Page 20 of A Murder at Kew Gardens

Nine

Ten Minutes’ Light

The dead-house stood behind the hospital like a thing the hospital was ashamed of, a low brick room with a north light and a smell that carbolic could only argue with and never win.

I had been in worse rooms. I had not, until that morning, been in one while pretending the man at my side was a secretary and not the Earl of Rosehaven come to read the corpse he was suspected of making.

Merrick met us at the side door with the look of a man who had agreed to something in the warmth of friendship and repented of it in the cold of the event. He did not shake Cosmos's hand, which told me how frightened he was, because the two of them were the sort of men who shook hands.

"Ten minutes," he said before either of us spoke. "The inquest has been fixed for tomorrow morning, and Dodson is expected presently. He wishes to view the body again and ask a few questions."

He looked at me. "You were never here." Then at Cosmos, his voice dropping. "You have never been here at all, and God forgive me for it."

"You'll have no cause to ask His forgiveness," Cosmos said. "Only the room and the light. Thank you, Merrick."

The surgeon exhaled softly, as though he did not share that confidence. "The post-mortem is complete. The coroner has not yet released the remains to the family." He turned up the gas. And there, upon the post-mortem table, lay Sir Basil Crane.

These last two days I had built him in my mind into something large. But he was barely of average height. A narrow gentleman of fifty-odd, going soft at the jaw, his side-whiskers dyed a shade his hair had long since abandoned. The kind of man who is asked to the edges of rooms and never the center, and spends his life resenting the distance.

Death had not dignified him. But then, it rarely does.

I had expected grief from Cosmos, or fear, or the awful private horror of a man examining the instrument of his own ruin. What I got instead was a stillness that came over him like weather, a voice gone flat and unhurried, and a pair of hands that moved above the dead man as though the dead man were a page in a language only my companion could read.

I had known Cosmos some years as Rosalynd's grave elder brother, the one who answered a dinner question about orchids at such length that he emptied the table.

I had not known this man.

There was no fear in him and no grief either, only attention—the whole vast engine of him turned upon a problem. And it was then I understood why the Yard had sought his counsel for years.

Cosmos leaned closer but did not touch the body. "Merrick, would you turn his head for me? Just a little."

The surgeon obliged, one hand beneath the jaw.

"There." Cosmos studied the dull mottling where the blood had settled and stilled.

“When they brought in Crane, did they say how they found him?”

“Lying on his back,” Merrick said.

“He did not die where they found him then.”

I stepped nearer. “What do you mean?”

"Look here. The blood has set along his side and his cheek, where it pooled while he cooled. A man left upon his back grows dark upon his back. Crane cooled on his side, for hours, somewhere flat and private, and was turned onto his back only after he had stiffened and let go again."

Merrick gently returned the head to its former position.

“Where exactly was he found, Merrick?” Cosmos asked.

“Next to that corpse flower.”

“Ah, yes, the titan arum. Stinks to high heaven. It bloomed a week past, though. This body was not lying there for a week.”

“No, it couldn’t have been,” Merrick agreed. “He was barely two days dead when they brought him in.”

Cosmos’s gaze dropped to the wound. “And there’s another thing.”

"A living man shot here bleeds.” He indicated the wound in the chest with two fingers, not touching. “The heart drives it.” Cosmos glanced around the room. “Where are his clothes?”