AT TEN I ATTENDED Lord Derby once again. This time I was not shown into the downstairs ante-room but directed straight up to the peer’s business room. The ante-room door, as I passed, lay ajar and I was afforded a glimpse of the leather case, like a hatbox, that contained Mr Kay’s measuring instrument. The land surveyor evidently was still waiting for his interview with his Lordship.
I had a further reminder of Mr Kay no more than three minutes later. The business room was empty as I was shown in and told that if I would indulge him for five minutes or so Lord Derby would join me to conclude the business at hand. I took a seat in front of the desk and settled down to wait – as one always waits on peers of the realm.
On the desk in front of me were several bundles of papers, tied with ribbons, being mostly parliamentary business or matters related to the county. The one nearest to me, however, was different. It was concerned with Preston, and I recognized it: it was the file I had last seen in Mr Matthew Thorneley’s hallway. I knew as soon as I saw it that I would not restrain myself. Listening hard for any approaching footsteps, I rose and turned over the top page, which was blank save for the identification ‘Private Instructions re: P.M. – Mr Kay’. The document immediately below this was a letter, which I rapidly read through.
I later obtained a copy of this letter as being of evidential interest. It read as follows:
To the Earl of Derby at Knowsley Hall, Lancashire.
My Lord: I am in receipt of your letter regarding the works at Preston proposed by Mr Scroop and others, and am sincerely flattered at the regard you express for myself and for my previous improvement projects, and gratified by your request that I participate in Mr Scroop’s scheme. However, I am presently engaged at Newry in Ireland in a most difficult engineering project which absorbs all of my energies at present. I can do no better therefore than to recommend to you a young man who has been in my employ. I refer to Mr Joseph Kay, who is a skilled surveyor and zealous believer in improvement. If you will send me your assent I shall direct him to wait on you at Knowsley.
I am your most obliged servant, Thomas Steers.
I had no time to look further into the file of documents, for now two sets of steps approached the door, and I hastily replaced the file’s title page and stepped back as Lord Derby and his legal secretary for the affairs of the county of Lancaster swept into the room. The business was summarily executed. I was handed a card with the words of a loyal oath, which I read with my hand on a Bible. His Lordship then pronounced me duly invested as a temporary incumbent, and presented me with my commission, a document furnished with elaborate decorative lettering, pendant seals, and the signature of Derby under the designation Lord Lieutenant.
When all was done, we shook hands and I left Patten House in a position which only three days earlier I had not the slightest inkling of: Coroner of the Duchy and County Palatine of Lancaster.
* * *
Scroop’s body was being kept under the care of the churchwarden at Kirkham and, as it is not in my nature to procrastinate, I had sent word even before Lord Derby had sworn me in that I would be inspecting the body during the second part of Thursday morning. Luke had agreed to come with me and to give his own opinion.
However, I had some other business in mind first.
‘Before we look at Scroop’s body we’ll be passing the mason’s yard,’ I told Fidelis as we rode into Kirkham. ‘I want to call there and talk to him, as he will have to give his testimony at the inquest.’
The stonemason’s name was Joseph Twiss and we found him kneeling in his yard chiselling letters into a smooth slab of granite. Skinny in body, he possessed a large head which, when he stood up, he canted forward as if to counter-balance the humped right shoulder. His body was all out of kilter, but the look in his good eye was lively and intelligent.
‘What can I do for you, gents?’ he asked.
‘A little information, if you please, Mr Twiss,’ I said. ‘Perhaps you remember that I was with the group of men from Preston who came out here the other day looking for Mr Abraham Scroop.’
‘Oh, yes, I do,’ said Twiss. ‘And you found him, too, knocked off his horse by a tree, I’ve heard.’
‘Just so. It is the kind of death where there must be an inquest to determine what happened, and I am holding it, you see. You must have been one of the last to speak to Mr Scroop.’
‘Happen I was,’ said Twiss.
‘Can you tell me the reason for your appointment with him that morning?’
