The Strings of Murder

by Oscar de Muriel

  ‘Yes, I do, sir. That’s what I used to analyse Wood’s stomach.’

  ‘Well, now you know why you found nothing in his tripe.’

  ‘Indeed I do.’

  ‘Good. Prepare the apparatus and test this man’s skin. If you still have samples from Wood’s body, test them too. There is another sample that I need you to analyse. We will fetch it and come back within the hour.’

  I walked out of the morgue with McGray behind me. He had to pull me by the arm

  ‘Ye better tell me now what’s goin’ on, Frey!’

  ‘Have you not worked it out yet? Wood and Ardglass indeed died of the same cause.’

  ‘Which would be …?’

  ‘Poisoning by cutaneous transmission.’

  McGray frowned. ‘Through the skin? Transmitted from whe–?’ He did not have to finish the sentence. He understood. ‘Come on, let’s get that sample!’

  The Marsh apparatus was quite simple, yet it looked like the convoluted glass devices that one would expect to find in a chemistry lab: A U-shaped tube filled with a white powder, one end of the U connected to a round flask – containing scrapings of the sample – and the other end connected to a longer, thinner tube heated by a Bunsen burner. Reed held a white porcelain dish close to the open end of that thin tube, and as soon as he did so, the pristine ceramic turned silvery black.

  ‘Lord!’ he cried. ‘I have never seen a result like this!’

  He took the dish with a pair of tweezers and placed it next to a collection of coloured films that went from the palest grey to raven-black. The stain on the dish was darker than any of them.

  ‘ ’Tis off the chart!’ McGray cried. ‘This could kill an elephant!’

  ‘Indeed,’ I said. ‘And now we know who did it all.’

  31

  I tossed the rosewood chinrest onto Joe Fiddler’s working table. His workshop still smelled of confined flatulence.

  McGray stood next to me and displayed the photographs from Fontaine’s study; all the ones that showed the Amati Maledetto. ‘How clever ye are, laddie!’ he cried in true admiration. ‘Ye managed to deceive us all!’

  Joe Fiddler was casting us an astounded look, his eyes almost popping out. ‘How can youse think I killed Guilleum?’

  ‘And Theodore Wood, and Danilo Caroli, and Alistair Ard–’

  ‘Nonsense! ’ Joe yelled, jerking a hammer about. ‘Youse are talking shite!’

  McNair stepped in behind us. ‘Ye want me to look for the stuff?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘You can begin in Mr Fiddler’s personal rooms.’

  Joe blocked McNair’s way. The poor man looked pathetic trying to stop the tall, young officer.

  ‘It will be wisest to let us do our job,’ I said.

  McGray approached him and gently pulled him aside. ‘Come on, laddie, we need ye to come with us for questioning.’

  ‘Not if youse don’t tell me first why!’

  He seemed so frail, so broken, that even I could not help feeling a smidgen of compassion.

  ‘Very well,’ McGray said. ‘Have a seat and Frey will explain it all to ye.’

  Joe Fiddler sat on a wooden box, his face all confusion. Whether it was genuine or fake, I could not tell right then.

  ‘You made this chinrest, did you not?’ I said while pacing around the workshop. I grabbed an unfinished violin and laid it next to the chinrest. ‘It has your mark on it.’ I pointed at the symbol I’d seen before: a winding character that formed both a J and an F. ‘Also, you were the last person to see Fontaine before he died, and you delivered a violin you had been repairing for a while; the same violin he was playing when it all happened.’

  Joe confronted us with a firm face. ‘Aye, I made this piece and I repaired Guilleum’s fiddles. That doesn’t make me a damn murderer!’

  ‘You gave a rather special treatment to this piece,’ I continued. ‘You soaked this piece of wood in a concentrated solution of arsenic …’

  Just as if he’d been called, McNair walked back into the room. ‘Found it, bosses!’

  He was holding a large bottle of amber glass. I grabbed it and read the label. ‘Bed-bug killer, and the label tells me this comes from a very good chemist. You know that this is basically arsenic dissolved in soap, of course? Wash away the soap and you are left with pure arsenic.’

