CHAPTER TEN
319 Words
CHAPTER TEN
Doctor Polidori dripped blue-tinted beeswax onto the flap of his letter to Mary and pressed his seal into it. The wax quickly lost its luster as it cooled. His quill stood in the ink pot beside the mangled foot and calf of the elderly gentleman.
“There is something I am missing,” he muttered to himself. He gripped the cold foot, pushed his thumb into the sole then released it. An indentation remained. He removed his own boot and stocking and swung his foot up onto his knee. He gripped it in the same way and pushed his thumb into the soft flesh. It sprang back when released and flushed pink and healthy. He didn’t expect the cadaver to react in the same manner, as death had most certainly overcome the gentleman. But...
“Blood,” he muttered.
There was very little at the scene.
He examined again the shredded flesh of the gentleman’s calf. Both tibial arteries had been severed. There should have been a lot of blood—a pool of it. He reached for his scalpel and sliced up through the remainder of the calf, following the posterior tibial artery. He needed his knife to cut through the flesh of the thigh, deep into the tough, atrophied muscles to uncover the full length of the femoral artery up into the groin. He urged the artery from the leg, alternately cutting with his knife and then his scalpel to loosen it. It should have been fat with coagulated blood, left dormant after the heart had ceased. Instead it was flat between his fingers. Like a ribbon.
“Could he have been killed somewhere else?” he said to the empty room. “The blood drained?” Polidori rang the bell for his valet, then began scratching out a letter for delivery to the Bow Street Runner. As he wrote he reached for the flask in his coat and took a sip. London Dry Gin with a tincture of arsenic.
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