The Anatomy of Death Read online

  She continued to manipulate his knee. “The swelling is much diminished. You should be ready for surgery in a month or so—would you like me to make the necessary arrangements?”

  The colour left Pike’s cheeks. “Thank you, but no, not just yet. I will need to talk to Shepherd. I am not sure when I can be spared.”

  “Surgical techniques and anaesthesia have improved greatly in the last ten years,” she said.

  “I’m sure they have.” He rolled down his trouser leg.

  “You don’t even have to have the operation in a hospital,” she persisted. “I can do it here if you wish.”

  He looked up from the bootlace he was retying. “You? Here?”

  “Home surgery is always an option. I can employ a private nurse and another doctor to administer anaesthetic.”

  Pike reached for his cane and pulled himself to his feet. “Thank you, Dr. McCleland, but I am in your debt as it is. I do not wish to impose further.”

  “Is it because I am a woman? I admit to not being a fully qualified surgeon—women are barred from the profession, you know—but the technique is a simple one. Or perhaps you do not think me capable,” she said, even though her instinct told her this was not the case at all. She felt sure his reluctance had more to do with his experiences in South Africa. His demeanour, the sparkle of perspiration on his brow whenever the subject of surgery was mentioned, reminded her of Florence after her prison ordeal. Encouraging her sister to talk about her ghastly experiences had helped very much. With a man of Pike’s reserve, however, it seemed unlikely he would be willing to talk—to her or to anyone—about something that he would see in himself as a lack of moral fibre.

  “No, no, not at all, I know you are quite capable of operating on my knee,” he said. “I have seen how you work and I am full of admiration. If I were to allow anyone to perform my operation, it would be you.” He flicked her a smile that did not reach his eyes. “But now I must leave. I have taken up enough of your time.”

  “Wait, we still have more to discuss. Please sit down, your consultation is not yet finished.”

  With a murmur of protest, he sank back down onto the chaise.

  “You are aware of the golf course sabotage and the arrest of three of the Bloomsbury WSPU members?”

  He paused. “I am.”

  “And you approve, I suppose?”

  “Of course. They were about to detonate a bomb. People could have been killed. They must suffer the consequences.”

  “Even if the consequences mean force-feeding?”

  “Yes, if medical intervention is necessary to prevent the crime of suicide,” he replied evenly, “but I cannot see what this has to do with my knee.”

  “Your knee? Oh, nothing at all.” Dody smiled with contrived sweetness. “Recently you gave me the opportunity to witness something I had never seen before. You told me it would assist with my further education.”

  He shifted on the chaise. “Ah, the Crippen execution …”

  “And now I would like to return the favour. I would like to give you the opportunity of witnessing something that will further your education. I would like you to accompany me to witness a force-feeding—medical intervention, as the legal profession euphemistically call it.”

  She was being cruel to a kind man, she knew it, but she wanted to shake him out of some of his rigid beliefs, and this was all she could think of. As she rose from her chair, she realised Florence and Pike were different sides of the same coin.

  He gazed at her for a moment. “You are throwing down the gauntlet, Dr. McCleland.”

  “You have never seen a force-feeding?”

  “No.”

  “Then perhaps it is time you did. It was your department, after all, that bribed the informer and subsequently arrested the women involved. Are you aware that the poor Treylen woman has since taken her life?”

  He said nothing, but the tightening of the lines around his mouth told her his answer would have been no.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The prison cell was no warmer than the hospital mortuary. Dody did her best to control her shivering as she sat next to Olivia on the plank bed and took hold of her icy hand.

  “Must you continue with this?” she said.

  Olivia squeezed Dody’s hand. “Please don’t waste your breath trying to dissuade me. Until all suffragettes, regardless of class, are treated as political prisoners, I will continue with this course of action—even if it kills me.”

  And well it might, Dody thought, looking around the cell. Dim grey light filtered through barred windows, which were high up on the walls so no view out was possible. An odiferous bucket stood in a corner. “It doesn’t look to me as if you are being treated as a political prisoner anyway.”

