Maxwell’s Curse Read Free

got to her, rigor was almost gone. Look,’ he was back at the body again, ‘the jaw moves freely, limbs quite mobile.’
    Henry Hall looked away. Pulling the dead about was Astley’s job, but there was a grotesquery about it, like some mad puppeteer pulling strings.
    ‘Rigor is delayed by freezing; it doesn’t start until after the thaw begins. So it buggers up the usual equation – normal body temperature minus rectal temperature divided by one point five … Not going too fast for you, am I?’
    Hall had regained his seat and sat with his head against the wall. ‘No,’ he said.
    ‘I won’t bore you with the chemical analysis,’ Astley went on, proud as always of his medical superiority, ‘and some of that’s still to do.’ He turned to face Hall and put his glasses hack on the bridge of his nose, as though to add majesty to his next pronouncement. ‘I’m estimating the approximate date – date, mark you, as opposed to time – at about December 20 to 22.’
    ‘Before Christmas.’
    Astley smiled and winked at the Chief Inspector. They weren’t mucking about at Bramshill these days, were they? Hall’s IQ was clearly off the scale.
    ‘And the cause of death? The freezing wasn’t accidental, presumably?’ Hall wanted to know.
    ‘Indeed not. When I peeled back the black bags, her arms were crossed over her chest in the traditional laying out position. She didn’t die from exposure. And she didn’t die from this, either.’
    ‘Just tell me, Jim.’ Hall didn’t want any more glorious technicolour close-ups. He heard Astley chuckle as he bent over the corpse again.
    ‘Oh, ye of little bottle,’ the pathologist said. ‘All right, then, the wussy way. She has a stab wound to the back of the neck. She must have been lying on her front when that was delivered or possibly in a sitting position. The knife you’re looking for is double-edged, the blade at least four inches long.’
    ‘Commando,’ Hall was talking to himself. ‘Special Services. Any survival store or mag sells them. Wait a minute – you said that wasn’t the cause of death?’
    ‘Indeed not. The stab wound was delivered post mortem. No blood. No bruising. Somebody impaled the old girl after she was dead. Now why, I wonder, would they do that?’
    Hall was on his feet, peering at the corpse, despite himself. ‘Frenzy? What kind of wound is it?’
    ‘One sure, powerful thrust. No sign of anything frenzied. In my experience, such an attack would produce several wounds, rained down with speed, blurred by the old red mist. There’s no indication, apart from the lack of clothes, of any sexual motive at all. No, the stab was an afterthought.’
    ‘So what did kill her?’
    ‘Ever heard me talk of Sir Ephraim Wallace?’
    Hall hadn’t.
    ‘Splendid name, isn’t it? Splendid chap, too. My old pathology teacher at Guy’s.’
    Hall thought Astley had graduated from Reading, but he let it pass.
    ‘“The face,” he would always say. “Look at the face. It holds a million secrets.”’
    ‘And what does the face tell you?’ Hall asked.
    ‘The eyes have it,’ Astley told him. ‘Petechiae. Tiny blood pricks in both eyeballs.’
    ‘Suffocation?’ Hall had met this before.
    ‘Possibly. But I don’t think so. Toxicology will confirm it later, but there’s much fatty degeneration of the internal organs. Swelling of the liver, stomach, spleen.’
    ‘Indicating … ?’
    ‘Poison, dear boy. Possibly phallin. If I’m right, the poor old duck would have had chronic vomiting and diarrhoea. She’d have dribbled and her eyes would have watered uncontrollably. She’d have felt dizzy, had the grandmother of all headaches, before slipping into delirium and convulsions. If she was lucky, a coma would have put her out of her misery after eight hours. Could have been as much as thirty, though. Who was she?’
    ‘I haven’t the faintest idea. Jane Doe at the moment.’
    ‘Hmm.’ Astley turned back to the corpse. ‘Just remember,’ he