He felt a gentle hand on his shoulder. Martha. He had not been aware of her return. Perhaps he had fallen asleep.
‘There’s someone here to see you, Dr Raven,’ she said.
‘Thank you, Martha.’
He got to his feet, aware that his hands were still shaking a little. They had remained steady when he needed them to, but it was as though a dam had broken and all the anxiety being held back was now slowly seeping through his system. Or perhaps it was merely the cold.
He stepped into the hallway, where he was surprised to find Jarvis standing before him. It seemed incongruous to see him anywhere but Queen Street, and looming in the gaslight he could almost have been a vision conjured by Raven’s over-wrought mind. There was no question but that he was real, though, and he was looking even more austere than usual.
‘I need to speak with Mrs Banks,’ he said firmly, taking off his hat.
‘She is indisposed.’
‘It is a matter of some importance, Dr Raven.’
The fact that Jarvis addressed him this way made Raven wary.
‘In truth, she has been taken ill. She is not fully conscious.’
Jarvis turned the hat in his hands, looking uncertain of himself. It was a sight Raven had never witnessed before.
‘Perhaps it is best that it comes from you,’ Jarvis said.
He cleared his throat.
‘Dr Banks is dead.’
SIXTY-FIVE
rchie’s was one of the more peaceful-looking bodies Raven had been confronted with. He was propped against his pillow, eyes closed, no evidence of writhing torment or the choking agonies Raven had feared might attend his passing. It would be important to convey this to Sarah. He could tell her Archie looked as though he had simply fallen asleep and never woken up. This was ostensibly true, but the actual nature of his death was more problematic, as indicated by the strong smell of chloroform pervading the room.
It was early morning. The sun had only just started to penetrate the mist as Raven and Jarvis strode briskly from Sarah’s home to 52 Queen Street, and the warm scents of Mrs Lyndsay cooking breakfast had greeted them as they entered the house. It had struck Raven that in an hour or so he would be expected to see patients as usual at the morning clinic. The house and the city beyond it were preparing to get on with a normal day, indifferent and oblivious.
‘I found him when I came in to ask if he felt strong enough to get up for breakfast,’ said Jarvis.
Archie’s right arm was extended, palm-up, a stock bottle of chloroform lying on its side a few inches from his fingertips. It had fallen from his grip, the stopper sitting in Archie’s lap. Half of the volume had soaked into the sheets and the mattress.
‘You had best let some air in here otherwise the pair of us will soon be on the floor,’ Raven said.
Jarvis assented with a nod, drew back the curtains and slid open the window.
In the brighter light, Raven could see from Archie’s pallor that he had been dead for hours. A wave of sadness passed through him as he reflected that he never really got to know the man, and now he would not have the opportunity.
Raven picked up the bottle and replaced the glass stopper.
‘What was he doing with the chloroform?’ asked Jarvis.
‘He had been using it to help him sleep. I suspect that last night it had its effect quicker than he anticipated, before he could put the bottle back on the bedside table. It spilled and he was overwhelmed by it.’
He wanted to place this explanation firmly in Jarvis’s mind. Raven did not want him, or anyone else, to guess what he truly suspected. One of the hardest things about what Archie had asked of him was the possibility that someone – but particularly Sarah – might deduce that he had deliberately ended his own life. She didn’t want to see him suffer, and she was preparing herself for life without him, but no one is ever prepared when the loss becomes real and final. To think that Archie had denied them more time together might only add to the pain.
It occurred to him that she never got to say goodbye, but his greater concern was whether she would live long enough even to find out. He would have to break it to her that she had lost the unborn child too. The one consolation was that Archie had gone to his death without knowing that. But for the chloroform, it might have been Raven’s painful task to inform Archie that Sarah had died, rather than the other way around.
Exhaustion was starting to hit Raven now, and with it the sense that everything was falling apart. Sarah had lost her baby, lost her husband, and might yet lose her life. There was no new disease to make Raven’s name, and the only fruit of his investigation might be that Simpson would dismiss him from his employ for going against his instructions. But he knew that he had to keep his wits about him, for there was still work to be done.
‘We should attempt to conceal what happened,’ he said, indicating the bottle. ‘Change the sheets, air the mattress. It would be easier on Sarah … on Mrs Banks,’ he corrected himself. ‘Easier on everyone if they simply believed that Archie’s time had come. He was, after all, very ill.’
Jarvis nodded solemnly, but as he did so, Raven noticed Quinton lurking outside the door. Looking, listening, taking note, as always.
Raven walked out of the bedroom and thrust the chloroform bottle into Quinton’s hands. ‘Here. Put this back in your stock cupboard,’ he said bitterly. ‘But before you do, perhaps you’d like to measure precisely how much is left in it, to keep your precious records straight.’
SIXTY-SIX
aven hurried back to Sarah’s bedside as soon as the morning clinic was over, just as he had done the day before. Mrs Sullivan had been good enough to sit with her. He knew there was little she would be able to do other than rush to Queen Street to summon him if Sarah suddenly deteriorated, but he would not have been able to pull himself away to attend the clinic otherwise.
‘There is little change,’ Mrs Sullivan said when he arrived.
