The Hidden Man

by Robin Blake

  ‘They’ve found a dead man.’

  ‘They’ve got a corpus.’

  ‘Dead he is, up on Moor.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  THERE HAD BEEN no time to fetch a horse, and so we walked it. The dawn was breaking over to our right, where the hills made a dark barrier of the horizon. Morning birds darted along the hedgerows and, as the light crept out across the land, rabbits hopped here and there and a hare moved with its limping, wary walk alongside a ditch. Most of the night creatures were fast in their nests and burrows: I did see one late fox slinking guiltily away from us as we entered upon the Moor, and there was the slightest smudge of white on the edge of a copse as a badger went home to bed. Above all, the night’s cloud had moved away to the north and the sky was clearing. It promised to be a warm day.

  The men with me were an assorted group that had been out all night after game. They were excited, and a little overawed by the discovery they had made and, as we walked, I tried to get a clearer idea of how exactly it had happened.

  ‘It were a man, Mr Cragg, lying flat out on the Bale Stone. I saw him but I didn’t know him. No, his face were battered so bad we couldn’t recognize him, not from ground. So Michael got up to shine lamplight on his face – I got up on the Stone, see, and they handed me up the light and, as I stood over him, I brought the light across and I saw the terrible thing right below me. We could all see it from where we stood. There were this great stake right through his heart, a terrible rough stake of wood driven deep into the chest. No chance that he was alive. No chance. We left him as he was with Leo Porter and two others to look after him and so we came down, and we decided amongst ourselves it should be you, Mr Cragg, we should knock up, and that you would know what to do.’

  I assured them they had done the right thing.

  ‘Did anyone find him first?’ I asked, ‘Or were you all in a group?’

  ‘Not one group. Different groups. It were me and Simon here and John Bailey that’s stayed up there with the corpus that saw it first. The rest came up later.’

  The speaker was a man called Edward Etherington, a carpenter, whom I knew to be literate and fairly sensible on the whole. I marked him out in my mind as the first finder.

  We reached the Stone after a stiff walk of less than twenty minutes. Now morning sunlight was bathing the Moor, making dew and cuckoo-spit glisten and picking out the green of the trees, the yellow of gorse and the velvet purple of the heather. The combination of silvery early light and receding dark made my senses dance, heightened as they were by sleeplessness.

  Three men emerged from the Stone’s shadow to greet us. One of them, Porter, hailed me and cheerfully volunteered the latest news.

  ‘He hasn’t stirred, Sir. He hasn’t uttered.’

  ‘Have you seen anyone else about?’

  ‘No. No one’s been near.’

  I could see the outline of a man’s bulk lying on top of the Stone.

  ‘Here, Sir, you should get on top for a look.’

  Porter, a man built like a bear, laced his hands to make a stirrup. I planted my foot on it and he heaved me easily up until I stood on the Stone beside the corpse, which lay on its back, splayed and empty of life.

  The sun was high enough now and there was no need for a lamp. I could see how grievously the fellow’s face had been assaulted. It was glazed in blood and there was little left of its original features, an ear half torn off, the nose and cheekbones smashed, and the jaw taken right out its hinges by what must have been a scything sideways blow. The eyeballs caught a ray of the sun, but nothing could animate their rigid stare.

  The Stone was large enough to enable me to walk all round the body. I did so, noting that the coat, breeches, shirt and stockings were of very ordinary cloth and that the one visible shoe – the other being absent – was of sturdy manufacture. And, although I could never have sworn to the identity of the man from what was left of his face, I knew who he was. I had seen all of these pieces of clothing in my courtroom on the previous day, when they had been worn by Tybalt Jackson, insurance agent of Bristol. Now they covered Mr Jackson’s mortal remains.

