The Haunted Martyr

by Kenneth Cameron

  ‘Exactly. Don’t want any trouble. Pro forma this—satisfying the old men in London.’ Maltby gave a braying laugh that he couldn’t have meant, as the moment he was done his mouth fell into a rather petulant baby’s pout. Donati continued to stare at him. Maltby looked back and curled one of his lips. ‘No suspicion of anything off, I hope. I speak for the consul when I say that.’

  ‘I have seen nothing to suggest anything “off”. I speak for myself.’

  ‘Well, I don’t want to be stuck with a lot of police gibberish that will cause some private sec to the under-sec to write a memo. We’re here to tell London that the old fellow died the natural, no suspicions, everything above board. Right?’

  ‘I trust you do not mean to imply that proper police procedure should make way for your dislike of complication.’

  Maltby looked at him for long enough to show that he was English and Donati, after all, was Italian and said to Denton, ‘You’re the man found the old boy.’

  Denton nodded.

  ‘You see anything off about it?’

  Denton had some views on what might have looked off, but he didn’t see any point in sharing them with these two. ‘I leave that for the police.’

  Donati laughed, replaced his pince-nez and said, ‘Signore Denton is too modest! He is a famous gentleman detective—the terror of Scotland Yard!’ He turned to Denton and waggled a finger at him. ‘I was in Newcastle-upon-Tyne when you at last caught Satterlee. Ver-r-r-y lucky!’

  Maltby now stared at Denton. It was clear that he didn’t like Donati and didn’t like what he’d just heard about Denton, either; Denton didn’t like him or Donati; and Donati surely was too taken up with himself to like anybody. The isosceles triangle expressed the three of them nicely. Denton stood. ‘If we have to do this, let’s get on with it.’

  Donati got up and arranged himself into a posture. ‘We shall visit the scene of death, and we shall have a look at the corpse.’

  Maltby frowned. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The corpse first, I think. It is on our route.’

  ‘My instructions don’t include a corpse.’

  ‘You may wait in the carriage, then. Shall we?’ Donati rose, draped his overcoat across his shoulders, pointed with his walking-stick, and went out.

  ‘Got a lot of brass, these Italians,’ Maltby muttered. He turned to Denton. ‘I asked to be posted to the Raj, I get this. I ought by rights to be an ADC in the Punjab—top ten in the examination.’ He came closer and lowered his voice. ‘Can’t say I like these poofy Mediterranean types.’

  ‘He’s doing his job, as I’m sure you are.’ Denton went off to get his hat and coat, tell Janet he had to go out. She was still comforting Lucy Newcombe and hardly glanced at him. He went out, feeling much put upon, and had started up the long, carpeted central corridor of the pensione towards Maltby’s distant bulk when another shape materialised from a doorway and clutched at his arm. ‘Aha!’ it cried.

  Christ, what now? Denton almost said it aloud, caught himself and stepped back. The figure turned into an attenuated man in his sixties, unquestionably English, who was red with exertion or embarrassment and who now hissed, ‘I had to come! I know it’s early, but I had to come.’ He pulled his hand away. ‘I’m Fanning, International Society of Super-Normal Investigation. Ronald Fanning.’ The emphasis suggested that Denton ought to recognise the name.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t—’ Denton looked up towards Maltby and waved his hat in that direction. ‘Somebody’s waiting for—’

  ‘An absolutely fascinating case.’ Fanning, oblivious to Maltby, had his hand on Denton’s arm again. ‘The old man, Lord Easleigh, the late Lord Easleigh—you found him, isn’t that right? I had to come at once. Has he come through? Sometimes they come through immediately after passing over, perhaps some reluctance to, mm, as if perhaps regret—Did he come through?’

  ‘Come through what?’

  Fanning stepped back. ‘My dear fellow! You are a psychic investigator, are you not?’

  ‘Not, um, really.’

  ‘You’re writing a book.’ It sounded like an accusation.

  ‘If I’m ever allowed to get to work, yes. Right now—’ He waved the hat again towards Maltby.

  ‘I’m dreadfully let down that Easleigh didn’t come through. He had definite psychical affinities. I spoke with him several times—said he was haunted, spirits tormenting him, things of enormous scientific interest. I’d pencilled him in for a formal investigation. Now he’s passed over and you say he didn’t come through.’ Fanning shook his head as if he were deeply disappointed in Denton.

