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THE DEAD MAN had been laid on boards on a bier in a chapel of rest. He was dressed in a shroud and still tilted disconcertingly upwards, his head a foot or so above the table, his nose flattened at the tip where it had pressed against the underside of the lid and his arms raised like a prizefighter about to attack his opponent. The gaslights had been turned up. They did nothing to alleviate the look of fright on his face, but I could make out several areas where the skin was sloughing away and his left eye had a discoloured half-moon under it.
‘Is it possible he had a spinal deformity?’ I suggested.
‘That would not explain the position of his arms.’ Sidney Grice dismissed the idea with a toss of his hat on to the altar.
‘Have some respect,’ Sir Grigsby protested.
‘I sometimes respect that which respects me.’ Mr G threw his overcoat after it. ‘You and your men will leave us now.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ In the light the director did not look quite so impressive. His eyes were small and perfectly round like a cheap doll’s, and his lower jaw receded so far behind his upper that it was difficult to imagine how he ate.
‘There is no need to do so,’ Mr G assured him breezily. ‘Go now.’
‘We have to examine the body now,’ I told him. ‘I do not imagine the public would like to think of you as an onlooker for such indignities.’
Sir Grigbsy tussled briefly, balancing the thought of being evicted from his own domain with the bad publicity he might be subjected to.
‘Very well. I shall adjourn to my office.’ He mustered his dignity. ‘You men go back and tidy up.’
The four gravediggers were leaning wearily against the wall.
‘Thirsty work, I imagine.’ I gave them a florin each.
‘Expecting a gratuity too?’ Sidney Grice asked, as Sir Grigsby loitered, and was answered with a slam of the door.
‘His body was found in the cellar, was it not?’ I asked.
‘In a disused cesspit, I believe,’ Pound replied, ‘buried in quicklime.’
‘I thought quicklime burns bodies,’ I objected.
‘I’ve known a few murderers use it to dispose of their victims,’ Pound agreed.
‘Dry quicklime does,’ my guardian conceded. ‘Calcium oxide can be gratifyingly corrosive, but wet quicklime becomes calcium hydroxide and an unparalleled alkaline preservative.’
‘So the body could have been in it for years,’ I conjectured.
‘A very long time.’ Sidney Grice patted the dead man’s chest.
‘It sounds hollow,’ I remarked.
‘Probably because it is.’ Mr G pulled the neck of the shroud down an inch. ‘The outside has been conserved – cured, one might say – but the slaked quicklime would not penetrate the body more than half an inch or so.’
‘So the inside has decomposed,’ Pound concluded, ‘and we are looking at a husk.’
‘Where have you seen bodies adopt similar poses, Inspector?’
‘Only after a fire,’ Pound replied.
‘The pugilistic pose,’ I remembered too late. ‘The muscles contract with the heat.’
‘But he has not been in a fire,’ Pound argued. ‘Not a hair has been singed.’
‘We are discussing the wrong crime,’ Sidney Grice announced. ‘How did he die?’
‘Strangulation with a ligature round the neck.’ I pointed to a sunken ring round the dead man’s throat. ‘Probably.’
‘Possibly.’ My guardian qualified my diagnosis. ‘We shall pass him presently to those who aggrandize their anatomical desecrations in the name of pathology.’
He took off his pince-nez.
‘His expression.’ Pound shuddered. ‘I shall never get used to rictus grins.’
‘You will have one yourself soon enough,’ Sidney Grice prophesied.
‘Take more than death to make you smile,’ the inspector retorted.
Sidney Grice tugged his scarred earlobe. ‘Is there more than death, Inspector? It would be pretty to think so.’