Death and the Running Patterer: A Curious Murder Mystery

by Robin Adair

  The oddness of the assignment lay in the fact that he was required to read a round-up of commercial news, much of it rather out of date, to a solemn audience of one man who never took notes. This was out of keeping, Dunne always thought, with the general efficiency of the bank. It had come a long way in the eleven years that had passed since it began trading as the colony’s first bank, in cramped rooms in Macquarie Place opposite the site where the obelisk from which all distances were measured now stood. This location was known, widely and slyly, as “the center of the universe.”

  Certainly, the Bank of New South Wales could boast of being at the center of Sydney’s business universe. Its only true rival was the Bank of Australia, begun in 1826 by wealthy pastoralist John Macarthur and his fellows. Most colonists spurned this institution, which was widely derided as the “Squatters’ Bank,” and stayed loyal to the Wales.

  But no one was more loyal to the bank than the man to whom Nicodemus Dunne now, and always, reported—Mr. Joseph Hyde Potts. He had started as the bank’s first employee, as porter and general servant, but Mr. Potts now used his penmanship, calligraphy and cleverness to draft official documents, even to design banknotes.

  As he had done since his first day, Mr. Potts always slept on the premises, ever watchful but hoping never to have to use the rifle and case of pistols he kept handy. Only once had the iron chest that served as a vault for money and valuables been threatened. On that occasion, Mr. Potts had to see off a drunken burglar who climbed down the chimney.

  This day, as usual, he and the patterer shared the cane-bottomed couch that welcomed visitors and customers while Dunne served a digest of London stock markets, fat lamb prices, wool sales, bills and bonds, land sales and shipping movements: much the same fare that Sam Terry had demanded.

  Dunne could never quite fathom why the bank—which surely had its own intelligence sources as quick as those of any newspaper—needed him. But Mr. Potts always assured Dunne of the value of his news and paid him the handsome sum of six pounds a month for his trouble. Also odd was that this client insisted that the fee be paid into an account opened for the patterer, but the credits always showed up and Dunne shrugged it all off as merely a banker’s eccentricity.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Fair Cloacina, goddess of this place,

  Look on thy supplicant with a smiling face.

  Soft, yet cohesive, let my offering flow,

  Not rudely swift, nor insolently slow.

  —Ancient Roman prayer to a deity, entreating success over the cesspit, or cloaca (translator unknown)

  EVERYONE CALLED HIM SIMPLY THE OX. OR THE OX OF THE ROCKS, THE violent Sydney village in which he lived and worked. The name suited him, for he was tall and powerfully built, and after all he did work as a slaughterman.

  But The Ox was puzzled by another nickname. God knows, he thought, why they called this place a “house of ease.” In other ordinary language it was a privy, an outhouse, the jakes, a shithouse. But house of ease?

  He had even heard older people call it the “hole of the siege.” And in his case, “siege” was a good word. Because, again, for days he had been laying siege to his bound-up bowels. And losing.

  In the word of the apothecaries he haunted he was “costive,” as it was delicately called, constipated. Yes, he ate well, he thought, though perhaps not as well as he had in the service. Now his teeth—missing, broken, worn down or decayed—left him unable to chew his food properly, even though his diet was as good as that of any other working man: maize bread and mutton or, when he couldn’t afford that, Norfolk Island mutton. (That’s what transported men called the despised substitute, goat.)

  And there was always the chance of bullock’s head brawn, boiled calf’s head, cow’s heel or calf′s feet broth. You couldn’t eat too much meat. That wasn’t the problem. He’d always been known to his messmates as “old cannonball guts.” They’d reckoned only a charge of gunpowder would move him.

  No, he had tried everything in search of the sovereign remedy for his condition. Nothing worked—pray God it wasn’t a sore! He couldn’t afford to consult a leech, so he regularly plagued the twenty or so apothecaries who hung up their mortar-and-pestle signs throughout the town.

