Death and the Running Patterer: A Curious Murder Mystery

by Robin Adair

  Back in the shadows, now by the side of the main road, he settled down to wait. He was weary from his day of fruitless walking and soon felt himself dozing off. A crackle in undergrowth brought him back to alertness. And there it was again; he could not quite pick the direction it was coming from.

  “Pieman, is that you? O′Bannion?”

  The only response was a crashing blow to the back of his head. A flash like lightning, then pitch-darkness swallowed him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Why, was there ever seen such villainy,

  So neatly plotted and so well performed?

  —Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta (1592)

  AREGULAR METALLIC SOUND AND A VOICE WELCOMED NICODEMUS Dunne back to the land of the living.

  “Snick, snick,” went the sound.

  “Bugger!” and “Bloody hell!” said the voice.

  Through the pain that steadily pounded his head, the patterer recognized the action of a flint and steel—someone was trying to use a tinderbox to make fire. And, it seemed from the oaths, trying unsuccessfully. The tinder, or kindling, would not take a spark from the friction. “Snick, snick” was the last thing he remembered as he again lost consciousness . . .

  The clicking and human voice had gone when Dunne woke again from the black pit and blinked his brain back to near full awareness. It seemed to be—still? again?—nighttime and he felt a frisson of cold. At first, that was almost all he could feel: He found he could not move his arms or legs. He flexed his fingers and toes, but movement ended at his wrists and ankles. He did find that he could move his head, though, forward and to each side.

  With a sudden fearful thought, he wondered if he had suffered an apoplexy that had paralyzed parts of his body. Then came the realization that, in truth, he was in bondage on the ground, spread-eagled.

  One thing: He could see. Out of the corner of one eye, he was able to make out the vague silhouette of the wheelbarrow he had stolen earlier. He could not speak, however; a wad of what tasted like clothing fabric gagged him.

  He tried to remain calm. It seemed that he was in much the same area that he remembered before the sudden blow and the dive into unconsciousness. Raising his head as high as possible, he suddenly realized why he felt particularly cold. He was naked; which was also why he could feel the rough ground under his back and limbs.

  He must have groaned through the gag. Or perhaps his movement was discernible, constricted though he was. A dim presence—he could not even call it a figure—appeared on one side. A male voice broke the silence: “So, you’re awake, patterer . . . Mr. Nicodemus Dunne . . . Ring-master!” The last was said as a jeer.

  All Dunne could do was gurgle.

  “You should know me,” said the voice.

  Dunne shook his head. He heard again the conflict of the flint and steel. A spark must have taken in the tinder, for now he could hear the man puffing the glow into further life. Moments later, the captor transferred the flames to a small fire on the ground, too far away to reveal his identity or warm the patterer.

  “Yes, you certainly should,” repeated the figure. “You smashed me with a rock when you sided with the Indians—you, a white man, taking their part against your countrymen. All we wanted was some fun, a bit of pussy. Their women are all pink inside, just like ours.

  “I looked for you all over, you bastard. My two mates were too yellow-gutted; they wanted no part of it. But I wasn’t going to forget. I finally saw you in the town and found out more about you. You’re no more a Ringer than I am. Just an old lag with a fancy tongue, yapping out the news.

  “Then, this morning, near the jail, I got lucky. You appeared and joined that train. So it was no secret where you were going and I only had to follow you and wait outside the House of Correction. I don’t know who helped you that morning—yet. Maybe you’ll tell me. Don’t shake your head. I’ve got ways. But I’ll get square with him, too. And those bloody blacks.”

  The patterer’s chest moved convulsively in a coughing spasm and his breathing through his nose seized up. He began to choke and suffocate.

  “Can’t have that, can we?” said his tormentor. “You’re not going to leave me—yet.” He ripped out the gag and Dunne’s breathing gasped gradually back to normal.

  “What are you going to do?” whispered the patterer. He could barely make himself heard.

