“Just a few minutes, sir,” he said. “I swear to you I would not have come here if I didn’t think it important.”
Christison sighed, and rubbed his chin.
“Very well. Very well. Give me a minute or two with Sergeant Quire, would you, gentlemen? Go and smoke a pipe, or take the air, or whatever pleases you.”
The two assistants—current or recent students of Christison’s, Quire guessed by their youthful looks—went reluctantly out, bestowing upon Quire glares of grave disapproval. It almost made him laugh, seeing those rosy- cheeked innocents so affronted by so trivially unexpected a turn of events. How ordered and polite they must imagine the world outside their cosy little bastions of learning to be.
“What is it, then?” Christison demanded.
“You’re the only man I know can read the tale of a corpse,” Quire said, advancing towards a vacant slab. “I’m in sore need of that today.”
“Well, I do like to think…” Christison began.
Quire unceremoniously emptied out the contents of the sack on to the slab. The dog’s decapitated corpse flopped down with a wet thud. The head tumbled after it, hitting the slab with a bonier crack, and rolled almost to the edge before coming to rest and fixing Quire with its lifeless gaze. The tongue protruded stiffly from between the yellowed teeth.
“Good God, man,” Christison exclaimed. “Have you lost your mind?”
“Not entirely, sir. Not yet.”
“I could have you thrown out for bringing such a thing in here. I could probably have you arrested, for God’s sake, and how would that look?”
“Please, sir. All I’m asking is that you look at it. Unless I’ve misunderstood what it is you do here, you’ll surely see something of interest. And if you don’t, I’ll leave the moment you tell me.”
Christison glared at him. Quire was testing their relationship to its very limits, he knew; quite probably beyond them, for it had never been more than a formal acquaintance as a result of their joint endeavours. But if he was any judge of men at all, Christison was the sort to give him the benefit of the doubt, and to succumb to his own innate curiosity.
Christison took a step closer to the dog’s body and leaned to examine its raggedly severed neck.
“I see no blood. There should be rather obvious evidence of catastrophic bleeding, internally, externally— everywhere, really—in a case of decapitation. There does seem to be some other fluid here, though.”
He looked quizzically at Quire, who simply nodded. Christison took hold of the hound’s stiff legs and turned it over. He ran his fingers through its noisome fur, using them to push it apart here and there, seeing down to the skin. He grunted and muttered to himself quietly. Shook his head.
He moved round to the end of the slab, set one hand on each corner of it, and leaned down to peer into the stump of the dog’s neck. He remained in that pose for some time; far longer, certainly, than Quire could ever have spent upon such an unappealing sight.
For Quire’s part, he waited patiently and in silence. He watched Christison, and thought it a good thing that he had come here. He disliked the room, the way it reduced death and the dead to mere matters of so much bone, so much muscle. Like carcasses in the Flesh Market. It was all too unemotional and calculating for Quire’s liking; but unemotional and calculating were the very things he now needed.
Christison took hold of a small clump of the dog’s hair between his forefinger and thumb and gave it a sharp tug. It came easily away, a little solid mat of it. He grimaced and wiped it off his hand on the edge of the slab.
“Someone is having a little fun at my expense, are they?” he said at length to Quire, looking anything but amused. “It’s an ill-timed jest, if that’s what it is.”
“No jest, sir,” Quire said earnestly. “I’ll swear to that any way you like.”
“Clearly a contrivance of some sort, nevertheless,” Christison said. “This animal was dead before it was decapitated. There are incisions that were made in its chest wall and in its neck, and then sewn up again. Also after it was dead, as best I can tell. Why, precisely, would anyone wish to cut holes in a dead dog and then stitch them up again? Have you taken to the study of canine anatomy, Sergeant Quire? Or embalming?”
“No, sir. I’m a student of much cruder sciences. It was me cut the head off this dog, and I promise you it was moving about just fine until I did it. In fact, it kept moving a wee bit after I’d done it too, but it stopped eventually.”
“Not possible,” Christison said emphatically. “That it was alive when its head was separated, I mean. I think I can tell the difference between ante and post mortem as well in a dog as I can in a human. And I assure you, I can tell the difference very well indeed in a human.”
His brow suddenly crunched into a frown, and his eyes narrowed as he looked from Quire to the dog and back again.
“Now just a moment,” he said, pointing a finger at Quire and then shaking it as if to free up his nascent insight. “Is this about that body you brought through here… what was the man’s name?”
“Edward Carlyle. This is one of the beasts that killed him, I think. This one or one much like it.”
“Really?”
And there was that vein of lively interest threading itself into Christison’s voice that Quire had hoped for. The stirring of his curiosity.
“You said it was a dog that did it,” Quire observed, “and here’s the proof that you were right. There were two more like this, but they escaped me. Or I them, to be honest.”
“Well, your persistence with such an unpromising case is admirable,” the professor said, bending to prod at the stump of the neck with his tongs. “Still, there is clearly some confusion at work here. What
Quire lifted the implements, surprised at the weight of them. They still bore the residue left by their application to the woman lying on the other slab. He gave them to Christison.
“Let us just take a quick look, shall we?” the professor murmured.
He cut open the dog’s chest. The long, flat knife slid through the animal’s hide smoothly, as easily as Quire had ever seen any blade cut. Christison cut along three sides of a rectangle, and pulled the large flap of skin roughly back, revealing the dog’s ribcage.
A foul stink burst from the carcass, potent enough to set Quire—and even Christison—grimacing. The rotten stench of putrefaction. Quire clasped a hand over his nose and mouth.
“That smell, Sergeant, is decay,” Christison said pointedly. “This animal has been dead a good deal longer than you seem to think.”
He took the shears to the dog’s ribs. They crunched through the bones as if they were twigs. Then he cut away at the animal’s innards. He did it roughly, quickly.
“Not taking my usual care, of course,” he said.
The heart came free, the size of a pear. Blotched, discoloured and feeble-looking. Pale liquid dripped from it. Christison frowned. He set the organ down beside the corpse, neatly sliced it with a single sweep of the knife, and spread it. It opened like a butterfly of flesh.
“Look at that,” he exclaimed as that same pale liquid flowed out from the exposed chambers. “Whatever this beast had in its veins, it was not blood. This is most puzzling.”
He glanced at Quire with narrowed eyes.
“You’re certain this is not some prank, Sergeant?”
“I am. I’ve come across a good deal that is puzzling of late, sir. Things I can’t rightly explain, and I don’t know that anyone can except by means I can’t bring myself to believe in.”
Christison raised a sharp eyebrow.
“And what do you mean by that, precisely?”
“I’ve had one or two folk mentioning the Devil to me lately,” Quire grunted.
“Ha! Come now… ah, I see you are serious. Look, Sergeant, you strike me—and sound, I must say—like a man under a good deal of strain. Perhaps some rest and recuperation…”
“I’d agree with you, were it not for the fact that some folk seem set on killing me. Not the moment for a nap, I think. There’s something I need to ask you, sir, in confidence. I need to find a man can testify to the involvement of certain… gentlemen… in the business of body snatching. Without a witness, my hands are tied. Can you tell
