Death and the Running Patterer

by Adair, Robin

  BUT THERE WOULD be no Madame Greene on duty to greet any nocturnal visitors to her bordello. She left her parlor and moved quietly down Middlesex Lane, past the jail. As she turned right and crossed George Street, heading south toward Bridge Street, her outline was spotted by the same guard who had seen Captain Crotty leave the barracks.

  He called the sight to the attention of his mate. Not that they intended to do anything about it. Their job was to check people getting into, or out of, the barracks. What people did in the streets outside didn’t matter a rat’s arse. But it was interesting nonetheless. The oddest people flitted through the town at all hours. This bulky figure staggered slightly and paused periodically, as if for air.

  “Just a bloody Indian full of bull,” said the second soldier dismissively, as they stamped off on their rounds.

  IN AN UPSTAIRS bedroom at Government House, Eliza Darling sat up with a start at an unexpected noise. It sounded like the stairs creaking. There it was again. She considered whether to call Ralph softly (he was only “Ralph” in their most private lives; at other times he was always “General” or “the governor”) from his bed-chamber next door.

  No. She decided it was only her imagination. She had not been sleeping well lately, she acknowledged with a sigh. But Ralph, well, he slept like a baby. A baby; she sighed again, deeply. It was little more than a month since one of her—their—babies, Edward, had died in the whooping cough epidemic that had swept the settlement. The Darlings had a large brood but that did not stop the loss hurting her deeply. She tormented herself with the thought that, had she not agreed to come to the colony, her child would not have died.

  She kept up a brave face and few noticed any change in her fine features and gracious air. She had publicly said of the loss only that “a few selfish tears will fall, but God knows best, and I can say, I hope with resignation, His will be done.” Privately, she thought she could see new gray in her dark hair and lines around her bright brown eyes, even though she would not be thirty for two months.

  Ralph, well, Ralph was a quarter-century older. He had his military career and his work here, unhappy though it had become. When they were first offered the colony she had jokingly called it “Bottomless Bay.” Now he was depressed by opposition from the Emancipists and almost obsessed with identifying with the Exclusives. And she felt empty. It was, indeed, all “bottomless” for both of them.

  Suddenly there was another sound. Eliza shivered. Intruders! The noise was at the front door. Now she realized that it was coming from outside, a thought that drew her from her bed to the window. In the flickering flare of a cresset torch, she watched the guard turn and pace to one side.

  Apparently having waited for this move and now out of the soldier’s line of sight, a figure in a dark cloak darted from the doorway into the bushes, then disappeared.

  Eliza Darling recognized the figure. She had been married to it for eleven years.

  ALL THESE WANDERERS moved furtively. But other, even more shadowy, creatures of the night were watching closely.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  He got a hundred on the back and you could see his back bone between his shoulder blades. The doctor order him to get another hundred on his bottom. His haunches was in such a jelly the doctor order him to be flog on the calves of his legs … The flesh and skin blew in my face as they shook off the cats.

  —Joseph Holt, exiled Irish rebel (1800)

  IT WAS THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, PERHAPS THREE HOURS AFTER SUNDAY had turned into Monday, long before the rising sun would kiss into bustling life the Lumber Yard on the corner of Bridge Street and the town’s main artery, George Street.

  While it was, in truth, a yard filled with stacks of milled timber under covers, the huge enclosure was much more than a storage space. Behind its high walls was a square ringed with low buildings. These were workshops that supplied the government with much of the sinews of the settlement’s daily existence. There were sheds for nailmakers, shoemakers, carpenters, tailors and a forge for blacksmiths.

  Guarded by bored soldiers and prodded along by “trusty” convicts acting as overseers, the convicts were marched from and back to their respective barracks every workday. They wore overalls marked “PB” for Prisoners Barracks at Hyde Park and “CB” for the Carters Barracks at the southern end of the town. The latter jail took its name from the human “draught animals,” convicts who were yoked to pull brick-carts and similar wagons. The men worked at the Lumber Yard from sunrise to sunset, a twelve-hour day at this time of year.

