A QUESTION OF GUILT

'Undoubtedly,' said Crippen, to whom the connection was clearly as novel as between water and ice to a South Sea Islander.

Bill left, cap on head and pipe in mouth, wearing the expression of awe shot with distrust of any Cockney finding himself the object of learned attention. Eliot washed his hands with yellow soap in a tin basin on another upturned crate. He told Crippen, 'I'm not running this surgery to cure Holloway's aches and pains, but to show what must be done. This is the most generous city in the world-you've only to look at _Fry's Guide to London Charities,_ there's two thousand hospitals, asylums, dispensaries, homes, orphanages. Not to mention Bible, tract and missionary societies. All with a total income of _twelve million_ pounds a year. The British aren't mean. They're class-ridden. They'd share their last crust with a beggar, but if he demanded half as a human right they'd rather toss it down the sewer.'

Eliot wiped his hands on a towel hanging from a nail. 'Oh, I know there're plenty of medical clubs, but they have to compete with the burial clubs, and the Cockney prefers the prospect of a good funeral to that of postponing it.'

Crippen seemed unstirred by social injustice. He enquired, 'Were you free for dinner tomorrow?'

Eliot excused himself promptly. 'Tomorrow's the Lords' vote on the Budget. I'll be in Parliament Square to see any fun. Please apologize to Mrs Crippen.'

'I shall not be with Belle. You remember Miss Le Neve, my typist? We have been acquainted since '03, when I was consulting physician to the Drouet Institute, and she came to us straight from Pitman's College, only seventeen. We often have dinner together at Frascati's in Oxford Street. They have a nice winter garden with beautiful music, and you can get a good little table d'hфte for five shillings.' Eliot felt admiration at such dalliance in the ogreish shadow of Belle. 'I'm sure that Ethel would enjoy the company of a medical man so cultivated as yourself, quite as much as I do.'

Eliot rang the compliment on the counter of cynicism. After some persuasion, he agreed. It might be amusing to observe Crippen without Belle. Frascati's made a change from the Caledonian Road. Crippen was so pathetically pleased, his watery eyes seemed likely to spill over. As he turned to leave, Crippen reached for a thick green book beside the bell-jar on the orange-box. 'Walsham and Spencer, _Theory and Practice of Surgery,'_ he murmured reverently.

Crippen turned the pages. _'Trephining the Skull…Rhinoplasty…Fracture of the Shaft of the Femur… Strangulated Hernia,'_ he read aloud. 'Do you know, I've still my surgical instruments? I keep the case at home, behind the books. Belle doesn't like to look at them. She calls them a hoodoo. She had an operation once,' he disclosed quietly. 'An ovariotomy, in New York…oh, over ten years ago. They left behind the womb and the Fallopian tubes, so the scar's not too ugly.'

He took the other volume from the orange-box. 'Gray's Anatomy, Fifteenth Edition by Pickering Pick, FRCS, of St George's Hospital,' he read out, as though the title page of the Bible. 'Such a wonderful book. I came across it while studying operations here in England, back in '83.'

'Borrow it if you wish,' Eliot invited handsomely.

'May I? I shall find nothing more satisfying than renewing my knowledge of the human body,' Crippen told him gratefully. 'I'll keep it from the rain under my waterproof. I've only a little walk to catch the Underground at Camden Road Station. I really called to ask if you'd be interested in a little proposition?' Eliot stared, unbelieving after Crippen's last feeler. 'I hold the patent of a remedy called 'Ohrshob-''

'Called what?'_

'The German for 'ear' with 'shob' from 'absorb'. A good name, I think? It's an ear salve, for deafness. If you could dispose of a gross among your patients, I'd be most liberal with the commission-'

Eliot clapped him on the shoulder. He felt no anger nor contempt for this threadbare physician. Only sorrow and amusement. He later reflected this attitude brought the failure of his early life and the success of his later one. 'My patients could never afford your remedies. Might I suggest an alternative? Spare them a mite yourself.'

Crippen seemed neither offended nor unresponsive. 'I shall draw a cheque, Dr Beckett. Frascati's at eight tomorrow.'

The door jangled, and he stepped into the rain.

