A Coat of Varnish

by C. P. Snow

  He remained still, except for the direction of his glances, which travelled from the body round the room. He was long-sighted, and the detail of the spilled-out objects thirty feet away he could make out as though it were bold print.

  He didn’t take a note. Note-taking on the spot didn’t suit him. It seemed to shut out impressions which were lurking on the edge of observation. Perhaps that was a minor vanity, for he had faith in his memory. Although he carried a recording machine in his pocket, he rarely used it. He preferred to give reminders to Shingler, who could feed them into his own machine. Then photographs were the best recorders of all.

  Soon the first photographs were being taken. After some more solitary moments, he called to Shingler: ‘Ready now.’ Shingler came in with a photographic officer. For the first series of shots, Shingler didn’t need instructions. The camera clicked, Lady Ashbrook was photographed more often and from more angles than ever in the past, even when as a young society beauty she had been caught by journalists after a supper party with the Prince of Wales. The body finished with, Briers told Shingler what shots he wanted round the room. The visual scouring clicked on.

  Shortly after nine-fifty, the constable on duty outside let another man into the room. He was carrying a bag, his face was flushed. His first act was to take off his jacket and throw it back to the constable. ‘Too hot for this lark,’ he said in a euphonious tenor. ‘Sorry I’m late, Frank.’

  ‘You always are.’

  In fact, he had come with maximum celerity. This was Owen Morgan, Professor of Forensic Science, who with the curious Anglo-Saxon lack of inventiveness about nicknames was known as Taffy. He was heavily set, fair, round-faced. He and Briers had worked together often. They had respect for each other, and a kind of protective friendship. Each thought the other a master of his trade. They found it necessary to express this by outbursts of sparring, or what used to be called ribbing. This didn’t seem particularly appropriate for either of them.

  ‘I suppose everyone’s made a mess of things already,’ Morgan said, as a thoughtful preliminary. He wasn’t referring to the casualty or the litter on the floor.

  ‘Oh, yes, our prints and traces, they’re all over the place.’ Briers was responding in kind.

  ‘Actually, Professor,’ said Shingler, in a placatory manner and a south-of-the-river accent, ‘nothing’s been touched. It’s all yours.’

  ‘That’s something, I suppose,’ Morgan said, as though displeased. He hadn’t met Shingler before, and Briers introduced them. Morgan said: ‘Well, let’s have a look.’

  He put on a pair of near-transparent gloves, trod with elephantine delicacy over particles on the floor, and began to touch the body. Out of proportion to his bulky chest and stomach, his hands were small, delicate, quick-moving, adept. He pulled up an eyelid, glanced at the scalp wounds, sniffed like one who had just opened a good bottle. He twitched an arm, which was limp, all stiffness departed. He turned back the collar of the dress and exposed a bruise on the upper arm. Carefully he passed his fingers round the neck. He grunted, and said: ‘Nothing much in it for me.’ He was turning back to Briers. ‘It’s going to be your problem, not mine. Unless you know already.’

  Briers shook his head. ‘Tell us. What do you get paid for?’

  ‘My God,’ Morgan broke out, ‘why aren’t you coppers given a course in medicine? If you were capable of taking it in. Have you looked at her face, man? Couldn’t you see the spots? And on the eyelids? It’s too bloody clear. Nothing in it for me.’

  ‘Come off it. You mean she was strangled?’

  ‘What else? Very easy with a woman that age. Almost certainly from in front, coming from her right-hand side. There was a bit of a struggle. One or two bruises. Not much good struggling at that age. I shall want photographs of the bruises, of course. Before I cut her up.’

  ‘So shall we,’ said Briers. ‘What about her head being bashed in?’

  ‘Done after death.’

  ‘How long after?’

  ‘Difficult to say. Not a great deal of blood. But it might have been done very soon after.’

  ‘Might have been a frenzy. We’ve seen that before, haven’t we?’

  ‘We have.’

  They were both used to actions after a killing. More often than not, they would have said, they were not nice for the public to know.

  ‘She passed water, of course,’ Morgan commented. The other hadn’t seen him make an examination, but his nose was acute. ‘No defecation, I think. Her bowels can’t have been loose.’

