by Aaron Elkins
The voice on the other end of the line was a stranger’s; hearty, aggravatingly jovial under the circumstances, and very English.
"Professor Oliver? Wilson Merrill here. Dr. Merrill. Coroner’s pathologist, Dorset Constabulary. I’d heard you were in Charmouth, and I know you’re on holiday and all, but, well, I wondered if you’d be interested in coming by the mortuary here in Bridport and looking at a body. We’d be most grateful."
The humor of the situation was not lost on Gideon. "You’d like me to look at a body?" he asked, his eyes on Julie, who now knelt on the bed, her hands clasped demurely in her lap.
"Yes, rather. It was found this morning on the shore near Seaton. I’ve done all I can with it, but I thought, inasmuch as you were nearby, that it might engage your interest. I’ve read about your work, of course, and it would be a pleasure to meet you."
"Uh, you’d like me to look at it now? Tonight?"
"Well, yes, unless it isn’t convenient." The voice hesitated. "It is only nine-fifteen, isn’t it? Yes, of course it is. The remains are being shipped to the forensic science laboratories in London tomorrow, and I simply thought you might want to have a go at them while they were still here. But if it can’t be managed…"
"What do you have?"
"Adult male. Greatly advanced state of decomposition, but the skeleton’s whole. Husky fellow; Caucasian, I think."
Gideon hesitated, then looked at Julie again. He shook his head firmly. "I’m afraid it’s out of the question this evening, Dr. Merrill. I’m sorry, I’d like to have helped."
"What about tomorrow morning?"
"Well, yes, I think I could do that…"
"I’ll be there for you at eight o’clock. Earlier if you like."
"No, eight’s fine. See you then."
"Righto. Thanks so much. I can’t wait to see you in action."
Gideon put the telephone down and looked up to see Julie getting off the bed.
"Hey," he said, moving to her, "where do you think you’re going?"
"Well, I thought you weren’t interested anymore. Your mind’s on other things."
"Why would you think that?" he asked, smiling. But he was thinking about other things. About Randall Alexander: adult male, husky, Caucasian. And missing from Stonebarrow Fell for two weeks.
"Why would I think that?" She laughed and gently poked him in the abdomen with a finger. "Because you’ve been standing there in front of me with your shirt unbuttoned, and you’ve forgotten to suck in your tummy and stick out your chest."
"Oh, no!" he exclaimed, pulling in the one and thrusting forward the other. "Now you know the awful truth about me. Another flabby-chested, pot-bellied fraud."
"You phony, you’re gorgeous and you know it. C’mere." She seized his belt and dragged him down beside her. "Mmm," she said, "I’m interested in bodies myself."
"Me too," he said, shifting his weight so they toppled gently sideways onto the bed, still embracing, their heads on the pillows. "One particular body, anyway. Now, where were we?"
SEVEN
WILSON Merrill was one of those people who look just the way they sound. Gideon had pictured a squarish, energetic man of forty-five, with a ruddy face and jolly eyes, and so he was. He arrived punctually at eight, just as Gideon and Julie were finishing a gigantic breakfast in the dining room. They were alone, Robyn and Arbuckle having started early on the two-hundred mile round trip to Swanscombe.
Merrill promptly accepted Gideon’s invitation to join them for a cup of coffee and plumped himself down at their table. They passed a few minutes in pleasant enough conversation about weather and countryside, and Merrill recommended several country walks they might like, being himself a great walker. (It was not hard to imagine him striding over the downs in knickerbockers and tweed coat, with a shooting stick under his arm, if they still had such things.)
When Julie said, "I hear you’ve found something in my husband’s line," he was off at once, with energy and relish, before he even swallowed the coffee in his mouth.
"Um," he said, and swallowed. "Ah. Yes. Male. Caucasian, I think, but hard to say. An awful lot of putrefaction, and the fish and crustaceans have been having a jolly time with him. Not much face to speak of. They’ve eaten away most of the soft parts—lips, eyelids, nostrils, that sort of thing. And of course the bloating and hypostasis have produced the most grotesque distortions."
He put his hands to his face to demonstrate God knows what, but Gideon had noted that Julie was sitting rigidly in her chair, not chewing the toast that had gone into her mouth a moment before. Her eyes caught his in a frantic plea for help.
