Andrew Taylor - The American Boy

"There's foxes, and a terrible deal of rats," Orton said.

Grout motioned me to approach the makeshift table. The body was entirely covered with a grey blanket, with the exception of the left hand.

"Dear God!" I ejaculated.

"You must brace yourself, Mr Shield. The face is worse."

His voice seemed to come from a great distance. I stared at the wreck of the hand. I bent closer and the constable shone the light full on it. It had been reduced to a bloody pulp of flesh, skin and shockingly white splinters of bone. I fought an impulse to vomit.

"The top joints of the forefinger appear to be missing," I said in a thin, precise voice. "I know Mr Frant had sustained a similar injury."

Grout let out his breath in a sigh. "Are you ready for the rest?"

I nodded. I did not trust myself to speak.

The constable set down the lantern on the corner of the door, raised himself on tiptoe, took the top two corners of the blanket and slowly pulled it back. The figure lay supine and as still as an effigy. The constable lifted the lantern and held it up to the head.

I shuddered and took a step back. Grout gripped my elbow. My mind darkened. For an instant I thought the darkness was outside me, that the flame in the lantern had died and that the day had slipped with tropical suddenness into night. I was aware of a powerful odour of faeces and sweat, of stale tobacco and gin.

"He should think himself lucky," Orton wheezed at my shoulder. "I mean, look at him, most of him's hardly touched. Lucky bugger, eh? You should see what roundshot fair and square in the belly can do to a man. Now that's what I call damage. I remember at Waterloo-"

"Hold your tongue, damn you," I said, obscurely angry that this man seemed not to have spent the battle cowering in the shadow of a dead horse.

"You block the light, Orton," Grout said, unexpectedly mild. "Move aside."

I closed my eyes and tried to shut out the sights and sounds and smells that struggled to fill the darkness around me. This was not a battle: this was merely a corpse.

"Are you able to come to an opinion?" Grout inquired. "I realise that the face is – is much battered."

I opened my eyes. The man on the trestle table was hatless. There were still patches of frost on both clothes and hair. It had been a cold night to spend in the open. He wore a dark, many-caped greatcoat – not a coachman's but a gentleman's luxurious imitation. Underneath I glimpsed a dark blue coat, pale brown breeches and heavy riding boots. The hair was greying at the temples, cut short.

As to the face, it was everyone's and no one's. Only one eye was visible – God alone knew what had happened to the other – and it seemed to me that its colour was a pale blue-grey.

"He – he is much changed, of course," I said, and the words were as weak and inadequate as the light from the lantern. "But everything I see is consonant with what I know of Mr Frant – the colour of the hair, that is to say, the colour of the eyes – that is, of the eye – and the build and the height as far as I can estimate them."

"The clothes?"

"I cannot help you there."

"There is also a ring." Grout walked round the head of the table, keeping as far away from it as he could. "It is still on the other hand, so the motive for this dreadful deed appears not to have been robbery. Pray come round to this side."

I obeyed like one in a trance. I was unable to look away from what lay on the table. The greatcoat was smeared with mud. A dark patch spread like a sinister bib across the chest. I thought I discerned splinters of exposed bone in the red ruin of the face.

The single eye seemed to follow me.

"Now take cavalry," Orton suggested from his dark corner near the stove. "When they're bunched together, and charging, so the horses can't choose where they put their hooves. If there's a man lying on the ground, wounded, say, there's not a lot anyone can do. Cuts a man up cruelly, I can tell you. You wouldn't believe."

"Stow your mag," said the constable wearily.

"Least he's got a peeper left on him," Orton went on. "The crows used to go for the eyes, did you know that?"

The constable cuffed him into silence. Grout held the lantern low so I could examine the right hand of the corpse. Like the left, it had been reduced to a bloody pulp. On the forefinger was the great gold signet ring.

"I must have air," I said. I pushed past Grout and the constable and blundered through the doorway. The clerk followed me outside. I stared over the desolate prospect of frosty mud and raw brick. Three pigeons rose in alarm from the bare branches of an oak tree that survived from a time when the land had not been given over to wild schemes and lost fortunes.

Grout pushed a flask into my hand. I took a mouthful of brandy, and spluttered as the heat ran down to my belly. He walked up and down, clapping his gloved hands together against the cold.

"Well, sir?" he said. "What is your verdict?"

"I believe it is Mr Henry Frant."

"You cannot be certain?"

"His face… it is much damaged."

"You remarked the missing finger."

"Yes."

"It supports the identification."

"True." I hesitated and then burst out: "But who could have done such a thing? The violence of the attack passes all belief."

Grout shrugged. His eyes strayed towards the nearest of the half-built houses.

"Would you care to see where the deed was done? It is not a sight for the squeamish, but it is as nothing compared with what you have already seen."

"I should be most interested." The brandy had given me false courage.

He led me along a line of planks that snaked precariously across the mud. The house was a house in name only. Low walls surrounded the shallow pit of the cellar, perhaps two or three feet below the surface of the field in which we stood. Grout jumped into it with the alacrity of a sparrow looking for breadcrumbs. I followed him, narrowly avoiding a pool of fresh excrement. He pointed with his stick at the further corner. Despite his warning, there was little to see, apart from puddles of icy water and, abutting the brickwork in the angle of the wall, an irregular patch of earth which was darker than the rest, darker because shadowed with Henry Frant's blood.

"Were there footprints?" I asked. "Surely such a struggle must have left a number of marks?"

Grout shook his head. "Unfortunately the scene has had a number of visitors since the deed was committed. Besides, the ground was hard with frost."

"When did Orton make the discovery?"

"Shortly after it was light. When he woke, he found that while he slept someone had wedged the door of the shed. He had to crawl out through one of the windows. He came here to relieve himself, which was when he found the corpse." Grout's nose wrinkled. "First he alerted a neighbouring farmer, who came to gawp with half a dozen of his men. Then the magistrates. If there were footprints, or other marks, they will not be easy to distinguish from those which were made before or afterwards."

"What of Mr Frant's hat and gloves? How did he come here? And why should he come at that time of evening?"

"If we knew the answers to those questions, Mr Shield, we would no doubt know the identity of the murderer. We found the hat beside the body. It is in the shed now, and has Mr Frant's name inside. And the gloves were beneath the body itself."

"That is odd, is it not, sir?"

"How so?"

"That a man should remove his gloves on such a cold night."

"The affair as a whole is a tissue of strange and contradictory circumstances. Mr Frant's pockets had been emptied. Yet the ring was left on his finger." Grout rubbed his pointed nose, whose tip was pink with cold. "The principal weapon might have been a hammer or a similar instrument," he went on, the words tumbling out at such a rate that I realised that he, too, was not unmoved by the dreadful sight on the trestle table. "Though it is possible that the assailant also used a brick."