The Devil's Making (27 page)

‘Awright.'

I leaned forward, my ribs pressing against the gunwale, and hooked my right arm around the woman's waist, feeling around the wet material of her dress, my arm plunged underwater. I stubbed my fingers on something hard and rocklike through the cloth and moved my hand further around to get a grip on it. ‘All right', I said. ‘Heave ho!' The cheerful cliché came out easily but I wished I could take it back. The man and I pulled hard, the stern dipped further, and I felt the woman's dress wet against my cheek. I was almost hugging her as she came out of the water. She lay over the gunwale, water pouring off her. We heaved again and rolled the body onto the seat where she lay facing upwards.

‘Aaah!' A bellowing shriek from behind me. I turned my head. It was Quattrini, standing in the bow, looking towards us over the seated oarsmen. His face above his beard had gone pale and his eyes were bulging more than ever.

I looked at last at the body and felt a shiver up my spine. Her face! Then I realised what it was: an enormous purple starfish, about a foot across, centred on one cheek, its thick pointed arms studded with shiny protuberances spread out over the forehead, cheeks and chin. There was only one thing to do. I reached forward and seized one limb of the star. Its skin was rough, like coarse sandpaper, and cold. The whole starfish came off with a squelch. I threw it over the stern into the water with a splash.

The girl's face was pale blue and luckily the eyes were closed, though the lids were swollen and the cheeks were puffy. Just beside the nose where the starfish had been centred was a small patch of abraded flesh, but no blood. Her hair was dark brown from the water but might have been fair if dry. Her dress was dripping and tight over her nipples as if there were no undergarments. There was a huge bulge at her waist as if she were pregnant, but oddly shifted to one side. ‘It's a rock', I said to fill the deadly silence. ‘I could feel it.' Then I noticed that the pink of the dress, sticking up ridiculously because of its hoops, was streaked and darker in places from the upper legs downwards. This was not silt from the harbour bottom, but blood.

‘Can we bring her back to your warehouse, Mr Quattrini?' This was Wilson's voice. ‘If you don't mind receiving her as your guest for a short while till the undertaker comes.'

‘Guest?' said Quattrini. ‘Of course. My God, that was a shock – the sea star. I know this girl. She's one of my domestics. Kathleen Donnelly. Terrible business.' His voice was now completely firm. He began giving orders to the lightermen.

I looked at the body. It was still dripping. The grapple man was sitting slumped beside me. ‘I knew her', he said quietly, ‘Pretty gal she was. Jesus Christ.' He leaned his face forward into his hands.

The corpse frightened me less than I might have expected. But McCrory had not frightened me much either. A corpse was, after all, simply a corpse. She – whoever she had been – was simply not present. This was not ‘she' but ‘it'. At a given moment she had ceased to be and left this familiar thing she had lived with all her life – now embarked on decay. The starfish had only started the job the worms would finish. I had often contemplated in agony a universe in which as the mechanical meaning of things was discovered the spiritual meaning had vanished – as this girl had vanished although the abandoned machine of her body was here. It was a mere thing. But she had been more than a thing – no thing, not nothing. Although I had lost my faith I could believe that something had survived. ‘She' was not here, but elsewhere.

Then as the lighter was rowed across the harbour, in the transient sparkle of the sun on the water, the comfort of my intuition began to fade. If she was elsewhere it was only as a ghost – either in her own right or in the mind of those who had known her. How long could a ghost survive? I had steeled myself to the fact that knowledge – or ‘science' as we are beginning to call it – had abolished the immortal soul. But what if, as the emptiness of this corpse suggested, there was after all a soul, but not necessarily an immortal one? If body was nothing without soul, what was soul without body? The great John Donne in his sermons had insisted that at the day of judgement the
body
would be reconstituted into new life. A comforting dream. What if the soul was in turn mortal? This would be a worse nightmare than no soul at all: the girl's soul merely a ghost fading away as her abandoned body rotted.

*   *   *

By the time we had hauled the corpse up the steps to the wharf at Quattrini's warehouse the undertaker's wagon had arrived. The corpse was loaded onto it, grotesquely on one side, with that huge rock still inside the dress. Dr Powell would do an autopsy at the undertaker's. Wilson, showing no signs of wear, scurried back to his paper at the courthouse and I was left to find out what I could about the dead girl.

