Rutherston took up her offer of another pair, a bib-apron and a mask that smelled strongly of disinfectant, and a little jar of a strong-smelling ointment. He rubbed a touch of that below his nose and handed it around, and was glad of it when she pulled out the tray--decay had been quicker than he would have expected, given the refrigeration.
Odd, he thought. The marks are almost like burns, rather than sores. Blister marks running with clear fluid. As if he’d been touched with a red-hot... no, there’s no charring. As if he’d been touched with something supremely cold instead.
The nurse might have been examining a gutted chicken at the butcher’s, but Corporal Bramble went a little gray beneath his olive tan, and Mrs. Purkiss looked at the ceiling; both stood well back. Rutherston sympathized. The postmortem had left the corpse as gruesome as anything on a battlefield, if neater, and whatever the man had died of was ghastly. Sections of the back peeled away as she moved the corpse.
“I conducted the autopsy,” she said. “I usually do them here and pass on the reports to the County Coroner. I confess I was tempted to send for Dr. Kvaran from Petersfield this time, but honestly I don’t think Gudrun could have made head nor tail of it either.”
“I’d have brought a forensic surgeon from Winchester if one had been available, but I agree that it’s quite baffling,” Rutherston said. “May I see your notes?”
“By all means,” she said, handing him a clipboard.
Wooton, Jon: age, 27, single male, height 5 ft 11 inches, weight eleven stone, hair, dark brown, eyes, green...
Jon Wooton had been a fairly average modern Englishman... if you subtracted the gruesome lesions that had killed him. The small photograph attached showed him in his late teens, scowling and slouching in a coat with extravagant lapels, but with a certain crude Heathcliffian handsomeness to him. Even allowing for the circumstances, the ensuing decade hadn’t been kind.
Rutherston got out his own notebook and began sketching and making observations of the body; he’d seen a good many corpses himself in both his careers, and this one had certain features you didn’t often find in a Home Counties’ village mortuary. After a moment he tapped his pen in the air above the left shoulder.
“Notice that, corporal?” he said, pointing to a white scar on the triceps.
Bramble nodded. “Not before, sir; I was sort of distracted. But you’re right--he didn’t get ‘is buckler up in time that round,” he said.
Then the noncom followed the pen with his comments: “That’s an arrow-wound... so’s that... or a square-headed crossbow-bolt... sword-scars on the right arm. Nasty cut to the leg--he was lucky that time. That there could be a spear’ead. He didn’t get that lot being quarrelsome in the pub of a Saturday night. Not even a pub in Portsmouth or Bristol.”
“No record of military service,” Rutherston said thoughtfully.
“No, not beyond the usual militia training,” the District Nurse confirmed. “He did say he’d shipped out overseas as a merchant seaman several times, to Asia and America and the African coast.”
“So he might have got those fighting off pirates. But,” Rutherston said, and turned over the man’s right hand.
Even with the skin damage, the hands were definitely wrong for a seaman. Hauling on tarred hemp and sisal and fisting up canvas gave you a layer like cracked horn all across your palms, and you didn’t lose it quickly either; he’d seen that often enough. Jon Wooton’s right hand was if anything less callused than Rutherston’s own, which bore the marks of life-long work with the sword. It did share the “swordsman’s ring,” a circle of hard skin around the outer side of the forefinger and the inner side of the thumb. There were other scars, too, ones that looked as if they’d been caused by hot metal or acid.
Odd, Rutherston thought. Those look like blacksmith’s marks, or even what someone working in a bleach-powder plant might get. With nothing else to go by, I’d put these as the hands of an artisan in some skilled trade.
“But he was away from home for a good long time?” the detective said.
“More often than not, since he turned twenty. Usually about half the year, a month or two at a time; more in the winter than the summer.”
“Hmmm. Did he have money?”
“Nothing formal, but he didn’t seem to lack for it. Of course, the Wootons are fairly well-to-do; the family have held the lease of the mill since the resettlement.”
“Cause of death?”
