The Devil's Grin: Illustrated Edition (An Anna Kronberg Thriller Book 1) Read online

  Gibson did not reply, only looked expectant, hoping perhaps that I would solve the case for him. Meanwhile, Holmes had refocused his absent-minded gaze as though he only now noticed our company.

  Irritated by the two men, I turned my face away to speak to the window instead. ‘I will dissect the body upon arrival at Guy’s and will hopefully learn what happened to the man. I’ll send you a report tomorrow.’

  ‘I will assist,’ stated Mr Holmes with delight.

  ‘Excuse me? Mr Holmes, I will certainly not allow a lay person to attend a dissection of a cholera fatality.’

  ‘I believe you will.’ His intense stare told me that I would indeed, should I wish to keep my identity a secret.

  We arrived at Guy’s after one hour of stale silence. At the porter’s, I asked for a nurse and a cart to help transport the body to the dissecting department — a small red-brick building containing an antechamber equipped with several slabs of marble. We had the place to ourselves, as no anatomical lessons were given on Saturdays. That also meant I could disinfect the room with fumes of concentrated acid without having to discuss the issue with curious students.

  Afterwards, I would prepare a report for the Home Office, stating, in essence, that there was no danger of cholera transmission through London’s drinking water supply.

  Gibson took his leave — not too eager to watch me cut up a floater while I provided Mr Holmes and myself with an India rubber apron, gloves, and a mask. The last was a simple device made of fine, double-layered fabric which I had invented for such occasions. With the mask covering nose and mouth, dangerous airborne germs could not infect the man conducting a dissection or surgery — or, in my case, the woman. I felt nauseated at the thought that the man next to me knew my secret.

  ‘Mr Holmes, may I recommend you visit a circus next time you want to see a curiosity?’ I noted, regretting the snide comment instantly.

  He coughed and replied, ‘I guess I must apol—’

  ‘Actually, this is not what worries me!’ I slammed my hand onto the marble. ‘I’m seriously considering blackmailing you. Unfortunately, you are rather sharp and my chances of winning such a game or even finding a rancid spot with which to taint your reputation are probably close to nil. So perhaps…’ I cleared my throat as not to groan and slap my forehead. Where the devil was my self-control? ‘My apologies. Please assume I have been thoroughly friendly.’

  I decided to better keep my mouth shut. At least until my hands had stopped trembling.

  Mr Holmes, though, laughed heartily. ‘I suppose your deceit is morally justifiable, although, if exposed, will cause a public outcry. Fortunately, we both have the right to private judgement. Trust me, Dr Kronberg, exposing you to the police or anyone else appears utterly boring to me.’

  I peered over the edge of my mask and found his expression to be sincere enough. And yet, the stiffness of my spine would not disappear. To turn the attention to the matter at hand, I nodded at the corpse. We undid the blanket and hoisted the body onto the slab’s polished surface.

  With a pair of tweezers, I collected the fragments of flora and fauna that had caught on the body’s clothes and hair and placed them into a small bowl. Then I cut off the man’s coat.

  His shirt buttons did not show any grease prints, nor did the buttons of his trousers. I then proceeded to cut off the remainder of all his clothes and found restraint marks not only on his wrists, but also on his ankles, as well as needle punctures in the bend of the man’s left elbow.

  I pointed out the punctures and Holmes nodded, scanning each square inch of newly revealed skin as I undressed the man in front of us.

  ‘The punctures look professionally done, not like the holes they punch into people in opium dens. He must have seen a medical doctor. Highly unusual,’ I observed while picking up my largest knife.

  I was uncertain about Holmes’s endurance when it came to slicing apart human beings, so I kept half an eye on him while cutting a large Y into the man’s torso, starting at the clavicles and extending down to the pubic bone. Holmes, though, seemed perfectly unmoved by the procedure, so I continued with sawing off the sternum and removing part of the thorax. The odour worsened significantly and reminded me once more that I would never get used to the stench of death.