  ‘I really have to go.’

  ‘Perhaps he will come through, however. You must stay alert—attentive, open. Have you had spirit messages before? Perhaps he needs time to accommodate to his new surroundings. I think the services of a trustworthy medium might be productive. You know of Signora Palladino?’

  Denton was moving up the corridor; Fanning trailed half a step behind, head bent forward, one hand at Denton’s sleeve as if he were making a touch. He gabbled on, his voice urgent, assured: they could go together to the medium, Signora Palladino; time was of the essence, before the ether lost the impression of the death.

  When Denton reached Maltby, he said, ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘And about time, too.’

  Fanning held Denton’s arm. ‘We must see her soon. Today.’

  Denton detached himself. ‘Why don’t you leave your card.’

  ‘But this is so vitally—’

  ‘Your card,’ Denton said over his shoulder, letting Maltby shove him through the door. Fanning tried to come right behind him, but Maltby threw a kind of American football block and came next, and Fanning was left to patter down the stairs behind them, trying to sound urgent and important. Donati was waiting at the kerb with a carriage; he surprised Denton by grasping the situation at once and letting Denton and Maltby pass and then stepping in front of Fanning and saying in a surprisingly authoritative voice, ‘Capitano Donati, Carabinieri! Official business, signore! Stand back.’ And he leapt into the carriage and told the driver to go.

  They went up the Via Toledo, Donati amused, Maltby glowering. Halfway along that broad, busy street, Denton thought suddenly, Ronald Fanning, oh hell! He remembered who Fanning was: he had a letter of introduction to him. An authority on all things super-normal. And Denton had brushed him off. Oh, hell!

  Their destination was a rather frivolous-looking building near the museum that proved to be the morgue, a small palazzo with a lot of scrolls and cupids somewhat the worse for soot. The upper floors seemed to belong, if Denton’s crude translation was right, to a Division of Non-Edible Marine Products of the Office of Industry and Labour; the basement and, as it turned out, a floor below were the morgue’s. Donati seemed to know exactly where to go, and he led the way, his stick tapping, his overcoat billowing behind him like a cape. Maltby’s heavy tread came right behind. Denton, leaving it to the two of them to make a race of it, came more slowly. He was still tired, not at all eager to spend the morning looking at death with two much younger men he didn’t like. They went through a portiere’s door, then down a corridor, past a guard who insisted that they sign a register, and so to a stairway, down whose steps the smell of death’s formulary was first met—carbolic, formalin, ammonia, decay.

  The morgue’s premises surprised Denton by being as modern as any he’d seen in England, certainly more so than London’s police morgue. The air was cold, like the interior of a closed house; the ammonia smell came from a rather efficient cooling system. He wondered what he had expected instead—medieval vaults? Catacombs?

  ‘You wish to remain outside?’ Donati was saying to Maltby.

  ‘In for a penny, in for a pound.’

  ‘You have looked at a corpse before?’

  ‘Of course I have!’

  Donati shrugged, cocked an eyebrow at Denton, twitched his moustache to one side.

  An old man in a dark smock and grey trousers, carpet s
lippers worn against the cold of the stone floors, led them through double doors into a long chamber with a low, slightly vaulted ceiling, the walls painted grey-green to shoulder height, tan above. Wooden tables lined the sides, most with mounded shapes under slightly, probably permanently, grubby sheets, the effect that of a medium’s apparition: suggestive bulges—feet, nose—and a lot of cloth. Electric lights hung by cloth-covered wires from the ceiling, their frosted tulip globes hurtful to the eye.

  A balding man in a black cutaway was standing at the far end of the aisle between the rows of feet; he now came towards them and murmured with Donati in Italian, turned to Denton and Maltby and said, ‘I have little bit English only. I am Dottor Vinciani. I am physician of the polizia.’

  He beckoned with his whole hand, the fingers folding into the palm, opening, folding. He had prepared, apparently; there was no fumbling under sheets or looking at records. He took them directly to a table well along the room and pulled the stained grey covering down to the breastbone underneath.

  ‘L’inglese,’ he said to Donati. ‘I know nutting ’bout a milord; questo uomo qui se chiama “Fra Geraldo”.’

  Denton got the last, also ‘inglese’, ‘English’. He said, ‘He called himself Fra Geraldo. He was some sort of monk.’

