A Dark Anatomy (19 page)

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Authors: Robin Blake

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I considered the matter. There was something in what Elizabeth was saying. This young anatomist just might be hot-headed enough to take such a risk. It was impossible to make a judgement until we knew his identity. But it deserved further investigation, I was thinking. Tomorrow, possibly.
We were now through the Bar and had walked up a slight rise past the bowling green, and the windmill, which commands the approach to the town from that direction, and made another fifty yards along the road before arriving at our garden's gate. I
opened the padlock with one of the keys attached to my watch chain and pushed it open. Like all the gardens hereabouts, the half-acre plot was enclosed by high wattle fencing and supported not only vegetable beds and fruit trees but a couple of beehives, a small flock of hens and a dovecote. As always when I came here I looked upon it with satisfaction – a place in which the flow of time became pleasantly sluggish, and the cares of business dissolved like mist in sun.
We got about our business, I to lifting the leeks and Elizabeth the carrots. But after a few minutes, with her basket full enough, she wandered up to inspect the beehives and see how busy their inhabitants were in the spring sunshine. A moment later I heard her scream.
‘Titus! Over here! Titus!'
I got up from my knees and ran towards her. She was looking down at the ground behind the hives. A man lay spread out there on his back, with his arms by his sides but his head at a grotesque angle. His eyes stared, and his purple tongue stuck out.
It was the architect Barnabus Woodley.
 
 
B
EFORE I COULD stop her, Elizabeth was on her knees beside him, loosening the stock and the shirt at the throat. There was much dirt on the front of the shirt.
‘Please God, let him be alive,' she prayed. ‘Let him live.'
I moved to her side and knelt in the same way, touching the back of my hand to Woodley's brow. It was cold as marble.
‘We are much too late. He's been dead for hours.'
She clapped her hands to her cheeks.
‘It's Mr Woodley, isn't it? Oh dear! Oh dear God! Is there really nothing to be done?'
She was in distress, almost crying. I touched her elbow.
‘No, nothing. Come away.'
I drew her to her feet and began walking with her as quickly as she would allow me towards the gate.
‘But why? Why here?' she protested. ‘Why in our garden? What was he doing here?'
These were the same questions I was asking myself.
‘I don't know, yet. But I shall find out.'
We reached the gate and went out into the road. I turned her towards me and held her by the upper arms. Her eyes were wide and filling with tears.
‘Don't cry,' I said. ‘There's nothing we can do for Woodley
now, except be just to him in death. Go back at once and tell Furzey what's happened. I'm staying here. We cannot leave the body alone. Furzey will notify the bailiff's clerk and then help will come. Woodley has to be removed to some suitable place. The House of Correction would do. Tell Furzey to suggest it. Now go!'
When she had gone I went back and stood beside the body, trying to make up my mind about it. One's response to a death depends on one's relation to the deceased. Woodley and I had been the next thing to strangers. We had met, but in an entirely superficial encounter, as if making the opening moves in a chess game. They had not revealed Woodley to me as a person, but only as a rather strange type, and one I had not liked very much. But now the sight of his corpse, inside its blue coat, prodded my conscience. The remarkable wig was missing, revealing a head of brown hair pulled into a pigtail at the nape. Poor histrionic Woodley. If the world's a stage, he had fallen through the trapdoor in mid-performance.
Yet to pity the architect was useless, as I had already reminded Elizabeth. It didn't in any way advance my understanding of how he came to be lying dead in this garden, and of who killed him. How, for instance, did he come in? I returned to the gate and examined it. The lock had been intact on our arrival. Dead or alive, Woodley could not have come in that way. So I walked the perimeter of the garden outside the fence – a few steps along the road and then I plunged into the narrow pathway that separated my garden plot from my neighbours'. Similar pathways snaked around and between all the plots here-about, making a kind of maze, walled on each side by tall lattice fencing that was overgrown with climbing plants to form high hedges, all but impenetrable. But in one place, well in from the road, I found what I was looking for. A ragged hole had been
hacked right into the fence, large enough for a man to pass through to my garden. I looked down at the surface of the path beside the hole. There were hoofprints faintly discernible in the dry mud. A horse had been here, and recently, though the path was not intended for horses. Whoever rode this horse in must have done so with the sole purpose of breaking the fence and entering my garden unobserved.
I forced my way with a little difficulty through the hole and stood once again inside the garden. I was certain Woodley had come in by this means. But in what condition was hard to know. Had he walked through himself, or been dragged? And who had made the aperture? On the ground just inside it lay a hatchet, which was not from the stock of tools I kept in the garden. I picked it up and weighed it in my hands. It was well-balanced and sharp. No doubt it had been the means by which the fence had been breached.
I went back to the body. The exposed face was scratched and grazed, but there was very little blood on it. Still holding the hatchet I knelt and used it to lever the rigid body up and over, until it was lying face down. I now saw that a single savage wound had been inflicted on the back of the head. The blood had gushed down the man's nape and neck and soaked his shirt and coat to the small of his back. I looked closely at the split in the skull. It was like a notch, about four inches long. Carefully I placed the hatchet's blade against the lip of the wound. It fitted exactly.
‘Stay! Don't move, there!'
A booming voice echoed around the garden and I looked up. Sergeant Mallender was coming towards me, holding up his hand. With him were two constables, followed by Bailiff Grimshaw, who was bustling in through the gate with a look of officious determination. I rose to my feet. Mallender and his
two acolytes – they were the brothers Esau and Jacob Parkin – arrived breathlessly and surrounded me while Grimshaw hurried to catch up.
‘Well? What are you waiting for, Sergeant?' the bailiff called as he stumbled through the leek bed, kicking a hen out of his way. ‘Take this man up! Can't you see? He has a weapon in his hand and a body at his feet. Do your duty, man! Arrest him, at once!'
 
