CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER THREE
The sun was creeping out from the fog when Inspector Pinsley reached St. Bartholomew’s hospital for the autopsy of Tabitha Greene.
Pinsley stepped down into Smithfields and took a moment to brace himself against the cold of the February air in the district.
“Get’cher papers!” a crier on one of the corners called. “Government denies involvement in Orsini plot! Victories in the Raj and in China!”
Pinsley ignored him. This wasn’t the breakfast table, to be reading the broadsheets. Instead, he stared up at St. Bart’s. The building towered above him, three stories tall and fifteen bays wide, dominating one entire end of the square he stood in. It was a building that promised the finest teaching the Empire had in medicine. Pinsley just hoped that it had other answers for him.
A porter eyed him as he stepped inside, probably surprised by the earliness of the visit. He looked presentable enough, at least. He’d had time enough to head back to his club, have breakfast, and shave, but no more than that. He could have headed home, but home held too many memories of Catherine and Olivia. He only kept the place at all because of the possibility that his and Catherine’s daughter might come back.
He couldn’t concentrate on the past now, though, not when the present held its own troubles. He knew the way to the surgical theatres by now, and strode to them with the stiff backed quickness of a soldier on the march. A few young men were in already, moving from one side of the hospital to the other as they prepared for the morning’s work. Automatically, Pinsley picked out one who had been drinking heavily the night before, one who had been in a fight, one whose poorly repaired clothes suggested money troubles he was trying to hide.
He kept going, into the heart of the place, until he came to the surgical theatre he wanted, with a plaque that marked it as the domain of Dr. Jonah Florian. Pinsley took a breath before he stepped inside, steeling himself for what was to come. As he entered, the cold air of open windows hit him so that it was no better than being outside.
The room was truly a theater, with circles of benches arranged so that a smattering of students might look down from all sides on the events taking place at the center of the room. A sturdy table stood there, long stained by the procedures that had taken place on it. The body of Tabitha Greene lay on that table, stretched out in that too-still way that only the dead had. Pinsley felt a pang of disquiet at seeing her laid there, as if she were no more than an object of study.
Dr. Florian stood beside her, stripped to shirt sleeves and waistcoat, with a leather apron over the top that might have suited a butcher as much as a surgeon. It didn’t help that Dr. Florian
looked
like most people’s image of a butcher, thick set and square-featured, sporting a thick moustache and a shaven head, with a ruddiness to his complexion that seemed like the only warmth in the otherwise frigid room. He looked up as Pinsley approached down the steps towards the middle of the room.
“Ah, Inspector,” Dr. Florian said with a faint smile. “Here to arrest me as a resurrectionist? I assure you that all bodies here have been procured legitimately, under the Act.”
“I know,” Pinsley said, ignoring the reference to grave robbery. That hadn’t been a problem in London for a decade or more. “I made sure that this body came to you specifically. I would value your opinion.”
He heard Dr. Florian sigh. “Of course you would. Is this to be a full inquest? Are we to have a dozen jurors walk in to watch, and a coroner? It seems a little early for them, and I was planning to be away in an hour. I have two amputations to perform, and the possibility of a baby to deliver.”
Probably all while wearing the same bloodstained apron.
“Have you read Dr. Semmelweis’s thoughts on the effects of washing your hands and your equipment?” Pinsley asked, as casually as he could. It was better not to confront the man too openly when he needed his help.
Dr. Florian laughed at that. “Do I tell you how to investigate a crime, Inspector? The windows are open to prevent miasma, and this patient… well, I doubt that she will get much sicker. Perhaps you feel that I should administer ether before I begin?”
Pinsley gave up. He was here for a purpose, and it wasn’t to debate medical procedures.
“What can you tell me about this young woman?” he asked. “She was killed in the early hours of this morning.”
“Yes,” Dr. Florian said. “That is consistent with the level of rigor in the corpse.” He started to talk to the wider room. “Note that the body relaxes completely upon death, and that it progressively stiffens, until such time as putrefaction begins. By understanding the process, one can judge the time with relative precision.”
Pinsley wanted to hurry the other man along, hated wasting time when there were answers to be found, but knew from experience that Dr. Florian would always proceed at his own pace.
“What else?” he asked.
“Shall we proceed to the cause of death?” the physician suggested. He started to cut away enough of Tabitha Greene’s dress to display the claw marks clearly for his students. “Note the parallel gouges, consistent with the claws of some large beast.”
Pinsley felt a brief thrill of excitement at that. He’d known that this wasn’t down to a simple knife. Then he felt a moment of guilt at that excitement. A woman lay dead.
“Can you guess what kind?” Pinsley asked.
Dr. Florian bestowed an affronted look on him. “I do not
guess,
Inspector. I am a man of science. Suffice it to say that this was not caused by some domestic cat or dog. The claw marks
here
are the key ones. See the way they dissect the carotid artery and the trachea?”
Pinsley nodded. Around him, He could see some of the medical students flinching or struggling to maintain an impassive expression. Pinsley felt as much as they did, but he hid it better now. After all he’d seen in the Crimea, violent death was anything but a stranger. He’d seen men torn open by sword blows and cannon shots, seen others lose fingers to the cold, seen his wife…
…no, he wouldn’t think about that. A flash of raw grief shot through him, and Pinsley had to fight to keep it at bay.
