aven ran out onto the pavement, where he found that his ancient coachman had vanished. Perhaps they had passed a comfortable-looking cemetery on the return journey and he had gone there to take up residence. Raven looked left and right in the hope that he might find Dr Simpson and Angus hurrying back. Instead he merely saw darkness and fog.
Having no notion of how to drive horses or to ride one, he had little option but to run. He took off along Queen Street, heading east at a pace he estimated he could maintain for the entire journey. Shrub Hill was only a fraction of the distance he had run from Professor Gregory’s lab after discovering the dead rabbits. Recalling that occasion, he wondered whether once again he might be wrong about the danger, just as it transpired that Sarah had mislaid the deadly vial. Beattie would have no reason to suspect Sarah’s queries on Mina’s behalf indicated any inkling of his greater secret, so perhaps at most he would send her away with a scolding for doubting his word, and for her insolence in pursuing those doubts.
After all, Sarah had no inkling. If she did, she would never have gone there.
But as he ran, he saw how Beattie might indeed suspect. He had recognised Raven on the dock outside the King’s Wark and understood that Raven was looking into these matters. Beattie had fled, and then doubled back to kill Spiers. Had he also seen Sarah, and deduced she was the housemaid who sought Madame Anchou’s services in order to draw her out?
Raven cut around the back of Hope Crescent, sacrificing street light for the ability to approach Beattie’s cottage from the rear. It would not do to present himself at the front door, as Beattie already knew Raven was a threat. He would have to take him by surprise.
He crept quietly into the grounds, picking his path carefully in the sparing glow of light from a rear window. He saw no shadow, no flicker of movement from within, and heard no voices. The sound of argument would have been a welcome one.
Raven drew closer, crouched beneath the sill, then slowly raised himself up to look inside. All thoughts of stealth and strategy flew from his mind as he peered through the glass and saw Sarah’s body lying on the floor.
He ran directly to the back door, ready to break it down if he had to. It was not locked. He charged inside with no thought for quiet, passing through a kitchen where he caught a glimpse of a mortar and pestle next to the kettle, fine powder dusting the marble’s rim.
From the hall he could see Sarah’s arm outstretched where she lay on the floor of Beattie’s study. Raven felt propelled towards her as though driven by a hand at his back. As he neared the doorway, he was felled by an explosion of light and pain. Something solid and heavy struck him across the face, the full force of its swing added to the weight of his own momentum.
He reeled from the impact, blind and dazed, his legs weakened beneath him. Raven caught a flashing glimpse of Beattie clutching a poker or a stave. Further blows rained without mercy, one to the base of the spine, another to the back of his legs, another smashing down upon his head. He collapsed face-first to the floor, where still another strike to his side left him barely able to breathe. He was helpless.
Beattie knelt on his back and began securing his wrists with twine. He did so tightly and expertly, in a way that told Raven he was not the first person to be bound by this man.
He tried to raise his head, but as he did so, blood ran from his scalp into his right eye. Through his left he could see Sarah lying on the carpet a few feet across the room. She was utterly still. No twine had been necessary for her.
He would have cried then, but he did not have the breath.
Above her body, he saw shelves upon shelves of anatomy specimens ranged in jars, dominating the room. Even in his damaged state, something about the collection struck Raven as strange, though it took him a moment to grasp what was wrong with them.
The answer was: nothing.
Most medical men kept specimens of diseased organs as well as healthy ones, illustrative of unusual and damaging conditions. Beattie’s were all perfectly healthy, utterly normal.
‘You killed them,’ Raven said, finding a voice.
‘Killed who?’ Beattie asked, as though irritated by the query.
‘So many. The women who took your pills. You gave them a slow and painful death, and you cared not. The women you operated on for abortions died just as slowly. You killed them too.’
Raven glanced across the room once more, some part of him still hoping he would see the movement that would prove him wrong. It did not come.
‘And you killed Sarah.’
‘Quite,’ Beattie replied, as though it were a mere detail.
Raven struggled to find his voice through anger and grief. ‘My God, man. The only woman you didn’t kill was Graseby, yet you told me I had. Did you think I would never find out?’
‘As you suggest, I cared not. But I knew that believing it would make you most obedient, almost as obsequious as you are towards that bombastic and self-regarding prig you work for.’
‘Self-regarding? You murdered Sarah, Rose Campbell and Spiers, merely to silence them.’
‘Their sacrifice is unfortunate, but they forced my hand. I am on the cusp of remarkable things that will bring untold benefits. For a housemaid or a publican to have stopped my work would have been a disaster.’
Beattie satisfied himself that the bonds around Raven’s wrists were tight and began binding his ankles.
‘You, by contrast will not be a great loss. You would not have made a good doctor, Raven. You let sentiment hold you back: sentiment and sympathy. To truly succeed, you must set the patients apart from yourself, and I saw no evidence you could do that, which is why you would never have been anything more than a nurse.’
