Sir Edmund Wetherby

Good day, dear reader. My name is Sir Edmund Wetherby, and I suspect I am the most prolific murderer you have never heard of.

There. We have got the awkwardness out of the way, which is more than can be said for most introductions. At dinner one is normally supplied with a name, a profession and whichever achievement the host believes will persuade the table that an evening spent in one’s company is not entirely wasted. Medicine is worse. We collect letters after our names until we resemble railway timetables, list honours that everybody present already knows we possess, and omit our failures on the perfectly sensible grounds that otherwise nobody would ever get as far as the soup.

I shall try to spare you that sort of introduction. The name will do for now. The title came much later, and the murders before it.

There were approximately twenty of those.

I say approximately because the question of what constitutes a murder becomes rather more troublesome once one has committed several. I do not offer that as philosophy, still less as mitigation. It is bookkeeping. There are deaths for which I bear complete and deliberate responsibility; others in which my intervention altered an outcome already moving firmly in one direction; and one or two instances where certainty would flatter both the surviving evidence and my memory. Mr Hales will, I am sure, insist upon a number eventually. Young men like numbers. They give an investigation the agreeable appearance of having edges.

For the present, approximately twenty will do. You may already dislike me, which is understandable, although slightly premature. You know very little about me beyond an occupation I have not yet properly described and a private practice to which you would almost certainly object.

I was a surgeon, and for much of my adult life I taught anatomy in London. I was considered very good at both. I do not include this from vanity, though naturally I possess vanity in quantities sufficient for most ordinary purposes. My ability as a teacher is a matter of record. Men who later became excellent surgeons sat in rooms with me and learned where to cut, where never to cut, what could safely be moved aside, and what, if damaged, would leave a family standing beside a bed while somebody found a respectable way of saying there was nothing further to be done.

Some of those men saved lives. Some of what I taught them came from books, some from cadavers, and some from sources neither my colleagues nor my students would have wished described in the prospectus. We shall come to those in due course.

It would be tidy to begin my story with my first murder. I could tell you where I was, what I had intended, and the precise point at which intention gave way to curiosity. It would certainly make for a brisk opening. Unfortunately, it would also be dishonest, because my first murder began long before anybody died by my hand.

It began with my mother.

I was ten when she became ill, although if I have the year wrong it can only be by a matter of months. Childhood ages are peculiar things. People insist that they remember being six or eight or eleven as though the number had been attached to every day in brass. I remember rooms more reliably. I remember the dark green paper in the downstairs passage, the walnut cabinet my father disliked because one door would not close properly, and the narrow staircase on which adults repeatedly told me not to linger during the final week of my mother’s life. I remember, too, the smell of boiled linen, which is perhaps the clearest detail of all.

My mother had been unwell for several days before anyone admitted that she was ill. This was partly her fault. She considered illness an inconvenience that could usually be defeated by refusing to rearrange one’s plans around it. She had managed headaches, winter coughs, an infected finger and, on one memorable occasion, a burn to her forearm with the same mixture of impatience and embarrassment, as though the body were an otherwise dependable servant who had chosen an awkward moment to demand attention.

The pain in her abdomen was initially treated in that spirit. At breakfast she pressed a hand against her right side when she thought I was not looking. I was looking.

“Indigestion,” she said when she caught me.

I had not asked, which presumably irritated her further.

“You’re staring, Edmund.”

“Does it hurt?”

“No.”

This was plainly untrue. She had gone rather pale around her mouth, and when she reached for her tea there was a tiny pause before the movement, as though she needed to negotiate with herself first. My father lowered his newspaper and asked why she had eaten nothing the previous evening. She reminded him that she had already explained the fish was overdone.

“It wasn’t,” he said.

“Then I was not hungry and the fish was overdone. Both things can occur simultaneously.”

My father considered this, perhaps recognised the danger of pursuing it, and returned to his paper. That was how they argued. They had been married long enough to achieve disputes in very small spaces, and I remember being reassured by the exchange. Adults who could quarrel about fish could not, I reasoned, be in serious danger.

By luncheon she had gone upstairs.

A doctor came that evening. I was not permitted into the bedroom while he examined her, but nobody had yet appreciated how successfully a ten-year-old can become part of the furniture when he wishes to hear something not intended for him. I sat three steps below the landing with a book open across my knees and caught only fragments through the door: inflammation, bowel, fever, rest. There was another word which I failed to retain. I have occasionally wished I had, since it might have told me what the physician believed he was treating rather than what I, with more than seventy years of hindsight and vastly more medical knowledge than he possessed, believe was killing her.

He came downstairs eventually, carrying his bag. My father accompanied him as far as the drawing room and closed the door. I moved immediately.

The useful thing about a large house occupied by people accustomed to servants is that doors are frequently believed to provide more privacy than they actually do. I crouched beside the cabinet in the passage, one hinge digging into my shoulder, and listened.

“We shall see how she does tonight,” the physician was saying.