"Dr. Merrill," Gideon said quickly, "my wife isn’t terribly familiar with this sort of thing."
Merrill’s hands dropped away from the corners of his mouth, which he had begun to tug outward in a spirited rendition of bloating and hypostasis. "Oh dear, Mrs. Oliver," he said, looking genuinely distressed, "how completely thoughtless of me. Look here, I am sorry."
"That’s quite all right," Julie said a little thickly, around the toast. She closed her eyes and, with an effort, swallowed. "No problem at all. But it is almost eight-thirty," she said brightly, "and I insist on having my husband back in time for one of those walks. So perhaps you’d both better get to your, er, remains."
"I say, I am sorry," Merrill said again as he pulled the little Fiat into the light traffic of Charmouth’s main street. "My wife doesn’t mind in the least when I go on about bodies and things." He chuckled. "Not that I suppose she hears a word of it after all these years. But really, I must remember that many women are rather sensitive about these things."
Not only women, Gideon thought; men, too. Sometimes even physical anthropologists. Julie had not been the only one whose appetite had vanished so suddenly. He was not, after all, a pathologist but an evolutionary theoretician, a student of early man. Naturally, an understanding of what bones could tell was essential, and it was this knowledge that had led him—how, he could hardly remember—into spending a substantial portion of this time with policemen, pathologists, and corpses.
He had never tired of learning about the human skeleton, and to sit down over a fifty-thousand-year-old skull, to tease from it the essence of the long-gone, living man— what he looked like, what he ate, what he did, how he died, sometimes even what he thought—this was the most engrossing activity of his life …his work life, anyway. (Julie’s arrival on the scene had drastically reordered his priorities, and all to the good.)
Still, an analytical session with an ancient skeleton was something he always looked forward to, "ancient" being the key word. A dry brown skull or a dusty old femur had a clean, curved beauty of its own, apparent to the educated eye or fingertip. But a greasy, decomposing corpse, always pathetic, frequently the victim of a horrendous crime, was another thing. Gideon had never grown used to them.
"Were you able to establish cause of death?" he asked. "Drowning?"
"Assuredly not," Merrill said with emphasis. "No sign of ‘drowning lung,’ no diatoms in the subpleural tissue or the bone marrow. Definitely not drowning."
"Any other ideas?"
"Well," Merrill said, and looked briefly at Gideon, "yes, I do have some ideas….Would you like to hear them?"
"On second thought, no. I’d be better off coming to my own conclusions. Less chance of bias."
"Quite proper," Merrill said approvingly. "Very professional. Not many are these days, I can tell you."
They drove in silence into the pretty village of Bridport and turned left off A-35 to the very edge of town, where a large hospital and a small police station shared a block of grassy land. They also shared the same mortuary, it seemed. Merrill parked the car in front of the police station, one of those grimly utilitarian Victorian structures of red brick turned by time to the color of dried blood. It consisted of a pair of identical two-story buildings, each with two big brick chimneys crowned with jumbles of sooty chimney pots. On the lawn before the buildings was a small, sad marble column, a
memorial to the village dead of the two world wars, with faded artificial flowers at its base.
"Here we are at last," Merrill chirped when he parked, as if he’d brought them to one of the must-see spots of the British Isles. "In we go."
The entry took them under a gray concrete arch that connected the two dreary buildings and was inscribed with wedge-shaped Roman lettering: covnty constabvlary. On the drab wall of the building on the left was a modern, incongruously bright sign of blue and white: Dorset Police. South Western Divisional Headquarters.
"Mortuary’s here on the right," Merrill said, then glanced at Gideon. "Something on your mind?"
"Yes. Someone’s been missing from the Stonebarrow Fell dig for a couple of weeks; a man named Randy Alexander. Any reason to think it might be him?"
Merrill laughed. "That, my dear fellow, is what we were hoping you’d tell us."
GIDEON’S hope that "mortuary" might signify something a little warmer, a little less dingily depressing than the morgues he’d gotten used to in the United States was quickly extinguished. The Bridport Mortuary might have been a scaled-down replica of the coroner’s morgue in San Francisco’s gloomy old Hall of Justice.
