Death and the Running Patterer (22 page)

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Authors: Robin Adair

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“And the face.” Even in death her complexion was decidedly beautiful, that of a younger woman. “I just don’t know why she caked herself with all that muck,” sniffed Owens. “Her eyes see nothing now, but even as I treated her last night they were wide and glittering; her pupils were dilated.” He then fingered her hair and remarked that it was shiny but thin to his delicate touch.
“What are you driving at?” asked the patterer, not really understanding what he was being shown. “Exactly what disease are you talking about?”
“Patience,” begged the doctor. “There’s no hurry. Not now. She is not suffering by my deliberate manner.” Then his attention seemed to wander, for he went off on a tangent. “Years ago, a French acquaintance, a very perspicacious artist named Horace Vernet, told me that in all matters—and I take this to apply to medical issues—when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. My examination shows that, despite some suggestive symptoms, she did not die of dysentery. The same goes for typhus. True, in Madame’s case there was great prostration and a petechial eruption—the red spots I referred to on the belly—but that doesn’t always attend typhus, and in this case certainly did not. And although I rule out cholera, there are some similar indicators—puckered lips and a hollow facial appearance—apparent in her case. Please remember that.”
“What then,” inquired Dunne, “is the truth, the improbable that must be the truth?”
Owens grimaced. “The truth is that she died of acute poisoning.”
“Why is that so improbable?”
“Because, my dear young man, I simply have no idea how it could have occurred. I suppose I was reasonably sure of the what—if not the why—when I realized what the unusual odor in the room was. You recall, I’m sure, the smell that Captain Rossi so acutely identified as garlic, which Elsie stoutly denied her mistress had ever touched. A reek of garlic can be a pointer to the presence of arsenic in a body. Very confusing in Latin countries, no doubt!”
“Could it not all have been an accident?” asked the patterer.
The doctor shrugged. “Perhaps. A lot of women take small doses of arsenic to improve their complexion. And deadly nightshade can be used by the ladies to highlight the allure of their eyes. That poison’s other name is, of course,
belladonna
—in words other than the Italian, ‘fair lady.’ Even the late king’s doctors dosed him with emetic tartar during treatment for his madness. That nostrum contains antimony, which is commonly contaminated with up to 5 percent arsenic. So you can see that the toxin has respectable medical usage.”
“So, in a nutshell, she died by taking too much arsenic,” said the patterer.
“‘Taking’ is the problem word,” replied Owens. “Yes, arsenic killed her, but did she ‘take’ it, in the conventional sense? I tend to believe what Elsie, her distraught lover, told us at the theater—that no contaminated or otherwise infected food or water passed her or her mistress’s lips. And the same must be true of poison: Ergo, there is no possible agent in that manner, unless the poison was self-administered.”
“You are saying she killed herself, either accidentally or deliberately?” Nicodemus Dunne was not especially religious, but he had a superstitious dread of suicide and all it could mean, of bodies refused rest in hallowed ground and supposedly being buried at crossroads.
The doctor shrugged. “This poisoning was a gradual process. A suicide would surely end it all with one large overdose. And I have recently treated Madame Greene for debilities I now realize were the symptoms of her progressive poisoning. But I believe she was a woman who wanted to live.”
Breaking the train of his discourse and pulling the patterer closer to the corpse, Owens poked a flat instrument into the mouth, between the slightly open lips. He withdrew it and remarked, “Nothing.” He turned away and continued, “So, to sum up, I have drawn your attention to the rash, the coarse nails, the clear complexion, the once-glittering eyes, the thin, shiny hair—all symptoms of arsenical poisoning, which I have confirmed by postmortem. And … ?” He paused and looked at the patterer inquiringly.
Dunne frowned. “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
“To the curious incident of the mouth,” said Owens.
“There was nothing in the mouth.”
“That was the curious incident,” remarked the doctor.
Dunne did not understand.
The doctor explained, “The deceased’s mouth lining and tongue contain dissipated traces of the poison. Most of these traces have been deposited by the passage and residue of vomit—you will remember her retching in the green room? Now, why did I charge you to recall the fact that Madame’s face had the shriveled and puckered look associated with cholera—if I also told you that the disease was not involved?”
From the patterer, no response.
So the doctor, slightly irritated by his companion’s inability to match his mind, continued. “What is now missing from Madame’s appearance, her image as you remember her? And I remind you again of the collapsed face.”
Dunne recalled the vivacious, always smiling woman, then he said suddenly, almost shouting, “Teeth! She has no teeth! But how so?”
“Because,” said Owens, “
I
have them!” In the dramatic manner of a prestidigitator, he whipped away a cloth from a small mound on a side table. Revealed was a set of artificial teeth for the upper and lower jaws.
“I did not know she had such teeth,” said the patterer.
“Neither did I,” said the doctor. “Until, that is, I found them beside the commode on which she had been sitting. She obviously took them out when she first called for the bowl, and at the time we were all too busy to notice her putting them down. I only collected them just as we were heading off to the hospital.”
Nicodemus Dunne looked at the gleaming teeth, grim ghosts of Madame’s smile, now vanished forever. He had never before thought to study such things closely. They were rare; only the rich could afford them. He knew that some supposedly were made of wood—that most famous American, George Washington, was reputed to have had a wooden set—but there were people who said that wood was too fragile for the purpose. He did know that some teeth were carved from whalebone. The best though—if the most ghoulish—were sets made using real teeth taken from the dead.
Dragging himself back to the present situation, the patterer said, “That’s all very interesting, but what is the particular significance of the teeth?”
Owens smiled, obviously well pleased with himself. “Before I cleaned the teeth to their current presentable state, I examined their surfaces.”
“So?”
“So they were free of any toxin-bearing vomit.”
Dunne did not want to say “So?” again and further show his ignorance. He remained silent.
“It proves,” said the doctor—rather smugly, the patterer thought—“that no toxic substance passed in through Madame Greene’s mouth while she wore her teeth—and that would be all her waking hours. Yet inside she was stewed with evidence of the arsenic that killed her. Thus the improbable conclusion, which must be the truth, is that somehow she was murdered!”
A trick of the light made Madame’s teeth seem to smile. She was no soldier, but was the similar death of The Ox somehow linked to hers?
It was not until the patterer had left Dr. Owens and his sad charge that he wondered why, if Elsie could be regarded as trustworthy on the matter of food and drink, the doctor could doubt her story of the proffered lozenge.
Dr. Owens was widely known for his habit of offering the sweets to everyone, including Dunne. And he admitted to dosing Madame. Earlier, too, something about Owens had engaged the young man’s imagination. But then he shook his head. If the doctor were in any way connected with the fat lady’s death, he would hardly have tried so hard to save her and then have announced, when he could have said it was accident or suicide, that it was murder.
Still, Dunne now half-heartedly entered Owens’s name on his list of “Persons of Interest.”
And the patterer decided it would do no harm to have a further talk with Elsie.
BUT THAT INTERVIEW never eventuated.
By the end of the day after Madame Greene’s death, Elsie, too, lay dead. She was found in a shed behind the whorehouse. Her wrists were slashed and a bloody knife lay beside her body.
Captain Rossi took control of the case, but had to agree that it seemed a clear case of suicide while in a state of despair over the death of her mistress. Out of respect for the two women, he made sure that their full relationship was left out of the report to the coroner.
At least, Dunne and the captain agreed, Elsie would not be left in a legal limbo, unlike the other poor devils who had died, and whose inquests returned “open” findings as the search for the truth went on.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
What dire offence from am’rous causes springs,
What mighty contests rise from trivial things.
—Alexander Pope,
The Rape of the Lock
(1714)
 
