“I’ll see you in an hour, then. It will be a treat to work with you again. We’ll have a jolly time of it, you’ll see!”
“I’m looking forward to it, Merrill,” Gideon managed. It wasn’t the first time he’d been overwhelmed by Merrill Wilson.
Or in this case, only partly overwhelmed. He had to admit that he was extremely interested in having a look at those “complex trauma” of Joey’s skull to which Dr. Gillie had referred. It was the process of getting down to the skull that he wasn’t looking forward to.
Back in Robb’s cubicle, he was explaining what the call was about when a clatter overhead drew all three men’s eyes to the window. A red helicopter was descending, mantislike toward the open space of Holgate’s Green. “Cornwall Air Ambulance,” it said on the side.
“Your conveyance, I believe,” said Clapper.
“Mine and Joey’s,” Gideon said.
NINETEEN
TRURO is a venerable cathedral and market town, but the Royal Cornwall Hospital at Treliske, on its western outskirts, is sleek, modern, and well-equipped, with its gleaming basement mortuary being no exception. The waiting room, mercifully unoccupied at the moment by any apprehensive, fearful relatives or friends, was living- room friendly, with plum-colored fabric on the walls, homey furniture, flowers, coffee-table picture books, and up- to-date magazines. Having announced himself to the receptionist, Gideon had finished an article on human cloning (“Another you—the next best thing to teleportation”) in New Scientist and was starting one on a methane-spewing volcano that had been discovered on one of Saturn’s moons, when his host came barreling through the door from the interior.
Wilson Merrill in the flesh, was, if anything, even heartier than he was on the telephone. A ruddy, stocky, country-squireish sort of man who radiated bluff good humor, he stuck out a blunt-fingered hand in greeting. “Well, well, it seems the Dynamic Duo is back in business again.”
“It’s good to see you, Wilson,” Gideon said.
“Come on, old man, let’s get you suited up.”
“Oh, I don’t think I need to put on scrubs,” Gideon said. “I don’t really expect to be doing anything—just observing.” From as great a distance as I can get away with, he might have added.
Merrill laughed as merrily as if Gideon had told an amusing joke. “Nonsense,” he said, taking him by the elbow and shuffling him along the corridor. “Gets a bit splashy in there sometimes. Wouldn’t want to get anything nasty on that pretty shirt.”
Merrill himself was wearing the green, oversized, hand-me-down (from the hospital upstairs) scrubs that were usual in mortuaries around the world, fronted by a plastic apron, and complete with oversize booties. Gideon had noted before this preference of pathologists for roomy scrubs. They needed them, too. Unlike surgeons (other than orthopedic surgeons) who work mostly in small spaces with delicate instruments: scalpel, forceps, probes, retractors—pathologists use implements that look as if they came from a carpenter’s tool chest: hammers, chisels, saws, even pruning shears (for snipping through the ribs). A grizzled, old-school coroner Gideon knew claimed that he bought all his instruments at kitchen shops and hardware stores. “They’re the same damn knives and things, just as good, but if it has ‘autopsy’ in front of it, they charge you an arm and a leg.”
Five minutes later, in the locker room a few yards down the hall, Gideon was getting similarly outfitted in scrubs that must have been made for a professional wrestler. While he was swimming his way into them, Merrill used the time to browse through the file folder of materials that had come with Joey’s body.
“Oh, dear,” he said as Gideon wrapped the drawstring twice around his waist, “did you see what his blood alcohol level was?”
Gideon shook his head. “Pretty high, I imagine.”
“That’s putting it mildly. One hundred and fifty-two milligrams. Not surprising he fell off that catwalk. The wonder is that he was able to get out on it in the first place.”
“You’re inclined to go with the ‘accident’ theory, then?”
“Well, I wouldn’t go quite as far as that. That’s what we’re here to try and determine, isn’t it? But I must say it seems like a reasonable starting hypothesis. At that level of intoxication, one is anything but steady on one’s stumps.”
Gideon slipped into the booties—normal-sized ones—and the two men shuffled down the corridor to the autopsy room, Gideon stolidly, and Merrill practically skipping at his side.
“It’s a pity you weren’t here just two days ago,” the pathologist told him. “We had an astonishing case, really incredible. This chap had committed suicide by turning on his table saw and jamming his head into it. Never seen anything like it. Cleaved his head in half right down the middle, neat as a pin, exactly through the longitudinal fissure, clear down to the vermis of the cerebellum, can you believe it? Like looking at a median sagittal section of the head in an anatomy text.” He sighed. “Gone now, though. Had to release the body.”
“Sorry I missed it,” Gideon mumbled. “My bad luck.”
Merrill brightened. “We have photographs, though.”
“Oh, great. Maybe later if there’s time.”
“Here we are, then,” Merrill said with transparent pride, pulling open the door to a spic-and-span, white-tiled autopsy room. “Hie locus est ubi—”
“—mortui viventes docent.” Gideon finished for him. This is the place where the dead teach the living. A favorite motto of forensic labs. Gideon had it on a plaque on the wall of the anthropology department’s bone room at the university.
The moment the door opened, the mildly unsettling smell of hospital antiseptic was displaced by the more unsettling, though more familiar mixture of formaldehyde and tissue going bad, l’arome de la morgue. Inside, Joey’s graying body lay faceup on the metal table, naked and pitifully vulnerable under glaring fluorescent light fixtures. Above the foot of the table hung the usual meat-market scale, shocking in its ordinariness, in which his internal organs would be weighed. A tall, somber, long-limbed Indian man, the diener—the autopsy assistant—was finishing up his tasks of preparing the body and the instruments, and taking the preliminary measurements and
