Murder at the matinée – Part 5
Sherlock:
To say that the medical examiner was surprised when three people stepped into the autopsy room would have been nothing but the truth, but to say he was quite disconcerted that one of these people was a young and pretty woman, would have been understating things. Doctor James Bell, had just taken off the sheet, that had covered the body, to start with the outer examination, but as soon as his eyes fell on my wife, he quickly slipped it back over the dead man, who had not even been stripped yet.
I had met the doctor before and he knew me as well, nodding towards me in his usual friendly manner but when his eyes darted over to Lestrade, he seemed almost accusatory.
"Inspector, this is not a public autopsy. You yourself have ordered it to be none. Mr Holmes I guess is all right to attend, but I doubt very much, that this is the right past time for a lady." and then he added, turning towards Harriet: "Madam, I am very sure that this is not anything you would wish to see. It is giving many a man some sleepless nights, after having been present, when a man is cut open and I dare think you are not planning to enrol in the subject of medical study."
"No, doctor, I indeed do not plan to enrol at university to study medicine, as I have already done that and have graduated four years ago, making quite a name for myself already – though your subject happens to have the wrong gender for my line of expertise." her smile was disarming and it was not wasted on the good man. "Though I was called in on occasion by colleagues of yours when it came to the mutilation and abuse of women. - Doctor Holmes is my name now, but I publish under the name of Stephens, still."
"I have heard of Doctor R. H. Stephens and have read his work." Doctor Bell answered, the sheet still in his hands, ready to pull it off of Thompson once more.
"Yes, that is me."
"I thought you might appreciate her help, Bell." Lestrade defended himself. "I would not have brought her, had she not been familiar with the case anyway. - She was the one who pronounced him dead. - By the way, you still need to sign the death certificate, madam."
"I shall do so after the autopsy."
It was obvious, that the examiner was still not quite comfortable with my wife being around, but he, at last, removed the sheet, folded it and put it on a stool beside the slab.
"Where is Hill anyway, should he not be here to assist you?" the inspector wondered, looking around the large whitewashed room for the assistant.
"He is lying in bed, being ill. I have sent him home this morning, seeing that he had a fever."
"Good, then I can take his place." Hattie smiled broadly, while Doctor Bell frowned once again.
Harriet, taking one of the aprons that hung behind the door and wrapping herself in it, stepped closer to the body, but respecting the lead of the other physician.
"We came to the conclusion, that the man cannot have died from the cut, but it was completely impossible to determine, what he had died of," she informed him, indicating the wound and taking another look at the injury in the more appropriate lighting that the dissecting room afforded.
"Yes, I would say, you are right with that assumption. The lack of blood is a clear indicator, that the blood flow towards the head was already cut off."
Watching my wife, I saw her biting her lower lip, before reaching for a magnifying glass and having a thorough look at the neck, but to my astonishment below the actual cut.
"Well, the blood flow was not cut off manually in any way," she said after a moment and a small smile graced the lined face of Doctor Bell.
"No – so he must have died from some other cause."
"May I?" Harriet carried on, taking the end of the wire that had us so bemused.
"Sure, but be careful, it is extremely sharp. I was told the sergeant who oversaw bringing him here has managed to cut himself with it quite badly."
"Yes, I realised that yesterday, too. You would not know, what a wire like this is used for, would you?"
"No."
Bell had lifted Thompson's head, so Harriet could pry loose the mysterious wire without greater difficulty.
Lestrade and I had sat down on a pair of surprisingly comfortable chairs and watched the two doctors working quite peacefully together. After taking a closer look themselves, the medics handed us the at first glance unassuming implement, but again, I was taken by the sparkling substance the wire was coated in.
"May I use your microscope quickly?" I asked, getting up already and walking over to the doctor's desk in the other corner.
"Sure, knock yourself out, Mr Holmes."