“Proximate cause was massive exsanguination due to internal bleeding,” Miss Medford said.
She unfastened the clips and opened the body cavity. Her sister looked aside slightly, and Corporal Bramble more than that.
“You see?” she said. “The pattern of tissue degeneration is quite unlike anything I’ve seen before; very severe mercury poisoning, perhaps--that would account for some of the sores--but there’s nei evidence of mercury in the amount you would need. And that should have taken longer. I passed him in the street the day before yesterday, and he was healthy enough to scowl and spit then; perhaps a bit pale, but no more. And note how there’s no inflammation around the lesions? Simple cellular collapse, I think. There’s been no bacterial action to speak of.”
“You don’t think it was an infectious agent, then?”
“Probably not. I’ve read of African viruses with similar effects in the old days, and he might have come in contact with those on a voyage, but it’s a month’s sailing time between Britain and the Guinea coast, and they acted quickly. And the Journal of the Royal Medical Society lists no known cases since the Change; I have a complete series.”
“Had you treated Jon Wooton before?”
“Apart from the usual childhood complaints? Yes.” She sniffed audibly. “For a social disease, twice: gonorrhea. Cured by a course of antibiotics from the National Health Center. One tries to be forgiving, but I cautioned him that I would report any further occurrences to the Ministry of Health.”
She slid the tray closed with a snap. They stripped off their gloves and washed up in the stainless-steel sink with strong medical soap, then repaired to a sitting-room to one side of the business part of the building; Rutherston took a seat, and Bramble stood next to the door, shrewd dark eyes taking everything in. The furniture was in excellent if subdued and rather plain taste, with a picture on the wall that Rutherston thought might be French Impressionist--salvage art--and a landscape showing Eddsford from the Downs, done in the fashionable neo-Pre-Raphaelite style with a certain amateurish attractiveness. Miss Medford rang a small handbell.
“Tea, please, Aud,” she said.
Inwardly, Rutherston raised a brow as a pretty young woman in a dark dress and white apron bustled in and then returned with a tray that had obviously been kept in near-readiness; usually a District Nurse’s salary wouldn’t run to a housemaid, and he noticed that Mrs. Purkiss seemed a little constrained. When the tea came--in a beautiful salvaged set of Wedgewood, rather than modern manufacture--he could tell by the scent that it was the genuine black-leaf article from Hinduraj or Sri Lanka, rather than the herbal substitutes most people still used. Asian tea wasn’t quite a luxury reserved for the wealthy any more, but it was expensive even in these days of prosperity, peace and growing trade, like the cubes of white refined cane sugar in their silver bowl.
He took out his cigarette case and raised a brow. Miss Medford raised her high-bridged nose in turn.
“Not in here, if you please, inspector,” she said in clipped tones. “It’s a filthy habit and I don’t encourage it.”
He sighed slightly and slipped the gunmetal case back into its pocket; he could have used one now... or a stiff whiskey-and-soda, despite the hour. Winchester was a city of 70,000, and they might have as many as four or five homicides a year, but none like that.
She went on: “How do you take your tea?”
“Two lumps and milk, thank you,” he said, sipped appreciatively, then buttered one of the fresh muffins. His notebook went on his knee. “You taught Mr. Wooton, Mrs. P
urkiss?”
“Yes; for six years--he left school at fourteen.”
That was the minimum legal age, and usually the maximum for ordinary countryfolk. Rutherston made another note. He’d have expected a miller’s son to take another two years; the rural middle classes, farmers and craftsmen and shopkeepers, usually did. Primary education was free to that level, if not compulsory; and a miller, even if he rented rather than owning the machinery, was usually prosperous enough that he didn’t depend on a teenage son’s labor to keep the family eating.
The retired schoolteacher seemed to sense his question. “Jon’s father died when he was twelve--fell into the gears. His elder brother Eric took over the mill, young as he was. Sir James wanted to keep it in the family.”
“What sort of a student was Jon Wooton?”
