The Scottish Play Murder (8 page)

Second Witch Willie said, “Indeed, indeed, sister. A devil lurks among us we must needs purge. Should we dally, ’twill surely be our end.”

Third Witch Tucker cried, “Another body! Another body! Another body!”

“Hail!”

“Hail!”

“Hail!”

Suzanne expected a surge of belly laughs from the three, but they fell into an eerie silence that made her go pale. Then suddenly there was high, screeching, manic laughter, then the sound of scampering feet on the stage as they hurried into the ’tiring house above.

She said to Ramsay, “I’ll take your statement under advisement.” Then she returned to her dinner without committing herself to a courtship she couldn’t trust.

I
t wasn’t until the next afternoon before the evening performance that Suzanne finally caught up with Arturo to ask detailed questions. The questioning before had come from idle curiosity, and now her curiosity had a purpose.

“Tell me, Arturo, who else was in the Goat and Boar with you that evening?” She pulled up a stool to sit next to him at the makeup table in the green room, and folded her hands between her knees. There was no use trying to hide her interest in what he might say, and she leaned forward a bit in eagerness to hear his reply, and at a volume level that might not carry to the others in the room who filled it with their own pre-performance chatter.

Arturo wasn’t nearly so eager to talk about the murder of the Spaniard as she was, and his reply was somewhat distracted. “So,” he said as he cleaned his face in preparation to paint it, “you’ve decided, then, that Ramsay should be taken to Newgate?”

“No, I’m asking you who else witnessed the fight between Ramsay and the Spaniard.”

Arturo stopped wiping his face and looked over at her. She sat still, her demeanor entirely neutral. He said, “You don’t take my word for what happened?”

“It would never occur to me you might not tell me the truth. After all, you need my good will far too much to be caught in a lie, and furthermore I have no reason to believe you have anything to hide regarding this. My interest is in searching down other witnesses who might be able to answer questions you couldn’t. Such as, what was the gist of the argument between Ramsay and the Spaniard? Where did the Spaniard come from? Was he truly a pirate? How long had he been in London? Why was he in London? Where would he have gone, had he been alive to leave London?”

Arturo relaxed some, and wiped his face some more, slowly. He picked up a shard of an old mirror from the table before him, its edges filed down and dipped in wax to dull them, to see what he could of his face in it as he rubbed off a bit of dirt invisible to Suzanne. “Well, I know he hadn’t been here terribly long. I’d never seen him before that night. I’m certain it was his first time at the Goat and Boar, and there might not be many to know much about him.”

“I won’t know until I ask. Who else did you see there? Any of the other Players?”

Arturo shook his head. “I was the only one from the theatre that night. I believe the lot of them had gone to see the bullbaiting. ’Twas Matthew, I think, who was aquiver at the prospect of it.” He thought a moment, and slowly wiped his face some more, though it was quite clean now. Finally he said, staring into the middle distance as if gazing at a painting depicting the scene, “Angus. He was at their table. Or near it, at least. Sitting near Ramsay, as I remember. More than likely for the sake of passing time with another Scot. He would have been one to speak to Ramsay, and would have heard what passed between the two before their voices were raised.”

“I see. Has Angus told you anything about Ramsay since then?”

Arturo shook his head. “I wouldn’t expect him to. ’Tis none of my business what’s between himself and his countryman.”

“The Spaniard wasn’t his countryman.”

“And so all the more odd he should have sat at that table. In any case, although I like Angus, I don’t know him the way his fellow musicians do. I couldn’t tell you what business he could have had with a Spanish pirate.”

“Do you remember anyone else who might have been there that night?”

Arturo shook his head. “I was, after all, minding my own business and not attending to the others in the room until their conversation grew loud enough I couldn’t ignore it. I couldn’t say why Angus was there, only that he was, and I don’t remember any other faces.”

“Very well, then, Arturo. Thank you.” With that, Suzanne went to have a look for Angus.

