Sinistrari

Chapter 3

Chapter 3

NEWGATE PRISON

LATER THAT NIGHT

HUMMING TUNELESSLY AND SWAYING SLIGHTLY AS HE WALKED, DOCTOR PASHA ROSE made his way down the ill-lit corridor towards the prison mortuary. He leaned forwards to try to keep his balance with the result that his head and body preceded well in advance of his feet that were constantly hurrying on to try and catch up with the rest of his body. ‘Shuddled have had another brandy,’ he told himself, unaware that he was speaking aloud. ‘Good stuff, though. Damn fine brandy Billington keeps. Damn fine.’

He lurched forward rather more than usual, tried to get balance again and caromed sideways into the wall, banging his elbow and dropping his bag. ‘Whoops,’ he said aloud again, ‘Solly, I mean, sorry.’ He picked up his bag, not without difficulty and then giggled to himself, stopping to take his bearings.

The walls of the prison around him were quiet and for a minute or two he was quite disorientated, he should have waited for a warder to escort him down to the mortuary, but normally he knew his way round well enough, just a bit brandy befuddled that’s all. Damn good brandy at that.

The Governor had been anxious to get away after the hanging, kept on rubbing at his crotch when he thought no one was looking, ‘Cunning swine, he’s got some little dolly mop doxie lined up somewhere I shouldn’t wonder,’ Rose mumbled to himself. ‘S’all right for shome. But shome of us ’as to work. Got to autopsy Mister Sinis … Sinis … Sinistrari. Damn silly time to hold an autopsy. What?’ he swirled around, as if he had heard something behind him. ‘What? Who’s there? Sir William?’ Even though Billington had left after only one more brandy, leaving Rose to kick his heels for an hour or more before he could think about performing the autopsy.

The cold glazed tiles of the corridor walls echoed his mumbled words back at him.

‘Rats,’ he told himself. ‘Damn great rats. Vermin everywhere in this damn place. Most of ’em human.’ He giggled away to himself and carried on weaving towards the mortuary.

Doctor Pasha Rose had carried out the post mortems on dozens and dozens of executed criminals at Newgate, and at Brixton and Wandsworth goals. As a young boy, aged no more than eleven or thirteen, many more years ago than he cared to remember, his uncle Cartwright had taken Rose to attend the public hangings outside Newgate1 and to the public dissections of the executed criminals at the now demolished Surgeons Hall, adjoining Newgate, also at the public dissecting rooms at Hicks Hall, the Clerkenwell Sessions House. The excursions had been intended as salutary lessons as to the consequences of criminality, but Rose had been fascinated by the sight of blood and gory strings of internal organs and so found his vocation in life.

He had lost count of the autopsies he had performed throughout his career, many hundreds to be sure – thousands. In fact, Rose been responsible for popularising the use of a V-shaped incision so that the front of the neck could be taken out and the larynx removed for separate examination; a procedure still used today in the autopsies of strangulation suspects.

He sometimes carried out autopsies with the aid of an assistant, usually Richard Brandon, but Brandon was today ill with the fever and so Rose would carry out the autopsy on his own. Not a problem, in fact he preferred to work alone. Brandon was such an inveterate chatterer, usually about nothing of any great interest that Rose often felt like sewing up his lips with the needle and thread such as he used to stitch a corpse together after autopsy. No, even working on his own, it would not take long to conclude that the death of Edward James Sinistrari had been caused by the dislocation of the vertebrae, i.e. the breaking through of the odontoid process at the base of the skull into its ligament and the crushing of the vital centres in the medulla oblongata, such effect brought about by judicial hanging by the neck. ‘And damn good riddance,’ he muttered.

He stopped and peered up at the small sign, hand painted letters on a piece of wood screwed to a green painted door. The sign was fixed above eye level and in the dim light it was difficult to read, but by standing on tip toe, not easy in his condition, and pressing his face to within six inches of the lettering Rose was able to make out the words ‘Mortuary’ and ‘Restricted Access’.

‘Good,’ he said and fished about in his jacket pocket for the keys that Chief Warden Brunskill had given him. ‘Mister Sinistrari, may you rot in Hell, here we come. Time to meet the knife.’

