A Case of Doubtful Death

by Linda Stratmann

  Frances perused the opening lines of the pamphlet. ‘Is death merely a disorder,’ she asked, ‘like the influenza; a condition from which one may recover with the correct treatment?’

  Bonner smiled and nodded sagely. ‘That is what Mr Erlichmann believes. You are aware of course of the work done for so many years by the Royal Humane Society on the recovery of those drowned?’

  ‘I am,’ replied Frances, ‘but I had always imagined that those who recovered were not in actual fact dead but in a state of suspended animation, and therefore alive and wanting only warmth and other treatments to restore them. Does Mr Erlichmann claim that he was indeed dead?’

  ‘He undoubtedly showed every sign of death recognised by medicine: the body cold, the eye flaccid, no sensibility to pain, and respiration and pulse both arrested. Every sign that is, except one. The one, to my mind, infallible sign of death – putrefaction of the tissues. But in so many countries those early signs are seen as certain proof, and so men and women are hurried to their graves still living.’ Bonner leaned forward with an intense stare, like a storyteller who had reached the most dramatic part of his narrative. ‘Imagine, Miss Doughty, the plight of young Erlichmann. Fully sensible of all that went on around him; unable to move, unable to speak, yet he could feel the hands of the attendants placing him in his grave clothes, feel himself being lowered into his coffin, hear the lamentation of his friends as they gazed upon his face. Imagine the horror of hearing one’s own funeral dirge and seeing the approach of the coffin lid as it descends, sealing you from the world forever, knowing that you are about to be placed in your grave.’

  ‘I cannot imagine such a thing,’ said Frances. ‘How was he able to make his plight known?’

  ‘He believes that the violent emotions which he experienced had the effect of starting the heart and blood moving again. The coffin lid had actually been fastened down and he felt himself being lifted and carried to his grave when at last he found that he was able to move, and he knocked and knocked until his hands bled. His friends tore off the lid amidst great exclamation, and,’ Bonner concluded triumphantly, ‘found him rosy faced and warm.’

  ‘A most fortunate escape,’ said Frances.

  ‘But just think how many others have not been so fortunate – how many living persons who might have been recovered but have actually been coffined and buried, and how frightful a fate befell them when the warmth of the earth restored them to life only to perish alone and confined in the terrible darkness, in a situation of the most appalling horror.’

  ‘But surely,’ said Frances thoughtfully, ‘if a person is placed in a coffin while still alive and the coffin is then sealed they might not come to themselves at all, but perish in a very short while, and never be conscious of their plight?’

  ‘Ah, I understand your thoughts, Miss Doughty. You are suggesting that the amount of life-giving air in a coffin is insufficient to support the human frame for very long, and this is true if the unhappy individual is fully awake. Indeed, if he struggles to escape and gasps a great deal he will suffocate in a very short while. But a person who has been inadvertently coffined in a state of suspended animation will not be in want of so much air and might live a great deal longer.’

  ‘And once buried he or she would be unable to escape or alert others,’ said Frances, ‘and would die in the dark, alone, afraid and struggling for breath. How cruel!’

  ‘There you have it!’ said Bonner. ‘That is why the Life House supplies the service it does. And for the greater comfort of our customers, those who wish it may have additional assurances. For those buried beneath the earth we can, for an extra fee, provide a breathing tube through which they may both suck air and call for help, and a bell so they may give the alarm. For those in vaults or catacombs there is a small air vent and a lever is placed by the hand, which may be operated by even the weakest individual, which will at once open an aperture for more air and sound a bell to alert the attention of an attendant. This, for reasons of hygiene, will only be the case for a short while, no more than two weeks. After that, we do accept the fact of death, and as is required by the cemetery, the inner shell is sealed in lead and placed inside a heavy coffin. One of the vaults in All Souls cemetery is reserved for the sole use of customers of the Life House.’

  ‘According to Dr Bonner,’ Frances told Sarah, as they enjoyed a simple luncheon of bread and butter with boiled eggs, ‘there is only one true way to be sure that a man is really dead.’

  Sarah thought for a moment. ‘Chop his head off?’

