Surgeons’ Hall

by E. S. Thomson

  ‘It’s him.’ She took a noisy gulp. ‘Dead!’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir. I only saw his feet, the soles of his boots. Oh, I can’t go back there. I can’t! Not this morning.’ I saw her gaze slither over to look at the gin bottle and the armchair.

  ‘You may stay here,’ I said. ‘For now.’ Gabriel and Jenny had appeared and were looking at Mrs Speedicut in bleary surprise. ‘Make sure she doesn’t drink all of this,’ I said, handing the gin to Jenny. ‘Hide it. And find her some work to do.’

  I took up my hat and coat and shouted for Will, who was already dressed and half way down the stairs. Two minutes later we were out of the door and heading towards St Saviour’s Street.

  ‘What is it?’ said Will. ‘Did she say it was a body?’

  ‘Yes. More or less. But I don’t know whose it is. Do you have your keys?’

  In the event we did not need them, for Mrs Speedicut, the first to arrive that morning and also the first to leave, had raced out into the cold morning leaving the door ajar. There was no one else about. The hall remained unswept from the night before – the woman evidently too lazy to do it when it was supposed to be done. I was not surprised. I had been acquainted with her all my life and knew her for a lazy slattern. The place was in darkness, for it was too early for the dawn to give us any light and the only illumination came from the lantern Mrs Speedicut had brought through from the scullery. She had left it on the porter’s chair, the flickering candle causing shadows to leap like demons about the walls. The two twisted skeletons so beloved by Dr Crowe grinned down at us from their glinting glass case, their bones parchment-yellow. Mrs Speedicut’s broom lay abandoned in the middle of the hall, her mop and bucket flung to one side. From where we stood at the foot of the stairs we could see nothing. There was no body, nor any sign that there had ever been one.

  ‘It’s all in her imagination,’ said Will. His voice was loud and echoing in the dark. ‘I’m hardly surprised. This place is enough to give anyone the frights – especially at this time in the morning. Come on, Jem. There’ll be a fresh pot of coffee ready by now and we can pick up a warm loaf from—’

  ‘When I asked who it was she said she didn’t know. She said she could only see his feet. “Only the soles of his boots.”’ All at once I caught a whiff of bowels upon the air, and my boot slipped on something wet. I looked down, and saw a pool of liquid. Beside it, a rag, stained with blood. And then I looked up.

  I remembered how Will had once admired the whorl of the stairs, the way they curved elegantly upwards towards the luminous cupola at the top. Now, that graceful sweep of polished wood framed the body of a hanged man.

  We took the stairs two at a time. I saw the threadbare coat, the collar high at the neck, the grubby shirt and neckerchief. The face above it was purple and swollen, the tongue a black protruding mass. The eyes bulged, scarlet with congested blood. The rope that held him was tied to the banister.

  ‘We must cut him down,’ I said.

  ‘But what about the police? Surely this time—’

  ‘I must examine him, preferably before anyone else does, since I seem to be the only person willing to admit that something is amiss at Corvus Hall. Besides, we cannot just leave him.’

  ‘Who would do this?’ said Will. He could not take his eyes off the dead man’s face. ‘Is it possible that he did it himself?’

  ‘It is possible. But I think it is not probable. I didn’t know Dr Wragg, but what I saw of him does not lead me to think of him as a man who would take his own life. He was an old man, he was doing what he most loved, what he had done all his life. Why would he kill himself? And in so public a way too.’ And yet, I thought, the alternative was murder. Dr Wragg led a solitary life, from what I could make out. What might he have done to provoke such hatred in someone else that they were prepared to kill him – and in so brutal a way too? But I would have a clearer idea of what had happened if I were able to look at him.

  The body did not weigh as much as I had expected, though it was cumbersome and we struggled to draw it up and over the banister.

  ‘Should we call Dr Crowe?’ gasped Will. ‘He will be in his own wing of the building, surely. Perhaps he saw or heard something?’

  ‘Unless Dr Crowe is the murderer,’ I said. ‘Though I admit that seems unlikely, given how many years the two men have worked together.’

  ‘Besides, surely a small man like Dr Crowe would not have the strength to overpower another, wrestle him into a prepared noose and toss him into the abyss.’

  ‘That’s true enough,’ I replied. ‘And yet anyone might have the strength for such an undertaking if they plan it well and if they’re determined.’