Mrs. Purkiss lips thinned until they were bloodless. “Quite talented,” she said in a tone that tried for clinical and nearly achieved it. “And he continued to study after he’d left school; requested books on interlibrary loan through our reading room here.”
“Quite the scholar, then? His interests were?”
“Late-period pre-Change history, and the sciences. He enjoyed reading, too, which I’m sure you know isn’t all that common, particularly if it’s not just romances and adventure stories. Very intelligent; even brilliant, perhaps. With more application and self-discipline, I would have recommended him for a Royal and Imperial Scholarship. Father Frances thought the same.”
“You liked him, then?” Rutherston said neutrally.
The pinched look grew stronger. “He was a detestable little boy and did not improve with age. A sneak, bullied until he got his growth, and a vile bully himself afterwards. When he was quite little he would try to look in the...”
She flushed a little and set her cup down sharply.
“...the girl’s privy.”
“Unpopular?” Rutherston asked. “As an older boy, or a young man.”
“With all but the worst element, louts and... girls of questionable taste. He had his cronies. And he would do unspeakable things to library books! I had to speak very sharply to him about that, and impose fines.”
“Ah,” Rutherston said, with an inward sigh.
Unpopular with the respectable element, and the village Bad Boy. Probably got a girl or two pregnant, too, or gave her Cupid’s Measles, and skipped out on some of his trips to avoid the avenging relatives and the Squire and the parish priest.
When they’d left the clinic, the detective put his hat back on--the sun was bright in a sky with only a few piled white clouds--before he snapped the notebook shut and turned to Bramble with a silent question.
“Bad apple, that one,” Bramble said. “Knew some wide lads like that back home, but none so bad. From the looks of the knocks he took--and lived afterwards--I’d judge he was a hard man and nei mistake, not just your High Street ruffler ready with his fists or a quarterstaff. Smuggler, probably--treasure trove.”
Rutherston nodded. Ruins within the Empire of Greater Britain-- which included western Europe to the old German and Italian borders, the Mahgreb west of the Sicilian settlements around Tunis and Bizerte, and theoretically the Atlantic coast of what had been the United States--were in law Crown property. Salvage for ordinary materials went on by firms making competitive bids for the rights to a given area, and control of exports gave Winchester influence with the King of Ashante and the Sultan of Zanzibar and his ilk.
Certain types of salvage goods, bullion and jewelry and artwork, were still more tightly controlled. Licenses for searching the dead cities for those were dependent on good character, and the government kept the Royal Third. That made violating the law potentially very profitable for interlopers... and in the vast tangled wilderness of the Wild Lands northward and on the Continent outside the English settlements, very hard for the authorities to stop. The whole army wouldn’t be able to surround the jungled wreck of Paris or Madrid alone.
If the wilderness hadn’t been so dangerous, with remnant tribes of Brushwood Men ready to kill and rob unwary travelers--and sometimes, still, to eat them--the problem would have been even worse.
Bramble went on slowly: “There was something a bit odd about the way those two talked about him, sir. Miss Medford didn’t like him--not half! You could tell that, but she gave him penicillin for the clap, twice, without reporting him.”
“That is odd, corporal. Not technically very illegal, but odd. She’d have to mention it, it would be in the NHS disbursement records...”
Bramble frowned as they walked toward the church. “Something rum there. You don’t suppose... you don’t suppose he was having it away with ‘er, or something of that sort, sir? She struck me as a born old maid, though.”
Rutherston started to wave a dismissive hand, checked himself, and spoke slowly in turn, stroking his jaw: “No... but you’re right, there’s more there than meets the eye.” He thought for a moment. “And by the way, do ask questions if you think it would help. I need you for another viewpoint, not just to look formidable.”
He sighed. “The usual procedures are of little use here. Everyone had access to the victim, if it is a poisoning case. There’s no clear time element with slipping something into a man’s beer, the way there is with bashing him over the head.”
The churchyard was well kept behind its wrought-iron fence, even the older graves from the last century. Like most here in Hampshire, the new sections started with a marble slab on a long mound for the bodies found when the area was resettled from the Isle of Wight in the spring of 1999. By then the dead in Britain had outnumbered the living by around three hundred to one...