But he wasn’t there that night, for that night’s play did not require him. So first thing the next morning she set out to visit him at home. Suzanne knew Angus only by his first name, as she did many of her longtime friends in Southwark. Nicknames were common among entertainers, and that was why she didn’t know Horatio’s real name at all. Angus was a musician from Glasgow who sometimes played for the performances at the Globe, and she thought him quite good. Most people did, she’d heard. He played the Scottish pipes, both
mór
and
beg
, and was proficient with timbrel and tabor as well. She’d seen him play both pipes and drum at once, attracting a crowd with Big Willie and his fiddle on a corner in Bank Side, which was their occupation when not busy playing their medieval repertoire for the Globe performances. She knew where he lived, and donned her cloak against the sharpening fall air to go there.

The streets in Southwark teemed always with folks of little means, intruded upon occasionally by carriages passing through, belonging to the wealthier classes from the western end of London across the river. There had been some truth to Daniel’s claim of sending away his carriage to prevent damage to it by gangs of boys out to do mischief, for the streets were thick with idlers and becoming worse every year. Street vendors competed with each other for the attention of anyone who appeared to have cash in their possession, a cacophony quite unlike the genteel quiet of the new neighborhoods closer to Whitehall. Those places had servants to cook, clean, and shop for the household, and no need to buy prepared foods cooked with someone else’s wood on someone else’s fire and eaten from someone else’s container. No need to haggle with a too-savvy child over the price of a used pair of shoes or a stolen watch, and so the byways of such neighborhoods as Pall Mall were absent of noisy commerce. Suzanne walked quickly to the tenement where lived the musician Angus in a one-room flat on the third floor. Inside the stairwell a dark smell greeted her. Moist, like spoiled rubbish and moldy wood. The building was old, and retained the stench of many tenants and their animals.

It was a long, cold walk up. A drunken woman lay splayed on the first landing, her dress shoved up and situated so that her private parts were in full view, her heels on the first step below and her snores echoing up and down the stairwell. Plainly someone had been at her, and Suzanne only hoped it had occurred before the woman had passed out and not after. She went on her way.

Up another flight, and there were shouting voices of a man and woman having a marital argument. Each threatened to kill the other, and Suzanne thought how easily such a threat was made and how difficult to carry out in earnest. She hoped that was the case with Ramsay, for though he did not strike her as particularly trustworthy, she enjoyed the game he played with her. He charmed her, and she wanted his threat to the Spaniard to have been an empty one.

She considered his request to court her. Surely it was a game, she decided, and was not to be taken seriously lest there be disappointment and embarrassment. Those things came too easily in life to suit her, and she preferred to do without. She was far too old to be seriously courted. It would be best to assume he thought so as well.

At last she came to the tenement’s third and top floor, which extended over the street by several feet, the culmination of each floor gaining space in overhang. Through the tiny-paned window in the top landing she could look out and see the building across the street nearly within arm’s reach, for it also gained space as it rose. The street below was dim in the shade of these tenements that encroached as far as they could, to gain for themselves space beyond the land on which they stood. The third floor was much larger than the ground floor, but was divided into many more apartments than the floors below. The air was close up here, hotter, the old building smell much stronger. A whitewashed hallway marked with decades of filthy hand marks and gouges led to the rear of the well, lined with doorways that indicated rooms not much larger than a monk’s cell. It was a building designed for a landlord bent on having as much rent as he could get for the space he owned.

One of the doors toward the rear was open, and Suzanne went toward it, for it was Angus’s. How lucky to find Angus in and plainly awake for visitors.

But when she came to the door and tapped on the doorframe to catch his attention, she saw he was in but not the least ready to receive. Inside the room, Angus lay in a pool of blood, his gut sliced open and his entrails spilled onto the floor.

The sight was the most gruesome she’d seen in all her life, and the smell of blood and bile turned her stomach. Her first reaction was to gasp, cover her mouth with her hand to hold back a scream, then turn and make for the stairs.