After some fumbling at the keyhole, Rose finally got the door of the mortuary open and staggered inside. The mortuary was dimly lit, not all the gas lights had been lit, something the hangmen were supposed to do before they left, but by what light there was, Rose was able to see that a shrouded corpse lay on the porcelain mortuary table.

‘Ho hum, beeladle dum,’ he sang as he peeled off his jacket, managing to get the sleeves inside out in the process and made to hang up it one on the coat rack, but missed, depositing the coat onto the floor instead. He tried to bend down to pick it up, but a wave of giddiness swept over him and he had to stand upright again and swallow down the rush of vomit that scalded into his gorge.

‘Goodness gracious almighty.’ he swore, hanging onto the coat rack for support, breathing heavily. ‘Damn fine brandy, what?’ His jacket momentarily forgotten, Rose took down a filthy apron from a peg beside the coat rack. The apron had once been white in colour but was now stained with a thick coating of dried blood and corpse detritus, desiccated pieces of flesh stuck to the fabric as if they had been glued in place and the entire garment stank of old blood and decaying flesh.

Rose was a doctor of the old school and did not subscribe to new-fangled notions about cleanliness and sterility. A corpse was a corpse was a corpse and no amount of filth and germs were going to harm it now. The fact that Rose might have used the same filthy garments whilst treating live patients never occurred to him and in the past, on many occasions in the past he had gone directly from an autopsy with the blood of a cadaver still on his hands to treat and operate on the living. Dr Rose had a high incident of post operation mortality, but never once in his career had he wondered why. Patients died under the knife on the operating theatre, and that was that.

It was a fact of life, or death, and nobody could ever convince him that sepsis, introduced by Rose, and might be the cause. Stuff and nonsense.

The gore-stiffened apron crackled like the thin skin of ice on a puddle as Rose approached the mortuary table and the shrouded corpse.

‘Dum-di-deee-di-dum-di-dum-dee-do,’ he warbled with brandy induced high spirits, momentarily forgetting his bout of nausea and the inconvenience of having to perform Sinistrari’s necropsy at this time of night ‘Now then, Mister High and Mighty Mister Sinistrari, let us see how high and mighty you are feeling now, shall we?,’

Rose had very plump and hairy hands, flecked with aged dark liver spots, and they scuttled across the shroud like mating tarantulas as he pulled back the covering from the body, which lay, on the table. He blinked in owlish amazement and re-adjusted his spectacles more securely onto his broken-veined nose before peering closely at the broken necked corpse once again. ‘But no, you, you … you aren’t Sinistrari, no sir; this has to be some mix up. Now, where in the Devil are you, damned fellow.’

Rose looked wildly about the mortuary as if expecting Sinistrari’s corpse to make itself known to him and then squinted back at the corpse on the table, perhaps hoping for it to transmogrify back into Sinistrari if he stared hard enough at it.

‘Good lord, it’s … it’s the hangman?’ Rose started as his fuddled senses recognised the corpse and he clicked his fingers in frustration, trying to remember the name of the executioners. ‘Jenkins! That’s it, Jenkins. Hangman Jenkins. Good heavens, what on earth?

‘Good evening, Doctor Rose. Or should I say good morning, it surely is a most ungodly hour for good men to be about their business.’ What sounded horribly like Sinistrari’s taunting voice cut across the gloom of the mortuary like a scalpel and Rose felt sudden icy chills of dread trickling down his spine, his heart seized in frozen terror. In his shock, he staggered into the mortuary table, knocking Jenkins’ arm loose so that it fell away and a dead hand brushed against his groin like a lewd caress. With a startled strangulated scream, he backed away, his hand to his mouth as he turned to face the horror he knew could not be there.

By all that was holy and sacred, Rose knew that Sinistrari could not be there, Sinistrari was dead, hanged by the neck. No heartbeat. No possibility of brain activity. All life extinct. No, no, the drink had befuddled his senses and induced wild imaginings. Or else someone was playing a very unpleasant practical joke, one of the warders perhaps. Or maybe Dennison, although the hangman did not strike Rose as being a man for japes or joke.

