by Andrew Lane
Dunbard nodded. ‘’S right. Strangest thing I ever heard of. Couldn’t make it up, if you know what I mean. ’Parently it’s been ’appening for a while – someone dies, their body is brought into the mortuary for an autopsy, an’ then they’re sent off for burial, but it turns out that there’s less of the bodies bein’ buried than there was at the autopsy. Always different bits missin’ – eyes, ears, hands, feet, anythin’. I did wonder if it was connected to that monster story, but I reckon it’s just students muckin’ around.’
‘Bodysnatchers?’ Sherlock ventured, remembering the lecturer at Christ College.’
‘Nah – they’d’ve taken the whole body. That’s where the money is. Bits of bodies aren’t worth anything.’
‘How did it get discovered?’
He laughed – a bitter sound, like a barking dog. ‘Gent buried ’is wife, then realized she’d been interred along with ’er weddin’ ring, some earrings an’ a pearl necklace, so he ’ad her disinterred. Trouble is, the ears was missin’. Cue big rumpus an’ lots of runnin’ around.’
‘And nobody knows where these body parts have gone, or who took them?’
Dunbard shook his head. ‘Not a clue. The police’re stumped. We’ve run out of different ways of reportin’ the case, so we’ve stopped runnin’ the story.’
‘Didn’t I read that the police questioned a lecturer from Christ Church College?’
‘That’s right,’ Dunbard confirmed. ‘We never actually named ’im, because it turned out ’e had an alibi for all the dates on which things went missin’.’
‘And did you ever talk to the pathologist in the mortuary?’ Sherlock asked. It was an important question, as the answer would dictate what he did next, but he tried to make his tone as innocent as possible.
‘Nah. Tried to, but ’e wouldn’t see me.’ He shrugged. ‘Okay, is that it? Cos I’ve got an important story about silt in the canal to type up.’
‘Yes. Thanks.’ Sherlock started to move away, then turned back. ‘Sorry, but do you have a business card, or a visiting card or something? Just in case I have any more questions?’
Dunbard reached into his shirt pocket and took out a slip of cardboard. ‘’Ere’s me details, but you can find me in this place most days.’ As Sherlock was walking away he heard the man saying, more to himself than to Sherlock, ‘an’ to think I left the London Gazette for this. Supposed to be more responsibility, but the office cat gets out more than I do!’
Sherlock tucked the business card into a pocket of his jacket. He had plans for it, and didn’t want it to get lost.
CHAPTER FIVE
Sherlock left the newspaper building and headed in the direction of the mortuary. Oxford Hospital was an impressive red-brick building set in the middle of a small lawn. The mortuary was in its own single-storey building, set discreetly off to one side. Walking through the hospital grounds towards it, Sherlock took a deep breath and ran over in his mind the story he was going to tell. Of course, it all depended on how well-known the reporter Ainsley Dunbard was. If the doctor who carried out the post-mortems on the bodies of the dead knew Dunbard by sight, then Sherlock’s entire ruse was doomed from the start, but Sherlock had specifically asked Dunbard if he had interviewed the pathologist, and the answer had been in the negative. Surely the reporter would have mentioned if he had known the pathologist from before?
The door to the mortuary was white-painted, with panes of frosted glass set into the top. Sherlock knocked smartly on the glass. A voice from inside called: ‘Enter!’
Sherlock walked in and shut the door behind him. He wasn’t sure what to expect – dead bodies stacked up on shelves perhaps? – and he was a bit nervous as a result, but in fact he found himself standing in a long corridor that ended with the mortuary’s back door, which appeared to be bolted from the inside. The only indication that he was somewhere medical was the strong smell of disinfectant that assailed his nostrils.
‘Yes – who are you?’ a man said, stepping out of one of the side doors. He wore a white coat and gloves, both stained in ways that Sherlock didn’t want to think about. The man himself was elderly, with a thick white moustache and white hair that was brushed straight back from his forehead. His face was lined and also tanned. In a part of his mind, Sherlock wondered if he had been abroad in the recent past.
