The Scent of Murder (6 page)

The horse churned through the water and then lurched up the bank, jerking Florence’s body to and fro like a floppy doll. They joined Tristram and Warrior at the top, Speedy pausing to shake, and once more Florence found herself holding on for dear life.

Another copse lay ahead. The baying of the hounds grew to fever pitch. Florence tried to hold her horse back, but he would have none of it. He took off after Warrior, as keen to be a part of the action as anyone — except her.

And then realisation dawned.

She spied a fleeting russet form, glimpsed a bushy, white-tipped tail — brush, she corrected herself. Now what? Well, what had she expected? That they would pat the fox on the head and let it go?

The hounds closed in, their snarls and growls unravelling into a tangle of yelps and screams. Horses danced. Riders cheered. The scent of blood filled the air.

All of a sudden Sir Desmond’s strong hands were pulling her from the saddle and hauling her towards the mêlée. Florence tried to dig her heels into the ground, but Sir Desmond was too strong for her. Mr Montague cracked his whip and sent the hounds scurrying from the mutilated corpse.

‘What’s happening? What are you doing?’ she cried.

‘Wait, Uncle, this isn’t necessary,’ she heard Tristram protest.

‘Of course it’s necessary, my boy. Tradition.’

Tristram grabbed his uncle’s hand and attempted to pull it from Florence’s arm.

‘Out of the way, Mr Slater,’ Montague said, gritting his teeth and elbowing Tristram in the side.

Tristram grunted with pain and dropped his hold on his uncle. Sir Desmond tightened his grip on Florence.

Mr Montague picked up one of the fox’s detached paws and ripped the hat from her head.

Florence struggled against Sir Desmond’s firm hold. ‘Wait, stop!’ she cried.

Too late.

Laughing as he did so, Montague smeared blood from the paw across her forehead and down her cheeks. She felt the heat of blood, smelled a strange, feral smell. A drop of blood trickled into the corner of her eye, another slid down her face, glazing her lips with a vile, metallic taste.

She dropped to her knees and was violently ill.

‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,’ Tristram murmured over and over again. He stayed with her and rubbed her back until she had stopped vomiting, long after the hunting party had left for home.

CHAPTER FIVE

Timothy, one of the footmen, drew the cart alongside the ice house, unloaded it and helped Dody with her preparations. The threat of rain gave her little choice but to examine the bones in the dark tunnel. They positioned lanterns in its wall alcoves and set up two long trestle tables. Provided the tunnel door remained open, the light would just be sufficient. Timothy filled several buckets from a barrel of water they had brought with them and placed them on the ground next to the tables. He explained that the river was close by and she could replenish her supplies there, if necessary.

He produced another bucket filled with cleaning implements: scrubbing brushes of various sizes, small paintbrushes, clean rags and scrapers. Then he took Dody’s portmanteau — the one Annie had been so curious about — from the cart and carried it into the tunnel, setting it down on the brick-paved floor. Finally, he lifted out Tristram’s basket of bones and placed it on the table, keeping his eyes averted from the contents.

Most were not as driven to solve the mystery of death as she was, Dody reflected; more often they were repulsed by it. She herself had shared the majority view until circumstances dictated that the only medical specialty open to her was autopsy surgery — better known to the layman as ‘the Beastly Science’. It was amazing how quickly she had adapted to the stench and the gore. Soon her growing understanding of disease, injury and decay had transformed her studies from bearable to fascinating. To detect the cause of a mysterious death, to provide grieving loved ones with the answers to their desperate questions, was satisfying in itself, and all the more if the death was at the hands of someone who needed to be brought to justice.

Dody’s hunger for justice was as keen as Pike’s, and was what had first driven them into a cautious alliance, then friendship, and then so much more. She tried not to think of the telegram burning a hole in her pocket and forced herself to put an end to her daydreaming.

Timothy was keen to leave her to it. He had been jumpy since they arrived, turning at every rustle, starting whenever a pheasant broke cover and whooshed from the undergrowth. ‘The hunting party will be returning soon, miss, and I am required to wait at table for luncheon.’ He paused. ‘Lady Fitzgibbon asked if you will be joining us.’

