A Case of Doubtful Death (9 page)

‘When Mackenzie returned to England and was trying to establish the Life House he initially met with very little interest. The project is an expensive one as you can imagine, the land had to be purchased, and the house built to a very specific design. The Paddington vestry would not countenance the matter and Mackenzie exhausted all his savings, but it was not sufficient and his efforts at raising funds produced very little. I came in with him as a partner, but we were still short of what we needed when Mackenzie thought of bringing Erlichmann over to England to lecture about his experiences. You have never seen him but Friedrich Erlichmann is a man of excellent address and is, so many of the ladies have told me, considered to be extremely handsome. His command of English at the time was somewhat wanting, but Mackenzie was able to write his speeches for him. The lectures were very successful and Erlichmann became quite the lion of Bayswater; no elegant dinner was complete without him and the stories he told of his experiences both chilled the blood and opened the purses of our patrons. I understand – and this is only a rumour, of course – that he was summoned to a private audience with the Queen. Perhaps she hoped that Prince Albert might not be beyond recovery. If so, she was undoubtedly disappointed.’

‘Do you think Mr Palmer might have gone to Germany?’ asked Frances.

‘Whatever for?’ exclaimed Bonner.

‘He might have gone in connection with some business of Dr Mackenzie’s.’

Bonner looked doubtful. ‘If Mackenzie had any business in Germany in recent years, I am unaware of it. He has friends there still and there may be some exchange of medical information, but that is all.’

Frances perused the opening lines of the pamphlet. ‘Is death merely a disorder,’ she asked, ‘like the influenza; a condition from which one may recover with the correct treatment?’

Bonner smiled and nodded sagely. ‘That is what Mr Erlichmann believes. You are aware of course of the work done for so many years by the Royal Humane Society on the recovery of those drowned?’

‘I am,’ replied Frances, ‘but I had always imagined that those who recovered were not in actual fact dead but in a state of suspended animation, and therefore alive and wanting only warmth and other treatments to restore them. Does Mr Erlichmann claim that he was indeed dead?’

‘He undoubtedly showed every sign of death recognised by medicine: the body cold, the eye flaccid, no sensibility to pain, and respiration and pulse both arrested. Every sign that is, except one. The one, to my mind, infallible sign of death – putrefaction of the tissues. But in so many countries those early signs are seen as certain proof, and so men and women are hurried to their graves still living.’ Bonner leaned forward with an intense stare, like a storyteller who had reached the most dramatic part of his narrative. ‘Imagine, Miss Doughty, the plight of young Erlichmann. Fully sensible of all that went on around him; unable to move, unable to speak, yet he could feel the hands of the attendants placing him in his grave clothes, feel himself being lowered into his coffin, hear the lamentation of his friends as they gazed upon his face. Imagine the horror of hearing one’s own funeral dirge and seeing the approach of the coffin lid as it descends, sealing you from the world forever, knowing that you are about to be placed in your grave.’

‘I cannot imagine such a thing,’ said Frances. ‘How was he able to make his plight known?’

‘He believes that the violent emotions which he experienced had the effect of starting the heart and blood moving again. The coffin lid had actually been fastened down and he felt himself being lifted and carried to his grave when at last he found that he was able to move, and he knocked and knocked until his hands bled. His friends tore off the lid amidst great exclamation, and,’ Bonner concluded triumphantly, ‘found him rosy faced and warm.’

‘A most fortunate escape,’ said Frances.

‘But just think how many others have not been so fortunate – how many living persons who might have been recovered but have actually been coffined and buried, and how frightful a fate befell them when the warmth of the earth restored them to life only to perish alone and confined in the terrible darkness, in a situation of the most appalling horror.’

‘But surely,’ said Frances thoughtfully, ‘if a person is placed in a coffin while still alive and the coffin is then sealed they might not come to themselves at all, but perish in a very short while, and never be conscious of their plight?’

‘Ah, I understand your thoughts, Miss Doughty. You are suggesting that the amount of life-giving air in a coffin is insufficient to support the human frame for very long, and this is true
if
the unhappy individual is fully awake. Indeed, if he struggles to escape and gasps a great deal he will suffocate in a very short while. But a person who has been inadvertently coffined in a state of suspended animation will not be in want of so much air and might live a great deal longer.’

‘And once buried he or she would be unable to escape or alert others,’ said Frances, ‘and would die in the dark, alone, afraid and struggling for breath. How cruel!’

‘There you have it!’ said Bonner. ‘That is why the Life House supplies the service it does. And for the greater comfort of our customers, those who wish it may have additional assurances. For those buried beneath the earth we can, for an extra fee, provide a breathing tube through which they may both suck air and call for help, and a bell so they may give the alarm. For those in vaults or catacombs there is a small air vent and a lever is placed by the hand, which may be operated by even the weakest individual, which will at once open an aperture for more air and sound a bell to alert the attention of an attendant. This, for reasons of hygiene, will only be the case for a short while, no more than two weeks. After that, we do accept the fact of death, and as is required by the cemetery, the inner shell is sealed in lead and placed inside a heavy coffin. One of the vaults in All Souls cemetery is reserved for the sole use of customers of the Life House.’

‘According to Dr Bonner,’ Frances told Sarah, as they enjoyed a simple luncheon of bread and butter with boiled eggs, ‘there is only one true way to be sure that a man is really dead.’

Sarah thought for a moment. ‘Chop his head off?’