  “There are inequalities for men and women in prison just as there are outside it. Male political prisoners can rent better cells, wear their own clothes, and have as many visitors as they like.”

  Dody touched the sleeve of Olivia’s coarse blue dress, so different to the brightly coloured kaftans she favoured. “But you are not even in your own clothes.”

  “I soiled them with vomit.”

  Indeed, Dody thought, the smell hung about her still.

  “How many times have they force-fed you?” she asked.

  “Three times yesterday and once this morning.”

  “Will you let me examine you?”

  “What is the point? The prison physician has already done so, and I know you have no legal power to stop them.”

  “But I might be able to make the process more humane.”

  Dody exchanged her bowler hat for a light reflector, adjusting the strap around her head. Giving Olivia no opportunity for further argument, she took hold of her jaw and turned her head towards the light. “Please, dear, open your mouth for me.”

  Olivia licked dry, cracked lips and complied like an obedient child. Dody caught the thin beam of light from the window and directed it into Olivia’s mouth, pressing down on the tongue with a wooden blade. The throat was raw, the mucosa of the inside of her mouth dotted with purple ulcers, sections of gums still seeping blood from the morning’s ordeal.

  “They have only used the stomach tube?” Dody asked as she put the tongue depressor down and redirected her light up Olivia’s nostrils. Thankfully these seemed free from irritation.

  “Yes.”

  “With clamps to lever your mouth open?”

  “They used a metal clamp for the first two feeds, but when they saw the damage it was doing to my mouth, they exchanged it for a wooden one.”

  “How considerate of them.”

  A fleeting smile passed over Olivia’s pale features.

  “Your mouth and throat are raw. They cannot continue to feed you this way. The next feed will have to be through your nose.”

  “And when my nostrils are destroyed, I will be fed through the back passage, and after that …” Olivia shuddered.

  Dody flinched. The only reason for feeding a prisoner that way was to torture them. “For the love of God, Olivia, pray eat something, and then this torture will stop!”

  Olivia said nothing. She had lifted her gaze to the window high in the wall, the whites of her eyeballs showing beneath her pupils and a strange gleam in her eyes.

  Dody took off her light reflector and spent a moment adjusting her hat. Olivia must be coming down with a fever, she thought, though she had failed to notice any other sign. She raised her hand to feel Olivia’s brow, but Olivia dodged her touch and clambered to a standing position on the plank bed, stretching out her arms on either side.

  This parody of a crucifixion was not the plump and affable Olivia she thought she knew. She realised then that the gleam in Olivia’s eye was not fever; it was fanaticism and it was far worse than anything she had ever worried about in Florence.

  “Don’t you understand, this is the only way to make them see reason?” Olivia cried. “If I die, I will die a martyr to the cause and then, ultimately, maybe not this yea
r or the next, but eventually, the women of Britain will be set free!”

  Dody looked around the cell. “Hush now, I haven’t finished your examination—do you want the wardens rushing in?” She took Olivia’s hand and urged her gently back on to the bed.

  Olivia fell silent, stared at Dody for a moment, and then shook her head like one waking from a nightmare. She allowed Dody to guide her back into a sitting position on the bed and open the buttons at the back of her dress. She sat limply as Dody listened with her stethoscope to her breathing and heartbeat. Both were faster than normal, probably caused by her sudden burst of excitement, Dody surmised, but no faster than the hammering still reverberating through her own chest.

  As she redid the buttons, she observed that Olivia’s generous figure showed no sign of malnourishment.

  “As you can see, Dody,” Olivia said, speaking levelly again, “I am hardly at death’s door. That puts paid to the lie that force-feeding is necessary to save lives. The doctor weighed and measured me yesterday. He said I could safely afford to lose three more stone before my life becomes endangered.”

