The Anatomy of Death Read online

  “By all means,” he replied.

  Dody read the report’s conclusion aloud:

  Death believed to be the result of blunt force trauma to the skull. Four separate wounds on the head were discovered, all depressed fractures containing inverted bone fragments and all the result of considerable force. Any one of the blows could have caused coma followed by cessation of life. The indentations of all wounds were of a triangular nature, approximating those that may be caused by the corner of a brick. Brick dust found after combing the victim’s hair further supports this supposition.

  Florence jumped to her feet. “What nonsense is that? She was beaten about the head by a policeman with his truncheon!”

  Pike said nothing but observed Florence with his hands folded loosely on the desk, his expression unchanged. He had surgeon’s hands, Dody noticed—long, elegant fingers with neatly trimmed fingernails, not the meat cleavers one would expect of a policeman.

  Dody tugged the side of her sister’s dress until Florence dropped back to her seat. “I don’t see your signature here as a witness, Chief Inspector,” Dody said.

  “Regrettably, I was called away.”

  Florence pursed her lips. “I have a friend who saw with his own eyes Lady Catherine being beaten about the head by a policeman.”

  “That is a serious accusation, Miss McCleland. May I ask who this friend might be?”

  “The Honourable Mr. Hugo Cartwright, Lady Catherine’s nephew,” Florence said haughtily.

  Pike leaned back in his desk chair. “Ah yes, and the heir to her fortune.”

  The sisters exchanged glances.

  “You were not aware?”

  “Now you mention it, I suppose it stands to reason,” Florence replied. “He is her only living blood relative. But this is all very convenient for you, isn’t it, this autopsy result? The police are off the hook and you think you have licence to throw mud around at whomsoever you wish. You are now saying that Hugo took advantage of the chaos and bludgeoned his aunt to death with a brick in order to receive his inheritance.”

  “People have been murdered for less, miss, and this wouldn’t be the first murder committed under the cover of a public disturbance.”

  “I’d like to be present when you accuse Hugo of this to his face. He won’t stand for it, you know. I hope you have a good solicitor, Mr. Pike,” Florence said.

  It was hard to imagine the pathetic, grief-stricken creature Dody had bandaged in the drawing room having any such fight in him at all. Antagonising Pike with wild threats would get them nowhere. She pressed her foot into Florence’s shin.

  “If Mr. Cartwright did indeed witness events as you describe them, he did not report it,” Pike said. “That in itself is a punishable offence.”

  “Indeed he did report it, Mr. Pike.” Florence retorted, her chin raised. Dody knew that by addressing him with his civilian title, Florence wished Pike to know she considered him not worthy of his rank. “But the beastly policeman refused to take his statement or write his name down, even. Hugo tried to stop the attack on Lady Catherine but couldn’t move fast enough on account of his injured foot, which had been callously stamped upon by a charging police horse.”

  Dody detected a hastily suppressed flicker of amusement in Pike’s face. Florence must have noticed it, too, for she bristled. “Mr. Pike, you need—”

  Pike cut her off. “I have every intention of following the incident up with Mr. Cartwright, and I will personally go through the witness reports again, looking for his name.”

  Florence frowned, not reassured at all.

  “Then in the meantime, sir,” Dody said, “I would like permission to examine Lady Catherine’s body for myself.”

  Florence drew a breath and appeared surprised; this was not something they had discussed.

  “Is there something in the report that prompts you to make this request, Doctor?” Pike asked.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, there are several things.”

  “First is the evidence of the brick dust. When a body comes to the slab straight from the ice chest, the hair is always damp. Combing it for dust would be difficult, if not impossible.”

  “But if the hair had dried?”

  “It would also be stiff with blood—how can one expect to remove brick dust from that?” As she spoke, Dody pictured a case she’d studied in Edinburgh in which London police had laundered a victim’s shirt before examining it for bullet holes—a prime example of the lack of cooperation between the forensic and police departments. It would have been no surprise to hear that Lady Catherine’s hair had also been washed before examination.

