point of the letter opener.” She pointed to one of the shelves. “The weapon is over there on a linen cloth. You might as well take a picture of that as well.”

  The photographer began to set up his equipment, and the two doctors retreated to a corner of the room to confer over Uzziel’s notes. Murdoch went to the shelf where he could see Howard’s clothes had been piled and tagged. Every item of clothing was bloodstained, including the one-piece undergarment. His suit was worsted but not of especially high quality. His white cravat was fine silk, but his shirt collar was starting to fray at the neck and had already been turned once. Murdoch took a closer look at the tear in the waistcoat. The pocket where he’d kept his watch was slightly stretched. A large watch then. The trouser pockets were empty except for a crumpled and stained white handkerchief and a wrapped cough lozenge. He wore leather suspenders for his trousers and New York garters of an atypical cherry red, kept up his socks that were darned at the heels. His wife or the maid had made sure he went out into the world well brushed and mended, but either from moral conviction or financial necessity, Reverend Howard had not been extravagant in his attire.

  Cavendish had finished and he backed off to the far corner of the room with his equipment. He might still be needed, but this next part was nothing he liked.

  Dr. Ogden walked over to the table and her father hopped onto the stool.

  “I’m going to commence the dissection now, Mr. Murdoch. Am I correct in assuming you will not faint on me like a green boy?”

  “I have seen other post-mortem examinations, ma’am. You don’t have to worry about me.”

  He hoped that was true. It wasn’t as if he watched a scalpel slicing into dead flesh every day. Dr. Ogden wheeled over a small table on which she’d fastened her surgical instruments in loops on a roll of cloth. She selected a scalpel and tested it on her thumb.

  “You need some more chloride of lime,” said her father. “It’s starting to pong in here.” He went to a bucket in the corner of the room. While he was doing that, Dr. Ogden leaned over and made a Y-shaped incision from Howard’s shoulders, down the breast bone to the top of the pubes. Then she pulled back the skin and flesh as if she were opening a valise. All of Howard’s inner organs were exposed.

  “Clippers please, father.”

  Uzziel handed her what looked like a pair of pruning shears, and with the decisive, vigorous snips of an assured gardener, Julia cut through the cartilage attaching the ribs to the sternum.

  “Saw, please.”

  Except that it was clean and shiny, the saw looked to Murdoch exactly like the kind of tool used to cut branches. Dr. Ogden sawed through the ribs, dropping the cutoff bones into a dish. She acted quickly and efficiently and Murdoch was glad when she’d finished. The sound was not pleasant. That done, she picked up a long scalpel and severed the valves that connected the heart to the bloodways of the body, then she lifted out the organ from the chest cavity and placed it in a dish that her father had ready for her. There it sat, an inert piece of red meat, once the source of all Howard’s fears, angers, and passions. In spite of what he’d said earlier, Murdoch felt a rush of bile come into his mouth.

  “Are you all right, detective?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She looked at him kindly. “My tutor used to think we should hang up a sign in the morgue. Hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae. Or to translate, ‘This is the place where death rejoices to teach those who live.’”

  Ah, but what is the lesson? Murdoch thought.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “HERE YOU GO, WILL. This’ll wake you up.”

  Sergeant Charlie Seymour plonked down a mug of steaming tea on the table. Murdoch could see that he’d made the pot of tea so strong, a spoon would stand up in it, but he didn’t mind. He needed it. He yawned again and Seymour laughed.

  “If you don’t stop that, you’ll set me going too and I’ve got a few more hours on my shift to go.”

  They were sitting in the duty room where the officers were allowed to have their meals. Seymour looked tired. All of the police sergeants worked twenty-four hours at a time. One turn of
duty on, one off. If the station was quiet, they could nap during the night but never for more than two hours at a stretch. He sat down across from Murdoch, who was cautiously sipping at the tea.

  “Did anything come out of the post-mortem examination?” Seymour asked.

  “Not unless you count the smell that’s stuck in my nostrils. The doctor said she thought Howard had been kicked at least three times. The wound to the neck killed him, but he would have lasted a few minutes probably before he died.”

  “Poor soul. Not the way he expected to go out, I’ll wager. What about the search of the church? Did that bring us anything?”

  “About two dollars in coins, two lady’s handkerchiefs, both silk, three men’s umbrellas, and four different ear bobs, which had fallen under the pews. Nothing that seems important.”

  Seymour had a thick slice of meat pie on a plate in front of him and he stuffed a forkful into his mouth. “Delicious,” he mumbled.

  “Katie’s?”

  “Hmm.” He wiped away some crumbs from his moustache. “Crabtree should be due in soon. He was doing house to house along Gerrard Street with Fyfer. Dewhurst and Birney were both doing Jarvis Street.”

  “Tell them I’d like to talk to each of them when they report in. I’m going to check on the reverend’s relief list. I don’t know how long I’ll be, but they’ll have to wait for me even if their shift is over. I also have a list of the casuals who were taken into the House of Industry last week, but tracking them down is going to be a headache.”

  “Do you think the inspector is going to assign us more men?” Seymour asked. “It’s a bloody large area to cover.”

  “That’s it for now.”

  “I don’t understand him sometimes. The pastor’s death is the biggest news the city has seen for months, you’d think he’d throw everybody into the investigation.”

  Murdoch sighed. “He always wants to appear self-sufficient to the rest of the police nobs, if you ask me. And as you know he hates spending money. He won’t pay for extra shift work if he can avoid it.”