  I knelt, pulled out the tail of his shirt and pushed my hand under it, up as far as the armpit. Fidelis had taught me that I should do this on every occasion that I came across a body, to test the temperature. In this instance the flesh felt cool by comparison with my own body heat and I turned my attention to the object jutting, some way out of the vertical, from Jackson’s chest, with about three inches of it showing. The men’s enthusiastic evocation of a ‘great stake’ driven into his heart had made me visualize something the thickness of a fencing post, sharpened and malletted with mighty blows through the body. It was nothing like that, but thinner and unshaped, like a piece of wood split for kindling. I grasped it and pulled upwards. It must have penetrated between two ribs, for it was wedged quite firmly. I left it in place.

  I took out my watch. A quarter past five. The sooner Fidelis got out here the better for we could not leave the body long exposed to the June sun. I vaulted down from the Stone and asked which of the men could stay and assist. I really did need help: a messenger to convey a summons to Dr Fidelis in Fisher Gate and then, unfortunately but inescapably, to Sergeant Mallender at his house in Tithe Barn Street; and I required some of them to fashion an awning for the body, and then a litter, in order to be ready, when the time came, to carry it back to town. But I also wanted to detain as many of these men as I could, to delay by a little the spread of the news. In truth, I had little real hope of this. The word would be carried with the baker’s boy and the dairyman, so that by breakfast-time it would be in every house and hovel in town. But I did not relish the lot of gawpers that would be trailing out here as a consequence.

  Two or three of the men nevertheless insisted that business called them away, though the greater part were so much enjoying the dramatic moment that they did not want it to end. While Etherington got a group of them to work on the awning – saying they would improvise a screen for the body from the long-nets they had with them, which would later form the bed of a litter to carry it – I set to work speaking to each of the men, starting with those wanting to leave us.

  The picture that I formed from these discussions was inconclusive. The men divided into three groups. Each had been out on the Moor, or ranged further off into the Fulwood or over the fields beyond Cadley, and had come together around the dead body after Etherington, with his brother Simon and brother-in-law Bailey, had first found it. Etherington’s own group had only just come out from town. They had set the Stone as their meeting place, being intent on erecting long nets nearby in which to drive the morning’s crop of rabbits as they ventured out of their burrows. A second group, that came up shortly after, were five fellows with a pair of lurcher dogs. They had been up all night beating the edge of the woods, hoping for a deer but now bringing home only a brace of hare. Finally there had been Leo and his son, a lad of sixteen built along similar lines to his father’s massive frame, who were on their way back after a night’s fishing on the little Savage River above Cottam Mill.

  None of these ten men reported seeing or hearing anything suspicious on the Moor. I had made sure to take each one apart from his fellows to question him, but separately no man had anything to disclose that contradicted what another had said – except that both Leo and young Alan Porter claimed to have caught the fine pike that lay in their fish bag.

  A drumming of hooves was heard coming from the north of us, and I recalled that was where the path of the racecourse passed the Stone. I looked and saw John Barton with a stable boy, each of them riding a strapping courser heavily rugged and bonneted.

  Barton pulled up his mount and called out when he saw me.

  ‘Cragg!’

  I walked towards him and down the shallow bank until I stood on the track itself.

  ‘Someone was fatally attacked here last night,’ I said. ‘Have you seen anything? Heard anything?’

  Barton shook his head.


  ‘No. This is our first string to come out. I was dreaming in bed until twenty minutes ago, all night undisturbed since ten o’clock.’

  He looked at the boy.

  ‘Seen anything suspicious last night, Bobby?’

  Bobby shook his head.

  ‘So who’s dead?’ Barton went on, turning back to me. ‘Anyone I know?’

  ‘A stranger.’

  ‘Probably a stranger who did it, then.’

  I let that go without reply and waved goodbye to the horse exercisers, who set off again at a steady canter.

  Three of the hunters were now ready to leave. The two dogs they had with them were alert to this and were suddenly nosing the wind, barking and pulling at their leashes, all straining in the one direction towards the east of the Bale Stone. The owner of one of them said:

  ‘Well, us’ll have some sport before we go home after all, eh lads? It’s likely a deer that’s strayed too close.’

