The operating theatre was circular and steep, the central well thirty feet across with only three steep ranks of seats rising around it. A lantern rose from the roof above, giving only gloomy light because of the rain, augmented by standard gas lamps in a rough circle around the wheeled table that was the centrepiece. The unheated space felt arctic; a coal stove on the far side was unlit. Fewer people than Denton had expected sat as audience, all men, most in overcoats as he was. Denton didn’t register as a separate fact that the only woman in the room was the dead one until he had looked around, got bored and begun really to see. He would, on the other hand, have been surprised to find a living woman there. He would not have been able to articulate why he would have been surprised. Now, he thought about it. Why was the murder of a woman a solely male concern?
On the table lay, presumably, what was left of Stella Minter, covered with a much-washed white cloth, some old stains barely perceptible as yellowish blooms. Sir Frank Parmentier stood a few feet away next to a table of instruments, consulting with, or giving orders to, a smaller man. Parmentier was tall, thin, fully bearded, an apparently virile man in his fifties with a full head of rather long, possibly curled, hair. Denton judged him something of an egoist, as he seemed to like poses that threw his head well back. Both men were wearing day clothes — dark coats and waistcoats, Parmentier’s in the rather outdated style named after the late husband of the Widow of Windsor. For the third time since Denton had come in, Parmentier consulted a pocket watch, and at the same moment three men came in from the staff entrance, one of whom Denton recognized as Detective Sergeant Willey of the City Police. If Willey recognized him — unlikely in that gloom, that crowd — he gave no sign; he was muttering with Parmentier, who was gesturing impatiently. Willey and one of the other policemen (such they had to be, Denton thought) went up into the seats; the third put a chair near the table of instruments and took out a notebook and a pencil.
‘I am about to begin,’ Parmentier announced. It was said the way a stage magician might have announced that he was now going to lock himself into a trunk. The audience of mostly medical students, who had been making a good deal of noise, shut up as if a curtain had been dropped. Parmentier pulled on rubber gloves that looked very white in the brightness and glanced in Willey’s direction. ‘Belatedly,’ he said in an acid tone, but Willey didn’t react.
‘I am about to perform a post-mortem examination on the body in a police matter of a victim named Sarah Minter.’ The accent was upper-class, the voice accustomed to inspiring awe.
The man with the notebook said something. Parmentier frowned. ‘Stella Minter,’ he said. He let several seconds pass. Then, deliberately, he selected a bone-handled scalpel from the tray of instruments, turned back and in one swift gesture strode to the table and whipped the cloth aside. The rubber gloves, coming high on his arms over his coat sleeves, gave him a vaguely rakish look, the gauntlets of a pirate or a highwayman, at odds with his clothes and his voice.
Denton, like others, gave no outward reaction when the body was exposed, but, to someone standing close and looking directly at him with a good light, he could have been seen to narrow his eyes, a kind of blink; looking closer, a dilation of the pupils would have been visible. The widespread effort to show no reaction made the theatre quite silent as even breathing stopped.
Stella Minter lay on her back, nude, legs together, head sticking a few inches beyond the end of the table so that her light-brown hair fell back and down and the slash across her throat gaped. She was painfully thin; her ribs showed clearly; but her breasts, flattened by her position, were nonetheless large, the aureoles dark. Her skin was greenish-grey, the light unkind to it; she had no hint of warmth, of the pink that is life. Using a cheap pair of opera glasses picked up on the way, Denton could see the curled, grey-brown edges of wounds on her breasts and abdomen. Two inches below the navel, the abdomen was open, and unidentifiable organs lay on her joined thighs, as grey now as pickled specimens. Denton counted eleven wounds on the upper half of the torso. Visible blood was brown but very scanty; the body, he thought, had been washed. The bloody sheets of his wedding night. Not a lot, but it seemed so, his new wife in tears, wanting to wash the sheet before it was discovered. So much of women was about blood.
‘The subject is a woman, somewhat but not excessively undernourished, height-’ Parmentier gestured; the assistant handed him one end of a tape, and Parmentier walked to the feet. The assistant muttered to him. ‘Five feet, four and one-quarter inches.’ He let go of the tape. ‘Age-’ He walked to the middle of the body, felt over first one hip and then the other; walked to the head, felt the top of the head; returned to the middle and leaned over the pubis, apparently studying the rather sparse, sandy hair. ‘Perhaps sixteen or seventeen; if we had time, we would excise one tip of the pelvis to study bone growth.’ He started again for the head and paused at the breasts, again leaned forward until his eyes were directly above the right breast. With his left hand, he touched the nipple, rubbed the tips of the fingers together, sniffed them, then leaned still farther and examined the other breast. ‘Evidence of lactation in both breasts, which also appear to be engorged.’ He straightened. He looked halfway around the circle of men. ‘What does this suggest to us, gentlemen?’ He waited and waited until somebody at last said in a gruff but hesitant voice, ‘Had a baby?’
