Abney Park was immense, covering dozens of acres and including the graves of countless dead. If they couldn’t find some sort of record for Durst’s burial, they’d have no way to know where to find her grave. They couldn’t possibly hope to locate it by chance.
It was clear to Lily that the cemetery caretaker was not a stickler for cleanliness or organization. Durst’s burial had been recent. She could hazard a guess where she stood the best chance of finding those records and it wasn’t the file cabinet.
Lily sat down at the desk itself.
She found what she was looking for in the middle of the mountain of grimy papers piled on its surface.
“It says she’s ten yards north of something called ‘Path K’,” she reported before snapping the file closed and shoving it back into the pile.
Dr. Gardner flashed the lantern around the cramped interior, stopping at a map mounted on the wall. It was yellowed, crumbling at the corners and half-covered in notices.
“Here. Toward the north end.”
Strangford pushed shut the file drawer. It closed with an abrupt clang.
He flipped the bolt on a door at the back of the lodge and stepped through it, Dr. Gardner and Lily following.
They emerged under a sprawling oak tree, looking out over a wilderness. Graves rose like ghosts from the darkness, pale forms whispering into view from behind overgrown shrubs and slender trees, wrapped in shrouds of ivy.
The doctor selected two shovels from a pile leaning against the back of the building and set them over his shoulder. He paused, then plucked a crowbar up as well.
“Which way?” Strangford demanded.
“Over there.”
Dr. Gardner led them onto a tree-lined avenue that would have looked lovely in a city park were it not for the dead that lined the way. Lily moved past stone lions, their flowing manes mingling with dry grass. Stern angels dripping with moss watched their passage.
The silence was complete. It far surpassed the quiet of a Bloomsbury night, absent even the vaguest echo of wagon wheels or the hoot of a distant train. There was only the scratch of the tree branches and the rustle of dry leaves.
She thought of the illustrations in the tabloid press of a fanged monster looming over the supine form of a sleeping woman.
Lily did not think the killer they sought was some supernatural being. Men were far more plausible and certainly capable of acting like monsters.
However, in the night-shrouded atmosphere of Abney Park, on her way to remove a woman from her grave, the implausible became a bit harder to dismiss.
She shifted her grip on her staff and continued walking.
The avenue led to a clearing where an immense Gothic chapel towered unexpectedly, complete with spire and buttresses. The white tombstones surrounded it like worshipers at the feet of an ancient god.
Strangford walked through the center of the open ground. The doctor followed him, the shovels clinking softly as they bounced against his shoulder.
Lily paused, her instincts urging her to keep to the forested verge where she could conceal herself in the darkness. After all, how could they know there wasn’t some caretaker strolling the grounds or a constable set to watch the place and guard against exactly the sort of crime she and the others were here to commit?
There was a sound of scratching against stone. Lily whipped around and saw a fat brown rat haul itself up over the edge of a nearby mausoleum. It stared at her, whiskers twitching.
She looked out over the clearing around the chapel and realized she could see more of them, the movement standing out here in the stronger glow of the unimpeded moonlight. Dark, greasy bodies scurried between the graves, finding perches on top of headstones.
Their watchmen, charged with raising the alarm if danger approached.
She quickened her stride, hurrying across the clearing in Strangford and Dr. Gardner’s wake.
Beyond the chapel, the park grew wilder. Trees met and tangled overhead, casting the narrow paths into such deep shadows Lily could barely tell if she had wandered off the way.
The world was wrapped in a coat of ivy and moss, save here and there where the odd vigilant family member kept the resting place of some still-loved one clear. The rest of the grounds felt abandoned like the ruin of a lost civilization.
The shovels rattled as the doctor shifted his grip. He nodded toward an opening in the forest that grew around them. It was barely more than a darker gap between the trees.
“This ought to be Path K,” he announced.
It was thickly overgrown. Lily moved along the gravel-lined walk slowly, using her stick to avoid tripping over some unseen tombstone. The doctor kept the lantern shuttered. Lily could see the wisdom in that. They couldn’t afford more than a narrow beam without risking detection and the light would only make it harder for their eyes to adjust to the darkness. Seeing their way along the path was less important than spotting a fresh grave amid the riotous growth around them and that required a broader field of vision.
Without speaking, they split up, stepping off the path into the deeper verge. Lily felt her way around thick gray tree trunks and tilted mausoleums. Something cracked under her foot. She hoped it was only a tree branch.
“Here,” Dr. Gardner called softly, swinging the shovels and crowbar down off of his shoulder and planting them in the earth.
Lily moved to where he stood. There was a path cut through the brush and ivy, the ground churned up and muddy, showing where heavy foot traffic had recently passed through. At the end of it, under a thin alder tree, was a tumbled rectangle of fresh earth.
“There’s no tombstone,” she pointed out. “How can we be certain it’s Sylvia Durst?”
“We can’t.”
“So what do we do if we’re wrong?” she demanded as he yanked free one of the shovels.
“More digging,” he replied and thrust the blade into the earth.
ELEVEN
LILY STOOD AT THE edge of the path, watching the dig.
