Chapter 9
Chapter
Nine
Ten Minutes’ Light
The dead-house stood behind the hospital like a thing the hospital was ashamed of, a low brick room with a north light and a smell that carbolic could only argue with and never win.
I had been in worse rooms. I had not, until that morning, been in one while pretending the man at my side was a secretary and not the Earl of Rosehaven come to read the corpse he was suspected of making.
Merrick met us at the side door with the look of a man who had agreed to something in the warmth of friendship and repented of it in the cold of the event. He did not shake Cosmos's hand, which told me how frightened he was, because the two of them were the sort of men who shook hands.
"Ten minutes," he said before either of us spoke. "The inquest has been fixed for tomorrow morning, and Dodson is expected presently. He wishes to view the body again and ask a few questions."
He looked at me. "You were never here." Then at Cosmos, his voice dropping. "You have never been here at all, and God forgive me for it."
"You'll have no cause to ask His forgiveness," Cosmos said. "Only the room and the light. Thank you, Merrick."
The surgeon exhaled softly, as though he did not share that confidence. "The post-mortem is complete. The coroner has not yet released the remains to the family." He turned up the gas. And there, upon the post-mortem table, lay Sir Basil Crane.
These last two days I had built him in my mind into something large.
But he was barely of average height. A narrow gentleman of fifty-odd, going soft at the jaw, his side-whiskers dyed a shade his hair had long since abandoned.
The kind of man who is asked to the edges of rooms and never the center, and spends his life resenting the distance.
Death had not dignified him. But then, it rarely does.
I had expected grief from Cosmos, or fear, or the awful private horror of a man examining the instrument of his own ruin.
What I got instead was a stillness that came over him like weather, a voice gone flat and unhurried, and a pair of hands that moved above the dead man as though the dead man were a page in a language only my companion could read.
I had known Cosmos some years as Rosalynd's grave elder brother, the one who answered a dinner question about orchids at such length that he emptied the table.
I had not known this man.
There was no fear in him and no grief either, only attention—the whole vast engine of him turned upon a problem. And it was then I understood why the Yard had sought his counsel for years.
Cosmos leaned closer but did not touch the body. "Merrick, would you turn his head for me? Just a little."
The surgeon obliged, one hand beneath the jaw.
"There." Cosmos studied the dull mottling where the blood had settled and stilled.
“When they brought in Crane, did they say how they found him?”
“Lying on his back,” Merrick said.
“He did not die where they found him then.”
I stepped nearer. “What do you mean?”
"Look here. The blood has set along his side and his cheek, where it pooled while he cooled. A man left upon his back grows dark upon his back. Crane cooled on his side, for hours, somewhere flat and private, and was turned onto his back only after he had stiffened and let go again."
Merrick gently returned the head to its former position.
“Where exactly was he found, Merrick?” Cosmos asked.
“Next to that corpse flower.”
“Ah, yes, the titan arum. Stinks to high heaven. It bloomed a week past, though. This body was not lying there for a week.”
“No, it couldn’t have been,” Merrick agreed. “He was barely two days dead when they brought him in.”
Cosmos’s gaze dropped to the wound. “And there’s another thing.”
"A living man shot here bleeds.” He indicated the wound in the chest with two fingers, not touching. “The heart drives it.” Cosmos glanced around the room. “Where are his clothes?”
“There.” Merrick pointed to a pile of clothing on a table.
“Show me his shirt,” Cosmos said. When Merrick picked up the garment, he said, “There. The shirt is soaked through. He was shot in it, certainly. But he did not die where they found him.” He paused for a moment while he visually examined the shirt.
“The question now becomes where was he killed?
If we can answer that, we'll have a lead. "
He bent close to the welts of the boots and the turn of the trouser-hems, and he was quiet a long moment. "Steele. What is the ground where they found him, beside the corpse flower?"
"You tell me. I know roses from cabbages and little beyond."
A wry grin from Cosmos. “Rich garden loam. Dark, friable, worked by gardeners for years." He had Merrick take a fold of the trouser-cuff between two fingers and turn it to the gaslight. Caught in the seam was a dark smear. "This is not that."
Merrick held it nearer the flame.
"That is black silt—fine as powder, with clay in it and a greasy feel. There is soot here, and coal dust. Look." He indicated the cuff without touching it.
"You see the grit? Crushed shell. A little river sand."
"You know all that from a speck of mud?"
"I know where it does not belong. This is not Kew soil.” He fell silent another moment. "This is tidal mud, Steele. River mud."
"The Thames?"
He nodded.
"A working reach of the river, I should say. Not a place where ladies sketch and children sail toy boats. Somewhere lower down. Mud fouled by coal and commerce."
He asked Merrick to scrape a small trace onto a square of paper, fold it, and hand it to him. "At some point, before or after his death, Crane stood upon the river."
“You’re certain?”
“As certain as I can be without being allowed to examine him properly.”
Bootheels rang on the flags of the passage. Merrick was at the door in an instant, his hand flat on it, his face the color of the corpse. “Dodson. He’s early—go, go now, the side door. And for the love of God, walk slow.”
Cosmos straightened his cuffs. Between one breath and the next, he turned from the consultant into Rosalynd’s brother once more. And then Merrick pushed us out into the gray yard and the side lane.
Neither of us spoke until the carriage. As it rolled away from the hospital, I set each of Cosmos's observations carefully in my mind, one beside the next.
Crane had not died where he had been found. He had lain for hours upon his side before someone carried him to Kew. He had stood, at some point before his death, upon the banks of the Thames.
A quarter of an hour in the dead-house had undone what the police had accepted these past two days without question.
I glanced across at Cosmos. Until that morning, I had thought of him chiefly as Rosalynd's learned elder brother, a botanist whose enthusiasm for orchids could outlast any dinner.
I had mistaken the nature of his gift. He did not merely see what lay before him.
He drew from each small fact the only conclusion it would honestly bear, and then another from that, until the truth emerged as naturally as a plant from the soil.
“I have to admit, Rosehaven, I was impressed.”
“Are you?” He glanced at me. “Understand what we carry out of that room, Steele, and what we do not. We can prove he was moved. We can very nearly prove he was killed elsewhere and brought to Kew with my gun. What we cannot do is say so. The moment we speak it aloud, we have told Dodson that the Earl of Rosehaven knows exactly how the body lay. And how would he know that, but by having laid it?” He opened his eyes.
“The truth, in our hands, hangs me faster than the lie.”
He was right, which I disliked. But Cosmos was not responsible for any of it. Someone else had staged the body at Kew so it would point directly to him. Yet none of it could be spoken aloud. The truth, for the moment, belonged to the murderer.
“And then there’s Merrick,” I said. “If Dodson catches the smallest thread of this morning, it is not only you who pays the price.”
“I know it.” Cosmos’s mouth thinned. “I have spent the favor of a decent man this morning, and I shall spend the rest of my life knowing the price of it if it goes wrong. Do not let it go wrong, Steele.”
It was not a thing I could promise, so I did not insult him by promising it.
But we had one thing the murderer had not meant to give us. The river. It had kept its secrets before. At the moment, it was keeping this one.
Now all we had to do was make it speak.