‘My name is Ainsley Dunbard,’ Sherlock said, holding out the business card he had taken from the real Ainsley Dunbard and holding his breath. This was the point where his bluff might be called. ‘I’m a reporter for the Oxford Post.’
‘You’re a bit young for a reporter, surely?’ the man said, raising bushy eyebrows in surprise. He took off his gloves, reached for the business card and examined it suspiciously.
Sherlock took a relieved breath. The man clearly didn’t know who Dunbard was. ‘I’m actually an apprentice,’ he said apologetically. ‘The paper has taken me on so I can get some work experience. I want to be a full reporter one day.’
‘Good for you,’ the man said. ‘I admire someone with a touch of ambition. M’name’s Lukather – Doctor Wilberforce Lukather. What can I do for you?’
‘I was hoping that the newspaper could do a feature on you,’ Sherlock said. He wanted, of course, to ask about the theft of body parts, but that would raise Lukather’s suspicions straight away, and he would probably be refused an interview. On the other hand, if he started off by asking about the job of a pathologist, and then gradually got around to the thefts – or, even better, Lukather volunteered the information himself – then he would get what he needed and the pathologist would be none the wiser.
‘A feature?’ Lukather said, suspicious but intrigued at the same time. ‘Why on earth would anyone want to know about me?’
‘Well, it’s the final mystery, isn’t it?’ Sherlock asked, remembering his thoughts after the lecture: ‘What happens when we die? How does a vital, alive person suddenly become a block of flesh and bone and tissue? What happens to the soul? What happens to the personality? These questions are the kind of thing that would fascinate our readers, and you are right at the sharp end, dealing with a person’s final moments every day of your life! People will be fascinated!’
‘Never really thought about it that way,’ Lukather said, brushing his moustache. ‘Autopsy work has always been the un-regarded cousin of the medical profession.’
‘Not any more,’ Sherlock promised. ‘I want to open the whole thing out – get your opinions on the whole business of life and death. Would that be all right?’
‘I suppose it would.’ He took a watch from the pocket of his waistcoat. ‘I can spare half an hour, I suppose. I was about to make a pot of tea. Can I interest you in a cup?’
Lukather led the way into a small room with several chairs – somewhere that grieving relatives could be comforted, Sherlock assumed. Light was provided by a large skylight in the roof. They spent the next hour – far longer than the thirty minutes that Lukather had promised – with Sherlock asking questions about the process of death and autopsy, and Lukather answering them carefully and with due gravity. Despite the fact that he desperately wanted to get on to the subject of the theft of body parts, Sherlock was fascinated. This man was, in his own quiet way, a genius! His job – in fact, as it turned out, his passion – was taking the evidence that was set out on the metal tables in his laboratory – the bodies of people who had died unusually or suspiciously – and painstakingly searching inside them for evidence as to how and why they had died. It was very much what Sherlock had started thinking that he might do with his own life, with the exception that it was confined to a laboratory rather than taking place out in the real world. In a strange way it was the kind of thing that Mycroft might have ended up doing, if he could have conducted autopsies from the comfort of an armchair.
Sherlock was particularly interested in how Lukather could tell the difference between an accidental death and a murder. Flattered by the attention, Lukather was very informative on the subject.