  Pike’s gaze wavered for the first time since the meeting had begun and she wondered if he, too, was reflecting on similar police bungles.

  “I’m afraid I didn’t notice her hair. Like you, I had only a brief glimpse of the body before the sheet was replaced,” he said.

  Florence had turned quite pale, Dody noticed. Hearing Lady Catherine spoken about in this manner must be distressing. Perhaps it would have been best if she’d remained in the waiting room.

  “In any case,” Dody said, “the wounds themselves, not the dust, are what need the most careful observation, and in Dr. Mangini’s report, they received only a cursory mention. It also surprises me that he makes no mention of the scalp being shaved—how else could the head wounds be thoroughly examined? I need to shave the hair, take measurements of the wounds, and then conduct some tests. A conclusion cannot be made instantaneously in the mortuary.” Dody flicked the document with her finger. “Furthermore, this illustrates to me that Dr. Mangini is one of those old-school medical practitioners who treat coroner’s inquests much too lightly. If he has not assessed the victim’s general state of health through adequate dissection, how can it be proved without a doubt that these blows were the cause of her death? She may have had a long-standing ailment of the brain that the blows merely hastened to conclusion. A defence barrister would make a meal out of Dr. Mangini if he were called upon as an expert witness.”

  Pike didn’t respond for a moment, and Dody looked around her as she waited. Her eyes settled on a file lying closed on his desk with the name Hawley Crippen inscribed on it. Had he been working the Crippen case with Dr. Spilsbury, too? The flamboyant Inspector Dew was the only member of the police department Dody had remembered the pathologist mentioning.

  Pike must have followed her gaze, for he picked up the file and placed it in a desk drawer. Finally he spoke. “I would be the first to agree that coronial enquiries are not infallible, but I will have to ask Superintendent Shepherd’s permission. I’m afraid I don’t like your chances at a second attempt, seeing as you turned down the initial opportunity. But I understand your argument and I will do my best on your behalf. Excuse me for a minute.”

  He lifted the telephone receiver, cranked the handle, and asked the operator to connect him to Shepherd’s office. The sisters listened intently as he stated the case to his superior. Upon replacing the receiver, he told them, grim faced, that the coroner had already released the body and that the funeral parlour would be picking it up first thing in the morning. Dody may have been mistaken, but she thought she saw a reflection of her own thoughts in Pike’s eyes: that he was as doubtful of Mangini’s work as she was, and disappointed that there would be no second autopsy. Perhaps there was a glimmer of hope after all.

  He took his watch from his pocket and let out a low sigh. “I’m afraid I’m running out of time, ladies. I have an engagement to attend. But before you go, I’d like to hear your personal opinions of Lady Catherine. Did she have any enemies that you are aware of? Anyone else who might benefit from her death other than Mr. Hugo Cartwright?”

  “She was loved by everyone who knew her. Her only enemies were in the government and the police force,” Florence said darkly.

  “Perhaps not so surprising, Miss McCleland; she was imprisoned for spitting at one police officer and physically assaulting another, and while in prison engaged in a hunger str
ike. The police and prison authorities have better things to do with their time than force-feeding recalcitrant prisoners, I assure you. But of course you know this. You yourself were incarcerated for throwing rocks at the prime minister’s motorcar.” Florence stiffened in her chair, but said nothing. Dody realised that while Pike might have seen her side of the autopsy argument, he showed no sympathy to the plight of the suffragettes.

  “And you, Dr. McCleland,” Pike went on, fixing his eyes upon Dody. “Did you have an opinion of Lady Catherine?”

  “I did not know her well enough to form an opinion.”

  Dody’s opinion was that Lady Catherine was similar to the Pankhursts: domineering, controlling, and completely inflexible in her views, antagonising militants and nonmilitants alike. But this was hardly something she could say in front of her sister.

  A little while later Dody and Florence stepped from the building into the swirling river mist. To hear Dody and that policeman talk so matter-of-factly about Catherine’s death had been almost unbearable to Florence. The anguish and frustration that had been building up in her since they’d first entered the policeman’s office finally burst its banks.

