The Anatomy of Death Read Online Free Page A

sister was a prominent suffragette and had also been present at the riot, would they have faith in her impartiality? What a way to start a new engagement. But it was too late to back down now; they might think she had no stomach for the job.
    With their combined smoke swirling around the room, she removed her jacket and replaced it with an apron she found hanging on a peg near the sink. Some nurse’s cuffs also rested near the sink, and these she slipped over the sleeves of her lace blouse.
    “The first body, if you please,” she said.
    Shepherd snapped his fingers and Alfred appeared from the cadaver keep, pushing a wooden trolley with a sheeted body upon it. A parcel of personal effects rested at the body’s feet. Dody glanced through them while the attendants heaved the body onto the marble slab.
    She read aloud from the victim’s file. “‘Seventy-year-old Miss Jemima Jenkins. Witnesses say she was complaining of shortness of breath before the riot, then later they saw her clasp her chest and fall to the ground.’” Dody spent another minute reading the case notes provided by Miss Jenkins’s physician and the police surgeon, respectively. She noticed Pike had found himself a spot leaning against the far wall, puffing on his cigarette and apparently listening to a murmured conversation between Mr. Bright and the attendants. SuperintendentShepherd seemed unable to stand still; he glided about the room in his oversized mackintosh like one of Count Zeppelin’s airships.
    But when she drew back the sheet covering the body, the men stopped what they were doing.
They are probably expecting me to faint
, Dody thought.
I have never fainted before in my life and I will not start now.
    There was no need for dissection; the oedematous ankles backed up what she had already read in the notes. Evidence of pink froth on the lips, since dissipated, but reported by the police surgeon soon after the woman’s death, also assisted her with her conclusion.
    “Death due to heart attack, the result of longstanding congestive cardiac failure,” she dictated to Mr. Bright. She stared at the body for a moment longer, wondering what force of passions, now extinguished, had compelled this frail old lady to participate in such a vigorous demonstration.
    The cause of death of Mrs. Margaret Baxter, age forty-five, was also self-evident, but required some thoracic dissection to discover the precise nature of the injuries beneath the gaping chest wound. From the row of autopsy instruments on a nearby bench, Dody took a heavy anatomist’s scalpel and with a few deft strokes performed a Y-incision from armpits to groin. What blood there was—the women had been on ice since yesterday and there wasn’t much—was directed by Alfred into the runnels of the slab, and from thence to the blood bucket below. Dody peeled back the skin, then set to with the bulky rib-cutters, snipping through the bone to reveal the heart where the bulk of the blood had pooled.
    Superintendent Shepherd watched over her shoulder, spilling ash from his cigar into the thoracic cavity. She waved himaway with a flick of her scalpel, then used the chest spreader to part the lungs. There was no need to remove the heart; a cursory glance revealed all that was necessary. The railing upon which Mrs. Baxter had impaled herself had penetrated the thorax and diaphragm at a forty-five-degree angle, piercing the left ventricle and the descending aorta. Death would have occurred within seconds. Small comfort to her family, Dody mused, as she finished dictating her findings to Mr. Bright. She rinsed the scalpel and her gory hands under the tap while Alfred repaired the damage to Mrs. Baxter with needle and thread.
    The other attendant wheeled in the next body from the cadaver keep and Dody refilled her pipe.
    “Now this death has to be regarded as potentially suspicious,” Shepherd said as the attendants exchanged one body for the other on the slab. “We are obliged to perform a