  He’d loudly complained about his predicament in so many places that the whole colony must know of his failures. Castor oil was three and six a pint down the drain; Epsom salts were the cheapest chance at nine pence a pound, but they didn’t succeed; senna leaves at one shilling an ounce were no answer; rhubarb root at the same price had the same negative effect; ipecacuan powder at two and six an ounce had a result but with the wrong orifice—it simply made him vomit.

  During this latest visit, the apothecary had desperately suggested he consider the gum resin called asafoetida, until the disgusting smell convinced The Ox otherwise. So he was frantic enough to grasp at any help when he left the shop, even though the apothecary had promised to think of something and send word to him.

  He had walked only a few hundred yards along George Street when he felt a tug on his coattails. Looking around and then down, he saw a barefoot urchin of streetwise teenage years.

  “Bugger off,” The Ox said, raising his fist to give the lad a cuff. He was surely a beggar wanting a penny, a child of the streets or even a stray from among the child offenders in the Carters Barracks at the southern end of town. There were hundreds of masterless children at large.

  “No, sir,” said the dusty boy. “Something for you.” He held out a small envelope.

  “Who from?”

  “ ’Pothecary, sir. ’Pothecary sent it. For you, sir. Said it was urgent.”

  Sure enough, the envelope was addressed to The Ox by name. He took pride in his ability to read.

  “Said you could pay later,” piped the scrawny street sparrow.

  That idea appealed to the big man and he looked down at the boy. “Did you get anything for your trouble?” he asked.

  “Threepence, sir.”

  “All right. Then here’s a tip from me—bugger off!”

  Much amused and hopeful, The Ox headed home.

  HOME, WITH ITS privy out the back, was a dingy room in a dilapidated house in The Rocks, near Cribb’s Lane. The narrow thoroughfare, made by a butcher whose yard was nearby, was nondescript and anonymous to most outsiders. So if The Ox wanted to give directions to it, he simply said it was near a hotel, Jasper Tunn’s Whale Fishery.

  Now he was back at the siege-hole, reading a note from the envelope. It told him that the accompanying powder would work most efficaciously if swallowed while he was at stool in the squatting position. He prepared to take his medicine.

  He sat over the latrine pit. In Sydney, if you were fortunate, cesspits emptied into a drain or the mess seeped into the surrounding soil. Many, however, overflowed or even leaked out under adjoining buildings. Some people simply emptied their chamberpots into street gutters or even threw their contents onto the street out of a window. The warning cry, “Watch under!” was so common that human emissions were generally known as “chunder.”

  The only people sanguine about the unwanted abundance of dung were the men called rakers—usually Celestials—who collected nightsoil to spread on their market gardens. Fullers of cloth would seek urine but it was rarely pure.

  Hoping finally to end his lonely vigil, The Ox obeyed the note’s instructions. He was ready. Optimistically, he had set beside him what were called arse-wipes—paper was scarce in poor households, so arse-wipes were usually old cloths or even small piles of dried cut grass. Some men, old salts come ashore, stuck with their maritime habits and used a sponge and a bucket of seawater.

  In accordance with the instructions, The Ox had a beaker of water, half-filled, into which he mixed white powder from a spill of paper in the envelope. He swirled around the mixture then, as instructed, swallowed it in one gulp.

  He sat awaiting results. Which soon manifested themselves as increasing pain in his belly, pain that he felt spreading to his muscles and ext
remities. He tried to call out for help but his throat was too painful, as if it had been scalded, and he found breathing difficult.

  Before he lost consciousness, he felt himself lose control of his bladder and his bowels began—finally—to empty. The pain was beyond endurance.

  Waking briefly from his faint—he didn’t know for how long he had lost his senses—he knew that his agony was worsening. The icy chill settling throughout his limbs did not diminish his pain.

  As he jerked against the privy wall then slid to the dirt floor, his bowels, mouth and nose voided blood. The Ox was dying, not even as quickly as one of his slaughterhouse victims.

  THE SMELL OF feces, human as well as animal, was usually unremarkable in much of the town. Even the grandest manor might have runnels of noxious waste flowing, not so freely, close beneath polished floorboards and Turkish carpets.

  But no near neighbor could for long ignore the stench of The Ox’s violent last relief at the siege-hole. When a nose-holding fellow lodger finally investigated and pushed open the privy door, he turned tail and ran, yelling for help.