  ‘Certainly not,’ Maltby said.

  ‘Well, he dressed like one. In a robe. He told me to call him Fra Geraldo.’

  Donati sniffed. ‘I think this was a fragment of his imagining.’

  ‘Figment,’ Maltby said. ‘Figment, old boy—you said “fragment”.’ He winked at Denton.

  Donati frowned. ‘Touché, man ami!’ He murmured something to the police doctor, who gave Maltby a severe look. Denton was leaning over the corpse’s head to study the injury to the right side of the forehead. Still bending, he looked up at the doctor. ‘What’s the cause of death?’

  ‘He fell!’ Maltby snarled.

  The doctor was tapping his own neck. ‘Broken, ah—?’

  ‘Neck? How did he break it?’ The doctor looked puzzled; Denton appealed to Donati, who translated. The doctor spewed a stream of rapid Italian and Donati said, ‘He thinks the fall down the stairs.’

  ‘What I said!’ Maltby cried.

  Denton was frowning. He looked at the doctor, found that he, too, was frowning. Denton said, ‘He told you more than that, didn’t he?’

  ‘Merely technical matter. Which vertebrae were affected, the result, et cetera, et cetera.’

  ‘Ask him how in his fall down the stairs he broke his neck. I mean, exactly what motion broke the neck—hitting the head? Or hitting his neck? Or what?’

  Maltby said he really had to be back at his shop soon, but Donati spoke to the doctor, who, instead of being annoyed, seemed to warm to Denton and began to lecture him. Most of it was in Italian, but where he knew the words he repeated himself in English, with demonstrations—the twisting of the head, the sideways blow that had left the contusion on the forehead, a head-over-heels tumble symbolised by spinning his hands one around the other. He finished by touching Denton’s chin and the back of his head and pantomiming a quick twist. ‘So, he turns—cosi—the head right, the body left—crik-crak—broke, eh?’

  ‘And you have—mmm, Lei a…aperti… the neck?’ Denton used his finger as a scalpel to mime cutting into his own neck.

  ‘Ah, si, si! Vogliete vederla? Guarda—’ The doctor rolled the head and the torso, indicating to Denton to help him lift the right shoulder; a long cut at the back of the neck appeared, the severed edge of skin surprisingly thick, bloodless, grey. The doctor took a wooden pencil from his breast pocket and used it as both probe and pointer to show things that Denton didn’t see even when they were pointed out. Maltby turned away with an impatient hiss, but Donati, too, bent in close, then sidled around the table to the doctor’s side.

  ‘I don’t know what he’s showing me,’ Denton said.

  ‘A twisting of the spinal, mmm, chimney—’

  ‘Column.’

  ‘Ah. Yes, the—do you say spinal nerve? Ah, it is “cord”? Yes, twisting—see, he says, the colouring. With a glass, he sees torn fibres. He says it is definitive.’

  ‘But it’s twisting—that’s definite? Twisting, not a blow right on the spine or something like that?’

  ‘He says twisting.’

  ‘And that’s common in falls?’

  Donati and the doctor talked. Donati’s eyebrows went up. ‘He says it is possible.’

  ‘But not common?’

  More talk. ‘Possible.’

  They let the body back down on the table; the doctor moved the head back to its position so that the incision was hidden. Denton pointed to the contusion on the forehead. ‘E questa?’

  The doctor touched his own forehead. ‘A stair.’ He slapped his forehead. ‘Cosi.’

  ‘There wasn’t much blood.’ The doctor looked puzzled. Denton, Donati and the doctor all talked; Denton finally got through the fact that he’d found the body and there’d been almost no blood from the wound. The doctor pushed out his lips, raised his eyebrows. ‘Possibile.’ He said something to Donati.

  ‘The police did not tell him this. They said there was blood. When the corpse came here, there was some little blood and they cleaned it. He wants to know what you are asking.’

  Denton looked at the doctor. ‘Was the old man already dead when he got that wound?’

  Donati translated; the doctor shrugged. ‘Dead, maybe—the—’ He tapped his neck. ‘—broke already, dies, falls more—’ He whacked his forehead with his hand.

  ‘But not that quick.’

  ‘Comè?’

  ‘He fell down one flight of stairs. If he broke his neck halfway down, wouldn’t he still bleed a lot at the bottom? Wouldn’t his heart still be pumping for a few seconds?’

