Chapter One
He lay on his back in the centre of the floor, a dark crescent of blood about his head. Above the left ear a long metal object projected. His face – my God, I shall never forget it, nor would anyone else who looked on such a sight, for it was like nothing on earth I had ever seen. The eyes were blackened with blood, as if the sockets had been daubed with the stuff. The ears were missing, cruelly severed so that the wounds gaped in two dark gashes; the lips darned shut with six long, black stitches. They gave the face a crude death’s-head appearance, like a child’s drawing. Beside me, I heard Will give a faint moan, and fumble in his pockets for his salts. I was half tempted to ask for a whiff of them myself – and I with my years as St Saviour’s apothecary too! Why, I had seen faces so eaten away by the pox that it was impossible to tell where mouth ended and eye socket began. I had seen flesh corroded by gangrene, cancers swollen and pustulant – those were the wounds nature inflicted upon humanity with wanton capriciousness. But this? This was nothing one would ever find in nature. This was vicious and calculated, brutal and terrifying. This was man’s handiwork.
I leaned closer, until I was breathing in the iron reek of blood, the earthy odour of flesh and hair; so close that I could almost taste the fear that had broken from the skin as life left it. Between the blackened lips and beneath those taut strands of bloodied wool something pale protruded.
‘The tongue?’ whispered Will.
‘The ears,’ I said. ‘I believe they have been cut off and stuffed into the mouth, the lips sewn closed over them.’ The eyes too, I could see now, had been sutured with two crossed threads.
‘Dear God,’ said Will. ‘Who would do such a thing?’
I had no answer. ‘Have the police been summoned?’
Dr Hawkins, Angel Meadow’s physician superintendent, shook his head. ‘I thought it best to call you first,’ he said. ‘After what happened with Dr Bain at St Saviour’s last year – without you the matter would never have been resolved. But I will be sending Pole out for them directly. Pole!’ He waved a hand towards the shuffling attendant waiting in the hall. ‘Go along. The watch passes down St Saviour’s Street at twenty past five. Find the constable and tell him there’s been a murder at Angel Meadow Asylum. A doctor. Hurry now!’
‘And the body was found by whom?’ I said.
‘Mrs Lunge.’
‘Is she here?’
Dr Hawkins shook his head. ‘I sent her back to her room to lie down.’
‘She refused. She said she did not wish to be sedated whilst a murderer was at large about the place.’
‘Might she be prevailed upon to explain what she saw, how she came upon him?’ I had met Mrs Lunge many times. She had always struck me as a hard sort of woman and I had the feeling she would not blench at being summoned back to so horrible a scene.
‘I’m sure she will,’ said Dr Hawkins. ‘I’ll fetch her myself.’
The moment the doctor had gone I set to work. We had to move quickly – when the police came they would be all over the place, touching things and making a mess. I pulled out my lens, and the rolled canvas pouch that contained my pocket collection of scalpels, probes and scissors.
‘What’s this?’ said Will, pointing to the metal object that protruded from the head. He sniffed again at his bottle of sal volatile. ‘It looks like some sort of measuring instrument.’
‘It’s a set of phrenological callipers,’ I said. I crouched down to turn the head in my hands. I had seen those callipers – a long metal handle with a pair of blades projecting from one end like a pick-axe – and others like them, many times at Angel Meadow, though I had never imagined they might be used for such a purpose. I put my fingers to the wound. The handle hung down; the blades, closed so as to create a long spike, had been smashed through the left pterion – the thinnest part of the human skull. I almost vomited as my fingers felt the cold mush of blood and bone and hair. The blades had been driven into the head with a single blow.
‘There’s an artery directly below this point in the skull,’ I said. ‘Once ruptured, or severed, epidural haematoma is the only possible outcome.’
‘I assume you mean death,’ said Will. ‘Death is the only possible outcome.’
‘It is in this case. The blades of the callipers have been driven in right up to the hilt.’
‘And was it a matter of luck or judgement that the blades landed where they did?’
‘Impossible to say. Given how small the area is, it was possibly both. But look at the angle of the handle.’
‘Pointing towards us a little,’ said Will. ‘The assailant was directly in front—’
‘Anything else?’
‘He was right-handed.’
‘He?’
