by Robin Adair
“Yes,” said the patterer. “Although one thing has been troubling me. What did Captain Rossi mean when he said there was sugar in the man’s mouth?”
“Well, that was interesting. Of course, by the time he was examined it had largely dissolved, but there’s no doubt his mouth had been filled with what was clearly fine-grained sugar. Not the irregular pieces people make by scraping at a sugar cone, highly refined stuff. There’s something else in line with that—but I will delay mentioning it until a more appropriate, logical time.”
Dunne was puzzled but decided to let the matter lie. “Is there anything else you can tell me about the victim?”
“I can tell you he was attacked from the front and also, from the fatal wound I deduce that the killer was Bollocky Bill.”
“You know his name?” asked the patterer incredulously.
“My apologies,” replied Owens with a laugh. “I was slipping back into the idiom of my military days. Bollocky Bill was the derisory name given to the soldier who broke the rhythm of any cooperative function, say arms drill, because of his left-handedness. He ballsed it up. Your killer was sinister, literally. But that’s all we know.”
The doctor waved at the covered, complete body nearby. “By the way, this other fellow also died hard. He said he wanted to and he did indeed.”
The younger man frowned. “What’s your meaning?”
“Well, he was poisoned in a most painful and pitiful manner. In point of fact, he ingested enough arsenic to kill a team of horses or a plague of rats.”
The patterer was curious. “Why did you say he wanted a hard death? Did he leave a farewell note?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes. A note was found near his body that gave explicit instructions on the method of administering the poison. You certainly, however, don’t expect a man of his class and background to take that particular way out of this vale of tears.”
Dunne felt a sudden tingle of anticipation. “What of his background and class?”
“See for yourself.” The doctor turned down the blanket and they looked down on a tall middle-aged man with a trunk built like a barrel. Dunne tried to avoid staring at the long cut from breastbone to belly, which had been roughly sewn up. He understood vaguely that this was the primary cut in anatomical dissection. Indeed he had even read that early surgeons named the knife to perform this crucial leading incision “Follow me.”
The corpse reeked of the vinegar with which it had been washed. But, said Owens, this was a distinct improvement on the earlier encrustation of excrement and dirt. The skin was white under a pelt of dark hair, except for the hands, which were deeply tanned up to the wrists. The face, too, had a curious tan: It ended about an inch above the eyebrows and just below the chin at the Adam’s apple.
Owens watched the patterer keenly, with the hint of a knowing smile. “Think about the coloring,” he said. “It is unlikely to be what is commonly called a farmer’s tan, or a laborer’s tan—these arms, neck and brow have not seen sunlight for years. But what if I said to you that I have often seen such solar pigmentation—when the face is always shaded by a military cap’s visor, the arms by unchangeable uniform sleeves, the neck by a high collar ...”
“You’re saying that he was a soldier?”
“Indeed. And not just any soldier. Observe!”
Owens dramatically and triumphantly pointed to the corpse’s shoulders. On the left was a tattoo, the Roman numerals “LVII,” and on the right the words “Die Hard.”
Dunne shook his head in disbelief. “Die Hard” and “LVII”—the man was yet another, the latest, the third, dead soldier of the 57th Regiment!
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Death hath a thousand doors to let out life:
I shall find one.
—Philip Massinger, A Very Woman (1655)
“YOU MENTIONED A NOTE,” SAID THE PATTERER TO DR. OWENS. “May I see it?”
The doctor gingerly produced from the side bench an envelope, a spill of paper and a single small sheet bearing a short message. All were still soiled with excrement and were terribly malodorous.
Wishing he had another lozenge, Dunne read, “To work efficaciously, swallow all at once in small water while at stool.”
Even before his brain registered the meaning of the words, he recognized the writing—it was the same script used by the author of the letter to Governor Darling, the letter that had begun the quest. And the patterer realized now what the backward-slanting characters had always indicated: The writer was left-handed.
Distantly, Dunne heard the doctor saying, “We examined the vital organs and it was, without a doubt, arsenic, commonly used as vermin bait. And available at any apothecary’s—you can buy a pound for two and sixpence.”
Owens looked pained when the patterer asked if he was sure of his analysis. “There is no doubt about such matters these days.” He explained that the detection of poisons had advanced greatly since the pioneering work in Spain fifteen years earlier by Dr. Mathieu Orfila. “Once doctors could not do much more to identify a poison than interpret a victim’s symptoms, or even rely on smelling the breath or vomit. For instance, prussic acid is apparently given up to the investigator by a distinct odor of almonds. But heart’s-ease—useful in itself—when crossed with some other plants can give a false scent of prussic acid . . . Anyway, there were arsenic grains in the envelope.”
The doctor’s paean of praise for advances in chemistry washed over Nicodemus Dunne. He was stunned by the latest development. Bodies everywhere! He felt like a crow in a field of carrion. He took quick notes on the unexpected corpse, but also realized that he should concentrate on pursuing the case of the dead printer.
At a nod, Owens turned and lifted away the blanket covering the remaining body and its head. The trunk and limbs had been cleaned with a disinfectant but Dunne still caught the scent of growing putrefaction.