  “He made it all sound like a childish game!” she sobbed. “I know you never cared much for Catherine and I appreciate that you said nothing negative about her to that unprepossessing little man. But Catherine was one of the best friends I had, devoted to the end. You might not remember this, but she put me up when I ran away from home, never telling Mother and Poppa where I was.”

  At seventeen she had fallen in love with a literary acquaintance of their mother’s, taking it for granted that her liberal parents would agree to the marriage. But when they discovered the liberties the thirty-two-year-old poet had been taking with her, they refused to give their consent and banished him from their house. Florence had run away to London then, expecting her beloved to join her there. He never did. It was discovered later that he had a wife and two children secreted away in Blackpool. She still cringed with shame whenever she thought about it. Bloody men, she thought, shame they were necessary at all. With the exception of Poppa, the world would be a better place without them.

  “And it was Catherine who convinced me to go back to Mother and Poppa,” she went on, “telling me I needed to focus on other people more and less on myself; basically that I was a spoilt little brat. She encouraged me to help in the soup kitchen and with other charitable works, and it was through her that I joined the WSPU.”

  Dody pulled Florence to a stop under a lamplight, brushed a tear from her cheek, and put her arm around her shoulders. “There, there,” she said.

  Dear Dody. Florence did not know what she would do without her big sister. She kept on talking through her sobs. “But, Dody, how on earth are we to get justice for Catherine when no one on the police force will take us seriously? I had staked my hopes on that man Pike, but now I see he is as sarcastic and corrupt as the rest of them.”

  “I’m not of quite the same opinion, Florence,” Dody said as they made their way arm in arm to their waiting carriage. “I think Pike would have been happy to let me reexamine Catherine if not for Shepherd. I’m thinking he might have doubts about the autopsy himself.”

  “Well, his doubts don’t help us, do they? What are we going to do?”

  Dody gazed around the foggy street as if making sure they were not being observed. “Don’t worry; I have something up my sleeve. Literally.”

  Under the gaslight near their carriage, she revealed a police truncheon within the sleeve of her coat. “It was lying on the sergeant’s desk in the waiting room. I took it when he was helping you on with your cape.”

  Florence felt her face break into a smile, marvelling at her sister’s cleverness. “You’ve stolen it!”

  “Borrowed. You see, Florence, even I will bend the law sometimes, if I think the cause is just.”

  “But what use is it to us?” Florence said, dashing away her remaining tears.

  “I’ll tell you as we go, but first we must find a chemist’s shop that is still open.”

  Chapter Seven

  Pike rarely turned down a request from the landlord at the Three Bells to entertain his guests, and tonight was a particularly special occasion—the wedding reception of the landlord’s daughter. Pike’s knee never seemed to pain him at the piano, and he manipulated the pedals with a jaunty spring that had long been missing from his walking gait. As his fingers melted into the piano keys, he left the unsettling scene in his office behind. How the superintendent was going to get away with a shoddy autopsy on a high-profile society figure wasn’t his problem.

  He had started the evening with a selection of traditional ballads and romances, joined by a quartet of young women from the Southwark workhouse. He’d first heard them sing in his local church, and whenever an appropriate opportunity arose, he asked them to join him when he played.

  “But you’re not staying for the whole night,” he’d warned. “Functions like this tend to get a bit out of hand, bawdy even. I don’t want your innocent young minds corrupted.” To which the girls had responded with a mixture of disappointment and mirth: “That’s right, Captain—pure as the driven slush is what we are!”

  The last song of the first bracket was a round, “Summer Is A-Comin’ In,” and his spirits soared with the melody as he accompanied the pure voices that cut clean through to the heart.

  Summer is a-comin’ in

  Loudly sing cuckoo

  Groweth seed and bloweth mead

  and springs the wood anew

  Sing cuckoo!

  The song ended to a roar of applause. The girls responded to the whistles and catcalls with mock curtsies, flinging lip back as good-naturedly as it was hurled at them. Pike decided the audience was ready for a change of pace. He would skip the Gilbert and Sullivan he’d planned and get straight into the rollicking music hall numbers everyone could sing along to.

