Resurrectionist

time. Then he looked up. “I find that most curious. It leads me to believe that your investigation continues, despite Colonel Hyde’s demise. I’m wondering why that should be. I can think of only one explanation.” Leaning back against his desk, the apothecary took off his spectacles and misted the lenses with his breath. “You think Colonel Hyde is still alive, don’t you?”

The room was still. Locke reached into his sleeve and took out his handkerchief. He began to polish his spectacles vigorously.

“I don’t think Hyde’s still alive,” Hawkwood said. “I bloody know he is!” The words were out before he could stop them.

He’d expected an immediate gasp of astonishment from Locke, some show of surprise, but the apothecary’s expression remained curiously impassive. “How do you know?”

“The body in the church wasn’t Hyde’s. He made another substitution – dug up the body of a recently deceased man of similar age and build, and left it to burn in his place.”

“So the colonel must have known about the burial before he made his escape.” Locke spoke matter-of- factly.

Hawkwood nodded. “Reverend Tombs would have told him. Reverend Tombs would have told the colonel a lot of things, especially if the colonel asked the right questions.”

Which is what I should have been doing, Hawkwood thought.

Locke returned the handkerchief to his sleeve, placed his hands behind his back and began to pace the room. “So your subsequent visits here have been part of your effort to track him down?”

“Yes.”

“And what have you discovered?”

“I know he’s obtaining and dissecting dead bodies.”

Locke stopped pacing.

“Two cadavers were left outside Bart’s Hospital. Some of their insides had been removed. Parts of their skins had also been taken, including their faces.”

A nerve quivered in the apothecary’s cheek. He put his hands together as if about to pray and rested the tips of his fingers against his chin. Then he started pacing again. “Go on.”

“I know that all Colonel Hyde’s actions have had a purpose. His cultivation of the priest, the theft of the scalpel and the laudanum” – at this, Locke coloured – “the murder of Reverend Tombs, the escape, the digging up of the substitute corpse, the burning of the church to divert us from his scent, and now the mutilation of the women … I know it’s all part of some grand scheme. I just don’t know what that is.”

Locke said nothing. The silence stretched for several long seconds. Finally the apothecary moved to his desk. “Let me explain why I summoned you. I was in the colonel’s quarters and I discovered these –”

They were papers, Hawkwood saw, folded in two.

“I was gathering up the colonel’s effects,” Locke said, lifting one of the sheets and opening it out.

At first glance, it looked similar to the etchings Hawkwood had seen on the walls of the colonel’s room; a series of anatomical studies of the lower half of the torso and limbs, displayed in lifelike detail. And yet they were not the same. Hawkwood stared at the sketches. He knew his brain was telling him there was a difference but for the life of him, he couldn’t see what it was.

And then it came to him.

It was the legs. They were completely out of proportion. The thigh and calf muscles and the bones beneath the skin were clearly defined, but the limbs were too slender and elongated and it was the way they were displayed, with the thighs spread wide and the knees bent. It didn’t look natural. It looked bizarrely like the sort of pose a fencer would assume before executing a riposte, or a tumbler about to attempt a somersault. And then there was the torso, or at least what Hawkwood assumed was the torso, for it didn’t resemble anything that he’d ever seen before. In fact, it looked more like a sac of eggs. His eyes moved down. The anklebones looked too fragile to be able to bear even a modest weight and as for the feet, well, they were the oddest feature of all, each one impossibly long with the toes limp and obscenely splayed. In fact, if he didn’t know any better, they looked more like –

“Frogs,” Locke said.

“Frogs?” Hawkwood echoed, feeling immediately stupid. Of course, they were bloody frogs. What else could they have been? “Why frogs?”

“Many surgeons practise their early anatomy on the corpses of animals. Even schoolboys dissect frogs in school. Galen used to cut open apes. Eden Carslow once dissected an elephant.”

Why has he got me looking at bloody frogs? Hawkwood wondered. He stared again at the illustration. “What are these?”

The apothecary followed his finger.

Running from the muscles at the ends of the severed limbs were a series of wavy lines. The end of one of the lines was attached to whatever it was that looked like an egg sac. The other end was connected to some kind of wheel, complete with a winding handle.

“Fascinating, isn’t it?” The apothecary’s voice was a whisper.

“It might be if I knew what the devil it was,” Hawkwood said, though he had to admit the drawing was intriguing.

“I believe it to be an illustration of one of Galvani’s experiments. He was an Italian physician who believed that all animals possess a special electrical fluid that is generated in the brain and which passes through the nerves into the muscles. In order to prove his theory, he conducted a number of experiments with amphibians.” Locke tapped the etching with the end of his finger. “I believe that is what’s represented here.”

The apothecary indicated the lines. “I suspect these are the wires through which his fluid passes.” Locke shook his head in wonder before sliding the illustration to one side. “And then there are these.”

The second sheet contained a drawing of what looked like twelve sealed, jar-shaped containers, arranged in three rows of four. A thin tube protruded from the lid of each jar. The top of each tube was linked to the next one in line in each direction so that the jars appeared to be covered by a squared grille. The top half of each jar was transparent. The bottom half was either opaque or else the containers held some kind of liquid.

Hawkwood didn’t know why, but the illustration rang a faint bell.

“What’s this?”

“An electrical machine. Look, see, there’s more.” With excitement in his voice, Locke reached over and unfolded the third sheet. Smoothing it out, he laid it across the desk.

As soon as Locke mentioned the word “electrical”, Hawkwood knew why the drawing of the jars looked familiar. Electrical demonstrations had been a popular form of entertainment in some of the London theatres. Hawkwood had been in the audience at Astley’s when a black-cloaked master of ceremonies had exhorted several dozen giggling volunteers to form a circle and hold hands; he had then proceeded to send them into convulsions by the touch of a wire and several glass bottles. Hawkwood recalled that the women had been more susceptible to electrification than the men. He had no idea why. It hadn’t seemed to matter very much at the time. It had been an amusement, nothing more.

The third sheet made no sense at all. It showed what appeared to be a column of discs stacked one on top of the other, enclosed within four vertical retaining rods. At the base of the column was a basin-shaped container. The bottom disc was attached to the basin by what looked like a thin flow of liquid. The discs were arranged in pairs, each pair separated from the pair below by a smaller, darker-coloured disc. There were sixteen of the larger discs, making eight pairs in all. Each disc was marked by a letter; the upper disc in each pair carried the identification letter Z, the bottom disc the letter A.

“And this?” Hawkwood asked.

“The same, though I believe it represents a more advanced device.”

Hawkwood pointed to the column of discs. “All right, so what are these?”

Locke adjusted his glasses. Behind the lenses his face was quite animated. “See, there’s a key at the bottom of the page. The A represents silver; the Z is zinc. I believe it’s also possible to use copper discs instead of silver.”

“All right, Doctor, I’ll admit this is all very fascinating, but what would Colonel Hyde want with electrical machines?”

“Perhaps we should ask the man who drew them.”