My father’s reply was lower. “She is in a great deal of pain.”

“Yes.”

“You said nothing was broken.”

“I said I could find no obstruction of the kind I feared.”

“And that is good?”

“It is preferable.”

That answer bothered me immediately. Even then I disliked words that disguised whether something was good or bad. My father asked another question, one I could not hear, and the physician took longer before replying.

“I cannot tell you with certainty.”

That was the sentence I carried away. It was not the fever, nor the pain, nor even my mother’s death three days later. It was the admission that the man with the black bag did not know.

I had believed doctors knew. It seems an absurd assumption now, but children understand professions by their outcomes. A blacksmith knew horses, a carpenter knew wood, and a doctor knew bodies. Adults could disagree about Parliament or money or whether the fish was overdone; a physician stood beside a bed and knew what was happening beneath the skin.

Except this one did not.

I went upstairs after he left. My mother was awake, although the curtains had been drawn before full dark. Someone had lit a lamp on the dressing table and the room looked wrong in the particular way familiar rooms do when illness rearranges their purpose. A basin stood near the bed. Towels had appeared. Her water glass had been moved from its usual side. One of my father’s dining chairs had been carried upstairs and placed beside her. The household had begun, without anyone announcing it, to organise itself around the possibility that she might not simply get up again.

There was sweat in her hair.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” she said.

“Father said I could come up.”

“Did he?”

“No.”

“Ah.” Even ill, she managed to put a great deal into that one syllable. “Then we shall agree that he probably would have.”

I remained at the foot of the bed until she asked whether I intended to stand there all evening.

“What is wrong with you?” I said.

“Edmund.”

“The doctor doesn’t know.”

Her expression altered by very little. “You were listening.”

“He doesn’t.”

“He knows a great deal more than you do.”

“That isn’t the same thing.”

She closed her eyes. For one appalling second I thought she had died while I was standing there, but then she breathed slowly through her nose and I understood that the pain had come again. I went around to the side of the bed.

“Where does it hurt?”

She opened one eye. “What are you going to do about it?”

“I want to know.”

“So did the doctor.”

“Here?”

I pointed to my own abdomen. She reached out, took my wrist and moved my hand a little lower.

“Thereabouts.”

I pressed experimentally against myself. Nothing hurt, which seemed both obvious and unfair. My mother watched me doing it for several seconds before a tired smile reached her face.

“You are a strange little boy.”

I remember that sentence because she said it affectionately. Other people would offer versions of it later without the affection.

“What’s there?” I asked.

“Inside me?”

“Yes.”

“Several things, I should imagine.”

“Which things?”

“I don’t know. You tell me. You’re the one conducting the examination.”

The difficulty was that I knew almost nothing. There was the stomach, because everybody knew about the stomach. The heart lived higher up and somewhat to one side, though I was uncertain which. The lungs occupied the chest. Somewhere there were kidneys, but at ten I could not reliably have pointed to them if offered a sovereign. Until that moment, my ignorance had not troubled me. Suddenly it was intolerable. My mother was in terrible pain a few feet away, something inside her was causing it, and that thing had a location and shape and purpose, yet everyone around her remained outside the body guessing.

She saw the irritation on my face and laid her fingers over my wrist.

“Stop worrying at it.”

“I wasn’t.”

“You were.”

“I want to know what’s wrong.”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you?”

She looked towards the drawn curtains for a moment. “That isn’t always the same as wanting to know everything.”

I remembered that sentence too, although I spent many years believing she was wrong.

She worsened overnight. The following morning brought another physician, older and much less inclined to soften his language for my father. I did not manage to hear the examination because by then the household had become alert to me. A maid intercepted me twice on the stairs and eventually threatened to tell my father if she found me there again, so I went outside instead.

Our garden was narrow and badly designed. My father employed a gardener despite possessing very little interest in anything the man grew, while my mother knew the name of every plant and frequently disagreed with his pruning. I sat on the low wall beside an apple tree and tried to reconstruct the inside of a human abdomen from memory. I had seen illustrations, though none that were useful. Religious paintings exposed hearts for symbolic purposes. Classical statues showed every surface and nothing underneath it. There were books in my father’s study, but nothing that would tell me what I wanted.

So I imagined, without much success. The inside of my mother became an indistinct arrangement of reddish parts, any one of which might be hurting her and none of which I could properly name.

That afternoon she vomited. By evening she could barely bear anyone touching her stomach. The doctors spoke of inflammation having spread. They used compresses and gave her laudanum, which eased the pain for a while and made conversation difficult. My father stopped reading the newspaper.

On the third morning I was allowed into the room without having to lie about permission. My mother looked smaller. I do not know whether dying people truly appear smaller or whether memory reduces them because we already know they are leaving, but her face seemed to have sharpened overnight. She recognised me at once.

“Edmund.”

I came closer. My father stood on the other side of the bed. He had not shaved.

“Don’t tire your mother,” he said.

