“Miss Montgomery,” he greeted me. “Are ye certain ye want to do this? It’s not usually somethin’ a young lady would ask for.”
I assured him that I was very certain. He nodded.
“The morgue is in another part of the building. The main entrance is on the adjacent street.”
Inspector Landry pulled on a heavy coat with neck scarf and hat. He also carried an umbrella as he escorted me out to the sidewalk.
“Sir McQuarrie has arranged for a man of his acquaintance by the name of Munro to meet us. I’m told you are acquainted with him as well.”
Munro. I was not surprised after our encounter the previous evening.
We walked to the corner and continued down the adjacent street to a brick and cut stone entrance with signage for the morgue.
I was not unfamiliar with such places, having previously accompanied Mikaela Forsythe on an inquiry case.
However, as she said at the time, no amount of experience could prepare one for the smell of such a place or the sight of a body, laid out naked with all assortments of injuries on a steel table.
We entered the foyer of the morgue and then stepped into the front office that might have been any business establishment with a clerk at the counter. Except the business here was death.
The smell was as I remembered it, that cloying stench that filled the back of my throat along with the sharp, pungent scent of embalming fluid for some of those inside those walls. For others, as I had learned, those of no family or means, there was only the smell of decaying flesh, followed by a quick burial in a nameless grave after a crime was solved.
Inspector Landry went to the counter to sign in while I waited apart, the smell of the morgue stronger here as an attendant in a white apron appeared with a clipboard, that unmistakable odour following him in a smothering wave.
I closed my eyes as the smell washed over me, along with the image of Dory’s body from the night I found her.
A strong hand closed around my arm.
That familiar icy gaze locked with mine. I attempted to pull my arm free.
“I’m all right.”
“Of course, ye are,” Munro replied. “Ye might want to sit down before ye fall down. Have ye eaten this mornin’?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“I’ll take it that ye have not, just as I thought. And now yer about to fall to the floor. Ye might want to remember to eat before taking yerself off to view dead bodies.”
I managed to free my arm.
“And ye are an expert?” I replied, stronger now.
Inspector Landry returned and nodded to Munro.
“The police surgeon is waiting.”
We followed Inspector Landry through a door that opened onto a long hallway, with a half-dozen doors simply marked ‘Examination Room,’ with numbers—one, two, three, and three more on the opposite side. He stopped at Room No. 3 and opened the door.
I had told myself that it was no different than another time I had been inside a morgue. However, thiswasdifferent. A thin, balding man acknowledged us, read the paper that Inspector Landry gave him, then motioned us to follow him.
When we reached one of those steel tables, he pulled back the sheet that covered the body that lay there.
“Is this the victim, Inspector?”
He nodded with a look at myself.
I stepped closer. The body that lay there was naked except for the sheet that had covered it.
Without the clothes Dory had worn the night I found her, I now saw the bruises down her arms and on her hands in the harsh glare from the overhead lights. My attention was then drawn to the ghastly cut across her throat.
