Death and the Running Patterer (34 page)

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Authors: Robin Adair

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Miss Dormin looked around the room coldly. “So I see.” She took the seat proffered. “What makes you think that I, as you say, did it?”
“Oh, it all came together. Very slowly, admittedly. I suppose I first realized, early on, that you were left-handed, like our killer. But I dismissed it. Many people are—at least until a schoolmaster or parent has thrashed the sinister habit out of them. Or tied the offending left hand behind their back until they learn to use the proper right hand. Enough of that, though. More important—and not necessarily in this order—I gradually examined all the things I knew about you. They eventually added up to the rather startling conclusion that there really is no such person as Miss Rachel Dormin.”
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)
 
 
 
 
 
 
R
ACHEL 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 …”

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