  While the yard rang with voices and the clangs and bangs of industry during most days, it should always have been deathly still, almost grave-like, during the dark hours.

  But this early morning there were unexpected noises, sounds other than the normal murmur of the Tank Stream, trapped and running sluggishly in a channel beside the yard, or the rustle of foraging rats. The air was filled with the slaps of a hard object erratically striking a softer surface, irregular grunts of expelled breath followed by hissing intakes, and scuffling sounds of restless feet, almost the swish of a dancer. None of these noises, however, was loud enough to escape over the thick, high walls and shut wooden gate.

  In any case, although the yard was only a few hundred yards away from, and almost in the line of sight of, the occupants of the main guardhouse at the redcoats’ barracks, the soldiers there took no interest in the closed workplace. And any passing constable on watch patrol would only see that the gate remained safely undisturbed.

  Those noises that were somehow in rhythm with the dancing feet seemed to be interrupted regularly by muffled moans and sobs, and raspy, tortured breathing. The first range of sounds came from a scourger wielding a cat-o’-nine-tails; the noises in counterpoint came from a man being flogged to death.

  IF IT WAS an odd time for a flogging, the equipment involved was standard in a time and place where the punishment was commonplace.

  Convicts casually called twenty-five lashes a “tester” or a “Botany Bay dozen” to show disdain for the punishment; a “canary,” as well as being a nickname for a yellow-clad convict, described a hundred strokes—because the whip and the victim supposedly “sang” together. Such punishment could be meted out for a misdemeanor as minor as insolence to a jailer.

  The least lashes administered was usually twenty-five; the average was fifty. Many men suffered up to 500; some died, if not of the physical wounding then of heart attack at the pain and shock, or even the raw fear. One prison commander ordered 26,024 strokes in 16 months; another once handed out 1,500 before he took breakfast.

  Although a victim could be imprisoned in a pillory or in the stocks to receive the flagellation, or even simply be lashed to a tree, the most common official restraints were the triangles.

  This prisoner in the Lumber Yard was confined thus. Three iron poles, each eight feet long, were planted in the ground to form legs that tapered to a common point higher than a man’s upraised hands. Similar sets stood throughout the settlement.

  The scourger now wielded the cat’s nine long cords, knotted rockhard at each end and attached to the leather-bound handle, but to an irregular rhythm. In the shadow of the tall walls and with not even a new moon, the darkness dampened the standard army rate of three or four strokes a minute. The only light came, weakly, from a softly glowing whale-oil lantern set on the ground. It was sufficient to show that the victim was stripped to the waist, obviously male and tall. His tormentor remained a phantom figure.

  The cruelty of the cat alone was not punishment enough to satisfy the bloody-minded torturer, who regularly dipped the tails into a nearby bucket of wet sand and lime, called the “pepper pot”—to load the knots with what felt like thousands of red-hot needle points.

  After twenty minutes, the method of punishment surprisingly changed. The torturer threw the cat aside, exchanging it for a smaller, lighter weapon called a tawse, which was usually reserved for chastising juvenile offenders. It was a broad leather strap split at the end int
o narrow strips. Normally this would not break the skin, only raise bruising and welts. Schoolteachers often used the tawse.

  This new attack had a strange variation, however. Before applying the tawse, the scourger attached a small blade that glittered even in the dim lamplight to one tail of the smaller whip. Only then did the thrashing continue, now at a more rapid rate.

  Fifteen minutes later, the flogger’s onslaught stopped and the yard fell still. The gagging groans and tortured breathing had stopped. Sweaty fingers felt for a pulse in the neck of the man on the triangles. Nothing.

  The killer detached the blade from the tawse tail and now used it to slash at the suspended man’s throat, then moved down to hack wounds first across the belly and then across both ankles.

  The gag was ripped from the dead man’s face, sending a frothy spray of blood and spittle from the suddenly open, slack lips. He had bitten through his tongue. Into the drooling livid mouth, bloody fingers rammed a handful of crumbs shaken from a small bag.