They entered through a sterile little anteroom, unfurnished but for a solitary couch covered in green plastic, which looked fifteen years old but never sat upon. One wall was of glass, like the viewing room in a maternity ward, but this wall was not for viewing the newly living.
"Observation room," Merrill explained unnecessarily, searching through his pockets for the key that would let them pass through.
It is generally only in the movies that people who come to identify corpses walk into the morgue and peer into a drawer to see a chilled body with a red tag tied by a string to its big toe. They’re there, all right, in their drawers, with tags on their toes, but the insides of morgues are almost never seen by the public. Instead, the body to be viewed, decorously clothed in a sheet pulled up around its neck, is wheeled to the viewing-room window on a gurney. If the head has been damaged, the "better" side is presented to the observer. And if there is no better side, a technician will make whatever cosmetic repairs are possible, more to spare the viewer than to aid in the identification.
Merrill finally found the right key. "At last! Thought I was going to have to disappoint you." He laughed happily, and Gideon smiled unconvincingly back as they entered the morgue proper, a small, white-tiled room with two tables, on the nearer of which was what they’d come to see.
"Whew," Gideon said, steeling himself not to shrink back.
"Pretty bad, eh? Of course, once you get something like this out of the water, decomposition speeds up enormously. Naturally, we’ve had it in the freezer overnight. By the by"—Merrill gestured at a stainless-steel door in one wall—"We’ve got a really fascinating case in there. Poor old fellow was done in by a high-pressure jet of cellulose spray. Astonishing sight. Never seen anything like it. Perhaps if you have time after you finish here—"
"Thanks very much," Gideon said quickly, "but I think I’d better get back as soon as I’m done. I’m on my honeymoon, you know."
"Honeymoon! No, I didn’t know. Congratulations!" Laughing, he led Gideon by the arm toward the corpse. "What’s a newlywed like you doing in a place like this, eh?"
"Eh" is right, Gideon thought.
"Well," Merrill said crisply, "we shan’t keep you long. Now, let’s have a look at this chap."
Gideon made himself look down. He had learned that it was only the first few minutes that were really bad, and that the sooner he got used to it, the better off he’d be. The body, terribly swollen and discolored to a blackish green, lay on its back on a basin-shaped porcelain autopsy table that was tilted slightly so that the pink, transparent fluid that ran sparsely from it dribbled down to a hole at the table’s foot and drained through a rubber tube to collect in a thready puddle in a stoppered sink below—for what purpose Gideon didn’t know and didn’t want to know.
The autopsy had already been performed; the body was sliced from throat to crotch, its ribs spread open like a pair of cupboard doors. The scalp, with its algae-like cap of mud-colored hair, had been peeled back, the top of the skull sawed off, and the brain removed. The skullcap, neatly cleaned, had been placed near the head, flat side down, like a halved coconut, presumably awaiting Gideon’s inspection.
"Well, then," Merrill said, "Where shall we begin?" He clapped his hands softly and squeezed his fingers. He might have been a child looking forward to solving a jig saw puzzle; in a sense he was. "How long would you say he’s been in the water?"
"I’ll accept your judgment on that, Doctor. Outside of the skeleton, I’m afraid I don’t know much about tissue pathology. Besides, the water here is probably colder than what I’m familiar with. That would make a difference, wouldn’t it?"
"Oh, yes, all the difference in the world. It would retard the postmortem changes drastically. Now," he said, slipping comfortably into a teacher’s role, "this is a typical four-weeker."
"Four-weeker? That rules out Alexander. I was talking to him only two weeks ago."
"I said a typical four-weeker. But a body might be caught up in a warm current, for example, or float where there are industrial effluvia that heat the water. Either way, decomposition would be hastened. Or it might run into a particularly voracious school of fish or other flesh-eaters. I grant you, this one seems awfully advanced for two weeks, but let us reserve our conclusions."
At Gideon’s nod of agreement, Merrill resumed his lecture where he’d left off. "Now this, as I say, is a typical four-weeker: The face is gone, as well as the flesh of the hands—no fingerprints from this one—and the meat is pretty well eaten away between ankle and calf. And just look at the maceration! Classic washerwoman’s skin syndrome." With a finger he pushed gently at one wrinkled foot. The skin slid loosely back and forth. "I could slip the dermis off as easily as if it were a sock."
