Stone Cold (8 page)

‘Very well,’ he continued eventually. ‘Now, let us meet Mr Adam Bagshawe.’

He pulled the sheet off the body. A hushed silence fell around the room. Sherlock found himself thinking, bizarrely, of the deaths he had witnessed. He had probably seen more death than anybody
else in that room, save the lecturer, but he still leaned forward, hushed in reverence, as the lecture continued.

After the body of the late, unfortunate Mr Bagshawe had been comprehensively sliced up and his various internal organs displayed for public appreciation, and after no less than five of the
students in the audience had been suddenly taken ill and had to run for the door, the lecture finished. As the remaining students clapped politely the lecturer covered the remains of Mr Bagshawe
with a sheet – which immediately began to stain with the seepage of blood from the corpse – and two assistants wheeled it away. Sherlock stood there for a while, as the students filed
past him, thinking about what he had seen. Thinking about the fact that the miracles of the human body could be treated in much the same way as the cogs, wheels and springs within a clock –
disassembled and laid out on a table for inspection. The difference being, of course, that the various components of the body couldn’t be reassembled, whereas a clock could. Life, once gone,
could not be regained. So what, he thought to himself, did that make life? Was it the same as the soul? Was it the same as consciousness? What exactly was it?

Big questions. Perhaps that was what University was for, in the end. Not answering the big questions, necessarily, but asking them.

Eventually he left the auditorium. The sun was shining outside, and Matty was waiting for him.

‘’Avin’ fun?’ Matty asked.

‘I’ve been looking at a dead body,’ Sherlock confided.

Matty thought for a moment. ‘Is that a yes or a no?’ He looked at Sherlock, then shook his head. ‘Never mind. I’m assumin’ it’s a “yes” in your
case. You love all that kind of stuff.’

Sherlock was about to reply, pointing out that he also liked all kinds of things that people might consider normal, when he saw Chippenham across the other side of the paved area, talking to
some friends. He was about to suggest to Matty that they head across to join Chippenham when he saw two men in blue serge uniforms and helmets walking over as well. He held back, watching.

One of the men took hold of Chippenham’s elbow. ‘Mr Paul Chippenham?’ he asked.

The student look puzzled, and concerned. ‘Yes. Who are you?’

‘I am Sergeant Clitherow, of the Oxford Constabulary. This is my colleague, Constable Harries. We’d like to ask you a few questions.’

‘Oh. All right then – what do you want to know?’

‘Not here, sir. Down at the police station, if you’d be so kind.’

‘I’ve got a tutorial!’ Chippenham protested.

‘Don’t worry, sir – this won’t take long, and there’ll be other tutorials, I’m sure.’

One of Chippenham’s friends stepped forward. ‘I’m studying law,’ he said, trying to sound officious but just sounding pretentious. ‘I demand that you tell us why
you want to talk to Mr Chippenham.’

‘Inquiries in connection with a series of recent thefts,’ the sergeant replied.

‘Thefts of bodies,’ the constable confided. ‘Well, bits of bodies.’

The sergeant stared at him, frowning, and the constable subsided.

‘Is Mr Chippenham a suspect?’ the law student asked.

The sergeant shrugged. ‘Let’s say he’s helping us with our inquiries,’ he said. He turned to Chippenham. ‘Aren’t you, sir? Might look suspicious if you
refused. Might look like you had something to hide, like.’

‘I’ll come along and answer any questions you’ve got,’ Chippenham said firmly, but Sherlock could detect a slight tremor in his voice. Chippenham turned to his friends.
‘Tell my tutor,’ he said. ‘Let him know what’s happened. He might be able to . . . intercede with the police, or something.’

The policemen guided Chippenham away by the elbow. He cast a last, despairing glance over his shoulder before they vanished around a corner.

‘I’m glad I’m not ’im,’ Matty said darkly. ‘The Oxford police have a reputation. They don’t like cheek, or anyone talking back to them. ’E’d
better cooperate, otherwise ’e’ll find ’imself trippin’ up every time ’e walks down a flight of stairs. Man could do ’imself some nasty injuries that
way.’

‘I can’t see him being guilty,’ Sherlock said.

‘Why’s that then?’

‘He seems too normal, too ordinary. And when he talked about the thefts, the other night at Mrs McCrery’s, he was completely open.’ Sherlock shrugged. ‘I suppose you
can’t tell what’s in people’s minds, but I’d like to know if there’s any evidence against him. I’m not convinced that the police actually care that much about
evidence, just as long as they have someone in the cells.’