Adjusting the mirror of the microscope so the light from the gas jet above the desk would illuminate the object well enough to discern its details, I closed my left eye and glanced at the wire with the other. The wire was not particularly thin, but not very sturdy either and it looked as if it had been made of steel that in turn had been coated with a glistening substance while it had still been hot from pulling it. It was distributed all over the wire, apart from a couple of inches on either end. Looking more closely I saw that this glistening substance had extremely sharp edges, like tiny shards of glass. I took one of the unused specimen slides that lay ready to be used on top of a wooden cigar box and taking the coated wire, tried to cut it in half. It worked perfectly, giving as little resistance as if I were cutting a slice of buttered toast with a knife.
"Whatever are you doing there, Holmes?" Lestrade wondered, having divided his attention between the doctors and me.
"I have been wondering, what this substance was and I am happy to say, that now I can tell you. - It is diamond dust."
"Are you certain?"
"Nothing else would cut glass this easily," I argued, holding up the two halves of the slide. Stretching my back I turned around to see for myself, what Doctor's Bell and Holmes were up to now and saw, that with an expression of uneasiness on the formers face, they had by now almost stripped the man of his clothes – apart from his underpants. But when Harriet tried to remove them as well, the examiner stopped her.
"I do not think this would be appropriate," he mumbled, his face turning a faint shade of red. Looking up, my wife looked first confused, before the corners of her mouth began twitching suspiciously.
"I was not aware, you had female medical examiners..." she mused, her eyebrows raised challengingly.
"We have not. Of course not!"
"Then how do you deal with dead women?" Lestrade and I looked at one another and were both hard pressed not to laugh.
"I am a professional, I can deal with both men and women," Bell answered indignantly.
"Then you should realise, that the same applies to me. I may have specialised in the diseases of women and little children now, but my curriculum was exactly the same as yours when I studied and I have actually seen more men than women being cut open during that time – and all of them were as naked as on the day they were born. So, can we decide on stripping him down now and carry on?"
With a sight, Bell opened the fastening of the man's underpants, which naturally were close to his crotch and while he lifted the man's buttocks slightly off the slab, my wife removed the offending item.
"Whoa, what..." Inspector Lestrade cried out, as soon as Thompson had been stripped naked at last and I could understand his reaction very well.
Had I already caught a glimpse of the tattoo around the man's arm, which considering his overall proper attire, had already been a surprise, the second tattoo left all four of us astonished.
"That must have been very painful to have that done..." was the dry comment of my wife, "I bet it was quite a surprise for his wife, too, when she first got a glimpse of it."
"Not if they always turned off the light beforehand." I heard Lestrade mutter under his breath behind me as the same thought crossed my mind. Bell, on the other hand, looked utterly taken aback and I would have wagered there and then, that he already regretted it bitterly that he had agreed to Harriet helping him.
Ignoring the discomfort of her colleague, Harriet carried on viewing the body in silence, once in a while stopping to take a closer look with the magnifying glass and at long last, the actual autopsy was performed. The corpse was opened and the inner organs removed to be examined on the pewter covered side table with its high sides and the drainage hole to one side.
"No inner bleeding, no other injuries and no signs of strangulation or asphyxia," Bell muttered, lost in his own thoughts now.
"And it does not appear as if he has been poisoned either."
"No, no unusual rigour, no discolouration on the inside of the mouth, absolutely nothing."
"He had a bottle of Laudanum on him and he might have taken some. It had been almost half empty." I interjected.
"That might be so, but he certainly did not die from intoxication. There is no sign of any reflux no unusual smell of his stomach contents – as said, nothing. Though he might have been drowsy from the opiate – but it certainly did not kill him."
"His wife said, he always took Laudanum with him, wherever he went," Lestrade confirmed though. "Several years ago he had an accident and since then loud conversations and music gave him severe headaches. He used the stuff frequently and it seemed to be the only thing that helped him with his malady."
So far I had been right then. And now knowing that it was a habit of his, many people who knew him, would have known about it, too.
"And he used some of it yesterday?" I dug deeper while watching Bell and Harriet carry on working, taking apart the body of what once had been Charles Thompson. Harriet had taken a few samples of the inner organs and was busy preparing the glass slides to have a closer look at the tissue.
"Yes, she said so. He was in a rather bad mood because he was in pain – she said they even quarrelled at the theatre."
