AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I don’t know,” Loomis admitted. “But I’m prepared to do everything in my power to find out.” He stood up. “We can begin with my father’s records. He never destroyed them. They are all in the cellar. Do you know exactly when he died?”
“Yes!” Hester said straightaway. “September twenty-seventh, 1839. It’s on his gravestone.”
“Excellent! Then it will be a simple matter.” Loomis led the way out into the hall, calling his intentions to Mrs. Selkirk and instructing her that he was not to be interrupted for anything less than an emergency. “I’m glad you came today,” he went on, going to the cellar door and opening it. “We’ll need a light. There’s no gas down here. I have very few patients today, and my wife has taken the children for a day or two to see her father. He is not very well and does not travel, but he is very fond of my daughters.” He smiled as he said it, and his own affection was clear in his eyes. Perhaps that was some of his feeling for Samuel Jackson.
He found a lantern and lit it, then led the way down the narrow stone steps to the cellar where rows of boxes filled with papers lay neatly stacked.
It took them only ten minutes to find the right box for the month of September in the year 1839, most of the work moving the boxes above it.
“Here it is!” Loomis exclaimed, lifting out a handful of papers. “Samuel Jackson…” He held it closer to the light, and Hester and Monk both peered over his shoulder while he read the generous, sprawling hand.
“You are right—he didn’t know,” Hester said the moment she came to the end. She stared at Loomis. “He wasn’t satisfied. He just couldn’t prove there was anything wrong. Can we get an order for an exhumation?”
Loomis chewed his lip. “Difficult…”
“But possible?” she insisted.
“I don’t know.”
“Where do we begin?” Monk asked urgently. “We can’t just let this go!”
“With the police,” Loomis answered, meeting his eyes. “We’ll go up to the station and speak to Sergeant Byrne. He’ll remember Sam Jackson—and Dolly. I won’t let this go, I promise you. But it’ll be very hard….”
Hester straightened up. “We’ll find Sergeant Byrne, then we’ll find the judge.”
Monk looked dubious. “The question is, if it was poison, will it still be there to find, even if we can dig him up?”
“Depends what it is,” Loomis answered, putting away the rest of the papers and closing the box. He handed all the papers on Samuel Jackson to Hester. “Depends on the quality of his coffin, if it’s all dry inside, and what’s in the surrounding earth. I don’t know what chance we have of proving anything this long after. Arsenic remains, I know that. But this doesn’t sound like arsenic. I think my father would have seen that. This was bleeding … more like an internal ulcer burst, or an artery, or something of that sort. I don’t know why he wasn’t satisfied, but from his accounts here, he wasn’t.”
“Probably because Samuel had no history of earlier illness,” Hester suggested. “There’s no mention of pain before, or difficulty with eating, no nausea or earlier signs of blood.”
Loomis looked at her quickly.
“I am a nurse,” she explained. Then, as if she recalled the general reputation of nurses as women who scrubbed floors and emptied slops, she added, “In the Crimea. I’ve done a good deal of field surgery.” She said it with pride. It was not boasting but a statement of fact.
Loomis nodded slowly, his face full of admiration.
“Then we had better take these papers and see if we can get Sergeant Byrne on our side, and then persuade a judge that we have reasonable cause to suspect a murder. I warn you, it may be a long and fruitless task, but I am ready, if you are.”
“We are!” Monk said without hesitation, including Hester automatically and without even bothering to glance at her.
Sergeant Byrne at the local station was quite easily persuaded. He was a middle-aged man who had known and liked Samuel Jackson, and Jackson’s death had shocked him. He took little convincing that there was cause for further investigation. He was more than willing to leave his tedious paperwork and go immediately with Hester, Monk and Dr. Loomis to call upon Judge Tomkinson across the river in Parsons Green.
The judge occupied a large house with an excellent view over a sweep of lawn towards the water, and he did not appreciate being taken from the dinner table.
Loomis had been right in that it was difficult and frustrating to a point close to loss of both temper and hope to persuade Judge Tomkinson to order an exhumation of the body of Samuel Jackson, decently buried, without question, twenty-one years before. He argued with every point they raised, shaking his head and tapping his fingers on the top of his cherry wood desk.
They tried every line of reasoning they could think of, relevant and irrelevant, based on logic or emotion, anger, pity or the desire for justice. The judge dismissed them all, for one cause or another. Even Sergeant Byrne’s presence moved him not at all.
Finally, at quarter to seven in the evening, it was Monk’s impassioned anger at the death of Keelin Melville which won him over.
“Melville?” the judge said slowly, letting out his breath in a sigh. “The Melville who built that marvelous hall for Barton Lambert? That place full of light?”
“Yes!”
Hester held her breath.
Loomis looked nonplussed.
