by Andrew Lane
‘Also a good point.’
‘Which leaves us still with a puzzle.’ Sherlock considered. ‘Why would anybody take just those things?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Is there any security here?’
Lukather looked embarrassed. ‘It never occurred to me that it was necessary. There was nothing valuable here, nothing we thought was worth stealing. The front door was locked and the back door was bolted when I left, of course. There is a skylight but that is sealed shut. The only possible way in is a small window that we leave open for ventilation, but it is far too small for a man to climb through. The hospital gates are locked at night too, of course,’ Lukather added, ‘but that’s of little use. There are plenty of trees that overhang the wall which a thief could use to get into the grounds, and I know that there is at least one place where the wall is crumbling and someone could get through, if they were small enough. Once I knew that the thefts were occurring I made sure that the door was double-locked and the skylight sealed, but somehow the thief still managed to find a way in. I did ask the police to mount a guard, but they told me they were too busy doing important work.’
‘Who had the key to the door?’
‘There is only one copy, and I have it myself.’ Lukather delved into one of his pockets and brought out a bunch of keys on a chain. He selected the largest one. ‘This is it. Stays with me all the time. Never leaves my person.’
Sherlock thought for a moment. Maybe the thefts of the body parts were covering up something else?
‘Were any valuables kept here – from the bodies? Things like watches, or jewellery, or even wallets?’
Lukather shook his head firmly. ‘All that kind of thing would have been removed by the constables before the bodies were brought to me. They would have been kept at the police station as evidence.’
‘The bodies were brought straight here from the places they were discovered?’
‘They were.’
‘And they go from here to . . . ?’
‘To the undertakers, to be prepared for burial.’
Sherlock shook his head, confused. ‘I can’t see why anybody would want to steal parts of bodies. It just seems so . . . bizarre.’
‘I know. It has me puzzled too.’
‘Do the police have any suspects?’ Sherlock asked the question innocently, but he already knew what the answer was likely to be.
‘There’s some chappie who keeps asking me if he can take one of these newfangled photograph thingies of the bodies. I think he’s a lecturer at Christ Church College. He says he wants to record them for posterity. I can see the point, of course – it would be valuable for teaching purposes – but there’s something about his manner that I find a bit strange, so I keep saying no. He’s very insistent. I told the police about him, and I think they have taken him in for questioning, but there is no direct evidence that he might be involved. Oh, and there’s a student as well – a Mr Chippenham. He’s an odd one too. Studying natural science, but he’s tried to get in here a couple of times. Claimed that he wanted to do some extracurricular research, if you please! I told the police, of course, and I think they’ve questioned him as well.’
‘Yes, they have,’ Sherlock murmured. He looked up to find Lukather staring at him penetratingly. ‘I heard one of the other reporters talking about it,’ he said quickly.
‘I see.’
Sherlock glanced down at his tea cup. It was, fortunately, empty. ‘Could I possibly have another cup?’ he asked. ‘I’m fascinated by everything you’ve been saying, and I’d like to stay for a little longer, if you would let me.’
Lukather nodded. ‘Nice to have someone here who isn’t spooked by the whole idea of dead bodies on the premises,’ he said. He got up and started to head out to the little kitchen area, then stopped and stared at a picture on the wall. ‘I never married,’ he said. ‘There was a girl once, but when she discovered what I did every day, she ended it. Said she couldn’t stand the idea of me touching dead bodies all day long then coming home and kissing her. Never met anyone after that. Never saw the point.’ He shook himself, then walked out into the kitchen. Sherlock glanced at the picture on the wall. It was a drawing of a woman in her twenties, striking rather than beautiful, but with large, soulful eyes. Then he looked at the door through which Lukather had vanished, and sighed. It was sad, he thought, how a man could choose a career that cut him off from ever having a happy home life.
