The Hidden Man (24 page)

‘A stranger.'

‘Probably a stranger who did it, then.'

I let that go without reply and waved goodbye to the horse exercisers, who set off again at a steady canter.

Three of the hunters were now ready to leave. The two dogs they had with them were alert to this and were suddenly nosing the wind, barking and pulling at their leashes, all straining in the one direction towards the east of the Bale Stone. The owner of one of them said:

‘Well, us'll have some sport before we go home after all, eh lads? It's likely a deer that's strayed too close.'

He slipped his dog's leash and he tore off, followed by the other, and by their owners with their guns, galloping through the brush in increasingly distant pursuit. No deer was sprung, however, and at a hundred and fifty yards from the Stone the dogs found their prey exactly where they had scented it. I could hear growling and yipping as they worried at it, but soon they were roughly called off. I saw the men kneel to look at whatever creature their lurchers had caught, and then one of them leapt up, waving and shouting towards the Stone, his words blown away from us by the breeze. They began hauling whatever creature it was towards us, and we soon realized it was not an animal, but a young person with the appearance of a boy, in cap, shirt and breeches (though no shoes). He was being both pushed and dragged along, his eyes wide from fear and holding with one hand the wrist of the other, in the place where one of the dogs had seized it. I was struck by his crying – it was silent. The other notable thing about him was his skin: he was as black as a cottage kettle.

At this point a heavily puffing Sergeant Oswald Mallender arrived at the spot. He had received the message of a dead body at the Bale Stone and hastened out without even waiting for his courtiers, the two Parkin brothers. The Sergeant took one look at the dead body, and another at the unfortunate prisoner, who had now been brought to stand with his back to the Stone. Mallender acknowledged my presence with little more than a grunt before he turned his attention fully towards the prisoner.

‘What have we here, lads? A dead body – and a suspicious person in custody, by the look of it. What, men? Was this wretch caught running away?'

The owner of the dog that had caught the boy explained the circumstances.

‘Well, boy, speak English do you?' growled Mallender, gesturing towards the body. ‘What do you say to all this? You've been caught lurking near the scene of a death – no! A murder! Did you do it? Did you?'

He took the boy by his ear and twisted it, but could wring no sound from him except for the snuffles of his streaming nose.

‘No answer? You young savage, of course you did! Who's the corpus? Does anyone know him?'

‘His name is Tybalt Jackson,' I said, ‘and yesterday he gave evidence at the inquest into the death of goldsmith Pimbo at the Friary Bar Inn. This boy I believe to have been Jackson's servant. I also believe he may be a mute, which would explain why he does not answer your questions.'

‘I have a readier explanation, Cragg. Guilt!'

Mallender seemed quite uninterested in looking over the body, and I noticed he kept himself at an uneasy distance at all times from the Stone on which it lay. When I suggested he take a closer look at Jackson, he hastened to decline with a wave of his hand.

‘Time enough for that, Cragg, when you get it to town. Meanwhile I shall personally escort this Devil-child of Satan to Moot Hall where his judgement awaits, shall I?'

Mallender's behaviour had so far been entirely consistent with his usual procedure. He liked, when called to a crime, to convey the impression of a man of decision, a man of action, able in an instant to penetrate to the heart of a mystery and point his finger at the villain. He must have been delighted at what he found by the Bale Stone, nervous though he was of the Stone itself. A killed man, and an already-made murderer of that man fallen without effort into his hands. I knew it would be useless but still I warned him.

‘I really do not think we should hurry to judgement on him, Mallender. He may be a witness; I very much doubt he is the murderer.'

Mallender looked astonished that I should contradict his own instinctual grasp of criminal truth.

‘But what we have here is a black savage, Mr Cragg. Kill without a second's thought, they will. We must take him before the Mayor without delay for, in my opinion which I am sure Mr Grimshaw will share, the piccaninny must be kept in gaol until he comes to the Assizes. So I'll be happy to let you have charge of the body, and I shall have charge of the killer. Are we agreed? Let's go, my lads.'