‘Let us assume,’ he said, taking a sip of his tea, ‘that you are called in to a place where a man’s body has been discovered. Let us say that it is his bedroom. He is lying beside his bed, face down. There are no obvious marks of violence – no blows to the face, no blood, no stab wounds or suchlike. The body is just lying peacefully on the floor. Now, the average constable might think the man died from a heart attack or a stroke, and perhaps ask the man’s family whether he has been feeling out of sorts recently, but you as a medical man are not so easily convinced. Rather than making a decision and then seeking evidence to back it up, you look for the evidence first and then see where it leads you. So, you have the body brought back to the mortuary here, and you examine it from head to foot. Perhaps you notice that the corpse’s face is unnaturally pink, which may indicate that he has suffocated after breathing in a poisonous gas such as carbon monoxide. Now, having found that, you ask the constable to investigate the man’s bedroom carefully. Is there a stove there that might have produced carbon monoxide that filled the room so that he breathed it in? Are the windows closed, despite the fact that it is summer, meaning that perhaps someone deliberately closed them so that the carbon monoxide has no way to escape? Maybe there is no stove, but is there perhaps evidence that a pipe has been introduced into the room through a wall or the floor through which carbon monoxide might have been pumped from a stove outside? You see the kinds of questions you might start to ask, just based on the fact that the corpse has an unnaturally pink face?’
‘I see,’ Sherlock replied, fascinated.
‘Alternatively, the corpse might not have a pink face, but you might notice a small pinprick wound on a shoulder or on the neck. Perhaps the man was accidentally stung by a wasp and died of a severe reaction, but if so you might expect to find some swelling around the wound. Or if there is no swelling, then perhaps the man was injected deliberately with some poisonous substance from a hypodermic syringe while he was asleep, in which case you are back to deliberate action again.’
Sherlock nodded.
‘Or you might not find any pinprick wounds, but inside the man’s mouth there is evidence of blistering, suggesting that he drank or ate something toxic. You ask the constable again to look in the man’s bedroom for evidence of food or drink, and if it is found then you test it on a rat, perhaps. If there is nothing there, or if the things that are there are innocuous when fed to a rat, then you might suspect that the man was given something poisonous, which killed him, but then the evidence was removed by his killer. Do you see?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘But let us say that there is no blistering inside the mouth either. You then have to investigate inside the body, by cutting it open. You may find a blood clot inside the heart, in which case you might report a heart attack as the cause of death. You might find that the liver is enlarged and scarred, in which case you might diagnose liver failure due to excessive alcoholism as the cause of death. You might find some aneurism in the brain which has resulted from a defect in the blood vessels. You might find that there is something caught in the gullet which has caused the man to choke. All of these would indicate death from natural causes. However, if the man has been suffocated, perhaps by having a pillow held over his face, then in my experience there would likely be broken blood vessels in the eyes, caused by the struggle for breath, and perhaps evidence of bruising around the mouth. If alternatively the man has been strangled then there might be marks either on the surface of the neck or beneath the skin, and there are certain small bones that might well have been broken by the pressure. All of these indications, taken together, might point towards deliberate or accidental death.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Perhaps, when you examine the body, you find that despite the initial apparent absence of any wounds there is actually a depression of the skull, hidden beneath the hairline. Did the man accidentally fall as he was getting out of bed, getting his legs caught in the bed sheets perhaps, and knock his head against the wall, or the head of the bed? If so, you might find hairs the same colour as his, or marks from his hair oil, on the plaster of the wall or the wood of the bed. If those hairs or marks are not there, then you might conclude that you are back to deliberate action, and you would suggest to the constable that he looks around the house for a stick or a club that does have these traces.’
‘This is fascinating!’ Sherlock said.
‘The problem is,’ Lukather sighed, ‘that most of the time I end up with a body on my table where the cause of death is sadly all too obvious. The poor fellow might have been hit over the head by a bottle during a fight in a tavern, or caught himself with the sharp point of a scythe when cutting corn, or he might have tripped over in the street and had his neck run over by a cart. It’s all too rare that I get something interesting to exercise my brain properly.’
Sherlock thought quickly. He wanted to get Lukather around to talking about the theft of body parts from the mortuary that he had heard about, but that was likely to be a sensitive subject, and Lukather might get angry about being questioned directly. Sherlock already had the impression that he was a bit of a prickly customer. He would have to lead around gradually to the subject.
He remembered again the anatomy lecture that he had attended in Christ Church College. That might give him a lead-in.
‘I presume,’ he said carefully, ‘that in order to detect all of these various signs of natural or unnatural death that you must have trained on lots of bodies which had died in different ways?’
