The Anatomy of Death (13 page)

D
uties at the New Women’s Hospital and inclement weather both played their part in delaying Dody’s tests. Two days had elapsed since her clandestine activities in the cadaver keep, and she was anxious to make up for lost time.

She had trouble keeping her patience as Fletcher, their coachman, stocky frame lumbering around their backyard, never quite got the gist of her instructions. He heaved the tool bench from the stick-house and placed it in front of the coal chute.

Dody suppressed a sigh. “Not there, Fletcher, you’ve hardly left room to swing a cat—closer to the servants’ privy, please, towards the back wall.” With much sweating and grunting, he dragged the bench across the mossy cobbles, until finally he had it placed in a suitable position. Here there would be plenty of room for him to swing each of the possible murder weapons: half
a brick, a belaying pin, a piece of wood measuring four-by-two, and the policeman’s “borrowed” truncheon.

“The first one, if you please, Fletcher,” Dody said.

She sensed movement from the house next door. A sash window rattled open and a maid appeared, shaking out a floral bedspread. Pausing in her work, the maid watched as Fletcher removed a pig’s head from a bulging sack resting against the stick-house wall.
Lord
, Dody thought,
don’t let this be the start of more complaints from the neighbours.
Florence’s steady stream of exuberant visitors had led to more protestations than she cared to remember. She prayed that this time they would not call the police.

Fletcher secured the pig’s head firmly to the bench with a clamp, its snout to the back wall.

“All right, Fletcher, you know what you have to do.”

“As ’ard as I can, miss?” Fletcher asked Dody with a somewhat worrying gleam of excitement to his eye.

“Precisely—four sharp blows with the brick.” Dody stepped back towards the scullery door and opened her umbrella. Fletcher picked up the brick. “On the count of three, if you please: one, two, three!”

The first blow hit the back of the skull with a hard, moist crack. Upon the second, bone and grey matter flew in all directions.

The sash window next door slammed shut.

By the third blow, the head was a pulverised mess with barely any flesh left upon the clamp for Fletcher to bludgeon.

“You can stop now,” Dody said, shaking gristle and bone from her umbrella. “You’re hitting much too hard, there’s hardly anything left for me to examine.”

“I did buy extra, miss.”

“Good. Use the brick again, but not so hard this time.”

Dody sensed movement from the scullery door behind her. She held up her hand for Fletcher to wait and stepped aside for Florence. Her sister appeared flushed and hatless, her hair dishevelled and her coat stained with what, on closer inspection, looked like tomato pulp. “Oh, Dody,” she said between excited breaths, “you should have been there; we’ve had the most marvellous time! After our meeting there was a mob waiting for us—mostly men but some women, too—all behaving abominably. Christabel asked me to speak—can you believe it? I think I managed all right, too; really roused them up, and the newspapermen came and it was all photographed—we must pray the papers publish the pictures.

“And, oh, you should have seen Olivia! A particularly obnoxious brute attacked poor Daisy and stole her new straw bonnet. Olivia was marvellous, launched herself at the brute like a lioness defending her young and scratched him down the face with her nails.”

“Sounds a little overzealous to me,” Dody said with concern.

Florence did not seem to hear the comment, drew a quick breath. “Oh, and I called in on Hugo on my way home to see how he was and tell him all about the rally. That beastly chief inspector interviewed him, you know, and made him retract his statement about witnessing Catherine’s beating—he was quite threatening apparently. Now more than ever we have to discover the truth …”

Florence stopped short, having finally noticed the carnage
in the yard before her. She took some brisk steps back and pressed herself against the scullery door. “Good God.” She spotted a pig’s ear at her feet and her hand rose to her mouth. “Now I can see why Annie didn’t want me to come out here—Dody, you’ve turned the place into a slaughterhouse!”

“How else did you expect me to conduct my experiments? I need to compare the effect of blows to these pigs’ heads with Catherine’s head injuries, to see if I can match them to a specific weapon. Identifying the weapon might help us to identify the killer.”

“Have you tried the truncheon yet?”

“Only the brick, and so far that was inconclusive.”