Merrill looked as if he might demonstrate, and Gideon interrupted hurriedly. "So he was fully clothed, then?" Aquatic life, he knew, attacked the uncovered parts of the body first. On a clothed male it would be the head and hands, then the area just above the socks, where the trousers floated free, then the rest.
"Correct, Professor. Leather jacket, jeans, and all the rest. We’ve checked, of course, and the clothing might be Alexander’s, but there’s no positive identification. They’ll be shipped to the Yard today with the body. Now then, does anything else strike you?"
"Well, there’s an odd pattern of lividity. The body fluids seem to have settled in the arms and legs. Chest, too, it looks like. As if he’d been draped over a saw horse when he was killed."
"Ah, very perceptive. Excellent reasoning." Merrill laughed his jolly laugh. "Erroneous conclusion, however. You must remember that although a newly dead body sinks for a few days before floating to the surface, it does not lie upon the ocean floor. No, it hangs suspended, in a shadowy limbo, as if were, between surface and bottom." Merrill’s gentle eyes glittered with enthusiasm. And why not, Gideon thought. Who was he to look askance if Merrill got enthusiastic about cadavers? There were plenty of people who wondered what he found so absorbing in skeletons.
"And," Merrill went on, "what with the torso being the most buoyant part of the body, the corpse naturally turns on its face, its legs and arms trailing below, its head lolling forward, more or less like a great jellyfish." He leaned over, dangled his head and arms, and made a presumably jellyfish-like face. From this unusual position he continued to speak.
"Obviously, the lividity—hypostasis is the better term, really—would therefore be most pronounced in the legs and arms. Face, too." He stood up straight, smiling charmingly. "But of course, this fellow doesn’t have a face, so it’s moot."
"Interesting," said Gideon, and in spite of himself he was interested.
"Yes, isn’t it?" Merrill responded with sincerity. He seemed about to elaborate on the subject but caught himself. "See here, you have a beautiful wife waiting for
you, so let’s get down to our business, which is: What can you tell us from the skeleton?" He went to a metal cabinet. "I have sliding and spreading calipers for you, and dissecting tools."
"And if you have a pair of gloves, I’d appreciate them," Gideon said.
"Gloves?" Merrill turned his head. "You mean rubber gloves?"
"Yes, if you have them."
A faint shadow of surprise flitted over the pathologist’s face. "I suppose we do, if you really want them. For myself, I find the sense of touch in my bare hands extremely sensitive."
I do, too, Gideon thought but did not say. That’s why I want the gloves. If he’d had the nerve, he would have asked for a surgeon’s face mask and a rubber coat.
He slipped on the disposable plastic gloves that Merrill found for him, picked up a probe, and poked gingerly at the gristly tendons and ruined muscles of the face to see the bone underneath. It didn’t take much poking. When the head wobbled on the plastic neck rest, he forced himself to steady it with his other hand. It was, he reminded himself, the first touch that was the worst.
"We don’t expect any miracles, of course," Merrill said, watching with interest, "but if you can give us anything positive that might be helpful in identification, we’d be most grateful. The race, perhaps…"
"You said you thought he was Caucasian?"
"Yes, from the hair. The color’s no help after all this time in the water, obviously, but I had a look at some of the head hair under a microscope. It’s oval in cross section, and relatively fine, both of which suggest a Caucasian. But even hair gets distorted after a month in the water, so I’m not overly confident."
"Well, you’re right. He’s Caucasian."
Merrill beamed. "Oh, but I say…just like that? But don’t you have to measure the breadth of the skull, or index the pelvis, or some such arcane thing?"
"No, there are quite a few indicators visible right here." Gideon said, and delivered a little lecture of his own. The skullcap, he pointed out, was dolichocephalic, quite a bit longer from front to back than from side to side. This was both a Negroid and Caucasoid trait; Mongoloids, on the other hand, tended to be round-headed. Moreover, the malars, or cheekbones, sloped sharply back. In a Mongoloid skull, the cheekbones would be broad planes that projected out to the sides, producing the wide, flat face of the Oriental or the American Indian. Thus, the body was almost certainly not Mongoloid, and it only remained to determine if it was that of a white man or a black man. That distinction, Gideon explained, was not difficult on this particular cranium.