The lanterns burned absolutely steadily. It was totally windless, almost airless in there.
“You’re right!” Piers looked up, his eyes wide and dark in the uncertain light. “His neck is broken. I don’t understand it. That blow shouldn’t have done that. It’s in the wrong place, and at the wrong angle.”
“Would that blow at the back have killed him?” Pitt asked.
Piers looked unhappy. “I’m not absolutely certain, but I don’t think so. I don’t see how it could.” He swallowed, and Pitt could see his throat jerk. “There would be no way of knowing if he was dead when he slid under the water ….”
Pitt waited.
“I could find out if there is water in the lungs. If there isn’t, then the broken neck killed him and he was already dead before he went under.”
“And the blow at the back?” Pitt asked again.
“I might be able to tell from that if it happened when he was alive, or dead, by the blood and the bruising. The bathwater washed the outside clean, of course.” Piers seemed hunched into himself, his face shadowed starkly in the lanternlight. “But if I … if I did a postmortem examination … at least … I don’t know if I … I am really qualified to give an opinion. I couldn’t in court, of course …. They wouldn’t accept my judgment.”
“Then you had better be very careful how you treat the evidence,” Pitt said with a bleak smile. “It could make a lot of difference, one way or the other.”
“Could it?” Piers sounded disbelieving.
Pitt thought of Justine, of Doll, and of Lorcan McGinley.
“Oh, yes.”
“I can’t do it here,” Piers said grimly. “I can’t see, for a start. And I’m so cold I can’t hold my hands still.”
“We’ll use one of the laundry rooms,” Pitt decided. “There’s running water and a good wooden scrubbing table. I don’t suppose you have any instruments with you?”
“I’m only a student.” Piers’s voice was tight and a little high. “But I’m very nearly qualified. I take my final exams this year.”
“Can you do this? I don’t want to send for the village doctor. He won’t be trained for this kind of thing either. To send to London for someone I would have to do it through the assistant commissioner, and it will take too long.”
“I understand.” Piers looked at him unwaveringly in the lanternlight. “You think it was my Uncle Padraig, and you want the proof before he leaves.”
There was no purpose in denying it.
“Can you work with the best kitchen knives, if they are sharpened?” Pitt said instead.
Piers flinched. “Yes.”
Carrying the body from the icehouse was a miserable and exceedingly awkward matter. It must not be handled roughly, or damage might be done which would destroy the very evidence they were looking for. Geville had been a large man, tall and well built. To place him on a door would make him impossibly heavy for Pitt, Tellman and Piers to carry unassisted.
“Well, we can’t get anyone else,” Tellman said tartly. “We’ll have to think of another way. I’ve seen enough of these servants to know what would happen if we used a footman. We’d be branded ghouls or resurrectionists by tomorrow morning.”
“I’m afraid he’s right,” Piers agreed. “We could try boards. There’ll be some in one of the outbuildings, like the ones they used for the study window.”
“We’d never balance him on boards,” Pitt dismissed the idea. The thought of struggling along the passageway in the half dark trying to keep a corpse from falling off a plank was grotesque. “The door is the only thing.”
“It’s too heavy!” Tellman protested.
“Laundry basket,” Piers said suddenly. “If we’re really careful how we put him in it, we won’t disturb the evidence.”
Pitt and Tellman both looked at him with approval.
“Excellent,” Pitt agreed. “I’ll fetch one. You get him ready.”
* * *
It was after eleven o’clock by the time Tellman stood by the laundry door, which naturally did not lock, and Pitt watched as Piers Greville very slowly began cutting into the body of his father, holding Mrs. Williams’s best kitchen knife in his right hand. The ordinary lights were turned up as high as they could go, and there were three extra lanterns placed so as to cast as little shadow as possible.
It seemed to take hours. He worked slowly and extremely carefully, cutting tissue, hesitating, looking, cutting again. He obviously loathed the necessity of what he was doing. But once he had become engrossed in it, his professionalism asserted itself. He was a man who loved his calling and took a kind of joy in the delicate skill of his hands. Never once did he complain or suggest that it was unfair of Pitt to have asked him. Whatever fears he had as to what the evidence might show, he hid them.
It was warm in the laundry, and damp from the steam of the coppers boiling heavy linen and towels. It smelled of soap, carbolic, and wet cloth.
Tellman stood with his back to the door. No one in the house had been told what they were doing. They had brought the body themselves, after making sure all the servants were elsewhere. Most had already gone upstairs. If they heard even a whisper that there had been a body cut up in the laundry, the stories would grow until they were monstrous, and no servant would come to work in Ashworth Hall ever again.
It was now half past eleven.
“Will you hold that, please?” Piers asked, indicating the bones of the chest he had cut with Mrs. Williams’s meat cleaver. Pitt obeyed. It seemed callous to be holding a part of a man’s body, and yet he knew as well as anyone that it was no longer animate, but it still seemed peculiarly personal.
Another ten minutes went by. No one spoke again.
There was no sound but the hissing of the gas. The entire house seemed silent, almost as if there was no one else in all the dozens of rooms.
“There is no water in the lungs,” Piers said at last, looking up at Pitt. “He didn’t drown.”
“Did the blow to the back of the head kill him?”
Piers did not answer, but closed up the chest as well as he could. He wiped the blood off his hands, then, after Pitt had helped him roll the body over so he could see, he turned his attention to the wound at the back of the neck.
Another twenty minutes passed.
“No,” he said with a lift of surprise. “There’s no bleeding, no real bruise at all, just a crushing of bone … there.” He pointed. “And there.” He screwed up his face in confusion. “He was killed … twice … if you see what I mean? First by breaking the neck, which was a very expert blow, exactly right. It must take some skill, and strength, to break a man’s neck with one blow. And there was only one. There’s no other bruising or damage.”
Tellman had come inside earlier, silently, and now he came forward from the door, his eyes wide open, looking first at Piers, then at Pitt.
“Then someone hit him over the back of the head and pushed him under the water,” Piers finished. “I haven’t the faintest idea why. It seems … crazy ….” He looked totally bewildered.
“Are you sure?” Pitt felt a soaring of spirit that was out of all proportion to any good there could possibly be. “Are you absolutely sure?”
Piers blinked. “Yes. You can get a proper police surgeon to check after me, but I’m sure. Why? What does it mean? Do you know who killed him?”
“No,” Pitt said with a catch in his voice. “No … but I think I know who didn’t ….”
“Well, it looks like two people did.” Tellman stared down at the body on the bench. “Or meant to!”
Pitt did not move. He was wondering if he could make a case against someone for hitting the head of a corpse and holding it under the water. What could the crime be? Defilement of a dead body? Would the courts bother with it? Did he even want them to?
“Sir?” Tellman prompted him.
Pitt jerked his attention back. “Yes … Yes, tidy up here, will you, Tellman. I have something to do upstairs … I think. Thank you.” He looked at Piers. “Thank you, Mr. Greville. I appreciate both your courage and your skill … very much. Put the body back in the icehouse, will you, and for God’s sake, lock the door and don’t leave any traces of what we’ve done here. Good night.” And he went to the door, opened it, and strode back towards the main house and the stairs.