She moved her eyes towards him. “He rarely tires me.”

“I do sometimes,” I said.

“Yes. But not today.”

That pleased her enough to produce something like her usual smile. I wanted to ask whether it still hurt, but I did not. This has always interested me. I had spent three days asking questions nobody wanted, listening where I should not and trying to understand what was happening inside her body; yet when there was almost no time left, another fact was the last thing I wanted. I wanted my mother not to die. Children understand that distinction more easily than adults sometimes suppose.

She died shortly after midday. I was downstairs when it happened because nobody thought I should be present. Years later, when families asked whether a child ought to see a dying parent, I never knew what to tell them. I had been spared something unpleasant, certainly. I had also spent much of my life resenting people who decided what truths other people could endure.

My father came to find me himself. Instead of remaining standing, as he generally did when speaking to me, he sat down beside me. That frightened me before he said anything. One button of his waistcoat had been fastened through the wrong hole, and I remember staring at it because I had never seen him dress incorrectly.

“Your mother has died,” he said.

I continued looking at the button.

“Did the doctor find out what it was?”

He put a hand over his eyes.

I wish I could tell you that I immediately understood the cruelty of the question. I did not. At ten it seemed entirely reasonable. Something had killed her; the doctors had spent three days trying to identify it; death, if nothing else, ought to have concluded the investigation.

“Not now, Edmund.”

“Can he?”

My father lowered his hand. “What?”

“Find out.”

“It doesn’t matter now.”

“Yes, it does.”

His expression hardened in the familiar way that meant I had reached the boundary of his patience and ought to retreat. I did not.

“If they look,” I said. “The doctor said he didn’t know.”

“Your mother has just died.”

“I know.”

“Then behave as though you know.”

I went quiet. He stood and left the room.

That might have been the end of the matter if I had not heard the doctors later that afternoon. One had remained in the house and another returned. They spoke with my father in the library. I was sent to the kitchen, which naturally meant I went nowhere near the kitchen, and this time I stood outside the library door.

Their conversation was initially too low to follow. Then my father said, very clearly, “No.”

A doctor replied, and my father’s answer came louder.

“I said no.”

“It may provide an explanation.”

“I have no interest in explanations bought at that price.”

“Mr Wetherby-”

“My wife has suffered enough.”

There was a pause long enough for me to hear the clock on the library mantel. One of the doctors said something about the knowledge being useful to the family.

My father gave a short, furious laugh. “What possible use could it be to her?”

None, obviously. That was the question he had asked, and it took me years to understand it. At ten, however, I thought he had misunderstood the purpose entirely.

I moved closer to the door and a floorboard betrayed me. The conversation stopped. A moment later the door opened and my father looked down at me. There are occasions when one realises, with perfect clarity, that an adult has known about one’s supposedly secret behaviour for much longer than one imagined.

“Go upstairs.”

“What did he want to do?”

“Edmund.”

“To Mother.”

One of the physicians appeared behind him, and my father turned sufficiently for me to see the man’s face. He looked embarrassed, which made everything worse.

“What did he want?”

My father stared at me for a moment before answering. “He wished to perform an examination.”

“What sort?”

“After death.”

I understood, or believed I did.

“Then let him.”

Something crossed my father’s face that I had never seen before and did not see again for many years. He slapped me. It was not hard enough to knock me down, but hard enough that I remembered it. The physician stepped forward immediately. My father looked more shocked than I was, while I stood with a hand against my cheek and wondered why everyone in the passage had suddenly become so still.

“Go to your room,” he said eventually, and this time I went.

I sat on the floor beside my bed until the mark faded. I did not cry, which was not because I was unusually brave. I was furious. My father had prevented the doctors from discovering the truth because he considered cutting my mother’s dead body worse than leaving the cause of her death unknown. The distinction seemed incomprehensible to me. She could no longer feel pain. She could no longer object. Whatever had happened inside her still existed in some form, waiting to be seen, and the adults preferred ignorance because knowledge offended them.

There was no examination. My mother was buried, and my father never discussed the matter with me again.

Much later, after I had learned enough anatomy to reconstruct her symptoms with something approaching competence, I formed an opinion about the cause. Acute inflammation beginning in the lower right abdomen, deterioration, spreading infection, severe tenderness, fever, vomiting and death after several days suggest to me that an inflamed structure in the bowel perforated and produced fatal peritonitis. I cannot prove it, and that is worth stating. I have spent a lifetime being irritated by people who promote probability into certainty merely because certainty makes a better story. My mother’s body was never examined. The evidence was buried with her. What remains is inference.

Even today, after everything I subsequently learned, I cannot tell you with certainty what killed my mother. There is that sentence again.

For years I thought the tragedy lay in our not knowing. I was wrong. The tragedy was that she died; the ignorance merely offended me personally, and it took me an indecently long time to appreciate the difference. At ten, however, I carried away something much simpler and much more dangerous: the body contained answers, and when people refused to look, the answers remained inside.