Emberverse Short Stories Page 2

  Rutherston nodded as he took a sip of the cool, nutty-bitter ale; it didn’t do to make things easy for a would-be Dick Turpin. Open lawlessness like that wasn’t likely around here anymore, but it honed field-craft and helped hold edge-dulling boredom at bay. He took his gunmetal cigarette-case out of his jacket and flipped it open, offering it across the table.

  “No thank you, sir. Never got the habit.”

  Rutherston lit one himself. They were rum-flavored Embiricos cigarillos from Barbados, and he found the rich smooth taste soothed and helped him concentrate. The old-timers said tobacco was bad for you, but then living was ultimately always fatal and they seemed to have been a bunch of damned old women back then anyway.

  “Go on,” he said, and opened his notebook to begin jotting down the points.

  “We were passing the Mill here on our way back to base—”

  “This was early this morning?”

  “Yessir, about eight hundred hours. We’d been out since midnight, not seen nothing more dangerous than a badger or a barn owl, the usual. A woman—the old miller’s widow, name of Kristin Wooton—ran out and grabbed me stirrup; there was a man behind her, a wringin’ of his hands. She screamed out that her son Jon was dying, and we should get him help. Well, I sent young Jones—that’s him, sir, the one with the ears like a bat—back into the village for the District Nurse, then went in to see what I could do.”

  Corporal Bramble looked hard enough to drive horseshoe-nails with his knuckles, but his strong-boned face was uneasy as he went on.

  “The man was dying, right enough. Never seen anything like it, sir, and I’ve seen men die before… been stationed over most of the Empire these last ten years. It was like he was rotting, sir; hair comin’ out in clumps, sores all over his hide. Bleeding from everywhere too, eyes, nose, gums—even his arsehole, begging your pardon, inspector.”

  “I’ve heard the word before, corporal.”

  A broad white smile, and the man drained half his mug as if trying to wash away a bad taste. His voice was impersonal as he went on:

  “Looked like poison to me, sir, and his mother was swearing that he’d been fine the day before, or maybe just a bit peaked. So I sent McAllister—he’s the one with the hair like a new penny—over north to the line of rail, they’ve a semaphore station. Just about then the poor unfortunate bugger did die, and Major Grimsson sent back that I was to hold in place until someone arrived, so I had the body put in keeping, the man’s room sealed and a guard put on it. And then I waited until you got here. Which was quick work on your part, sir.”

  Rutherston looked down at his notes, tapping the pen on the metal coil at the top of the pad. “It does sound like possible foul play,” he said thoughtfully. “The first in this parish since 2012… and that was a drunken swain using a hay-knife when he caught his ladylove where she shouldn’t have been.”

  “I don’t have any great acquaintance here in Eddsford, sir, but I’ve heard little good of Jon Wooton. Nothing specific… but reading between the lines, like.” A pause for another pull at the beer. “Still, you’d ‘ave to hate a man right hard to do that to him.”

  Rutherston nodded and finished his beer. “See that your men get a good night’s rest,” he said.

  Meaning, this isn’t a weekend pass so see that they go to bed sober; but there’s nei need to say that aloud.

  Bramble nodded in turn, obviously following his meaning effortlessly. He’d never met the corporal before but he knew the type, a reliable long-service non-commissioned man, steady as a rock in any situation he understood.

  What’s uncertain is how much imagination he has, but offhand I think he has plenty, just doesn’t show it much.

  “Tomorrow we’ll start doing the rounds,” he said aloud.

  Bramble hesitated. “If you don’t mind my asking, sir, why do you need me and the lads?”

  Rutherston closed the notebook. “I very well may not,” he said. “On the other hand, if there’s something nastier than a simple impulse killing… or someone may run, in which case I’d rather have help quicker on their feet than the usual part-time village Special Constable.”

  Bramble nodded and grinned. “The one here, name of Edward Mukeriji… runs the tobacconists and sweet-shop, sir, and he was fair stuttering. I see your point.”

  “And while this may not be your village, you might see things that I don’t.”

  “Ah,” Bramble said. “That’s a point too, sir.”

  The words were uninformative, but Rutherston felt that he’d passed some test.