  ‘Ye cannae –’

  ‘Pray, let me finish! Arsenic, as you know, is one of the preferred poisons of our times: it is easy to obtain and produces symptoms that the untrained eye can mistake for digestive tract ailments such as cholera or gastric fever – even our forensic man, despite his undeniable skills, failed to spot the subtle differences. I, in particular, became very familiar with arsenic’s properties while investigating the case of Good Mary Brown – the woman who poisoned five husbands, if you recall; it was the most famous case I’d worked on before the Ripper …’

  ‘Give it a rest; we’ve all heard that story a million times!’

  ‘All right! Well, arsenic is also poisonous when absorbed through the skin. It is not the preferred method of murderers, as it produces eruptions and hyperpigmentation, and most importantly, it only becomes lethal after prolonged contact … and you knew that, Joe.’

  ‘I didnae!’

  ‘Oh, but you did! It was a brilliant way to exclusively kill the violinists who dared play this violin. You did not want to kill everyone who came to hold it – McGray and I have repeatedly touched the violin, but that never gave us any symptoms. No, you only poisoned the chinrest because you wanted to kill violinists, who must hold the instrument with their neck and chin, for hours at a time. My own brother happened to play this violin, and could well have been poisoned, but thank goodness he protects his neck with a cloth.

  ‘That reminds me of another advantage you must have recognized: you knew that the inevitable hyperpigmentation that came with arsenic could easily be mistaken for … what do you call it, McGray?’

  ‘Fiddler’s hickey.’

  ‘Exactly, and that was what happened with Theodore Wood; the man had such a bad case of fiddler’s bruise we could never have related it to poisoning.’ I recalled vividly the sight of Wood lying in his coffin: a pale corpse with a bright red mark on his neck. ‘We only made the connection after checking the body of Alistair Ardglass, who happened to have the same reddened marks on his skin, and also began to show symptoms of arsenic poisoning moments before being run over.

  ‘I probably should have realized it much sooner, since I had the chance of examining the violin not long after the murder occurred.’ I stretched out a hand and seized one of the pictures. ‘Now it is clear to me, even obvious, but back then I could not pinpoint it … I simply felt like I’d spotted something out of place, and for a while …’

  ‘Frey, yer rambling again.’

  ‘All right, all right! But I am still astounded by my omission! I saw the blasted violin closely, I held it with my own hands, yet I did not manage to see what these pictures show us: Fontaine’s throat was sliced open while he played, so his blood was splattered all over the instrument … but not on the chinrest. I even recall thinking that the rosewood looked pristine.’

  ‘So someone changed the thingy for the poisoned one after slaughtering Fontaine,’ McGray added, mocking my inflexions.

  ‘Yes, and I still cannot fathom why you did that. Did you want people to become fearful of the instrument until it eventually fell into your hands? Did you want us all to suspect the cursed violin rather than human agency, and thus draw eyes away from you? Which reminds me of the many other aspects of the murders that you need to explain. How did you manage to climb those chimneys? Where did you learn all that blasted witchcraft? And most importantly, where is your workshop and what are your plans for the catgut you are making? The more I think about it, the more it astounds me that I did not suspect you from the very start; you are obviously a very accomplished luthier, and string making must be one of your skills.’

  ‘Catgut? Witchcraft?’ He turned to
McGray. ‘What the Hell’s he talking about? Maybe I just cannae get his doddy accent.’

  He looked utterly baffled. Not once did he flinch or tremble in the way guilty men do when panic betrays them. He was nervous, of course, but in the way anybody about to go to jail would be.

  McGray noticed it too; he stroked his stubble and spoke gently. ‘What can ye tell us to defend yerself?’

  Joe Fiddler breathed anxiously. ‘What d’ye want me to tell ye? These are all cock-and-bull stories! Abody uses that bug-killer!’ He cast a filthy look at the bottle. ‘I’m sure yer maids use it to clean yer shitty linen too! That makes youse murderers? Even my dead wife used the stuff to make her skin all white and pretty!’

  ‘No wonder you are a widower,’ I muttered.

  ‘And also, I didnae make that chinrest for Guilleum. He didnae like rosewood; he always used ebony.’

  I had to grant him that. ‘Rosewood is unusual for a chinrest …’

  ‘Aye! That’s why I recall making this piece perfectly. I hardly ever work with rosewood; it smells vile!’