‘He’d sent word to meet at the graveside of his baby. He wanted to give me a paper that he’d prepared with the words for its headstone.’
‘Can you show me the paper?’
‘I can do better,’ he said. ‘Come along.’
He put down his mallet and chisel and led us to the end of the yard where his store of flagstones lay in orderly stacks according to their size, with a number of rougher boulders interspersed. There was also a row of finished carvings – urns and garlanded tablets, and a remarkable angel with furled wings who rested on one knee. I stopped to admire the angel.
‘This is a fine piece of work,’ I said.
The statue had the preternaturally beautiful face and elegant neck of a young man in a Greek or Roman bust. The hands, however, though resting on the pommel of an unsheathed broadsword, were more like those of a girl. I touched one of them, to feel the almost silken texture of the stone.
‘The hands are my wife’s,’ said Twiss. ‘She had the fingers of an angel. Not ugly like mine.’
With a gappy grin he held up both hands. The fingers were large, knotted and much calloused.
‘Nevertheless, yours are the hands of an artist, Mr Twiss.’
‘I thank you sir. I like to think so. Now, this headstone. It’s over here.’
The stone that he showed us lay propped on a wooden pallet. It was no more than a foot and a half high, by a foot wide, and was etched with elegant flowing letters. The largest of these spelled out the name ‘LOAMMI SCROOP’ under which in smaller script ‘Born and died 1743’.
‘You completed the work?’
‘I did it the same day, before I knew Mr Scroop was dead. I’d have waited else.’
‘So this is the inscription he asked you to put.’
I lowered myself to the posture of Twiss’s angel and read the words aloud.
‘“Plead with your mother, plead.”’
A strange injunction. Luke, do you recognize these words?’
‘No, I cannot place them.’
‘Mr Twiss, did Mr Scroop tell you what they mean or why he wanted them on his son’s tombstone?’
‘He didn’t.’
I let my forefinger trace the curl and sweep of the lettering and found that the stone gave the same illusion as the angel’s hands, of being soft instead of hard.
‘First this peculiar name for the infant – Loammi – which we think biblical, and then the obscure inscription. Might it be from scripture also?’
‘You are asking the wrong person,’ said Fidelis. ‘My knowledge of holy writ is selective at best.’
‘But it is such a very bald injunction – “plead, plead”. Was Scroop in his right mind?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Luke. ‘I fancy the man was sending a message. It would certainly be useful to find out who it was for, and what the message means.’
* * *
Scroop’s body lay on a table in a damp, stone-walled room at the base of the church tower. Bell ropes mutely surrounded him, hanging down through slots in the vaulted ceiling. While Fidelis opened his medical case, took out a small candle and lit it, I cast my eye over the corpse. It was a study in the diminishment of mortality, for death had entirely undone the substance of the man. His confident living face had crumpled and his body seemed too shrunken, now, for the riding clothes he had died in.
The first thing we did was strip these accoutrements off him. As I went rapidly through his pockets – finding nothing of note – Fidelis used a measuring rule to take the dimensions of the livid head wound just above Scroop’s right eye. The dent in the forehead bone was two and three-quarters inches long, half an inch wide and a quarter of an inch deep.
‘The wound looks quite deadly,’ I said. ‘But is it actually serious enough to kill him?’
‘It might not be. The effect of a wound in the head is always variable. However, in this case, I would doubt it did for him instantaneously, as Harrod believed. On the other hand it would certainly have knocked him unconscious.’
He lowered his head and using the light of the candle examined in minute detail the wound, and then the rest of his head, with particular attention to the dead man’s mouth, nose and ears; but it was only on the left ear that he lingered.
‘Well, well!’ he said. ‘I wonder what’s here.’
He selected a pair of narrow tweezers from his bag and, inserting them into the ear, withdrew a plug made from a small piece of white cloth wrapped in a ball. He held the tweezers to the light and we saw that the cloth was darkly stained on one side.
‘That would be blood,’ said Fidelis. ‘And therefore I think we have found the true cause of death.’