  But first, he escorted the girls to the pub door and handed each of them their sixpence, warning them not to dawdle lest they should find the workhouse door locked. Winnie Whistle threw her spindly arms around his neck and thanked him for the chance of escaping the workhouse for the evening.

  “And I didn’t cough once and spoil it, did I, Captain?”

  “You did marvellously, Winnie.”

  Delighted with the praise, she offered her rouged cheek, pressing it to his lips before he could back away. “Better get that stuff off your face, Winnie,” he said, holding her by the wrists at arm’s length, “or they’ll have you out the workhouse in a flash.”

  “Oh, give over, Captain.” She laughed.

  “She wouldn’t be laughing like that if she knew you was the Old Bill,” Brockman, the landlord, said as he joined Pike at the door. The clatter of the women’s footsteps and a bout of coughing from Winnie continued for some moments after the mud-coloured fog swallowed them up.

  Pike wiped the grease from his lips and tapped his nose. “Our secret, Mr. Brockman.”

  “Winnie’s a lunger, is she?”

  “I think she might be. Though the workhouse authorities assure me she’s clear of TB.” Pike would have liked to do more for her; the girl had a child and did her best for it. But he could hardly send her a hamper—the workhouse staff would surely keep it for themselves. He was glad he could slip her a sixpence every now and then.

  He accepted a mug of ale from Brockman and took a long swallow, feeling more at ease in the dockland pub than he ever had in polite society or the stuffy confines of the officers’ mess.

  Brockman had been his regimental sergeant major and served with Pike in India, Afghanistan, and South Africa. He and his wife were the only people in the pub who knew Pike was a high-ranking Scotland Yard detective. To everyone else he was just the captain, an old army chum of the landlord—a gentleman who had fallen upon hard times and who kept to himself when not playing the piano.

  “Are you sure I can’t tempt you with a small stipend, Captain?” Brockman asked n
ot for the first time.

  “Against the law, I’m afraid. Police officers aren’t supposed to take other forms of employment.” Though with the appalling pay and working conditions of the lower ranks, they often did, and found themselves compromised because of it. For the first time since he’d started playing, his mind drifted back to Lady Catherine’s autopsy. If accurate, the report ruled out bludgeoning by a uniformed officer’s truncheon, but it did not eliminate plainclothes members of the force. Although better paid than the uniformed division, any member of the detective force might have been willing to stir up trouble for the sake of a few bob. So far he had not recognised any in the surveillance photographs behaving with impropriety, but he had yet to see the last batch of pictures. The death of Lady Catherine might have been unintentional; but in the heat of the moment boundaries are blurred, mistakes made, a brick or club impulsively grabbed.

  If the autopsy report was accurate. His doubts over Mangini’s competency took on more weight when combined with the woman doctor’s concerns. Her reservations had made sense to him. The wisest course of action, he decided, would be to continue with his enquiries as if there had been no autopsy at all. He would begin by following up Mr. Hugo Cartwright’s allegations and pay the gentleman a visit first thing in the morning.

  “Have another on me, mate,” Brockman broke into his thoughts. “And try one of the missus’s fancy pies for your supper; she’d be mighty offended if you turned one down.”

  “Indeed I will, thank you, Mr. Brockman.”

  Brockman bellowed towards the bar for the servant girl to fetch over a pie, quick smart. Pike sank his teeth into the flaky pastry and savoured the succulent filling. He waved his appreciation to Mrs. Brockman, busy thumping slopping glasses onto a table in the far corner of the room.

  He squinted through the smoky gloom. There was something familiar about one of the men she served: the rakish insouciance of the cap, the defiantly long hair tied back and snaking down his spine. The man raised his head. Dark brows knitted as he returned Pike’s stare. Did he recognise Pike for what he was? Pike doubted it. Dressed in collarless shirtsleeves and with his cane out of sight, Pike doubted even Sergeant Fisher would recognise him from this distance.