The Anatomy of Death (3 page)

The other man, Pike, seemed his complete opposite; smaller, clean-shaven, and finer featured. He leaned heavily on a cane as he walked the few steps to the coat pegs. His physique under the worn but well-cut overcoat appeared straight-backed and trim—he had not yet surrendered to the portliness of middle age—yet the antique blue eyes with their dark pouches spoke of a weariness beyond years. Standing next to the anteroom wall, he seemed almost to blend into it. If not for the cane, his unobtrusive appearance and mild manner would have rendered him the perfect invisible policeman, or “defective detective,” as her sister, Florence, was wont to call men of his kind.

The elderly attendant sat behind his desk and slid a leather-bound register towards them. His request for them to enter their names was interrupted by a fit of painful coughing. Unable to speak for a moment, he rapped himself on the chest and pointed with a crooked finger to the place they were to sign. Upon his recovery, he cocked his head and read aloud the string of initials Dody had written after her name. The policemen, neither of whom had said a word to her beyond that first introduction, looked at each other. A small glow of satisfaction melted Dody’s earlier feelings of trepidation. She could, and would, go through with this. She had the training and she would prove to them that she could do the job as well as anyone.

“This can’t be a healthy environment for someone with as
delicate a chest as yours, sir,” she said to the attendant as she passed the pen on to Pike.

Alfred gave her a toothless smile. “Goose fat and brown paper, miss, that’s what keeps the chill away.”

“Well, it doesn’t appear to be working very satisfactorily,” she said, and withdrew a glass bottle from her Gladstone bag. “Here, try this camphoric lotion; you will find it much more effective than goose fat. Rub it on to your chest and the soles of your feet, too. It will tide you over until you get the chance to purchase a carbolic ball from the chemist, which will be better still. You can carry the ball around with you and inhale its fumes whenever the need arises.”

The old man took the bottle from her, got to his feet, and clasped both of her hands. “Why, thank you, miss, thank you very much. But I’ll ’ave to owe you for this medicine, I—”

“Please don’t worry about it.” Dody smiled.

“Then if I can ever be of any extra assistance, you’ll find me ’ere six days a week and sometimes into the night, too.”

The superintendent had finished signing his name and was pointing to a bleak stone staircase. “Time is of the essence; lead on, if you please, Alfred. After you, miss.”

“It’s Dr. McCleland, Superintendent,” Dody reminded him.

His mumbled response was lost on her.

Dody followed Alfred down the stairs, the two detectives clumping behind.

Halfway down Shepherd stopped. “You don’t say much, Pike”—Dody caught Shepherd’s loud whisper—“but I can tell you’re as unhappy about this as I am. Impudent creature, answering me back like that. What in God’s name do you think would induce a woman to get herself involved in the Beastly Science?”

What indeed, Dody thought, other than the lack of any other specialist surgical positions available to her. She remembered all too well the revulsion she’d felt for the dissecting rooms as a raw medical student, and how those feelings had returned during her first few weeks in Edinburgh. But it was amazing what one could get used to, especially when there was no choice. Of course, she would rather be working with the living than the dead, but she had soon discovered that her talent for detached observation put her in good stead for such a profession. Irrespective of the gore in which she was sometimes steeped, the wonder of the science and a natural inclination to solve a mystery had soon put an end to the horrors she once had. After a while, even the odours ceased to bother her.
Mortui vivos docent
—the dead teach the living. She wondered what the dead bodies awaiting below would teach her.

At the bottom of the stairs she looked around the small autopsy room. It was a far cry from the facilities in Edinburgh. No amphitheatre here with raised seats on which craning students sat and observed; no benevolent pedagogues and powerful electric lighting, ventilation, and decent drainage. Here she would be a one-woman show, performing in a primitive environment for sceptical men who didn’t believe women should be engaged in the practice of medicine, let alone the Beastly Science. The sudden weight of it hit her as she stepped into the icy cold room.

Exposed pipes clung to the chipped and dingy whitewashed walls. A stained porcelain sink rested against the far wall between shelves of books and specimen jars. Above the sink there hung a portrait of King Edward VII, black mourning crepe still wound about the frame. There was no portrait of the yet-to-be-crowned King George V. It seemed
appropriate somehow: a dead king to rule over the kingdom of the dead.

