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By Root 590 0

of that did go on. “Bodysnatching”, it was called. There was so much of it happening that friends and relatives of anyone who had just died used to keep watch over the grave to stop it being dug up. Some people – rich people – used to have cages built around graves of their relatives to stop anyone getting in. Before they realized what was going on, people used to visit the graves of their loved ones and find them disturbed, as if the bodies had come back to life an’ just crawled out of their own accord.’ He and Sherlock were pushing their way through the crowded streets towards their hotel. ‘Course, once people got to know about the bodysnatchers, they had to change how they went about things. They was quite inventive, the bodysnatchers. They used wooden spades, cos they made less noise than metal ones, an’ they used to dig down at an angle, so that any disturbance to the grave would be a way away, not directly over it. They’d uncover the end of the coffin, smash it open an’ drag the body out with a rope.’

‘All right, but you said this Burke and Hare weren’t bodysnatchers. What were they then?’

‘They was both Irish, for a start,’ Matty replied, ‘an’ they moved to Edinburgh to work as labourers on the Union Canal. Burke ended up stayin’ at a boarding ’ouse run by Hare’s missus. They got to be drinkin’ buddies, an’ they got talkin’ one night about ways of makin’ some money. One of ’em suggested that they could steal the body of someone who ’ad died locally of natural causes an’ ’ad no family, like, an’ sell it to someone at the College who could use it to demonstrate ’uman anatomy to students. It weren’t long before some old pensioner who owed Hare four quid died of natural causes. Burke an’ Hare made sure the coffin that was buried was filled with tree bark, ’an they flogged the body to a Dr Knox ’ere in the city for seven quid.’

‘Very enterprising,’ Sherlock said drily.

‘Problem was that people weren’t dyin’ of natural causes fast enough for ’em, so they decided to ’elp ’em along a bit. First one they actually killed was a local miller. They got ’im drunk on whisky an’ then suffocated ’im. Second one was another pensioner, a woman this time, named Abigail Simpson. After that . . .’ He shrugged.

‘Well, they was off an’ runnin’. Dr Knox would pay ’em a guaranteed sum for every dead body they delivered to ’im, no questions asked – ten quid if the body was in good nick, eight if there was anything wrong with it. They preferred women and kids, of course, cos they was easier to subdue an’ to suffocate.’

Sherlock found he was feeling sick. It was the casual nature of what Burke and Hare had done that offended him. The murders weren’t crimes of passion, or ‘spur of the moment’ incidents – they were a series of what were effectively business decisions. Business decisions that left people dead.

‘How many people did they end up killing?’ he asked quietly as they turned the corner and headed towards the hotel’s front door.

‘Best guess is seventeen,’ Matty answered, ‘over the course of a year.’

‘And didn’t anyone suspect? I mean, the doctor they were selling the bodies to must have realized that they weren’t executed criminals. Hanging must leave a distinct mark on the neck, and those corpses wouldn’t have had that mark.’

‘Dr Knox? Yeah, he knew, all right, although Burke later swore otherwise. He just didn’t want to disrupt the supply of bodies. He was getting a reputation as being the best anatomy teacher around, an’ students were flocking to his lectures, and payin’ for the privilege. He wasn’t going to give all that up.’ He snorted. ‘Story is that there was one bloke that Burke and Hare killed, name of Daft Jamie, who was well known around the town. When Dr Knox uncovered the body in the lecture theatre, ready to cut into it, some of the students recognized it. Knox said that it must be someone else, but he started the dissection on the face first, to make it unrecognizable quickly.’

‘What happened in the end?’ Sherlock asked, as he pushed open the front door. ‘I presume they were found out, otherwise you wouldn’t know