instruments of the trade they will practise tonight: a spade, a pickaxe, an iron bar, ropes, a small saw, some sacks. Taking turns, they start digging up the earth on the fresh pauper’s grave.
It takes time, but they work doggedly, skilfully. They are careful, because even though the watchman has drunk himself to sleep in a neighbouring pub, only a few yards and the darkness and fog separate the graveyard from the backs of the houses on Clement’s Lane. They are poor houses, falling to pieces, slimy and stinking, and they are inhabited by poor people, falling to pieces, but both the shadows know that it is such people — not the wholesome rich — who are likely to charge to the rescue of one of their like, finally fallen to pieces, being dug out of eternal rest by body-snatchers, resurrectionists, lifters, grabs. So they dig carefully, only occasionally stopping to exchange labours and to curse: Why did they plant the devil so deep?... Damn the body bugs, do they have to be out even at night?... Lord, it stinks!
Finally, they reach the coffin, a flimsy affair, easily wrenched open with the iron bar. One of them — the one who is often cursed and does not curse back in reply — jumps into the grave and passes the rope around the corpse. Then he climbs back up and helps his accomplice haul the body out.
His accomplice is not impressed with the corpse. He drops the rope as if it has singed his hands. ‘Damn it’, he says. ‘Damn you.’
‘But John May’, the other replies, ‘it is a well-preserved Thing. Look. Look at the arms.’ He bends down and wrenches open the jaws of the dead man with his thick, stubby fingers. ‘Look’, he adds, ‘a perfect set of grinders. Those teeth alone will fetch two guineas.’
‘Who cares for grinders, you fool? It is the skull that matters.’
‘And what is wrong with it, John May, if I may ask? I have not seen a better skull in my life. Even the hair is clean and unmatted. Will fetch at least...’
John May curses under his breath. ‘It will have to do’, he says finally. ‘You take the body — I will expect five guineas as my share, mind you, at least five — and I will take the head.’
‘I get to keep all I get over five? Everything over? Your word on it, John May?’ Shields rubs his hands, perhaps to keep them warm, or perhaps he is gloating in anticipation of the money that will come his way once the Thing is sold to any one of London’s medical schools or seventeen private anatomy schools.
‘Yes, damn you. Get on with the saw. Don’t stand yapping till dawn; it is getting colder.’
And so, in that empty crowded graveyard, shrouded in fog, smelling of decay, a muffled grating sound is heard as the head of the corpse is separated from its body. Then Shields, a short, powerful man, bundles the body into a sack and carries it out to a waiting cart. John May carries the head in a smaller bag, still cursing the dead man for having such a smooth, normal skull. Will have to do though, he mutters. M’lord will be upset, but something is better than nothing. Then John May sees the possibility of humour in the sentence and reformulates it, emitting the choked grunt that passes for a laugh with him: A Thing is better than nothing.
Soon the sun will be out and the shadows will disperse. Soon someone will discover the open grave and the missing body. Soon a pen-pusher such as Daniel Oates will come to describe the scene for his broadsheet, an artist will sketch the gaping hole for some one-dime pamphlet. Soon the marketplace will buzz with the news and the drawing rooms thrill with the knowledge of the crime. For a few hours at least, the dead man will be missed more than he ever was in his lifetime.
7
Things change, and do not. I recall, around the time I discovered the notes of Amir Ali, reading my first report — or the first one that I fully understood and hence recall — of a riot between Hindus and Muslims. The news report, as was the custom, did not use