‘Would a woman really be capable of so brutal a murder?’
‘I think a woman might be capable of anything.’
‘Is strength required?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Only determination. And luck. Any higher or lower and the result may well have been nothing more than a severe fracture.’
Will took a deep breath and turned away. ‘God help me, Jem, but I cannot bear to look.’
‘Then don’t.’ I was bent over the corpse, peering at the gashes at the side of the head and noting the precision and neatness of the stitching – this was no ragged, hasty butchery, that much was clear. From my set of knives I selected a scalpel. Leaning close, I snipped off a length of suture from the corner of the sewn mouth. I folded it carefully in a scrap of paper and slid it into my pocket book. The stitching, and the severing of the ears, had been inflicted post mortem – there would have been much more blood otherwise. What had pooled about the skull was from the head wound only. I put out a finger and dabbed at the surface. The edges were almost dried. Close to the head, however, where the blood was most abundant, the stuff was still sticky, though a satiny meniscus, thick and gluey, had started to form. The face, despite its stitches, had a rigidity to it, the lips straining against their threads as the muscles had contracted in the early stages of rigor mortis. I moved the right arm. Its nascent stiffness supported my thoughts: death had occurred no more than three hours earlier. Two o’clock. Little happened that was virtuous at such an hour of the night.
‘Does the angle of the blades suggest anything?’ said Will.
‘Not really,’ I said. ‘But I would say that the assailant held the callipers like so.’ I clenched my fist, my arm stretched out behind me, my hand low. ‘And swung them up and through like this—’ I brought my arm round in an arc. ‘Plenty of momentum, plenty of force – a man, as much as an angry woman, could do it if they were quick enough.’
‘Their height?’ said Will.
‘Hard to say. Anything from five feet to five feet eight – my height. When the body fell backwards onto the floor it jarred the callipers and mangled the wound, so it’s impossible to be more accurate. There is one thing I’m reasonably certain about though. The attacker was known to the victim—’
‘How can you be sure it was not an intruder?’
‘In an asylum? People want to get out of a place like this, not into it. I think the blow was struck quickly, and hard, when least expected. Why would it not be expected? Because the assailant was known – and presumably considered unthreatening. Besides, the room is quite neat and orderly. There is no sign of struggle, no evidence of self-defence—’
‘What d’you make of that, then?’ said Will, pointing over my head.
Behind me, above the fireplace, the mirror was smashed into myriad shards. Knife-sharp, they radiated outward from a single point, a glittering spider’s web of cracks and fissures. ‘Mm,’ I said, turning back to the corpse. I pulled out my magnifying lens and examined the fingers. ‘No skin or hair beneath the nails. Scrubbed clean, in fact. In short, I’d say this attack was quite unforeseen.’
From somewhere outside I heard the bang of a door and the insistent jangling of keys. Dr Hawkins and Mrs Lunge? Pole and the constable? We would not be alone with the corpse for much longer.
Will was over at the fireplace. He reached forward and plucked something from the grate. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘What’s this?’ He held up a small rectangle of card. It was no more than three inches wide and four inches tall. ‘It looks like a calotype. A photograph. An old one too – hardly anyone uses the calotype method these days.’
I took the photograph from him. It showed a woman sitting alone on a high-backed chair. Her skirts were of a dark crumpled fabric, with the tight waist and fringed bodice that had been fashionable several years earlier. Behind her was a white sheet or curtain; beneath her feet were bare boards, and in her hands – what manner of horrible thing was it?
‘Who can she be?’ said Will, and then as if reading my mind, ‘And what in God’s name is she holding?’
I shook my head. There was no way of identifying who she was for her face had been burned away, consumed by the fire so that there was nothing above her shoulders but a ragged-edged space. As for what she was holding – a tangle of rope and rags, all mixed up with long strips of a curious black, leathery-looking substance. It was the most bizarre posy I had ever seen.
I am not a suggestible person. I pride myself on my rational and logical approach to life, and yet even I could not suppress a shiver at that strange ruined image. The hands were loose, the fingers languid against that horrible nosegay. The woman’s posture was half slumped, and yet erect, as though the only thing holding her up was the head-clamp photographers habitually used to keep the subject still whilst the image was forming. I opened my pocket book and slipped the picture inside.