Death and the Running Patterer

by Adair, Robin

  Only he broke the silence that had fallen. “You were no free arrival with independent means. Remember your tale of the aunt who was too poor to escape from the horrors of low Farringdon Street in London? But then, suddenly, she became a lady of means—leaving 150 pounds to you, a similar amount to the Church.

  “Official records show all ships that enter the port. There’s a good reason for this—they’ve been levied since Governor Macquarie’s time to pay for the South Head Light, and to facilitate customs transactions. Tallies of convict arrivals are kept, too—if sometimes rather haphazardly.

  “It seems that Rachel Dormin never arrived. You said that, on arrival, you were met on shipboard by Dr. James Bowman. But he was gone from that duty, to bigger and better things, by the time you say you arrived. Perhaps it’s only your timing, not the truth of meeting him, that is at fault. And seeing gold offered by Jimmy Grants to Bungaree? I have heard from his own mouth that he only asks for, and gets, coppers—at most a dump or small silver, never gold.”

  The patterer paused.

  Rachel Dormin remained still.

  “Then there is the matter of your treasured painting … your extremely professional miniature, executed here and signed ‘J. L.’ I am certain it could only have been executed by Joseph Lycett, who left here for England—in 1822. On the accompanying amateur depiction of your ship of passage, the red-and-white pennant gives a clue. That whip is the mark of a convict transport, which brings us to the good ship Azile. A friend coincidentally mentioned to me the transportees’ frequent desperate habit of seeking some sort of solace, if not salvation, by thinking and acting back to better times, literally trying to go backward. I discovered that one of the few ships to have made the crossing in about a hundred days was a convict transport in 1820. This was the Eliza … The good ship Azile, no?

  “Another of your stories falls down, too. No fiancé with such a serious lung disease would have won a berth with the agricultural company setting up here. And anyway, he could not have died here of pertussis in 1826. It wasn’t until two years later that whooping cough first entered the colony. And they are just two different names for the same disease.

  “Whoever you are, or were, you came as a convict and almost certainly served much of your time, before coming back to Sydney, on a pastoral property. That’s why you know so much about sheep. From your comments, I guess that your master was not an ardent admirer of the Macarthurs—of Mistress Elizabeth, perhaps, but not Master John. I also imagine that is how and where you gained your knowledge of firearms—which has proved so fatal.”

  Miss Dormin waved dismissively. “Even if all that were true, it would simply mean that I created a new life for myself—dragged myself up from adversity. I wouldn’t be the first to have done that.” She looked around the men in the room.

  Most nodded, or murmured agreement.

  Nicodemus Dunne bowed his head, then continued. “If that were only as far as you went! You began your killing spree and wrote the zuzim note to His Excellency. I thought it was Dr. Halloran, who knew the rare rhyme, but then, of course, you had access to his reference books.”

  Rachel Dormin sounded more amused than concerned. “But why, pray, would I kill a private soldier at a public house?”

  “Why? More of that later. But how? Well, you stalked the streets, trailed him to the Labour in Vain and, without resistance on his part, slashed him to death.”

  She laughed openly. “My dear sir! How can a young woman do that, unnoticed and unopposed?”

  “I didn’t know how,” replied the patterer, “until I saw a friend recite, in falsetto, female lines from Shakespeare. And another friend, at the same time, remark that if you skewed something, anything, ever so slightly, the outcome was altered. I missed your performance that night at Mr. Levey’s theater, but Captain Rossi praised it to me. He even repeated your lines from Othello. Later I checked them. They were the Moor’s lines! You were playing a male, voice and all. And ‘all’ meant that you played in black face.

  “Thus you killed the first soldier, and took a button as a souvenir, by flitting through the streets made-up and dressed—in a blanket?—as a native. They are always about.” He looked hard at the governor. “And we know no white men ever really see them, don’t we? The sugar, I believe, was all about Sudds. I don’t yet know your connection with him, but you did it.”

  “Rubbish!” cried Miss Dormin. “I was only play-acting at the Royal.”

