Aaron Elkins - Murder In The Queen's armes

"Why would I think that?" She laughed and gently poked him in the abdomen with a finger. "Because you’ve been standing there in front of me with your shirt unbuttoned, and you’ve forgotten to suck in your tummy and stick out your chest."

"Oh, no!" he exclaimed, pulling in the one and thrusting forward the other. "Now you know the awful truth about me. Another flabby-chested, pot-bellied fraud."

"You phony, you’re gorgeous and you know it. C’mere." She seized his belt and dragged him down beside her. "Mmm," she said, "I’m interested in bodies myself."

"Me too," he said, shifting his weight so they toppled gently sideways onto the bed, still embracing, their heads on the pillows. "One particular body, anyway. Now, where were we?"

Wilson Merrill was one of those people who look just the way they sound. Gideon had pictured a squarish, energetic man of forty-five, with a ruddy face and jolly eyes, and so he was. He arrived punctually at eight, just as Gideon and Julie were finishing a gigantic breakfast in the dining room. They were alone, Robyn and Arbuckle having started early on the two-hundred mile round trip to Swanscombe.

Merrill promptly accepted Gideon’s invitation to join them for a cup of coffee and plumped himself down at their table. They passed a few minutes in pleasant enough conversation about weather and countryside, and Merrill recommended several country walks they might like, being himself a great walker. (It was not hard to imagine him striding over the downs in knickerbockers and tweed coat, with a shooting stick under his arm, if they still had such things.)

When Julie said, "I hear you’ve found something in my husband’s line," he was off at once, with energy and relish, before he even swallowed the coffee in his mouth.

"Um," he said, and swallowed. "Ah. Yes. Male. Caucasian, I think, but hard to say. An awful lot of putrefaction, and the fish and crustaceans have been having a jolly time with him. Not much face to speak of. They’ve eaten away most of the soft parts-lips, eyelids, nostrils, that sort of thing. And of course the bloating and hypostasis have produced the most grotesque distortions."

He put his hands to his face to demonstrate God knows what, but Gideon had noted that Julie was sitting rigidly in her chair, not chewing the toast that had gone into her mouth a moment before. Her eyes caught his in a frantic plea for help.

"Dr. Merrill," Gideon said quickly, "my wife isn’t terribly familiar with this sort of thing."

Merrill’s hands dropped away from the corners of his mouth, which he had begun to tug outward in a spirited rendition of bloating and hypostasis. "Oh dear, Mrs. Oliver," he said, looking genuinely distressed, "how completely thoughtless of me. Look here, I am sorry."

"That’s quite all right," Julie said a little thickly, around the toast. She closed her eyes and, with an effort, swallowed. "No problem at all. But it is almost eight-thirty," she said brightly, "and I insist on having my husband back in time for one of those walks. So perhaps you’d both better get to your, er, remains."

"I say, I am sorry," Merrill said again as he pulled the little Fiat into the light traffic of Charmouth’s main street. "My wife doesn’t mind in the least when I go on about bodies and things." He chuckled. "Not that I suppose she hears a word of it after all these years. But really, I must remember that many women are rather sensitive about these things."

Not only women, Gideon thought; men, too. Sometimes even physical anthropologists. Julie had not been the only one whose appetite had vanished so suddenly. He was not, after all, a pathologist but an evolutionary theoretician, a student of early man. Naturally, an understanding of what bones could tell was essential, and it was this knowledge that had led him-how, he could hardly remember-into spending a substantial portion of this time with policemen, pathologists, and corpses.

He had never tired of learning about the human skeleton, and to sit down over a fifty-thousand-year-old skull, to tease from it the essence of the long-gone, living man- what he looked like, what he ate, what he did, how he died, sometimes even what he thought-this was the most engrossing activity of his life…his work life, anyway. (Julie’s arrival on the scene had drastically reordered his priorities, and all to the good.)

Still, an analytical session with an ancient skeleton was something he always looked forward to, "ancient" being the key word. A dry brown skull or a dusty old femur had a clean, curved beauty of its own, apparent to the educated eye or fingertip. But a greasy, decomposing corpse, always pathetic, frequently the victim of a horrendous crime, was another thing. Gideon had never grown used to them.

"Were you able to establish cause of death?" he asked. "Drowning?"

"Assuredly not," Merrill said with emphasis. "No sign of ‘drowning lung,’ no diatoms in the subpleural tissue or the bone marrow. Definitely not drowning."

"Any other ideas?"

"Well," Merrill said, and looked briefly at Gideon, "yes, I do have some ideas… Would you like to hear them?"

"On second thought, no. I’d be better off coming to my own conclusions. Less chance of bias."

"Quite proper," Merrill said approvingly. "Very professional. Not many are these days, I can tell you."

They drove in silence into the pretty village of Bridport and turned left off A-35 to the very edge of town, where a large hospital and a small police station shared a block of grassy land. They also shared the same mortuary, it seemed. Merrill parked the car in front of the police station, one of those grimly utilitarian Victorian structures of red brick turned by time to the color of dried blood. It consisted of a pair of identical two-story buildings, each with two big brick chimneys crowned with jumbles of sooty chimney pots. On the lawn before the buildings was a small, sad marble column, a memorial to the village dead of the two world wars, with faded artificial flowers at its base.

"Here we are at last," Merrill chirped when he parked, as if he’d brought them to one of the must-see spots of the British Isles. "In we go."

The entry took them under a gray concrete arch that connected the two dreary buildings and was inscribed with wedge-shaped Roman lettering: covnty constabvlary. On the drab wall of the building on the left was a modern, incongruously bright sign of blue and white: Dorset Police. South Western Divisional Headquarters.

"Mortuary’s here on the right," Merrill said, then glanced at Gideon. "Something on your mind?"

"Yes. Someone’s been missing from the Stonebarrow Fell dig for a couple of weeks; a man named Randy Alexander. Any reason to think it might be him?"

Merrill laughed. "That, my dear fellow, is what we were hoping you’d tell us. "

Gideon’s hope that "mortuary" might signify something a little warmer, a little less dingily depressing than the morgues he’d gotten used to in the United States was quickly extinguished. The Bridport Mortuary might have been a scaled-down replica of the coroner’s morgue in San Francisco’s gloomy old Hall of Justice.

They entered through a sterile little anteroom, unfurnished but for a solitary couch covered in green plastic, which looked fifteen years old but never sat upon. One wall was of glass, like the viewing room in a maternity ward, but this wall was not for viewing the newly living.

"Observation room," Merrill explained unnecessarily, searching through his pockets for the key that would let them pass through.

It is generally only in the movies that people who come to identify corpses walk into the morgue and peer into a drawer to see a chilled body with a red tag tied by a string to its big toe. They’re there, all right, in their drawers, with tags on their toes, but the insides of morgues are almost never seen by the public. Instead, the body to be viewed, decorously clothed in a sheet pulled up around its neck, is wheeled to the viewing-room window on a gurney. If the head has been damaged, the "better" side is presented to the observer. And if there is no better side, a technician will make whatever cosmetic repairs are possible, more to spare the viewer than to aid in the identification.