The Art of Murder

Chapter 14

To Mrs Sonia Thomson 13 October 1888 My mother died after a deliciously protracted illness. I was thirteen. I remember sitting with her in the darkened room directly opposite the top of the stairs in the east wing of the house. I grew fascinated by her physical degeneration. I had no emotional reaction to it whatsoever, but carefully catalogued each increment of her descent into Hell. For I was sure that if there were such a place, she would be heading that way. In fact, I took great pleasure in terrifying her with prophecy when we were alone together in that room. I spun such a tale of her sins… amplifying her every bad deed, convincing her utterly that she was destined for the eternal fires, that the flames would be lapping around her very soon. I recall standing outside the door and listening to my father's pathetic attempts to calm her down and his lame efforts to make her believe that she would be going to Heaven, that the Lord would forgive her sins. She could never mention to him what I had said, of course, because I had convinced her that if she did say anything, she would merely be compounding her own guilt.

But perhaps the most satisfying moment came when I managed to steal the crimson handkerchief she'd so cherished. She held it in her right hand where it lay outside the bedspread. My father and I were sitting on opposite sides of the bed, the curtains drawn tight shut. A single feeble lamp burned on a cabinet to my side of the room. The room stank of illness. I remember eyeing that handkerchief, waiting for the moment I could make my move, for I knew my unbeloved mother was close to death. I wanted to prise the scrap of crimson from her living fingers.

Then my moment came. Father left the room briefly. I stood up quietly and walked over to where my mother lay. I slipped the handkerchief from between her enfeebled fingers, thrust it into my pocket and returned to the chair just as Father stepped back into the room. The horrible woman died that night. I celebrated by taking the handkerchief down to the river and burning it in the silvery moonlight. I have a certain Dr Egbert Farmer to thank for facilitating my eventual escape from Hemel Hempstead. Dr Farmer was my headmaster, and it was he who first took notice of my emerging artistic talent. He was a ridiculous, fat man with an absurd sense of self-importance, but he was also one of those individuals who felt the need to encourage those he believed to be talented.

I had conceived a great love for drawing, and later painting, which was my only release from the strictures of my unhappy childhood. My walks and adventures along the river and my occasional dalliances with the Lord's furred and feathered creations held limited charms, which I quickly outgrew. For a long time the incident with the boy from London loomed large in my mind, as you may appreciate. I relived the experience over and over again, my memory of it fresh and powerful. I could recall every fine detail of that hour by the river. I learned that his stinking body had been washed up downriver two days later. I would have given anything to have seen his corpse, but of course that was not possible.

I often sketched Fred, the drowned boy. I spent long hours struggling to bring to the page his expression of terror, the pleading light in his eyes as he slid away from this world. I fantasised about the look of him as he drifted under the water carried by the current, his head battered against rocks, his face cut by rushes, and I tried to visualise his bloated, green-tinged form as his parents would have seen it after he was fished from the river.

Needless to say, these were not the pictures Dr Farmer saw. By the time I was sixteen, I had quite a decent portfolio of conventional pieces, and I had entered a landscape in a school art competition. When I won the prize, it seemed to be the first time anyone at school even noticed I was there. Before then, I had been little more than a shadow. Even Father took some notice when he heard of my success. Until then, he had not shown the slightest interest in my efforts but merely scoffed at the very idea his son should be interested in something so meretricious as art.

As a consequence, my father was quite bemused when Dr Farmer wrote to him inviting us to meet him. We dutifully went along to tea at the head-master's cottage not far from the school, and when the good doctor explained to my father that he thought I was the most promising young artist he had ever seen, and that he believed I had a chance of a scholarship to study Fine Art at Oxford, Father was struck dumb.

He himself was not in the least bit academic, but he held Dr Farmer in high regard. Farmer had been an Oxford man himself and had once been something of an ambitious young fellow. Sadly for him, he had been wounded in the Crimea and never regained his health. He came from a wealthy family with connections who had secured him a teaching post in Hemel Hempstead, and when the former headmaster, Mr Bathurst, had died back in the late sixties, the good doctor had succeeded him in the post. And I'm grateful he did or else I might never have achieved the wonders for which I am now infamous. On my first view of it, Oxford was shrouded in rain. The carriage taking me from the railway station rattled over cobbles and splashed through muddy puddles swamping Botley Road. It travelled past Northgate, on to Turl Street, and pulled up outside my new home, Exeter College. I was in reflective mood, paying little heed to my surroundings. It was only the next morning when bright sunshine lit up my meagre room that I felt I had actually arrived.