“Well, I hope it’s worth all this, this…mess.”

Dody smiled. “Don’t worry. When we’re finished, Fletcher will clean up the scraps and give them to Cook to make into her delicious jellied pork brawn.” She could not resist teasing her younger sister.

Florence paled. “Mr. Shaw is right, perhaps we should all become vegetarians.”

“Fiddlesticks. Meat strengthens the blood. You have enough causes on your plate.”

Florence swept her arm around the yard. “Can your experiments really tell us what we need to know?”

“I think so. Ideally, tests should be carried out on human skulls, but as I am not yet ready to add grave robbing to my résumé, pig skulls will have to do. A pig’s skull is more robust than a human’s, so what I have surmised so far is that the person delivering the fatal blows did not inflict anywhere near such damage as Fletcher, who pulverised the head with three blows alone.”

“So the killer was not as strong as Fletcher?”

“Either that or he acted with more restraint. After all, it happened in the midst of a large crowd, and one must imagine a murderer would try to be as inconspicuous as possible. And of course, it may not have been intended as murder. Really, so much is supposition. At the most, this will eliminate some of the potential weapons and I am afraid that is all we can realistically hope for.” She turned to Fletcher. “Clamp the next head, please. And this time I want four blows with the brick again, only not as hard.”

Movement at the scullery door suggested they were to have more company. Not the neighbour’s manservant in complaint, Dody prayed, but it was Annie. The maid covered her eyes and handed Dody a note then beat a hasty retreat. Ignoring Florence’s raised eyebrows, Dody quickly glanced at the note and placed it in her coat pocket.

Fletcher flicked the remaining scraps of tissue and bone off the clamp. Before affixing the next head, he held it in his hands and stared into the pig’s blue eyes with a smile.

“Oh my goodness,” Florence exclaimed, turning her back upon the proceedings. “I’m not sure what is more disturbing, the blood and gore or Fletcher’s obvious relish of it. I need a bath and a change of clothes. Let me know when you’re finished.”

Dody smiled at her sister. “Off you go then.”

But Florence remained where she was. “That note,” she said with a mischievous smile. “I couldn’t help noticing the Home Office stationery. Another summons by your hero, perhaps?”

To tease was obviously not only an older sister’s prerogative. Dody stalked across the slime-covered cobbles towards
the clamped pig’s head. Taking the brick from the coachman, she slammed it onto the cranium herself, barely pitting it. “Just a bit harder than that, please, Fletcher,” she said, handing the brick back to him and dusting off her hands. She did not turn around until she heard the soft click of the scullery door.

T
he cabbie dropped Dody off at the Offord Road rank; already the crowd had gathered outside Pentonville Prison, where Dr. Crippen was due to be executed this morning. The sun’s weak rays had yet to penetrate the bank of mist surrounding the prison, and while she could hear the crowd, she could see very little but blurred shapes and lanterns held high, blinking like animal eyes.

The mob was fractious; there was tension in the air. “It ain’t right, is it, dear?” an old woman said to her in passing. “They’ve no right to keep us out, not tell us straightaway that it’s ’appened—’angings should be public, they always was.”

Dody gathered from the murmurings in the crowd that there would be no death knell to announce Crippen’s passing. The crowd would have to make do with the lowered black flag and a printed announcement nailed to the prison door—a disappointing finale for such a sensational murder investigation.

No one stood aside as Dody approached the gateway, and she was forced to elbow her way through the crush. She tried to catch the eye of a policeman holding the crowd back from the prison entrance, but he paid her no heed, distracted by a conversation with two men standing before him.

“But did ’e really do it, that’s what I want to know—what do you reckon, mate?” One of the men was asking.

“I’m not in a position to say what I think,” the policeman replied stiffly.

“They say the Home Office has had letters from Cora Crippen from America. So, if she’s livin’ in America, ’ow the hell can they be ’er remains what they dug up in the cellar? It were only one fillet of flesh, after all.”

“How can a dunderhead like you say he’s innocent, when the best brains in the country say ’e’s guilty?” the other man chimed in.