The tap over the sink dripped and gaslights spluttered from their brackets on the walls. In bygone years, Dody reflected, autopsies would have been conducted in police stations or public houses; either would have been preferable to this dank, foul-smelling cave.

A bowler-hatted gentleman in a suit of loud checks stepped forward and introduced himself as Mr. Bright from the coroner’s office. He gave Dody a little bow, doffing his hat to reveal a skull as bald as an egg. Another mortuary attendant, marginally younger than Alfred, appeared from the cadaver keep and told them everything was ready.

Shepherd fumbled in the folds of his coat and produced a fat cigar. He bit the end off it and spat it onto the sawdust-strewn floor. After lighting up, he gulped down the smoke like he was slaking a thirst. Pike took a silver case from his inside pocket, offered a cigarette to Bright and the attendants, took one for himself, and snapped the lid closed.

Dody gave him a quizzical look, which he did not appear to notice. From her Gladstone bag she removed the velvet pouch containing her own smoking paraphernalia. Five pairs of eyes converged on her as she expertly packed her clay pipe, swiped the match across the rough wall, and coaxed the tobacco to a gentle glow.

“How many bodies are there, Superintendent?” she asked between puffs.

Shepherd was staring at her in undisguised disbelief.
A most unbecoming habit in a lady
, she could imagine him saying to his colleagues later in the station house. But what did he expect her to use to combat the stench—lavender water?

“Superintendent …” she repeated.

“Three, miss, all from yesterday’s riot at Westminster.”

Good God, the women’s march!
Spilsbury’s note had made no mention of that. Now she wished she had allowed Rupert to read her the whole of the article from
The Times
. She bit hard upon the pipe stem. She would be fair and professional; of course she would. But if these policemen were to find out that her sister was a prominent suffragette and had also been present at the riot, would they have faith in her impartiality? What a way to start a new engagement. But it was too late to back down now; they might think she had no stomach for the job.

With their combined smoke swirling around the room, she removed her jacket and replaced it with an apron she found hanging on a peg near the sink. Some nurse’s cuffs also rested near the sink, and these she slipped over the sleeves of her lace blouse.

“The first body, if you please,” she said.

Shepherd snapped his fingers and Alfred appeared from the cadaver keep, pushing a wooden trolley with a sheeted body upon it. A parcel of personal effects rested at the body’s feet. Dody glanced through them while the attendants heaved the body onto the marble slab.

She read aloud from the victim’s file. “‘Seventy-year-old Miss Jemima Jenkins. Witnesses say she was complaining of shortness of breath before the riot, then later they saw her clasp her chest and fall to the ground.’” Dody spent another minute reading the case notes provided by Miss Jenkins’s physician and the police surgeon, respectively. She noticed Pike had found himself a spot leaning against the far wall, puffing on his cigarette and apparently listening to a murmured conversation between Mr. Bright and the attendants. Superintendent
Shepherd seemed unable to stand still; he glided about the room in his oversized mackintosh like one of Count Zeppelin’s airships.

But when she drew back the sheet covering the body, the men stopped what they were doing.
They are probably expecting me to faint
, Dody thought.
I have never fainted before in my life and I will not start now.

There was no need for dissection; the oedematous ankles backed up what she had already read in the notes. Evidence of pink froth on the lips, since dissipated, but reported by the police surgeon soon after the woman’s death, also assisted her with her conclusion.

“Death due to heart attack, the result of longstanding congestive cardiac failure,” she dictated to Mr. Bright. She stared at the body for a moment longer, wondering what force of passions, now extinguished, had compelled this frail old lady to participate in such a vigorous demonstration.

The cause of death of Mrs. Margaret Baxter, age forty-five, was also self-evident, but required some thoracic dissection to discover the precise nature of the injuries beneath the gaping chest wound. From the row of autopsy instruments on a nearby bench, Dody took a heavy anatomist’s scalpel and with a few deft strokes performed a Y-incision from armpits to groin. What blood there was—the women had been on ice since yesterday and there wasn’t much—was directed by Alfred into the runnels of the slab, and from thence to the blood bucket below. Dody peeled back the skin, then set to with the bulky rib-cutters, snipping through the bone to reveal the heart where the bulk of the blood had pooled.