“Are you quite all right, Inspector?” Dr. Florian asked.
“Perfectly well, thank you,” Pinsley lied. He did his best to ignore the superior looks coming from some of the students. To try to regain control of the situation, he looked closer at the corpse. “Am I right in thinking that the angle of the blows would have been downwards?”
That seemed to catch Dr. Florian a little by surprise. “Yes, I suppose they would have been.”
“So a large animal indeed, unless it knocked her to the ground first.”
“Yes, I imagine so,” Dr. Florian said.
Except that an animal that large would have been noted, running around London in the dead of night. It was perhaps plausible that some creature might have escaped the confines of the zoological society’s captivity, but for it to then manage to find its way into the middle of Bedlam and out again… no, that made no sense.
The important thing, as far as Pinsley could see, was that Tabitha Greene’s cellmate had been somewhat shorter than the woman now lying on the table. It seemed just as improbable that she might have delivered these blows as that a wild animal might have gotten into the room.
“I should also say,” Dr. Florian said, “that I have seen frenzied knife attacks that have also inflicted as many wounds on their victims.”
“With such strange, parallel cuts?” Pinsley insisted.
“Well… no,” Dr. Florian said.
“What else can you tell me?” Pinsley asked the surgeon. He paced around the table, examining the body as if he were the doctor and not the other man.
“What would you have me say?” Dr. Florian countered. “I have established that she died, and from what wounds.”
“Are there any signs of a struggle upon her?” Pinsley asked.
“Aside from the cuts?” the surgeon shot back in a weary tone. He looked over the body again. “Her fingernails are ragged, and appear bloody. It seems that she may have fought back against her attacker. Unless you have some trick to link that to a killer, it hardly matters, though.”
“It matters in that one young woman who currently stands accused of this has no marks upon her from those nails,” Pinsley said, more to himself than to Dr. Florian. “There are cuts on her arms, too. She tried to defend herself against the blows, which meant that she saw her attacker.”
Again, though, that didn’t seem as if it could link to a particular killer with any certainty. Unless he was about to start placing faith in spiritualists, it wasn’t as if he could ask Tabitha Greene who she had seen.
That seemed to be all of it, except… something caught his eye, which had previously been hidden by the neckline of Tabitha Greene’s dress. There was a mark on her skin that seemed in almost the shape of an eye, an oval with a central dot and lines above that might have been stylized lashes. Pinsley moved to examine it. The mark was deep and vivid, a deep black that stood out against the paleness of her skin. The edges were defined, but it did not seem to be something on the skin; rather it was a part of the skin itself.
“What is this? A tattoo, a brand, a burn?”
Dr. Florian moved close to examine the mark. “None of those. There is not the scarring one might associate with a burn mark, and it is clearly not the work of needle and ink. No, I would say that this is a birthmark, nothing more.”
“A very unusual shape for a birthmark,” Pinsley said.
“Perhaps, but I hardly think it will lead you to your killer, do you?”
“No, I suppose not,” Pinsley said, trying not to let too much disappointment into his voice. “Still, it is unusual. Could you make a record of it?”
“I can do better than that,” Dr. Florian said. He took out a surgical knife. “It will be an opportunity to teach my students the principles of preserving flesh chemically. Now, if that will be all, I still have the principles of anatomical dissection to teach my students using the cadaver’s internal organs. Unless you wish to stay and watch.”
Pinsley didn’t. He wanted nothing more than to be gone from the room at that point. Tabitha Greene might be dead, but even so, this seemed callous. “It may be necessary to have you testify before a coroner, or a court when I catch who did this.”
“Of course,” Dr. Florian said, with the bad grace of someone who knew that he didn’t actually have a choice in the matter. He picked up a surgical knife. “Now, where was I…”
Pinsley left the theater as swiftly as dignity allowed. He couldn’t stop Dr. Florian’s efforts, when the 1832 Act to stop grave robbery explicitly allowed the use of corpses from poor houses and mad houses for such things. That didn’t mean that he had to be there to watch, though.
He headed back out into the open air, gulping in… well, the air of London hardly ever counted as
fresh,
even in winter. Still, it was enough to settle his nerves. He considered flagging down a cab to take him back to the station, but decided to walk instead. He needed time to think.
Somehow, though, Pinsley suspected that no amount of thinking would unpick this tangle. He had evidence pointing to a creature where none could have been, a murder in a locked room with no weapon, and a suspect whose protestations of innocence seemed all too genuine and who was too short to have inflicted the wounds that killed Tabitha Greene. It all fit together like jarring fragments of clockwork, each grinding against the others in Pinsley’s mind, increasing his frustration.
There wasn’t even an obvious route to find more evidence. The victim had no visitors to speak to who might know something, and there was no obvious motive for this. Worse, the warden of Bedlam had been adamant that Tabitha Greene’s cellmate had done this. That was the kind of accusation that could quickly harden into a certainty, and then become a noose around the young woman’s neck. Pinsley had to find an answer before that. He had to.