Innocent or guilty, it was a controversial topic and another reason feelings were running high. The policeman said no more to the men and cast a worried look over the crowd, as if at any minute he was expecting an outbreak of violence.

“Move along, you two.” A second policeman joined the first and together the two officers elbowed the men towards the edge of the police line. Dody managed to squeeze herself into their vacated space only a few yards away from the prison door.

She called out to a poker-faced prison guard at the gate, waving her letter of authorisation until she finally attracted his attention. He took her note and began to read it aloud. She snatched the note back from the guard before he could broadcast her business further, though it appeared that the damage had already been done. A number of grey men wielding
notebooks descended upon her, shoving and bumping one another in their haste.

“You are to assist with the Crippen autopsy, miss?”

“May we have your name?”

“Will you honour me with an exclusive? I guarantee my paper pays well.”

“Sir, please let me in!” Dody pleaded with the guard; the crowd pressed against her and she was having difficulty getting air into her—she should never have given in and let Annie squeeze her into the corset this morning. The smell of damp wool from the dirty coats around her made her want to retch.

“Make way, police!” The voice carried an edge of authority lacking in the uniformed officers. Despite their boos and hisses, the crowd parted and Dody soon found herself on the other side of the prison gate, standing in a broad passage and gazing into the stern face of Chief Inspector Pike. She hastily let go of his arm.

“It would have been more prudent, Dr. McCleland, for you to have taken the back entrance,” he said.

She waved the tattered note, hoping he did not notice how it trembled in her hand. “My instructions mentioned nothing of a back entrance.”

His expression softened. “The press are no better than a school of feeding sharks—may I?” Before she had composed herself enough to answer, he had taken the note from her hand and read it. “You are to observe the autopsy conducted by the prison doctor,” he said, “and take head measurements for the phrenological society?” He looked perplexed. Dody adjusted her hat. “Phrenology is the study of the relationship of a person’s character to the shape of his skull.”

“I am aware of that, Doctor, but I thought the science well and truly disproved.”

“I think Dr. Spilsbury is humouring an acquaintance.”

“With you as his instrument?”

“I am to observe the autopsy only, but while I am there, I may as well be of assistance if I can.”

“You have arrived somewhat early. The execution is still an hour away, with the autopsy not performed for an hour after that at least.”

“I thought it prudent to educate myself in the procedure.” A crow, striding about at the end of the passageway, stopped and gave her a beady brown eye.

“You wish to witness the execution?”

“I have been granted no such permission, but I hope to inspect the scaffold and find out everything I can about it. Would you be so kind as to find me a prison guard willing to serve as escort and to tell me how it is done?”

“I doubt there is a guard to spare on execution day. But as I have also arrived early, I will be happy to oblige.” A number of emotions might explain the look on his face, though none of them suggested happiness. Doubt, sadness, disgust, maybe. He offered his arm with the formality of an undertaker. “Allow me.”

He must think me a ghoul
, thought Dody.

They walked across the exercise yard towards B Wing, the ripe smell of the nearby cattle yard and slaughterhouse reaching them on the wind.

“Since the abolition of public hangings,” Pike said, “the law requires executions to be performed in sheds like this.” He pointed to a narrow, roofed structure. “Commonly called the ‘topping shed.’ It’s built over a deep pit into which the
body will drop. They store the prison motor wagon in the pit when it’s not being used.”

How practical
, thought Dody. There was nothing sacred about life here.

Pike held open the door of the shed for her, and she entered the wood-panelled room with a trepidation she was determined not to show.

Her determination won through even when Pike spoke of long drops and short drops—all dependent on the prisoner’s weight—and the fine line a hangman must walk between decapitation and slow strangulation. Then, before she knew it, he was asking her in a low voice, “How did your experiments go with regards to Lady Catherine’s head wounds?”

Her heart missed a beat—he must have guessed the reason why she had borrowed the truncheon, and her presence outside the mortuary. Had Alfred spoken after all? Exactly what else did Pike know? She was relieved to see the arrival of two gentleman of the press, who stopped at the wooden rail a short distance away from her and Pike.