  He slipped his dog’s leash and he tore off, followed by the other, and by their owners with their guns, galloping through the brush in increasingly distant pursuit. No deer was sprung, however, and at a hundred and fifty yards from the Stone the dogs found their prey exactly where they had scented it. I could hear growling and yipping as they worried at it, but soon they were roughly called off. I saw the men kneel to look at whatever creature their lurchers had caught, and then one of them leapt up, waving and shouting towards the Stone, his words blown away from us by the breeze. They began hauling whatever creature it was towards us, and we soon realized it was not an animal, but a young person with the appearance of a boy, in cap, shirt and breeches (though no shoes). He was being both pushed and dragged along, his eyes wide from fear and holding with one hand the wrist of the other, in the place where one of the dogs had seized it. I was struck by his crying – it was silent. The other notable thing about him was his skin: he was as black as a cottage kettle.

  At this point a heavily puffing Sergeant Oswald Mallender arrived at the spot. He had received the message of a dead body at the Bale Stone and hastened out without even waiting for his courtiers, the two Parkin brothers. The Sergeant took one look at the dead body, and another at the unfortunate prisoner, who had now been brought to stand with his back to the Stone. Mallender acknowledged my presence with little more than a grunt before he turned his attention fully towards the prisoner.

  ‘What have we here, lads? A dead body – and a suspicious person in custody, by the look of it. What, men? Was this wretch caught running away?’

  The owner of the dog that had caught the boy explained the circumstances.

  ‘Well, boy, speak English do you?’ growled Mallender, gesturing towards the body. ‘What do you say to all this? You’ve been caught lurking near the scene of a death – no! A murder! Did you do it? Did you?’

  He took the boy by his ear and twisted it, but could wring no sound from him except for the snuffles of his streaming nose.

  ‘No answer? You young savage, of course you did! Who’s the corpus? Does anyone know him?’

  ‘His name is Tybalt Jackson,’ I said, ‘and yesterday he gave evidence at the inquest into the death of goldsmith Pimbo at the Friary Bar Inn. This boy I believe to have been Jackson’s servant. I also believe he may be a mute, which would explain why he does not answer your questions.’

  ‘I have a readier explanation, Cragg. Guilt!’

  Mallender seemed quite uninterested in looking over the body, and I noticed he kept himself at an uneasy distance at all times from the Stone on which it lay. When I suggested he take a closer look at Jackson, he hastened to decline with a wave of his hand.

  ‘Time enough for that, Cragg, when you get it to town. Meanwhile I shall personally escort this Devil-child of Satan to Moot Hall where his judgement awaits, shall I?’

  Mallender’s behaviour had so far been entirely consistent with his usual procedure. He liked, when called to a crime, to convey the impression of a man of decision, a man of action, able in an instant to penetrate to the heart of a mystery and point his finger at the villain. He must have been delighted at what he found by the Bale Stone, nervous though he was of the Stone itself. A killed man, and an already-made murderer of that man fallen without effort into his hands. I knew it would be useless but still I warned him.

  ‘I really do not think we should hurry to judgement on him, Mallender. He may be a witness; I very much doubt he is the murderer.’

  Mallender looked astonished that I should contradict his own instinctual grasp of criminal truth.

  ‘But what we have here is a black savage, Mr Cragg. Kill without a second’s thought, they will. We must take him before the Mayor without delay for, in my opinion which I am sure Mr Grimshaw will share, the piccaninny must be kept in gaol until he comes to the Assizes. So I’ll be happy to let you have charge of the body, and I shall have charge of the killer. Are we agreed? Let’s go, my lads.’

  Mallender and the hunters left us, walking in a close huddle around the black boy. When we had stood for a few moments to watch them go, Etherington turned to me.

  ‘Shall us fashion the hurdle and take the body down now, Mr Cragg?’

  ‘No, do not move it yet. I want Dr Fidelis to look at it in situ first. He should be here – ah! There in fact he is.’