 
 
 
 
 
A
LTHOUGH LIVES WERE BEING EXTINGUISHED WITH OMINOUS regularity, the patterer determined that his life should go on as normally as possible. Thus he continued his regular public readings of the news, although he was not as driven to work as he had been.
When the demands of the investigation began to eat into his bread-and-butter labors, he confided to several people, including Dr. Owens and Alexander Harris, that his income was declining. Captain Rossi, too, showed sympathy.
His fortunes, however, had taken a turn for the better when he last examined his bank account. Mr. Potts, in his impeccable script, added an extra ten pounds to his usual fee. The only explanation that was forthcoming was that Mr. Potts’s principals were very satisfied with the patterer’s service and felt that he had been insufficiently rewarded for it.
Nicodemus Dunne did not argue, but returned to work with a new sense of security and a new spring in his step. And so he went about, bringing tidings of the coming withdrawal from legal tender of the holey dollar, that strange ring-shaped coin that had, in its way, solved the colony’s currency crisis fifteen years earlier. Then, there had not been enough English, Spanish, Dutch or Portuguese coins to go around, and paying visiting traders for imported necessities always drained the purse. Promissory notes and private banknotes, like the famous Waterloo Notes, were of varying value.
Even the arrival from England to the colonial powers of 40,000 coins of that trading benchmark, the Spanish silver dollar (its value of eight
reales
spawned the legendary piratical label, “pieces of eight”) did not help, because many of them could soon slip back overseas.
Although it was before his time, the patterer knew the story of what happened next. The governor, Lachlan Macquarie, hit on a way to keep the new coins in the colony. And turn a profit at the same time. Naturally, he asked a convict forger for help. William Henshall punched out a small disc—called the dump—from each Spanish coin, leaving a larger ring, called the holey dollar. Macquarie valued the ring at five shillings and the dump at fifteen pence, so each dollar became worth six shillings and threepence.
Now their death knell had sounded.
Dunne moved on, entertaining a crowd with a letter written by the architect Mr. Greenway to
The Australian
about his plan to throw a soaring bridge across the harbor from Lieutenant Dawes’s Battery to the nearest point on the northern shore, a spot east of Billy Blue’s Murdering Point. He had been proposing the bridge for a decade or more. Ten years before, at the height of his powers, no one had listened. Now, in the decline of his career, the idea seemed doomed forever.
To select audiences, the patterer brought news that was difficult to find in the papers. Prizefighting or kangaroo-coursing might be tolerated by the authorities, but of the shadowy worlds of bull-baiting or cockfighting, aficionados could learn only by word of mouth. It was not nice news. He told them how at Brickfield village, the center of many blood sports, a fighting cock still wearing its spur had raked out the eye of its handler.

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