MURDOCH WAS LATE getting to Humphrey’s Funeral Home and Dr. Ogden made it clear she was not happy at his tardiness. He muttered his apologies. Cavendish, the police photographer, was standing with his tripod at the ready. He looked uneasy, but then he always did. An older, spry-looking man with a notebook open on his lap was perched on a high stool close to the examining table.
Dr. Ogden waved her hand. “This is my father, Dr. Uzziel Ogden. He has offered to serve as both a second medical witness and our clerk.”
The man hopped off his perch and held out his hand to Murdoch. “Good day to you, sir. Nasty business this.” His cheery tone belied the words and his blue eyes actually twinkled. He was enjoying himself. His daughter must have inherited her stature from her mother because she was a good seven or eight inches taller than her father, although she did have his keen blue eyes and rather sharp nose.
“I didn’t know the poor fellow personally, but Julia did and I thought I could come along and make sure she didn’t miss anything in the shock of it all.”
Dr. Ogden smiled briefly and Murdoch couldn’t tell if she was offended by this remark or not. He had the feeling she wouldn’t take kindly to women being considered the weaker sex.
“Well, I’m ready to begin,” she said. “Would you like an apron, Mr. Murdoch? Father?”
She was wearing a heavy brown holland pinafore. Murdoch remembered Sister Regina had worn something very similar when she’d conducted her natural science classes. Not that she’d cut up anything more fleshy than mushrooms.
Dr. Ogden pulled back the canvas cover, revealing the grey, stained body. Murdoch had seen corpses before, but they never failed to jolt him. The utter absence of life where there had so recently been one was always troubling. Howard’s clothes had been removed, but the body hadn’t been washed and the blood had turned black around the side of his face and where it had spilled down his shoulder and chest from the stab wound. Dr. Ogden took a sponge from a dish on the nearby table and wiped away the congealed blood from his neck. Her father handed her a measuring stick with which she checked the wound.
“Seven-eighths of an inch across,” she said and he wrote it down. “It was not a sharp instrument so the skin and flesh around the area are depressed and bruised. There is a torn fragment of his shirt visible in the cut.” She pulled it out with a pair of tweezers and placed the fragment on a dish. Uzziel wrote a label. Murdoch noticed the pastor’s body was quite hirsute and rather flabby, which was consistent in a man of his age and sedentary profession. His male member was a good size.
Dr. Ogden sponged away the blood from the side of the face. “The orbital bone is fractured, the eyeball crushed, and the cheekbone is depressed. I’m sure we will find it is fractured in more than one place. The cause of these injuries was a blunt instrument and we have a rather clear imprint here on the cheek.” She took the stick and measured the marks carefully, calling out the numbers to her father. “It is roughly in the shape of a crescent, the bruising is uniform, so I would agree with you, Mr. Murdoch, that it is likely caused from a vicious kick. I think we can safely assume that the blows to the eye and the eye socket were also from kicks. You can see the eyeball has been pushed down slightly to the left, which would be consistent with the victim being prone and on his back at this point. Would you agree?”
Murdoch didn’t particularly want to examine the bloody mess of an eye, but he peered more closely and agreed with what Dr. Ogden had said.
“Now, I can’t say with any certainty whether the boot was worn by a man or a woman. The mark is definitely rounded rather than pointed, which would rule out a woman’s fashionable boot, but as far as I can tell the mark could indicate either male or female ordinary footwear. What do you think, Mr. Murdoch? Have a look through the magnifying glass. And, father, perhaps you could offer an opinion as well.”
Murdoch took the glass and bent forward to see. “It’s hard to say. Could be either.”
“I’d say that was a man’s boot that did that,” Uzziel said. “A woman couldn’t have used that much force.”
Julia made no comment, but she glanced at Murdoch.
“I think a healthy woman in a state of extreme rage would have been able to inflict such an injury,” he said.
“Ah, you are probably right, you’re the detective after all,” Uzziel said.
Dr. Ogden lifted and rotated both of Howard’s arms so she could examine them.
“No sign of bruising on either arm, which suggests that he had no chance to defend himself. The nails on each hand are intact. This dark splotch between the index finger of the right hand appears to be ink. Had he written a letter recently?”
“It would seem so, ma’am, but I haven’t found it yet.
I am pursuing the matter.”
“Well that’s your province, not mine.”
Dr. Ogden walked slowly to the end of the table, making a close observation of the body.
“He is clean and well nourished.” Suddenly, she leaned forward and pinched at something on the chest hair. “He has, however, acquired lice.” She went back to examine the hair on Howard’s head, parting the strands carefully. “I don’t see signs of bites, so I assume this louse is a recent guest.”
“Are we going to mention the louse?” asked Uzziel.
