Dead in the Dog

When Tom Howden got back to his laboratory, he found a mug of milky, sweet tea ready on his desk and a solicitous lance corporal hovering around him. Lewis Cropper’s long, sallow face regarded him with spaniel-like concern. A Regular soldier, he was the despair of a series of sergeant majors across what remained of the British Empire, having been posted hither and thither merely to get rid of him. In spite of the fact that he was an excellent laboratory technician, his stubborn refusal to conform to authority kept him in almost continual trouble. He was nosy, garrulous, obsequious and generally bloody-minded to all except his pathologists, for whom he always seemed to have an embarrassingly doglike devotion.

‘Hear there’s to be a pee-em this morning, sir!’ he offered, making Tom marvel at the speed and efficiency of the hospital bush-telegraph.

‘That’s right. Ask Sergeant Oates to come in, will you?’

He sipped at his tea and flinched at the combination of condensed milk and three spoonfuls of sugar. But Cropper made no move to obey.

‘Won’t do any good, sir,’ he answered mournfully. ‘Sarge can’t stand the morgue. Last time, he threw up, then fainted. Says he’s never going to set foot in there again.’

Tom stared at the lance corporal over the rim of his mug. Was he pulling his leg or working up to some scam of his own?

‘I’ll have a word with him – I have to have some help in there.’

‘Well, Derek Oates won’t be any use, I can tell you! The last pathologist, Captain Freeman, said the sarge was to be permanently excused on medical grounds, on account of his puking all the time.’

‘What about one of the Malays, then?’

Cropper made a derisory noise, suspiciously like a verbal raspberry.

‘No chance, cap’n! It’s against their religion or some such.’

He leaned over the desk in an attitude of unwelcome familiarity.

‘S’alright, sir, I’ll help you out. I’ve already sharpened up the tools.’

Like a conjuror, he produced an old box the size of a small briefcase, made of dark hardwood and with the historic broad arrow of the ‘War Department’ carved into its varnished lid. Cropper opened it and displayed the contents to Tom with the proud air of a Kleeneze salesman on a housewife’s doorstep.

‘Pre-war, these are! Don’t know which war, but there’s a lovely bit of steel in them.’

Inside was a fearsome array of instruments, worthy of the worst excesses of the Spanish Inquisition. Nestled into faded blue velvet slots were several large knives, which would have looked perfectly at home in a slaughterhouse. An amputation saw, a steel mallet and several chisels jostled for space with scissors, forceps and a gadget that consisted of two half-hoops hinged together, like a folding crown.

‘What the devil’s that?’ demanded Tom.

‘A coronet, sir. Captain Freeman was very fond of that. You open it out and put it over the skull. Screw those spikes into the bone to hold it firm and you’ve got a nice straight guide for sawing off the top of the head.’

The pathologist grunted, thinking that he could manage without such medieval devices. The corporal’s importuning was interrupted by the telephone and Tom picked it up to hear the police superintendent on the line.

‘Would midday suit you for this post-mortem, captain?’ asked Steven Blackwell. ‘The SIB chap from Ipoh would like to be present as well as the major from the provost marshal’s office in the garrison.’

Tom agreed, then asked about identification of the corpse.

‘I was much too junior to do any police cases back on Tyneside,’ he explained. ‘But I know my boss always had to get someone to officially confirm who the body actually was.’

Blackwell said he had this organized and that he would be bringing James’s widow to BMH immediately before the examination.