He pulled himself together. He had work to do, and quickly. He stood up and reached out for the bunch of keys, which Lukather had left on the table next to his own cup. He picked them up. They were surprisingly heavy. He quickly flicked through them until he found the largest one – the key to the door of the mortuary. He held it up to his eyes, wishing momentarily that he had something that would allow him to see the detail of the key clearer – a magnifying glass, or something like that. He was looking for traces of material caught in one or two of the metal corners between the tines of the key – little flecks of something like clay, or putty. That might indicate that someone had taken the key from Lukather’s key ring while he wasn’t paying attention – while he was asleep perhaps – and pressed it into a block of clay, leaving an impression. Once they had taken the impression, they could have returned the original key immediately. They could have then used the impression to mould a new key out of some metal with a low melting point. They might even have carved a copy out of some hard wood. All it would have taken was time, and a little skill. The copy – whether it was metal or wood – wouldn’t have to last for very long: just enough for them to get in and out of the mortuary late at night several times.
The problem was, there were no traces of anything. The key was pristine. That didn’t mean that it hadn’t been copied, of course – just that if it had then the evidence had been removed.
He put the key back on the table just as Lukather returned.
‘Did the thefts of the body parts occur on a regular basis?’ he asked. ‘I mean, every week, or every month?’
Lukather thought for a moment. His brow creased in a frown. ‘I don’t recall the exact dates,’ he said eventually. ‘Let me check my diary.’ He reached across to a table and retrieved a leather-bound volume. He pulled up his half-moon spectacles, which were hanging from a chain around his neck, and perched them on his nose. He flicked through the diary, sometimes going backwards or forwards a few pages to check something and then returning to where he had been. ‘I have the dates here,’ he said eventually. ‘I made sure I recorded them all. The problem is that there is no obvious correlation between them. They never happened on the same day of the week, or the same day of the month.’ He shook his head in irritation. ‘There’s no obvious pattern. If there was, I would have spotted it. I even wondered whether the thefts might have occurred every full moon, perhaps, but that was not the case.’
‘Because the full moon would have provided the most amount of light for the thief?’ Sherlock guessed.
‘Partly that, but partly also because there is a known correlation between insanity and the night of the full moon.’ Lukather took his glasses off and polished them with a small cloth from his pocket. ‘Nobody is quite sure why,’ he went on, ‘but lunatics do appear to be influenced by moonlight. The fact has been known for years. Indeed the very word “lunatic” derives from “luna”, the Latin word for “moon”.’
‘Could I have a look at the diary?’ Sherlock asked. ‘I realize it’s your own private information, but I think there might be some pattern there, if only I can spot it.’
‘It’s not as if I have an active social life,’ Lukather said heavily. ‘There is nothing there I would be ashamed for my mother to see, if she were still alive, and if she had ever cared about what I do for a living.’
‘And there’s no confidential police information in there – reports of the autopsies themselves, or something like that?’
He shook his head. ‘That’s all put into special reports on printed forms, and c
ollected by hand by the police.’ He handed the diary across. ‘The dates where the thefts occurred are marked by a large exclamation mark in the top right-hand corner,’ he said. ‘While you take a look I’ll go and check on that kettle.’
Sherlock went backwards through the dates, starting that day. The entries were in neat, precise handwriting. They mainly covered meetings with the police or with the medical authorities in the hospital, dates for inquests or court appearances, dates blocked out for autopsies to take place, with the names of the deceased carefully recorded, with the occasional note for ‘reception’ or ‘dinner’. Whenever Sherlock came across an exclamation mark in the top right-hand corner of a day he made a note in his own notebook of the date, the day of the week, the phase of the moon (which was conveniently noted by the diary’s printers by means of a small illustration showing what the moon would have looked like on each day) and what Lukather had been doing on that day and on the day before, just in case that was relevant. There was, as Lukather had said, no obvious relationship between the dates. Sherlock looked in particular at the numbers of days between the incidents, but they varied – sometimes thirty days, sometimes forty, sometimes only eight.
Except . . .
Except that something was bothering Sherlock. There was a pattern there, somewhere – he just couldn’t see it. He needed time to concentrate.