  Fidelis had appeared walking briskly along the path towards the Bale Stone, carrying his medical bag. His face, as it usually did in the early morning, looked a little creased and drawn. But as soon as he saw the body he began to regain vitality like a drooping buttercup in water.

  ‘Aha! Didn’t I tell you this was a matter worth killing over?’

  Soon he had vaulted up onto the Stone and knelt beside the dead man. I told Etherington that he could finish constructing the litter now, as I thought we could be on our way in about ten minutes. And so we were.

  * * *

  Fidelis and I walked behind the four men that carried the litter, at sufficient distance to make it impossible for them to hear us. I said:

  ‘Give me your impressions.’

  ‘He still has warmth. He is not yet in the slightest stiff. I think he cannot have died more than five hours ago.’

  ‘What about the wounds? Which of them killed him?’

  ‘I need to open the body to see how far the stick in his chest penetrates. If it reached his heart it would certainly have killed him, providing he were not dead already.’

  ‘So can you tell if the face wounds were done before or after the stick?’

  ‘That is a very good question. And the answer is at the moment I can’t. But I will think about it.’

  ‘You saw Mallender dragging away the negro boy?’

  ‘I passed them on the path.’

  ‘He already has him lined up on the scaffold with the noose around his neck. But I doubt he is the killer.’

  ‘He cannot be the killer alone – there must have been killers, Titus. Did you not perceive the same?’

  ‘Go on, Luke.’

  ‘The attack did not start on the Bale Stone. Jackson was put there after he had been significantly wounded, if not actually killed. I rather fancy he was already dead: there had been no great spillage of fresh blood on the Stone. I could clearly see bloodstains where he was pulled up over the edge and onto the top surface, and also the drag marks made as he was manoeuvred into the position in which he was found, but no large pools as would have formed if he had pumped out his life-blood here.’

  ‘You’re right, Luke. One man could not have got the body up there – and certainly not a boy like that poor waif.’

  ‘A boy, you say?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I only caught a short glimpse, but I must place a caution beside that word.’

  ‘A caution?’

  ‘Yes. Of course, the assumption is that it is a boy, because, when one has a black servant, it is of course always a boy, is it not? And your poor waif was indeed dressed as a boy. Yet to my eyes the physical outline was not that of a boy, but fem
ale, Titus. Under that shirt I’ll warrant you she had the makings of breasts and under those breeches a girl’s arse.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  HEADING FOR THE House of Correction, we came into town by the Friary Bar and immediately made the turn into Marsh Lane. But here Fidelis excused himself,

  ‘I must leave you here,’ he said. ‘I have a busy round of calls.’

  I gestured at the improvised litter and its burden.

  ‘Will you examine him for me, later?’

  ‘With pleasure, but not before afternoon. Shall I meet you at three o’clock?’

  The town was shaking itself awake. Already there were children sitting on their doorsteps with slices of bread and dripping larger than their hands, watching their mothers as they sluiced and swept the cobblestones. Men, stumbling towards the market under laden hods or heavy satchels, wove a mazy path to avoid the women’s brooms. Boys idled on the way to the Grammar School, stopping in groups to roll marbles, or to tussle and taunt each other.

  Every head turned to us as we passed. I had picked up an old sack from the roadside along the way and used it to cover poor Jackson’s broken face, but this served only to increase the general curiosity, and soon we had a parade behind us like a disorderly funeral, the mourners calling out questions to the litter bearers, and shouting up to houses along the way for people to come and see. Death is all around us, yet we will never treat it as a commonplace. I suppose it is because we don’t know the manner of our own deaths that we are so powerfully drawn to discover how others have died.

  We arrived at the House of Correction and asked the porter to send for Arnold Limb, the Keeper of Correction. A minute later he hurried out to the lodge, flapping his hands.

  ‘Bless me, Cragg, what have you brought me now?’

  The Keeper had not had time to take breakfast, which would have made a dourer man bad tempered. But the genial Limb’s dominant humour was sanguine and, though he was agitated, he retained his bonhomie.

  ‘You are having an eventful morning, Mr Limb?’