  ‘Any semen?’

  ‘That I can’t tell you till I get her to the hospital.’ They were used to such consequences, too. They dropped into the formal textbook words. They made it that much more abstract, more hygienic.

  Briers asked more questions; Shingler, anxious not to be left out, putting in his own. Had the body been moved after the murder and the blows on the head? Morgan thought not. The blood on the floor and the urine staining didn’t look like it. ‘You mean,’ said Shingler, ‘he just killed her, stove her head in afterwards and left her.’

  ‘That seems to be the form.’

  ‘Time of the murder – any idea?’ Briers asked.

  ‘That’ll have to wait till the hospital as well. Temperature won’t tell us anything after this time. Maggots may. The larvae boys are beginning to be useful – you’ve seen what they can do. There must be plenty of infestation. The maggots have come along damn quickly in this weather. You can see them. My guess is that she’s been dead about thirty-six hours, plus or minus three or four. Saturday night, that would take you back to. But we might get a bit nearer than that. Look, have you finished here? It’s time we got down to some serious work.’

  Briers required some more tests, on the floor and the walls around the body, and called in a laboratory man. Then the body was lifted on to a stretcher, and carried down to the pavement. A few people were watching, for news had filtered round the Square and farther off. A miniature convoy, three vehicles, moved off, ambulance in the lead, Briers’ police car, Morgan’s private one.

  The convoy got through with police speed. Soon they were moving along a wide East End street, low buildings, humble paint-peeling shops, Jewish names, shields of David. Shingler, sitting beside Briers in the back seat, tried to talk. Briers did not respond. He had enough thoughts to occupy him.

  11

  The main hospital building was late nineteenth-century, solid and dark, but that they were not entering. Morgan’s domain was down a side street, small houses run together, a post-war assembly, including a couple of prefabs. There was a large bright-painted notice, as outside a pub or a trend-seeking church, which read: ‘Department of Forensic Science and Morbid Anatomy.’ Morgan’s domain might be ramshackle, but he was proud of it.

  When the others had got out of their car, he said to Briers: ‘No reason to hang about, is there?’

  In fact, none of them gave the appearance of hurrying. That was a beginner’s fault. Briers and Morgan kept to a tempo without spurts or stops. One of Morgan’s staff met them: he was carrying two notes addressed to DCS Briers. Briers skimmed through them, passed them to Shingler. They were briefs from the Yard, with bits of information about Lady Ashbrook. All formal – age, marriages, names of relatives.

  They followed Morgan into the mortuary. Under the strip lighting, there was one large room with stone slab-tables, white, anonymous. Another, smaller with a single table, also shone by the daylight lamp. In the smaller room, the mortuary superintendent, introduced as Agnew, was waiting, already wearing a laboratory coat, olive-coloured, not white. In an alcove, they put on similar coats. There were masks hanging up in that robing-room, but Morgan did not take one or invite them to. He had a reputation for haranguing his pupils: Smell was too important to play tricks with.

  When they returned to the mortuary, they could still, from the small room which Morgan kept for dissections, look out to the big classroom. They clustered round the single slab. The party had become Mor
gan himself, one other medical man, the superintendent and a technical assistant, Briers, Shingler, and the photographer. To begin with, the body had been propped up in a chair standing by the dissecting-table. It was exactly as it had been in the drawing-room, clothed, untouched.

  ‘Right?’ Morgan said.

  ‘Right.’ Briers nodded.

  ‘From the head down. Hair off later, of course.’

  The camera clicked, in front of the head, at the side, from on top.

  ‘Pictures of those wounds,’ Briers instructed.

  ‘I want swabs. Get them to the larvae boys straight away,’ Morgan said to Agnew. ‘Tell them it’s priority.’ Swabs of the nose and mouth. From both there had been a discharge of both blood and mucus, and maggots had been moving. ‘Also for the larvae boys.’

  More camera clicks.

  ‘Now get the clothes off. We want to know if anything was put on after she was killed. Go slow.’

