To the hilt [en]

'Oh my God,' he said, 'I've done so much harm.'

'Nothing that isn't being put right.'

I poured brandy into two glasses standing ready on a nearby silver tray and handed one to Ivan, one to my mother. They both drank without protest, as if I'd given them medicine.

I said to Ivan, 'If you just leave things as they are, the brewery should be out of debt in three years. I know some of the terms are hard. They have to be. The debts are truly enormous. Mrs Morden has done a marvellous job, but she says the future depends greatly on keeping the services of your present brewmaster and on the managing energies of Desmond Finch. Desmond Finch wouldn't take a diamond-studded suggestion from me, but he's used to following your instructions, so that's what you have to do, Ivan. Go back to the brewery and instruct him.'

My stepfather nodded with resolution. And how long, I morosely considered, would that resolution last?

The telephone rang. Ivan's hand asked me to answer it, so I did.

A confident voice said, 'This is Detective Constable Thompson of the Leicestershire police. I want to speak to Sir Ivan Westering.'

Ivan, of course, wanted me to deal with whatever it was. I explained that Sir Ivan was recovering from a heart attack, and offered my services.

'And you are, sir?'

'His son.' Well, near enough.

After a pause a different voice, just as confident, identified himself as Detective Chief Inspector Reynolds.

'What is this about?' I asked.

The voice enquired whether Sir Ivan knew anyone named Norman Quorn.

'Yes, he does.'

The voice impersonally explained. I listened blankly. The Leicestershire police had for two weeks been trying to identify a body that they now had reason to believe was that of a Mr Norman Quorn. The Chief Inspector wanted Sir Ivan Westering, as Mr Quorn's long-term employer, to assist in making a positive identification, yes or no.

With shortened breath, I said, 'Doesn't he have any relations?'

'Only his sister, sir, and she is… distressed. The body is partly decomposed. The sister gave us Sir Ivan's name. So we would be grateful, sir…'

'He isn't well,' I said.

'Perhaps you, then?'

'I didn't know him.' I thought briefly. 'I'll tell my father. Give me a number to phone you back.' He told me a number, which I wrote out of habit on the bottom of the box of tissues. 'Right,' I said, 'five minutes.'

As emotionlessly as possible I gave Ivan the news.

'Norman!' he said disbelievingly. 'Dead?'

'They want to know for sure. They ask you to go.'

'I'll go with you,' my mother said.

I phoned the Chief Inspector, told him I would be driving, and wrote his directions on the bottom of the tissue-box.

In the end four of us went to Leicestershire in Ivan's Rover (retrieved from an underground garage), Ivan and my mother in the back with Wilfred sitting in the front beside me, a box of heart-attack remedies on his lap. Wilfred read out the directions on the tissue-box so that fairly early in the afternoon we arrived at a featureless building in Leicester that housed a mortuary and investigating laboratories.

The Detective Chief Inspector met us, shook hands with Ivan and my mother and me and was impressed into solicitude by Wilfred's presence and medical precautions. Ivan, though in suit and tie, looked almost greyer than in his dressing-gown.

Inside the building, in a small reception area that doubled as waiting-room, a large weeping woman was being comforted in the arms of an equally large uniformed policewoman. The Chief Inspector indicated that we should wait there while he took Ivan to see the body, but Ivan clutched my arm and wouldn't go without me, so, shrugging, the senior policeman settled for taking me too.

We were all then issued with disposable gowns, with gloves, overshoes and masks for our noses and mouths. Dead bodies, it seemed, could infect the living.

I hadn't been in such a place before, but it was curiously familiar from pictures. We went down a passage into a white painted room that was clean, brightly lit, not very large and smelled not unpleasantly of disinfectant. On a high centre table, under a white cover, lay a long quiet shape.

Ivan's hand shook on my arm but civic duty won the day. He looked steadily at the white face revealed when a gowned and masked mortuary attendant pulled back one end of the covering sheet, and he said without wavering, 'Yes, that's Norman.'

'Norman Quorn?'

'Yes, Chief Inspector. Norman Quorn.'

'Thank you, sir.'

I said, 'What did he die of?'

There was a pause. The policeman and the mortuary attendant exchanged eyebrow signals that I hadn't the code to read, and the policeman also looked assessingly at Ivan's physical state, and at mine, and came to a decision.

'I'll take you back to your wife, sir,' he said to Ivan, and offered his arm instead of mine, neatly leaving me behind alone to hear the answer to my question.

The mortuary attendant first of all identified himself as the pathologist who had carried out the original post mortem.

'Sorry,' I said.

'Don't be.' He casually pulled down his mask, revealing a young face, competent.

'So… what did he die of?' I asked.

'We're not sure.' He shrugged. 'There are no obvious causes of death. No gunshots, no stab wounds, no fractures of the skull, no signs of strangulation, no household poisons. No evidence of murder. He had been dead about two weeks when he was discovered. He didn't die where he was found, which was in a rubbish dump. I saw him in situ. He had been placed there after death.'

'Well…' I frowned, 'was he simply ill? Heart attack? Stroke? Pneumonia?'

'More likely one of the first two, though we can't know for sure. But there is an abnormality…' He hesitated. 'We showed it to his sister, and she fainted.'

'I'm not his sister.'

'No.'

He stripped back the sheet as far as the body's waist, showing the dark discolorations of decomposition and the efforts made to tidy up the radical post mortem incisions. I thought it no wonder the sister had fainted and hoped I wouldn't copy her.

'Look at his back,' the pathologist instructed, and with his gloved hands gripped the shoulders and half rolled the body towards him.

There were about a dozen or more rows of darker marks in the darkened flesh, and flecks of white.

The pathologist eased the body flat again.

"Those white bits - did you see them? - are his ribs.'

I felt nauseous, and swallowed.

The pathologist said, 'Those darker marks are burns.'

'Burns?'

'Yes. The skin and flesh have been burned away in a few places down to the ribs. He must have fallen into something very hot when he died. Something like a grating. People fall on electric fires in that way. Terrible burns, sometimes. This is like that. Any thoughts?'

My chief thought was how soon I could leave the mortuary.

'He was wearing a nylon shut,' the pathologist said chattily, 'and there were man-made fibres in the lining and cloth of his suit jacket. They melted to some extent into his skin.'

In another minute, I thought, I would vomit.

I said, 'Could he have died from the burns?'

'I don't think so. As you saw, the burns extended only from below his shoulder blades to his waist. Several local burns, but not lethal, I don't think. It's most likely they occurred just after death, or anyway at about the same time. I would guess he had a stroke, fell unconscious on the fire, and died.'

'Oh.'

'Anyway,' the pathologist said with satisfaction, 'now that we have a positive identification we can have an inquest. The coroner's verdict will be "cause of death unknown" and the poor man can have a decent burial. I'll be glad to get him out of here, to be honest.'

I left him with relief and, stripping off the protective clothing, rejoined the group in the entrance area.