‘That would certainly be effective, but imagine a case in which you might wish to preserve the man alive, but cannot. No, the one sure sign of death is putrefaction. Until that starts there may be some hope of recovery.’

‘Well that’s not right,’ said Sarah. ‘My uncle Albert had a leg that went rotten and they cut it off, and he has a wooden one now but no one tried to tell him
he
was dead.’ She snorted. ‘I should like to have seen them try!’

‘You may have something there,’ Frances admitted. ‘Dr Bonner has lent me a book by a Reverend Whiter and
he
refused to believe that anyone was dead until the entire body was completely dissolved. He says that the more serious a disease the longer it takes to cure, and since people who have revived from death have often done so very quickly, this proves that death is only a slight disorder after all. Even the waiting mortuaries attract his criticism since many do no more than leave the bodies to decompose, so as to be sure that they are dead, and do nothing to try and re-animate them. I think Dr Mackenzie’s principle, whereby his patients are regarded as living until proven dead, does address that concern. It seems, however, that the worst offender is the undertaker, who stops the mouth and nose and binds the body in linen, so if there is any chance of recovery he makes it quite impossible.’

‘You’re not to have
me
laid out with people poking and prodding,’ said Sarah. ‘Dead is dead and I’d rather be done and finished with it. And don’t them who come back go mad? What good is that?’ She paused. ‘And I know what you’re thinking, and you’re not to think it. I’ve seen enough dead to know it, and your father was gone to his maker and no doubt about it.’

Frances didn’t want to admit it, but her thoughts had been tending that way. Her father had died in the cold winter and his body laid out in his room with no flicker of reviving warmth. None had seemed necessary. Suppose she had lit a fire and rubbed his limbs, would he have come back to her? She would never know.

Sarah’s interview with the new client that morning had revealed that ladies who used the private bathing pools and slipper baths in Queen’s Road had been complaining to the manager that young men had been using the vantage points of nearby tall buildings to spy on them through the glass roof. Gentlemen who heard of the menace treated it as a joke and ladies who objected had been told it was all in their imagination. Sarah, who thought that ladies’ imagination was a product of men’s imagination, which became most apparent when men were faced with something they wished to ignore, said that she would deal with the nuisance.

The luncheon plates were being cleared away when Frances received a visit from Mr Gillan of the
Bayswater
Chronicle
and was able to expand on her theory that Palmer’s disappearance and Dr Mackenzie’s death were in some way related. Gillan, who had some mysterious way of his own of extracting information from the police, which Frances suspected involved beer, reported that Palmer’s absence was now being taken very seriously, and patrolling constables had made thorough searches, but found no clues.

‘I have had a very interesting conversation with Dr Bonner, who told me about how the Life House was first established,’ Frances told Mr Gillan. ‘Apparently, it was partly due to an extraordinary young man called Friedrich Erlichmann, who had the most horrible experiences and came here to lecture about them.’

‘Oh the public like a good tale of the ghastly and the gruesome,’ said Gillan, ‘even when they pretend they don’t. That was a while back, I was a very young correspondent then, just starting to learn the business, but I do remember him. Did Dr Bonner mention the scandal?’

‘The scandal?’ Frances sighed and asked herself why people never told her the important things. ‘No, curiously that was a detail he omitted. What happened? And please avoid delicacy, it wastes so much time.’

Gillan smiled. ‘Oh all sorts of accusations being flung about, and openly, too.’

‘About Mr Erlichmann?’

‘Oh yes. Suggestions of fraud. And then, all of a sudden it stopped. Not because the public had moved onto some new sensation, not a bit of it. It just – stopped. I never did get to the bottom of that.’ He looked thoughtful and Frances suspected he had scented a story. ‘I won’t have the time to look into it myself, I’m covering the Monmouth Club affair, but if you could come to the office one day I could get you in and you can have a look through the old copies of the
Chronicle
.’

‘I shall go there immediately,’ said Frances, and rose and went to get her coat.

Mr Gillan saw her expression and decided not to argue.

‘I thought the Monmouth Club affair was settled?’ enquired Frances. The Monmouth Club was the site of a recent scandal in Bayswater. It had claimed to be a respectable organisation where young gentlemen could enjoy wholesome amusements. The
Chronicle
had with some relish, denounced the club as a gambling hell, where betting and card playing and billiards went on all hours of the day and night, not excepting Sundays. The club had also not hesitated to supply its members with alcoholic beverages at times that completely disregarded the licensing laws. Several young men had got into debt and robbed their employers and were in prison as a consequence, and one had committed suicide. The manager of the club had taken grave exception to the exposure and tried to bring the force of the law down upon the
Chronicle
, but the affair had been absent from the newspapers for some little while, and Frances had thought the case abandoned.

‘Settled? Not a bit of it,’ said Gillan, shaking his head, but would not be drawn further.

They departed together and Sarah put on her fiercest bonnet and went out.

When Mr Gillan introduced Frances to his colleagues in the offices of the
Bayswater
Chronicle
, she was surprised to find herself treated with some deference. She felt sure that in due course his lively mind would produce a highly decorated report of her visit for the amusement of the
Chronicle’s
readers. There was a large storeroom with heavily bound volumes of the newspaper going back to its inception and Frances thought what a pleasure it would be on an idle day, if she was ever to have such a thing, to come here and read through the newspapers of yesteryear. It also amused her to imagine others coming to do the same and it struck her as strange that someone might one day, perhaps in a hundred years’ time, read Mr Gillan’s colourful accounts of her exploits and wonder what kind of person she had been.