  That was Morgan speaking. Briers added: ‘Photographs at all stages.’ Carefully, with clinical caution, the hammer was eased out of the head. Photographs of the crevices. Then Agnew and his assistant stripped off the clothing. It was easy. In the heat, she had been wearing little. The dress came off. Morgan interrupted here, to have an inspection of the bruises on her neck and upper arms. ‘Not much force,’ he muttered to Briers. Throughout, Shingler was whispering into his recorder.

  Under the dress, a silk slip. ‘No stains visible,’ said Agnew. ‘You’ll test it,’ Morgan replied. A light bra, a very light girdle.

  ‘She didn’t need that,’ Morgan muttered. ‘How old was she?’

  Briers told him.

  Another mutter. ‘Christ Almighty, she kept her figure.’

  The body would not have seemed so thin as in her clothes, except for the legs below the knees.

  ‘Who was she, by the way?’ Morgan, sotto voce, to Briers. Again Briers told him.

  For the first time, Morgan exclaimed out loud.

  ‘My God,’ he said. ‘One of the Big People.’ He had assumed a Welsh lilt, in which he never spoke. This was some obscure joke, lost to all present but himself.

  Stockings off. Silk knickers. ‘Test those. You’ll find urine. I want to know if there’s anything else.’

  The instructions were unnecessary. Agnew was as experienced as Morgan himself.

  ‘That’s that,’ Morgan said. ‘Get her ready, will you? Ten minutes do you?’

  ‘Just about.’ Agnew was unfussed.

  ‘We’ll go outside, then.’ Morgan took them into the open. ‘You’re allowed a cigarette, now,’ he said to Briers.

  As Morgan knew, Briers was an addictive smoker, deprived for hours that morning. He promptly took out a packet. Both he and Morgan were unusually quiet, and it was Shingler, alert, slick as his own shining black hair, who made conversation. He was alert and observant, and had to be listened to.

  ‘We’ll give them a quarter of an hour,’ said Morgan, as though he were waiting for unpunctual guests. Then, not delaying for quite as long, they went back to the mortuary.

  The body lay stretched out flat on the table. Hair gone from head and body. The head looked much smaller without its hair. The body looked clean, thin but not skeletal, young. Morgan had already said that she was abnormally well preserved. But he, who had dealt with so many bodies, had already noted, what amorists had discovered long ago, that, though faces usually aged, bodies often didn’t. To some, that had been an agreeable discovery.

  ‘Right,’ Morgan said. He was spreading his nostrils, as he was to do several times during the next half-hour. There was, in the drawing-room, a tinge of the sweet smell of corruption. Nothing else yet, though. Except for another tinge, which he wished wasn’t present, the smell of formaldehyde from a previous operation.

  Without the policeman realising, Agnew was already taking off the skull cap. He brought out the brain and handed it, as though it was the most natural of gifts, to Morgan. Morgan studied it for seconds and said: ‘Two knocks. The second knock would have killed her. If she hadn’t been dead already.’

  At that point Morgan took over. There was nothing against the cut from throat to pubis for this dissection, and he made it. He often had a taste for the great V cut, Briers was thinking as he watched. Morgan extracted lungs and heart. ‘Not an indication, nothing wrong. She was stronger than most of us,’ he said with a touch of envy. Organs deposited in the sink, in a neat row. Liver, kidneys. The stomach bag he held on to longer.

  ‘We’d better have this gone over. We may as well know what she ate at her last meal.’ He was fingering one of the passages. ‘She may have had some trouble here. Nothing pathological, I think. Wear and tear. It could have been inconvenient.’

  The body lay on the table, a cavity, nothing else. The organs were on display. Only the doctors, and perhaps Agnew, could have distinguished them from their own organs if they had been on exhibition, too. Or have distinguished them from the offal in an old-fashioned butcher’s shop.

  ‘That’s as much as we can do for now.’ Morgan left them all standing, went out, came back with clean white hands. He spoke to Briers: ‘Let’s go along and have a talk.’ He said to Shingler: ‘Will you come, too?’ He asked the question as though he would have preferred Shingler to decline, but that was unlikely.