My dear lady, to whom I have promised to tell only the truth and only the relevant details of my tale, I will not bore you with the minutiae of my introduction to university life. We have all heard such mundanities before, have we not? Let us not waste time, but instead move straight on to the meat of the story. If you'll excuse the pun.

Since my earliest childhood, I had, as you know, led a solitary existence, and so being thrust suddenly into a community like the University came as something of a shock. I quickly realised that I could spend my three years there in one of two ways. I could remain isolated, a misanthrope, or I could make a performance of it. The first path was more in keeping with my true nature and was seductive to me, but I also knew that I would gain far more from the experience of being a student at Exeter College, Oxford, if I… how should I put it?… partook fully of it.

I found I was rather a good actor – something of a natural mimic, in fact. I learned to disguise my voice and adopt different personae. I experimented with sartorial styling, facial hair, dyes and postures. I actually enjoyed it. And, I have to say, I'm quite a handsome fellow. I have fashionably long hair which is dark blond. I have a strong, intelligent face and large blue eyes. My lips are perhaps my least attractive feature, they are slightly too thin, but I have a manly chin, a powerful neck and broad shoulders. I'm several inches above average height, and of muscular build. But, more important than my physical appearance, I succeeded utterly in taking on the role of someone devoid of any anomalies of character, which meant I was readily able to make friends with others of my own age. I knew these were not real friendships, these people were mere stage props to me. Some may even have been fellow thespians – who could tell?

One such associate was Winston Merryfield, a medical student at Lincoln College. I can't honestly remember how I first met the man, and really it does not matter. I liked the sharpness of his mind. He was something of an old-fashioned intellectual type, always reading weighty German novels in the original language and extolling the virtues of his favourite composers. I hate music, always have done, and Merryfield's insistence that I attend the concerts he so loved tested my acting skills to the limit. But I thought from the off that young Winston would be a useful person to know, so with him I made a special effort.

One of the things I learned early in my university career was that there is a very important link between art and medicine. This is a fact many people ignore. As a student of Fine Art I was taught the rudiments of anatomy in the belief that it would facilitate a more realistic rendering of the human and animal form. That is an important area of expertise for the artist. Indeed, the Renaissance painter Leonardo da Vinci wrote about it. But the teaching of anatomy for painters is, well, let us say, less than comprehensive. And, as you know of me already, dear lady, I have always been inquisitive when it comes to bodies, dead or alive.

Merryfield was delighted when he learned that I was happy for him to bore me with his intellectual posturing, and even more so when I told him one evening, after a particularly tiresome performance of a plinky-plonky Mozart concerto at the Sheldonian, that I wanted to know more about human anatomy than I could gain from my own courses of study.

'My dear Sandler,' he replied with characteristic enthusiasm, 'that really is a very easy matter to resolve.'

'What do you mean exactly?' I replied, leading him on.

'Are you tired?'

'No.'

'Well then, why waste a moment? Come with me.'

We were walking along Broad Street but he turned us both round by gripping my shoulder and spinning on his heel. 'Our lab is not far, just past Wadham on Parks Road. There's always someone working late.'

And so I saw my second dead body. As a third-year student, Merryfield had his own key to the laboratory. He was right, there were two other students working there still. The place was freezing. It was a cold November night, but I surmised the place was kept cool by some clever artificial means.

The cadaver Merryfield showed me was that of an old man. He was kept packed in ice in a steel cabinet. Merryfield opened the door to the unit and slid the body out on a narrow tray. I glanced down at the forlorn figure on its metal bier. His skin was yellow and as wrinkled as a dried prune. 'He was seventy-seven when he died,' Merryfield commented.

'But how do you obtain your specimens?' I asked. 'Is there still a trade in grave-robbing?'

Merryfield looked greatly offended. 'No, there is not, Sandler!' he snapped. 'We are morally minded students, just like you. The dead bodies we use are all officially accounted for and their passage from the workhouse, the prisons and the hospitals is documented in triplicate.'

'I'm sorry, I…'

'Burke and Hare went out of business a long time ago,' he added.

I held my hands up and made a very fine show of trying to pacify my 'friend'. The fact was, of course, that I was greatly amused by his reaction, though I could not let him know that. 'So how on earth do you preserve the corpses?' I said, quickly putting Merryfield back into a position where he could do his best to impress.