  ‘That would certainly be effective, but imagine a case in which you might wish to preserve the man alive, but cannot. No, the one sure sign of death is putrefaction. Until that starts there may be some hope of recovery.’

  ‘Well that’s not right,’ said Sarah. ‘My uncle Albert had a leg that went rotten and they cut it off, and he has a wooden one now but no one tried to tell him he was dead.’ She snorted. ‘I should like to have seen them try!’

  ‘You may have something there,’ Frances admitted. ‘Dr Bonner has lent me a book by a Reverend Whiter and he refused to believe that anyone was dead until the entire body was completely dissolved. He says that the more serious a disease the longer it takes to cure, and since people who have revived from death have often done so very quickly, this proves that death is only a slight disorder after all. Even the waiting mortuaries attract his criticism since many do no more than leave the bodies to decompose, so as to be sure that they are dead, and do nothing to try and re-animate them. I think Dr Mackenzie’s principle, whereby his patients are regarded as living until proven dead, does address that concern. It seems, however, that the worst offender is the undertaker, who stops the mouth and nose and binds the body in linen, so if there is any chance of recovery he makes it quite impossible.’

  ‘You’re not to have me laid out with people poking and prodding,’ said Sarah. ‘Dead is dead and I’d rather be done and finished with it. And don’t them who come back go mad? What good is that?’ She paused. ‘And I know what you’re thinking, and you’re not to think it. I’ve seen enough dead to know it, and your father was gone to his maker and no doubt about it.’

  Frances didn’t want to admit it, but her thoughts had been tending that way. Her father had died in the cold winter and his body laid out in his room with no flicker of reviving warmth. None had seemed necessary. Suppose she had lit a fire and rubbed his limbs, would he have come back to her? She would never know.

  Sarah’s interview with the new client that morning had revealed that ladies who used the private bathing pools and slipper baths in Queen’s Road had been complaining to the manager that young men had been using the vantage points of nearby tall buildings to spy on them through the glass roof. Gentlemen who heard of the menace treated it as a joke and ladies who objected had been told it was all in their imagination. Sarah, who thought that ladies’ imagination was a product of men’s imagination, which became most apparent when men were faced with something they wished to ignore, said that she would deal with the nuisance.

  The luncheon plates were being cleared away when Frances received a visit from Mr Gillan of the Bayswater Chronicle and was able to expand on her theory that Palmer’s disappearance and Dr Mackenzie’s death were in some way related. Gillan, who had some mysterious way of his own of extracting information from the police, which Frances suspected involved beer, reported that Palmer’s absence was now being taken very seriously, and patrolling constables had made thorough searches, but found no clues.

  ‘I have had a very interesting conversation with Dr Bonner, who told me about how the Life House was first established,’ Frances told Mr Gillan. ‘Apparently, it was partly due to an extraordinary young man called Friedrich Erlichmann, who had the most horrible experiences and came here to lecture about them.’

  ‘Oh the public like a good tale of the ghastly and the gruesome,’ said Gillan, ‘even when they pretend they don’t. That was a while back, I was a very young correspondent the
n, just starting to learn the business, but I do remember him. Did Dr Bonner mention the scandal?’

  ‘The scandal?’ Frances sighed and asked herself why people never told her the important things. ‘No, curiously that was a detail he omitted. What happened? And please avoid delicacy, it wastes so much time.’

  Gillan smiled. ‘Oh all sorts of accusations being flung about, and openly, too.’

  ‘About Mr Erlichmann?’

  ‘Oh yes. Suggestions of fraud. And then, all of a sudden it stopped. Not because the public had moved onto some new sensation, not a bit of it. It just – stopped. I never did get to the bottom of that.’ He looked thoughtful and Frances suspected he had scented a story. ‘I won’t have the time to look into it myself, I’m covering the Monmouth Club affair, but if you could come to the office one day I could get you in and you can have a look through the old copies of the Chronicle.’

  ‘I shall go there immediately,’ said Frances, and rose and went to get her coat.

  Mr Gillan saw her expression and decided not to argue.