  ‘Going along’ meant a progress. Across alleyways, up stairs and down corridors, as though in an imperfectly adapted hotel, to Morgan’s office. A cluttered room, with photographs of track teams, of medical groups and, apparently somewhat out of place, of sets of teeth. These were actually mementoes of a case reported in Famous British Trials, in which Morgan had given decisive evidence. ‘Having a talk’ in that subdued mortuary language meant, first and foremost, having a drink. As soon as they reached the room, Morgan was feeling for a whisky bottle behind his desk. He poured Briers a stiff drink, took a stiffer one himself. Shingler took a drink, diluted it, sipped at it. The others were downing theirs.

  Sometimes they talked, patting references across like so many ping-pong balls, as though they were careless. They certainly talked like professionals, as though they were machines. The fact was, they were relieved to be finished with the post-mortem. Yes, Morgan had done many. Yes, he liked using his skill, and showing it. Yes, Briers loved his job and snatched at the help that the pathologist could give him. But there were parts of the job, and this was one, which were still a submerged strain. He and Morgan were both hearty natural men, and sometimes they showed it. It broke out in their overdone matiness. Most of their time they lived close to death. But they didn’t like death. As he had his packet of cigarettes in front of him, Briers was more at ease. No one enjoyed a post-mortem. No one except the indifferent perhaps. Norman Shingler here seemed totally unaffected. He was learning from post-mortems, intent, preoccupied, just preoccupied with learning his job.

  Briers lit another cigarette, and they spoke as colleagues, work in front of them, coping with the case.

  ‘Some of it’s straightforward,’ he said. ‘Cause of death. No doubt in hell what that was. Why her skull was smashed later you’ll have to find out. I can’t be any good to you there. Time of death? We’re getting a bit closer. You’ll be lucky if anything more positive crops up. Unless one of your coppers comes up with an eyewitness. But, then, I shouldn’t believe him, after all I’ve been through with you. Anyway, you’ve heard the score.’

  Since they came into the room, there had been two telephone calls. One was from the entomologists. Morgan roared out what he was hearing. First-generation larvae, second-generation larvae, of course. Some argument over the phone. Morgan spoke back into the room. ‘Actually it’s pretty near what I guessed. Assuming her window was open, temperature not lower than twenty-five Centigrade – I told them what the conditions were, the bloody fools – earliest time for infestation would be 7 p.m. on Saturday night, latest time 11 p.m. That will have to be good enough.’

  ‘Head wounds post-date the murder,’ Briers said. ‘So time of murder had to be
earlier, probably not much.’

  ‘Still, it’s Saturday evening-to-night, not late night,’ Morgan said.

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Briers.

  The second report over the telephone was shorter and simple. It just said – no trace of semen. Morgan was surprised. He had found nothing by sight and touch, but nevertheless he was surprised. Briers was robustly teasing him: ‘You’ve seen too many murders, you have, Taffy.’

  Morgan took another sizeable whisky, but not Briers. It was now getting on into the afternoon. None of them had eaten. The older men showed no sign of the passing of time. About half-past two Briers said that he had work to do. He and Morgan parted on another robust note, Morgan saying that if the police got into inextricable trouble he would come and sort it out.

  12

  In the local police station half a mile away from Lady Ashbrook’s house, which Briers had not yet been inside that day, or as far as that went at any other time, he did have work to do. One of his aides, Detective Inspector Flamson, was setting up what he chose to call the Incident Room. Flamson was homely but handpicked. Filing cabinets were already installed, files waiting for Briers on a long table covered with green baize. A Press officer from the Yard was waiting. He had drafted a statement, non-committal, bare. Briers said that that would serve for today. Press conference tomorrow afternoon. Nothing much to say, Flamson reported. ‘Never mind,’ said Briers, ‘we’re used to that.’ Flamson had organised the first squad, who were out on enquiries house to house. Personnel? Yard officers, local ones, Division crime squads, local crime squads. ‘Well done,’ Briers said. ‘How many?’ About thirty that afternoon. ‘We shall want a hell of a lot more,’ said Briers. ‘Still, we’re in business.’