  St. Swithun’s School For Girls was not far from Eddsford, having been moved out of town when it started up again in the resettlement; a few young ladies in the dark-blue frocks with pleated skirts and white blouses of that revered institution were walking through the village, overseen by a nun in a gray habit.

  “Dullafullt,” one of them said to a friend, rolling her eyes.

  Rutherston had to admit that to a youngster Eddsford might indeed seem a little boring, particularly if you’d been stuck there by your parents during the holidays when the other boarders went home. That had happened to him several times, though Winchester College was admittedly much closer to the heart of things.

  I’d quite like Eddsford myself if I weren’t here to investigate a murder, he thought, taking a deep breath of the cool morning air; it was still fresh at eight o’clock, but he thought it would be another warm day. It reminds me of home.

  Corporal Bramble stood inconspicuously by his elbow as he used the brass knocker on the door of the clinic, or as inconspicuously as a sixteen-stone man in armor with a longbow and quiver over his shoulder could.

  The clinic was just down the lane from the village green; Eddsford wasn’t quite large enough to rate a doctor of its own, though one came by weekly from Petersfield, and could be fetched at need. There was a polished plate by the door, also brass, that read: District Nurse Delia Medford, SRN, and a modern bicycle with a rather heavy tubular frame and solid-rubber wheels in a stand by the entryway. Roses bloomed in a trellis along one wall, and there were colorful impatiens in the window boxes.

  Delia Medford opened the door and responded with a dryly courteous nod to the detective’s slight bow. She was a tallish, slender woman in her thirties with blue eyes and brown hair drawn back in a bun and a no-nonsense expression, and a stethoscope tucked into the breast pocket of her jacket. There was another with her enough alike to be her older sister.

  “Detective Inspector Ingmar Rutherston, ladies,” he said, removing his hat and showing his Warrant Card. “Corporal Bramble here is assisting me.”

  The soldier tucked his helmet under one arm and rumbled “Ma’am,” twice.

  The nurse gave Rutherston’s hand a quick firm shake. “My sister, Mrs. Alice Purkiss,” she said, after she’d introduced herself.

  The widow Purkiss was a decade older and otherwise very like her sibling, apart from the fact that she wore a conservative knee-length skirt rather than cord riding breeches; the other main difference was her shoes, which weren’t graced with thick rubber soles.

  “I was Jon Wooton’s teacher at our little school, Inspector Rutherston,” she said. “We thought it would save you time and effort if I came along first thing. I’m retired from teaching now, but I’m still postmistress and run the Eddsford reading room and lending-library.”

  Ah, excellent, Rutherston thought.

  He wanted to put off seeing the Wootons until he’d gotten a feel for how the rest of the village regarded them; and these two probably knew everyone’s family history since the resettlement, just for starters. Doubtless they were pillars of half a dozen Church organizations and ran the local Whig election committee with an iron hand as well.

  Like most such, the office had a waiting room with chairs, a table, and ancient copies of several magazines—The Illustrated Winchester News, the Church Times, the British Agriculturalist, and rather surprisingly the Boy’s and Girl’s Own Paper.

  There was also t
he inevitable Bible, a tall antique clock ticking in one corner and hanging pictures of King-Emperor Charles IV, Queen Thora, the Pope, and the Cardinal-Archbishop of Winchester. A consulting room gave off it and there were several storage areas in the back; presumably Delia Medford lived over the shop, judging from the selection of Wellingtons, umbrellas, and mackintoshes at the bottom of the hall stairs, and the tabby-cat looking down curiously from the top.

  The body was in one of the storerooms, a tile-floored one with two roll-out compartments for cadavers against the wall, and an ingenious icebox-like arrangement for keeping them cold.

  “Sir James sends me down ice when I need it,” she explained, as she pulled on a pair of thick rubber gloves.

  Rutherston took up her offer of another pair, a bib-apron and a mask that smelled strongly of disinfectant, and a little jar of a strong-smelling ointment. He rubbed a touch of that below his nose and handed it around, and was glad of it when she pulled out the tray—decay had been quicker than he would have expected, given the refrigeration.