Mallender and the hunters left us, walking in a close huddle around the black boy. When we had stood for a few moments to watch them go, Etherington turned to me.

‘Shall us fashion the hurdle and take the body down now, Mr Cragg?'

‘No, do not move it yet. I want Dr Fidelis to look at it
in situ
first. He should be here – ah! There in fact he is.'

Fidelis had appeared walking briskly along the path towards the Bale Stone, carrying his medical bag. His face, as it usually did in the early morning, looked a little creased and drawn. But as soon as he saw the body he began to regain vitality like a drooping buttercup in water.

‘Aha! Didn't I tell you this was a matter worth killing over?'

Soon he had vaulted up onto the Stone and knelt beside the dead man. I told Etherington that he could finish constructing the litter now, as I thought we could be on our way in about ten minutes. And so we were.

*   *   *

Fidelis and I walked behind the four men that carried the litter, at sufficient distance to make it impossible for them to hear us. I said:

‘Give me your impressions.'

‘He still has warmth. He is not yet in the slightest stiff. I think he cannot have died more than five hours ago.'

‘What about the wounds? Which of them killed him?'

‘I need to open the body to see how far the stick in his chest penetrates. If it reached his heart it would certainly have killed him, providing he were not dead already.'

‘So can you tell if the face wounds were done before or after the stick?'

‘That is a very good question. And the answer is at the moment I can't. But I will think about it.'

‘You saw Mallender dragging away the negro boy?'

‘I passed them on the path.'

‘He already has him lined up on the scaffold with the noose around his neck. But I doubt he is the killer.'

‘He cannot be the killer alone – there must have been
killers
, Titus. Did you not perceive the same?'

‘Go on, Luke.'

‘The attack did not start on the Bale Stone. Jackson was put there after he had been significantly wounded, if not actually killed. I rather fancy he
was
already dead: there had been no great spillage of fresh blood on the Stone. I could clearly see bloodstains where he was pulled up over the edge and onto the top surface, and also the drag marks made as he was manoeuvred into the position in which he was found, but no large pools as would have formed if he had pumped out his life-blood here.'

‘You're right, Luke. One man could not have got the body up there – and certainly not a boy like that poor waif.'

‘A boy, you say?'

‘Yes.'

‘I only caught a short glimpse, but I must place a caution beside that word.'

‘A caution?'

‘Yes. Of course, the assumption is that it is a boy, because, when one has a black servant, it is of course always a boy, is it not? And your poor waif was indeed dressed as a boy. Yet to my eyes the physical outline was not that of a boy, but female, Titus. Under that shirt I'll warrant you she had the makings of breasts and under those breeches a girl's arse.'

 

Chapter Eighteen

H
EADING FOR THE
House of Correction, we came into town by the Friary Bar and immediately made the turn into Marsh Lane. But here Fidelis excused himself,

‘I must leave you here,' he said. ‘I have a busy round of calls.'

I gestured at the improvised litter and its burden.

‘Will you examine him for me, later?'

‘With pleasure, but not before afternoon. Shall I meet you at three o'clock?'

The town was shaking itself awake. Already there were children sitting on their doorsteps with slices of bread and dripping larger than their hands, watching their mothers as they sluiced and swept the cobblestones. Men, stumbling towards the market under laden hods or heavy satchels, wove a mazy path to avoid the women's brooms. Boys idled on the way to the Grammar School, stopping in groups to roll marbles, or to tussle and taunt each other.

Every head turned to us as we passed. I had picked up an old sack from the roadside along the way and used it to cover poor Jackson's broken face, but this served only to increase the general curiosity, and soon we had a parade behind us like a disorderly funeral, the mourners calling out questions to the litter bearers, and shouting up to houses along the way for people to come and see. Death is all around us, yet we will never treat it as a commonplace. I suppose it is because we don't know the manner of our own deaths that we are so powerfully drawn to discover how others have died.

We arrived at the House of Correction and asked the porter to send for Arnold Limb, the Keeper of Correction. A minute later he hurried out to the lodge, flapping his hands.