‘Recent parturition, exactly, albeit crudely put. We speculate tentatively that subject has given birth within perhaps six months.’
He continued up to the head and examined the face, then the top of the head, parting the hair with one hand. The assistant made measurements — circumference of the skull, eye-line to back of the head, ear-to-ear width.
‘I find two contusions on the right side of the face, one on the maxillary, one two inches lower.’
Denton studied the face through the glasses. The bruise on the cheekbone was blue-grey. He hit her and hit her.
Parmentier straightened. ‘In certain cases, we would remove the cranium.’
He took a step backwards and spread his hands a little wider than his hips; the scalpel caught a light, winked.
‘The subject has been virtually exsanguinated,’ he said. ‘Exsanguination was undoubtedly the result of wounds visible even before examination — as you can perhaps see. However, as to which wound was the principal cause-’ He raised his heavy eyebrows. ‘Note the throat.’ He touched the body again, this time at the tip of the small chin. Pushing with one finger, he tried to force the head back; when it would not move because of its position on the table, he signalled to his assistant, and the man took the shoulders and drew the body a few inches towards him. The wound gaped wider and the head sank back. The surgeon probed the cut with a finger, then forced the head farther back still, reaching in with his left thumb and index finger. ‘The right carotid artery has been severed, as we suspected — reason enough for exsanguination, but — ’ he straightened and gestured with his scalpel — ‘we must never speculate.’
— and he cut her-
He put his eyes close to the wound and worked in it with his fingers. ‘Wound is deepest on victim’s right side, slightly less so in the centre, suggesting a cut from right to left that also tended somewhat downwards, exiting through the left sternocleidomastoid muscle, where I can follow an increasingly shallow incision that ends in a faintly jagged tear hardly visible to the naked eye. I deduce that the point of a blade was inserted on the right, then pulled across — not, let me say, the cut with the long edge of a blade that is suggested by the vulgar gesture of drawing the finger across the throat.’ He then made measurements with a flat ivory or bone instrument — Denton couldn’t tell which — that gave imperial measurements for what he had just said. The deepest thrust, on the right, had gone in more than three inches, actually striking into a vertebra. Parmentier measured the stabs in the torso with the same showy precision, counting fourteen, the deepest five inches. ‘Nine of these wounds show abrasion beyond the edges of the wound itself, in five of the cases the same pattern of ridges parallel with the blade. I take these to suggest — suggest, gentlemen, not prove, not yet — that a large clasp knife was used that, when thrust to the full depth of the blade, brought the end of the handle, and hence the bolsters, into violent contact with the skin, leaving the ridged patttern I have noted — that is, the marks of the bolsters.’
Then, for the first time, he used his scalpel. With one sweep, he cut the torso from the breastbone to the navel. Denton, with even his minimal knowledge of orchestral concerts, was reminded of a conductor. ‘In the event, what I am now doing is probably redundant, but it pays to be sure. We want to know that the victim did not die of poison or internal damage or any of the vicissitudes that await the human body.’ He handled a lung, cut a slice from it, then straightened, the tissue resting on his left palm. ‘The victim was in relatively good health, in fact, with no outward sign of disease to the lungs or stomach. I shall of course do the kidneys and liver separately. If enough blood remains in the spleen, as I expect it to do, we shall take a sample and test it for the grosser poisons.’ He handed over the piece of lung without looking towards the assistant. A slight smell of something like sewage spread through the theatre.
‘Now-’ The surgeon moved down the body. He was still immaculate, had not rolled up his sleeves or put on an apron, as his assistant had. Again, he held the scalpel up as if it were a cautioning finger. ‘To the organs that most interest the police.’ He looked down at the mass of tissue lying on the thighs and at the brutal gashes above it. ‘A crude semi-oval of approximately six inches by four inches has been cut, or perhaps I should say hacked in the abdomen, penetrating the muscle wall and damaging the intestines, although they were not, I believe, the goal.’ He was probing the terrible wound. ‘The spleen is untouched, sheer happenstance. Small intestine is perforated in at least three places, slashed right through in at least one; this isn’t our primary concern. Rather than damage to these organs, what has been so crudely attempted is an excision of the womb, cutting it — or perhaps tearing it, I cannot yet tell — loose from its connections so that it could be exvaginated through the vulva. In short, the most primitive sort of methods have been used to, as it were, surgically remove the most female parts of the body.’