The doctor first remarked that the larger body part was not marked in any significant manner, then went on: “The deceased was a well-nourished male in his forties, almost six feet tall—allowing for the head, of course. The body tells us little else. Now, the head ...”—and here Owens prodded the scorched and shattered mass with a silver instrument—“. . . tells us much. I will come back to the injuries but, first, a few general remarks . . . Only one eyeball, the right, remains intact.” He paused. “Y′know, once an anatomist would have shone a lamp onto it . . . a very old-fashioned concept, of course.”
“What was the point of it?” asked the patterer.
“Oh, the desire that the light might bring up the reflected image, from the moment of death, of the killer. Some thought the eyeball retained such an accusation.”
“Is there any basis of truth in it?”
Owens, the modern man of science, waved away this talk of past superstitions. “Most certainly not, but old beliefs hold on. To the matter at hand: He has most probably been a soldier”—at this Dunne nodded, pleased—“as the powder burns on the right side of the face indicate. But more of that later.”
“And his teeth?” prompted the patterer.
“Certainly, they are blackened by powder and by chewing tobacco,” Owens replied. “A printer, like many tradesmen, often chews plug tobacco or snuff instead of smoking because their close manual work makes it difficult to keep a pipe alight or to take snuff nasally.
“And here’s the completion of the thought I left dangling earlier, when we discussed the mouth of the first victim and the sugar found within it. With our man now, not all the brown or black, hard and viscous matter in his mouth was a mixture of tobacco and cartridge spillage over years. No, the cause wasn’t Brazil’s best twist or the army’s finest black powder. Because of the proximity of the fire, his mouth contained a melted mass that looked like treacle. It was burnt sugar. Sugar, again,” he repeated, as if Dunne needed the point emphasized.
“In greater detail,” the doctor continued, “a portion of the frontal bone, immediately above the left eye, was burst in. The o
rbital margin of this bone was also destroyed, as was a corresponding part of the roof of the orbit . . . The separated piece of bone was broken into several parts and pressed in on the dura mater covering the brain ...”
“Whoa!” interrupted Dunne. “In layman’s terms please, Doctor.”
“Very well. There was massive injury above the left eye and bone from it pressed in on the dura mater—the tough, fibrous membrane outermost of the three coverings to the brain and the spinal cord. To continue, the skull was fractured and the comminuted—very well, pulverized—portion of bone forced into its cavity, at least a quarter of an inch within the internal surface of the frontal bone.”
Owens pointed to the front of the skull. “When the brain was examined, the anterior part of the left hemisphere, corresponding to the external injury, was covered with a thin layer of extravasated blood—that is, forced out from blood vessels to diffuse through surrounding tissue. I don’t imagine you would wish to see the specimen of fluid found there of a semi-purulent—suppurating—nature?”
The patterer shook his head. So many new thoughts were running through his brain that once again he was not paying full attention to the doctor, who was now saying, “. . . it is somewhat extraordinary that the ball did not do more damage.”
Dunne whispered, “What ball?”
The doctor cocked an eyebrow. “What ball? My dear sir, the printing press doubtless crushed the skull nastily, but it alone did not kill him. Oh, dear me, no. He was probably dead before that. Shot, sir, shot! Here’s the ball.”
Dunne leaned against the one vacant dissection table, his mind weighed down by this amazing new knowledge, his hand with the ammunition that Owens had casually tossed him. It weighed about an ounce but felt like a cannonball.
He heard the doctor explain that the powder burns on the left side of the face were not, of course, from musket use, but from a weapon held close to the head. The killer would have been either left-handed if shooting from behind, or right-handed if firing from in front. The only certainty: The shot came from low down.
Dunne hurriedly thanked Dr. Owens then left the hospital, hoping to catch Captain Rossi at his office. The business could not wait until tomorrow.
That was Sunday. Which meant church. And cricket, of course.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
È sempre bene
Il sospettare un poco in questo mondo.
(It is always better, in this world,
To be a little suspicious.)
—Lorenzo Da Ponte, libretto for Mozart’s Così fan tutte (1790)
SEVEN BLOCKS BACK ACROSS THE TOWN FROM THE HOSPITAL, ON George Street, magistrates’ courts and a police office now stood under an elegant dome at the southern end of an area called Market Square, which had been laid out eighteen years earlier.
Admiring the building for which he was headed, the patterer mused that, ironically but in the best traditions of the colony, this home of thieves had been designed by a criminal, a pardoned forger named Francis Greenway.
The courts had risen, but the cluster of milling people through which Nicodemus Dunne worked his way still had unfinished business in the area. When the locals had completed their day’s duties, there would be an almost carnival atmosphere in and around the markets, which stayed open until late on Wednesday and Saturday nights. As well as stalls offering fruit, vegetables, meat and poultry, there were general stalls to tempt visitors, who were also entertained by jugglers, dancers, gypsy musicians, wandering food-sellers and peddlers. And there would be, of course, pickpocketers and pimps procuring for the town’s many brothels.