  The cell door creaked open and a warder appeared with a tray of food. A tin plate of potatoes sat next to a cylindrical tin of watery soup. The rims of the containers were black with grime as if they had never been cleaned.

  “As a political prisoner, you are entitled to have food brought in from the outside. I’m hardly surprised you’re not eating this,” Dody said, though she knew this was not the point.

  “Dody, have you not heard me? I will not eat. Even if they send in venison with cherry sauce.”

  At this the white-bonneted warder said, “I might just as well call them in now, Doctor; get this over with. Everyone’s waiting in the corridor for your say-so.”

  Dody gave Olivia one final squeeze of the hand and rose from the bed. “Very well, then.”

  The door opened and two more warders appeared, pushing a trolley holding an assortment of equipment: yards of stained rubber tubing, jugs, funnels, and enamel bowls. A tall man followed, and introduced himself with a stony face as Blake, the Holloway physician.

  Dody pulled him aside and tactfully suggested he try nasogastric feeding this time. He answered imperiously that this was exactly what he had intended to do. When she commented on the dirty equipment, he said he was at his wits’ end chiding the warders about it. Dody took it upon herself to send one of the warders out for some clean tubing, as narrow as she could find. “Irrational woman, seeks her own torture,” the physician muttered.

  While the preparations were being made, Dody became aware of a figure slipping through the open door. Pike took up a position in a corner of the cell as far from the action as the cramped conditions would allow. He gave Dody a brief nod. The others in the cell did not glance up from their tasks, as if they had not even noticed his arrival.

  Blake removed his frock coat, placed it on the bed and rolled up his shirtsleeves, took the rubber apron handed to him by one of the warders, and slipped it over his head. Taking a yard length of tubing—still too wide for Dody’s liking—he coated it liberally with goose fat from an enamel kidney dish.

  Holding the slippery tube up between his thumb and forefinger, he asked Olivia, “Have you ever experienced feeding through your nose?”

  Olivia shook her head.

  “Will you cooperate with me?” He dangled the tube in front of her face like a boy teasing a smaller child with a dead snake.

  Again Olivia shook her head. Blake nodded to the three warders. They descended like birds of prey and hauled a kicking and screaming Olivia from the bed, dragging her towards the chair. Once they’d got her into a sitting position, one of them sat on her knee while the others took an arm each and pinned them behind her back.

  Olivia continued to scream until her voice was no more than a hoarse croak. Dody moved to stand beside her and smoothed the hair from her damp face. She indicated a tumbler on the table. “Have some water at least,” she pleaded.

  Olivia shook her head violently.

  “Then you must be quiet in order to hear the doctor’s instructions. If you do as he says, it will be easier for you.”

  Olivia fell silent, though her eyes darted about the cell like those of a cornered fox.

  “Thank you, Dr. McCleland.” Blake cleared his throat and addressed Olivia. “When I insert this tube into your nostril, you will feel it in the back of your throat. You must swallow then to ensure it passes into your stomach and not into your lungs.”

  “May you all rot in hell!” Olivia screamed.

  Blake moved to stand between the two warders pinning Olivia’s arms and indicated to the woman sitting on Olivia’s knee to get off and grab her ankles. On the count of three, the woman tipped Olivia back in the chair as if it were a wheelbarrow, while Blake pulled back Olivia’s head. She bucked and gagged when the tube was inserted, and the faces of the wardresses turned red with the effort of keeping her still.

  Swallow, Olivia, swallow, Dody silently begged, feeling the tears begin to prick. Her eyes briefly met those of Pike, who up to now had been staring at the scene with unfaltering stoicism. She moved across the cell to stand next to him. A string of blood appeared from Olivia’s nostril and mixed with the tears trickling down her face. Beads of red dropped onto the milky white of her throat.

  “The tube is too wide,” Dody whispered to Pike. “It’s tearing the nasal cartilage.” Pike nodded as he continued to watch without uttering a word.

