Antidote To Murder by Felicity Young Page A

attendants. She smiled to herself when she caught Everard’s low groan. Perhaps if Henry Everard had had to work as hard as she had to obtain his position, he, too, would have been more accepting of the minor tasks he was assigned.
    Dody moved over to a wooden filing cabinet at the far end of the autopsy room and retrieved the heavy leather-bound Book of Lists. In it she recorded the details of Billy Kent’s death and sketched a tablet with the unusual scorings. She was about to flick back the pages to see if similar tablets had been recorded before her time, when Everard let out a curse—“Hell’s teeth!”—and held up his hand. Blood trickled from his finger and ran down his wrist, daubing the ashen corpse with drops of red.
    Spilsbury cast his eyes aloft and indicated for Dody to take over.
    She picked up the dropped needle and thread. “Disinfect that well, Dr. Everard,” she said. “You know what damage a simple needle prick can do.”
    “I don’t need you to point that out,” he shot quietly. In a louder voice, he said. “Thank you, Dr. McCleland.”
    When she had finished with the corpse, she joined Spilsbury at the trough-like sink, where they washed their hands in silence with the leathery-smelling carbolic soap.
    Conversation was not one of the pathologist’s attributes. Recently, though, Dody had taken the opportunity to watch him testify in court and experienced once more the sensations that had sparked an earlier, short-lived, infatuation. At the mortuary he had less life about him than most of their patients, but in court, Dr. Bernard Spilsbury shone.
    “You will visit Billy Kent’s family this afternoon, Doctor?” he enquired.
    “Yes, sir, and inform the coroner that he has a case.”
    “Good. If you find anything of further interest, I’ll be in the lab at St. Mary’s until about ten tonight. Tomorrow I leave for Edinburgh for two weeks. You will save all but the most routine cases for me.”
    “Will the trains be running, sir?” Everard called out.
    Spilsbury turned to face him and dropped the towel he had been using on his hands. “Lord only knows. I’ll go by automobile if I have to. Damned strikers—food left rotting on the docks, mobs in the street, starvation. Can’t they see what they are doing to the country, to their own people?”
    Dody remained silent. At first she had been in support of the strikers, who worked long hours often under intolerable conditions, until she’d begun dealing with the innocent victims—mainly the children, slowly dying of starvation. If the strikes went on for much longer, famine was predicted.
    “They say the country’s a whisker away from revolution, and a foreign war is the only way to fix the situation. God help us all,” Spilsbury added.
    Everard pulled the sheet over the body and joined them at the sink.
    “Have you had the chance to peruse our papers yet, sir?” he asked.
    “I have indeed. Very good, Everard.”
    Dody’s heart skipped a beat. “Papers? I thought our papers weren’t due until tomorrow.”
    “At the end of last week, actually,” Everard said, flicking water from his fingers and reaching for a clean towel. “Because Dr. Spilsbury has been called away, he wanted them in sooner—did I not inform you of that, Dr. McCleland?”
    “No, you did not,” she said coldly.
    Everard pressed a finger to his cheek. “Dear me, come to think of it, I didn’t, did I? Frightfully sorry; sir, this is my fault.”
    Spilsbury nodded; evidently Everard’s gallantry absolved him of all sin. Dody glared at Everard as they followed Spilsbury to his office, a large impersonal space off the autopsy room. Everard met her eye and shrugged.
    Spilsbury lifted a sheaf of typed foolscap from his desk and handed it to Everard. “As it will be some time now before I can look at Dr. McCleland’s paper, you may as well have yours back, Everard. Experiments showing that some foods are tumour-inducing in rats. Most interesting.”
    What?
Dody