‘Set them apart? You use them as subjects for experiment. You poisoned those women. Was it not enough to profit from their desperation by selling them a useless pill at exorbitant cost? Did you have to give them a painful death so that they did not come looking for their money back?’
‘That was not my intention. Again, you do not have any understanding. These were necessary sacrifices on the path to progress. I sought to get the measure right so that it might bring on premature labour without harming the mother. Imagine what a boon it will be when I perfect a safe and effective means to deal with the unwanted fruits of passion, to say nothing of a preventative check on the relentless spawning of the poor.’
Beattie stood up straight, standing over Raven as he lectured him. He always did love the sound of his own voice. Raven was keen to keep him talking, as his only hope of salvation lay in Simpson and McLevy getting his message via Jarvis and hurrying here in response.
‘I sold my remedy in good faith, Raven. If the pills did not get the desired result, I offered the operation. There were many who took formulations of my drug and, though it did not have the desired effect, they did survive to request the procedure.’
‘Which was when you killed them with your ham-fisted butchery.’
‘How else is one to learn but practice? And it is vital to perfect a technique before offering it to the wealthy ladies of the New Town. So who better to learn on than whores and housemaids, as the former will be buried unmarked and the latter buried unmourned?’
‘What about Graseby? Your technique was not perfected when you operated on her, for I know you have killed others since.’
‘That was something of an emergency. Her husband was apt to cause trouble so I had to act, and I knew that if she died, then either way it solved my problem.’
‘So the child was yours. You are an abomination, Beattie. Primum non nocere. Do you remember quoting those words to me? You say I am held back by sentiment and sympathy, but what is our purpose if not to alleviate suffering? To lengthen out human existence, not to curtail it? And to do those things, a doctor must not be apart from his patients, but one with them.’
Beattie sneered, ugly and yet amused. ‘You sound like your mentor: encumbered by emotion to the point of being unmanned. Do you think posterity will remember him just because he spared a few women an everyday and natural pain? I will grant you his chloroform has proven useful, but in the grander scheme, suffering has an important purpose, Raven. It is necessary. As is sacrifice.’
Raven swallowed, the fear gripping him as surely as the bonds. Beattie had said all he wished to, and was preparing for action.
‘What do you mean to do?’
‘Young Dr Duncan was right, though he spoke in jest. A footnote might yet be made of you in medical history. You will not be a doctor, but you will make a contribution as the subject of experiment.’
Raven’s eye was immediately drawn to the jars. He felt a growing panic, manifest in a struggle against his bonds, but his hands and feet were securely tied.
‘No, no, you misunderstand,’ Beattie told him. ‘The late Miss Fisher will fulfil that purpose adequately, for which I am grateful to her. Even with the Anatomy Act, cadavers for dissection are not so easy to come by. Whereas you, Raven, will provide me with something far more valuable: the opportunity to practise multiple surgical techniques on a live patient.’
He felt rough hands around his shoulders as Beattie began to drag him from the study.
‘I warn you,’ Raven said breathlessly. ‘You are already undone. When I left, Simpson had gone to fetch the policeman McLevy. I have left word for them to come to this address.’
‘Yet they do not arrive. But thank you for the warning: I shall extinguish the lights, so that if they do visit this house, they shall find me not at home. For the only lamps I burn will be down in my cellar, illuminating our work together.’
Raven saw the inescapable truth of it, and had no play left but to cry ‘Murder!’
Even as he shouted, he could tell his voice would not carry beyond the house. Nonetheless, Beattie stopped and crouched over him once again in order to stuff a handkerchief into his mouth.
This is how it ends, Raven thought. This is how it ends, as it was always destined to do. It was where his path began: with two bodies lying on a floor, one man and one woman. In the beginning, the man was dead, the woman alive, though scared and bleeding. At the end, it was the woman who was slain and the man bloodied but breathing – though only for now.
Where it began: in his mother’s kitchen, watching his father beat and kick her, oblivious of the blood and the screams, too drunk and blind in his rage to see that he would soon kill her.
Too drunk and blind to see his son approach from behind, clutching a candlestick, its round, heavy base to the top.
He had swung it only once, to the back of his father’s head. He meant only to stop him, but his blow was truer than intended.
You have the devil in you, she always said.
And in that moment, the devil claimed him.
Raven set out upon a mission to redeem himself, to become a doctor: to heal, to save, to atone. It was one of many fool’s errands in his life, for there was no redemption: only the twisting path that inevitably led him here to his final damnation.
He heard a whipping sound, something cutting through the air.
Beattie stopped. He let go of Raven, his eyes bulging as he clutched between his legs, a crippling, uncomprehending agony on his face.
He dropped to his knees, revealing Sarah behind him. She stood with a poker gripped in both hands, fire in her eyes.
‘I also have the wit to know that a preening onanist who regards himself a god does not gladly wait upon a housemaid,’ she said.
As these words met Beattie’s ears, the poker whipped through the air again, this time connecting with his skull.