"They did. I saw them. And it did not look as if they had resolved their differences when fate struck."
"No."
Harriet was now bent over the microscope and I could see, something had, at last, caught her attention. Swiftly she walked over to the table again and beckoned Doctor Bell to have a look likewise.
"He was a builder, was he not?" I enquired further, curious as to what was going on.
"How on earth can you possibly know that?" the inspector stared at me in bewilderment.
"Look at his hands. He has clearly worked with them when he was younger. More specifically I dare say he was a stonemason, but he sticks to designing things nowadays."
"And there I thought you would not baffle me anymore after all these years. Yes, he was a stonemason and builder."
"Obviously from New Zealand."
"Yes, he moved there as a young man. Returned about fifteen years ago, and has since made a name in indeed designing public buildings – or at least parts of them, as his speciality seems to be the decorative elements of them. So the architects hire him, to fill what they cannot or dare not design."
"He must have done well considering..." I stopped mid-sentence as Harriet scalped Thompson, pulling his scalp over his face so that it now looked as if he was wearing a gruesome mask and stepping back herself, Bell started sawing open the skull. With the familiar sickening plop, the calvarium was taken off and without batting an eyelid my wife took out the brain, while the pathologist severed the spinal cord.
Watching attentively how Harriet prepared yet another slide and handed it to Bell, she looked up with something akin to triumph on her pretty and eager face and a moment later Doctor Bell proclaimed that they had found the cause of death.
"What was it?" Lestrade asked impatiently.
"He was injected air into his carotid artery – it went straight to his brain and caused an embolism." the medical examiner answered.
"There are traces of air in the heart tissue also, so it must have taken a couple of minutes, till he had breathed his last." Harriet carried on. "But not more than a few minutes."
"But if he was injected air, how did we not find a puncture mark?" I asked, but then answered my own question. "Of course, it had been obliterated by the cut."
"There is but one thing, I do not understand," Lestrade remarked thoughtfully, "if he was already dead, why would someone attempt to cut off his head? I mean, why bother?"
"To make a statement?" Harriet suggested, shrugging her shoulders.
I continued her line of thought: "I dare say the whole murder was supposed to be a statement. The place, the method, the tool…"
"You said he was a stonemason?" she interjected me again.
"Yes."
"Then I think I might know what this wire is normally used for."
"You do?" I was aghast.
"In pottery, wires are used to cut the clay. – I think I have read somewhere, that stone, especially harder stone, sometimes is cut with what is called a wire saw. I have been wondering how it would work, but this surely would be the solution." she had carefully picked up the wire. "I dare say that this is such a wire saw. - It would also explain, why the ends have no diamond dust embedded. After all, one needs to be able to hold that thing somehow without cutting through one's own fingers."
"I can definitely see, why the two of you are attracted to one another..." Lestrade sighed in mock exasperation a friendly grin on his sharp face. "Must have been love at first sight."
"Yes, that is pretty obvious. - And it was." I smiled, my gaze fixed on my wife, who smiled back at me. "But there is still one question I would like to have answered."
"And that would be?"
"How much force does it take to cut a man's neck with it?"
"We can hardly try that on another body."
"No, but we could visit the nearest butcher shop."
A.N.: In case anyone was wondering, yes, Dr James Bell was meant as a homage to Dr Joseph Bell, the man, that the character of Sherlock Holmes was based on.
Also, I have done some research on air embolisms. I am aware that they don't need to be deadly and that it would need quite an amount of air, to have such an impact as to kill a grown man within minutes. Then again, all I could find were cases, in which the air was injected in the usual medical spots for injection, which rarely include the carotid arteries. Using the carotid artery as an entry, would mean, that the air bubble would first affect the brain and not the heart, as Thompson had a predisposition due to his old head wound, I assumed hence, that an air embolism within the brain might likely cause cerebral apoplexy, which in turn can lead to a quick demise, depending which part of the brain is affected. So let's just say, the murderer had been lucky that it worked.
And no, the tattoo is NOT on his 'you know what', but on both his upper thighs (inside and out) and also covering the butt. - Still, at least for Victorian times, quite a risky place.