‘I can’t think why they live here,’ Aunt Emily sighed as we left. ‘Somewhere in the New Town would be so much more pleasant, and far more fitted to Mrs Chalmers’ standing.’
‘Randall likes to be near the university. And Elisabeth says it’s livelier.’
Aunt Emily’s lips were pinched. ‘Perhaps you ought to confine your social activities to a more respectable area from now on.’
‘Perhaps she shouldn’t leave the house at all, with a madman on the loose.’ Uncle Hugh’s earlier boisterous air was gone and he looked like a sulky child kept too late after his bedtime.
Aunt Emily, however, had more pressing concerns.
‘Your mother,’ she sighed. ‘What on earth are we going to tell your mother? I told her the Greenes were a good family!’
A woman was dead, Aurora Greene was half mad with shock and their genteel home was crawling with policemen. But in the chilly carriage, my mother’s disapproval loomed large, more immediate and therefore far more terrifying than some murderer straight out of the pages of a penny dreadful.
‘Some silly girl got herself killed,’ Uncle Hugh snapped. ‘I hardly see how that reflects badly on the Greenes. Probably had a lover, or a debt. For heaven’s sake, don’t rabbit on at your sister about it when she comes. There’s more at stake here than just a wedding, you know.’
If there was, that was the first I had heard of it. Aunt Emily shot him a warning look, and returned to the subject at hand.
‘And how horrid that the girl stole from Aurora,’ she sighed. ‘The thought of some common thief rummaging through her things . . .’ She shuddered. ‘Well, best put it out of our thoughts.’
But try as I might, I couldn’t shake off a looming sense of dread that what we had witnessed tonight was only the beginning of something terrible.
Aunt Emily was restless too. As I was getting ready for bed, she knocked on my door with a worried look on her face. Dismissing Agnes with a jerk of her head, she met my gaze with a querying one of her own.
‘That professor of yours . . .’ she said.
‘Elisabeth was there,’ I said defensively. ‘We weren’t alone.’ Elisabeth had been examining a potted plant in the corner and I now realised with a hot flush of shame that she hadn’t just been giving us privacy to discuss a murder.
‘The last thing you want is Miles being jealous of a perfectly innocent acquaintance.’ The tone of her voice warned me that Merchiston had better be an innocent acquaintance – or else. ‘I heard he caught that terrible man who killed Miss Hartigan. I’m sure he’ll find whoever did that horrible thing to Aurora’s girl, but that doesn’t mean I want you speaking to him alone.’
Even in death, it seemed that a maid didn’t warrant a name. Wilson to the household, she would have been known by the family’s surname when they travelled, and even now her identity was erased.
‘Her name was Clara,’ I whispered. ‘Not “Aurora’s girl”. Not “Wilson”. Clara.’
Aunt Emily took my hand in her chilly one. Poor circulation, she always said. I suspected it was more to do with not having a heart at all.
‘Don’t you see, Sarah? This is what a husband can protect you from.’
‘Aurora and Colonel Greene are married, yet they still had a murderer on their doorstep.’
‘I don’t mean that, you silly girl. Clara Wilson’s fate could be yours more easily than you realise. Those degenerates the clinic treats – what would stop one of them from getting violent?’
‘They’re poor, not degenerate!’ Aunt Emily’s expression suggested that if she was aware of the distinction, it wasn’t a big one.
‘You see a woman’s sphere as confining, limiting. But better a life that occasionally leans towards tedium than one that comes to such a terrible end.’
‘You find domesticity tedious?’ Aunt Emily’s hidden depths grew deeper by the day.
She scowled. ‘Of course not. But I can see that for a woman of your intellect, the benefits might not seem so obvious at first.’
She hugged me, a quick, tight squeeze that felt all the more affectionate for how uncharacteristic it was.
‘I’m so glad you’ve found a man to take care of you.’ She pressed the lightest of kisses on my forehead and left me to my night-time ablutions. Her parting words raised my hackles and gave me a pang of guilt at the same time. How could I hate her when she was so truly happy for me?
