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sanitize death. Here, it seemed to have exactly the opposite effect, making it even more revolting than Herbert had thought possible.
    “You understand,” Rathbone said, “that drownings are usually suicides or accidents, yes? There are plenty of easier ways to murder someone.”
    “I understand.”
    “And it’s very difficult to tell whether someone was drowned at all, as opposed to being immersed in water postmortem, yes? Let alone whether they were drowned voluntarily or against their will.”
    “All I’d like you to do is to tell me how he died, and who he was.”
    “Well, ha-ha, I’m no alchemist, Detective Inspector…?”
    “Smith.”
    “First things first, yes? Let’s find out how long it’s been there.”
    It’s
, Herbert noticed, not
he’s.
Well, that was onlyto be expected. If he had had corpses coming across his table as though on a conveyor belt, he would probably have tried to regard them as objects rather than human too.
    Rathbone took a thermometer and rolled the body onto its side. It stared at Herbert with bulbous eyes in which he read accusing disappointment. The corpse’s cheeks were swollen and its skin wrinkled, like a washerwoman’s hands. Drained of color, its face seemed to leach into the air.
    Rathbone pushed the thermometer towards the rectum, and stopped.
    “What?” Herbert said.
    Rathbone placed a hand on each of the dead man’s buttocks, pulled them apart, and nodded for Herbert to come closer.
    Herbert thought of several snappy replies, all of them inappropriate.
    He stepped forward, looked, and winced.
    The man’s backside was a disaster zone; red raw, swollen into puffy ridges of flesh, and crisscrossed with scratch marks.
    “Raped?” Herbert said.
    Rathbone shook his head. “Not tonight. Many of these marks are several days old.”
    “Homosexual, then. And practicing.”
    “Very.”
    All things being equal, Herbert would rather this particular can of worms had remained unopened. Homosexuality was illegal—“gross indecency contrary to Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885,” as the law had it. Like most things illicit, it was also widespread, albeit necessarily furtive.
    Every queer therefore lived with the same question: who knew? Among their own, they were usually safe; but, if caught, they faced chemical castration, the introduction of female hormones for what the law saw as their abnormal and uncontrollable sexual urges. Estrogen would make them impotent and obese, their looks suffocated in a welter of fat, their touting reduced to receiver status only.
    As King George V had famously, or infamously, said about homosexuals: “I thought men like that shot themselves.”
    Herbert had no particular beef against homosexuals, certainly not by prevailing standards of intolerance. He simply did not relish the prospect of poking around a closed community trying to find a truth that was liable, like many deaths, to end up being petty and sordid.
    Rathbone busied himself around the man’s rear end for a few moments.
    “No trace evidence,” he announced at length. “No bodily fluids.”
    “You mean he’d taken a bath since his last, er, last…”
    “Encounter?”
    “Exactly.”
    “Probably. But the water in the park could have washed such evidence off, yes?”
    “The Long Water has no current. It’s like a millpond tonight.”
    Rathbone pursed his lips and nodded. “Unlikely, then.”
    He inserted the thermometer into the corpse’s rectum, waited a few moments, extracted it, and read off the digits.
    “Eighty-eight degrees.” He looked at his watch. “It’s half past nine now. Normal body temperature is ninety-eight degrees. Bodies in water cool at about five or six degrees an hour, twice as fast as they do in air, yes? But these measures are approximate. Very generally, therefore, I would estimate the time of death at between half past six and eight o’clock this evening.”
    In other words, not long before the body had been found; eight