  While removing the lungs, the pressure I exerted on them resulted in an expulsion of pink froth from the corpse’s nose and mouth. My physique was not ideal for a dissection, or, rather, I did not have the figure of a butcher. Grunting, I lifted the lungs into a bowl and cut them open.

  ‘As I suspected — the man didn’t drown,’ remarked Mr Holmes upon the fact that the lungs were not filled with water.

  ‘They contain only a small amount of dust and soot, supporting your assumption that the man spent most of his life in the countryside,’ I said. Had he been a Londoner, his lungs would have appeared grey.

  The number and size of the coagula inside the man’s abdomen corroborated our assessment of the time of death.

  That he had had cholera in the final stage was as clear as bright daylight. In addition to the appearance of his skin, his liver was reduced and pale. His guts were empty for but a small amount of dirty greenish liquid.

  All organs went into separate bowls, leaving me panting and sweating. By now, my apron had taken the function of a hothouse and my hands felt like slippery fish inside my gloves.

  Mr Holmes bent down low over the corpse and stared straight into the man’s half-emptied abdomen. Perhaps he found dissections entertaining.

  Upon examining the man’s mouth and eyes, I saw that his tongue was swollen and impressions of his teeth showed along its edges. I pushed the remains of his eyelids apart. After a moment’s consideration, I turned to Mr Holmes. ‘What do you make of this?’

  He gazed into the milky blue eyes with one pupil as small as a pinprick, the other spanning almost the entire iris.

  ‘Poison, or possibly a head trauma?’ he suggested.

  ‘Hmm…’ I answered, checking the man’s skull again. But I could still not find any signs of violence.

  I took up a smaller knife and made a cut along the hairline, and one from there to the top of his head and down on the back again. Then I pulled the skin to the side of the head and over his face. My hands worked with precision, but my brain revolted. Skinning a human face is another thing I would never get used to.

  I picked up a saw and cut into the skull, then used a delicate chisel and a hammer to crack the bone along the grooves I had made. Great skill and caution were needed to cut only the bones and leave the nerve tissue untarnished.

  The upper half of the skull came off like the top of a breakfast egg, revealing the brain that at first glance appeared normal. I extracted the right hemisphere and cut it into slices, took the magnifying glass from Mr Holmes’s hand, and bent down over the brain sections. Small, liquid-filled lesions presented themselves.

  ‘Odd!’ I straightened up, tossing my tools aside. His magnifying glass produced a loud clonk on the slab. ‘My apologies,’ I muttered.

  Pressing my palms onto the marble slab, I pushed all thoughts aside and let my gaze fly over the corpse, putting bits of information back into my mind, hoping a picture would form. What had I missed?

  Impatiently, I yanked my gloves off and pressed my fingers into the bend of the man’s elbow. The punctures felt stiffer than the surrounding tissue. I cut through them and pulled the skin apart. The vein appeared slightly infected.

  ‘It seems as though the man had a needle inserted, which was then left there for some time,’ I said, rather baffled.

  ‘That would make restraints necessary,’ he concluded.

  The man’s stomach lay in a bowl next to me. I opened the organ and another surprise presented itself: half-digested bread and smoked fish, probably eel, swam merrily out of the opening.

  ‘The man had eaten, although he shouldn’t have had an appetite at all during the final stage of cholera. And yet, he ate quite a few bites. I can see no signs
of force-feeding in his mouth or oesophagus. Peculiarly, his stomach cramped shut for probably two or three hours before his death. Although half digested, none of the food made it into the small intestines. Why is that?’

  My hands squeezed the slab hard as though a clue could be forced out that way. ‘Mr Holmes, could it be possible after all that the man had been pushed into the waterworks’ trench?’

  ‘I don’t believe so. One might think a boat could have dropped him off, but the fish wouldn’t have had time to eat all this before the body was discovered,’ he pointed to the corpse’s face. ‘Even if someone went through the troubles of dragging the corpse with a boat for one or two days before dumping him into the trench, we should see very different marks on his body and clothes from ropes or hooks that held him to the vessel.’

  ‘And if that someone had planned to poison half of London with cholera, he would have made sure that the body was fresh,’ I added.

