The boy dug slowly for the fear of making too much noise and it took him half an hour to dig a foot and a half. He was drenched in sweat from the effort but it was apparent that the prize was not too deep below. A strike more and his shovel uncovered the white shirt of Bernard. The boy dropped the shovel and took up a masons trowel to not ruin the body. Though it made little difference now, he preferred to keep his approach professional. Slowly, he removed dirt from his trowel. A few strokes and he knew that something was amiss. He did not word his doubt just yet. He swept off the dirt till he could grasp the sleeve of the shirt and tug it out, whole, but there was no one inside the shirt. Panicked, he took the shovel once more and dug desperately. His partner’s trousers soon made an appearance but like the shirt, it too had no leg inside. The boy dropped the shovel in confusion, it was clear that Bernard’s grave was empty.
26
The Glass Coffin
At first, Maya did not understand as Bhola threw the trowel away and began to dig furiously with the shovel. What had happened? Why was he treating the body of his colleague in such a manner? He then produced a muddy trouser, dug for a few moments more, then threw the shovel on the ground and clambered up the hole almost angrily.
“There is no one inside,” he said, wiping mud from his topless frame, “The grave is empty, there are only Bernard’s clothes inside, not him”.
“How is that possible?” Maya said getting up and looking into the grave, “This is the place that the doctor had pointed me to. Have you looked carefully?”
“Can’t you see,” said the boy irritably, “someone put the clothes here. The body is somewhere else.”
Maya could not understand why the doctor would do that, or even why he would mislead her as to the body of Bernard. She took up Bernard’s trousers and checked the pockets. They had nothing more than mud.
“Are these his clothes?” Maya asked the boy, who nodded.
“They are his clothes but I am more interested in his body, where is that?”
Maya was slightly irritated by the snappishness of the boy. She was trying to focus, and he was not helping.
Maya pushed Bhola out of her head. This was the exact place that the doctor had pointed to her in the afternoon today, these clothes were Bernard’s. Why was the grave empty then? It made no sense, where was Bernard?
Maya’s reverie was broken by a sudden noise. A huge boom echoed in the air. A gunshot? Maya turned to find a dark figure standing outside the house. He seemed to have a rifle in his hand, whose long nuzzle glinted in the moonlight.
“Who is there, don’t move or I’ll shoot.” Maya heard Rattan Singh’s booming voice echo in the compound. He was the one who had dug the grave according to the doctor. What had he done with the body? But there was no time to ponder on the thought as another gunshot rang in the air. There was blood on Rattan Singh’s mind.
Bhola seemed to have grown senseless by the appearance of a man with a gun, and instead of running towards the left, to the hole in the wall, he bounded straight towards the gate where the guard seemed to have woken up too and had lit a lamp. Maya crouched low upon the ground and moved stealthily towards the boundary wall. The boy had taken the attention of Rattan Singh and he was limping towards the gate. Taking advantage of the diversion, Maya hurried to find a place to hide on the other side of the house. She had earlier thought about escaping the compound through the hole, but she feared that if the boy was caught, she too would be chased and there was no place to run in the wilderness. She hoped to find a way inside the house and if possible interrogate the doctor about the missing body. Carefully she moved parallel to the boundary wall till she reached the wall of Rattan Singh’s room. A door to the house’s right seemed to be open. She had never used that entrance but she cast a glance towards the gate where the guard had caught the boy and then moved inside and softly closed it behind her.
The door led down the ground to the basement. She moved down the stairs and softly opened the door at the landing, stepping inside the basement. The smell told her that she was in the doctor’s office and a step more inside the place and she knew that Charles Melcrose was in the office.
The doctor lay face down upon the table on the other side of the basement. His workbench was as she had seen in the afternoon, a body lay upon it, its face pulled down. Maya squinted her nose from the nauseating smell of death and moved towards the doctor. It looked like he was asleep. A bottle of whiskey lay on the table along with an upturned glass which had spilled the ember liquid upon the papers on the table. Maya decided against disturbing the doctor, she doubted if she would be able to wake him up. Charles Melcrose had tried hard to drown the shock of realizing Bernard’s profession in alcohol. Her interest instead was piqued by the open doorway to her right. It was the crypt. The room which the notes said held a secret.
The room was wrapped in darkness. Maya picked up the lamp on the doctor's table and moved ahead. The crypt seemed like a completely different place from the other part of the basement. It felt like she was stepping in another world. She was welcomed by a cold damp gust that blew past Maya’s face and almost extinguished the candle in her hand. The draft held a strange smell. Maya was reminded of the sea somehow. The floor to the crypt was paved with stones and the tap of her leather sandals echoed eerily in the emptiness. The place was much larger than the other part of the basement, so much so that the end was beyond the reach of the candle’s glow.
The first stone basin emerged all of a sudden and Maya had to bite her tongue to not shout from fear.