  “Do? I’m not going to do anything to you. Not personally. But my friends here are.” Dunne felt the faintest touches on his chest. There seemed a barely perceptible movement, like someone dusting his skin with a feather.

  “You know what that is?”

  The patterer shook his head. He was still too hoarse to speak properly.

  “I’m dropping a handful of bulldog ants on you. There’s a nest nearby, almost alongside in fact, and, with a little bit of encouragement, these small fellows, not so small really, will do you in for me. You see? I thought, if I knife you or bash your brains in and if I did get caught, I’d swing. But here’s a way that kills you and I won’t have harmed a hair on your head.”

  Dunne knew the red-and-black bulldog ants, which were called soldier ants because of their ferocity and tenacity. They grew to an inch long and had agonizing stings. But could they be killers?

  “Now, how good are they?” said the man, reading Dunne’s thoughts. “Well, a couple will hurt but not necessarily harm. So here’s the help I said I’d give them ...”

  The patterer felt a rain of scattered sensations, even lighter than those made by the ants, fall on his chest and groin. There were two needles of pain, then a third.

  “I’ll lay a trail from the nest and dust you all over. They’ll follow it—to an even tastier meal: you. The bait? Have a bit yourself.” Some of the rain fell on Dunne’s face and lips.

  He tasted sugar.

  That fatal calling card—again. His inward groan was stifled by a chilling thought: Was it all just crazy coincidence? Or did it mean that, somehow, the mad mass murderer had turned the tables and caught the hunter?

  Then a pitch-topped torch flared to illuminate a face and body standing over the prone prey. The patterer could not recognize the young man he had flattened at the Miller’s Point. Something about him was familiar, though.

  “You know what they’ll do to you?” The voice was excited. “These little buggers will eat you alive. They’ll bite you so hard that you’ll pray you could tear your skin off. They’ll creep into your eyes and into your ears, up your nose and into your mouth. They like sweat and body muck. You’ll flinch and struggle and maybe squash a few. That’ll only make them angrier. And they’ll crawl up your arse and even into the eye of your cock.”

  “Shit!” said the patterer. It came out only as a strangled sob. His captor nodded and laughed.

  Then deliverance came on a divine wind.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Where does a wise man hide a leaf?

  In the forest.

  —G. K. Chesterton, “The Sign of the Broken Sword” (1911)

  THERE WAS THE SMALLEST OF WHISPERS IN THE NIGHT AIR, A THUD. Still holding the torch with one hand, the man suddenly stiffened and gasped. His free hand clutched at an odd, foot-long shaft that jutted out, as if by magic, from his chest. Even in the flare, Dunne could see that the eyes staring down had widened in fearful wonder.

  Before the torch dropped to the ground in a cascade of sparks, the patterer saw the man falter and a great gout of shining liquid spout from a silent mouth. The falling figure with its deadly spike narrowly missed Dunne and lay still, apparently pinned to the ground; the other, greater part of the shaft reared up from his back, six or so feet in the air.

  The patterer heard bodies thrashing through undergrowth, then a knife was slashing at his bonds and a voice in his ear was saying, “It’s me, O′Bannion, with William the Pieman. And Bungaree’s mob. They led us to you. You weren’t at the rendezvous so they offered to search for you.”

  He helped Dunne stand on his shaky legs. “I don’t know why
, but you’ve a staunch friend there. I’m not sure who told his man to let fly.”

  Bungaree helped brush off the ants and sugar. “He wanted to kill you. He got killed.” This was all he would say.

  The patterer nodded his thanks as he recovered his clothes, which were torn in parts but still serviceable, from a pile on the ground and dressed hurriedly by the light of the torch that William King had saved from sputtering out completely then waved back to life. The stolen clothing from the asylum went back into the wheelbarrow.

  The native spearman was recovering his weapon. He put his foot in the small of his target’s back and pulled and worried the shaft. The spear came out bloody, with a sucking noise. It had no barb, just a fire-hardened needle nose.

