Page 53 of The Bone Code
“The one in the cemetery the day of the exhumation.”
“You didn’t like her hair.”
Eyes rolling, I thrust the paper at Ryan.
A quick glance at the photo, then, “That’s you.”
“It is.”
“You look good.”
I definitely did not.
“Did you speak with her?” Ryan asked.
“No way.”
“The coverage seems accurate. 2006. A woman and a child. The—”
“That’s not the point.”
“There’s no byline credit. Do you think your carrot-headed shutterbug wrote the story?”
I shrugged. “Who knows?”
“Maybe Arbour acted as a source?”
“Or one of his employees.”
Ryan thought a moment. Then, “No harm, no foul. Exposure might even help. You know, spur the public into thinking about the victims again.”
“Maybe.”
I let it go.
My mistake.
That night, Ryan walked to Le Roi du Wonton for Chinese takeout. After dinner, he watched the Canadiens play the Bruins, the Islanders play the Sharks, someone else play someone else. I took a stab at Polly Beecroft’s request.
Seated at the dining-room table, I booted my laptop and pulled up the shots I’d taken of Beecroft’s death mask photo. Then, unsure what else to do, I started with Anne’s discovery about UCL.
As Anne said, the Robert Noel Collection of Life and Death Masks, consisting of thirty-seven specimens, was the work of an avid nineteenth-century German phrenologist. By casting the heads of both the living and the dead, Noel hoped to validate his belief that cranial lumps and bumps provided insight into a person’s character.
As Anne also said, Noel’s collection was displayed at various times in the past. Once at the Galton Eugenics Laboratory, once at the Slade School of Fine Art. Until recently, little else was known about it. The first breakthrough concerning its history came when one of the cast heads was offered to a group of museum studies students as their second-year collections curatorship module. The specimen chosen was the only one retaining its original documentation, the inscriptionIrmscher N; 34, murderer, decapitated 1840hand-scrawled on a label attached to its neck.
I already knew, again thanks to Anne, that the crafty students had managed to unearth an obscure volume in the British library:Notes Biographical and Phrenological Illustrating a Collection of Casts. Authored by Noel, the book provided background on every individual in his assemblage.
What Anne hadn’t conveyed was the absolutely mesmerizing nature of Noel’s undertaking. Nor had she mentioned the YouTube clips describing subjects in both of his “criminal” and “intellectual” categories.
As Ryan focused on nets and pucks, occasionally erupting with a shout or a groan, I found myself caught up in the videos. It was like wandering among old tombstones, imagining the tragedies reflected in the inscriptions.
Carl Gottlob Irmscher drowned his two-year-old son in a stream, then returned the dead child’s body to his bed. Later, fearful of discovery, Irmscher sent his wife to the cellar for potatoes and killed her with an ax as she descended the stairs. He was executed by decapitation with a sword. Irmscher’s mask shows a man with lips parted, eyebrow hairs embedded in the plaster.
Christian Gottlieb Meyer murdered his children by throwing them down a mine shaft. He was convicted and died in prison. Interestingly, Noel’s take on Meyer differed sharply from his assessment of Irmscher. According to Noel’s notes, the region of Meyer’s head reflecting love of children was quite prominent, and nothing on his skull indicated a tendency toward violence. Meyer’s actions, Noel concluded, derived from overuse of alcohol and fear of institutionalization of his kids. Despite the infanticide, Noel classified Meyer as “nonviolent.” A little fudging of the data, doc?
The only female in the Noel collection was Johanne Rehn. Wishing to avoid rejection by a new lover, Rehn threw her daughter into a cesspit headfirst. An autopsy showed that the child had survived the fall but drowned in the filth. Noel categorized Rehn as criminal, noting that her frontal region was small compared to the “hinder part of the crown,” rendering Rehn “deficient in her faculty of love of children.” Rehn was beheaded in front of a crowd of twenty thousand. The executioner missed twice, and the false starts, sutured postmortem, were evident in her death mask.
On and on, I looped through videos and written accounts, fascinated by the faces and the stories behind them. Not just Noel’ssubjects but hundreds of others, some famous, some not. I discovered nothing pertinent to Polly Beecroft’s missing great-aunt.