  At that moment I heard a door open, and quiet footsteps came along the passage at the top of the house. We turned, both of us, Dr Wragg’s body half draped between us across the banister. A face, white and textured, emerged out of the gloom. When he saw us he stopped dead. He put out a hand, to steady himself against the wall, as if he feared he might be about to faint.

  ‘Dr Strangeway,’ I whispered. ‘Help us! Please, sir!’

  We laid Dr Wragg down on the floor. He appeared to be wearing the clothes of a much stockier man, his body layered with shirts and waistcoats so that he was greatly padded, perhaps against the cold. It was as if the burly, muscular man he had once been had wasted away to nothing but skin and bone, so that he was, in death, a little old man in a suit of clothes made to fit his former self.

  Dr Strangeway bent down, his fingers quick about the body. ‘The hand,’ he whispered. ‘The hand, and the face. Are they . . . are they—?’ He fumbled at Dr Wragg’s sleeve. ‘Thank God,’ and turned the head slightly so that he could see the face. ‘Oh, thank God! Thank God!’

  I pulled at the noose, eventually managing to loosen the rope enough to get it over the poor man’s head. ‘He is long dead,’ I said. ‘See how the rope has cut into the neck? How the face is livid, the body stiff?’

  ‘Who would do such a thing?’ said Will.

  ‘We must take him downstairs,’ I said. ‘The porter will be in soon, and then the place will start to wake up. The constable must be called—’

  ‘The constable?’ said Dr Strangeway. ‘But surely—’

  ‘He must be summoned, sir,’ I replied. ‘There is no alternative. Perhaps you could tell Dr Crowe too. Quickly now,’ I said to Will as Dr Strangeway hurried away into the dark. ‘We have very little time.’

  We bundled up the body and carried it down the stairs, across the vestibule and along the passage to the dissecting room. Will lit another lantern and brought it over to the table.

  ‘I can tell very little,’ I said, poring over Dr Wragg’s body, ‘without seeing him unclothed and in full light, but we must do the best we can.’ I saw that the rope had burned the skin at his neck, the wrinkled flesh rubbed red and bloody.

  Will looked away. ‘The face,’ he said. ‘I cannot bear to look. The poor fellow!’

  I rummaged my hands through his clothes. A pocket book containing a few shillings, a ball of wax, a piece of lower vertebra, yellow and shining, as if he had kept it in his pocket for years, worrying at it with his thumb and finger. Other than that there was nothing. I looked at his hands. They were stained with tobacco, the fingernails grubby, but there was no sign of violence, no skinned knuckles or broken nails. Whatever had happened to Angus Wragg had taken him unawares.

  ‘There is a bruise here,’ I said. ‘Against the temple. It may very well have occurred as he fell, or it may have happened before that. Perhaps he was knocked unconscious and then the rope tied about his neck. It would allow a weak man, or a woman, to hang him – I can’t see how anyone would manage it otherwise.’ I pulled my magnifying glass from my satchel, and peered through it at the old man’s neck. ‘It’s hard to say,’ I whispered. ‘But I think there is something—’ I took out my tweezers and a sheet of paper. Behind us, I could hear the building awakening. They had taken longer than I had expecte
d – had Dr Strangeway really gone straight to Dr Crowe as I had asked? I could hear voices and footsteps. I turned my attention to the task in hand, plucking two thin blue strands from the damp raw skin of the old man’s neck. I folded them up in the paper and slipped it into my pocket.

  ‘What is it?’ said Will.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘But I think there is a chance that Dr Wragg was strangled – by something other than a rope. I found the same strands on the raw flesh at Wilson’s neck.’ I slipped my magnifying glass away as the doors flew open. ‘But that is between you and me.’

  ‘I heard. Is it – it can’t be—’ with rapid strides Dr Crowe crossed to the dissecting table. He stopped before the body, his face anguished. His eyes filled with tears. ‘Oh, my poor dear friend. You should have come to me. I would have helped you.’ He took the old man’s hand.

  ‘It is either self murder,’ I said. ‘Or—’

  ‘Or what?’ said Dr Crowe sharply. ‘Dr Wragg had cancer. He had told only me and Dr Cruikshank. We tried to help him as best we could. We operated. But we could not stop it.’ He shrugged. ‘He was an old man, and in a great deal of pain. There was nothing more we could do for him.’

  ‘Opiates?’ I said.