It was still raining hard at six the next morning, when Eliot arrived at the Cattle Market. It was almost an hour before sunrise. The Market was vast, 70 acres, 50 years old, a monument to the practicality which illuminated the Victorians' life as gloriously as their religion.

A 100-foot high, white stone clocktower, surmounted by a gold dragon wind-vane, dominated as majestically as the campinale in Florence a crushed cloister of shops and offices, the post office and telegraph station. Around massed rows of iron-railed stalls for the 750, 000 cattle which lowed their way through every year. Along the edges stretched the sheep and bullock lairs, low buildings with slate-and-glass roofs split for healthy ventilation, open- fronted with slim iron pillars, a three-foot deep cobbled gully along the back for hosing away each morning's dung. Victorian expedience incorporated a pub at each corner, identical Italianate four-storey square buildings, the Lion, the Lamb, the Bull and the _White Horse,_ open all night.

Eliot had sent a boy to Bill Edmonton at Poupart's meat works, saying to meet him in the White Horse-Bill certainly could not read a note. Eliot bought him three-ha'penn'oth of porter, but insisted leaving the warm gaslight before Bill became hopelessly drunk. They entered a broad gate in the blue-painted ten-foot railings. Under the naphtha flares, the sight struck Eliot as a brownish, choppy sea, with mooing for the sound of waves. Whistling and clanking of trains came from the huge triangular Great Northern goods depot against the Regent's Park Canal, where truckloads of cattle and sheep from the Midland shires and Yorkshire moors were shunted about all night.

The iron rails which confined the beasts hemmed the humans into narrow lanes. Butchers in bowler hats and heavy topcoats, landowners in deer-stalkers and Inverness capes, farmers wearing old-fashioned varnished flat waterproof hats, drovers with long sticks and leather-strapped corduroys who had walked ten miles from the Home Counties during the night, uncountable Cockneys with caps and mufflers and their hands in their pockets, and as many dogs, barking, snapping and sparring, seeming to enjoy the morning better than any other living things in sight.

Small, tight groups of better-dressed men with notebooks and pencils directed at the cattle sharp looks honed on experience, a nod sealing the bargain for another restless knot of animals to sizzle in the ovens or grills of Londoners. The repetitive large-scale transformation of living organisms into dead edibles chilled Eliot's imagination. To Bill, the Market was only an area which filled and emptied in the early morning, and needed hosing down before the next.

Bill conducted him across the broad, cobbled Market Road which bisected the pens. A pair of men in oilskins like sailors' goaded cattle into a long shed with a platform some six feet high running its length, on which stood a pair of men with sledgehammers.

Bill leered. 'The killing pen.' They mounted the platform as the gate clanged shut on a packed, snorting, heaving line of cattle. ''Ave a look at the knockers at work.'

Unhurriedly, the sledgehammers fell on the flat of the animals' heads, with a steady crack like a sportsman's gun. The knockers never missed. The beast fell, or sagged against the flanks of its fellows. Once the line was silent, and still save for mortal spasms, the knockers rested sweating on their hammers, the far gate was opened, and a team of men with hooks dragged the carcasses into the brightly gaslit building beyond.

Were they dead, Eliot wondered, or merely stunned? In the next building, it made no difference. All were raised by their hind hoofs on chains from the roof, and had their throats cut over buckets. The room was filled with men engulfed in leather aprons like a blacksmith's. They decapitated the animals with a stroke of a cleaver, tossing the heads like footballs into iron bins. They spread the carcasses on the flagged floor, shackling their hooves to short iron posts, and dextrously rid them of their hides. The shiny, bloody torsos were shifted by handcarts to worn wooden tables, where more aproned men chopped them to bits, separating the entrails into separate round bins of liver, kidneys, lungs, guts and tongues, with a final bin for all the rest.

Poupart's was hardly more than a shed, impossible to see across for steam. Bullocks' and sheeps' heads, bones with fragments of meat, bits of internal organs which had escaped becoming sausages, were dumped in boiling vats. The meat was sieved and minced, seasoned fiercely and packed into tins under heavy weights. The liquor went for pea soup, the skimmed fat for lard, the bones were crushed through steel rollers for meal to nourish the roses in London gardens.