  Dunne pressed on. “Now, let’s consider Will Abbot, the New World printer. You said that you saw him early in the evening, to deliver the ‘copy’ for a government order. And you said he was grateful, for he had no other setting to hand and was eager for the work. Then, you say, you picked up the copy for its next destination and this was just before his death and the fire. Now, I believe you did make both visits—but you didn’t really need to make that second call. For you had retrieved the copy and Abbot was dead not long into your first visit. You shot him.

  “You see, normally, to allow you to pick up the copy would require him to make full use of it and set all the material. Yet we found next day the only typesetting he was obviously able to do. If he had had all night he would have set much more than the inch and a third we found, unfinished. If a champion compositor could set at a rate of nineteen lines per quarter-hour, let’s say that Abbot’s fifteen or so lines took him much the same time. I say that he realized very early in the piece that he was in danger—and why. Did he recognize you? He may have. Anyway, he was alerted, although he did not reveal it to you. Somehow he stayed calm and plotted. He was, after all, quite used to being under fire. His chance came when you had to let him set some type, to confirm your innocent comings and goings. Right?”

  The patterer pushed on doggedly in the face of her silence. “Whatever. Nonetheless, you didn’t know that the material should be set in a large type size. And that allowed him to send a forlorn hope of a clue. He altered the case and hoped someone would notice and translate the message.”

  “What was this famous ‘clue’?” asked Miss Dormin. He told her, adding, “It led us eventually to Casa Alta.”

  He thought he saw a flicker of disquiet cross her face. For the first time.

  “Then,” he continued, “you made a mistake. For some reason, at one stage—perhaps to stall for time—you asked Abbot what the type he was using was called. Automatically, he answered. An English compositor would have said ‘Ruby,’ but he said the type’s American name, ‘Agate’—just what you said to me later when we examined the proof. You couldn’t have picked that up at The Gleaner or elsewhere—there are no other American printers here and Dr. Halloran has no expert knowledge of the craft. Soon you blasted him when he put down the galley of type. But you did come back the next morning. So that you could be seen to continue your normal routine, not to ‘find’ him.

  “Abbot had fallen dying across the guillotine bench. It did not require much effort to roll him under the blade and decapitate him. If it had not been possible, you wouldn’t have worried. It was just another touch. You knew that he, too, was—mysteriously to me still—involved in the Sudds affair. So, in yet another odd reference, you poured sugar into his mouth. There was no type form on the press bed and therefore there was room to squash the head. Another touch. Then you fired the building, to cloud the issue of cause and time of death.”

  Rachel Dormin was still calm, but she no longer smiled.

  DUNNE TOOK A breath. “Now, as for The Ox. Had it been an isolated occurrence, you may have been safe killing him, even though I found the apothecary who sold you the arsenic. At first I thought it may have been Dr. Owens, then Dr. Halloran. I’m certain that you got the poison to your victim by yet another theatrical deception.

  “The flogged blacksmith? Yes, I can see that he, too, had harmed Sudds, through his contraption of torture. You marked that connection with your trademark sugar—though green this time, the first link we could have seen to poor Madame. And your other marks—left-handed
ones—were at the Lumber Yard, too. Your scourger’s heel, your right one, made a clear indentation in the ground. Of course, even you had to change from the heavy cat to the lighter tawse, but to compensate for this handicap you added injury to insult by attaching the scalpel—the one you bought for ‘boils’—to the tawse tail.”

  “You can’t prove any of this,” said Rachel Dormin coldly.

  Dunne thought he saw Wentworth nodding in agreement with her.

  “Be that as it may,” he said. “This one I can prove. You poisoned Madame Greene over a long period. You talked her into dyeing her hair and introduced arsenic into the coloring mixture. She absorbed the toxin through her scalp. Just as you contaminated her constantly used maquillage, with the same results. But your masterstroke was performed in your role as her couturière—and I own that you did bring that skill with you to the colony. In doing so, you played up further to her obsession with all things green.