“It doesn’t seem significant. He was a minister. He probably had some parishioners of the poorest kind.”
She continued with the external examination. “There is a scar on the right thigh reminiscent of a chicken pox scar, otherwise the body is unmarked.” She moved aside the flaccid penis. “Testicles intact and normal size. Penis uncircumcised.”
She took some long swabs from a jar on the movable table. “I’ll check his orifices. Will you label the appropriate bottle, father?”
She went back to the head of the table and inserted the swab into Howard’s right ear, removing it and sniffing it. “No infection.” She dropped that swab into one of the clean jars that Uzziel had at the ready, then wiped out the other ear and, with a fresh swab, inspected Howard’s nose and mouth. “He was fond of snuff I see and he was just getting over a bad cold, but there is no blood in the mucus, which suggests there was no concussion. The kicks to the side of the head, although severe, were not the coup de grâce; most likely, he would not have died from them if he had not been stabbed. The cause of death was undoubtedly the massive bleeding from the carotid artery. Will you help me turn him over, Mr. Murdoch? No, it’s all right, father. We can do it.”
Murdoch took hold of one arm and leg and pulled, as she simultaneously pushed from the other side and they rolled the body onto its stomach.
“Other than lividity staining, there are no marks.” She took another swab and inserted it into the anus.
“There was a loosening of the bowels and the bladder, but that is to be expected.” She wiped her hands on her apron. “Let’s reverse him again, Mr. Murdoch.”
They did so.
She nodded over at Cavendish. “Will you take your photographs now, Mr. Cavendish, before I begin the dissection. I’d like three or four pictures of the head wound as close up as you can get it and the insertion point of the letter opener.” She pointed to one of the shelves. “The weapon is over there on a linen cloth. You might as well take a picture of that as well.”
The photographer began to set up his equipment, and the two doctors retreated to a corner of the room to confer over Uzziel’s notes. Murdoch went to the shelf where he could see Howard’s clothes had been piled and tagged. Every item of clothing was bloodstained, including the one-piece undergarment. His suit was worsted but not of especially high quality. His white cravat was fine silk, but his shirt collar was starting to fray at the neck and had already been turned once. Murdoch took a closer look at the tear in the waistcoat. The pocket where he’d kept his watch was slightly stretched. A large watch then. The trouser pockets were empty except for a crumpled and stained white handkerchief and a wrapped cough lozenge. He wore leather suspenders for his trousers and New York garters of an atypical cherry red, kept up his socks that were darned at the heels. His wife or the maid had made sure he went out into the world well brushed and mended, but either from moral conviction or financial necessity, Reverend Howard had not been extravagant in his attire.
Cavendish had finished and he backed off to the far corner of the room with his equipment. He might still be needed, but this next part was nothing he liked.
Dr. Ogden walked over to the table and her father hopped onto the stool.
“I’m going to commence the dissection now, Mr. Murdoch. Am I correct in assuming you will not faint on me like a green boy?”
“I have seen other post-mortem examinations, ma’am. You don’t have to worry about me.”
He hoped that was true. It wasn’t as if he watched a scalpel slicing into dead flesh every day. Dr. Ogden wheeled over a small table on which she’d fastened her surgical instruments in loops on a roll of cloth. She selected a scalpel and tested it on her thumb.
“You need some more chloride of lime,” said her father. “It’s starting to pong in here.” He went to a bucket in the corner of the room. While he was doing that, Dr. Ogden leaned over and made a Y-shaped incision from Howard’s shoulders, down the breast bone to the top of the pubes. Then she pulled back the skin and flesh as if she were opening a valise. All of Howard’s inner organs were exposed.
“Clippers please, father.”
Uzziel handed her what looked like a pair of pruning shears, and with the decisive, vigorous snips of an assured gardener, Julia cut through the cartilage attaching the ribs to the sternum.
“Saw, please.”
Except that it was clean and shiny, the saw looked to Murdoch exactly like the kind of tool used to cut branches. Dr. Ogden sawed through the ribs, dropping the cutoff bones into a dish. She acted quickly and efficiently and Murdoch was glad when she’d finished. The sound was not pleasant. That done, she picked up a long scalpel and severed the valves that connected the heart to the bloodways of the body, then she lifted out the organ from the chest cavity and placed it in a dish that her father had ready for her. There it sat, an inert piece of red meat, once the source of all Howard’s fears, angers, and passions. In spite of what he’d said earlier, Murdoch felt a rush of bile come into his mouth.
“Are you all right, detective?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She looked at him kindly. “My tutor used to think we should hang up a sign in the morgue. Hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae. Or to translate, ‘This is the place where death rejoices to teach those who live.’”
Ah, but what is the lesson? Murdoch thought.