'Well, that's actually a very good question,' he said, his ill temper evaporating. 'It's not at all easy. Have you heard of refrigeration?'

'Yes.'

'That's what we do here. We have a gas generator at the back of the building which keeps the room cool. You must have noticed?'

'Yes, I did,' I retorted with a shiver.

'The body is embalmed with a special chemical called glutaraldehyde and packed in ice in the box there.' He pointed to the dead man's steel tomb. 'The glutaraldehyde has turned Franklin's skin yellow.'

'Franklin?'

'That was his name. A murderer, apparently. Killed two small children.'

I stared down at the sinewy naked form and could not visualise it as ever having been a living thing, let alone a person possessing the passion to kill.

Later Merryfield and I walked back to Broad Street together. After arranging a date and time for my first extra-curricular anatomy lesson with him, we parted on good terms. He wandered off to his room in Lincoln College and I walked slowly along Turl Street towards Exeter. But I knew even then that I would not sleep until I had spent some more time with Franklin.

I waited for three hours, watching the clock on my mantelpiece until the hands reached one. We were all supposed to be tucked up in our rooms by ten at night, and the curfew was strictly enforced. But, as you will have gleaned, I've never been an entirely conventional fellow. Within twenty-four hours of arriving at Exeter I had found at least three different ways to avoid the Bulldogs. It was a simple matter to slip unnoticed past the head porter, Mr Cooper, as he read the Oxford Times and sipped tea in the porters' lodge. I could move with great stealth and almost completely silently. As a precaution, I had put on black clothes, smeared my face with paint and pulled a hat tight down over my head.

Another useful skill I had acquired years earlier was the ability to pick locks. To this day there is still not a lock that has defeated me… and, believe me, good lady, I have picked a few.

I have a near-perfect memory and could recall every detail of the inside of the lab. Another useful skill of mine. You have to admit, I am a rather clever chap. The room was black, but there was a gas lamp close to the door. I pictured the layout of the room: the wooden and metal benches, the chairs, the sinks and the metal 'tombs'. I made my way in the dark straight to the part of the room where Merryfield and I had been talking the previous evening. I lit the gas mantle, turning the tap to produce the palest, most sallow light.

The memory of it all is as clear as crystal in my mind today. Most people would probably have felt uncomfortable in that place. The cold was biting, my cheeks felt numb and my fingers were freezing. I could see my own breath in the air. But aside from these discomforts, I felt remarkably relaxed. The dead have never scared me, and in this dark, frigid room, I felt absolutely at home. And so I set to work.

I shall not describe precisely what I did. Let us just say I was searching for something. I always had been. This was in the days when I believed there was still something to find inside the human body. A time before I realised there was nothing there. Before I gleaned the real truth.

I haven't really explained this so far, have I? Perhaps I should. My parents' religious zeal repelled me, this much is undeniable. I had no time for myths and legends, and I certainly did not believe in a benevolent God. But at the same time, I could not come to terms with the idea that this meagre existence on Earth was the end of the story. I realise now that it was just my ego making me think this. After all, it is human ego that drives all religious faith, and like most people I needed to believe in the existence of the soul. As far back as the days when I'd vivisected rats and frogs, I was searching for a physical manifestation of it. I knew it had to be in there somewhere. That is what I was doing that night in Merryfield's lab. I was hunting for tell-tale signs that the dead murderer's body had once hosted a soul, that traces of it somehow remained. I realise the futility of it now, dear lady. But I was young once.

Anyway, I digress. I half-expected something concerning my nocturnal adventure to appear in the local paper, but, disappointingly, nothing was ever reported. It seemed the University hushed up everything. No blame was ever placed upon Merryfield because he shared the cadaver with at least a dozen other students. He told me there had been a discreet enquiry into the episode and that he had been questioned at length. I put on a wonderful show of shock and disgust when, after swearing me to secrecy, he told me what had happened. None of the medical students or teaching staff could quite understand why a hard-to-come-by corpse, employed for serious research, had been so comprehensively and systematically eviscerated, each organ ransacked, every inch of flesh diced and pulverised.

For my part, I'm just as mystified as to why Merryfield never showed the slightest suspicion that the destruction of Franklin's dead body had been in any way linked with our visit the previous night, or that it was anything to do with me. Either he was a very naive chap or I am an even better actor than I give myself credit for.