  The final indignity was yet to come. Unbuckling the corpse’s belt the scourger tore down the wet breeches—like many men being whipped, the victim had lost control of his bladder—and with two strokes of the blade slashed off the exposed penis, then shoved the gory mess into the open mouth.

  Carrying the tawse and the doused lamp, the killer slipped carefully through the gate, closed it quietly and melted away into the velvet night. There was no one to hear the last whispered, bitter message delivered to the mutilated man dangling on the triangles: “Bon appétit!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  What bloody man is that?

  —William Shakespeare, Macbeth (1606)

  NICODEMUS DUNNE AND CAPTAIN ROSSI STOOD IN THE EARLY Monday-morning sunlight closely watching Dr. Thomas Owens examine the body on the floor of the Lumber Yard.

  The hive of industry was quiet. The busy bees—an early coffle of convict workers arrived for the week’s first shift—were crowded, restless, in a far corner. They were excited by the break in their hard and monotonous routine but trying not to show it. They had been warned that any talk would be rewarded with fifty lashes. To start with. Later coffles were being turned back.

  A convict overseer stood nervously beside the tableau of victim and investigators. He explained he had been the second arrival, at six A.M., and had discovered the mess. The body lay now in a tacky pool of congealing blood at the base of the flogging triangles. Ants scurried through the gore, carrying away lumps of torn flesh. Someone had clearly unhooked the still-shackled wrists from the iron supports only recently.

  “What do we know?” asked Rossi, studying the discarded whip.

  “Well,” said Owens, dusting his gloved hands, “we know he wasn’t one of ours.”

  The police chief raised an eyebrow. “I mean,” the doctor continued, “that he is black but he is not an ‘Indian,’ not one of our sable brethren.”

  “Of course he’s not,” snorted Rossi. “He’s either a West Indian or from Mauritius. I’ve seen plenty of both.” Dunne looked up; he had always meant to ask the lawman about his time in Mauritius.

  The overseer cleared his throat. “Captain, he is—was—from the Indies, true, but a free man, one of our blacksmiths. Head one, in fact.”

  “So he wasn’t a scourger?” the patterer asked. The thought of a revenge killing had soon presented itself.

  “Lord, no. He only made the triangles. He really was a smith. A real craftsman, he was. A specialist, too. He usually only made shackles and chains for lags. It was like a gent going to his tailor. Here, I’ll show you what I mean. Hey!” he shouted at a guard. “Send one of those over here.”

  When “one of those,” an ironed convict, clanked over, the overseer indicated the leg shackles. “I know you gents have seen them before, but have you looked close?”—Dunne did not tell him how closely he had looked in the past—“Works of art these are, all done by our dear departed.”

  He pointed. The rings of iron plate, called basils, which went around the man’s ankles each comprised of two half-circles that, put together, fitted the size of the leg. The ends of the irons were flattened and had holes to take linking rivets. When the circlets were fitted to a convict, they were riveted together. This man’s irons were linked by about two feet of chain. A length of rope from the chain’s center link to the man’s belt stopped the chain dragging on the ground. Yes, Dunne remembered it all too well.

  “Beautiful,” said the overseer, dismissing the prisoner. “He—that’s our smith—was in Mauritius before he came here. That’s where he learned his craft, shackling slaves. Proud of his work, he was. Said they fitted so snug there was no chafing and he never hurt no one.”

  He paused. “Or maybe only the once,” he corrected himself. “He felt badly about one soldier here—too heavy the shackles was; fifteen bloody pounds, they say.” He dropped his voice conspiratorially. “But I reckon it wasn’t all his fault. He was only doing what Dumaresq wanted, only obeying orders.”

  Dunne and the others of course knew the name Dumaresq. Several brothers of that name—their sister was Mrs. Darling—had followed the governor on his posting to Sydney three years earlier. The Dumaresq in question was doubtless the one who had been put in charge of the Lumber Yard.