As Agnes undressed me, I retrieved the folded piece of paper I had found discreetly pressed into my hand as I left the Greenes’ house that night, and once she was gone, I examined it. It was a scrap of paper torn from a notebook. On one side was a scribbled chemical equation and on the other, in Gregory Merchiston’s handwriting, an address, a date and a time.
It seemed my assistance was needed after all.
Chapter 5
I walked through freezing fog up to Princes Street, where I would be able to hail a cab in relative anonymity. Already the smell of hops hung in the air, thick and yeasty. I used to hate the scent, the constant reminder of my uncle’s breweries and his omnipresent reach. Now it was a welcome reminder that I was out of the house, no matter the weather or the circumstance.
A hansom slowed to a halt on Frederick Street and I clambered in. If my destination was unusual, then my coin was as good as any respectable woman’s, and the carriage clattered through the waking streets towards the City Chambers, where Professor Merchiston was waiting for me outside the police mortuary.
He was leaning in the doorway as I arrived, watching the street with an unreadable expression. Outside was still black as night, with only the flickering gas lamps to illuminate the gloom, but the city was teeming with life, not all of it reputable.
His clothes were crumpled and I doubted if he had slept since I last saw him, but he was wide awake, his eyes bloodshot but alert. The thrill of the case must have made him jittery, because I had never seen him so animated. I barely had time to remove my coat before he was talking, leading me through the rabbit warren that housed the Edinburgh City Police.
We paused at a kitchen. ‘Here.’ He passed me a mug. ‘Coffee. At this hour, you’ll need it. Have you eaten?’ His hand lingered over the biscuit tin.
‘Yes, my aunt had the kitchen prepare me a slap-up breakfast before I slipped out at five o’clock in the morning to examine a corpse.’
He narrowed his eyes at my sarcasm, but didn’t rise to the bait. ‘You’ll be grateful for an empty stomach once you’re down there.’
‘It’s hardly my first autopsy, Professor,’ I reminded him.
He snorted. ‘I’ve seen coppers twice your age swoon like debutantes. If the innards don’t get you, the claustrophobia will. Now, follow me – and stay close.’
The morgue was buried in the bowels of the building, and as Merchiston led me through a maze of hallways and staircases, I realised I could not find my way back if I tried. At such an early hour, the place was quiet and dark and it was easy to believe that if I got lost, I might never be found.
‘Did you know there’s a whole city down here? They call it the Vaults. Miles and miles of streets and tunnels twenty feet below the ground. Edinburgh was expanding faster than the town planners could accommodate, so they dug into the rock and carved out a whole new city. Tradesmen used to sell their goods there for a time; it was a thriving hub of activity, all taking place beneath the cobbles. Then they moved above ground and the only people who plied their trade down there weren’t ones you’d like to meet in a tunnel on a dark night.’ He smiled, but in the gloom all I could see was teeth. ‘Tell me, Miss Gilchrist, do you believe in ghosts?’
I shook my head, hoping he couldn’t see me shiver. ‘I’ve seen enough evil done by the living not to worry about the dead.’
‘Aye, me too. Me too.’
He stopped abruptly and pushed open a door. With the flick of a switch, the room was flooded with harsh electric light, and I blinked, dazzled for a moment.
It was chilly, with no natural light and n
ot even a grate to provide warmth. I regretted leaving my coat upstairs.
‘You’ll warm up once we get started,’ Merchiston promised, moving quickly to tidy up some apparatus – a needle and a vial, although what use his patients down here would have for drugs was another matter. ‘Nothing like a post-mortem to get the blood pumping.’
My glance flickered to the table, where the distinct outline of a body lay beneath a sheet. Clara Wilson. No more beating heart for her, no sense of cold or heat. No kisses or tears or laughter; just a wooden box and the cool earth of the graveyard.
And yet she had secrets, and if her mouth could not whisper confessions, then maybe her body would.
Merchiston looked at me. ‘You feel it too.’ He ran his hand down the slab. ‘All that possibility. So much information, hidden in one package of flesh and hair and nails. Our bodies tell stories, Miss Gilchrist. The language may be foreign to most, but learn to translate it and you will be privy to all the secrets of our species, living or dead.’