  ‘I thought the Monmouth Club affair was settled?’ enquired Frances. The Monmouth Club was the site of a recent scandal in Bayswater. It had claimed to be a respectable organisation where young gentlemen could enjoy wholesome amusements. The Chronicle had with some relish, denounced the club as a gambling hell, where betting and card playing and billiards went on all hours of the day and night, not excepting Sundays. The club had also not hesitated to supply its members with alcoholic beverages at times that completely disregarded the licensing laws. Several young men had got into debt and robbed their employers and were in prison as a consequence, and one had committed suicide. The manager of the club had taken grave exception to the exposure and tried to bring the force of the law down upon the Chronicle, but the affair had been absent from the newspapers for some little while, and Frances had thought the case abandoned.

  ‘Settled? Not a bit of it,’ said Gillan, shaking his head, but would not be drawn further.

  They departed together and Sarah put on her fiercest bonnet and went out.

  When Mr Gillan introduced Frances to his colleagues in the offices of the Bayswater Chronicle, she was surprised to find herself treated with some deference. She felt sure that in due course his lively mind would produce a highly decorated report of her visit for the amusement of the Chronicle’s readers. There was a large storeroom with heavily bound volumes of the newspaper going back to its inception and Frances thought what a pleasure it would be on an idle day, if she was ever to have such a thing, to come here and read through the newspapers of yesteryear. It also amused her to imagine others coming to do the same and it struck her as strange that someone might one day, perhaps in a hundred years’ time, read Mr Gillan’s colourful accounts of her exploits and wonder what kind of person she had been.

  The Chronicle was a weekly publication, which was fortunate, or she might have had many hundreds of editions to look at, and it was very much taken up by advertisements and national or foreign news. The most interesting part of the paper for Frances was page five, a treasure trove of local information: the often controversial incursions of Mr Whiteley’s shopping empire into the life of Bayswater, the arguments in the Paddington vestry, reports of meetings and speeches, charitable organisations, public health, the antics of thieves, dreadful accidents, obituaries, police court news, and the many clubs, societies and entertainments to suit every taste and interest. It was possible, she reflected, for a person to live a full, interesting and profitable London life without ever going east of Paddington station.

  Frances soon learned that in 1863 Friedrich Erlichmann had given lectures at many different locations in the capital, one of which was Westbourne Hall on the Grove, speaking movingly of his miraculous recovery from death. He had been introduced by Dr Bonner as the wonder of the age, and each lecture had been crowded, especially, it was said, by members of the fairer sex. Frances sometimes despaired of her sex, since they seemed so often to pay attention to a gentleman’s looks and not to the sense, or otherwise, of what he was saying. She hoped that she would never be so shallow. The Chronicle reported the lecture given in Bayswater in some detail and here Frances learned little that was new, since the wording was essentially the same as had later been published in pamphlet form. Dr Mackenzie was briefly mentioned as having assisted as translator and interpreter. Erlichmann had been greatly applauded and was afterwards entertained to a grand dinner.

  There had been, she found, only one small difficulty. All the lectures had passed off to universal acclaim except for the one at Westbourne Hall. As Erlichmann began to speak, a woman in the body of the hall had risen to her feet and loudly denounced him to be a fraud, although she offered no reason why she thought so. She was quickly but gently removed. Erlichmann had later been questioned by the Chronicle and said that the woman was of unsound mind, and had been pursuing him ever since he had arrived in London. He believed that she had been driven insane by the fear that her late husband, Arthur Biscoby, a Bayswater physician who had died a year previously, had been buried alive. This explanation was accepted and the objector was not heard from again.

  Frances decided to look through the death notices and found the demise in October 1862 of Dr Arthur Biscoby, aged forty-three, who had left a wife, Maria, a son and two daughters. The eldest child was just seven. An inquest had been held, which supplied some useful information. Dr Biscoby had held a post in Germany at about the same time that Mackenzie was there, although there was no indication that the men had ever met or that Biscoby had shown any interest in waiting mortuaries. In 1861, Biscoby had returned to Bayswater to start a general practice, but unfortunately he had become addicted to strong drink and his mental capacity, moods and income had all gone into a sharp decline. After a bout of excessive drinking he had been found dead in bed, a victim of alcohol poisoning. Evidence was given that he was bankrupt and had been suffering from melancholia. There had been great sympathy for his destitute widow, and a kindly coroner’s jury had declared the death to be an accident. Given the inquiry, which must have involved opening the body, no one but an insane person could have been under the illusion that Dr Biscoby had been buried alive.

