I knew rather more about these crimes than the average person, through mere circumstance – was in at the start, so to speak; for the morgue was an extension of the museum in which I was pursuing my research. The museum was attached to the university, and the morgue was in awing of the university medical centre. One supposes it was a convenient arrangement. The medical students required cadavers, and unidentified and unclaimed bodies gravitated to the morgue; and for the good of medical progress – but I have no wish to moralize on this point. Things are done, things often are necessary, an accomplished fact is a fact, no more. I mention it only to set the scene, as it were, for my casual and superficial involvement – an involvement, I must admit, due more to morbid curiosity than any more elevated motives. I am a scientist and, quite naturally, I am curious about behaviour which does not fit the natural patterns, which floats suspended at some unexplored level of the sentient sea and defies the tides and waves of society.
I had been doing my research for some time – far longer than originally intended, for research, by its very nature, feeds upon itself and grows, extends and spreads strange and devious branches from the fundamental roots – and so, quite naturally, I came to know a number of people connected with the museum and the university and, by extension, the morgue. I became acquainted with Detective-Inspector Grant of the homicide squad and with Doctor Ramsey who performed the autopsies for the police. With Ramsey, in fact, an arrangement had developed. We found that our homes were quite close, in the same suburb, and in time we began to share the task of driving into town, alternating our motorcars to lessen the traffic and parking difficulties on the campus grounds. He proved an interesting and congenial fellow and the arrangement was very satisfactory. We became more than acquaintances, if less than friends. And it was through Ramsey, indirectly, that I came to see the first body . . .
It was my day to drive and I’d left the museum library and walked across the campus to the medical centre. It was a fine autumn day with brilliant leaves floating like colourful barques on a gentle breeze. Young couples strolled hand in hand across the lawns, and students reclined in the lee of oak and elm, talking of philosophy and love. It was a pleasant setting, slightly tinged with nostalgia – not at all the sort of time and place in which to encounter horror. I went into the medical building and down resounding corridors to Ramsey’s office. He wasn’t there, and his secretary told me he had been summoned to the morgue. She wrinkled her nose at the word and I didn’t blame her. I had no liking for the morgue myself. It was not a place to spend an autumn day. But I went on down the stairs and along a corridor and entered the antechamber, a stark room with a tiled floor and a ramp leading up to street level and large metal doors. It was down this ramp that ambulance and hearse descended to disgorge their still burdens before rising, lightened once again, into the sunlight. It was a place of grim silence and foreshadowing. Worst of all, to me, was the smell – that sharp antiseptic scent. Does any odour smell as much of decay and corruption as antiseptic? It eats at the very core of sensation, invoking the essence of death – of more than death, of that which has never known life. The scent of decay and disease is foul but natural, that of antiseptic carries the stench of sterility. It parted like morbid mist before my passage and dampened my footfalls on the tiles.
I stopped at the glass cubicle.
The attendant looked up reluctantly from a lurid paperback, recognized me and nodded. The nod served to lower his eyes once more to the novel and he was already pursuing his pleasures as he gestured me through. I passed on to the operating-room, where Doctor Ramsey was washing his hands at the sink. His white gown was splattered with dark stains and he washed his hands carefully, rubbing them together like struggling serpents in soapy froth. There was a slab in the centre of the room and a shrouded form on the slab. Ramsey looked up with a solemn face and nodded. I advanced, avoiding the slab.
“Will you be long?” I asked.
“No. The necropsy is finished. I’m waiting for Grant to arrive. Identification.” The way he said it you could tell he didn’t like that part of it. Maybe he didn’t like any part of it. He took off the blood-stained gown and stuffed it in the hamper.
“No sense letting them see the blood, eh?” he said. “Somehow the relatives always react more to seeing blood on a gown than to seeing the corpse.”
“Accident case?” I asked.
“It was no accident.”
I looked at him. He shrugged.
“The man was strangled,” he said.
“Oh. Hence Inspector Grant of homicide.”
“Exactly.”
“I’ll wait outside.”
Ramsey moved his head.
“Yes. An unpleasant case. The only relative is a niece. Young, I gather. I hope they weren’t very close. It’s always rough when they were. And pointless.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“We know who the man was. No doubt of that. But legal procedure demands positive identification by a relative. It’s funny how authority must always punish the innocent in the search for the guilty. Or maybe not funny.”
“Indicative maybe.”
“Maybe,” he said, and showed a sad smile. I turned to leave, and just then Grant came through past the cubicle. A uniformed policeman and a girl followed. Grant’s face was set and the cop looked stern. The girl was quite young and gazed around the room with big eyes. She seemed frightened. Of authority, perhaps. She was also rather pretty – pretty enough for the attendant to raise his attention from the vicarious thrills of his novel and regard her bottom. It struck me as a reaction perfectly suited to an attendant at a morgue. It annoyed me, too. But the man was young and had seen a good many bodies wheeled past his cubicle. Perhaps the sum total of his experience rested in the passage of death, and one must be tolerant.
Grant spoke softly to the girl, gestured to the cop and crossed the room. I noticed that his countenance was set more rigidly than normal and a lock of hair had fallen over his brow. He looked very much the way a police detective is supposed to look.
“Finished?” he asked Ramsey.
“Yes.”
“Lab boys been here?”
“Yes. I sent my report round with them.”
Grant seemed to notice me for the first time. We exchanged quiet greetings and he turned back to Ramsey.
“Anything that will help us?”
“I shouldn’t think so. Must have been in his seventies. Hardening of the arteries, chronic . . .”
“Skip that. We know who he was, we can get those details from the reports. Not that they’ll mean a goddamn thing. I mean any clue as to who did it? Or why?”