Raven wondered whether this was good news or not. He could hardly expect her to be up and about her usual business given what had happened to her. Little change was better than sudden sinking. He would settle for that.
Sarah was still deathly pale, but her pulse was lower than the day before and there was no sign of fever. The abdominal dressing was dry, which concerned him. He had expected some drainage from the wound and the absence of any effusion could mean that pus was collecting inside.
Raven had sent word to Dr Ziegler that he could not come to the Maternity Hospital that day. Ziegler was an understanding fellow, but Raven knew he would have to find someone to look after Sarah soon. Perhaps he could send her to Queen Street when she was well enough to be moved. That would not be for some time, though. If ever.
He was finding it difficult to be optimistic, concerned that any complacency on his part could lead to disaster. But he also knew that all he could do now was await events, hope that he had done the right thing and that Sarah would recover.
‘I have made a pot of soup,’ Mrs Sullivan told him. ‘You should get something warm down you. You look nearly as bad as she does.’
As she said this, Raven tried to think when he had last eaten. After returning from Milton House yesterday, he had stayed at Sarah’s bedside and woken in the night having once again fallen asleep in the chair. Mrs Sullivan had made a meal for him at some point in the evening, but it had lain there and gone cold while he slept.
He ladled himself a bowl of soup and carried it from the kitchen into the bedroom, eating it from his lap as he sat in that same chair. He did not wish to admit it to himself, but he preferred to stay here and watch Sarah breathing, in case these proved the last times he might do so.
He had wolfed down half of it when he heard the jingle of the doorbell. He put the bowl down and was on his way to answer when Martha Dempster appeared in the hall, having let herself in.
‘How is she?’ she asked, an anxious look upon her face as though she expected bad news.
‘No worse. Some signs of i
mprovement,’ he said, although this sounded more hopeful than he felt.
Martha stood before him quietly for a moment, nodding. Then she spoke.
‘Dr Raven, enquiring about Mrs Banks is not the whole of my business here. I have received word about my sister.’
Raven was jarred by how Mary Dempster had vanished from his mind. It was as though he hadn’t thought of her name in weeks rather than days. All he had thought about was Sarah, and it felt as though nothing else mattered. And yet if he didn’t find Mary, he would never be able to prove to Simpson or anyone else what he and Sarah had discovered.
‘She is staying in the place she ran off to once before, when we previously had a falling out. I received a letter from her. It was waiting for me yesterday when I returned home. She asks for me to visit her, which seems odd to me. Why would she not simply come home?’
‘Where is this place?’
‘Off the West Port. A building in Warnock’s Close. In truth I am afraid to go there. It is a notorious part of the Old Town.’
Is there any other kind?, Raven thought.
SIXTY-SEVEN
he Lawnmarket was teeming as Raven crested the Mound, the throng spilling down onto Bank Street. It was a market day, stalls lining the street from the Esplanade to the Tron.
As he crossed towards George IV Bridge, Raven passed spatters of vomit and blood, interspersed with the mounds of horse dung that choked the gutter. Some people had evidently cracked open the ale casks early, or perhaps they had simply been drinking all night. He saw a fight break out or possibly resume, heard the crack of fist upon cartilage, saw blood spurting from a burst nose. Another staggering combatant was cradling a broken arm, his inebriation a greater impediment to his perambulation than his agonies. Drink was muffling the pain for now, but when it wore off he would likely be presenting himself at the Infirmary. Would that the vintners and tavern-owners spared a thought for the doctors whose task it was to fix the damage wrought by their customers, he mused.
Then he chided himself for this thought. How many times had he himself drunk deeply of their wares before ending up in a brawl? As many times as he had gone into a tavern in the express hope of starting one. Was this new perspective a sign of maturity or merely hypocrisy?
The brawl attracted the notice of a policeman on the other side of the throng. Raven watched him hurry to a colleague, one he recognised from being in McLevy’s company when he came to Queen Street. The first was speaking animatedly and pointing Raven’s way, then they both set off towards him, negotiating the bodies, stalls and barrows.
Their haste warned Raven that it might not have been the fight they were interested in. He didn’t think Flint would have said anything, as it would only rain down greater trouble upon his own head, but it was possible someone else had told McLevy about Raven’s visits to Fountainbridge after the robbery. There had been plenty of witnesses: the family decanted from their home to accommodate his patient, for instance.
He did not wish to wait and find out. He ducked out of sight behind a stall, keeping his head below the crowd as he ran towards a close off the Lawnmarket. He glanced back and confirmed that it was indeed him they were pursuing. Perhaps McLevy planned to prevail upon him to give up what he knew.
He stood tall so that they would see him enter the close, then ran down it at full pelt before skirting left when he emerged. He turned into a parallel alley and doubled back, describing a full loop before proceeding down the new West Approach Road.
Martha was correct that the West Port was an insalubrious part of the town, and no respectable lady would wish to venture into it alone. It wasn’t particularly safe for a respectable gentleman either, but Raven wasn’t sure he yet qualified. There were times when he was haunted by the vision, the fate that might await him down some gloomy alley, but also times when there was a dark want in him, a desire to be the thing good people feared when they ventured into such places.