  At first, he believed that the figure on the floor was alive. It still seemed to be moving and a low groaning sound arose from it. But the movement simply came from Lucilia cuprina, the blue-black blowfly, and perhaps 60,000 of its cousins at work, as did the drone that accompanied their feasting. They heaved on the carcass as they searched for new parts in which to plant their eggs, the millions of eggs that would soon hatch into maggots.

  Someone was dead, awfully dead.

  IN AN APOTHECARY′S shop in Pitt Street, not far from Sam Terry’s houses, the pill-and-potion purveyor looked up and smiled as a customer, whose clothes he recognized, came in. A scarf worn high hid the newcomer’s face.

  As the apothecary wrapped the customer’s purchases, he said, “So that’s two ounces each of peppermint and magnesia lozenges, each at five pence per ounce; that’s one shilling and eight pence. And four shillings for a lancet—you can’t be too careful with boils—that’s a grand total of five and eight pence.” He added, “Did that mixture deal with the rat?”

  The customer nodded. “I fervently hope so. Good day to you.”

  SO IT WAS that Nicodemus Dunne, when he finally arrived at the hospital in Macquarie Street, had not one but two interesting bodies to survey.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  O, that it were possible,

  We might but hold some two days’ conference

  With the dead!

  —John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi (1623)

  A LONGSIDE THE HYDE PARK PRISONERS′ BARRACKS, SYDNEY′S general hospital loomed large, three graceful blocks in the classical colonial colonnaded style. As Nicodemus Dunne walked east up King Street, past St. James’s Church, he acknowledged that the pleasing pile nonetheless deserved the rather unbecoming label bestowed on it by the public, the “Rum Hospital.” This was not because its patients were all victims of the ardent spirit (although many undoubtedly were), but because the whole massive enterprise had been floated, so to speak, on an ocean of rum.

  It was no secret to Dunne or any other resident that the hospital had been built a dozen years earlier only because its contractors were given a monopoly on importing the colony’s rum for three years. Even then the construction cost them little; the government supplied convict builders, working bullocks and oxen for rations.

  The patterer had never met the most widely known of these contractors, Dr. D’Arcy Wentworth, who had died only the previous year. He was better acquainted with one of the late doctor’s sons, William Charles Wentworth, a businessman, explorer and lawyer who published The Australian, baited the governor and wooed Miss Sarah Cox.

  Old D’Arcy’s past was now discreetly veiled over. He had been acquitted at least twice of highway robbery in England before going into exile in Australia—where he found fame and fortune, helped immeasurably by the chance to sell 60,000 gallons of rum. He had even taken up the running of the new hospital, with Dr. William Redfern (the choleric gentleman who had flogged the hapless Gazette editor), a surgeon who had been sentenced to death, then to transportation, for involvement in a Royal Navy mutiny.

  Entering the hospital’s northern wing, Dunne felt the apprehension that such institutions elicited in all people. These were places you were lucky to escape from alive; all advice was to stay out—especially if you were sick!

  Tales of privations from the hospital’s early years still chilled Sydneysiders. The convict staff had been accused of theft and rape. The rations, certainly, were only cheap meat and flour; those unable to stomach this diet had to trade with citizens on the street outside. The room designated the kitchen had instead become the death-house. And dysentery victims, the most numerous patients (after those with venereal disease), had to stagger to outside privies.

  The patterer was still inwardly shuddering at the ghosts conjured by the mere proximity of the place when a hearty voice echoed through the main entry. It came from behind an outstretched hand, unseasonably heavily gloved.

  “Hello, I’m the doctor. Have a lozenge.”

  The speaker was a very tall man of forty or so years, with a shock of curly brown hair escaping from a wide-brimmed hat. He had a shy, discolored smile. The patterer knew him by sight as Dr. Thomas Owens, but apart from that he was an unknown quantity. His origins were unclear and he seemed to prefer keeping it that way. But that sort of secrecy was common in the colony, and the patterer had heard that Dr. Owens’s abilities were unimpeachable.