Quattrini was ready, with his usual energy, to go straight back to work, but I cornered him and requested a brief word in private. Scowling, he agreed, and led me to a small cubicle overlooking the warehouse, expelling the clerk with a few rough exclamations as he had for our previous interview. Quattrini apparently imposed himself on the whole warehouse – now here, now there – not limiting himself to a particular office room. As before we made ourselves comfortable on the hard chairs available, though Quattrini sat a little further away this time. Twitching restlessly, he gave off an air of impatience.

‘I tell you right away who the girl was', he said as I brought out my notebook. ‘Kathleen Donnelly, though we called her Kathy. A lovely girl, very industrious, very devout. I've never employed irreligious girls in my house, and she was the best Irish type – meek, and she knew her place, never gave any trouble at all. She was twenty one or two years old and she's been in service for me for five years. My brother sent her up to me from San Francisco. Her older sister was in service with him. Why should she do a thing like this? A melancholy attack? The hysterics? Let me tell you, I'm far too busy a man to understand such things.'

He visibly strained upwards with impatience to get up from the chair and back to work.

‘How many servants do you have?'

‘Kathy and another girl, Ellen – also Irish. Good workers. But not too much to do. There's just me and my kid, Giuseppino, and we're both down here most of the time.'

‘Did she have friends?

‘I wouldn't know. Very religious girl. Like I say, she went to church regular, with Ellen. I'm generous with days off. I don't know what she done with her time.'

‘Has she been in good health?'

‘Why would I know?'

‘So you've no idea why she did this – assuming she threw herself in deliberately.'

‘I seen that rock in her dress. Of course she threw herself in. Good way to make sure she went down and stayed down.'

‘Do you care about her?' This was from my heart, not my mind.

‘Waddya mean?' Quattrini's eyes bulged out and he levelled a finger at me like a gun. ‘Why you ask questions like that?'

‘You talk about her in such a neutral fashion now, yet you were upset when we pulled her out.'

‘Can you blame me? Christ! That damned sea star on her face.'

‘Did you know it was she before we pulled her up?'

‘Look, Sergeant, I don't know what you're getting at. I can talk to Mr Pemberton about this.'

‘Of course you can. But I have to ask these questions. Did you know it was she?'

‘I thought it might be her. The dress seemed familiar, and she wasn't home this morning. Ellen was flappin' about it at breakfast. But I just thought she'd made a mistake about her morning off and gone out early into town to shop or somethin'. Then when I heard someone say there was a stiff just off the quay in the water and I went out and seen that pink dress in the water I thought, Jeez, it might be her. Forgive my language, but yes, it was upsetting.' He took out a clean white handkerchief and mopped his brow.

‘You say she was devout. What church did she go to?'

‘Same as us. St Pat's.'

‘You've nothing more to say about her?'

‘Nothin'. This gave Quattrini the excuse to rise to his feet.

I stood up too. ‘You know the names of her nearest relations?'

‘I can find out. In San Francisco, they'll be.'

‘Please do. I'll come and see you later today or tomorrow.'

‘What for?' He seemed to feel he had the upper hand again and had become belligerent. ‘I'll do the right thing by the girl, give her a good funeral.'

‘I mean, if I find out anything that might interest you. There'll be an autopsy of course.'

‘You mean to see if she had a bun in the oven?'

‘That sort of thing. It's usual.'

Quattrini's expression changed again – God, the man was volatile – to one of calm piety. ‘I could swear there's nothing of that sort', he said. ‘She was too good a girl for that.'

*   *   *

Back at the Court House, Parry told me to pursue the case of the drowned girl, to go to the undertaker's and get the results of the autopsy which was being done, and to explore whatever connections she had in order to ascertain whether it was ‘the usual sort of case' – a pregnant girl killing herself in panic and despondency – or whether there was foul play involved, which Parry doubted. I could tell he was pleased to give me something to draw me away from the McCrory investigation, which he must see as a waste of time.

A telegram had arrived in response to a query I had sent to the University of Virginia. It was from the Registrar of the School of Medicine.

