What Dr Shivershev had kept to himself was that he could no longer align himself with the direction the brotherhood had taken. It had become far removed from its original purpose; the brotherhood had lost its way. It had turned into a perverted enterprise whose main function was the harvesting and selling of organs for private sale to rich old men. Their principal customers, Dr Shivershev said, were a certain breed of English gent with a fetish for collecting things, the more novel and outlandish the better. The sort of man who had everything already but who would always want more, especially when it came at the expense of another.
I thought of Thomas and his own mania for collecting things; of that shrunken head from South America that he obtained just for the pleasure of hearing me shriek, how he acquired me and clothes and the cigars he didn’t smoke.
‘What was the purpose of this brotherhood in the beginning?’ I asked.
‘It was about knowledge! We wanted to understand how the body worked, so we could fix it when it went wrong. Why leave it to God, when he was doing such a shoddy job of it,’ Dr Shivershev said, his eyes glistening, his voice rich with passion. ‘Nearly fifty years ago, the first collective was a group of outcast scientists, enlightened scholars and astronomers, supported by free-thinking members of the aristocracy who invested money in secret. They all wanted to see what could be achieved with medicine, how far it could go. They wanted to explore the human body without interference from the Church, without religious or cultural morality defining what could or could not be done.’
My mind flitted back to my grandmother’s church in Reading, to the stultifying hours I’d spent there, and to my grandmother herself. She loathed the idea of humans ‘playing God’ with a person’s body. One of the many reasons she took against my ever becoming a nurse.
‘Medical experimentation is not something everyone approves of,’ continued Dr Shivershev, as if he could read my thoughts. He was all but lost in his enthusiasm for his topic. ‘We understood that. Innocent people died and we made some difficult decisions, but we believed it was for the progression of humanity.’
What did he mean by ‘innocent people’, I wondered. Did the brotherhood really go about committing murder and digging around inside people under the guise that it would save lives in the future? It seemed it might not have been so wild a theory that my husband the surgeon was the Whitechapel killer. If not Thomas, what of Dr Shivershev himself? My pulse began to race again. It was imperative that I try to find a way out. I could never physically overpower Dr Shivershev, I must talk my way to freedom. But how?
‘Hospitals are wonderful places, Susannah, but they are administrative nightmares run by meddling bureaucrats who want nothing more than to push paper around their desks and feather their nests and who don’t give a damn about real science. They go home and sleep in their beds without imagining what could be possible. There were things we achieved in those early years that would never have been permitted in a hospital, and now they are common practice.’
He sighed now, and glared disparagingly at the dangling corpse of my husband. His neck had begun to stretch, the tongue swollen. I had to look away.
‘The problem, as so often, was money. Once certain members of our brotherhood realised the obscene profit that could be made from private collectors, nothing else mattered. There was a sudden mania among the rich for everything from shrivelled hearts to kidneys in wine and virgins’ breasts, and medical science was forgotten. This suited your husband very well. He wasn’t faring too happily at the hospital, and barely had any private patients, but he did at least know the rudiments of surgery. He had quite serious money concerns, I believe?’
I nodded, thought of Abbingdale Hall and the inheritance Thomas was no longer eligible for, being dead. Mrs Wiggs had counselled me about that. After all my efforts to remain in his house, to remain married for my own security, it didn’t seem as if I would achieve this after all.
‘The problem was that he would go to his clubs and houses and boast, tell people, in that obsessive need he had to talk of himself. But he didn’t realise who was listening, which is why he had to be silenced. The man at the Café Royale you mentioned, with the medals, I knew who he was instantly, and I’m afraid he is rather high up in the brotherhood. So when you told me about their conversation, I knew you were in danger. Why do you think I told you to find a safe place to go?’
‘Then, as it’s not about me at all, but my husband, why not let me go? I will keep my mouth shut – you know I can.’
‘The missing wife of a gentleman who has killed himself… The brotherhood can influence the investigation, they have links to the Home Office and there will be no problem with the police, but a missing wife from Chelsea is a story worthy of the news, and these journalists, you see, they have not been… adequately penetrated, as of yet, shall we say. The brotherhood will be left feeling exposed and they will blame me for attracting attention. There would be the potential for scrutiny, and scientists do not like scrutiny…’
The beginning of his explanation gave me some hope; my grandfather used to tell me it never mattered how desperate a man’s situation was, he will always cling to the faintest sliver of hope, as I did now, though I made sure to keep my face expressionless. Dr Shivershev was taking