I wondered what stories my body would tell on this cold January morning, alone in a room with a man who had not given me the shiny bauble on my finger. I twisted it off violently and tossed it onto the table. Yet the indentation remained, a band of depressed flesh that revealed what I wanted most to forget.
‘They found a note on her.’
‘From her killer?’ What sort of person would leave an explanation on the body of his victim?
‘We think so. It looks like someone was blackmailing her – or she was blackmailing them. Either way, it gives us a motive.’
He pulled the sheet down, revealing bruising on her sternum. ‘Whoever killed her was stronger, but she was a slight wee thing so that’s not surprising. There were scraps of debris on her coat and skirt – looked like rubbish. I think she’d been attacked somewhere else and then hidden in the bushes. That bruising suggests she might still have been alive when she was carried.’
I shuddered.
‘There’s no sign of . . .’ He broke off, glancing at me. ‘That is to say, she wasn’t . . .’
‘Raped?’ I supplied. ‘Well, there’s that at least.’ It was cold comfort under the circumstances, but I was glad she had been spared that.
He nodded. ‘Sadly, the killer didn’t leave any stray hairs behind to give us a nice obvious clue. But we’ll see if there’s anything else to be found. “There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face”,’ he quoted. ‘What’s beneath the skin, though – that’s another matter.’
He took Clara’s hand gently in his. ‘See that, under the nails? Arsenic, I’d bet money on it.’
I frowned. ‘But she wasn’t poisoned.’
‘She didn’t die from poison,’ he corrected. ‘The symptoms of arsenic poisoning in its early stages, provided the eventual murderer is slow and methodical rather than slapdash and eager, can be confused with an unpleasant stomach complaint. Perhaps she was being dosed by someone who grew impatient.’
I scraped the residue from beneath her nails, dropping it into the vial Merchiston had provided. I held her hand for a moment, chilly and limp in mine. The backs of her hands were smooth, but the fingertips were calloused – she would have taken charge of mending all Aurora’s clothes, and although a lady’s maid would never demean herself by blacking the grate or sweeping the floor, she still did more manual work in a day than her mistress would in a year. But presentation was important, and she would have scrubbed her nails assiduously – a woman unkempt in her personal appearance could never be trusted to look after a household or its occupants. There were countless ways she could have come into contact with arsenic – in her food, in her face cream (or in Aurora’s face cream, if she was the type of maid to enjoy her employer’s personal possessions once in a while). She could be a glutton or a thief, but she would never be messy.
‘Perhaps she wasn’t the victim,’ I murmured.
Merchiston lifted an eyebrow – he looked impressed, and I tried to ignore the warmth that suffused me.
‘There’s only one way to find out. Hand me that scalpel.’
He pulled the sheet away, settling it neatly just below the pubic bone. I felt my face flush as we stood before Clara Wilson’s still form – her dark hair still pinned above her head, eyes open but unseeing, unaware that her unclothed body was on display before two strangers. He nodded at my sleeves, ‘Can you roll those up?’
My fingers, still numb with cold, fumbled with the tiny mother-of-pearl buttons until I could push the fabric up to my elbows. Next to his forearms, taut and sinewy, I looked absurdly out of place: delicate – fragile, even. And that was one thing I had sworn never to be again. His gaze fell on the silvery scar that snaked across the inside of my wrist. It was little more than an inch, but somehow I knew that he recognised it for what it was. I wondered if his forensic knowledge could tell that it had been a hairpin, abandoned in my sheets by a careless sanatorium nurse who was later sacked for her negligence in leaving a sharp object with a woman who had been diagnosed with hysteria. I stole a glance at his face, and instead of pity saw understanding. I wondered if he himself had ever found existence so terrible that oblivion was preferable. No wonder he, too, preferred to keep company with the dead.
He picked up the scalpel and made the first incision, pressing hard to cut through muscle and tissue. He drew it slowly, gently across her left breast and I shuddered as the mottled flesh opened in the blade’s wake. He paused at the centre of the breastbone and looked at me as the cut began to ooze fluid.
‘Would you like to do the right-hand side, Miss Gilchrist?’
