Murder in the Queen's Armes

with wedge-shaped Roman lettering: covnty constabvlary. On the drab wall of the building on the left was a modern, incongruously bright sign of blue and white: Dorset Police. South Western Divisional Headquarters

'Mortuary's here on the right,” Merrill said, then glanced at Gideon. “Something on your mind?'

'Yes. Someone's been missing from the Stonebarrow Fell dig for a couple of weeks; a man named Randy Alexander. Any reason to think it might be him?'

Merrill laughed. “That, my dear fellow, is what we were hoping you'd tell us.'

* * * *

GIDEON'S hope that “mortuary” might signify something a little warmer, a little less dingily depressing than the morgues he'd gotten used to in the United States was quickly extinguished. The Bridport Mortuary might have been a scaled-down replica of the coroner's morgue in San Francisco's gloomy old Hall of Justice.

They entered through a sterile little anteroom, unfurnished but for a solitary couch covered in green plastic, which looked fifteen years old but never sat upon. One wall was of glass, like the viewing room in a maternity ward, but this wall was not for viewing the newly living.

'Observation room,” Merrill explained unnecessarily, searching through his pockets for the key that would let them pass through.

It is generally only in the movies that people who come to identify corpses walk into the morgue and peer into a drawer to see a chilled body with a red tag tied by a string to its big toe. They're there, all right, in their drawers, with tags on their toes, but the insides of morgues are almost never seen by the public. Instead, the body to be viewed, decorously clothed in a sheet pulled up around its neck, is wheeled to the viewing-room window on a gurney. If the head has been damaged, the “better” side is presented to the observer. And if there is no better side, a technician will make whatever cosmetic repairs are possible, more to spare the viewer than to aid in the identification.

Merrill finally found the right key. “At last! Thought I was going to have to disappoint you.” He laughed happily, and Gideon smiled unconvincingly back as they entered the morgue proper, a small, white-tiled room with two tables, on the nearer of which was what they'd come to see.

'Whew,” Gideon said, steeling himself not to shrink back.

'Pretty bad, eh? Of course, once you get something like this out of the water, decomposition speeds up enormously. Naturally, we've had it in the freezer overnight. By the by'—Merrill gestured at a stainless-steel door in one wall—'We've got a really fascinating case in there. Poor old fellow was done in by a high-pressure jet of cellulose spray. Astonishing sight. Never seen anything like it. Perhaps if you have time after you finish here—'

'Thanks very much,” Gideon said quickly, “but I think I'd better get back as soon as I'm done. I'm on my honeymoon, you know.'

'Honeymoon! No, I didn't know. Congratulations!” Laughing, he led Gideon by the arm toward the corpse. “What's a newlywed like you doing in a place like this, eh?'

'Eh” is right, Gideon thought.

'Well,” Merrill said crisply, “we shan't keep you long. Now, let's have a look at this chap.'

Gideon made himself look down. He had learned that it was only the first few minutes that were really bad, and that the sooner he got used to it, the better off he'd be. The body, terribly swollen and discolored to a blackish green, lay on its back on a basin-shaped porcelain autopsy table that was tilted slightly so that the pink, transparent fluid that ran sparsely from it dribbled down to a hole at the table's foot and drained through a rubber tube to collect in a thready puddle in a stoppered sink below—for what purpose Gideon didn't know and didn't want to know.

The autopsy had already been performed; the body was sliced from throat to crotch, its ribs spread open like a pair of cupboard doors. The scalp, with its algae-like cap of mud-colored hair, had been peeled back, the top of the skull sawed off, and the brain removed. The skullcap, neatly cleaned, had been placed near the head, flat side down, like a halved coconut, presumably awaiting Gideon's inspection.

'Well, then,” Merrill said, “Where shall we begin?” He clapped his hands softly and squeezed his fingers. He might have been a child looking forward to solving a jig saw puzzle; in a sense he was. “How long would you say he's been in the water?'

'I'll accept your judgment on that, Doctor. Outside of the skeleton, I'm afraid I don't know much about tissue pathology. Besides, the water here is probably colder than what I'm familiar with. That would make a difference, wouldn't it?'

'Oh, yes, all the difference in the world. It would retard the postmortem changes drastically. Now,” he said, slipping comfortably into a teacher's role, “this is a typical four-weeker.'

'Four-weeker? That rules out Alexander. I was talking to him only two weeks ago.'

'I said a typical four-weeker. But a body might be caught up in a warm current, for example, or float where there are industrial effluvia that heat the water. Either way, decomposition would be hastened. Or it might run into a particularly voracious school of fish or other flesh-eaters. I grant you, this one seems awfully advanced for two weeks, but let us reserve our conclusions.'

At Gideon's nod of agreement, Merrill resumed his lecture where he'd left off. “Now this, as I say, is a typical four-weeker: The face is gone, as well as the flesh of the hands—no fingerprints from this one—and the meat is pretty well eaten away between ankle and calf. And just look at the maceration! Classic washerwoman's skin syndrome.” With a finger he pushed gently at one wrinkled foot. The skin slid loosely back and forth. “I could slip the dermis off as easily as if it were a sock.'

Merrill looked as if he might demonstrate, and Gideon interrupted hurriedly. “So he was fully clothed, then?” Aquatic life, he knew, attacked the uncovered parts of the body first. On a clothed male it would be the head and hands, then the area just above the socks, where the trousers floated free, then the rest.

'Correct, Professor. Leather jacket, jeans, and all the rest. We've checked, of course, and the clothing might be Alexander's, but there's no positive identification. They'll be shipped to the Yard today with the body. Now then, does anything else strike you?'

'Well, there's an odd pattern of lividity. The body fluids seem to have settled in the arms and legs. Chest, too,