Beloved Poison (17 page)

‘What is it?’ said Will. ‘What do you see?’

‘Look,’ I said. ‘Look at the chairs.’ I pointed to the chairs on either side of the fire. ‘Do you notice anything about them?’

Will shrugged. ‘They’re just chairs. They were there yesterday. I assume they are always there.’

‘Yes, but last night they were not quite as they are now. Don’t you remember? You commented on them, in fact. “Why does he bother to have chairs if he has no intention of sitting on them?” They were loaded with books and papers.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Will. ‘Last night the papers and books were on the chairs. Now they are on the floor.’

‘
Hastily
put on the floor. Almost flung there, in fact. But look! One chair was cleared hurriedly, the books dumped onto the floor. The other—’ I looked about. ‘The other stack of books has been placed carefully on the table.’

‘Meaning what?’ said Will.

‘Well, why might he do such a thing?’

‘To sit down?’

‘But the chairs were always stacked with books. He never sat in them.’

Will said nothing. I could see by the way he was looking at me that he thought I was mad. Dr Bain had inadvertently poisoned himself. Did not everything point to such a conclusion?

‘It seems to me that Dr Bain tossed his books aside because he was anxious to make someone comfortable as soon as possible. The man had many faults, but he did not have bad manners. He had a guest last night, after he returned from Wicke Street. A guest he was at pains to seat quickly, and comfortably.’

‘A woman?’

‘Perhaps we can assume so. He might have been not quite so hasty to accommodate a man. But the
second
chair . . . If we follow our reasoning it was not so important that the second person be seated so hastily, so he put the books on the table.’

‘Perhaps a man?’ said Will.

‘But then where would Dr Bain have been seated? Might we assume that the second chair was for the doctor himself?’

‘What woman would visit a man, alone, in the dead of night?’ said Will. ‘A prostitute?’

I shook my head. ‘He had just been to Mrs Roseplucker’s. And besides, would he throw his books to the ground for a trollop? No, Will, I think we might assume it was a respectable woman whom Dr Bain entertained last night, and a respectable woman who comes alone to a man’s house late at night is a desperate one.’

We looked at one another. Mrs Catchpole? I could think of none more desperate. And yet, the last time we had seen her she was being bundled out of a bawdy house by her husband. I had seen her run away from him into the fog. Mrs Speedicut had seen her being dragged into Angel Meadow Asylum at dawn. Where had she been in the hours between?

‘Look!’ said Will suddenly. He bent down and plucked something from the ashes in the grate. It was one of the horrible dolls. Protruding from a mass of blackened rags, its face was even more hideous now that it was scorched and smeared with soot. Before us, the hearth was scattered with dried flowers. ‘Why did he throw these onto the fire?’

‘Perhaps he knew their meaning.’

‘He said nothing about it last night.’

‘And yet there
was
something bothering him. He knew
something
about them, and yet he would not say. You recall how obstructive he was?’ I forced myself to look at Dr Bain’s face. His lips were rigid, drawn back over his red-stained teeth, the flesh at his cheeks taut and waxy. There were signs of
rigor mortis
, that much was clear from the degree of rigidity in the limbs, but it was not yet widespread. He had been dead no more than ten hours, I was certain. The position of his arms – held close, as though he had died in some sort of paralysis, hands claw-like, the skin mottled pink and blue – spoke of asphyxiation, the failure of the internal organs, and a congestion of the heart. Perhaps, if we cut him open as we had the poisoned dog, we might find a similar pathology. And yet there were no signs of the emetic and purgatory effect one might expect from bloodroot poisoning. I peered into his glassy eyes. The pupils were fixed, dilated, the whites tainted with purple splotches. I picked up the glass that lay against the edge of the hearth and held it up to the sunlight. Inside, the crimson residue glittered like rubies.

A
pair of orderlies loaded Dr Bain’s corpse onto a stretcher and carried him across the road to the mortuary at St Saviour’s. The police inspector came. On hearing that it was customary for the doctor to try out poisons on himself, and having seen the bloodroot tincture in the bottom of the glass, he asked no more questions.

I had my own ideas about Dr Bain’s death, though I shared them with no one at St Saviour’s. What could I do? There was a murderer amongst us, that much was clear. The less I said about it – at the moment at least – the better. What I had seen of Dr Bain’s corpse told me that whoever had killed him had done so not on the spur of the moment, but with a calculated plan of action, and a will to deceive that had gone unnoticed by everyone but Will Quartermain and myself.

Dissection of the corpse was inevitable. Dr Bain had always claimed that anatomy was the first and most important means of medical inquiry and training, and, in the absence of any relatives or next of kin, Dr Bain’s colleagues were keen to stress how certain they were that he would have donated his body to medical science. With ill-concealed relish, Dr Graves elected himself to perform the task. I asked if I might be present. The doctor made no objection. ‘Dead, he is no better than anyone else,’ he said. ‘I hope you will not take it too badly to find it so.’ The grin was back on his face. I could not bear to look at him.

As much as I felt that the world should stop and mourn its loss, everything continued as usual. The patients came and went, the ward rounds took place three times a day, the routine of St Saviour’s did not alter. Will could no longer avoid the subject of his commission and the exhumation of the churchyard was scheduled to begin the following day. We walked in the sun across the uneven grassy mounds of the place. Here and there, the stones had sunk into the earth as the cheap wooden coffins and their occupants decayed beneath, causing the ground to sag. On occasion, the grass bowed slightly as we walked, as if the turf were laid over boards only inches below the surface.