I nodded mutely and took the scalpel, warm from his grasp. As I cut into the firm, cold flesh, I felt my nerves dissipate. I moved the knife through sinew stiffened by rigor mortis.
‘What are you doing?’ Merchiston’s voice was cool and clinical.
‘I’m cutting from the clavicular head through the pectoralis major, severing the lateral and median pectoral nerves.’
‘Why?’
‘So that once we’ve cut down the linea alba to the pubic symphysis, we can pull back the flesh from her sternum and crack open her ribs. Then we can remove the organs.’ I drew the scalpel back when my incision met his.
‘Nicely done. Steady hand, clean cut. We’ll make a surgeon of you yet.’ Glowing with praise, I went to hand him the scalpel. ‘No, no. You finish this one.’
It was easier the second time, the body already cut open. All I had to do was lean into it and draw the blade through flesh.
Whatever echoes of life had lingered around her were banished now. Clara Wilson was meat and muscle, a subject rather than a person. It was a grisly spell to perform and yet I felt my own pulse quicken as I surveyed the effects of my handiwork.
‘So much mess beneath such a pristine surface,’ Merchiston murmured. ‘We like to think that we’re civilised, superior beings, but we’re just bags of blood and bone like any other creature. All impulse and survival instinct.’ He stroked her cheek. ‘Shame that instinct isn’t always enough.’
He moved to his tray of instruments and pulled out a bone saw, nodding to the desk in the corner.
‘Take a seat; we’ll be here a while. There’s a pen and paper, so make yourself useful. Label each jar with the date, the name of the organ and the weight once I’ve lifted them out. This way the writing might be legible for a change.’
The pen lay untouched as I watched him retract the flesh and expose the ribcage, white bone stained reddish pink and shrouded beneath scraps of wet flesh. He leaned on it hard, and I heard a sickening crack before he lifted the saw. I was on my feet before I knew what I was doing.
I placed my hand on his as it rested on the saw. ‘May I?’
His skin was so warm – the only warm thing in the room. In that moment, it felt as though we were the only living people in the city, and blood pulsed quickly, our hands pressed so close together that I couldn’t tell whose heartbeat I was feeling.
‘Morbid girl,’ he murmu
red softly, and I didn’t argue with him.
He moved to stand behind me, guiding my hand, and I dragged the saw through bone.
‘It’s going to resist you. The body never wants to give up its secrets.’
As I cut, Clara Wilson jerked back and forth as though animated. I felt my stomach begin to curdle and focused on keeping my grip steady.
My arm ached and my hands were cramping but I refused to stop. I put my whole weight into it, but it wasn’t enough and the saw slipped from my grasp.
I swore, and Merchiston laughed.
‘Spoken like a true doctor. There,’ he said gently, taking the bone saw from me. ‘I’ll do the rest.’
‘It’s physical work,’ he said quietly as he resumed. ‘There’s no shame in not being able to do it single-handedly. Plenty of students have that problem – you all spend too much time cloistered indoors with your books and not enough time getting exercise. You did well, considering.’
‘I need to do better,’ I replied mulishly.
‘Boxing helps. And lifting crates for Mrs Logan because she doesn’t trust the delivery boys not to steal the silver.’
‘I doubt my aunt would let me help the servants,’ I pointed out. ‘So that just leaves boxing. I don’t suppose . . .’
He paused in his macabre efforts to look at me in surprise.
‘You want to learn how to fight?’
‘I want to learn how to protect myself,’ I corrected. ‘I’m sick of being told that women are weak – too weak for surgery, too weak for intellectual thought.’ Too weak to fight a man off when he tried to take advantage. ‘I can’t always rely on you to swoop in and save me. I’m not a damsel in distress and I don’t intend to become a corpse either.’
‘And how often do you intend to be locked in a room with a murderer? Fiona Leadbetter was an anomaly, it’s hardly on the syllabus.’
I looked down pointedly at the dead woman we were cutting up.
‘You’re assisting a professor. As a medical student, that isn’t beyond the realms of possibility. That’s not the same as investigating a murder.’
The Unquiet Heart Page 4