As he often did, Fidelis was running strides ahead of me.
‘And that is?’
‘If I open the skull, I would expect to find that the brain has been pierced through this left ear by a long, thin, spike-like instrument, and fatally wounded.’
I formed the scene in my mind.
‘So at a place other than the spot where Scroop was found his attacker smashed in his head with some object, or knocked him down in such a way as to smash his head, then carefully killed him while he lay unconscious.’
‘And the manner of his execution?’
Only then did I grasp the import of this.
‘He died in exactly the same manner as the baby in the tan-pit!’
‘Exactly the same: through the ear with a long needle or spike.’
It took a few more moments before my astonishment cleared, and I saw the implication.
‘My God, Luke! I’ve never seen such a type of attack before, and now we have two. The deaths must be linked.’
‘I’ll go further, Titus. I’ll stake the life of the Sultan of Scrafton, and all the money he won for me, that they were done by exactly the same murderer. Now, if you will allow me, I shall open him up.’
I did not stay. Post-mortem dissections are hard on the layman’s stomach, so I took the opportunity to go to the largest inn in the town, where I engaged its biggest room for the inquest, and then sought out the constable whose job it would be to distribute jury-summonses. By the time I had re-joined Fidelis, I was glad to find him sewing the corpse back together.
‘It is just as I thought,’ he said, with much satisfaction. ‘A thin spike into the brain via the ear. The brain bled profusely inside the skull, which is generally fatal. He would have died very soon after.’
* * *
My first thought on reaching home in mid-afternoon was to tell Elizabeth about the infant Loammi Scroop’s strange tombstone inscription.
‘Tell me what you think,’ I said to Elizabeth. ‘I have seen the writing Abraham Scroop ordered for his child’s gravestone just before he was killed. “Plead with your mother, plead.” What can that mean? Plead for what?’
Elizabeth repeated the words softly to herself, and added,
‘Plead for her forgiveness is likely, I would say.’
‘For what offence, though?’
‘For some wrongdoing by Scroop himself. He’s asking the innocent child in heaven to intercede on behalf of his sinful father still on earth.’
‘Intercession is a papist notion, Lizzie. The Scroops were very much of the Protestant faith, you know.’
‘It is not very Protestant for the wife, as soon as her husband is dead, to destroy or dispose of all his possessions. It looks like vengeance, Titus, and “vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord”.’
‘Why would she seek vengeance?’
‘Suppose that he broke his marriage vows.’
‘Abraham Scroop? He gave his wife a string of children. You really think he was unfaithful as well?’
Elizabeth laughed.
‘Titus, my love, he would not be the first man to do both.’
Even when she is laughing at me, I love to hear it. I put my finger against her lips.
‘Are you mocking me, wife? In my eyes Scroop was a righteous man. We may not entirely approve his ruthless way of conducting business, but I am much deceived if he was an adulterer.’
‘Faithless men make deception their business.’
‘Maybe the point is not whether Scroop was deceiving her, but that Mrs Scroop might, rightly or wrongly, have thought he was. She may have overheard her servants gossiping. O’Rorke told me there was talk amongst the Scroops’ servants that he had a fancy woman.’
‘That decides the case. Servants always know what’s what.’
‘Well these servants seem more than a little fanciful. O’Rorke went so far as to suggest something untoward in the conduct of Dr Harrod and Mrs Scroop.’
‘Titus, this is not to the point. Whatever her own conduct, and whatever she believed about her husband’s, I do not think Mrs Scroop murdered her husband on the road out of Kirkham.’
‘Harrod might have. But he was on his rounds seeing patients. Let me tell you what else I have found out today, with Fidelis’s help.’
I told her of the spike-in-ear method by which Scroop had been killed, just like the tan-pit baby.
‘Fidelis considers with much reason that the two murders were necessarily done by the same hand. He believes it is something to do with the improvement of Preston Marsh, and not just the tannery.’
