“Where is Dr. Gillie?” he asked. “I want to speak with him first.”
“I put him in my office,” Mr. Moreton said. “It’s more private.”
Kozlov, whom Clapper knew by sight, clarified. “By stairs. Through dining room. There.” He pointed toward the kitchen’s door to the interior.
Once in the dining room, the smell of pipe tobacco reached Clapper’s nostrils. He stopped and automatically reached for his cigarettes, lit up a Gold Bond, and continued into a cramped foyer, off of which was a tiny, cluttered alcove that looked as if it might once have been a coatroom. The doctor sat behind the desk, screwing the cap onto an old-fashioned, tortoise-shell fountain pen. He looked up, smiling, a long-nosed, horse-faced man in an old tweed jacket, with a pipe in the corner of his mouth.
“All right, what have we got?” Clapper said.
“Why, hello there, Davey-lad,” Gillie said, addressing himself, “so nice to see you again. I hope you’re well.”
“Sorry, Davey, I’m not in much of a mood today.” He stood, waiting.
“No, really? All right then, I’d better mind my manners. Well, you’ve looked at the body?”
Clapper nodded.
“Then you already know what we have.” He straightened the form on which he’d been writing and read aloud: “ ‘Cause of death, crushing head injuries; manner of death, undetermined; contributing causes of death, none indicated.” “ He looked up with a shrug. ”Been dead twelve to twenty-four hours, from the looks of him; rigor is quite pronounced and hasn’t begun to break up yet. So if what Kozlov told me is so—that he was alive and well as late as eleven o’clock last night—why then, we’d have to put the time at right around then, say somewhere between eleven and one. Body temperature, assuming that it was normal to begin with, is down fourteen degrees Celsius, so that fits nicely enough as well.“
“Other injuries?”
“Contusions and lacerations here and there, quite consistent with a fall. I would expect some internal trauma as well, when he’s undressed and examined. Oh, and he died right where he lies. No one’s moved him. The livor pattern makes that clear. I’d assume he fell from the catwalk up above.”
“And hit the pipe on the way down?”
“ Grabbed the pipe on the way down, I should say. There are rust stains and abrasions on his right palm. It would seem to have broken his fall and taken some of the force out of it. Otherwise—falling twenty-five feet directly onto stone like that—his head wouldn’t merely have cracked, it would have exploded like a watermelon.”
“Yes. ”Falling,“ you said? What about ‘jumping’ or ‘being pushed’?”
Gillie took the pipe from his mouth and pressed the bit into his cheek. “It’s always possible, I suppose, but the man had been drinking heavily last night—you can still smell it on him—and that’s a pretty narrow catwalk up there, and the railing’s not even waist-high. I see nothing that suggests anything beyond an accidental fall.”
“Oh? And what would he have been doing wandering out there on that narrow catwalk in the middle of the night?”
“Smoking a cigar.”
Clapper’s cigarette stopped halfway to his mouth. “Smoking a cigar? How do you know?”
“Because I asked Mrs. Bewley. ”Mrs. Bewley,“ says I, ”what would he have been doing wandering out there on that narrow catwalk in the middle of the night?“ She told me that he smoked these nasty black cigars that everyone hated—when he had one, even in his room, you could smell it all through the place—so that he often stepped out there to have one in peace without bothering anybody or being bothered by anybody.”
“Including at night?”
“Especially at night. After dinner. Look, Mike, I’ve been here twenty-two years now, and we’ve never yet had a homicide, let alone a murder, but you obviously think this needs looking into, so if you want me to do a postmortem—assuming the budget can stand it and I still remember how to perform an autopsy—I could do one for you tomorrow, much as I hate the bloody job. Not that I expect anything to come of it, you understand.”
“There are a few background elements you’re not aware of, Davey.”
“How mysterious,” Gillie said. “And am I permitted to know?”
“Not at this point,” Clapper said curtly.
Gillie smiled. “What a charmer you can be, Mike.” He folded the report, slipped it into a jacket pocket, and stood up. “I’m done with the body. Would you like me to call Algy and have him get it to the chapel?”
Algy Rennet was the coroner’s undertaker for the Isles of Scilly, and “the chapel” was the Chapel of Rest, a small room at St. Mary’s Hospital that served the community as a mortuary.
“No, as a matter of fact. I want it left here.”
“Here? Out in the open? But—”
“I don’t want him moved. Kyle is speaking with Exeter right now. They’ll have the Truro people here by helicopter in no time, and the deceased gentleman will soon be on his way to Treliske, where the Force pathologist is probably sharpening his gruesome instruments even as we speak. He’ll do the postmortem.”
“I see,” said Gillie, showing his first sign of irritation. “Local talent not up to the job, eh? Well, I suppose they have a point. I haven’t done an autopsy in two and a half years. My bad luck to live someplace where nobody kills anybody else.”
“It’s nothing to do with you, Davey. It’s the way it works in a sus-death. Standard procedure, it’s in the book.”
Robb came into the room, with a quizzical expression on his face, as if he didn’t know how Clapper was going to take what he had to say.
