of them needed: It was the pirate Bill Johnston and they were all in mortal peril.
It was at this point that Simms reached into the back of his wagon and brought forward his box of bibles and prayer books. If anything was guaranteed to generate interest in religious materials, it was the prospect of meeting one’s maker in a sudden and violent way. Lewis was disgusted at Simms’s obvious manipulation of the crowd for his own mercenary purposes, but everyone else seemed oblivious to it. They pushed and shoved their way to the front in order to be the first one to buy. The most popular items were the small books of prayers and psalms, each of them bound in cheap leather covers that left dye stains on the palms of those who handled them. Those and the prayer pins.
The details, when Lewis got them, for the most part matched what the smith had told him, and what he expected to hear. The girl had been left alone and was later discovered in her bed, fully dressed, by her returning family. Again, a small red Book of Proverbs was in her hands, open to Chapter Five. And like the last time, her petticoats had been thrown up and her womanhood exposed, and although it was not general knowledge, Lewis discovered from the local doctor that she had been slashed, not only below her skirts, but around her breasts as well.
Lewis outlined his interest in the case, and the doctor listened soberly to the details of the earlier deaths.
“Have you discussed this with the chief constable?” was his first question.
“Not yet. I’ve gone to the law on previous occasions. With the first murder, of course, no one thought it was a murder. With the second, I was suspicious but the local constable didn’t show much interest. The Coroner’s jury ruled it was a natural death, and he was little-disposed to investigate beyond that. I got no farther with the third. That time it was evident to all that it was foul play, but the constabulary was too busy to do anything about it until it was far too late to make any sense of it. Unfortunately, the crimes all took place in different jurisdictions, so I don’t know who to talk to next.”
The doctor nodded. “Yes, that’s one of the things that I hope will change now that we’ve been organized into a country of sorts. As long as there’s an amateur police force, we’re going to see amateur results. We need full-time police.” He exhaled in a long, whistling breath. “I have never in my thirty years as a doctor seen anything like this. I think you’re right, there’s a monster out there. The question is, what do we do now?”
Lewis felt an enormous relief at these words. His encounter with Francis Renwell had shaken his confidence and he had not communicated his theories to anyone since. He had been obsessed with Renwell, and now he was obsessed with the details of the murders. He had been wrong about Renwell, so he could have been wrong in his conclusions concerning the entire matter.
“Well,” he said, “I think we need to inform the local constable and hope he has enough sense to see the pattern. After that, I suppose, it’s up to him, but I can’t help but feel that he’ll take my words more seriously because you have.”
The doctor was deep in thought. “If this man has killed four, he’ll kill more. It’s only a matter of time. The real question is where he’ll strike next. Unfortunately, he, and I’m assuming it’s a ‘he’ …”
It hadn’t occurred to Lewis that it could be a woman. His heart wanted to instantly dismiss the notion of any woman being capable of committing such a deed, but in his mind he knew the doctor was right. Evil lives in women’s hearts as well as men’s, as much as everyone liked to claim otherwise.
“I think, for the moment, we should assume it’s a man. I mean, there’s a prurient aspect here that speaks of a man, and the marks on the neck looked to me as though they were made by someone with large hands.”
The doctor agreed. “Whoever it is has an excuse to travel. There are not many women who are unaccountable for their whereabouts for any length of time.” He looked at Lewis shrewdly. “Do you have a list of possibles? You must have at least thought about it.”
“There are a number of men I know who were in the different communities at the right time, or at least had the opportunity to be there. I’m disinclined to start pointing fingers, because truth to tell, one of those men is myself.”
The doctor chuckled. “Thank you for that. It had occurred to me that this was the case, but I suspect you wouldn’t have been pointing it out to me if you were the murderer.”
“Unless I was deviously clever.”
“No, I don’t think this is a clever man. I’m not even sure the murders are premeditated. He’s left too many clues. It’s almost as though there is a ritual that has to take place when the madness strikes him. The book, for example, would argue a religious man, yet what religious man would do such a terrible thing? The skirts thrown up, yet no act of intercourse undertaken.”
“That’s one of the things that has differed from time to time,” Lewis pointed out. “With the first two murders, he was careful to leave the skirts so that they seemed to have become disarranged through some thrashing of the victim. It’s only with the last two that his intervention is obvious.”
“So, his madness is growing. The ritual is becoming more complicated. Lust is not a factor here, I think; otherwise he would have assaulted them. It’s more like some strange version of revenge. But revenge against whom?”
“Well, women, I suppose. Else why would he murder only women?”
“There is another possibility. It could be somehow tied up with his feelings toward religion, or some sort of guilt that the verses emphasize.”
Deep down Lewis felt the truth of this assessment. The Proverbs warned against the wiles of strange women, the Lord’s Prayer promised comfort and forgiveness for the sin.
“There’s something else,” Lewis said. “With the first murders, it’s as if he waited for extraordinary external events to occupy everyone’s attention to help cover his crime. This last time there was nothing — no turmoil in the community, no battle, no fire. It happened with no reason and no warning.”
“He’s becoming bolder. He’s killed three times with no consequence. He must believe that he can kill at will and that no one can catch him. Why else would he leave so many clues behind?”
Again Lewis felt a shimmer at the edge of his mind, a grappling toward understanding, but it was so elusive that he couldn’t even begin to express it in words, except that it had something to do with the relationship between madness and mayhem. But he couldn’t catch it, and it remained just a dancing mote.
“What do you make of the pins?” he said finally.
“A grisly thing to do with them,” the doctor said. “As to their meaning, I have no idea. Unless …”
“What?”
“It’s almost as if he’s leaving them as a signature, a trademark, so that there will be no confusion about who has committed the deed. Why else stab something so inconsequential into a body that’s already dead?”
Lewis had no answer to this. “We need to find him before he does it again.”
But how? They agreed they would talk to the chief constable, and hope for the best from that quarter, but Lewis vowed to somehow narrow his list of suspects and keep his ear firmly to the ground.
III
By
