Read Online Simeon's Bride by Alison G. Taylor - Free Book Online Page A

swallow a fly if you’re not careful, then you’ll be like that old lady who had to swallow a spider to catch the fly.’ He surveyed McKenna speculatively. ‘Be interesting doing an autopsy on you after you’d swallowed the horse, wouldn’t it?’
    Jack giggled. McKenna glared at him and the doctor. ‘Are you having a bit of fun at my expense?’ he demanded.
    ‘No, I’m not. Straight up, this is, in your criminal parlance.’ Dr Roberts removed his surgical gloves. ‘After you’d told me that yarn the other day, I went to look in the archives in Caernarfon. It’s all there, word for word as you heard it. This is your Rebekah, final resting place finally found. It actually says “Resting place unknown” in the records. What a thing, eh? They’ll be able to fill in the gaps and draw a line under that story now. She’ll have to have a proper funeral, of course. Wonder who’ll arrange that?’ he asked. ‘Wouldn’t be quite right just to throw her into an unmarked grave and toss quicklime on her, would it? She’s a bit of history.’
    ‘Will you be cutting her up?’ Jack asked.
    ‘Oh, most certainly.’ Dr Roberts surveyed the body. ‘Very interesting it’ll be, as well. I’ve never had occasion to autopsy an executed criminal before. They’d abolished the death penalty before I started practising, you know. Be able to see how efficient they were in those days, won’t I?’ he added, sneaking a look at McKenna.
    ‘I think you’ve got something wrong with you, I really do,’ McKenna told him. ‘You treat these poor devils like specimens or something!’
    ‘Well, this one at least is a bit academic, so to speak, isn’t she?’
    ‘Are you really sure it’s Rebekah, Dr Roberts?’ Jack asked.
    ‘Look for yourselves,’ he invited. ‘Come on, McKenna, there’s no need to be squeamish. She won’t bite.’
    ‘Not all of us share your ghoulish interest in corpses,’ McKenna snapped. ‘How can you be so sure it’s this Rebekah?’
    ‘She’s virtually mummified,’ the pathologist said. ‘Comes from being in ground like this. If she’d been put anywhere else, she’d be nothing but dust by now.’ He turned to the four men waiting silently in the trench. ‘Let’s move her, shall we? And make sure you put all those bits of fabric in with her. I want those.’
    Jack and the pathologist walked together to the parked cars and the mortuary van, McKenna in front, but close enough to hear the pathologist’s conversation. ‘D’you know, Jack, after the riots at Strangeways Prison, they had to dig up the burial ground for the new extensions,’ he was saying. ‘Took nearly forty bodies out of there, and gave them a proper Christian burial.’
    ‘Who were they?’ Jack wanted to know.
    ‘About fifty years’ worth of executions, if not more. I’ve got some details on it at home, if you’d care to have a read. Who they were, why they were topped, when….’
    McKenna left them gossiping by the vehicles, and walked a little way into the woods. Darkness closed about him and, within a few paces, he was out of sight and earshot of the others, surrounded by whispering silence. Hopeless, of course, to expect to find the man he had seen, or follow the way he had gone. The familiar smell of rotting leaves and damp filled his mouth and nose. He stood for a while, trying to look through the trees, then turned to go back to the others, and knew a moment’s panic when he thought he might be lost. Only headlights glimmering at the edge of the wood as one of the cars set off up the track showed him the way out.
    Rebekah’s pitiful remains lay on the autopsy table in the hospital mortuary, denuded now of the scraps of cloth which had hung from her shrivelled flesh. Looking at her, Dr Roberts felt it would be almost sacrilege to cut into her, as if destroying a little of his own history with a few strokes of the scalpel.
    Emrys stood beside him. ‘D’you really think we ought to, Doctor?’ he asked.