  Nine-Nails let out a loud cackle. ‘It surely does!’

  ‘I can tell youse who commissioned that chinrest and even the day I delivered it.’

  ‘I am sure ye can tell us, laddie, but can ye prove it?’

  Joe rose immediately. ‘Course I can! I got a letter requestin’ it. ’Tis even dated and all.’ He opened an old chest that was heaving with crumpled documents. After rifling through them he produced a small letter. ‘Aye, it was in September, not so long ago …’

  I snatched the letter and looked at it. The handwriting was beautifully neat and the order did seem genuine; a specific request for a rosewood chinrest. When I realized who’d written it, I gasped.

  ‘So who bought that chinrest?’ McGray prompted.

  Joe showed a wry smile. ‘Tell him, laddie.’

  I uttered a name I would have never expected:

  ‘Lorena Caroli.’

  32

  The hard rain hammered my umbrella as McGray and I stood, staggered, by the Carolis’ front door. The mourning wreath still hung there: the yew branches still green and upright, but the laurel leaves, wilted by the elements, lay miserably on the black bow. We saw with sorrow that they’d added a thinner ribbon of white silk, and for a solid minute neither of us could speak. We knew too well that white was the colour of the innocent.

  ‘Are you sure you want to do this right now?’ I asked at last, only after feeling the icy rain through my damp trousers. The violin case, which McGray had brought, was now dripping wet.

  ‘Can ye think of a good time?’ McGray said, reluctantly knocking at the door, and he was right. Difficult as it was, we had to carry out our duty.

  It was the younger maid who received us. Her eyes were red and she pressed a wet handkerchief against her face. She tried to send us away, but McGray walked in nonetheless.

  ‘We’ve got to see yer mistress, lass. How’s she coping?’

  The girl shuddered. ‘Oh, she hasn’t spoken for a while, sir – or eaten. All she does is walk up and down her room. We’ve been hearing her steps since yesterday, all through the night. I pray to God she stops.’

  We could hear them too, echoing from above; thuds that came and went in an anxious rhythm.

  ‘When did it happen?’ I murmured. ‘The baby, I mean.’

  The poor girl tried to utter some answer, but then she choked, burst into tears and ran to the kitchen. For an awkward moment McGray and I stood in the hall, not knowing what to do. Except for the insistent pacing upstairs, the house was in absolute silence.

  ‘C’mon, Frey,’ McGray said, making his way to the stairs. My heart was thumping when he knocked at Lorena’s door. ‘Mrs Caroli?’

  No reply, but her steps never stopped. McGray knocked another two times.

  ‘We’re coming in,’ he said, slowly opening the door.

  Shyly, almost fearfully, I followed McGray into the room. The first thing I saw was the empty crib, still beautifully decked with white lace and an embroidered blanket. Then a tall shadow passed in front of it, and my heart sank at the image of Lorena, who now looked like a female embodiment of the Grim Reaper: draped in black, her cheeks sunken and the skin so pale that it almost shone like clean bones.

  She paced with such anguish, such uncontainable distress, from one end of the room to the other, sometimes bumping into her little table. With one hand she clutched her rosary beads, pressing her still swollen belly; with the other she rubbed her chest, as if trying to rid herself of an unbearable chill.

  ‘Mrs Caroli,’ said McGray, ‘we need to ask ye some questions.’

  She did not reply, or even seem to notice our presence. She simply kept pacing, and for a moment I thought she had lost her mind.

  McGray placed the violin case on the small round table and opened it.

  ‘I believe this still belongs to ye.’

  Lorena paced on for a moment, oblivious to us, but upon reaching the table she caught a glance of the violin.

  She immediately halted, her eyes almost falling out of their sockets. After a troubled gulp she tried to speak. Her mouth was dry, so the words came out rough.

  ‘Where did you find it?’

  McGray spoke softly. ‘Lord Ardglass had it.’ Then he pointed at the chinrest. ‘And we ken that this piece is poisoned. We’ve also been told ye had it specially made.’

  It must have been a mere few seconds, but it felt like hours before Lorena moved or even blinked. There was nothing left of the flawless beauty and the vivacity we’d seen but a few days before. That evening she was nothing but despair.