‘Please send Her Ladyship my apologies. This might keep me busy until teatime.’

‘May I organise some sandwiches then, miss?’

‘No, thank you.’ After a breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, devilled kidneys, mushrooms, tomatoes and two pieces of toast, it was hard to imagine ever being hungry again.

Timothy shuffled on his feet.

‘You may go now.’ She was as reluctant to have the young man breathing down her neck as he was to be there. ‘I will pack up myself and drive the cart home. There is no need for you to return.’

‘The master won’t like that.’

‘But you would, I’m sure.’

The footman would not meet her eye.

‘What’s troubling you, Timothy?’

The young man shrugged beneath his smart black overcoat. ‘Don’t like this place, that’s all. Even Sir Desmond won’t come ’ere at night.’

Dody smiled. ‘Because it’s supposed to be haunted?’

‘No s’pose about it.’

‘And yet you are willing to return and collect the cart after dark?’

‘Not really willing, miss, but I don’t ’ave much choice, do I?’

Dody read the anxiety in the young man’s face. Doubtless even the activities of the lowliest footman would be known to the head of this household. Timothy had been ordered to bring the cart back and do so he would. His fear of Sir Desmond was stronger than his fear of ghosts.

‘If I finish before you return, I will make my way back on foot and you can collect the cart at your convenience.’ She would hate to get the young man into trouble. ‘Perhaps the other footman might accompany you.’

‘Yes, miss, thank you, miss,’ Timothy said. He turned towards the path and took off at a brisk pace. Dody heaved a sigh of relief. At last she could get some work done now. But first she’d take a moment for something more pressing, and considerably more pleasant than the task ahead.

She removed the telegram from her coat pocket. The butler, Mr Alistair, had presented it to her on a silver salver at breakfast in front of the other guests and she’d been forced to feign nonchalance while reading it. Now she read it again, absorbing the telegram’s every word.

Case closed sooner than expected stop If possible meet me at Grand Palace Brighton at noon Monday stop M.P.

She pressed the note against her heart. If possible? She would jolly well make it possible!

Next, she opened the portmanteau and gazed affectionately at the contents.

‘Ah, Fred, I have missed you,’ she said, resisting the urge to plant a kiss on the skull’s smooth cranium. She had acquired the skeleton in Edinburgh when studying for her autopsy diploma. Fortunately, the days of the resurrection men were long gone and corpses for medical research were not so hard to come by. This skeleton had been named after the lecturer who had given it to Dody, a doctor who possessed a much-coveted licence to use unclaimed or pauper corpses for dissection.

Because Fred had once adorned the university dissection laboratory, he was already partly assembled and joined by tiny wires. It did not take long for Dody to lay him out on one of the trestles. She had brought him along for revision purposes — to fill her idle hours at the Hall — but had realised he might prove to be an interesting source of comparison or reference for the bones from the river bed.

Compared with Fred’s painted gloss, the bones in the basket did at least
look
old, exuding nothing but an earthy odour. Still, out of habit, she lit her clay pipe — she used it to deaden the scent of decay in the mortuary whenever her superior, who thought a smoking woman an abomination, was absent. She puffed away as she methodically washed and examined the bones and began to place them in anatomical alignment on the table next to Fred.

They were of a brownish-yellow hue, these bones, not the chalky-white one would expect of ancient bones, nor the hard, polished white of Fred’s. Soil stains could explain their colour, of course; the gravel in the dried river bed was chiefly composed of hard iron-sandstone with the occasional glimmer of iron pyrites. This pile of bones was surely far older than anything Dody had examined thus far in her career. That she might be of any help to Tristram remained to be seen.

She worked her way upwards from metatarsals, tarsals, tibia, fibula, and then on to both femurs. It was when she was washing the right tibia that she felt a strange roughness. Removing it from the muddy water, she dried it on a rag and emerged from the tunnel to examine it in natural light, barely noticing the patter of rain on the bracken, the icy drizzle on her cheek and the cold of her hand as she ran the bone through her bare palm.

The bone was splintered, but still intact — a greenstick fracture. A young person, then. It was an incapacitating injury but unlikely to cause death, though stranger things had happened.