  ‘In heroic quantities and for many years. It may well have altered the balance of his mind. And Dr Wragg had long since stopped believing in God, so that would not have stopped him from taking his own life if he chose to. I have no doubt he found he was no longer able to bear the pain.’ He released Dr Wragg’s hand. ‘He often spoke of taking his own life, though I never expected him to do so. And so there will be no talk of murder, if you please. And now,’ he took a deep breath, ‘if I could be alone with him for a moment.’

  ‘The constable must be called—’

  ‘I have sent a boy for him.’

  Lilith, Sorrow and Silence entered the dissecting room. Dr Crowe motioned them closer. ‘Oh, but sir,’ said Will. ‘Is he really a sight for . . . for ladies?’

  ‘My daughters are strong in spirit, Mr Quartermain. They have seen enough of the dead not to fear them.’

  The three women glided closer, their faces expressionless. We moved away, leaving Dr Crowe and his daughters standing for a moment over the body of their old friend.

  The door to the dissecting room was locked by Dr Crowe until the constable came. Will and I went upstairs to Will’s room above the anatomy museum. ‘Suicide?’ he said.

  ‘It’s possible. No doubt Dr Crowe believes it.’

  ‘Unless it was he who killed the fellow,’ said Will. ‘But what did you find?

  ‘I need your microscope.’

  There was evidence that Halliday had been working late. His desk was busy with papers and books, a box of microscope slides, a bottle of iodine and a spleen floating in a glass jar. I was glad he was not in yet; for all that I liked the fellow I did not want him privy to our conversation. I took the fold of paper from my pocket. The fibres I had plucked from Dr Wragg’s neck were almost invisible to the eye, and I was concerned in case they blew away. I held my breath, peering through my magnifying glass, my tweezers poised. At first I thought I had lost them, but there they were. One. Two. No more than mere hairs. I bade Will find a clear slide for the microscope and then we were ready. I hardly knew what they would tell me, only that looking at their colour, the shape of the fibres close-up might tell me more than I might learn with my magnifying glass. I adjusted the focus, the great brass eyepiece moving down, trained on the slide below. The fibres were smooth, a deep sky blue, though darker toward one end where they had absorbed some of the blood and fluid from Dr Wragg’s neck. Silk? I was sure I had seen something of blue silk recently but I could not place it. I let Will take a look.

  ‘You think he was throttled by something other than the rope that hanged him?’

  ‘Yes. A scarf or a shawl, perhaps. The flimsy sort women wear sometimes.’

  ‘You think a woman did this?’

  ‘I think it was a woman’s scarf. I don’t say it was a woman who did the throttling, though it is not impossible by any means. There were no abrasions to the throat, no claw marks, which is what one might expect if he was conscious when he was attacked. So we might assume that he was not conscious – you saw the bruise to his temple – in which case either a man or a woman might have the strength to hang him.’

  ‘Then why throttle him at all? Why not just hang him?’

  ‘And if it was only throttling that was required then why hang him too?’

  ‘To make sure he was dead?’

  ‘Possibly. Perhaps to make it look like suicide. Perhaps the strangling was necessary to the perpetrator, but the hanging was done to conceal the murder. Certainly with suicide the police don’t bother themselves to look for the culprit. As for the body of Wilson – and yes, I am sure it is him, as he is the only one missing who had been whitewashing the dissecting room – there was enough evidence about the neck to see that the muscles were bruised, the windpipe crushed even though the flesh of the head and throat had been removed. Ritual strangulation, therefore, may be common to both. I found the same blue silken threads on Wilson’s neck as on Wragg’s. And “ritual” is the correct word to use too, under the circumstances. Both deaths, both murders, for that is what they are – were carried out by the same hand or hands—’

  ‘Speaking of hands,’ said Will, ‘if this were the same perpetrator then surely the right hand would be missing and the face sliced away.’

  ‘And yet it is not.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘There is time enough yet.’

  ‘Do you have any idea who?’

  I shook my head. ‘Not yet. And it is a wily adversary that would dress up a murder as suicide. Besides, if Dr Wragg wished to kill himself he needed only to take an overdose of laudanum. It does not make sense for him to hang himself. What medical man would choose such a death?’

  ‘Perhaps he ran out of laudanum and was overcome with pain,’ said Will. ‘Perhaps the laudanum he had taken put him not in his right mind?’

  ‘It’s possible,’ I said.

  ‘And besides, those fibres might have arrived there by some other means. It does not necessarily mean he was throttled by a silk scarf before he was hanged.’