Strangford had shrugged out of his coat, tossing it over a tomb nearby before he picked up the other shovel. He and the doctor had already moved several feet of earth from the grave. It was mounded up beside them, illuminated by the narrow band of light from the lantern.
She felt useless. She wasn’t the medical expert who might be able to glimpse some new clue as to how the murder victim they were exhuming had died. Nor was she the one who could read the past with her hands. She couldn’t even say she was keeping watch, not as the rats continued to dart back and forth through the brush around them. She could see them in the branches of the trees, dark eyes glinting like wet pebbles.
She had nothing to offer but a vague and pointless sense of guilt.
Dr. Gardner grunted, his brow glistening with sweat in the occasional bands of moonlight that found their way through the twisted branches overhead.
Strangford dug with a grim determination, moving earth with the relentlessness and silence of an automaton.
She wondered just what they would find at the bottom of the hole they were opening in the ground.
Answers, perhaps, that would save Lord Deveral from hanging for a crime he hadn’t committed.
Maybe even the knowledge they needed to save Estelle’s life.
No, she thought firmly. She would not go down that path. To allow that hope a space inside of her would only lead to more heartache.
Or it could all turn out to be just a big, humorless mistake.
Strangford’s shovel struck wood with a dull, hollow thud.
“I think you’ve got something there,” the doctor commented.
They cleared the remaining earth away until the top of the coffin was fully exposed.
The doctor wedged the crowbar into the edge of the lid. He worked it, struggling a bit for leverage in the narrow confines of the open grave.
Lily moved closer.
There was a horrible crack, a scream of protesting metal, and the nails holding the coffin closed wrenched loose.<
br />
“I’ll require a bit of assistance.”
Beside Dr. Gardener, Strangford wedged his gloved hands under the lid. He hauled at it, his muscles straining under the soiled linen of his shirt.
It popped free.
The smell rose up like a cloud, reminding her of meat left too long in the icebox.
The worst of it dispersed, leaving a lingering foulness.
“Where’s the lantern?” Dr. Gardner asked.
Lily collected it and brought it over. Strangford climbed up to intercept her, putting his body between her and the dark hole in the ground.
She stopped. It was not because she had any fear of what she would see if she looked down into that grave. She was sure she had been confronted with worse. One did not try—and repeatedly fail—to avert all manner of disasters without coming across a fair share of corpses. Those had almost always been in a fresher state but also likely more brutalized than Sylvia Durst, who had died in her bed without a mark on her body.
It was for Strangford’s sake. If it gave him some kind of comfort to think she’d been protected from the worst of this endeavor, it was the least she could do after being the one to drag him out here in the first place. Her eyes weren’t going to tell them what they needed to know, anyway. It was Strangford’s hands they depended upon for that.
Strangford passed the lantern to the doctor, who opened the shutter. Light brightened the hole in the ground, spilling out across the surrounding cherubs and memento mori.
Rats scurried for darker spaces to hide in, eyes glinting.
Strangford moved to the edge, looking down. Lily took the opportunity of his distraction to slip a bit closer.
The body of a middle aged woman lay in the opened coffin. A bit of dirt had crumbled onto her cheek, which was colored a mottled purple. Her skin looked like wax but was otherwise unmarked.
“I can’t be sure if it’s her,” she admitted. “The newspapers never published a picture.”
“Right sex, anyway. Age?” the doctor asked.
“She was said to have been around fifty.”
He prodded her arm.
“Hard to tell if there was any exsanguination. She’s been fully embalmed and they would’ve drained her for that anyway. Pardon, madam,” he murmured as he opened the buttons of her black funeral gown, exposing her neck and chest. “There was an autopsy, at any rate. That’s promising.”
“It is?” Lily asked.
“Aye. They wouldn’t have bothered if she’d died of pneumonia. Ah, here we are.”
He ran his hands over her neck, turning her head to the side.
“What do you see?” Strangford asked. His tone was flat, a mask of calm firmly set in place, but Lily could see the tight set of his jaw.
“There’s a needle site right over the jugular artery.”
“The papers mentioned a puncture wound in her throat,” Lily recalled.
“This was a physician’s needle. Something was injected or withdrawn. Probably the latter—it’s a larger bore. Fresh. Must have happened right as she died. Needle sites heal very quickly and this is still open.”
“You’re certain?”
“I’m a doctor, my dear. I have rather a lot to do with needles. I’m quite certain.”
A physician’s needle, right at the jugular. It made a perfect and terrible sense.
Despite the sensational assertions of the papers, there had never been a supernatural power at play here. The killer had exsanguinated his victim by simple, practical means—a needle in the neck, a length of rubber tube. She thought of the vision of Annalise’s death, the sound that had echoed through the room as the dark shadow of the murderer moved closer.
Clanging glass, like the rattle of a milkman’s crate.
Bottles.
That’s why there was no blood in the room. The murderer had drained it into bottles and carried it out with him.
The knowledge raised as many questions as it answered. Chief among them was why—what possible reason could any man have for stealing a woman’s entire store of blood?
Dr. Gardner moved the lantern, adjusting the angle of the light. The focus of his examination had shifted to Sylvia Durst’s face.