Dody pressed her fingernail into the bone as hard as she could. This was a simple test that might give her more of an idea of the bone’s age. Older, softer bones would be marked with an indentation; younger, harder bones like Fred’s would not.

The bone failed to yield under the pressure. This meant the colour of the bones was not from soil staining after all; they had not been in the ground long enough for that. The test she had just performed indicated they were a mere fifty to one hundred years old at most.

I’m so sorry, Tristram, Dody thought.

There was only one thing she could do to gauge the age of the bones more accurately, damaging though it was. Taking the other, unbroken tibia in both hands, she placed it over her knee and exerted as much pressure as she could. The bone splintered, but did not snap, meaning it still had significant moisture content. Its age could now be narrowed down to around ten to fifty years. The police would have to be informed and a thorough investigation undertaken.

For the benefit of any future pathologist who might wish to examine the bones, Dody took her fountain pen and wrote the date on the bone she had broken and also recorded her findings in her notebook. Then she returned to the table in the tunnel and placed the splintered tibia alongside the corresponding fibula. The other long bones appeared healthy and intact. She cleaned the ribs, discovering remnants of leathery tissue under the dried mud — reinforcing her theory that the bones were of a relatively young age.

Her view of the skeleton before her gradually began to change. The bones were no longer relics of long ago, an interesting archaeological challenge, they were the remains of a living, breathing human being, a person who might have died within Dody’s own lifetime. She bowed her head over the table with a sense of reverence, with the same respect she held for the more intact bodies she examined on the mortuary slab. There was nearly always someone who loved and missed the deceased, no matter how despicable a person they might have been. This was only a young person, and surely still vivid in someone’s mind.

A sudden snap in the undergrowth jolted Dody from her thoughts. A horse snorted. The tethered cart-pony whinnied in response. Sir Desmond’s slobbering black labrador appeared from nowhere and charged, almost tipping over one of the tables in its excitement. She scolded the beast and dragged it by the collar from the tunnel just as Sir Desmond was dismounting from his mud-splattered hunter.

He touched his top hat with his crop in lieu of a formal greeting. He still wore his scarlet hunting jacket and there were splashes of blood on his white stock.

‘Good afternoon, Doctor McCleland. How goes the investigation?’ Sir Desmond tied his horse to a tree and sauntered toward the tunnel as if he owned it — which of course he did.

‘Hmm.’ He sucked air over his teeth with an irritating half-whistle, half-hum, then reached into his pocket and produced a silver-capped rabbit’s foot, which he kissed as naturally as a Roman Catholic would a crucifix. After popping the silky fetish back into his pocket, he proceeded to examine the bones on the closest table with no hint of squeamishness.

‘Like assembling a jigsaw puzzle, what?’ Catching sight of Fred, he started, and pointed his crop at the second trestle. ‘Don’t tell me you found two.’

‘No, that is a skeleton I’m using for comparison. I brought it with me.’

Sir Desmond blinked several times. Dody did not care how macabre he thought her. She tapped her pipe against the sole of her boot and began to repack it.

After a stunned silence, he said, ‘Mind if I watch?’

She struck a match against the stone wall of the tunnel and drew on the pipe until the tobacco glowed. ‘I prefer to work alone, Sir Desmond, if you don’t mind,’ she said, the smoke curling around her words.

Sir Desmond pulled himself together, took a step towards her and inhaled the pipe smoke as if it were exotic perfume. ‘I’ve never seen a woman of class smoke a pipe before.’

His proximity was discomforting; Dody took a discreet step backwards.

‘I suppose there’s a first time for everything.’

‘You’re an unusual woman, Doctor McCleland, no doubt about it. Your sister is a beauty. She craves excitement but can’t always take it. You, on the other hand — what you do, your devotion to your work,’ he waved his hand over both sets of bones, ‘must be the essence of excitement itself.’

She did not like the way the conversation was going and scrabbled through her mind for something that might distract him. ‘Tristram says you use the dome for storing game. How is the season going? I imagine the dome must be almost filled up by now. Last night’s pheasant was quite delicious.’