Superintendent Shepherd watched over her shoulder, spilling ash from his cigar into the thoracic cavity. She waved him
away with a flick of her scalpel, then used the chest spreader to part the lungs. There was no need to remove the heart; a cursory glance revealed all that was necessary. The railing upon which Mrs. Baxter had impaled herself had penetrated the thorax and diaphragm at a forty-five-degree angle, piercing the left ventricle and the descending aorta. Death would have occurred within seconds. Small comfort to her family, Dody mused, as she finished dictating her findings to Mr. Bright. She rinsed the scalpel and her gory hands under the tap while Alfred repaired the damage to Mrs. Baxter with needle and thread.

The other attendant wheeled in the next body from the cadaver keep and Dody refilled her pipe.

“Now this death has to be regarded as potentially suspicious,” Shepherd said as the attendants exchanged one body for the other on the slab. “We are obliged to perform a full medico-legal autopsy, though I’m sure you will be able to confirm accidental causes. We don’t need to take too long about it.”

Dody riffled through the items in the effects parcel: an expensive walking outfit, gloves, boots, stockings, silk blouse, assorted linen, and a somewhat crushed wide-brimmed hat. Under this, something metallic glinted against the brown paper packaging. She picked it out and turned it over in her hand. The silver medal of a hunger strike survivor gleamed back at her—her sister Florence had one just like it. For a moment Dody ceased to breathe. At once she dreaded what she might find under the sheet.

But Florence was alive and unharmed; Rupert had told her so. Drawing a lungful of pipe smoke, she pulled back the sheet and found herself looking upon the familiar face of Lady
Catherine Cartwright, one of her sister’s close friends. Closing her eyes, she prayed her vision was playing tricks on her. She opened them again. It was not. She felt herself grow dizzy.

She must not faint.

To steady herself, she reached for the dissecting slab. With the other hand, she replaced the sheet.

“Doctor? Is something the matter?” Pike appeared from nowhere, moving to her side.

“Fetch some smelling salts, Alfred, the lady is going to faint.” Shepherd made no effort to hide the glee in his voice.

“I am not about to faint, Superintendent,” Dody managed. “Alfred, stay where you are if you please, I am perfectly all right. But I regret to inform you that I cannot proceed with this autopsy. I know this woman; she was a friend of my sister. It would be unprofessional of me to continue.”

Shepherd smacked a heavy fist into his hand. “Damn it, this is all we need. Are you quite sure? It is most important we ascertain a cause of death immediately.”

“Sir,” Pike cut in, “Dr. McCleland is correct; she can’t be expected to continue.” He spoke with a peculiar emphasis, and Dody looked up to see him giving his superior a meaningful glance, as if he was trying to signal something to the superintendent that should already have been self-evident.

P
ike held Shepherd back from following Dr. McCleland up the mortuary stairs. “McCleland, sir, do you not recognise the name?”

Shepherd turned. “Should I? Not a bad-looking filly,” he said, as if to himself. “But marred by intelligence and overly wilful, I suspect.”

Pike hadn’t paid much attention to the woman’s looks; he had other things on his mind. “Florence McCleland is an associate of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, the leaders of the militant suffragettes,” he said. “She runs the Bloomsbury Division of the Women’s Suffrage and Political Union. Presumably she is the sister Dr. McCleland was referring to.”

Shepherd slapped the side of his mackintosh. “You mean that woman is one of those godforsaken Anglo-Irish-Russian-Socialist McClelands from Sussex?”

“I believe they call themselves Fabians, sir.”

“Fabians, socialists, what’s the difference?”

Pike allowed a faint smile. “Despite their close ties with the Labour Party, Fabians tend to be better bred than most socialists. They believe in gradual reform through education rather than sweeping, revolutionary changes. The simple way of life is important to them, though some are absurdly rich and often artistic—Mr. Bernard Shaw is a Fabian I believe, sir.”

“Intellectual poppycock.”

For a change Pike was inclined to agree with his superior. “But it would have been useful to have Dr. McCleland conduct the autopsy—should the result fall in our favour, sir,” he said. “If a suffragette sympathiser could prove we had no involvement in the death, then no one could accuse us of falsifying the results. Assuming, of course, that, like her sister, she is a sympathiser.”