Last Respects

Even Constable Crosby raised his head at this.

“Furthermore,” said the pathologist, “in my opinion he died from the consequences of a fall from a considerable height.”

Detective Constable Crosby clearly felt it was incumbent on him to say something into the silence which followed this pronouncement. He looked round the room and said, “Did he fall or was he pushed?”

“Ah, gentlemen,” Dr. Dabbe said courteously, “I rather think that your department, isn’t it? Not mine.”

Detective Inspector Sloan was not to be diverted by such pleasantry. There were still some matters that were the pathologist’s department and he wanted to know about them.

“What sort of height?” he asked immediately.

“Difficult to say exactly at this stage, Sloan,” temporised the pathologist. “There’s a lot of work to be done yet. I’ve got to take a proper look at the X-rays, too. I can tell you that there are multiple impacted fractures where the shock effect of hitting terra firma ran through the body.”

Sloan winced involuntarily.

The pathologist was more detached. “It demonstrates Newton’s Third Law of Motion very nicely—you know, the one about force travelling through a body.”

Sloan didn’t know and didn’t care.

“He didn’t fell from the air, did he?” he asked. There had been parts of a dead body dropped from an aeroplane on the Essex marshes just after the last war. That case had become a cause celebre and passed into legal history and he, Sloan, had read about it. “We’re not talkig about aeroplane height, are we?”

“No, no,” said Dr. Dabbe. “Less than that.”

Sloan nodded. “But he didn’t fell into the water?”

“Not first,” said the pathologist. “I think he hit the earth first.”

That only left fire. If Sloan had been a medieval man he would have promptly enquired about the fourth element—fire—that always went with earth, water and air. He wasn’t, he reminded himself astringently, any such thing. He was a twentieth-century policeman. “A fall from a height,” he said sedately instead.

“Yes,” said the pathologist.

“And onto hard ground,” said Sloan.

“Hard something,” said Dr. Dabbe. “As to whether it was ground or not I can’t say yet.”

“Not into the sea, though?” concluded Sloan.

That stirred Detective Constable Crosby into speech again. “What about Cranberry Point?” he suggested. “That’s a good drop.”

“Rather less than that, too, I think,” said Dr. Dabbe more slowly, “though I can’t tell you for certain yet. I’ll have to have a look at the exact degree of bone displacement…”

The knee bone was connected to the hip bone and the hip bone was connected to the thigh bone…

“You can get out onto the cliff above Kinnisport,” persisted Crosby, “if you have a mind to.”

“But,” pointed out the pathologist, “if you go over the cliff there you don’t hit the water.”

“No more you don’t, Doctor,” agreed the constable, in no whit put out.

Sloan had forgotten for a moment that the pathologist was a Sunday sailor himself. He remembered now that Dr. Dabbe sailed an Albacore somewhere in the estuary. He was bound to know that stretch of the river and coastline well.

“You hit the rocks if you go over the edge up there,” pronounced Dr. Dabbe, thus revealing that he had already given the cliffs beyond Kinnisport some thought.

“But not the water,” agreed Sloan. That was what had saved Cranberry Point from becoming Calleshire’s Beachy Head all right. “The tide never comes in to the very bottom of the cliff.”

“Exactly,” said Dr. Dabbe. “He wouldn’t have ended up in the water if he’d gone over the cliffs there.”

“Unless,” said Inspector Sloan meticulously, “someone had then punted the body into the sea.” It might be Dr. Dabbe’s function to establish the cause of death; it was Detective Inspector Sloan’s bounden duty to consider all the angles of a proposition. “After he’d fallen…”

“Or been pushed,” said Crosby unnecessarily.

It was Sloan whom the pathologist answered. “Yes, Inspecter, I suppose you shouldn’t discount the theoretical possibility that someone dragged him off the rocks at the foot of the cliff and into the sea.”

“They’d have had a job,” said Crosby roundly, forgetting that it was no part of the office of constable— detective or otherwise—to argue with an inspector—detective or otherwise—let alone with a full-blown medical man.

Sloan regarded Crosby with a certain curiosity. It wasn’t the breach of protocol that intrigued him. After all, protocol was only significant in one of two ways—either in its observance or in its breaching. What he had noted was that Detective Constable Crosby—traffic policeman manque—didn’t as a rule take such an interest in a case early on. He wondered what it was about the matter so far that had caught his wayward attention.

“I must say, Sloan,” added Dr. Dabbe, who never minded with whom he argued, “from my own experience I can confirm that it would be the devil’s own job to get in there under the cliffs with a boat to do any such thing.”

“Would it, Doctor?” Cranberry Point, then, could be discounted.

“It certainly wouldn’t be a job for a man on his own,” said Dabbe, “and the tide would have had to be exactly right.”

“And as for walking round the cliffs from Kinnisport, sir,” put in Crosby.

“Yes?” said Sloan, interested in spite of himself. Crosby was no walker. His stint on the beat had proved that.

“You’d have your work cut out to do it, sir, without the coastguards seeing you.”

If Superintendent Leeyes had been there he would have automatically added a rider to the effect that the coastguards hadn’t anything else to do but look out at the sea and the cliffs. The superintendent wasn’t there, of course, because he never went out on cases at all if he could help it. He stayed at the centre while his myrmidons fanned out and then reported back. The still centre, some might say; others were more perceptive and spoke wisely of the eye of the hurricane…

“Exactly,” said Dr. Dabbe, who was fortunately able to concentrate entirely on the matter in hand. Forensic pathologists didn’t have superior officers chasing them. In theory, at any rate, they pursued absolute accuracy for its own sake—at the request of Her Majesty’s Coroner and at the behest of no one else. The only people of whom pathologlsts had to be wary, thought Sloan with a certain amount of envy, were opposing counsel in court who wanted to give the Goddess of Truth a tweak here and there to the benefit of their particular client.

Detective Inspector Sloan took out of his notebook the copy that he had brought with him of Constable Ridgeford’s brief report. “Our man at Edsway says that there weren’t any clues as to this chap’s name at all that he could see.”

“And none that we could either,” agreed the pathologist. “Not to his name,” he added obscurely. “Well have to leave his personal identity to you people, Sloan, for the time being. Even his own mother wouldn’t know him now.”

Sloan nodded. The doctor’s “we” included his own assistant, Burns, a taciturn man who rarely spoke, but who would have gone through the dead man’s clothes with the meticulousness of an old-fashioned nanny. “We’ll need as much as we can to go on, Doctor.”

The pathologist started to take his jacket off and to look about him for a green gown. “His physical identity’s no problem.”

“Good,” said Sloan warmly.

“He’s male,” said Dr. Dabbe, obligingly beginning at the very beginning.

Sloan wrote that down. The Genesis touch, you could say. “And how old, Doctor?”

Surely that did come after sex, didn’t it? “About twenty-three,” said the doctor promptly. “Give or take a year or two either way.”

Sloan looked down at his notebook and wondered what came next in the pathologist’s logical sequence after sex and age.

“As to his race…” began Dr. Dabbe cautiously.