A pale white face peeked at her from under the ripple-free surface of the water. She stumbled backward, then regained balance and looked back into the basin. A body, stark naked, floated in the water, its eyes open looking blankly towards the ceiling. The body was of an old bald man with a puckered face. Maya withdrew her glance and moved ahead. She realized that the room was filled with rows of similar stone basins, each filled with a colorless liquid with a body floating inside. The next body was of a small girl, whose floating blonde hair formed a halo around her head. Beside her was a woman, middle-aged, with hair tied behind her head. The next was a midget, a man with small limbs and a large head. Maya was feeling nauseated, she skipped ahead till the end of the hall. At the very edge was a glass case. Twice the height of the other basins and filled again with a liquid. Maya put her face to the glass to gleam inside and had to hold the edge of the box to avoid toppling over from shock.
Inside the case floated, in perfect harmony, the body of Cecilia Melcrose.
27
Midnight Fracas
Cecilia Melcrose woke up with a start. For a few moments, she wondered what had woken her up, all was still in her room. Then the unmistakable boom of a gunshot rung once more in the compound. She jumped out of her bed and stumbled towards the window. The night was too dark to make out anything clearly, but in the moonlight, she could just see the silhouette of Rattan Singh limping in the compound towards the main gate where the guard was struggling with someone. It seemed like an intruder had tried to trespass into the house and had been caught. Cecilia put on her nightgown, lit a candle, then cast a glance at her bed. Charles was still not back. The doctor had become even more distant after the discovery of Bernard’s body. The notes had taken their toll. She sighed and started out of the room to assess the situation. She doubted if Charles had heard anything in his blasted basement office.
As she emerged into the hall, the front door burst open and the burly figure of Rattan Singh limped inside.
“What happened Rattan? What is the commotion about?” Cecilia asked.
The old man seemed out of breath and held a rifle in his hand.
“An intruder had broken into the compound.”
“Did you catch him? Should we call the guards.”
“We managed to catch a boy but he told us he was not alone. He got away too, slipped out of that idiot guard’s grasp, but not before telling us who else was with him.”
“Who?”
<
br /> “He said he had come with a woman. I believe it is the same lady who the doctor had employed to find more about Bernard.”
“Why was she here?”
“She was here to dig Bernard’s grave.”
“What!” gasped Cecilia.
“The boy said something about grave robbers but he made little sense. I doubt he knew much anyway.”
“And did they find that the grave was empty?”
“Yes! They know that it was empty.”
Cecilia felt she might faint. She walked over to the sofa and settled upon it.
“What is the use of fretting now,” said Rattan Singh, “you shouldn’t have let her inside in the afternoon. The guard and I had done a good job of sending her away. Neither would she have come nor would the doctor have told her about Bernard.”
Cecilia sighed.
“It was foolish to not let her in,” she said softly, “I am sure she suspects you now. Did you think that if you would refuse, she would never be able to find Charles?”
“At least not today,”
“Let’s not get into this,” Cecilia ended the argument, “Where is the woman now?”
“She seems to have escaped the place,” the old man scowled, “I’ll look around the compound but I don’t think I would find her there.”
Rattan Singh turned to limp away cursing.
Cecilia stared absently into the flickering flame of the candle. She hadn’t envisaged this in her little scheme. She turned towards the door to the basement. Perhaps, it was time to tell her husband everything.
28
Secret of the Crypt
Maya closed her eyes, took a deep breath to control her pounding heart, then looked again inside the glass box to ascertain the identity of the dead woman inside. There was no doubt. It was the body of Cecilia Melcrose. However, she looked older and had much less hair. The skin upon her face was puckered while her eyes were closed.
Maya turned around to leave the crypt, she didn’t feel particularly comfortable in the dark dampness of the place. Seeing the pickled body of Cecilia Melcrose had made the feeling even worse.
But the door to the crypt was blocked.
“Looks just like me, doesn’t she?”
Cecilia Melcrose stood at the door, a candle in hand. The light from the candle fell upon her face in an eerie glow and made Maya’s heart shrivel. It felt like the body in the glass case had made a phantom apparition.
“She is Camilla,” said Mrs. Melcrose, “my twin sister. My husband’s first wife.”
Mrs. Melcrose slowly stepped forward towards Maya and peered into the transparent cage.
“It’s incredible,” she said, “that two people can look just the same. Don’t you think?”
Maya was not prepared to indulge in her idle talk. Her mind was buzzing with the newly discovered facts and a lingering question that she had been harboring for some time now. It was time now to put it to Cecilia.
“Why did you send those notes to your husband, Mrs. Melcrose,” she asked all of a sudden.
Cecilia Melcrose failed to hide her shock upon hearing the question. She shuffled her feet looking down with guilt.
“You know that?” she said finally in a tired tone of a woman who had held a secret for too long.
“Yes,” said Maya. Notwithstanding the gravity of the situation, she struggled to contain the pride that she felt in her deduction proving true.
