The Three Locks by Bonnie MacBird (learn to read books txt) 📕

the head protruding. The face had been covered by two white handkerchiefs which clung to the damp features, creating a ghostly visage. The rest of the corpse was concealed by layers of summer jackets and shawls. Two delicate white feet extended out the other end of this motley pile.

Her shoes must have come off in the lock.

Five or six policemen attempted to discourage the crowd, waving hands and admonishing the gawkers. The public’s response to horrible deaths never failed to disturb me. Two constables stood directly over the corpse, attempting to act as human screens.

‘Pickering! The cloth!’ barked Hadley and indicated that the younger man should hold up the fabric to keep the crowd from seeing the body. Even as he did so, I could see running towards us a newsman and his assistant carrying photographic equipment. Pickering held up his fabric shield just in time.

Hadley and I kneeled by the body. He nodded to me, and I peeled back the handkerchiefs.

‘Dear God,’ I said. The face was indeed Dillie Wyndham’s, her blue eyes half-lidded and lips parted. She looked peaceful, but I could tell in an instant that her end had been anything but calm. A bruise above her left eye was telling. One hand was visible at the edge of the coverings, and I looked closely at it.

‘Blood under her fingernails,’ I said. ‘Clearly not a suicide.’

‘Not with that bruise,’ agreed Hadley.

I started to pull back one of the coats covering the body but Hadley stopped me with a hand on the arm. ‘Not here.’ He looked up at one of his men. ‘A full post-mortem. Inform the coroner.’

Pickering, who had the knack of insinuating himself into every discussion, had handed off the fabric screen, and was now kneeling beside us. ‘But sir, perhaps the family would prefer—’ he began.

‘No. This is my responsibility,’ said the senior man, gruffly. ‘Summon Dr Caswell. And cover the face. Now.’

Pickering hesitated.

‘Do it!’

The mortuary was in the basement of a building some ten blocks from the river. As Hadley filled in paperwork upstairs, I descended the iron steps to the examination room where Odelia Wyndham’s body had been brought. The temperature had dropped a good twenty degrees, as it always did in such places.

Dr Caswell, a rotund, porcine man with a grey brush cut, was laying out his instruments. My nostrils were assailed by the familiar yet always disturbing odours of carbolic acid, ammonia and death. I shivered in my linen suit at the sudden chill, contrasting so sharply with the damp heat of the day.

Caswell looked up and nodded. A combination of gas and electric light gave the place a strange brilliance. On the table, covered by a white sheet, lay the body of poor Odelia Wyndham. An attendant pulled back the draping, and once again I stared down at the girl’s dead face.

The young woman, of late so vibrant, volatile and lively – was now a marble carving, white and still. Her blonde hair, free from its constraints, billowed about her on the table, a wet and tangled mass of curls. Her beauty was transformed into an ethereal shell of young womanhood. Our first meeting had been troubled, but even so, in this quiet, cold room, I felt a sharp pang of grief. A wasted young life, tempestuous but nevertheless promising, that promise now never to be fulfilled.

Had Holmes been there, he would no doubt have chided me for the sentiment.

‘May I begin?’ I asked, and with Caswell’s nod I withdrew the covering, took out my pocket lens, and began to examine the corpse in the manner I hoped was like my friend’s.

Sherlock Holmes’s protocol was unique, as he never took the means of death for granted. Although it would appear Miss Wyndham had drowned, I checked her nails, inside her mouth, her neck and head, and all the major and minor bones. The body had been in the water for several hours, and in that amount of time and with the heavy current in the lock, vital evidence could have been washed away.

Hadley joined us and stood silently against the wall to give us room to work.

‘Serious bruising,’ I said. ‘Two fingers broken, and possibly two – no, three – ribs. She fought someone, and fought hard.’

Caswell followed behind me, confirming these larger injuries and undertaking his own business. He vouched that the young lady had not been molested. At least there was that.

Thirty minutes later, I had all the information that could be gleaned from Miss Wyndham’s corpse. Her wrists bore the bruises of someone’s strong grip. The broken fingers and more bruises along the side of her right hand and across the knuckles indicated she had struck something, more than once, with considerable force. I announced those findings to the others.

‘I concur on all,’ said Dr Caswell.

‘If she struck the face of her murderer with the force this indicates, there would surely be a mark on him,’ said Hadley, who had been watching with interest. ‘Or her, if the murderer were female,’ said I. ‘But I rather think a larger person, so more likely a man. Her left fourth finger was bare, with an abrasion near the second joint. Had a ring been torn from her hand? And yet this wound looks slightly less fresh.’

‘Ah,’ said Caswell, ‘I missed that.’ He looked closer. ‘As to the timing of this injury, the immersion makes this uncertain.’

‘By the amount of liquid in the lungs, Miss Wyndham was alive and breathing when she hit the water,’ I said. Her hair was tangled, more so than one might have predicted. A small patch of hair was torn free, the scalp had bled, but very little. Torn off in the lock, no doubt.

‘Oh, to be trapped in the lock like that,’ said Hadley, shaking his head. The senior man had more feeling than I had credited.

Unbidden, a sudden image washed across my mind, another woman, perhaps thirty, floating in water, tangled in some branches, the river rushing past her. A flash and