  Odd, he thought. The marks are almost like burns, rather than sores. Blister marks running with clear fluid. As if he’d been touched with a red-hot… no, there’s no charring. As if he’d been touched with something supremely cold instead.

  The nurse might have been examining a gutted chicken at the butcher’s, but Corporal Bramble went a little gray beneath his olive tan, and Mrs. Purkiss looked at the ceiling; both stood well back. Rutherston sympathized. The postmortem had left the corpse as gruesome as anything on a battlefield, if neater, and whatever the man had died of was ghastly. Sections of the back peeled away as she moved the corpse.

  “I conducted the autopsy,” she said. “I usually do them here and pass on the reports to the County Coroner. I confess I was tempted to send for Dr. Kvaran from Petersfield this time, but honestly I don’t think Gudrun could have made head nor tail of it either.”

  “I’d have brought a forensic surgeon from Winchester if one had been available, but I agree that it’s quite baffling,” Rutherston said. “May I see your notes?”

  “By all means,” she said, handing him a clipboard.

  Wooton, Jon: age, 27, single male, height 5 ft 11 inches, weight eleven stone, hair, dark brown, eyes, green…

  Jon Wooton had been a fairly average modern Englishman… if you subtracted the gruesome lesions that had killed him. The small photograph attached showed him in his late teens, scowling and slouching in a coat with extravagant lapels, but with a certain crude Heathcliffian handsomeness to him. Even allowing for the circumstances, the ensuing decade hadn’t been kind.

  Rutherston got out his own notebook and began sketching and making observations of the body; he’d seen a good many corpses himself in both his careers, and this one had certain features you didn’t often find in a Home Counties’ village mortuary. After a moment he tapped his pen in the air above the left shoulder.

  “Notice that, corporal?” he said, pointing to a white scar on the triceps.

  Bramble nodded. “Not before, sir; I was sort of distracted. But you’re right—he didn’t get ‘is buckler up in time that round,” he said.

  Then the noncom followed the pen with his comments: “That’s an arrow-wound… so’s that… or a square-headed crossbow-bolt… sword-scars on the right arm. Nasty cut to the leg—he was lucky that time. That there could be a spear’ead. He didn’t get that lot being quarrelsome in the pub of a Saturday night. Not even a pub in Portsmouth or Bristol.”

  “No record of military service,” Rutherston said thoughtfully.

  “No, not beyond the usual militia training,” the District Nurse confirmed. “He did say he’d shipped out overseas as a merchant seaman several times, to Asia and America and the African coast.”

  “So he might have got those fighting off pirates. But,” Rutherston said, and turned over the man’s right hand.

  Even with the skin damage, the hands were definitely wrong for a seaman. Hauling on tarred hemp and sisal and fisting up canvas gave you a layer like cracked horn all across your palms, and you didn’t lose it quickly either; he’d seen that often enough. Jon Wooton’s right hand was if anything less callused than Rutherston’s own, which bore the marks of life-long work with the sword. It did share the “swordsman’s ring,” a circle of hard skin around the outer side of the forefinger and the inner side of the thumb. There were other scars, too, ones that looked as if they’d been caused by hot metal or acid.

  Odd, Rutherston thought. Those look like blacksmith’s marks, or even what someone working in a bleach-powder plant might get. With nothing else to go by, I’d put these as the hands of an artisan in some skilled trade.

  “But he was away from home for a good long time?” the detective said.

  “More often than not, since he turned twenty. Usually about half the year, a month or two at a time; more in the winter than the summer.”

  “Hmmm. Did he have money?”

  “Nothing formal, but he didn’t seem to lack for it. Of course, the Wootons are fairly well-to-do; the family have held the lease of the mill since the resettlement.”

  “Cause of death?”

  “Proximate cause was massive exsanguination due to internal bleeding,” Miss Medford said.

  She unfastened the clips and opened the body cavity. Her sister looked aside slightly, and Corporal Bramble more than that.

  “You see?” she said. “The pattern of tissue degeneration is quite unlike anything I’ve seen before; very severe mercury poisoning, perhaps—that would account for some of the sores—but there’s nei evidence of mercury in the amount you would need. And that should have taken longer. I passed him in the street the day before yesterday, and he was healthy enough to scowl and spit then; perhaps a bit pale, but no more. And note how there’s no inflammation around the lesions? Simple cellular collapse, I think. There’s been no bacterial action to speak of.”