  ‘Precisely,’ said Holmes.

  Then a thought hit me. I almost slapped my forehead with my contaminated hands, quickly washed them, took my mask and apron off and said, ‘Wait here,’ before leaving in a rush.

  Mr Holmes had his eyebrows pulled up as I returned with a box of polished birch wood. I set it on one of the other slabs and extracted a stereo-microscope from it. I wiped its three lenses and both oculars with a silken handkerchief.

  ‘May I introduce the best microscope you will ever set your eyes upon? Or, rather, peer through,’ I said enthusiastically. ‘I found this one in Boston, although it’s a German make. Its secret lies in the stacks of multiple lenses. I never came across a better one. And it cost me an arm and a leg,’ I explained while extracting liquid from the man’s vein.

  I placed a single drop of serum onto a glass slide and tipped a cover slip as thin as paper onto the drop to flatten it to a thin film of liquid. Then I fastened the slide onto the holder just underneath the largest microscope lens and inserted a drop of immersion oil underneath. I aligned the small mirror at the bottom of the microscope towards the sun, peered through the oculars, and focused on the swirling particles.

  Microbes, as seen through Dr. Robert Koch’s Microscope, 1877 (6)

  ‘What resolution does it have?’ asked Mr Holmes, sounding intrigued.

  ‘With an approximately one-thousand-fold magnification, I can see anything as small as two micrometers.’

  ‘Exceptional!’ he cried out and pushed closer.

  And there, in the circular field-of-view of the microscope swam peculiar cells, shaped like minuscule tennis rackets of only five micrometers length — bacteria that could kill every warm-blooded vertebrate. I moved aside to let him take a look.

  ‘Germs!’ he said, intrigued.

  ‘Yes. It seems you were right again.’ I smiled up at him.

  ‘I never mentioned that possibility.’

  ‘You did. You mentioned poison.’ Upon his quizzical look, I added, ‘Germs produce toxins. That’s how they kill.’

  ‘But cholera is not found in the bloodstream.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘he didn’t die of cholera. Although he had had it in its final stage, I believe he was already recovering. The food in his stomach indicates that. The deadly blow must have come from tetanus. But I don’t know how he got infected. The needle punctures are only slightly inflamed, and don’t show the typical appearance of a tetanus entry wound.’

  Mr Holmes was silent for a long while, mulling things over with a furrowed brow and narrowed eyes. I was almost done cleaning up my dissection equipment when he muttered, ‘I need to take that bowl with me,’ indicating the collection of twigs, leaves and beetles I had picked off the man’s clothing.

  ‘How good are you at identifying them?’

  ‘I dare say the best.’ He pulled off his gloves, apron, and mask, and I showed him how to disinfect his hands and the contents of the bowl he wanted to take with him.

  ‘I suggest we meet Inspector Gibson at my residence tomorrow morning at eight.’

  ‘Hmm…’ I replied.

  ‘Would that be a problem?’

  ‘I will think about it. I might deliver my report directly to the Yard’s main quarters.’ I avoided looking at him.

  He turned to leave, but then seemed to think otherwise. ‘I assume you wouldn’t tell me your real name?’

  Aghast, I shook my head. ‘Don’t try to go behind my back to find it out.’

  He looked slightly amused. The thought had probably crossed his mind.

  ‘Do you want me to find out your address behind your back? Just in case, I mean.’

  He slapped his hand against the door frame. ‘221B Baker Street.’

  — three —

  I stepped off the omnibus and just managed to avoid a pile of horse manure on the pavement. Turning around, my gaze fell on the street sweeper. He was leaning on his broom handle, chewing on something obviously ropy and picking his teeth with blackened fingers. Such archaeological excavations exceeded even dissections at being unappetising.

  I tipped my hat at him, entered the eastern end of Regent’s Park, and turned north. The bustling of the street behind me gradually dimmed, to be replaced by the quiet chatter of couples walking arm in arm and sparrows’ grating chirps.