  ‘Also possible,’ I said. ‘And you are right, we must not jump to conclusions.’

  Outside the night had grown pale and watery, a reluctant dawn leaching in from the east. I knew it would be a dark day, a day when lamps and fires smouldered continually, trying to add light and warmth but only contributing to the thickness of the dark and, by nightfall, the inevitable choking pall of fog.

  ‘Let’s take a look in Dr Wragg’s accommodation,’ I said. ‘Before the constable comes, for he is bound to do the same.’

  Dr Wragg’s room seemed more forlorn than ever now that he was not in it. The stove was cold, the room icy. My breath bloomed in the air before me.

  ‘How did he bear it here?’ said Will, looking about. ‘And what a paltry reward this little attic is for all his years of work.’

  I was wondering the same thing, though I had the feeling that Dr Wragg had wanted no more from life than what he had ended up with.

  The room was no different to the last time I had seen it: untidy, with a miscellany of bottles and books lining the shelves, the bed rumpled, the workbench scattered with all the accoutrements of anatomical preservation. I spied a ledger showing which specimens he had prepared for which students. The last name in it was Wilson’s, dated some three days ago, but I could see nothing that might tell us what had happened last night, or why. There was a pen and an open inkstand on the desk. Beside it, a sheet of yellowed paper bore a dozen or so scribbled words. He had started writing a note to Dr Crowe, though he had got little further than the name and date – the previous night at ten o’clock. Had something – someone – disturbed him? ‘The matter is now urgent. We have in our midst—’ What was he referring to? An imposter? A murderer? Had he discovered something? So
meone? Was that why he had died?

  An empty bottle of laudanum rolled beneath the bed, another, half full, stood upon the wash stand. A large heavy book lay open on the floor beside the desk. There were books everywhere, but this one seemed out of place. It was a Bible. And yet Dr Crowe said that Dr Wragg had long since put aside any religious convictions. Why would Dr Wragg be looking through a Bible? I picked it up. The name inside the cover was J. H. Franklyn, beneath this were the words Surgeons’ Hall, Edinburgh, 1830. One passage had been underlined – recently, it seemed, for the ink was quite fresh – Deuteronomy, chapter 32, verse 35. ‘To me belongeth vengeance and recompense; their foot shall slide in due time, for the day of their calamity is at hand, and the things that shall come upon them make haste.’

  Something crunched beneath the heel of my boot. I bent down and picked up what looked like a broken tooth, embedded in some sort of dark wood.

  ‘What is it?’ said Will.

  ‘It’s a part of Dr Wragg’s dentures,’ I said after a moment. I slipped the bizarre relic into my pocket. ‘I think it more than likely that he was murdered here and then dragged out onto the stairs.’

  Two murders. And yet what could Dr Wragg possibly have in common with Wilson? A young uninspiring medical student and an old man at the tail end of an inauspicious career. I could not figure it out.

  Downstairs the constable had arrived. Dr Crowe was explaining about Dr Wragg’s cancer, and the man was nodding and writing slowly and methodically in his notebook. He looked worried, staring around at the surroundings – a display cabinet of monkey skulls, the skeletons of an ostrich and a flamingo – as if he expected them to burst into life and start dancing and squawking before him. The pair of twisted skeletons stared down at him, their spines snaking, their legs tangled, their jaws wide and cackling. Sorrow and Silence were standing beneath the wall clock, their faces impassive, Sorrow with eyes fixed upon the opposite wall, her dead pupils cloudy and pale beneath half-closed lids. She seemed tense, as if alert to every sound, every whispered word, every footstep, smell or touch. Silence was watching the constable. When she saw me, she smiled, her face lighting up. The sisters were more beautiful than ever that morning, their pallor accentuated by the darkness and by the crimson inkiness of their lips, their black silken hair, the jet droplets they wore at their ears shining like beetles. Skinner appeared, along with the head porter. Bullseye whined and pulled on a leash at his side. Dr Cruikshank was there too now, though he had clearly not had time to attend to his toilet – something I assumed was a protracted and elaborate affair – for he was looking pale and haggard. His hair was wild and stringy, his rings, jewels and frothing neckerchief all absent. Instead he appeared to have flung on anything that came to hand. He was looking at Lilith, who stood beside her father with her hand upon his arm, his expression a mixture of longing and sorrow. But when he saw that I was observing him he frowned and looked away.