Lukather came back then with another tray of tea and biscuits. Sherlock opened his mouth to say, ‘I’m really sorry, but I need to go . . .’ but then he saw from the pathologist’s eager expression how much he was enjoying having the unexpected company. If Sherlock left now, then, he suspected, Lukather would just sit there for a long time, alone, drinking the tea and eating the biscuits, maybe staring at the portrait of the woman hanging on the wall. ‘Are you sure I’m not imposing on your time too much?’ he asked instead.
‘Not in the slightest,’ the pathologist replied. ‘I have a foreign student from the University, a Mr Daniel Hussein, on my table at the moment. He arrived but recently from the Middle East, and then dropped dead at a market at Rokeby, nearby. I suspect a pre-existing disease, which is why I have taken precautions to isolate the body and wash it with carbolic acid. I will sterilize my tools afterwards, twice, just to make sure. But yes, Mr Hussein can wait while we finish our tea and biscuits. He isn’t going anywhere.’
A thought came to Sherlock that really should have occurred before. He frowned, considering it. ‘If the thefts happen at night, he said, ‘then that means the bodies are actually stored here. I mean, they aren’t taken away as soon as the post-mortem examination has taken place.’
‘That’s correct,’ Lukather confirmed. ‘Sometimes, if there have been a lot of deaths, then I have a queue waiting for my attention, so they have to be stored in a separate room. The room is cooled with ice, to prevent . . .’ he hesitated, ‘. . . to prevent the natural processes of decomposition from taking place. Also, I sometimes finish a post-mortem examination late in the day, after the funeral directors have closed, and the body has to wait to be collected the next day. On rare occasions, if I cannot determine a cause of death, then another pathologist has to be called in to examine it, and that also takes time. So, for all these reasons, there are always bodies in the mortuary. It is no stretch for the thief to know that.’
They sat there for the next forty-five minutes, with Sherlock asking as many questions as he could about death, the various ways it might happen and the evidence that would be left behind in each case. In particular he found that the pathologist was very experienced in poisons that mimicked symptoms of disease, so that a woman who had died from drinking a tea made with belladonna leaves could well be diagnosed as having died of a heart attack if the pathologist wasn’t paying particular attention to his job. Again Sherlock found himself thinking back to something that he had been involved in, but in this case it was the death of the philanthropist Sir Benedict Ventham in Edinburgh, who had been killed in a very similar way to the one Lukather had described.
They did circle back to talking about the thefts, briefly. Sherlock asked a question that perhaps he should have asked before. ‘Is there any blame attached to you? Do your superiors think that you should be doing more to protect the mortuary, or do they even think you might be involved?’
‘I’ve spoken to the Board of Directors at the hospital several times,’ Lukather confided. ‘I have told them everything I know, and the police have also reassured them that I am not and never have been a suspect.’ He laughed, but there was little humour in the sound. ‘And they must be asking themselves – Where else could they get someone to do this work? I don’t see a queue forming.’
Eventually, however, despite the conversation, the temptation to analyse the dates became too much. ‘I really will have to go,’ Sherlock said, ‘but I’d like to thank you for a very interesting conversation.’
‘I have really enjoyed myself as well,’ the pathologist replied, rising and shaking Sherlock’s hand. ‘Do let me know if the newspaper piece ever comes out, but please also feel free to come back for tea and biscuits any time you wish.’ He paused for a moment, thinking. ‘I could always bend the rules and allow you to watch an autopsy being performed,’ he said tentatively. ‘It really is a most instructive experience.’
‘That really would be amazing,’ Sherlock said, touched by the pathologist’s suggestion. ‘I certainly will be back to see you, and I may well take you up on that offer.’
Lukather smiled. ‘That would be capital,’ he said. ‘I don’t get the opportunity that often to talk with a like mind. There was a man, some time ago – Ferny Weston, his name was. Big fellow. Very big. Policeman, he was. He stopped coming.’ His face fell, and he looked away. ‘I think I must have bored him.’