‘Surely,’ Matty reasoned, ‘if there keep on bein’ thefts, then they’ll have to let him go.’

‘Not necessarily,’ Sherlock said bleakly. ‘The thief might stop for other reasons. Or, if I were them and someone had been arrested for the crimes I was committing, I might
move to a different area, a different mortuary, and start again.’

‘You’ve got a cunnin’ mind,’ Matty pointed out. ‘Ever thought of becomin’ a criminal yourself?’

It was much later in the evening, after dinner, that Paul Chippenham returned to Mrs McCrery’s boarding house. He was pale, and his hands shook as he sipped at the sherry that Reginald
Musgrave poured him. There was a fresh bruise on his forehead.

‘What happened?’ Sherlock asked.

‘They asked me a lot of questions about the Oxford hospital mortuary, and why I had been visiting it. I tried to persuade them that it was nothing suspicious, but they were fixated on the
idea that I was the one who had stolen those body parts that have been in the newspaper, and that the lecturer mentioned this morning.’ He raised a hand to the bruise on his forehead.
‘Things got a bit . . . physical . . . and the constable belted me across the head when he thought I was being cheeky.’

‘What did you tell them?’ Thomas Millard wanted to know.

‘The truth.’ He looked embarrassed. ‘It was going to be a jape – a joke. A small group of us were going to steal a body from the mortuary, dress it up like a student and
prop it up in the lecture theatre for the anatomy lecture. We thought it would be funny, knowing that there was a dead body in the audience as well as on the table.’

‘Sacrilege, treating God’s creation like that,’ Millard murmured, shaking his head sadly, but he didn’t sound surprised. Presumably it was the kind of thing that students
regularly got up to.

‘I’m guessing that you didn’t manage to get hold of a body,’ Sherlock said.

Chippenham shook his head. ‘The pathologist – Doctor Lukather by name – was too fly. He wouldn’t give me the time of day, let alone a look at a body. I told the police
that. They said they’d check with Lukather, but they seemed to believe me. I won’t say they were satisfied, but they let me go.’

The conversation moved on to famous jokes and japes that had been played by students on each other, and on the lecturers, over the years. Sherlock slipped out after a while and went up to his
room. He had a lot to think about.

The next morning he rose early, had breakfast and went straight out into the town. Something had occurred to him overnight, and he wanted to try it out.

He went straight to the offices of the
Oxford Post
. At the reception, he asked to see whichever reporter was on desk duty that day. He knew that most reporters would be out researching
stories, but there was always one left behind just in case anyone wandered in with something.

The one left behind today was Ainsley Dunbard, a man not that much older than Sherlock with a sparse moustache and beard and an expression that suggested he’d seen too much of life and
didn’t like what he had seen.

‘What can I do for ya?’ he asked when Sherlock was shown to his ‘office’ – actually a room barely larger than a broom cupboard with a desk, a typewriter and no
window.

‘Sorry to bother you,’ Sherlock started, ‘but I’m interested in becoming a reporter myself when I leave school. I wondered if there are any tips you can give
me?’

‘Just what I need,’ the man muttered; ‘competition.’ He stared at his desk, then at the wall. ‘There’s only a couple of things you need to know,’ he
said eventually, sighing. ‘First is, always check your facts. Make sure that if you print something, at least two people have told you about it, and check that the first person didn’t
tell the second one.’

Sherlock dutifully wrote this down in a notebook he had bought from a stationer’s just a few minutes before.

‘Second thing is, people don’t talk in a way that makes good newspaper reporting, so you got to tidy it up. Take out the “um”s an’ the “ah”s an’
the “oh, I say”s, an’ put the events in the right order, cos people tend to remember things out of order an’ keep correctin’ themselves. When it all gets printed
they’ll remember it the way you wrote it, not the way they said it. Third –’ and he glanced sideways at Sherlock through eyes that were bloodshot and tired – ‘remember
that if a dog bites a man then it ain’t news, but if a man bites a dog then it is. People want stories that are out of the ordinary, maybe a bit grotesque.’ He thought for a moment.
‘Take this story I worked on last year,’ he continued. ‘Some people wrote to me from one of the local villages. It was like a petition – they all signed the letter. They
told me that there’s this creature that lives in the woods near them who’s not actually a real man, with a mother an’ all that, but ’e’s been
made
by sewing
bits of dead bodies together. Now
that’s
macabre. Would’ve made a great story, except that it sounds just like that book
Frankenstein
by the poet’s wife – Mary
Shelley. I reckon someone’d read the book, or seen the play, an’ ’ad a nightmare about it. Too much cheese for supper, I ’spect.’ He sighed. ‘I did do a bit of
digging around, just in case, but I couldn’t find any corroboration. There was nothing to the story.’