  The pieman held the torch over the facedown body while O′Bannion rolled it over with his foot.

  He let out a long whistle. “God save Ireland!” he said. “We’ve just killed James Bond.”

  DUNNE NOW RECOGNIZED the face as that of the young man who had surrendered his place in the prisoners’ line on the street outside the jail. That’s why he had been doubly familiar.

  “The little shite!” was all O′Bannion could say.

  The patterer interrupted. “We’ve got to get rid of him. Think of it: You, O′Bannion, you’re an old lag—an Irish one to boot, with fresh marks on your record—and I’m damned sorry I’ve involved William. Then there are the blacks. They’ll hang them without a second thought—and they’re already getting the rope ready for me.”

  As Dunne rubbed his face free of a stray ant, Bungaree told him the insects would not have killed him—probably—but he was taking no chances. “We could dump him in the bush, but there’s always a chance of a dog finding the body.”

  Brian O′Bannion broke in. “Where can you best hide a body? Why, with a lot of other bodies.”

  “Like a battlefield,” said William King.

  “Sure,” agreed the Irishman. “Unfortunately, the lobster-backs at the barracks are not likely to stage a battle just for our convenience. But I’ve got a grand idea. Grab him and follow me.”

  They loaded the late, unlamented James Bond into the wheelbarrow, on top of Dunne’s looted laundry. The strange procession, led by O′Bannion, creaked and groaned as quietly as it could to the Sandhills cemetery. The Irishman whispered to King Bungaree, who sent a warrior silently running on ahead. He soon came back, nodding.

  They all pushed on after him and, not much later, came upon an open grave, clearly dug earlier that day and awaiting a burial on the morrow. Even the shovels that would be needed again were still there, sticking out of the mounds of sandy loam alongside the pit.

  The patterer read O′Bannion′s intent. He gave a shovel to the pieman and said, “You’re the strongest. Get down and make it, say, a foot or so deeper. The sand should make it easy.” The softness of the cemetery may have been a gravedigger’s boon, but it also allowed noxious fluids to leach out to lower ground, some said darkly into the nearby stream, which fed the brewery. And foraging wild animals sometimes found it, as they had the earlier abandoned burial ground, a happy hunting ground.

  As a wild dog scrabbled nearby, a warrior’s spear thudded into another victim. So much death, thought Dunne. Could the corpse before him be the final piece in the game of murder? He dropped down and riffled through the pockets. Nothing. Now perhaps they would never know. He could hand over all he had discovered—and that was a name—to Captain Rossi and let his men track the dead young man’s movements.

  But if it were true that the dead man had only stumbled across the patterer that morning, and there was no reason to doubt it, he could not have known of his planned meeting with the compositor. More to the point, at the time of that murder Bond must have been safely in custody.

  Dunne knew that his only hope of saving his own neck rested with solving the crimes—and that meant making his peace with Rossi, or at least buying more time. First, however, they had to bury James Bond. They covered him with a layer of rocks to deter any animals, then a layer of infill, until the hole looked much like the original empty grave. Bungaree agreed to leave a native on guard until daylight, hidden but ready to repel scavengers. Then the patterer’s rescuer melted away.

  “It’ll be a tight squeeze,” said Brian O′Bannion. “But I fancy neither occupant will complain.”

  “What if it’s a woman?” the pieman queried dubiously.

  “If it’s a woman on top,” replied the Irishman, “well, that’s where they all secretly think they ought to be.” He struck a pose at the graveside, raised a large rock level with his eyes and declaimed, “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy ...”

  “That’s downright disrespectful,” chided William King.

  “Who to?”

  “To the man in there—blackguard though he was—and to whoever will be there tomorrow.”

  “No disrespect intended,” protested O′Bannion, throwing aside the rock. “Any road, Master Shakespeare—and he had such a sweet way with the words that he must have been Irish—said, ‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players ...′”

  The pieman wasn’t mollified. “He also said that we should not tamper—except at our peril—with the normal way of things. Remember, he wrote:“Take but degree away, untune that string,

  And, hark, what discord follows! each thing meets

  In mere oppugnancy ...”