They had taken my coat and I was sitting in my shirtsleeves, on the filthy mattress of a narrow pallet, looking into the beady eyes of the only visitor so far allowed me. The brown rat, up on his haunches amidst the stinking straw and cleaning his whiskers fastidiously, was staring back with the fixed attention of someone who has just asked a question, and wants a reply.
Grimshaw, his face set in an expression of grim delight, had brought me with Mallender and the Parkin brothers in an ostentatious parade up Friar Gate, across Market Place and into the town lock-up. This occupied part of the cellars of the Moot Hall, a clammy, subterranean accommodation reserved for those taken up and awaiting a charge, or their trial, or the judge's sentence. These cellars extended beyond the aboveground perimeter of the building, and it was plain my own cell lay directly below an area of the market itself. The space was faintly lit by holes in the ceiling that had been drilled through the market's pavement, so there were spots of light high above my head shining like constellations. I could hear market traders' faint cries, the clop of hooves, and the rumble of barrows. The whole point of a prisoner is his exclusion from normal life. I had been incarcerated for only an hour, but these ordinary sounds were already making me feel painfully alone.
The walls were thick, but I could make out the sounds of
other prisoners, hammering the doors for water, food, or some human contact. Not all of them were suspected felons: there would be strangers among them, condemned by Grimshaw and his cronies as interlopers and awaiting expulsion from the town. These were, by definition, friendless in town, and therefore hungry. I could hear their beseeching cries – ‘Bring bread! Bring meat!' – which made me conscious of my own hunger.
With squeaks and groans the door had swung open and I heard the voice of Ephraim Grimshaw.
‘Well, Cragg, this is a pretty pickle of a mess you're in.'
The bailiff stepped inside, attended by the gaol's keeper. The brown rat scuttled out of the way.
‘Am I? I should say that was you, Grimshaw. You have unjustly imprisoned His Majesty's coroner on a specious excuse.'
Grimshaw sneered.
‘Did I? You were found with a dead body at your feet, in your own garden, holding the weapon that, as seems likely, inflicted the fatal injury. Even a coroner is not immune from suspicion in such a circumstance.'
‘I went there with Mrs Cragg. The body was already lying there, and it was cold. The weapon was also on the ground. I picked it up to examine it. That was after I had sent my wife to find Mr Furzey, and tell him to inform you, which I presume is what happened. You know quite well I didn't kill the fellow.'
‘That will be for the Mayor alone to decide.'
‘In the meantime I demand that you let me out of here.'
‘That too is for the Mayor.'
‘Can I have pen and paper?'
‘No.'
‘A candle then, and a visitor? I am sure Furzey's out there, asking for me.'
‘Possibly.'
‘Then let me see him.'
As Grimshaw considered the request he sighed, which made his gleaming waistcoat shimmer in the gloom. Suddenly he swivelled and made for the door.
‘All right,' he said over his shoulder. ‘If your man is up there, we'll send him down. But you won't be out of here until the Mayor bails you.'
‘Bails me?' I protested. ‘There's nothing to bail me for.'
But the bailiff and gaoler had already left. The heavy iron-bound door thudded shut behind them.
Furzey appeared ten minutes later. Tucked under his arm was a linen-wrapped parcel and, in his hands, a flagon and a lighted tallow candle. The dancing light of the candle animated his face and I wondered if it was only the effect of this that made him appear likely to laugh aloud at any moment. In the event, he didn't laugh, though I suspected vast amusement at my situation on his part.