  “I’ve already explained briefly to these gentlemen that Muller, your last victim, guided me, in confirmation of Will Abbot, to the colony’s Casa Alta—Madame Greene’s High House. At first I thought that his last words were all in German, but only moments before I had begged him to speak in English and, with a few exceptions, he obliged. He did say ‘bloody hand’ in his native tongue, but he did not say ‘chaos,’ or alter meaning ‘old,’ as I had thought. He was saying ‘Casa Alta.’ And, more important, his final words were not Rache for ‘vengeance.’ No. Meaning Madame Greene’s killer—and his own—he simply said ‘Rachel.’ Which, I know now, is why he was so surprised when I required him to translate it as ‘revenge.’”

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  What she is not, I can easily perceive; what she is,

  I fear it impossible to say.

  —Edgar Allan Poe, “MS. Found in a Bottle” (1833)

  RACHEL DORMIN GLARED DEFIANTLY. CAPTAIN ROSSI AND DR. Halloran, who admired her, wore pained expressions.

  The uncomfortable silence that had fallen in the room was finally broken by Colonel Shadforth. “You haven’t told us what else this Muller said. It seems there was more.”

  The patterer nodded. “He offered two more words. I heard grün. Whether this was, in fact, ‘green’ in German or in English, matters little. In the context, that he was referring to Madame seems certain. The other word was Schwein. Was this simply a pejorative allusion to his attacker I wondered? I doubted that he literally meant ‘pig.’ Was it a choked-off longer word, perhaps? Later—in fact, only yesterday—when I was seeking enlightenment on our biblical clue, I came, quite by accident, across a legendary figure whose name plays a part in our mystery.”

  Dunne saw that his audience was puzzled by this seemingly abrupt swerve from the subject, but pressed on. “Finding that heroic figure sparked in my memory the myth of Medea. In Greek mythology, when Jason abandoned Medea for another, she murdered her rival—with a poisoned garment.

  “I was also playing mental games with Muller’s word Schwein. If it wasn’t a pig or a person—could it be a place? I looked in a gazetteer. In Britain, I found Swindon, two Swintons, Swinefleet and of course Swineshead Abbey, near where bad King John lost the royal treasure trove in The Wash 600 or so years ago …”

  “Get to the point, damn it!” ordered the governor.

  The patterer nodded, unperturbed. “Then I found a German link, Schweinfurt. And a book on poisons took me even further.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?” Darling asked, still dissatisfied.

  “Everything. It brings together our words Schwein and ‘green,’ which does turn out to mean Madame Greene. And the manner in which she died. You see, ‘Schweinfurt green’ also describes a paste of copper arsenite and starch dried onto dress material and polished to a high sheen. It’s popular in Europe, but it can be highly dangerous. Particularly here. In a hotter climate it can be lethal. As it was for Madame Greene.

  “Her best-loved gown and turban were made of tarnatan, a muslin originally from Bengal and treated in Germany with the paste. She wore them as often as possible, as well as her shoes covered in the same material, outside and inside, day and night. I’m sure we’ve all seen her. She danced furiously and sang in sweltering halls, under hot lights.

  “Every time, the poison was absorbed through her skin, as was white arsenic from her makeup and the poison in her dyed hair. Minuscule glittering flakes from the material were also shaken into a cloud that entered her mouth and nose.

  “That dress, Miss Dormin, was all your work.”

  “THAT MAKES ME a murderess?” she asked, arch now, unsmiling. “Even if I innocently made the dress in question? I know nothing of this material.”

  The patterer looked at her sadly. “Ah, but you do. And you were very patient. You had the deadly dress in planning for a long time—allowing for ships’ passages, perhaps a year. Which suggests how long you plotted to kill Madame Greene, how far back your grudge against her lies.