‘Bless me, Cragg, what have you brought me now?'

The Keeper had not had time to take breakfast, which would have made a dourer man bad tempered. But the genial Limb's dominant humour was sanguine and, though he was agitated, he retained his bonhomie.

‘You are having an eventful morning, Mr Limb?'

‘I am. I have already received into my hands a young negro stranger who can't or won't speak, and who Mallender says is a violent murderer. I have to entertain him until he is brought before the Mayor at ten o'clock, and to keep his cell on for him, as Mallender says he is sure to be coming back when the Mayor commits him for the Assizes.'

‘Well just for the sake of completeness,' I told him, ‘may I present the man that was murdered? I would like to billet him on you, Mr Limb, just as we did Pimbo.'

Limb's conceit was always to speak as though his small prison were an inn, and that his prisoners were there for their own pleasure, and not at that of the law.

‘Yes, yes, of course, Cragg. Take our new guest to those same quarters. Mr Pimbo's remains are leaving us this morning, I am glad to say, so they won't have the inconvenience of sharing for long. I have Oatseed boxing him up now to be taken home for his funeral tomorrow. There's just one thing … the reckoning has not been paid for Mr Pimbo's time with us.'

I suggested he send the account in to my office, and so we took the body to the same chamber, set apart from the main accommodation, that the goldsmith had been occupying. Pimbo who wore nothing but a simple winding sheet lay beside it in a plain box supported by trestles while the coffin builder added a few refinements – four iron rings through which to lower him into his grave, and an engraved brass plaque for the coffin-lid. When we had placed Tybalt Jackson on the table he had vacated I lifted the sacking from his face and retrieved from the floor the sheet that had covered Pimbo.

‘I suppose he will not mind another man's covering sheet,' sighed Arnold Limb, as we left the cell and made our way back towards the porter's lodge. ‘Perhaps I should have found him an unsoiled one, but my weekly laundry bill is very burdensome.'

‘He won't mind anything earthly now, Mr Limb.'

‘I wonder what it is that protrudes from his chest.'

‘He was stabbed with a sharpened stick.'

‘Oh dear. Should you not pull it out? It would be more comfortable, I think.'

‘Dr Fidelis will come this afternoon to attend to that, with your permission.'

‘Oh, most willingly. He should have a doctor, even though it is too late. You must find it a great pity that his face is so horribly disfigured. I remember your renowned father telling us when I served as juror in one of his inquests that there's much to learn from the expression of the face in death.'

‘Yes, my father wrote notes upon that and they are in his book.'

I had not recently looked at my father's distillations of everything he had learned during a quarter century as a Coroner. He had them printed, before he died, as
Notes on the Appearance of the Human Body upon Death, with Indications Therein of the Means of Expiration, for the Guidance of Coroners
by Samuel Cragg. The chapter on the face, as I remembered, listed all the qualities of death that may be detected through facial expression, such as the surprised death, the resigned death, the desired death, or the just death. Much as I loved and respected my father, I had myself found death always too contrary and misleading to leave such simple signposts; but he like many Coroners of his time believed in these easy facial auguries.

‘Well we can learn little from that particular face now,' sighed Limb. ‘It has been destroyed.'

‘Oh, I don't know that we can't,' I said. ‘We shall see what Dr Fidelis has to say on the matter.'

We were passing the door of the main building, and I stopped to listen to the cacophony within. There were shouted conversations between the cells, repeated banging, screams and curses and a good deal of plaintive weeping.

‘I know what you are thinking,' laughed Limb ruefully. ‘It is like a madhouse. But many of them are troubled souls, we must remember that.'

But I had something else on my mind.

‘I wonder if I might take this opportunity to speak with your latest arrival,' I said. ‘The African?'

‘Oh, yes, if you like. There is nothing against it – and much to be said for it, if you can persuade him to speak. We cannot do so. Ground floor, I think. Warden Rawley will show you the chamber. I myself am heading for my breakfast, at last. Good day, Sir. You will find Rawley inside.'