  “You don’t think it was an infectious agent, then?”

  “Probably not. I’ve read of African viruses with similar effects in the old days, and he might have come in contact with those on a voyage, but it’s a month’s sailing time between Britain and the Guinea coast, and they acted quickly. And the Journal of the Royal Medical Society lists no known cases since the Change; I have a complete series.”

  “Had you treated Jon Wooton before?”

  “Apart from the usual childhood complaints? Yes.” She sniffed audibly. “For a social disease, twice: gonorrhea. Cured by a course of antibiotics from the National Health Center. One tries to be forgiving, but I cautioned him that I would report any further occurrences to the Ministry of Health.”

  She slid the tray closed with a snap. They stripped off their gloves and washed up in the stainless-steel sink with strong medical soap, then repaired to a sitting-room to one side of the business part of the building; Rutherston took a seat, and Bramble stood next to the door, shrewd dark eyes taking everything in. The furniture was in excellent if subdued and rather plain taste, with a picture on the wall that Rutherston thought might be French Impressionist—salvage art—and a landscape showing Eddsford from the Downs, done in the fashionable neo-Pre-Raphaelite style with a certain amateurish attractiveness. Miss Medford rang a small handbell.

  “Tea, please, Aud,” she said.

  Inwardly, Rutherston raised a brow as a pretty young woman in a dark dress and white apron bustled in and then returned with a tray that had obviously been kept in near-readiness; usually a District Nurse’s salary wouldn’t run to a housemaid, and he noticed that Mrs. Purkiss seemed a little constrained. When the tea came—in a beautiful salvaged set of Wedgewood, rather than modern manufacture—he could tell by the scent that it was the genuine black-leaf article from Hinduraj or Sri Lanka, rather than the herbal substitutes most people still used. Asian tea wasn’t quite a luxury reserved for the wealthy any more, but it was expensive even in these days of prosperity, peace and growing trade, like the cubes of white refined cane sugar in their silver bo
wl.

  He took out his cigarette case and raised a brow. Miss Medford raised her high-bridged nose in turn.

  “Not in here, if you please, inspector,” she said in clipped tones. “It’s a filthy habit and I don’t encourage it.”

  He sighed slightly and slipped the gunmetal case back into its pocket; he could have used one now… or a stiff whiskey-and-soda, despite the hour. Winchester was a city of 70,000, and they might have as many as four or five homicides a year, but none like that.

  She went on: “How do you take your tea?”

  “Two lumps and milk, thank you,” he said, sipped appreciatively, then buttered one of the fresh muffins. His notebook went on his knee. “You taught Mr. Wooton, Mrs. Purkiss?”

  “Yes; for six years—he left school at fourteen.”

  That was the minimum legal age, and usually the maximum for ordinary countryfolk. Rutherston made another note. He’d have expected a miller’s son to take another two years; the rural middle classes, farmers and craftsmen and shopkeepers, usually did. Primary education was free to that level, if not compulsory; and a miller, even if he rented rather than owning the machinery, was usually prosperous enough that he didn’t depend on a teenage son’s labor to keep the family eating.

  The retired schoolteacher seemed to sense his question. “Jon’s father died when he was twelve—fell into the gears. His elder brother Eric took over the mill, young as he was. Sir James wanted to keep it in the family.”

  “What sort of a student was Jon Wooton?”

  Mrs. Purkiss lips thinned until they were bloodless. “Quite talented,” she said in a tone that tried for clinical and nearly achieved it. “And he continued to study after he’d left school; requested books on interlibrary loan through our reading room here.”

  “Quite the scholar, then? His interests were?”

  “Late-period pre-Change history, and the sciences. He enjoyed reading, too, which I’m sure you know isn’t all that common, particularly if it’s not just romances and adventure stories. Very intelligent; even brilliant, perhaps. With more application and self-discipline, I would have recommended him for a Royal and Imperial Scholarship. Father Frances thought the same.”