As he looked around Doctor Pasha Rose suddenly felt very sober, very sober indeed. Before him, in the deeper shadow of the corner stood the hanged man, Edward Sinistrari, leaning against a bench, one foot crossed over the other – tall – elegant – mocking.

Very much alive.

Dressed once more in the clothes in which he had been executed, the garments looking as fresh and crisp as though a butler had laid them out freshly ironed no more than an hour or so ago. Rose felt his bowels loosen, liquescent with fear.

‘You seem somewhat surprised to see me, doctor, startled almost? Do squeeze tight onto your sphincter, there’s a good chap. Awful smell and all that.’

‘But you! You’re dead,’ Rose managed to stumble out, his tongue knotted, ‘I saw you hanged, I know you were dead, and … and,’ he pointed to the corpse of Jenkins, ‘He was alive. I know; I saw him! You were dead and he alive.’

‘Mmmmm, a rather inconvenient situation, I thought, and so I arranged … how shall I put it? A metamorphosis, shall we say,’ Sinistrari said, waving a languid hand in the direction of body on the mortuary slab.

‘Metamorphosis?’

‘Yes. His life for mine. As St John so admirably puts it, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” Not that we were friends exactly but we were acquainted, oh my word yes; acquainted in the most intimate of circumstances.’

Sinistrari smiled, a chilling smile in which his eyes sparked like ice flows in the pale winter sun of the arctic. ‘As shall we, doctor, you and I.’

Then, suddenly, without seeming to move, Sinistrari was alongside Rose, towering over him. With a cry Rose fell back, bumping into the mortuary slab once more, the sudden rush of warmth in his crotch as his bowels and bladder discharged unnoticed in his terror.

‘Oh dear, I did specifically ask you to control your bodily functions, did I not?’ Sinistrari mocked. He reached for Rose, his hands hooking like the talons of a bird of prey. ‘Time I think for an anatomy lesson.’

THE BODY OF DOCTOR PASHA ROSE WAS NOT DISCOVERED until 6 o’clock that morning, when four prisoners under escort arrived at the prison mortuary to collect, as they thought, the body of the executed murderer, Edward James Sinistrari, for burial in the prison grounds.

Rose had been anatomically dissected. A subsequent post mortem of his mutilated corpse indicated that many of the incisions had taken place whilst he had been alive. The final cut had been a V shaped incision to the front of the neck, allowing the removal of the larynx. Other organs, including Rose’s heart, liver and kidneys, were also removed and of which no trace could be found. Rose’s body had been tied to the mortuary table by strips of his intestines and his black doctor’s bag had been thrust into the cavity of his hollowed out abdomen.

The body of executioner’s assistant Alfred Jenkins was also discovered in the mortuary. Apart from the marks of strangulation, his corpse was unmarked. The n***d body of hangman Dennison was found in the execution pit. He was hanging by his heels from the noose with which he had executed Sinistrari. His corpse looked as though wild animals had savaged it. Deep scratches, like claw marks, ran the length of his torso and limbs, crisscrossing and overlapping in a frenzied scored patchwork so that Dennison’s skin had been all but totally scraped away.

His eyes were ripped out and left to dangle like children’s playthings on the b****y strings of their membranous ocular muscles. Dennison’s genitals had also been torn away and stuffed into his gaping mouth, the tip of his p***s hanging from the corner of his mouth in a grotesquely lolling parody of his missing tongue.

Dennison’s stomach had been slit open and his intestines slowly been drawn out, stretched across the pit and then coiled in a heap in the corner like a nest of b****y serpents. As had been the case with Rose, many of the injuries had been inflicted whilst Dennison was still alive and the fact of being suspended upside down meant that the concentration of blood to his brain prevented him from passing out. He would have felt every slicing cut, every raking incision, lingering in agony for hours before finally expiring from loss of blood.

Of Sinistrari, there was no sign. He had vanished from the prison as if he had been no more substantial than vapour, like the first thin curl of smoke from a newly lit fire evaporating into the damp morning air.