  The Chronicle office had copies of the Paddington postal directories and the one for 1862 included an entry for Dr Biscoby, but there had been none subsequently for his widow. Eighteen years later the unhappy Mrs Biscoby was, thought Frances, either in a workhouse or an asylum, or, more likely, dead. Despite the suggestion that her outburst had been the product of some mental distraction, it was possible that she had known something that might cast some light on the letters Dr Kastner had written to Mackenzie. It was a very long chance, but Frances decided to ask Sarah to go to Somerset House first thing the next morning and see if she could find out if and when Mrs Biscoby had died and if any of her children had married.

  Sarah had been keeping a close watch on the area around the Paddington Baths, and reported on her return home that she had been rewarded by paying particular attention to the activities of young male shop workers who lodged nearby. They were, she discovered, beguiling the few minutes of their allotted luncheon time with a little Alpinism, finding windows and ledges from which they could obtain a frosted-glass view of female forms. She had, without drawing attention to herself, discovered an ideal place where she might wait to intercept their activities, and planned to return there the next day. Any young man descending from his eyrie would feel a firm hand on his collar and be able to view a rather less lissom and more muscular female form than he usually favoured, and very much closer than he might wish. Frances prudently suggested that Sarah might undertake that errand in the company of a policeman, but her eager assistant, who had undoubtedly been experiencing the pleasurable anticipation of seizing the miscreants, took some persuading. Frances explained that Sarah was to undertake a very important enquiry at Somerset House, and would be pressed for the time to do so if she was also obliged to drag wriggling malefactors to the poli
ce station. Once Frances had described the tale of Mr Erlichmann and Mrs Biscoby, however, Sarah, who enjoyed a good mystery, especially if it involved a vengeful female, was obliged to admit that it was interesting.

  Next morning Frances was busy interviewing several new clients, the most promising of whom was a gentleman of means who wanted her to discover the family connections of a prospective business partner, but in a very careful and discreet manner that would not alert the object of his interest. Frances had the strong impression that should she succeed in this delicate task, further valuable recommendations might follow and was anxious that this enquiry should be carried out promptly and successfully. She at once composed a letter to Chas and Barstie, who knew everyone of note in Bayswater involved in any endeavour that concerned money.

  Her next visitor was banker’s wife Mrs Pearson, a lady of considerable dignity who spent the first ten minutes of the interview explaining to Frances that consulting a private detective was something far beneath her usual mode of behaviour. She could scarcely imagine how a young woman, who she had been given to understand came from a respectable if impecunious family, could have thought to enter such an unsavoury profession; it was something she found profoundly shocking. There was a long silence during which Mrs Pearson, as if watching a sideshow entertainment, waited for Frances to provide evidence of her degraded status. Frances saw before her a stout woman of fifty-five dressed in the most recent fashion, resplendent with fur and lace, and a festoon of pearls and garnets about her throat. ‘How may I help you?’ she asked quietly.

  The client explained that her maid, who went by the name of Ethel Green, was nowhere to be found and she feared for the girl’s safety. The maid, who had been in the house some six months, was twenty-three, a girl with rather greater personal attraction than was entirely good for her, who had learned to dress well and copy the manners of her betters and so present herself almost as a lady. This attainment had gone far beyond the bounds of what was appropriate for her humble position and had put the girl in some danger. She thought that as a result the girl had been stolen away. The maid had last been seen going out smartly dressed on Sunday 12th September. Frances knew that ladies sometimes made gifts of discarded gowns to favoured servants and asked the lady if she had done so, as this would have afforded her a very good description of what the maid was wearing. The client said that she had not given any of her clothing to the maid, as it would not have suited her. She said nothing more on the subject but from her manner, Frances gained the impression that the maid was considerably more slender than her mistress. Mrs Pearson said that she had now employed a new maid, one that would not give herself such airs, but she wished to be assured of the safety of the missing girl.