  The doctor pursed his lips. ‘Possibile.’

  ‘This is getting us nowhere!’ Maltby growled.

  Donati twisted one end of his moustache. ‘To the contrary.’ He eyed Denton. ‘You raise a perhaps significant point.’ He said something to the doctor, who nodded as if agreeing. Donati touched Denton’s shoulder. ‘He will think about this.’

  ‘May we please in the name of God go!’ Maltby was already partly up the long room and pointing at the doors.

  Denton held his hand out to stop the doctor from covering the body. He searched his brain for the word the portiere had used. ‘Il cazzo,’ he said. ‘I want to see the cazzo.’

  Donati sniggered and punched Denton’s arm. ‘Naughty boy,’ he said.

  The doctor, unfazed, was pulling the sheet down the body as far as the knees. The twin sadnesses of old age and death were revealed: bloodless skin the colour of putty, wrinkles, bones poking flaccid skin like wave-washed timbers emerging from sand. Denton heard an intake of breath from Donati, and Maltby, who had come back down the room in a rage, muttered, ‘Oh, dear God,’ and spun around and ran for the doors.

  ‘What happened there?’ Denton said to the doctor. ‘Cosa…a succede—succedi?’ He couldn’t get the past of the verb for ‘happen’.

  The doctor used his pencil to point. He spread the loose, rubbery flesh of the upper thighs with his other hand and pointed to the long-healed, slightly lighter-coloured seam where the remains of the scrotum had been sewn together. ‘Here, the, mmm, sack, the—ah—’

  ‘Scrotum.’

  ‘Si, the testicles—taken off and mmm—’ He made a gesture, palm to palm. ‘Closed, eh? By a physician. Very nice, very good.’

  Donati murmured something; the doctor answered; Donati said, ‘He thinks this was a surgical removal. Maybe cancer or other medical explanation. Nothing to do with the death.’

  ‘How long ago?’

  ‘Long. Years. Maybe—twenty. More.’

  ‘And the cazzo?’

  The doctor made a tutting sound with his tongue, unclear whether he meant Denton’s Italian or the injury.

  ‘Very, mmm, rude. Con violenza—violent.’

  ‘Knife—coltell
o?’

  ‘Si, coltello, forse. Maybe.’ He pointed at the stump of the penis; all three heads were low over the corpse, the smell of death and chemicals stronger in Denton’s nostrils than the lingering odour, despite washing, of Fra Geraldo. ‘Guarda.’ Denton knew that the word meant ‘look’, but he didn’t know what he was to look at. Several sentences followed in Italian. Donati said, ‘He says this old man had his organ removed nastily. He shows us these bumps? lumps?—which he says are left from sewing together the remains with something coarse. Thread or string, maybe. But also he points to this flat place—see?—which he says may be from a burn. As if there was some trying to—I do not know the word, to—’

  ‘Cauterize? Close the wound with fire?’

  ‘“Cauterize”, what a fine word! Yes. To cauterize.’

  ‘Painful.’

  ‘Yes, he says agony.’

  ‘Who would do such a thing? An enemy? Punishment? Is this something Neapolitan?’

  Donati almost whispered. ‘The criminals here will do anything.’

  Denton looked at the doctor. ‘How long ago?’

  The doctor shook his head. ‘Long—long.’

  ‘Before or after the testicles?’

  Another shrug, a shaking of the head. Donati, straightening, touched the knot of his necktie, started to touch his moustache, then thought better of it and began to wipe his fingers on the sheet. ‘This is not, however, germane to our quest, Signore Denton. The state of his masculinity has nothing to do with his fall down the stairs, eh?’

  ‘How do we know?’

  Donati signalled to the doctor to cover the body. ‘It is intuitively obvious.’

  ‘I don’t much trust intuition.’

  But Donati was waggling his fingers at the doctor to indicate that he wanted to wash them; the old man was summoned, and he led Donati away through a door at the end of the room. The doctor, who had been tucking the corpse in, walked down along the table, head bent, the knuckle of one hand rubbing his upper lip, suggesting to Denton that he was less fastidious than Donati, and came around to Denton and took his arm. He stood there for three or four seconds and said, ‘E detective, signore?’ He used the English word. He meant, Was Denton a detective?