  “Mary!” said O′Brien. “What the devil does oppug . . . whatever, mean?”

  William King patiently replied, “Opposition, contrariness, alteration, contradiction—in that a small change can alter the chain of events.”

  While the two argued, a seed of thought buried deep at the back of the patterer’s brain germinated and began to grow.

  As if at a distance, he heard the Irishman complain. “Will you let a man have one last little bit of fun?” And in a falsetto he recited, “‘O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?’”

  The seed blossomed and Nicodemus Dunne believed that now he knew the secrets—most of them anyway—of the slayings.

  He clapped his hands in delight. “Juliet, I could kiss you!” he shouted.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales; and he received sight forthwith.

  —Acts 9:18

  “GOD SAVE IRELAND! WHAT THE DEVIL’S THE MATTER WITH YOU now?” asked Brian O’Bannion. He was startled by the patterer’s outburst, and puzzled. So, too, was the pieman, but since their companion showed no signs of explaining his sudden cry of pleasure, they both held their peace. He would explain, he told them, but later. First they all had much more work to do.

  “I must get to Captain Rossi, unmolested—and unarrested,” he said. “But I’m guessing there are constables and soldiers still searching for me.”

  “They were all over the place when we came looking for you,” confirmed William King. “And they’re sure to be still on the job.”

  Dunne nodded. “That’s why I called for you then, and why I still need you now.” He looked to O’Bannion. “The plan stays the same, so let’s go over it.”

  THE PATTERER ENTERED the heart of the town unhindered, just as he had plotted. It seemed an age since he had first hatched his plan, but it was, in fact, a matter of a few hours.

  Led by the Irishman bearing aloft a flaming torch, the Flying Pieman wheeled the wheelbarrow at a fast clip, his streamers flying. Dunne sat demurely in the wheelbarrow, clothed in the purloined dress, his face shadowed by the mob-cap and the shawl.

  Whenever fellow travelers, late shoppers and other pedestrians appeared—and, for the hour, there was a surprisingly large number of them—O’Bannion would circle the procession, shoving people out of the way and shouting, “The pieman’s on a record! Let the bugger through!”

  And witnesses—not least patrols of soldiers and constables intent on capturing the escaped murderer Nicodemus Dunne—stood as
ide, even clapped and cheered.

  On George Street, when they were just past the old burial ground and approaching the market houses, William King abruptly dropped the handles of the wheelbarrow. Then he punched the Irishman full in the mouth and the pair began to roll violently on the ground. They were soon surrounded by a cheering crowd.

  No one was interested any longer in King’s woman passenger, who was spilled to the roadway. And no eyes followed her as she ran down the pathway that led to the rear of the markets—and the police office.

  Ten minutes later a disheveled O’Bannion joined Dunne. “I’ve done this before,” he said reassuringly, and proceeded to force a window. He then boosted his companion over the sill into a corridor. “Good luck.”

  “I’ll keep my fingers crossed,” said the patterer.

  “If you keep those clothes on,” replied the Irishman with a chuckle, “you’d be advised to keep your legs crossed. You make a darlin’ woman.”

  Within minutes the transformation was achieved, the gown, cap and shawl disposed of, and Nicodemus Dunne was making himself comfortable in the seat of power normally graced by Captain Francis Nicholas Rossi’s posterior. He went to sleep and dreamed of ants and murderers.

  DUNNE WAS STILL dozing when the room’s rightful occupant arrived early the next morning. A speechless Rossi shook him awake. The patterer’s first words were, “Who betrayed me?”

  The policeman shrugged. “I just don’t know. I didn’t know anything about the . . . the mess until after you’d been arrested. A message had come to the office early. My man acted on his own initiative, in good faith, I believe. Here’s what started it all.” He handed over a note that read:He’s killed again, there’s none that’s meaner.