  As he spoke, Owens held out a paper bag filled with diamond-shaped confectionery. “I always offer these to visitors entering the hospital,” he said cheerily. “These are peppermint,” he added, pointing, “and your tastebuds and olfactory organ will appreciate the relief they offer in the face of the noxious miasma that invariably inhabits a house of sickness. These other lozenges are of tolu, a stomachic agent of fragrant balsam. Even I, inured as I am to grisly sights and effluvium, find tolu useful to settle an interior unnerved by exposure to corruption. Do not hesitate to tell me if, or when, you require one of those.”

  Dunne duly took a peppermint and sucked it thoughtfully as they walked along a corridor flanked on one side by a ward of coughing, occasionally groaning patients and on the other by a room that, incongruously, was filled not with people but with stuffed birds and animals.

  “Don’t believe all the stories you hear,” said Owens suddenly, seeming to read the patterer’s initial gloomy thoughts. “The hospital has been reformed in many ways. Those taxidermy subjects are the only things we want to see dead!” At this he peeled off his gloves.

  “Oh, we have had to share with other birds of a feather in this institution. Why, until a few years ago the central wing was occupied by judges and officers of the Supreme Court. Truly a case of putting habeus and corpus together, what?” When Owens clapped his hands, Dunne noticed he had scaly and scarred palms and fingers, no doubt what they called “doctor’s hands,” with localized sepsis caused by the bacteria commonly transmitted from patients.

  They arrived at the dissecting room, a large area well-lit both by tall windows and by candles and oil lamps in wall sconces and portable holders. A workbench along one wall was littered with glass phials on stands, chemical retorts and similar alembic apparatus.

  Dunne’s gaze took in the glass-doored wall cabinets and shelves. These exhibited metal basins, bleeding bowls, clamps and probes, and various saws and knives. Some of the most fearsome instruments were also works of art, their handles decorated with sharkskin, mother-of-pearl or tortoiseshell. There were also trepan sets for drilling into the skull.

  Apart from these instrument cases, the only other furniture was three long, wide tables. These were scored along their tops by long, deep grooves that led into drains over enamel buckets. The dominance of the tables in the room was accentuated by the sinister magnetism of the bodies resting, under blankets, upon two of them.

  “We don’t have many visitors here,” said Owens. �
�Living ones, that is,” he added slyly.

  But Dunne wasn’t listening to the doctor’s black humor. He was mesmerized by the outlines on the tables. One blanket obscured two distinct mounds. He pointed.

  “Is that . . . mine?”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The voice of the dead was a living voice to me.

  —Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “In the Valley of Cauteretz” (1864)

  “INDEED IT IS ΥOUR BODY, AS YOU SAY,” SAID DR. OWENS ENTHUSIASTICALLY. “Its companion is another gentleman recently brought here. I have performed postmortems on both. Two in a matter of days. Dear me.”

  “Do you handle many?” asked Dunne.

  “Oh, we would only deal with, ah, cases of suspicious death—those the coroner cannot comfortably rule as having ‘died by visitation of God.’ And we are allowed to anatomize the bodies of prisoners hanged at the jail. That keeps us on our toes, mind. They hang up to fifty poor devils a year, y’know. What remains ends up in an anonymous lime pit.

  “It is rough justice, Mr. Dunne. As is even flogging, to my mind. That’s one of our more unfortunate duties, y’know—to supervise, witness, the scourgings next door at the barracks or down at the Lumber Yard.” He snorted. “As if they need a surgeon to tell them that even after four strokes the cat draws blood. Why do they need to be told what a canary of a hundred strokes will do?

  “But enough of that. About the first murder, the soldier at the public house, I can tell you little that you probably haven’t heard already from Captain Rossi, who, as you know, has discussed it with me. Now, of course, the body is lying in the Sandhills cemetery. At the time, we studied the exterior of the man only briefly, the cause of death being so obvious: calamitous loss of blood following a cut to the throat. Expiry was almost instantaneous. The lacerations to the abdomen and ankles were profound but largely superficial. But I’m sure you’ve already been told this.”