‘You won’t bore me,’ Sherlock promised.
CHAPTER SIX
Leaving the mortuary and the hospital grounds, Sherlock took the shortest route back to where he knew the river was to be found. He located a bench looking over an attractive spot and settled down, getting his notebook out to check the dates of the thefts. Perhaps it was the talk he’d had with Charles Dodgson about mathematic sequences of numbers, but he knew there was a pattern in this one, if only he could see it. He sat there for a long time, while the sun gradually went down and the shadows of the trees on the other side of the river lengthened across its rippling surface. At one point he became aware that Matty was sitting patiently beside him, but he didn’t remember noticing that his friend had even arrived.
Eventually he looked up. His mouth was dry and tasted funny, and he had a slight headache, but he thought he had it.
‘There is no pattern,’ he said to Matty – the first words he had spoken for several hours. ‘That’s the pattern.’
‘What does that mean?’ Matty asked.
‘Things have been going missing from the local mortuary – parts of bodies. My new tutor, Charles Dodgson, is a potential suspect, and so is one of the students I’m rooming with – Paul Chippenham. You remember, we saw him being taken away yesterday by the police for questioning. I’ve talked to the pathologist, and I’ve got a list of the dates when the body parts went missing. I thought I could find a pattern, so I could predict when the next theft will occur, but I can’t.’
‘So that’s it then? You need to find another line of investigation.’
Sherlock shook his head. ‘No – the lack of a pattern is actually a pattern. The thief, whoever it is, has deliberately avoided a theft on the same day of the month, or when the moon is in the same phase, or with the same number of days between thefts. They’ve done thefts on the same day of the week – they could hardly avoid it, because there are only seven days of the week, but they won’t do the same day on consecutive thefts. There are no Mondays together, no Tuesdays together—’
‘I get the idea.’
‘They also vary the weather conditions. There’s only one rainy Monday, only one sunny Monday, only one cloudy Monday. In their attempts to avoid setting any
kind of pattern, they’ve set a different pattern.’
Matty scratched his head. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Put it this way: it’s been twenty-two days since the last theft. The thief has already put a twenty-two day space between thefts, so they won’t conduct a theft tonight. Tomorrow is a possibility, according to the gaps, but not according to the weather. It’s a Thursday tomorrow and there’s bright sunshine forecast, which rules it out because the very first theft was on a sunny Thursday. If I can figure out all of the variables, I can go through the calendar and work out which days are left.’
Matty nodded slowly. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is real clever thinkin’.’ He paused. ‘Does thinkin’ actually take energy, the same way that runnin’ or carryin’ boxes does?’
Sherlock considered. ‘I’m starving now, if that means anything.’
‘Let’s go an’ get some food then. I reckon you’re goin’ to need it.’
They ate, and then went their separate ways.
It took Sherlock most of the next day to work out the cycle. He ended up having to buy a large roll of wallpaper and borrow the dining table at Mrs McCrery’s boarding house – with her permission, of course. He unrolled the wallpaper so that it covered the table, and then with a ruler and a pen he painstakingly set up a calendar for the next three months, with each day marked separately, and space marked on each day for listing the weather, the phase of the moon and all the other variables that he thought the thief was using, including whether or not they were public holidays or market days. He then painstakingly annotated the calendar as far as he could. Weather was the problem – the local newspapers only predicted it up to a few days ahead, which at least told him that the thief was not planning any further ahead than that anyway. It would have been pointless to arrange a robbery for a sunny Monday with a new moon only to find out that, on the day, it was snowing and he’d already conducted a robbery on a snowy Monday with a new moon. Sherlock would have to do what he assumed the thief was doing, and plan only a few days ahead, checking the weather and predicting it as far as he could. What he did do, however, was to cross through the days that could be ruled out because their set of characteristics had already been used. That at least told him which days the next robbery wouldn’t occur on. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the combinations had already been used up, and there weren’t that many days left when a robbery could occur.