He reached up inside and-
He then handled the tissue lying on the thighs, slit the exvaginated portion and opened it out. Denton was reminded of a fish or a bird spatchcocked for broiling. Around him, men were making notes or looking on without expression. He thought that they were all keeping themselves under tight control, as was Parmentier, he supposed, never mentioning the dead woman’s humanity, the horror of the crime; it was as if they were all dealing with the unpacking of a suitcase. Denton looked around the faces again. Control, yes — a considerable feature of English life, the part he found least likable, least sympathetic, dropped only in special environments: the whorehouse, the battlefield. But control of what, really? Superficially, any response that would show weakness, he supposed, or anything ‘undignified’. But the savagery of the woman’s injuries were far beyond dignity or respect, rather in the realm of madness. Was this male control partly the suppression of a desire, or at least — he winced at the memory of his wanting to hurt Emma — the suppression of a recognition of a possibility? Had they all murdered her, in fact? Had he murdered Emma so, in his mind?
Parmentier was ordering the body rolled over, then opening the back to get at the kidneys and the liver. Organs were weighed, put into bottles; at last the corpse was covered again with the cloth and the organs were wheeled out of the theatre. Parmentier made a summary — exsanguination, multiple stab wounds, blood in the trachea and lungs suggesting possible asphyxiation after the carotid artery was severed; the inference to be drawn was that this had been the first wound, although not impossible that the others or at least some of the others were done first, but this notion not supported by the lack of bruising or other signs of response to extreme pain. No indication of restraints on wrists, ankles, or mouth. One interesting detail lay in the lifting of part of the scalp from the cranium, probably by the assailant’s free hand, pulling the head back as the throat was slashed.
‘An exceedingly violent act by an exceedingly powerful person, perhaps in an extreme state caused by alcohol or other substance, perhaps not, the many stab wounds allowing us to speculate as to his or her mental state.’ Parmentier put down his scalpel at last. ‘Questions?’
The questions were of two kinds, the incomprehensibly scientific and the banal. Parmentier dealt with the first at the same level of incomprehensibility, the second with ridicule. ‘Frenzy? What do you mean, sir, by frenzy?’ Then, ignoring the student’s stammered response, ‘I do not deal in frenzy. I leave such conclusions to the police.’ Staring into the near-dark of the audience, for the light had clouded in the lantern above him. ‘You, perhaps, have embarked on the wrong career, and would be better off to think of one in some more emotional field.’ And then, playing to the house: ‘Perhaps journalism.’ Uneasy, then relieved laughter.
Denton asked no questions but made his way into the arena as soon as Parmentier announced that they were done. Detective Sergeant Willey was making his way down from the other side but coming slowly, talking to his companion and the one who had served as clerk. Denton went right to Parmentier and, by talking louder than the nervous medical student already there, said, ‘Could the throat have been slashed while the attacker was engaged in coitus with the victim?’
The great man eyed him. He paid Denton the compliment of immediately turning his attention away from the student as he began pulling off the rubber gloves. ‘Do I know you, sir? Are you of the profession?’
‘I’m a guest of Hector Hench-Rose’s.’ Making it a joke: ‘Not a journalist.’
‘I shall take it as given that your interest is not prurient. I don’t know Hench-Rose, unless he’s related to George Hench-Rose.’
‘An older brother, I think.’
‘Ah. I see him at old-boy dinners.’ He tore at the left glove, which clung to him like skin, muttered, ‘These damnable things-’ and wrenched it off, dropping it on the floor with disgust. He took Denton’s left arm and steered him towards the covered body. ‘Yes, of course, if it was a man, it would be quite possible for him to support himself on his left elbow while grasping the hair with that hand and making that long, powerful cut across the throat with his right.’ He removed the cloth; the body was still face-down. ‘If you’ll just lend a hand-’ Denton took the cool, waxy ankles, and they rolled her over on her back; she seemed weightless. Lighter than Emma. ‘Now, you see how it can be done — the elbow here — the knife in the hand-’ Parmentier was bending over the girl as if he were the murderer still coupled with her, his eyes bright with enthusiasm.
‘Was there ejaculate in the vagina?’
‘Perhaps. It’s going to be difficult to tell because of the state of the tissue; a good deal of blood and secretion in there. I’ll have a look at it under a microscope. Are you in the police?’
‘No.’
‘I thought not. American? Canadian? American, yes.’ He wiped his hands on the cloth.
Denton was examining the stab wounds in the breasts. ‘You’re satisfied she’d given birth,’ he said.
‘Oh, yes.’
‘Thank you.’ Denton searched for a compliment. He hadn’t sat in on a post-mortem since he’d been a marshal and the local doctor had done an examination that lasted four minutes. ‘An elegant performance, sir.’ He had started to say ‘doctor’, but he couldn’t remember which sorts of medical men liked to be called doctor and which thought the word an insult. Parmentier half-smiled, bowing his head.
Going out, Denton came face-to-face with Detective Sergeant Willey, who scowled but turned away as if his most cynical ideas of Denton had been confirmed.