He tapped at a series of angry red marks that surrounded her nose and mouth.
“There’s something about these burns.”
“Burns?” Lily had thought the marks just another form of the discoloration that mottled her skin after death.
“Aye, they’re burns.” The doctor opened the dead woman’s mouth and looked at her tongue. “It’s something I’ve seen before, but where is escaping me.” He frowned at the body a moment longer, then shook his head. “I’m afraid that’s all I can give you. It’s possible I might be able to say more if I reopen that autopsy incision, but in this light, without any instruments . . .”
“Thank you, Doctor. That won’t be necessary,” Strangford cut in.
The physician narrowed the shutter of the lantern, then hauled himself back onto level ground.
Strangford stared down into the open grave, his face pale in the moonlight. He tugged off his gloves, tucking them carefully into his pocket.
The trees shifted overhead, branches rattling in a wind that tasted of winter. Lily pulled her coat closer.
He dropped down into the grave. The dirt crumbled under his boots, rattling hollowly against the coffin. He looked at the dead woman at his feet.
“It is possible that I might start screaming.”
Lily fought against the impulse to intervene. Instead, she stood sentinel-still at the edge of the grave, watching. If she couldn’t stop this, she could at least bear witness to it.
The nobleman knelt down in the loose earth.
He closed his eyes, taking in a deep, uneven breath. The moment dragged. Lily began to wonder if perhaps he would lose his nerve.
Then he placed his bare hands against the exposed skin of the dead woman’s chest.
Lily saw his shoulders stiffen. He gasped as though someone had just struck him. Every instinct ordered her to dive into the grave and haul him out.
She didn’t move.
The trees swayed overhead, skeletal arms dancing against the night sky. Rats darted through the tall grass behind her, the scrape of their claws whispering in the darkness.
Finally he started to speak.
“They gave him a christening. He was already dead but the vicar was a friend and agreed to it. He feels cold in her arms. She hates how it feels—like a bundle of cold rags—but she can’t bring herself to put him down because she remembers how he felt when he was still breathing. Warm. Present. So much grief . . .”
His voice was raw with it, the pain of a mother holding what was left of her child.
He turned his head, as though forcing himself to look away.
“The tables. Rough wood under her fingers. Holding the hands of strangers. Warm hands, cold hands. Hands like sandpaper. The dead are fickle. Refuse to come half the time but you put on a bit of a show. It keeps coins in one’s pocket. A widow has to do what she can to get by. Gives them comfort, believing there’s something after, but it’s just wisps of memory, bones and dust. Bones and dust.”
He was meandering, she realized, pulled into the dead woman’s experiences—her sharpest grief, the endless routine of her work. He needed help to focus on what mattered—on the reason they were all here.
She moved closer, dropping to her knees at the edge of the crumbling soil.
“Enough of that. Find the night she died,” she ordered.
Dr. Gardner looked over at her from across the grave, where he sat on the edge of a lichen-encrusted tomb.
“Sleeping,” Strangford said after a moment. His voice was thick. “Not sleeping. Something else. She wants to wake but she can’t.”
“Is anyone there?”
“Yes.”
Lily’s pulse pounded.
“Who?”
Strangford shook his head.
“She doesn’t know. Can�
��t wake up. It hurts.”
“What hurts?”
“Her neck. Aches.”
“We need to know who else is in the room.”
Strangford’s shoulders were bunched, muscles knotted with tension.
“Just a shadow. She can’t see. Lights . . . The gas is broken.”
The words triggered an unexpected memory.
Every time I ask her . . . she just shows me a lamp.
Estelle’s words, the story she claimed to have gotten from the ghost of Agnes McKenney.
It was an uncanny connection but far from helpful. Gas lamps didn’t murder people and carry off their blood.
“If she can’t see, can she feel? Hear? There must be something,” she demanded, frustration edging her tone.
“There’s a smell,” Strangford said. “Overpowering. She’s drowning in it. Can’t get enough air.”
“What kind of smell?”
“Sweet. Acrid. Burning sugar and lamp oil.”
On the far side of the grave, Dr. Gardner straightened.
“Chloroform,” he announced.
“The anesthetic?” Lily asked.
“Those marks on her face . . . some patients react to the stuff when it touches their skin. I haven’t seen it in ages, but I remember well enough what it looks like. The odor’s distinctive but it disperses. Outside half an hour, no one would’ve caught more than a whiff of it.”
“So this is some sort of surgery she’s recalling?”
“Surgeons don’t use chloroform anymore. Not at any hospital in London. It’s all ether. Has been for over a decade.”
Her mind whirled, putting together the details.
“Can chloroform be applied when a patient is already asleep?”
“It works through inhalation. Patients are still breathing even when they’re dreaming.”
The pieces fell together. A killer waiting until his victim was already lost in sleep. Drugging them into a deeper and less volatile unconsciousness, then inserting a needle and siphoning blood into bottles.
But how did he get inside? There had been no signs of a break-in at any of the murders and a man carrying a case full of bottles of blood would hardly have been inconspicuous.
The Fire in the Glass Page 16