  “When the dressmaker here from whom you had obtained work made out an order for fabric from Europe, you were suddenly inspired. You secretly added your requirement for some of the poisonous cloth. When the consignment finally arrived, it went to The Gleaner. No one there opened it; had you told the office that such a parcel was coming for you? Even if they had pried, the contents would have meant nothing to them. But …

  “That’s where Muller somehow uncovered you. Perhaps he saw you with the material? He was widely read, from the Schweinfurt area and, when Madame died and the description of her strange death circulated, he put two and zwei together. Whatever happened, he had to die. But, at the end, he was able to point to Casa Alta, to name your ingenious murder method—and to name you as the ‘bloody hand,’ ironically in the only German to which he completely regressed.

  “Oh, and don’t imagine that you can bluff it out here and later destroy the evidence. I have what’s left of the consignment—even the dress, which I’m sure Dr. Owens can analyze.”

  Miss Dormin was wide-eyed now. “But, how … ?”

  “Rather simply,” replied Dunne. “I stole it—or, rather, had it stolen—from your hiding place above the shop, where the disabled mistress of the house has never lately ventured. Recent events guided me. When I was a felon on the run, what better place to hide than among felons? Who would look there? You had applied the same thinking to the green dress. What better place to conceal it than among many other dresses?”

  Miss Dormin frowned. “Why would I have killed Elsie?”

  The patterer sighed. “Why do you ask that? I’ve only just informed these gentlemen that Elsie was murdered—you’ve never even been told.” Rachel Dormin paled.

  “But, since you ask,” continued Dunne, “she was another danger to you. She might find the poisoned maquillage. But, more important, she might have asked you to return the dress. Remember, Captain?’ he addressed Rossi. “After we left the theater that night, Miss Dormin had the dress. And she kept it. As we left her at her front door, she said something. You took it to be directed at you—that she ‘would not call for the police.’

  “In fact, she was telling Elsie, who was going back to the brothel, that she ‘would not call for the pelisse,’ p-e-l-i-double-s-e. I later learned that this is an overgarment that goes with a lady’s gown. This particular example was furred and, doubtless, unpoisoned. And it would seem not to be incriminating. But …” He turned to Miss Dormin. “You eventually did want the pelisse. Its existence on its own could always raise the question of the whereabouts of the dress. I also found the pelisse. You killed Elsie, and made it look like a lover’s suicide. And you killed all the others, too, didn’t you?”

  RACHEL DORMIN NODDED, almost dreamily.

  “I’m sorry about Elsie,” she said at last, softly. “At first she thought Dr. Owens had poisoned her mistress with his eternal lozenges. But then she remembered something: where she had seen me before, in another life. That’s why she surely had to die. Yes, I killed them. Every one.”

  Only th
e ticking clock broke the silence as she paused.

  “I killed the soldier in the lane just as you deduced. He suspected no attack, only had time to invite me to urinate with him, then ask what I was doing there. Will Abbot at the New World also died much as you said. I don’t regret telling him that he was about to die, even if he was more cunning than I could have imagined. I waited until he paused to fiddle with the tray of type, then I stepped behind him, clapped the pistol to his face and fired. I took back the document for setting and, on the spur of the moment, decided to leave another significant, yet confusing clue. And, yes, more disguises delivered The Ox to me.”

  She rushed on, brooking no interruption. “The Lumber Yard blacksmith? Male vanity and lust sealed his fate. Again in my first disguise, I played the tart and made up to him as he went to work. He greedily accepted my offer of some bhang. What danger could a native harlot pose? With the promise of my favors, I persuaded him to demonstrate the workings of the flogging apparatus. I secured him there and … you know the rest. You’re correct about the tawse and the scalpel. The green sugar? Oh, I accidentally spilled hair dye.”

  “Why?” Mr. Hall got in a word. “Why, in God’s name, mutilate him in that horrific manner—even worse than the others?”

  Miss Dormin’s fierce frown returned him to fascinated silence. “I chose the way that bitch, Madame, died quite deliberately. I wanted her to sicken slowly, not go out quickly. You were right, in the main, about Elsie,” she said to Dunne. “But only partly correct about Muller. His main offense was to know the same secret that sealed the maid’s fate. But neither of them deserved the mark of sugar,” she added cryptically.