This story sounded like the one he’d heard from the farmer who had given him a lift back to Oxford – about the strange creature living in the woods near that strange house. It
suddenly gave Sherlock an opportunity that he had thought he might have to manufacture himself. ‘Talking of bits of bodies,’ he said, deliberately roughening his tone a bit to match the
journalist’s, ‘what ’appened at the mortuary then? I hear there was some thefts there. Nothin’ to do with this creature then?’

Dunbard nodded. ‘’S right. Strangest thing I ever heard of. Couldn’t make it up, if you know what I mean. ’Parently it’s been ’appening for a while –
someone dies, their body is brought into the mortuary for an autopsy, an’ then they’re sent off for burial, but it turns out that there’s less of the bodies bein’ buried
than there was at the autopsy. Always different bits missin’ – eyes, ears, hands, feet, anythin’. I did wonder if it was connected to that monster story, but I reckon it’s
just students muckin’ around.’

‘Bodysnatchers?’ Sherlock ventured, remembering the lecturer at Christ College.’

‘Nah – they’d’ve taken the whole body. That’s where the money is. Bits of bodies aren’t worth anything.’

‘How did it get discovered?’

He laughed – a bitter sound, like a barking dog. ‘Gent buried ’is wife, then realized she’d been interred along with ’er weddin’ ring, some earrings an’
a pearl necklace, so he ’ad her disinterred. Trouble is, the ears was missin’. Cue big rumpus an’ lots of runnin’ around.’

‘And nobody knows where these body parts have gone, or who took them?’

Dunbard shook his head. ‘Not a clue. The police’re stumped. We’ve run out of different ways of reportin’ the case, so we’ve stopped runnin’ the
story.’

‘Didn’t I read that the police questioned a lecturer from Christ Church College?’

‘That’s right,’ Dunbard confirmed. ‘We never actually named ’im, because it turned out ’e had an alibi for all the dates on which things went
missin’.’

‘And did you ever talk to the pathologist in the mortuary?’ Sherlock asked. It was an important question, as the answer would dictate what he did next, but he tried to make his tone
as innocent as possible.

‘Nah. Tried to, but ’e wouldn’t see me.’ He shrugged. ‘Okay, is that it? Cos I’ve got an important story about silt in the canal to type up.’

‘Yes. Thanks.’ Sherlock started to move away, then turned back. ‘Sorry, but do you have a business card, or a visiting card or something? Just in case I have any more
questions?’

Dunbard reached into his shirt pocket and took out a slip of cardboard. ‘’Ere’s me details, but you can find me in this place most days.’ As Sherlock was walking away he
heard the man saying, more to himself than to Sherlock, ‘an’ to think I left the
London Gazette
for this. Supposed to be more responsibility, but the office cat gets out more
than I do!’

Sherlock tucked the business card into a pocket of his jacket. He had plans for it, and didn’t want it to get lost.

Sherlock left the newspaper building and headed in the direction of the mortuary. Oxford Hospital was an impressive red-brick building set in the middle of a small lawn. The
mortuary was in its own single-storey building, set discreetly off to one side. Walking through the hospital grounds towards it, Sherlock took a deep breath and ran over in his mind the story he
was going to tell. Of course, it all depended on how well-known the reporter Ainsley Dunbard was. If the doctor who carried out the post-mortems on the bodies of the dead knew Dunbard by sight,
then Sherlock’s entire ruse was doomed from the start, but Sherlock had specifically asked Dunbard if he had interviewed the pathologist, and the answer had been in the negative. Surely the
reporter would have mentioned if he had known the pathologist from before?

The door to the mortuary was white-painted, with panes of frosted glass set into the top. Sherlock knocked smartly on the glass. A voice from inside called: ‘Enter!’

Sherlock walked in and shut the door behind him. He wasn’t sure what to expect – dead bodies stacked up on shelves perhaps? – and he was a bit nervous as a result, but in fact
he found himself standing in a long corridor that ended with the mortuary’s back door, which appeared to be bolted from the inside. The only indication that he was somewhere medical was the
strong smell of disinfectant that assailed his nostrils.