  “Was he by any chance a soldier?” asked Rossi.

  “Of course he was a soldier, didn’t I just say so? Oh, you mean the smith? Yes, he had been, but that was years ago, before the century turned. He was always proud he’d been in the 45th in Grenada. Over the governor, he said.”

  An oddity suddenly pricked Dunne. “How were you second arrival yet the one who found him? Who was first?”

  The overseer shrugged. “Why, he was first, of course. Always was. He came always a few hours early at the beginning of the week because the forge would have been cold on account of Sunday. At other times the fire would have been banked overnight.”

  “So,” said Rossi, “he was killed between, say, three A.M. and six A.M.?”

  Dr. Owens nodded. That tallies with the body’s rigor and the fact that there’s as yet no putrefaction. And the lividity, from its levels in the lower limbs, suggests that he has been down from the triangles about—what is it now, nine A.M.?—only since about sunup.”

  “Yes, sir,” agreed the overseer, “I unhooked him.”

  “That raises the question: Who hooked him up?” said Rossi. “He must have been a strong devil to handle the strength of a smith.”

  “Maybe our killer had an accomplice,” suggested the patterer.

  “Indeed, sir,” interposed the overseer. “But there are tricks to every trade and flogging’s no exception. I’ve seen a man suspend himself—God’s own truth, sir!—so no manhandling of a reluctant or dead weight was called for. You persuade him, with the cat or the tickle of a blade, you see, to stand on a box or the like and throw his hand bindings or manacles over the top of the triangles. Kick his legs from under and he’s hanging like game.”

  Rossi nodded. “However he was suspended, he was ironically—hah!—ironed around the wrists and ankles like the felons he catered for, no doubt by his very own handiwork. But, first, what exactly killed him?”

  Owens blew through pursed lips. “We’ll know for certain when I have had him up on the table, but I’m pretty sure the whipping didn’t—by itself, that is. Men of his strength usually take it better than that. I’ve seen proud lads take 500 lashes and walk away. Of course, our man was old—well into his fifties, I’d guess. And his wounds were not the work of a professional scourger. Some of these are cat marks, and you can see where the tails have bitten deep. They’ve been dipped in wet sand to rough them up before each stroke.

  “Now while that’s pretty professional, some wounds are just strap marks, although they often end in lacerations, as though something sharp was attached to the strap, a blade of some sort. I’d hazard that our flogger got tired with the cat and moved to something lighter. Which suggests someone untrained in the black art.”

&n
bsp; “But what did kill him?” pursued Dunne. “Did he, er, choke on the …” He gestured at the amputated member the doctor had removed from the victim’s mouth.

  Owens shook his head. “No, not that. That was done last. The leather gag would not have helped, for I see that his nose has been broken in the past and he would have had trouble breathing through it at the best of times. No, I suspect he had a seizure. See, his face is empurpled. And one other thing—two, really—the cat tails and the other slashes left their marks mainly on the left of his back and curl around onto the left side of the belly. And the deepest heel marks of the scourger belong to a right foot.”

  “Which means?”

  “That we are looking again at our old friend Bollocky Bill.”

  And, as Owens beckoned to two hospital handlers to approach and remove the body on a litter, he added, “Oh, and of course there were slashes to the throat, midriff and ankles. Just like the first victim outside the tavern. And, as well as having his private parts placed where they shouldn’t be, the poor fellow was also given a ration of another old friend we’ve met before—but with a difference.”

  He smiled at his companions’ frowns. “There is sugar again in the mouth, but very unusual sugar. It’s bright green.”

  There was a long silence. “I think,” said Rossi at last, “that we need to hold a council of war.”

  As the official party of investigators left the Lumber Yard, Dr. Owens to escort the body to the morgue for examination and his companions to return, if only briefly, to their normal lives, Nicodemus Dunne paused and took the captain aside.

  “That strange remark by the overseer,” he said. “I meant to pursue it back there, but it slipped away in the excitement.”