But at the top of the stairs she made herself stop. With one hand gripping the newel post hard, she forced her feet to be still. She wouldn’t flee down the stairs; she needed to pull herself together and face what had happened to Angus. It was Angus, to be sure, for she had recognized the bright red hair, which appeared orange next to his body covered in purplish-red blood.

She looked back at the open door, and took a deep breath to steel herself. Now she recognized the dank smell of the building as the stink of Angus’s body creeping through it. The air in the top landing was so thick with the metallic smell of blood she could almost taste it now. Slowly she released her grip on the newel post, and moved toward Angus’s room. At the door, once again in view of the corpse, a sob escaped her. She’d liked Angus, and to see him like this broke her heart. Screwing up her courage, she stepped into the room.

It was tiny. Just large enough to hold a narrow bed, a small table with two chairs, a trunk, and a washstand, with enough floor space for one or two people to move between them. Atop the trunk lay the case in which he carried his pipes; on the washstand stood a bowl, ewer, and one wadded-up towel; and the table bore a wooden cup and plate, a knife, a wooden spoon, and a stoneware jug. On the bed were a single linen sheet, a woolen blanket, and a feather pillow of blue ticking.

Angus lay half on the mattress, his upper body splayed across it, and the lower half of him was on the floor, as if he were in the process of sliding off the bed to sit on his heels. The enormous slit in his belly gaped red, his various innards spilled out onto the lap made by his bent legs. They were of varying colors: red, blue, gray . . . and black bile oozed from holes nicked by the knife. They glistened with wetness. There had not been enough time since their exposure to air for them to have dried. The murder had happened not long ago at all. She looked to the door, half-fearing the killer might still be lurking about.

She drew a deep breath and told herself to stop being a frightened little girl. Her mind calmed as she made herself think of this as a problem to be solved and not a threat to herself. Someone had murdered Angus, and it was possible she might be equipped to learn who it was. That thought brought steel to her spine and settled her stomach so she could think clearly. She began to examine the room closely to see what she could see.

The floor was bare of covering of any kind. No reed mats, nor even loose reeds. In fact, it was remarkable how clean Angus had kept this place, though everyone knew he was a tidy man. The blood from the body had flowed over about half of the open floor near the bed, which stood beneath the window, at the end of the room opposite the door. Suzanne saw footprints across the near end of the room. She raised the hem of her cloak and stepped over to examine them closely.

The maker of the prints had been standing fairly close to Angus, where the blood surrounded the body, then walked out of the puddle toward the trunk. Apparently there had been no rummaging through the cabinet inside the washstand, for the prints stopped only at the trunk, the toes pointing directly at it, then faint marks indicated a retreat straight out the door. Those marks faded until they ended just inside. The killer surely hadn’t stayed very long, for the bloody prints had not time to dry to black since the stop at the trunk. A shiver shook her spine as she realized she must have just missed him. Perhaps she’d even passed him on the street coming in. The thought left her breathless.

Suzanne stepped back, outside the door, and assessed the room overall. The image set solidly into her mind’s eye. The position of the body, the size of the blood pool, the yellow film atop the still-wet puddle, the track of shoes leading from the pool to the trunk and then out the door. Angus had died quickly, she thought. Though his hands were bloody, his arms didn’t appear to have attempted to hold his gut together as he died. No great struggle with his attacker, only some flailing about in one spot. The dishes on the table were arranged as if someone had just stood up after a meal, the remains of that meal still on the plate: a thin film of grease and bits that appeared to be beef or mutton. It was impossible to tell which by the smell, for the stink of bowel and blood in the room was overpowering. The plate bore no bones or gristle left behind. The spoon, cup, and knife, and the table and chairs themselves had not been knocked about, though there was little space between the table and the bed.

She stepped over to the table and saw the cup was empty. She sniffed of the jug and found it half full of Scottish whisky. She’d only ever seen the stuff when she had it sent from Scotland, for it was not available at the Goat and Boar and not widely available in London. From the eye-watering, woody smell, she could understand why. Angus’s knife and spoon lay on the table in an attitude of use. There was no blood on either, and Suzanne guessed the killer had brought his own knife.