I led him to the south side of St Saviour’s church. Against the wall of the nave a crowd of daffodils jostled one another in the breeze. ‘My mother’s grave,’ I said.

‘Luckily for her she will not be dragged from the earth and taken off to some other place. The excavations will not come this close to the church building.’ Will stepped up to the daffodils, and bent down to take a closer look. The headstone was blackened with soot, as was everything in the city, and the words hard to read. Nonetheless, her name, and the date of her death, could be made out easily.
Elizabeth Maud Flockhart. 18th July 1822
. He looked up at me. ‘But that’s—’

‘I know.’

‘You didn’t say?’

‘I didn’t want to say. I have no idea why her name was in one of those coffins. I didn’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to talk about it now.’

‘Did you recognise the handwriting? You must know the hand of every doctor in this hospital,’ said Will.

‘I do,’ I replied. ‘And I don’t believe it was written by anyone currently at St Saviour’s.’

‘It was not your father’s?’

‘No.’

‘The answer must lie in one of the other coffins,’ said Will. ‘There was writing inside another of them, as I recall.’

‘It’s a pity Dr Bain or his lady visitor – whoever she might be – threw them on the fire.’

I closed my eyes. For once, the sun was shining. Suddenly, I did not want to think about death, for all that we were crouched at my mother’s graveside talking of Dr Bain. I knelt down and plucked a dandelion from amongst the daffodils. I had covered my mother’s resting place with flowers, cramming the scanty earth with bulbs – snowdrops, crocuses, narcissi, tulips. In summer, the place was a bright tangle of herbaceous perennials; in winter, I had pansies, sweet William, polyanthus and Christmas rose. I paid no heed to the language of flowers, that maudlin and spurious search for meaning; instead, I sought nothing but life, bright and unstoppable, in every season.

Once, as a child, I had stretched out upon her grave, my eight-year-old limbs half hidden in the daffodils. How far beneath the ground was she? Did she know I was there? Was she looking down upon me from heaven? With the questions tumbling in my mind and the clouds racing overhead, I had fallen asleep in the sun. I woke up in my own bed, carried home – I assumed – by my father, though neither of us ever mentioned the subject. I knew he attended her grave, though I saw him rarely. I was sure he came only when he thought he might be alone. The following Saturday I had come across him on his knees there, plucking weeds from amongst the nodding blooms. He had seen me out of the corner of his eye, I was certain, but he did not speak to me. Instead, he put his back to me, turning his face to the earth where my mother lay, a silent rebuke for disturbing his solitude.

A team of men arrived to begin work at the graveyard. The sharp, bright weather vanished and a cold persistent drizzle seeped from the leaden skies. The world was leached of colour, becoming a drab mixture of grey and black – black clothes, grey faces, sooty walls, dark pools of glistening mud reflecting the slate skies. Everything was blurred at the edges, as though the places we knew were somehow disappearing, being rubbed out, like a faulty drawing on an architect’s plan.

Will assisted us as best he could in the apothecary in the morning, and then disappeared to St Saviour’s churchyard to supervise the excavations. He directed the proceedings with accuracy and precision, marking out the ground with pegs and string, paring back the scanty grass as an anatomist peels back the skin of a corpse, scraping away the miserly top soil and mounding it up at the side of the path. The gravestones were plucked from the earth and stacked against the church wall. And all the while the rain poured down, drumming on the church roof, gurgling along gutters and spouting from drains. Under such a deluge, that half of the churchyard upon which Will and his team of labourers were working soon became a foul-smelling mire. The first layer of rotten coffins was no more than six inches below the surface, visible now, and projecting from the reeking mud like the timbers of a wrecked ship. Periodically, the earth belched wearily as its contents eased and shifted, forcing bubbles of stinking gas to the surface.

With the coming of the rain, the weather turned a little warmer. It was vital that the dissection of Dr Bain took place as quickly as possible. And so it was that two days after Will Quartermain and I had found Dr Bain on the hearth rug in his laboratory-parlour, his body was anatomised by his most jealous rival in front of a room full of students.

The air in the dissecting room was damp and chilly. As usual there was no fire – the last thing the dead needed was to be warmed up, and the living had to endure the cold if they did not want to be driven from the place by the stench of putrefaction. The room was north-facing, which allowed us to make the most of the brightness of the day without the heat and glare of direct sunlight. We wore coats and caps set aside for the purpose, with brown aprons on top. The smell of decay pervaded everything, leaching into the clothes and hair of those present, occupying every inch of space, so that even when there was no corpse in the room the place reeked of rotting flesh, of bowels and viscera, preserving spirits and the smells of sickness and disease. Only Dr Graves didn’t notice or care. He wore the same clothes whether he was working in the anatomy room or not. The smell followed him everywhere.

That day, Dr Graves was ecstatic. He rubbed his hands together greedily and sharpened his knives with the relish of a butcher about to carve a Sunday roast. His face, usually so pale, was ruddy with excitement; his grin wider and more gleeful than ever. He moved quickly, bounding from one side of the slab to the other with such speed that some of Dr Magorian’s uneaten sugar lumps sprang from his pockets and scattered about the floor. He did not even pause to pick them up.