A Fine Night for Dying

He paused to light a cigarette, a tall handsome man with a face as Gallic as the Pigalle on a Saturday night, and the heritage of his Breton father was plain to see in the Celtic cheekbones. A park keeper drifted out of the shadows and faded without a word, a thing which, considering the circumstances, could only have happened in England. Chavasse went on his way, unaccountably cheered.

St Bede’s Hospital was on the far side of the park, a Victorian Gothic monstrosity in spite of its worldwide reputation. They were expecting him, and when he called at Reception, a porter in a neat blue uniform escorted him along a series of green-tiled corridors, each one of which seemed to stretch into infinity.

He was handed over to a senior lab technician in a small glass office, who took him down to the mortuary in a surprisingly modern lift. Chavasse was conscious of two things the moment the doors opened – the all-pervading smell of antiseptic so peculiar to hospitals, and the extreme cold. The vast echoing chamber was lined with steel drawers, each one presumably holding a corpse, but the object of his visit waited for him on an operating trolley covered with a rubber sheet.

‘We couldn’t get him into one of the boxes, worse luck,’ the technician explained. ‘Too bloated. Stinking like last year’s fish, or worse.’

At close quarters, the smell was quite overpowering, in spite of the preventive measures which had obviously been taken. Chavasse pulled out a handkerchief and held it to his mouth.

‘I see what you mean.’

He had looked on death many times in most of its variations, but this monstrosity was something new. He stared down, a slight frown on his face.

‘How long was he in the water?’

‘Six or seven weeks.’

‘Can you be certain of that?’

‘Oh, yes – urine tests, the rate of chemical breakdown and so on. He was Jamaican, by the way, or did you know that?’

‘So they told me, but I’d never have guessed.’

The technician nodded. ‘Prolonged immersion in salt-water does funny things to skin pigmentation.’

‘So it would appear.’ Chavasse stepped back and replaced the handkerchief in his breast pocket. ‘Thanks very much. I think I’ve seen all I need.’

‘All right for us to dispose of him now, sir?’ the technician enquired as he replaced the sheet.

‘I was forgetting.’ Chavasse took out his wallet and produced a printed disposal slip. ‘Cremation only, and all documents to the Home Office by tomorrow.’

‘They’d been hoping to have him in the Medical School for dissection.’

‘Tell them to try Burke and Hare.’ Chavasse pulled on his gloves. ‘Ashes to ashes for this boy, and no funny business. I’ll see myself out.’

When he had gone, the technician lit a cigarette, a slight frown on his face. He wondered about Chavasse. There was a foreign look about him, but he was obviously English. A nice enough bloke - a gentleman, to use an old-fashioned word, but something wasn’t quite right. It was the eyes, that was it. Black and completely expressionless. They seemed to look right through you and beyond, as if you weren’t there at all. The kind of eyes that Jap colonel had had, the one in the camp in Siam where the technician had spent the worst three years of his life. A funny bloke, that Jap; one minute full of the milk of human kindness, the next smoking a cigarette without turning a hair, while they flogged some offender to death.

The technician shuddered and unfolded the slip of paper that Chavasse had given him. It was signed by the Home Secretary himself. That did it. He carefully stowed it away in his wallet and pushed the trolley through into the crematorium next door. Exactly three minutes later, he closed the glass door of one of the three special ovens and reached for the switch. Flames appeared as if by magic, and the body, bloated with its own gases, started to burn at once.

The technician lit another cigarette. Professor Henson wouldn’t be too pleased, but it was done now, and after all he did have it in writing. He went next door, whistling cheerfully, and made a cup of tea.

* * *

It was almost two months since Chavasse had visited the house in St John’s Wood, and returning was like coming home again after a long absence. Not so strange, perhaps, when one considered the kind of life he had led for the twelve years he had been an agent of the Bureau, the little-known section of British Intelligence that handled the sort of business no one else seemed to know what to do with.

He went up the steps and pressed the bell beside the brass plate that carried the legend Brown & Co – Importers & Exporters. The door was opened almost immediately by a tall greying man in a blue serge uniform, who positively beamed a welcome.

‘Good to have you back, Mr Chavasse. You’re nice and brown.’

‘Glad to be back, George.’

‘Mr Mallory’s been asking for you, sir. Miss Frazer’s been phoning every few minutes.’

‘Nothing new in that, George.’

Chavasse went up the curving Regency staircase quickly. Nothing changed. Not a thing. It was just like it had always been. Lengthy periods in which damn-all happened, and then something broke through to the surface and the day needed twenty-seven hours.

When he went into the small outer office at the end of the narrow corridor, Jean Frazer was seated at her desk. She glanced up and removed her heavy reading glasses with a smile that was always a shade warmer for Chavasse than for anyone else.

‘Paul, you’re looking fine. It’s wonderful to see you again.’

She came round the desk, a small heavy-hipped woman of thirty or so, but attractive enough in her own way. Chavasse took her hands and kissed her on the cheek.

‘I never did get around to giving you that evening out at the Saddle Room. It’s been on my conscience.’

‘Oh, I’m sure it has.’ There was a look of scepticism on her face. ‘You got my message?’

‘My flight was delayed, but the messenger was waiting when I got to the flat. I didn’t even have time to unpack. I’ve been to St Bede’s and had a look at the corpus delicti or whatever they call it. Most unpleasant. He’d been in the sea rather a long time. Bleached a whiter shade of pale, by the way, which seemed extraordinary considering what you told me about him.’

‘Spare me the details.’ She flicked the intercom. ‘Paul Chavasse is here, Mr Mallory.’

‘Send him in.’

The voice was remote and dry and might have been from another world – a world that Chavasse had almost forgotten during his two months’ convalescence. A tiny flicker of excitement moved coldly in his stomach as he opened the door and went in.

Mallory hadn’t changed in the slightest. The same grey flannel suit from the same very eminent tailor, the same tie from the right school, not an iron-grey hair out of place, the same frosty, remote glance over the top of the spectacles. He couldn’t even manage a smile.

‘Hello, Paul, nice to see you,’ he said, as if he didn’t mean a word of it. ‘How’s the leg?’

‘Fine now, sir.’

‘No permanent effects?’

‘It aches a little in damp weather but they tell me that will wear off after a while.’

‘You’re lucky you’ve still got two legs to walk around on. Magnum bullets can be nasty things. How was Alderney?’

Chavasse’s English mother lived in retirement on that most delightful of all the Channel Islands and he had spent his convalescence in her capable hands. It occurred to him, with a sense of wonder, that on the previous day at this time he had been picnicking on the white sands of Telegraph Bay; cold chicken and salad and a bottle of Liebfraumilch frosted from the fridge and wrapped in a damp towel, strictly against the rules, but the only way to drink it.

He sighed. ‘Nice, sir. Very nice.’

Mallory got straight down to business. ‘You’ve seen the body at St Bede’s?’

Chavasse nodded. ‘Any idea who he was?’

Mallory reached for a file and opened it. ‘A West Indian from Jamaica named Harvey Preston.’

‘And how did you manage to find that out?’