‘I can have no opinion on that, Titus my love. But it seems to me that if what Fidelis says is true you only have to catch Mr Scroop’s killer and you’ll have the one that killed the newborn in the tan-pit. That will be an excellent thing, after all the trouble the case caused you.’
‘Even if it turns out to be one of the tanners? I am very sorry to feel I may have been wrong about them. Not only was the little child found in their yard, but it is known the tanners hated the sight of Abraham Scroop. What’s more, they’re leather workers as well as tanners; they have strong needles and spikes in their gear as a matter of course. I have seen them in use.’
‘It would be a strange thing for Scroop, if he were wicked in that way, to be punished instead for doing something perfectly legal, such as improving the skin-yard.’
‘But, if you are right about him, fortune is evidently better advised than us. It runs its course and gets its way.’
* * *
I went into the office to confer with Furzey, and see what names he had for Saturday’s jury. Within half an hour we had made out the summonses and engaged a messenger to take them to the constable of Kirkham for distribution. I also made out witness summonses for Captain Strawboy, Dr Harrod, Mrs Scroop and Bartholomew Lock, Scroop’s foreman.
‘You won’t have heard the rumours, then,’ said Furzey, when we had finished.
‘About what?’
‘About Mr Scroop being attacked deliberately, and not killed by riding into a low branch.’
‘Who’s saying this?’
‘Everybody. It’s all over town.’
My first thought was that, despite our agreement not to speak of it, Fidelis had been expanding on his murder theory in some tavern. I had doubted my friend unfairly, as soon became evident, because the talk had in fact reached us from Kirkham. The late Mr Matthews’s gardener had brought some produce to market there, and reported that it was common talk in the Matthews house that the late coroner had believed Abraham Scroop was the victim of an assassin. It did not come out that the idea had come from his speaking with Luke Fidelis.
By evening the murmur of murder grew to something more like a roar, and my hopes of keeping it under seal until the inquest had vanished like smoke. Now all the talk in Preston’s taverns and coffee houses was of mortal force and malice aforethought, and there was much ado over it, too, at Moot Hall. The burgesses may often have had their differences and their cliques, but collectively they were a club, and they considered any act against one of their members to be an assault upon the whole. So it was announced they would sit in session the next morning to debate the emergency and, that evening, the Mayor sent for the town sergeant, Oswald Mallender, to demand that immediate action be taken to limit the danger of this terrible act. A simpering Mallender asked just what could he do? Thwaite (as Furzey was later told by his cousin Simcox) barked at him, with spittle flying, that he must take measures immediately, measures to satisfy the burgesses when they convened, and nothing short of someone in custody would do the job. In short, he must make an arrest.
In all the public discussions about who the felon might be, one name predominated. Had not the Irishman O’Rorke just been dismissed from Scroop’s service? Had he not made himself scarce and furthermore did he not have red hair, the sure sign of violent dispositions? Some of those in cock-fighting circles had grown fond of O’Rorke and did their best to speak up for him, but their voices could not outweigh the majority opinion – that Jon O’Rorke must have been the killer.
Mallender entirely shut his ears to this talk. It was in part because, absurdly, he considered himself independent of mind; but also because the theory that O’Rorke was the felon was no use to him now, since the Irishman had sailed away from Preston. Mindful of the Mayor’s express instruction to find the culprit, Mallender therefore fixed his mind upon another doubtful foreign character on whom he actually could lay a hand: Joss Kay. The land surveyor had been going around loudly complaining that Scroop died owing him money. Mallender had interpreted this to mean Scroop died precisely because he owed Kay money – from which a short step led him to form the idea that only Kay himself could have done the murder. When the sergeant heard report later in the evening that the young man had been seen near the bottom of Water Lane at midday on Monday, at the same time as Scroop’s riderless horse had appeared from the direction of Kirkham, and further that one witness actually saw Kay catch the reins of the horse, Mallender’s suspicion solidified into certainty.
In logic it made no sense, but logic is not the driver of gossip, or of prejudice, or even of political expediency. Joss Kay was a stranger, and strangers are always the first to be accused when accusation is called for.