  The Flower Walk, Regent’s Park, London, 1896 (7)

  After a few minutes, I reached 221B Baker Street. Like its neighbours, the three-storey house was built of red bricks, with its base looking as though it had been dipped into cream. It had large white-framed windows and a smoked oak door. As my hand closed around the brass knocker, I wondered how much Holmes earned with that odd occupation of his. After a knock and a moment of waiting, the stout landlady beckoned me in.

  I watched my feet climb the stairs while thoughts swirled around in my head like a swarm of mosquitoes. To me, Holmes was a magnet with north and south poles unified. He knew my secret and could, with a single statement, destroy my life. I wasn’t quite certain whether avoiding or observing him would be the safer tactic.

  Upon reaching the landing, I finally lifted my gaze and noticed a small crater in the wall. I probed with my finger, then brushed the plaster off and peered through the hole. On the other side, I could see Gibson’s head. Wondering whether this was a bullet hole, I knocked at Holmes’s door.

  Gibson opened, I stepped in, and the world changed from polished and gleaming to utter chaos. The ceiling was decorated with stains, the spray pattern indicative of small explosions. Some spots looked as though acid had eaten into the plaster. I had noticed splotches on Holmes’s hands yesterday but had not been able to identify them. Now I knew — the man was a lay scientist.

  Enormous stacks of paper hid the desk, a chair, and most of the mantelpiece, where a knife stuck in the carved wood held a bunch of papers. On top of the marred panelling stood a photograph of a beautiful woman.

  I apologised for being late. Gibson was pacing the sitting room, looking important. Holmes himself was smoking a pipe in an armchair by the fireplace, looking bored. His violin lay on the coffee table in front of him.

  A small and timid chambermaid with hair the colour of dirty egg yolk served us tea and biscuits. She did not glance at anyone in the room. Slinking here and there, she seemed to go unnoticed by Gibson, who now lowered himself into the other armchair to receive his refreshments.

  Holmes was giving Gibson the results of the dissection, but did not elaborate on the twigs and beetles or on any other thoughts he entertained on the case.

  ‘Were you able to identify the man, Inspector?’ I enquired.

  He shook his head, showing me his annoyance. ‘No, I already told Mr Holmes I’m afraid it will be entirely impossible. He didn’t have any papers on him and no one who fits his description has been reported missing. I will not waste my time investigating this case. I hope you agree, Mr Holmes.’

  Holmes nodded without looking up and Gibson heaved himself off the chair with a satisfied smile.

  ‘Dr Kronberg, if I have any other questions, I wi
ll contact you,’ said Gibson and took his leave. I knew he wouldn’t, and that was just as well.

  As the inspector stomped down the stairs, I stood with my back to the closed door and looked at Holmes. ‘Interesting,’ I noted, and he opened his eyes, apparently surprised to see me.

  ‘Is there anything else, Dr Kronberg?’ His voice was monotonous.

  ‘Gibson is wrong and you know it,’ I answered. Holmes raised one eyebrow and I waved my hand at him. ‘Well, when is he not?’

  ‘Indeed,’ murmured Holmes with an expression of impatience.

  ‘My apologies for wasting your time, Mr Holmes.’ I produced a warm smile. ‘I have only two questions. Did I miss anything of importance owing to my late arrival?’ He shook his head once. ‘The second question is: could you find anything of interest in the bowl you took home yesterday?’

  ‘It was full with insects, leaves, and dirt. Highly interesting.’ He yawned.

  His gaze followed mine as I looked at the violin and said, ‘She is on top of the breadcrumbs — you played her before Gibson came in. Are you on a case at present?’

  He narrowed his eyes and I saw him getting ready for combat.

  ‘What amused you about the maid?’ he asked calmly.

  If he wanted a diversion, so be it. ‘I was wondering why she was so extremely shy. Whether it could be her inexperience, or a problem she has with you. The fact that I wondered at all, was, well… amusing.’

  ‘Amusing?’

  ‘Mr Holmes, you are the most observant man I ever came across, yet you want me to believe that you don’t know the impression you leave on others?’

  ‘I have a theory, but I am involved and thus not entirely independent in my judgement.’