Maxim Jakubowski - The Best British Mysteries III

The first I knew of disaster was a shout from Hunter, followed by the frantic neighing of his horses and a thud. Something heavy catapulted across the roof of the carriage and tore varnished canvas above my head. A woman shouted, and the carriage tipped sideways.

We travelled maybe five paces before the first of the horses went down, tripping that behind. The scream of a wounded animal is something one never loses. It was such a scream, heard in the hills behind Kandahar, which convinced me Mr Darwin was correct and we did not, after all, rank between the angels and the animals. A man with his leg badly broken sounds little different to a horse in similar straits.

Using a window, which now showed only clouds, weak sunlight and the grey of an English sky, I crawled from the carriage, to find Hunter already knelt beside the head of a magnificent grey, tears in his eyes.

‘Done for,’ Hunter said. ‘Legs, ribs… All broken.’ For Hunter this was almost a speech.

‘Bad luck,’ I said. Undoing my loden coat, I loosened a holster that kept a Bulldog in place. ‘Here.’

Taking my proffered revolver in silence, the coachman put its blunt muzzle to the side of his horse’s head.

‘At the back,’ I suggested, ‘or directly from the front. I can do it if you’d rather.’

Hunter stared at me, although it’s unlikely he saw much.

‘Let me,’ I said, and when he looked doubtful, in as much as a face carved from Irish oak can carry that expression, I admitted something few people know about me. ‘I have a fine understanding of anatomy.’

‘You, sir?’

‘I used to be a surgeon.’

There are advantages in my world to being seen as a coldblooded killer, and to admit to saving as many as I had killed. Such admissions can do harm. Although the truth is far stranger, because I have killed fewer people than most believe and saved many more than I am prepared to admit.

Taking the revolver from Hunter, I clicked back the hammer and clambered across a broken shaft to reach the animal’s head. Speak kindly and most people will give you their trust. The same applies to animals. With one hand I stroked the dying animal and with the other I put my revolver between its eyes and pulled the trigger. It died with a kick and a spasm, but the fact its skull contained myriad cavities did much to baffle the sound and gave me an idea for later.

‘Thank you, sir,’ Hunter said, thus using up another week’s worth of words.

It was only then I remembered the unfortunate cause of our crash. I could see where he lay by the interest his agony attracted. A smaller crowd had come together around my wrecked carriage, drawn by its quality, but a far larger crowd was gathered a dozen paces behind this, and it was here the human cause and casualty of our accident lay.

They grew quiet at my approach, the crowd. Men fell back and women looked away, averting their eyes. A small girl burst into tears and a youth old enough to know better stared openly into my face. That was when I realised it was my revolver which earned their silence.

‘You have killed me…’ The voice was high, slightly strange and the man who spoke indeed looked on the edge of death, which was an improvement on what I had been expecting.

‘It is always a bad idea to step in front of a moving carriage,’ I replied, unwilling to have him meet God believing the fault mine.

‘Please,’ he said, ‘fetch me a doctor…’

He had the hollow face of a classics master and the fingers of a second violinist, somewhat bitten around the nails. Behind me, I could hear muttering and a woman bustled forward, mouth already opening to share her news. ‘A doctor recently took residence in a street behind.’ Several of the crowd began to agree, and one, a clerk from his dress, which was careful if none too clean, crouched beside me and offered to fetch this man.

I am a…

I almost said those words aloud, but instead I gave the clerk a guinea, to show the doctor his fee would be paid and told the man to run as swiftly as possible. Had I done what first occurred to me and announced myself a medical man, my coming retirement might have been very different.

‘Tell your doctor to hurry,’ I said. ‘This patient needs urgent attention.’

A man running is always a ridiculous sight and the clerk confirmed this fact, his feet slapping cold cobbles and his elbows flexing like the wings of a game bird. A handful of seconds after he started, he disappeared down a narrow alley in a sideways skid that almost had him on his back. With nothing else to occupy the seconds, I sat back and waited.

Close examination of human blood has taught me three things. It is as thick as paint, it is surprisingly nutritious and, finally, like excreta, we do not find that our own excites a reflex of disgust.

The man lying on cobbles kept gagging at the taste of the watery red liquid which dribbled from his lips, and it was this that gave him away. A sponge, I guessed, hidden in the corner of his mouth and worked by his tongue. Chicken’s blood, most probably, it looked too thin for pig.

His legs lay at strange angles, no bones visible through the cheap tweed of his trousers but obviously broken, at least, obviously broken to those who did not know how such breaks looked in real life.

If the clerk had looked ridiculous, the doctor was even more so, his short legs pumping and his face as red at that of a Sioux brave. He wore a frock coat that had seen better days and once belonged to someone else; unless our man had shrunk several inches in height as he filled out around his waist.

‘Stand back,’ he demanded. ‘Stand back.’

Those around the injured man did as they were told.

‘Ahh,’ said the doctor, seeing me stand alone. ‘You must be the unfortunate owner of that unhappy…’ Shrewd eyes flicked from my carriage, which had him frowning, to my clothes, which seemed to put his mind at ease.

‘A shocking accident,’ he said, ‘most shocking.’ A refrain quickly taken up by a woman in the crowd and then by several people around her.

Kneeling, the doctor touched his hand to the victim’s throat in a manner that would have been entirely convincing had be been checking a body for a pulse. Since the patient’s eyes could be seen fluttering in his head such checking seemed entirely redundant.

Next the doctor reached inside the thin man’s coat to feel for his heart, and when the doctor took his hand away, his fingers were red with blood. This was enough to make a woman faint. Needless to say, it was the woman who’d first taken up his refrain and as she fell, she twisted to land elegantly, revealing rather more ankle than was seemly.

This seemed to make the doctor angry.

‘Hysteria,’ he announced. ‘Not helpful.’ The fat little man eyed me grimly. ‘All the same, not surprising. Such a shocking accident…’ His smelling salts left the woman with tears running down her face.

An attempt to straighten the injured man’s leg produced a shriek of such pitch that it unsettled one of the horses now being cut from its harness. I knew this because Hunter swore, despite the tender sex of many of those around him and swore almost as loudly as the man had screamed.

The fat little doctor stood, shook his head and turned towards me. ‘If we could talk…?’ he said, taking my elbow.

We walked together towards the bridge, while those around us fell back as if afraid of the weight of guilt they believed I carried. The sky was still grey, the river little brighter than the surface of a rusty sword. A chill wind swept along its surface, and although this was nothing to the winds which blow so fierce in the Hindu Kush that they carve rock before one’s eyes, it was in keeping with the drabness of a drab town. In England, bless it, everything works on a smaller scale.