‘Oh, of course,’ Lukather said. ‘You can’t spot the signs of carbon-monoxide poisoning unless you have seen several bodies that you know died of the same thing. You can’t recognize the signs of a heart attack unless you have cut open many, many hearts and seen what they look like under all conditions.’
‘Isn’t there a bit of a problem with the process of anatomy?’ Sherlock went on. ‘I mean, I presume that a lot of people are very religious, and object to the bodies of their relatives being cut open and examined by a group of students. Partly I suppose they want their relatives buried intact, but partly they don’t want them being gawped at and perhaps laughed at. And you do hear about some students playing practical jokes with the bodies – leaving them in chairs in people’s rooms and suchlike.’
‘It is true,’ Lukather sighed, ‘that the supply of bodies for anatomy lessons is . . . problematic. Fortunately, there are enlightened people who make it a condition of their will that their body be left to science for medical investigation. There are also those poor unfortunates who die with no family or friends, and therefore there is nobody to have any say in what happens.’
‘I presume,’ Sherlock said carefully, ‘that there might be a tendency, perhaps in other, less moral institutions, to accept bodies from . . . dubious sources?’
‘You mean bodysnatchers?’ Lukather’s mouth twisted into an angry line. ‘Yes, there have been times in the past when some unprincipled researchers have accepted, as you say, “bodies from dubious sources”.’ He stared at Sherlock from beneath his shaggy eyebrows. ‘I hope you are not suggesting that I have ever taken advantage of such a grotesque opportunity? I treat the bodies in this mortuary with the utmost care, and I have never accepted a body where I have not been completely sure where it came from!’
‘Of course!’ Sherlock said, raising his hands. ‘I did not mean to imply anything else. I just wondered whether you have ever heard of anything like that happening to anyone else?’ He held his breath for a long moment.
Lukather frowned and looked away. ‘I presume,’ he said stiffly, ‘that you are referring to the thefts that have recently occurred here.’
Sherlock tried to look as reassuring as possible. ‘I realize it is a sensitive subject, and I also realize how much you must be professionally offended by it, but I was wondering whether you had any theories as to why the thefts had occurred?’
‘I am at a loss.’ Lukather frowned. ‘If it had been entire bodies that had been stolen, then I might think they had been taken a
s a prank, by students, or so that a hospital or medical university that was short of bodies for training might obtain some in an underhand manner, but parts of bodies? It makes no sense!’
‘Can you tell me what exactly happened?’ Sherlock asked.
‘It is, on the face of it, very simple, and yet very puzzling. On perhaps ten or twelve occasions I have left a body here in one state, and when I came back the next morning I found it . . .’ he paused, apparently distressed, ‘diminished.’
‘And what parts were taken?’
‘Various ones. On several occasions a hand has been removed at the wrist. On one occasion an entire arm was taken. Several ears have been cut away from the head. Two feet – one left and one right – were taken at different times.’
‘And . . . forgive me for asking . . . this wasn’t scavenging animals, like wild dogs or foxes?’
‘Absolutely not. The missing parts were removed with a knife or a hacksaw, not chewed or bitten off. This was not wild creatures scavenging for food. And besides, hands and feet and ears are not the obvious targets for hungry animals. They have precious little meat.’
‘Which raises another interesting question,’ Sherlock said. ‘No . . . internal organs.’
Lukather frowned. ‘What are you getting at?’
‘It just seems an odd selection,’ Sherlock went on. ‘Hands, arms, ears, feet . . . they are all, if you like, obvious body parts – the things you can see in a person when they are walking along. From what you have said, no hidden bits have been taken. No bits beneath clothing, or beneath the skin.’
‘That is a good point,’ Lukather acknowledged.
‘Which does suggest that it has nothing to do with a student prank – as they would probably much rather take the whole body and leave it somewhere amusing. It also suggests that it has nothing to do with medical teaching, as they would be more interested in the internal organs – the heart, the lungs and so on.’