  The physician attached a syringe to the end of the tube and withdrew a small amount of fluid. “He is ensuring the tube is in the stomach and not the lungs,” Dody explained.

  Satisfied that the tube was in the correct position, Blake replaced the syringe with a funnel and slowly began to fill it with the contents of the jug. Olivia moaned like a dying animal.

  Dody leaned towards Pike again. “Probably eggs and milk,” she whispered. She felt strangely disassociated.

  Then Olivia gagged and a terrible sound bubbled in her throat. Dody put her fist to her mouth and bit down on her knuckles.

  The doctor leapt to the side as a torrent of liquid gushed from Olivia’s mouth. “God damn it!” he cursed. “Now we will have to start the procedure all over again. Can’t you see that we are doing this for your own good, you stupid woman!”

  Olivia wept. The doctor prepared to reinsert the tube. Dody turned to Pike, but found him gone, the slow tap of his cane fading down the prison corridor.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Pike took the buff envelope of photographs from his briefcase and paused for a moment, tapping the envelope against his hand. Then he spread the dog-eared photographs on his desk for one last look. He had viewed them so often during his recuperation in Hastings, he would not have been surprised to find that his vision had been playing tricks on him. Consequently he had resisted looking at them since his return.

  And yet here it was again—one grainy photograph showing one policeman so different from all the rest.

  He had no sooner placed the envelope in his desk drawer than Sergeant Fisher appeared in his doorway, twisting his hat in his hands.

  “Good morning, Fisher,” Pike said. Despite the pending meeting with Shepherd, the morning had to be good compared to the events of yesterday afternoon. He’d seen some disturbing things in his time, but they didn’t get much worse than the force-feeding he had witnessed with Dr. Dorothy McCleland.

  “The meeting in the superintendent’s office has been changed, sir. It is now in the commissioner’s office,” Fisher said. “They want to see me, too.”

  Pike felt an ache in his stomach. Had they found out about his injury? Were they going to demand his resignation—and Fisher’s, too, for his complicity?

  The glum look on his sergeant’s face suggested he, too, thought this the likely scenario. “Let me do the talking, Fisher,” Pike said. “I’ll tell them I coerced you into helping me.”

  “Yes, sir.” Fisher’s manner suggested he didn’t think Pike�
�s intervention would be of much help. He had the appearance of a man about to face a firing squad.

  “Buck up, man,” Pike tried to jolly him along. “You lead the way, I’m a bit slow this morning.” He dreaded to think what condition he would be in after the steep climb to the top of the commissioner’s tower office.

  As it happened, they were kept waiting so long that by the time the commissioner’s secretary had shown them into his office, Pike’s knee had almost recovered. Some rare winter light reflecting off the river several storeys below struck them in the face as they entered. In front of the window Pike saw only the silhouettes of three men. As his eyes adjusted, he made out the commissioner seated behind his carved wooden desk, Shepherd swamping a small chair to his right, and Pike’s friend from Special Branch, Superintendent Callan, on his left.

  Pike managed to keep his surprise to himself, but Fisher’s gasp was audible. His sergeant had probably never shared air with three such highly ranked officers in his life. Pike prayed Fisher would not weaken and say anything untoward.

  “Good morning, Pike, Fisher,” the commissioner greeted them, smiling. He commented about the weather; how nice it was to have some sunshine for a change, though at this time of year one knew it would never last. He asked Pike if he had recovered from his bout of influenza. Pike told him he had never felt better.

  “I am told that congratulations are in order,” the commissioner said at the end of the pleasantries.

  “They are, sir?” Pike scanned the line of faces before him.

  “Indeed, yes, for both of you.” The corners of the commissioner’s eyes crinkled, his small moustache twitched. “Sergeant Fisher has been put forward for promotion—inspector at Whitechapel.”

  No doubt to fill one of the gaps left empty after Pike’s purge of the division. He turned to Fisher, held out his hand, and said warmly, “Well done, Fisher, you’ve earned it. Though I shall miss you.”