‘So, here you are!' he exclaimed. ‘How you got yourself into gaol would bamboozle philosophy. Mrs Cragg sends food and beer.'
He stooped to place the candle on the floor, and the package on the bed beside me. Then he unstopped the flagon and handed it across, watching critically as I tipped beer into my thirsty mouth.
‘Let's just apply ourselves to getting me out of here, shall we?' I asked a little testily, as I laid the flagon down and turned my attention to Elizabeth's food. It was half a loaf of bread and some pieces of ham. I was truly ravenous.
As I tore at the bread and ate it, turn by turn with the ham, Furzey gathered himself to leave.
‘You don't need to eat so desperately. I'll see to it. Mayor upstairs'll have you out of here within the hour.'
Furzey's parting words cheered me, but presently it grew dark outside and the candle, which my clerk had ‘forgotten' when he left me, burned itself to nothing. My spirits dwindled with it as no word came from upstairs. I could see nothing in the pitchy dark and was by now shivering uncontrollably from cold. I hammered on the door, shouting for a blanket and, eventually, the leather-hooded turnkey appeared. I tried to talk to him about my release but he only grunted. He proffered a horse-blanket, then pulled it back as I made a grab, wagging his finger. I found a coin in my pocket, which he took. Then he threw the blanket at me with a menacing growl and pulled the door shut. Disconsolately, I wrapped his coarse offering around my shoulders, took a last pull from the beer flagon and, with only my inquisitive (and now invisible) rodent for a cell-mate, I lay down in the dark to think about the afternoon's events.
Who was the late Barnabus Woodley? A peculiar sort of man, Elizabeth had said. And Fidelis had learned ‘particulars' of him that he could only pass on by mouth. Would these provide reasons why someone wanted to kill the man?
One or more of his workmen might have. If Peg Miller's words meant anything, none of the gang or their women thought highly of their employer. On the other hand, if they had killed him, would they have engaged in the
rencontre
with the soldiers? That only happened because Piltdown – so he claimed – had been threatened by Woodley with a stoppage of wages if damage occurred to the building works. The gang would hardly have run the risk of death by musket fire on the threat of a man they knew to be already dead.
I returned to the more dramatic idea that Woodley had in some way come between Squire Brockletower and his wife: that he was their Jago and betrayer, their poisoned mouth, ‘more fell than anguish, hunger or the sea'. But if this were true, what did
Woodley know? What did he tell Ramilles Brockletower? And could he have carried through his role as the squire's Spartan dog or bloodhound as far as cutting her throat? I doubted it.
I ran through one supposition after another, but in my particular situation there was one central fact that I could not remove from my thoughts: that it was me, and not the murderer, that lay here in prison. From being the agent of inquiry, I was suddenly the subject of it. But why had the body been brought to my garden and left there?
Cui bono?
Who gained by this crude attempt to incriminate me? Falsehood was outrunning the truth in every direction, I thought, as I fell asleep at last to the sound of the rat, darting this way and that through the straw to scavenge the breadcrumbs I had dropped from my supper.
 
The rusty hinges of the cell door screeched and I awoke. Light penetrated in scattered spots through the holes in the ceiling. It was morning.
‘Wake up, sir! Wake up! It's Furzey back again.'
I rolled into a seated position and rubbed my neck, stiff from lying without a pillow.
Furzey held a paper in front of my face.
‘Your manumission. You can come out.'

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