Some of the crowd were already bent on having a drink or more at nearby hotels. They would “work and burst,” a wry saying that meant that after a week’s labor they would spend all their earnings on one long binge.
Others would pause to be entertained—rather than educated as the authorities intended—by the sight of wretches sentenced either to the large wooden pillory or to the stocks nearby. Dunne saw that this time the four stocks, wooden frames with holes for imprisoning ankles and wrists, were empty. Sometimes the stocks were even used as flogging restraints, when the iron triangles were too busy.
The pillory, bars atop posts with apertures for prisoners’ hands and heads, and wide enough to accommodate two victims, now confined only one poor soul. One of his ears was bloodied, having been nailed to the frame, an additional punishment meted out for anything ranging from perjury to selling underweight bread.
It was small comfort, but Dunne knew the prisoner’s ordeal would be over by nightfall. He would be free of the strength-sapping and muscle-wrenching suspension and inactivity, and from the intermittent showers of market refuse from jeering bystanders. The patterer had once heard the punishment described as “a civilized crucifixion.”
At least prisoners here were not left out overnight, he thought, even if only to protect them from the rats in the marketplace or those from the abandoned burial ground next door, which bred among the often-exposed old graves, disturbed only by thugs and robbers. A fence kept out rooting pigs, but not these rats, which literally rose from the dead.
Deep in his gloomy thoughts, the young man bumped into Captain Rossi on the steps of the columned entrance to the law offices.
“Ah, Dunne,” said the policeman. “Can we meet in half an hour in the taproom?” He pointed toward the Market House Hotel.
This suggestion suited the patterer. He had neglected his pattering work of late and welcomed the opportunity of a captive audience again. In the crowded bar he was soon busy.
To a group of sunburned men in long smocks, clearly farmers in town with their produce or animals, he retold from one of his newspapers the story of the bloody and brutal end to a dogfight at Brickfield village. Two bull terriers had forced a stalemate when they sank their teeth into each other and neither would let go. To prove his charge would fight on in any circumstances, one owner had chopped off the animal’s feet. He lost his wager.
Dunne then sold an advertisement to a drinker. He helped him with a prepared document that needed only names and dates filled in. There was always great call for this form. The stock advice read:I the undersigned do hereby Caution the Public, not to give credit to my Wife _____, as I will not be answerable for any debt she may contract, she having left my house on the _____ instant, without any cause whatsoever, and which she has repeatedly done.
At the end was room for a name and date. The newspaper’s rate was eight lines for two and six plus a penny per extra line. The patterer charged the man for ten lines; two shillings eight pence. He could keep sixpence of that for himself, and charge the man threepence for taking the notice to the printer and making sure it appeared.
Next, he related to drinkers how “Jeremiah Gerraty, in possession of a proboscis highly carbuncled, was charged with reveling in Bacchanalian joys, till Morpheus muzzled him and laid him on his back in the middle of George Street. For this, two hours’ lounge in the stocks.”
To a group of women smoking and drinking together, away from their men, he shared the authorities’ regret that “We have no bathing place for the fair sex of Sydney. At present females are debarred from this enjoyment, which in many cases is necessary to restore health.”
The women showed more interest when he alerted them to the fact that J. Wyatt’s cheap wholesale and retail warehouse had just received Leghorn bonnets at twenty-five shillings and upward, children’s beaver hats and bonnets with feathers, twelve and six each, and ladies’ white stays, ten to twenty-five shillings per pair.
As always lately, he avoided relating any of the small stories that referred, with details officially played down, to the three recent murders.
He had finished his recitations and ordered his first glass of beer when, over the sea of straw, beaver and kangaroo-skin hats, he saw a familiar face heading his way. Nicodemus Dunne was pleased. He liked Alexander Harris, an educated and intelligent man who described himself as an emigrant mechanic, and whose shrewd opinions the
patterer valued.
As he approached his friend, Harris politely refused an invitation to drink from a man he did not know who was already at the bar. When the man had gone, the mechanic declared, “I can’t help observing a remarkable peculiarity common to them all—there is no offensive obtrusiveness about their civility; every man seems to consider himself just on a level with all the rest, and so quite content either to be sociable or not, as the circumstances of the moment indicate as most proper.”
“That’s quite a mouthful, and rather a philosophical turn of mind for a Saturday in a taproom,” Dunne remarked. Yet at the same time he wondered if this were true.
Harris nodded. “I only have a moment, but, yes, I have been thinking greatly on my fellow man, hoping that the lot of all may improve. I simply cannot get out of my mind a disturbing experience I just had in Bridge Street, at the Lumber Yard. I had to pass the triangles, where they had been flogging incessantly for hours. I saw a man walk across the yard with blood that had run from his lacerated back squashing out of his shoes at every step he took. A dog was licking the blood off the triangles . . . and the scourger’s left foot had worn a deep hole in the ground by the violence with which he whirled himself round on it to strike.”
Harris ended this grim tale and excused himself for it, just as Captain Rossi bustled through the low doorway.
“Great news, sir!” Rossi said as he motioned for a nobbler of rum. “We are finally making progress. And I have very special news for you, something very pleasing, I’m sure!”