  ‘It’s all my fault,’ she whispered, dropping the rosary, then pressing her temples with her knotted, stiff hands.

  A shrill sound came out of her throat. It grew slowly into a mad squeal from the darkest depths of her body, worse than the squealing of pigs in the slaughterhouse. I flinched at the howl, wanting to cover my ears, but she held it until she ran out of breath and slowly sank onto the bed.

  McGray went closer, held her gently by the shoulders and helped her sit up. ‘How can ye say it’s yer fault? Ye cannae have done it, missus.’

  She was trembling. ‘Not myself … but Heaven knows what I have done. I could have held the knives and slashed their throats myself … My husband’s –’

  She rubbed her chest again, this time so desperately I thought she’d tear her dress.

  McGray picked up the rosary and put it back into her hands. ‘Whatever it is, we need ye to tell us.’

  Mrs Caroli only sobbed, wanting to pull her hands away, but McGray would not let go.

  ‘I’ve felt what yer feeling now,’ he whispered. ‘It cuts deep. I felt it when I lost my folks; in one day all my kin got shattered and I was left all alone, just like ye. My wee sister’s still alive, but some days it feels like she’s gone further than my dead ones …’

  I’d never heard Nine-Nails talk with such intensity. He had clearly wanted to say those words out loud, and I could only wonder for how long he’d repressed them.

  ‘We’re almost partners in disgrace,’ he added, showing her what was left of his fourth finger; an eerie parallel to her awful arthritis. ‘There’s nothing ye can say that I won’t understand.’

  Lorena Caroli shed copious, silent tears, but after a while she managed to nod.

  ‘Good,’ McGray said. ‘Take yer time, missus. We’ve got all night.’

  McGray somehow persuaded Mrs Caroli to have some tea and a light supper. Amidst her wails and stuttering, it became evident that we’d have to calm her down if we wanted a coherent statement.

  The maid soon came in with a tray, her entire body shaking, the cutlery and crockery rattling. Her wary eyes were fixed on the cradle as she poured the tea, and I had to take the pot out of her hands when the cup was full to the brim.

  ‘That will be all,’ I told her, and the girl was more than happy to leave.

  Mrs Caroli had to use both hands to lift the cup, h
er fingers pointing at abnormal angles. She swallowed a few short sips, but when she tried to put the cup down she dropped it; the china caught the edge of the table and shattered on the carpet.

  She stared at her inflamed joints, her eyes bloodshot. ‘This is where it all started,’ she said, suddenly focused. ‘These damned bones! The curse of the Zangrando family! My grandmother had them, my mother had them, my sister Lucía and I … We thought only us women would have it, but then my poor Lucía married and had a son.’

  I looked up so quickly I nearly snapped my neck. McGray was thunderstruck.

  ‘A son, ye said?’

  Lorena nodded. ‘Yes. Giacomo. I’ll never forget the day he was born: the midwife thought that Lucía had given birth to the Devil and I can’t blame her.’ The tears rolled and rolled. ‘The wretched child was hideous …’

  At once I pictured the horrible figure we had seen in the graveyard.

  ‘He was a big baby,’ Lorena continued, ‘and his arms and legs never seemed to stop growing. And he could do things with them that nobody else could: he could twist his fingers in all directions, dislocate his shoulders and thighs at will … oh, if people had seen him they would have burned him alive! All the family, for that matter!

  ‘So we sent the boy to my uncle. He was a glass blower on this little island near Venice, Murano. People only ever go there to trade glass, so he remained well hidden. My uncle taught Giacomo his craft and the boy learned very quickly. He made the most beautiful things – my rosaries, beautiful vases and figurines … Giacomo was the most gifted young boy I’d ever seen. He also liked to carve wood and draw and read and recite the names of the stars.’

  For a moment I even thought she was about to smile, but of course things had eventually gone so terribly wrong.

  ‘Then my uncle and sister died, and there was nobody left but me to look after Giacomo …’ Again she pressed her chest. ‘Oh, you have to understand … On her deathbed Lucía made me swear on our mother’s grave that nobody would ever know about the boy. I couldn’t say no! I –’