And the man on the table, then, is, or was, her lover. What if we were to suppose that the husband has discovered his wife’s infidelity? Perhaps the young man is his apprentice, one whom he has trusted and loved as a substitute for the child that has never blessed his marriage. Realizing the nature of his betrayal, the master lures his apprentice to the cellar, where the table is waiting. No, wait: he drugs him with tainted wine, for the apprentice is younger and stronger than he, and the master is unsure of his ability to overpower him. When the apprentice regains consciousness, woken by the screams of the woman trapped with him, he is powerless to move. He adds his voice to hers, but the walls are thick, and the cellar deep. There is no one to hear.
A figure advances, the lamp catches the sharp blade, and the grim work begins.
IX
So: this is our version of the truth, our answer to the question of attribution. I, Nicolaes Deyman, did kill my apprentice Mantegna. I anatomized him in my cellar, slowly taking him apart as though, like the physicians of old, I might be able to find some as yet unsuspected fifth humour within him, the black and malignant thing responsible for his betrayal. I did force my wife, my beloved Judith, to watch as I removed skin from flesh, and flesh from bone. When her lover was dead, I strangled her with a rope, and I wept as I did so.
I accept the wisdom and justice of the court’s verdict: that my name should be struck from all titles and records and never uttered again; that I should be taken from this place and hanged in secret and then, while still breathing, that I should be handed over to the anatomists and carried to their great temple of learning, there to be taken apart while my heart beats so that the slow manner of my dying might contribute to the greater sum of human knowledge, and thereby make some recompense for my crimes.
I ask only this: that an artist, a man of some small talent, might be permitted to observe and record all that transpires so the painting called The Anatomization of an Unknown Man might at last come into existence. After all, I have begun the work for him. I have imagined it. I have described it. I have given him his subject, and willed it into being.
For I, too, am an artist, in my way.
The Trials of Margaret
L.C. Tyler
Margaret’s first thought on waking was that she had had an unusually good night’s sleep. It was only as she rolled over in bed and came face to face (as it were) with the back of Lionel’s head that she remembered she had murdered her husband the evening before.
She rolled back again thoughtfully and then just stared at the ceiling for a while. There was a crack in the plaster that Lionel had been promising for months that he would fix. He probably wouldn’t be doing that now.
There were clearly things that she hadn’t thought through as well as she might, including what to do with the body. Still, for the moment she could afford to lie there and listen to the early morning birdsong and watch the first rays of the sun flickering on the oak chest of drawers. Such was the inward peace that she felt that she was only slightly resentful that it was, strictly speaking, Lionel’s turn to make tea that morning. Somewhere in the house a clock struck six, then another slightly further off, then another. Lionel, in his pre-victim days, had always liked his clocks. He spent half an hour every Sunday going round the house winding them all; she thought she probably wouldn’t bother with that.
Margaret slowly slipped out of bed, trying not to disturb the duvet over her husband, and tiptoed out of the room — it was unlikely she would wake Lionel, but it seemed more respectful somehow. It wasn’t until she got to the kitchen that she allowed herself to start humming something from South Pacific.
Sitting at the table, tapping her foot to the tune and sipping her tea, she ran through the events of the night before. There had been the argument — what they had argued about wasn’t so important as the fact that Lionel had flatly refused to see it as a problem of any sort. Men didn’t see that sort of thing as a problem. Being a man had, frankly, been Lionel’s fatal mistake. Afterwards, he had gone off to wind clocks or something and she had sat there regretting the fact that they did not keep cyanide handy under the kitchen sink. Then she had remembered that she did have a lot of sleeping pills that might be ground up very finely and put into something.
“Would you like an omelette for supper, Lionel?”
“That would be nice, dear,” he had replied, doubtless reflecting that she had got over whatever-it-was quite quickly this time. She opened a bottle of Chablis to go with the food. He had appreciated that and attributed his later drowsiness to the wine.
“I’d get an early night, dear, if I were you. I’ll follow you up later.”
Oh yes, and when serving the two omelettes — the pill-laden one and her own — she had for a moment lost track of which was which, but then thought she could detect just a trace of white powder in the one in her left hand. It must have been the excitement of the moment, because she was always quite good at remembering, for example, which cup of tea had sugar in it and which did not. She had presumably got it right, because Lionel was dead and she wasn’t.
She drained the last of her tea, then realisation finally hit her that she would have to Do Something fairly soon. The initial plan had not gone much beyond poisoning her husband. After that she had assumed there might be a certain amount of awkwardness. Now she thought it through, that awkwardness might include having to spend the rest of her life in prison — in pleasanter company than Lionel’s of course, but still...
Lionel’s body was too heavy for her to carry to the car unaided and, even then, it would be difficult dumping it in a river (or whatever you were supposed to do) without somebody noticing. She could bury it in the vegetable patch of course, but Lionel had always been the gardener in the family. And again, she was sure that her neighbour would find it odd that she was digging such a deep hole in the early hours of the morning.
The issue of the near-miss with the fatal omelette started an interesting second line of thought however. What if she were to claim that Lionel, not she, had cooked the omelettes (some husbands did such things apparently). What if he had done it with the intention of poisoning her and had then mixed up the plates, as she almost had, and eaten the deadlier supper of the two. In that case she would have woken up, gone down to make two cups of tea and then on her return to the marital bed discovered her husband already cold and stiff. She would initially have had no idea what had caused his death, because (being totally innocent) how could she possibly guess that he would have ever contemplated such a thing? So, she would have phoned for an ambulance or something and then looked on with innocent incredulity as events unfolded...
It needed working on a bit, but that seemed the general direction to go in.
“So, you had no idea,” said the policeman, “what had caused his death?”
Margaret wiped a tear from her eye and shook her head. “He went to bed early,” she said. “I didn’t try to wake him when I came to bed myself. It wasn’t until I brought him a nice cup of tea the following morning that I found I was unable to... unable to...”