RE RICHARD MC CRORY DECEASED STOP BORN 1830 ALBANY NEW YORK STOP RELIGION CONGREGATIONALIST STOP DEGREES FROM THIS SCHOOL BONA FIDE BUT PERSONA NON GRATA DUE IRREGULAR ASSOCIATIONS NOTABLY JOHN NOYES PREACHER FREE LOVE COMMUNISM IN ONEIDA COMMUNITY NEW YORK STOP MC CRORY LEFT ONEIDA OR EXPELLED RETURNED VIRGINIA MENTAL ALIENIST WITH PRIVATE ASYLUM STOP UNSUCCESSFUL STOP JOINED CONFEDERATE ARMY AND CASHIERED SUSPICION SPYING STOP MOVED SAN FRANCISCO WHERE ALIENATION OF AFFECTIONS SUIT CAUSED DISREPUTE THIS SCHOOL STOP NO RELATIONS KNOWN HERE STOP SUGGEST TRY ALBANY STOP MC CRORY NOT VIRGINIAN OR GENTLEMAN

I liked this last phrase, remembering Mrs Somerville's insistence that McCrory was
such
a gentleman. My attention stuck on the name John Noyes. I had seen it somewhere. Yes: in McCrory's library, on the spine of a small book or pamphlet. I wrote a note to Rabinowitz who had McCrory's goods in storage, asking if he would be so kind as to search for the book and send to me urgently.

*   *   *

Since the undertaker would arrange the funeral, at Quattrini's expense, and was well equipped to deal with blood and body wastes, there had seemed no point in transporting the girl's corpse back and forth to the doctor's office. I caught Dr Powell as he had just finished his autopsy. He was brisk in manner and known to be competent. We talked privately in the undertaker's office.

‘I'll write a report', Powell said. ‘But I'll tell you my findings, insofar as they amount to anything. Cause of death was drowning: the lungs were full of water. She had been in the water six or seven hours: rigour had only partly set in. Thus, she entered the water some while before dawn. She had, as you will have observed, inserted a heavy rock into the front of her dress. She was not, by the way, wearing stays, by which I assume she got up in the middle of the night and did not bother with her “toilette”. The rock is one such as are piled at the end of the quay near the warehouses where she was found.' Powell smiled. ‘Forgive me. I'm doing your detective work for you.'

‘That's all right. Your observations are to the point.'

‘There are no signs of foul play. No bruises or cuts except for a small contusion on one cheek which puzzled me somewhat…'

‘A star fish. It was on her face when we pulled her out.'

‘How ghastly. That explains it. To repeat: no signs of foul play. And no signs of ill health. Nor was she “enceinte”. She was in fact in the course of a “monthly”, and wearing the usual towel. That was the blood you may have noticed. I should mention, though, that she was not “virgo intacta”. Of course the membrane might have ruptured accidentally in the past, but then one might expect the opening to be less than it is. She was a ‘nullipara' – that is, she had never had children. That is all I can report. She was not known to me personally. Must have been a pretty girl, but in spite of her swollen appearance now, I should say that she was quite thin. Sad business. She was wearing a locket on a chain. You may claim it from the undertaker if you wish.'

We shook hands and Dr Powell left. The undertaker appeared and I asked for the locket. It had been placed in an envelope. I asked permission to examine it in the undertaker's office, since I planned to be on the move and did not want to return to the court house. I sat down at a desk and opened the envelope.

The locket was quite large, of silver, oval with an imitation ribbon diagonally across it, also of silver, which gave a slightly vulgar effect. It was on a silver chain. Modestly expensive. I found the catch and pressed it with my fingernail. A small amount of water dripped out onto the table. The locket opened with the usual butterfly effect of two oval recesses connected by the hinge. In one was a curling lock of light brown hair, neatly tied with a silk thread. In the other was a photograph of a face of man wearing a straw boater. But since it had a protective cover of thin glass which was still misted from the damp, the face could not be properly seen. I debated whether to force the glass off, but decided to be patient and let it dry, in case the photograph was stuck to the glass by damp and might be damaged. I put the locket, spread open, carefully back into the envelope which I wrapped tightly around it, secured it with a rubber band from the undertaker's desk, and put it in my pocket.