The foam came away, except where it had lodged in the crevices of the inscription.
He stepped back. Now the legend was revealed, in menthol, the best-shave-you-can-get white.
Cornelius Tiplady 1845-85.
He was a consistent Member of the Church, a Friend of the Lord, ever an affectionate husband to jemima and an indulgent Father.
Faith was triumphant in his death.
Sweet is the memory of such for we know they sleep to live again.
Jemima. That confirmed it. Cornelius and his final resting place had at long last been found. He now had enough detail on his life to produce a decent report for his client. He scribbled the epitaph in a notebook and put the materials back in his bag, then took the opportunity to scour the surrounding area.
There was no one, only the distant, demented cackle of the crows and the wind rustling the trees.
Before he left, he cast a guilty look at the grave, illuminated with foam. The chemicals in it could leach into the pores of the gravestone and cause permanent damage. For the umpteenth time that morning he surveyed the grey sky. Forget the sun, he thought, what I need right now is some heavy rain.
2
Heather was waiting for Foster at the autopsy room in Kensington. It was approaching noon and he was running late, delayed by his interview with the two stoned kids who had stumbled across the body.
'Did they see anything?' she asked hopefully.
Foster's face gave her the answer immediately, incapable as it was of hiding disdain. His crumpled, creased face appeared to darken, his lip curled and the mournful brown eyes narrowed. An unlamented ex-girlfriend from years ago once told him he had an 'ugly/handsome thing going on', a phrase he still didn't know whether to take as an insult or compliment.
'They could barely recognize their own mothers,'
he spat out. 'I've left them with an artist. They saw a few people on their way to the churchyard. But, given the strength of the skunk they were smoking, I won't be surprised if we get a sketch of Big Bird.'
They put on their masks, covering nose and mouth, took deep breaths and entered the pristine, stark white- tiled space. The smell of disinfectant hung in the air -- almost, but not quite, managing to obliterate the underlying stench of death and decay. A couple of morticians busied themselves around James Darbyshire's handless, naked body, supine on the dissecting table. The sternum had not yet been cut.
Foster was glad; he wanted to see the body as it was when they found it, before Carlisle peeled back the skin like fruit rind to reveal the flesh and internal organs. Sometimes, when Foster got there, those organs were sitting in metal pans waiting to be weighed or examined. He could handle death; he could stare at a corpse and learn from it regardless of the injuries it had endured. But the sawing and splicing involved in most autopsies never failed to sicken him, which is why he liked to have a look first and read about it later.
Edward Carlisle welcomed them with a quick nod and motioned for them to follow him towards the body. Foster turned to check Heather was OK; his eyes made contact with hers, but the look she gave back was impatient, as if his concern was grating.
'Here it is. Of course, I haven't yet rummaged around inside, but it seems clear, as I indicated earlier, that the cause of death was a single stab wound to the heart, here.' He pointed to a two-inch slit slightly to the left of centre of the victim's chest. 'I'll have more on that later. And as for the hands, I'm almost certain they were severed prior to death.'
Foster looked at Heather. This wasn't a case of mutilating a dead body. It was torture.
'What has interested me are these wounds here,'
Carlisle continued.
Foster and Heather watched as his hands pointed out a series of scratch marks and nicks across the chest.
'I can only think they are the consequences of a struggle, but there are no defence wounds elsewhere, and the victim's shirt has not been damaged.'
'Not even by the stab wound?'
Carlisle shook his head.
'Then he wasn't wearing it when he was stabbed.
Or when these cuts were made.'
Foster was standing to the right-hand side of the cadaver. He walked slowly, clockwise around the table, never taking his eyes off the body. When the soles of the dead man's feet were facing him, he stopped for perhaps a minute, his eyes fixed on the victim's torso. By this point Heather and Carlisle were more interested in Foster's perambulation than the corpse. He set off once more until he arrived back where he started. He leaned in for a closer look at the scratched and bloodied chest.
'Did you shave the chest?' he asked Carlisle, without looking up.
'No.'
Foster stepped back and examined the torso, tilting the angle of his head slightly as he did, first to the left, then to the right, then leaning over once more. He looked around the room, his eyes eventually alighting on an empty dissecting table that had been pushed against a wall to one side of the mortuary.
He walked over and grabbed it, using his strength to free the table from its awkward position, and then wheeled it over to where the others stood.
Carlisle's eyes narrowed.
'Can I ask what you're doing, Grant?'
Foster held up his hand as if to say, 'Wait and see.'
Bit by bit he manoeuvred the table into a position parallel to the one holding Darbyshire's body, both edges touching, then he hauled himself on to it. He stood up and leaned over the dead man, his weight on his right l
He remained on his perch for some time, without speaking.
'Heather, get up here,' he said finally.
She hopped up beside him, while Carlisle shook his head in disbelief.
'These aren't defensive wounds,' Foster said.
'Look at the right nipple: above it is a long vertical scratch. Can you see that? Then look how it's topped with a small diagonal nick, or looks like it is. And beneath it is a horizontal scratch.'
Heather agreed.
'What does that look like?'
She stared at the wounds. 'A number i,' she said, certain.
'Look at the others.'
Carlisle had joined her at the other side of the table for a closer look. Foster dropped to his knees. He pointed towards the middle of the chest, his finger tracing the lines of two slanted cuts, the hairless, paper-white skin almost delicately torn.
'See how they almost reach a point?' he said. Then he indicated a barely distinguishable graze between the two lines, like a shaving nick.
'That almost bridges the gap between the two wounds. It looks like a letter A.'
Foster continued his way across the man's chest, following the outlines of each cut and deciphering a figure or letter it represented. At the end, Foster reached under the gown and retrieved his notebook from his suit pocket. He wrote down five figures: 1 A 1 3 7.
'These cuts were made postmortem,' Carlisle commented.
'In which case, they were for our eyes,' Foster replied. He turned back and looked at the body for the final time. Carlisle picked up a scalpel to show what he intended to do next.
'Fill your boots,' Foster said, gesturing towards the body.
They left the room before the first incision was made.
