Sherlock Holmes Read Free Page B

niceties or conversation, but then nodded thoughtfully, as if remembering that he should have expected no less. “Of course,” he said.
    He glanced in my direction and I smiled warmly. His reciprocating smile told me that he appreciated the gesture. “If you’d care to follow me?” he said, beckoning toward a side passage that would lead us from the reception lobby and into the morgue proper.
    We trailed after him in silence.
    * * *
    Foulkes led us deep into the warren of white-tiled corridors and chambers. Everything was lit with the harsh brilliance of naked electric bulbs, causing the tiles to gleam like the porcelain scales of some vast, dormant beast.
    The passages were abuzz with activity, and we were forced to stand aside whilst two porters shuffled past us bearing a litter. The corpse on the stretcher was blackened and burned, barely more than the skeletal remains of a man, but I found myself unable to avert my gaze, fascinated by the dead man’s ghastly visage, the blank stare of his empty eye sockets.
    The porters scurried away down the passage with barely a word or a nod of acknowledgement. I could hardly blame them for such minor infractions, however – if ever there was a soul-destroying job, it must be this. As a doctor I had long ago vowed to heal people, to find ways to help them continue to
live
. Consequently, in a place such as this, I always had the sense of arriving too late. By the time a person’s corpse had found its way to the morgue, the only job left was to clean up after them.
    We resumed our trek through the maze of rooms. After a short while I noticed that the tiled walls had given way to a series of canvas screens, and realised that the place where Foulkes had brought us was, in fact, a much larger chamber that had been segregated to create a series of smaller partitions. There must have been ten or more separate booths, each of them occupied by people both living and dead. The familiar sounds of autopsy and medical examination mingled with the muffled voices of the surgeons muttering to one another.
    Foulkes navigated his way around these small pockets of industry and we followed on behind him, until, finally, we came to a side room toward the far end of the chamber, in a quiet corner away from the bustle. Here, the corpses of the three suicides had been laid out for us on adjacent marble slabs.
    I had never felt the charnel-house atmosphere of the place more acutely than I did upon sight of those three unfortunates. Their remains were displayed like carcasses in the back room of a butcher’s shop: naked, uncovered, their dignity unpreserved.
    Holmes immediately shrugged off his coat and, without even a courteous glance over his shoulder, held it out behind him, clearly intending for me to take it. With a sigh I did what was required, accepting it and folding it over my arm.
    Unbuttoning his cuffs and pushing his sleeves up to his elbows, Holmes quietly set about the task of examining the bodies.
    They were each of them in a rather sorry condition. Foulkes, clearly gritting his teeth, talked us through them in turn. “Captain John Cummins,” he said, indicating the remains of the man on the slab nearest to the wall.
    “The man who threw himself into the tiger enclosure at London Zoo,” I said. That much was evident from the condition of the corpse. Even a cursory glance made it clear that the animals had done for him: his throat had been ripped out by the powerful jaws of a beast, leaving unsightly ribbons of torn, glistening flesh. Hunks had been removed from his upper left arm and his right thigh, and perhaps most disturbing of all, his ribcage was exposed on the left side, where the tigers had worried at the flesh, trying to get at the organs. The body was already beginning to show signs of decay.
    “Quite so, Dr. Watson,” confirmed Foulkes. “The zoo attendants got to him as soon as possible, but clearly, he was beyond help.”
    “Hmmm,” murmured Holmes