He was familiar with Warnock’s Close from his schooldays not so far from here. It was one of the places he knew to hurry past should his route take him this way. The passage was barely wide enough for two people to pass each other, the clogged channel in its centre wholly inadequate to draw the contents of soil buckets out to the street. The walls were buckled, the building on his right looking in danger of collapsing into the equally creaking tenement on the other side.
As he hastened towards the door Martha had specified, a figure emerged to block his path: a scrawny, malnourished and filth-caked specimen gripping a blade. It looked like a common table knife that had been sharpened to a point, its handle no more than a wad of rags. He held it up before Raven’s face, a blast of alcohol accompanying his words.
‘Give me what money you have, or you will feel my knife.’
Raven held out his hands in a gesture of surrender. The would-be thief eyed his right hand eagerly as Raven reached into his coat.
He produced the Liston blade.
‘That wee skelf isn’t a knife,’ he said. ‘This is a knife.’
The cutpurse did not tarry to argue the point.
‘Run along,’ Raven muttered. He would likely encounter him again soon enough, or one of his colleagues would. It only remained to be seen whether it was in a hospital bed or in the mortuary.
He put the knife away but reckoned it might not be the last time he would have to defend himself before he left this neighbourhood.
Raven stepped into a stairwell on the right where the smell of urine was at least a change from faeces in the gutter. As he ascended, he heard retching behind one door, the sounds of congress behind another: male grunts and exaggerated yelps of female pleasure. He identified a professional performance, intended to hasten the conclusion.
The address he had been given was on the sixth floor. Simpson’s words were a mockery in his head as the climb tested his thighs, but the sixth floor wasn’t even the top of this ramshackle construction. It might have been once, as might the fifth or fourth, but more storeys had been added over the years, hence the buckling of the walls below.
He knocked on the appointed door, immediately hearing some movement in response to the thumps, but the source sounded lighter than a human on the move. It was not the tread of footsteps, but a sudden scuttling: birds perhaps, or cats. He thought again of the oddness of Mary’s request, which had rightly unsettled Martha.
The door was locked but it was a rotten, ancient-looking thing. It took very little effort to force it, the wood crumbling away from the lock, which clattered to the floor.
The smell hit him as soon as he opened the door, but it was not the only thing to come rushing his way. The scuttling sound had been at least two dozen rats, initially disturbed by his thumping and now startled by the sight of his presence. They were scurrying to get away, but he was standing before the only exit. He had to kick and stamp as they flowed towards him, though not all of them were skittish in the face of human interruption.
A hardy few were proving themselves reluctant to give up their feast.
She was lying with her back to him before an overturned chair, from which she must have tumbled. She was wearing the same style of dress he had seen draped over her bed: dark blue with white braiding on the cuffs. Raven stepped around to the other side of the body, causing the last of the vermin to scatter. He did not recall much about her face from their brief encounter at Broughton Street, but that would have made no difference. The rats had nibbled away at the exposed areas first.
He looked around the sorry little room. There was a makeshift bed upon the floor, only a pile of straw and some filthy sheets. There was a gin bottle and two glasses next to it on the bare boards, alongside a plate and a knife. Barely a crumb remained of whatever she had been eating. The rats had seen to that too.
The room’s only other piece of furniture was the table Mary had been sitting at when she fell. It had on it a pen, a bottle of ink and a pile of papers. Raven picked the first sheet up and read the heading:
MY TESTIMONY AND
CONFESSION
MARY MACDONALD
He rifled through the leaves, too impatient to focus in depth, individual phrases and details catching his eye. A brutal childhood in Glasgow, abandoned to an orphanage, adoption by Mrs Dempster, further cruelties inflicted upon her there. But it was not merely a catalogue of how she was sinned against. It was a stated admission of her crimes. A confession indeed.
Raven turned hurriedly to the final page.
I am about to take my own life because I am afraid of what I have become, and afraid of who I will hurt next. When Martha told me people had been asking questions about the deaths of my patients, I was forced to confront how I would feel were she to discover what I am and all that I have done. I write this not in the hope that Martha will forgive me, or even understand, but because I have come to accept that she deserves to know the truth.
He flipped back through the sheaf and started reading more closely. The stench in his nose was telling him he should take the pages and resume reading somewhere else, but he was impatient to find out all he could. However, he had barely begun before he became aware of the echo of voices from in the stairwell, the hurried thump of feet upon wood. He looked up to see McLevy’s man bound through the door. His colleague almost ran into the back of him as he stopped to take in the gruesome sight he had encountered.
‘Dr Raven, I am John Soutar, police officer and assistant to Mr James McLevy.’
‘I know who you are. It is as well you are here, as you can see, though you don’t know the half of it.’
‘Bind him, Tommy,’ Soutar commanded the other man. ‘And take care to bind him well. He is wanted for murder.’
Raven reeled, looking from Soutar to the corpse. He wondered for a moment whether Martha Dempster had somehow laid a trap for him but didn’t see how that could be or how it might profit her.
‘What are you talking about? This one’s been dead for days. I just got here. She took her own life. She has even left a testimony explaining why.’
The Art of Dying Page 30