There is nothing random about the two incisions. They were not made in anger, but deliberately, the tip of the blade cutting deeper into the flesh as the hand grew steadily more confident. Nicholas can see how the direction and depth change, how a slight twist or turn of the wrist has left a small promontory of flesh hanging here and there. He is so close that the smell of decay and river mud is overpowering, but he hardly notices it.
‘He’s searching for something, with the tip of his knife,’ Nicholas says, to no one but himself. ‘But he’s holding too tight. He knows what he’s looking for, but he has little skill.’ He beckons to Ned to bring the lantern even closer. ‘Ah! And then he finds it–’
‘He does?’ asks Ned at his shoulder, wondering how someone can read another man’s thoughts in a tear in the flesh.
‘Then the other cut – transversely, just to make sure.’
‘To make sure of what?’
‘That he’s fully severed the tibial artery.’
‘And what’s that, to a simple man?’
‘It’s a vessel in the body that carries the blood. Like a pipe.’
‘I just mind the bodies, I don’t ask what’s in them,’ says Ned defensively.
‘You remember the last time I came here, and I told you how lethal a simple knife-wound could be? Well, this is a perfect example. He’s severed one of the major vessels that brings the blood down to the extremities. Cut through this, and eventually you’ll lose enough blood to kill you.’
‘But when I used to get a bit fractious and ended up with bloody knuckles – or when you got that lucky shot at me – my blood would dry up and stop the wound.’
‘It does, Ned, but a tear in an artery or vein is too great a breach. And it could be that the killer is administering something to thin the blood, so it won’t coagulate.’
‘So what makes the blood flow out, then?’
‘According to the ancients, there’s a tidal flow between the liver and the organs. If you can get to the tear quick enough, you can hold it back.’
‘How?’
‘Most physicians will cauterize the vessel’s severed ends with hot oil or tar to seal them. I prefer silk.’
‘Silk?’ echoes Ned, who can’t even begin to imagine how an expensive fabric he’s only ever seen adorning the gowns and doublets of the rich could possibly have a place in the treatment of a knife-wound.
‘In Holland I used silk a lot: two ribbons, but they have to be really fine. Looped around the cut vessel, they’ll tie off the ends nicely. Causes far less pain, too. But to be truthful, usually there’s so much of an outflow of blood that it’s impossible to find the tear in the artery before the patient bleeds to death. These incisions were made deliberately, to do just that. The wound on the neck was made to drain the body completely. But the man who did it would make a better slaughterman than a surgeon.’
‘What kind of devil are we dealing with here?’ Ned asks.
‘Oh, I don’t think he’s a devil, Ned. He’s just a man, fallible, like any other. He’s already made one mistake: he thinks the tide is carrying the bodies downriver and out to sea. And he’s arrogant enough to believe that if one should wash up on the riverbank, no one will care enough to take much notice.’
‘But he leaves the Devil’s mark behind him: the Cross, stood on its head.’
‘That’s what I thought – at first. But it’s not a crucifix, Ned. At least, I don’t think it is.’
‘Then what is it?’
‘It’s just the way he uses the knife; a surgical technique. Like the way a man signs his name.’
‘Funny kind of name-mark,’ says Ned.
‘But it’s the same every time. This is a creature of habit, Ned – a very tidy man. But where did he get his knowledge from? Does he go to Tyburn and take note of the way the executioner cuts the body? Is he a barber-surgeon? Is he one of those people who attends the public demonstrations at the College of Physicians?’
At once Nicholas is back in Knightrider Street at the Guildhall, shoulder-to-shoulder with Simon Cowper, Ned Wooley and the rest, listening to Fulke Vaesy’s biblical thundering.
‘Or is he a physician?’ he whispers as the dark, appalling notion strikes him. ‘An incompetent physician – or one who’s disguising his hand? Whoever he is, I have absolutely no idea how to stop him.’
When two nurses come down to prepare the body for the winding sheet, the corpse from Battle Abbey creek is given back his name. ‘Mercy! It’s that Pinchbeak fellow,’ one says, recognizing the face. ‘I heard him ranting like a zealot outside St Antholin’s towards the end of Advent. Put the very dread of Judgement Day in me for a week or more. Spoilt my whole Christmas!’
22
‘Mercy, what’s the matter with you?’ asks Bianca, when Nicholas returns to the Jackdaw that evening.
‘There’s been another killing. Only this time I got a proper chance to inspect the body.’
Ashen-faced, she draws him to a quiet bench. She’s been dreading this moment as much as he has.
Nicholas tells her about his visit to the Magdalene – how he’d seen Ned Monkton forcing his way through the crowd and had known that this time it was going to be different. This time he would be no helpless bystander.
‘This one fits the pattern exactly,’ he tells her. ‘Always he chooses someone afflicted with a malady. Always someone weak, someone unable to protect themselves.’
‘Look on the bright side,’ she says.
‘This has a bright side, does it?’
‘At least now they’ll have to listen to you,’ she tells him, laying one hand on Nicholas’s arm to tell him he’s not fighting this battle alone.
With a written testimony in which he describes the wounds made upon the preacher’s body, Nicholas returns to the alderman’s clerk at Bridge House. He stands over the man while he pens a report for the Surrey coroner, who – with surprising speed – sends a deputy the very next day to convene a jury. Nicholas is even invited to sit upon it.
‘He is not the first,’ Nicholas assures the jury foreman, a stout baker named Royston with rosy-veined cheeks and a duck’s tail of ginger hair at the nape of his neck. ‘There have been others.’
‘But if we know not from whence this fellow came,’ says Royston, with the weary casualness of a man who is being kept too long from his proper calling, ‘then he is of no concern of ours. He is a vagrant. What does it matter how he died?’
‘An honest man can scarcely travel the queen’s highway these days without encountering all manner of brigands and beggars!’ complains another of the jurymen. ‘Better they slay each other than honest folk.’
Nicholas fights, but he is outnumbered. The brief and inconclusive life of the jury barely spans the period between the bell at St Olave’s tolling eight and then nine. Its verdict is brutally short: Unknown man of some forty years, slain by knife-wound to the liver, probably in dispute with a fellow vagrant on the road.
Nicholas can do nothing but place it beside those other forlorn conclusions stored away in his mind: Male child… taken up drowned at the Wildgoose stairs on Bankside. Name unknown, save unto God… The wholly natural sensitivities of the expectant father…
Having decided the killer must be keeping his victims somewhere secluded before he butchers them, Nicholas asks Royston to include in his report to the coroner a request that a search be made of all disused buildings along the south bank of the river between the bridge and the start of the Lambeth marshes.
‘Perhaps you’d like me to ask the Privy Council to raise a muster while I’m about it, Dr Shelby,’ is the dismissive reply. ‘I’ll ask them to call out the trained bands, shall I? – all for some unknown vagabond who’s taken umbrage against another.’