It bore a simple: For the unnumbered and nameless whom we could not aid: Father forgive us. Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy.
The fifty-two years since showed the usual pattern, a burst in the first years of terrible struggle, then four or five annually, then more again as population built up and the last survivors of the old days approached their three score-and-ten--according to the Hampshire Gazetteer, the village had about 600 people now, and the parish as a whole twice that. A sexton in his shirtsleeves with his suspenders dangling was digging a new grave for Jon Wooton, not far from a spreading yew whose dark foliage seemed to drink the sunlight.
The notice-board beside the doors of St. Mary the Virgin gave the times for services--Mass Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sunday mornings of course, as well as the holy days--and the usual exhortations to parishioners to make sure that they confessed and were absolved before partaking. Below that were listed meetings of the vestry, the choral society, the Harvest Festival Committee, the Mothers’ Union, the guilds--a dozen organizations altogether, some like the Sunday School chaired by the vicar’s wife.
Rutherston and the soldier removed their headgear and walked through the open door into the cool gloom, with beams of light shining through the stained glass of the windows overhead and a small side-altar to Our Lady of Walsingham. They touched their fingers to the holy water in the font, signed themselves, and genuflected to the altar and the image of the Blessed Mother, waiting for their eyes to adjust. A half-dozen other people were in the church: the usual volunteer middle-aged women and elderly men cleaning and polishing and doing minor repairs, an organist running her fingers through a hymn with the pumps disconnected, a few at silent prayer in the pews, and the vicar himself talking to a deacon.
The detective smiled to himself; together with the sweetness of cut grass from the churchyard it all had the wax-incense-hassocks-and-choirboy smell of Anglican Rite rural piety; not much different from St. Wilfred’s back in Short Compton, where he’d been born. He thought of himself as an unsentimental man, but the scent did take him back to the summer Sundays of his boyhood. Janice and he had been back just this Lammas, to watch the Loaf and the corn dolly being carried in and to share a niece’s First Communion.
The priest here was a different story from old Father Johnson, though. He nodded to the deacon and came striding over, the skirt
s of his black cassock swirling around stout walking shoes; Father Frances Broxby was a vigorous man in his mid-thirties, not tall but bull-chested and broad-shouldered, with reddish muttonchop whiskers and an athlete’s corded neck under the clerical dog-collar.
Squire’s younger brother, Rutherston reminded himself as they shook hands; he’d consulted Burke’s Peerage and Landed Gentry, and the Church Registry, of course. The grip was not only strong, but callused like a laborer’s or a smith’s.
That’s a bit surprising too. This parish is a reasonably good living.
Topped up by the major landowner, and at his encouragement by donations from the yeomanry and tradesmen. In theory the Church didn’t allow lay patronage, but in practice the bishop always consulted about local appointments with someone like Sir James, who owned about half the parish. The everyday work of the church required the leading family’s cooperation.
Frances Broxby has an Oxford Divinity degree, too, but he’s not ambitious; he wouldn’t have married before he was ordained if he was.
Married men could be ordained in the Anglican Rite and be parish priests, but not those who aimed at episcopal rank, or of course monastics; it was much the same arrangement as for the Ruthenian Catholics though on a vastly larger scale.
“Come, walk with me, my sons,” the priest said. “I think I know what you wish to speak of. A painful duty grows nei easier if we put it off.”
Rutherston blinked in the sunlight behind the churchyard. The long meadow there was part of the glebe--the land a parish priest used to graze his necessary horses and a milch-cow for his household, and cut hay; the sweet scent from the two fresh stacks was overwhelming. It was also the site where the militia practiced with their longbows once a week; the tattered-looking wooden target shaped like a Moorish corsair with a scimitar stood down by the hedge and bank at the end, along with a row of thick shield-shaped wedges of wood on stakes. Two Irish setters trotted up grinning and lolling their tongues; the priest bent to ruffle their ears and then led on at a brisk pace until they were on the embankment.
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