“I’ve known it for some time,” Maya explained, “Or at least I have held the suspicion for a while. Initially, it was just a hunch, not backed by a lot of facts, but today, when I saw your sister’s body in this glass coffin in the crypt, the center of all the threats that the doctor has received, my conjecture turned into certainty. The first time I became suspicious of your involvement was when I saw the original notes which the doctor had received. The paper of the notes had the watermark of the University of Cardim. It belonged to someone who worked at the university or someone who lived with such a person. The ink used to pen the notes too was not the normal iron gall ink that is in common use all over, it was a fine quality black ink which I suspect is used specifically for anatomical sketching. When I had come to the house first and borrowed the doctor’s stationery to make my notes, I had observed both. It is clear that the notes had been penned by someone in this household and there aren’t many people who live here. My initial hunch, though, was Rattan Singh. I had always looked at the old man in suspicion. He acted strangely in front of me like he was very displeased that I had agreed to take the case. However, something happened today which turned the needle of suspicion at you. When I met you in the afternoon you mentioned to me that doctor Melcrose was in terrible stress regarding the “notes”. I noticed that you mentioned not one but multiple notes. But I did not know then that the doctor had indeed received more than one note and I thought I must have misheard you. However, when Charles did finally tell me that he had received four notes, a knowledge which he had hidden from everyone else, I instantly became suspicious. You were not supposed to know that there were four notes. That you knew, meant that you had a hand in sending them. The incident made your involvement more or less clear. And seeing the body of Camilla here in the crypt, any doubts that I still harbored were resolved.”
Mrs. Melcrose nodded in agreement with Maya’s theory.
“What I don’t know, though,” continued Maya, “is why you did it?”
“It was because of Camilla,” sighed Cecilia Melcrose, “My twin sister has been the bane of my life.”
She let her hands run upon the surface of the glass case, slowly, as if caressing her dead sister’s hair.
“We were born in Calcutta, Camilla, and I. The twins. That’s what we were called. We were not Camilla or Cecilia in people’s eyes, but the twins. We were one entity and we did not necessarily mind it. I remember, growing up we always kept together, the two of us, we were inseparable. It seemed like we needed no one else.
That changed, though, when we fell in love with the same man.
Charles was a young physician who often came to our house to tend to father. Both us sisters grew very fond of him. But Camilla, though she looked just as I did, outshone me all the time. She was a bundle of energy, my sister, she would jump up and down the house when Charles was there, dress in her finest garb, braid her dark hair and make him cookies and cakes and tea while I stayed in the shadows with my desires confined dearly in my heart. It was little surprise, then, that when Charles asked for a hand for marriage it was my sister’s. I accepted it and resigned myself to my fate. Charles and Camilla married and decided to shift to Cardim to help the doctor expand his practice. Father had a bungalow in Cardim which had lay vacant for decades. The two settled there. But destiny undid their grand plans. A year in Cardim and Camilla became afflicted by a debilitating illness. I came to Cardim to take care of her and observed helplessly as Charles invested all the knowledge and time he had in trying to cure Camilla of the mysterious disease. In the end, though, he could do little against fate. Camilla died soon and Charles was let distraught and grieving. He accompanied me back to Calcutta and stayed with us for a few days and then returned to Cardim. In a couple of months though, he returned, this time to ask for my hand in marriage. I was overjoyed, as you can imagine, there was nothing that I wanted more than to be with him. I remember sitting in my room with the knowledge of our impending marriage and resolving to give Charles all the love that my sister, by her misfortune, could not. What I did not know then was that though he had come back to marry me, what Charles really wanted was to marry not me but Camilla again.
Both of us shifted back to this large house in Cardim. Charles was a recluse, he kept to his office most of the time and he did not like people disturbing him in his work. He would meet me in the morning, have tea with me, then disappear in the basement to work on autopsies and research.
Charles wasn’t rude or anything, but he was distant. He talked to me warmly enough but it wasn’t like a husband with a wife. I
t was strange. I thought he would come round it in some time, get used to me, but that never happened. He spent most of his time downstairs in the basement leaving me alone in this big ugly house.
I became miserable from the loneliness and missed Calcutta dearly. I desperately wanted the wretched time to pass. Little did I know that the worst was yet to come.
It was my second month here, when Charles woke me up one morning and excitedly ushered me to the basement to show me something which he thought I would love. He put a band around my eyes then led me down in this crypt, to this same place. He opened my eyes to show me the lifeless body of Camilla. I was scared by my wits. He told me later that he had gotten Camilla’s body dug up from the grave on the day of her death and preserved it in some sort of medical solution. My husband could not bear to be estranged from Camilla. I could not stay in the crypt for a moment more. But he wouldn’t allow me to go out. He told me he had plans for our night. And then, I shudder to think of the night, he made love to me in this same room with dead Camilla watching from her glass coffin.
My sister’s death, I deduced later, had left my husband mentally unstable. He could not forget her, it seemed, she had remained etched in his head like a recurring dream. But I could not let that happen, I resolved to cure him of the illness by showering him with all the love and care that I possessed.
The Anatomist (Maya Mystery Book 2) Page 12