More students arrived, so Diamond made sure he had a seat in the front row, and presently a young woman in a white lab coat came in pushing a steel clothes rack on wheels that looked as if it had been borrowed from some dress shop. The remnants of the clothes, presumably. Under the plastic cover the shapes of several hangers could be made out. Then a photographer came in and arranged two cameras on stands. A third assistant had a video camera and close-ups of the skeleton soon started appearing on the large screen. Maybe after all the Beau would get the attention he deserved.
Claude Waghorn made his entrance wearing surgeon’s scrubs, cap and mask as if he was about to conduct a full postmortem on a fresh corpse. All he lacked was the rubber boots. Much to Diamond’s disgust, he was wearing sandals.
The room had filled and the students still hadn’t all got seated. Although Waghorn must have noted Diamond’s presence, there was no meeting of eyes. The anthropologist stood in front of the bones, gazed up to the top tier and addressed his audience in the mincing voice familiar from the demolition site. ‘Today you are privileged to be present at a medico-legal investigation of human remains and I must ask you to treat the occasion with respect. Kindly find a place and have the good manners to remain seated until the autopsy is complete.’
He waited with folded arms.
When everyone was settled, he said, ‘I must also insist on total silence.’
Only then did he take a pair of surgical gloves from his pocket and make a performance of putting them on, magnified on the screen like a TV commercial. At last he said with a lack of volume that almost dared anyone to breathe, ‘The skeleton was discovered just under a week ago during the demolition of an eighteenth-century house in Twerton.’
Shots of the building site now appeared on screen in a short PowerPoint presentation. If that picture appeared, Diamond would feel like pulling his jacket over his head. But he need not have worried. This was all about Waghorn.
The star of the show was saying, ‘I was called to the scene at an early stage and took command. Fortunately the demolition had been halted before irreparable damage was done to our subject. You will know that when decomposition has taken place the bones become disarticulated because the tendons and ligaments that bind them together are lost. Unless the subject is horizontal at death, you end up with a heap of two hundred and six bones. Unusually, this skeleton was more or less intact in a seated position, supported by a combination of its clothes and a wooden armchair. As you saw on screen it was clothed in the vestiges of an eighteenth-century male costume typical of the upper class including jacket, waistcoat, shirt, breeches, stockings, buckled shoes and a long black wig. Under my close supervision the seated figure and the chair were eventually lifted from the loft space and transported to a laboratory here.
‘Removing the clothes from a skeleton is a painstaking process taking several hours at the best of times but is even more laborious when the garments have mostly rotted and there is a generous coating of dust. Each item of dress can contain clues to the time since death, the subject’s identity and, more importantly, the cause of death. It’s all evidence and is treated with the utmost respect. That particular process would have taken far too long to perform in front of you. In fact, it was a two-day job. Strictly speaking, it was part of the autopsy and you must take it as a given. The remnants of the clothes are on the rack which my assistant will uncover later. Shall we begin?’
He’s milking this, Diamond thought. It’s an act.
‘One takes nothing for granted,’ Dr. Waghorn continued, ignoring the fact that he was asking his audience to take the undressing for granted, ‘so let’s start by confirming the sex of the deceased. What is the most obvious indicator of the gender?’
A voice from the back said, ‘The pelvis.’
‘Who spoke?’
Everyone turned to see. A hand was up in the second row from the back and it belonged to a shaven-headed male in a football shirt.
Waghorn gave the offender a look as if he was next for dissection. ‘Do you understand English?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re not deaf?’
‘No.’
‘My question about gender was rhetorical. Didn’t I ask everyone just now to remain silent?’
For a short interval that must have seemed unbearably long to the hapless student, Waghorn stood in silence, as if the entire procedure had been ruined. Finally he resumed in that thin, strangled voice. ‘A female pelvis is typically broader than that of a male and this is most apparent in the anterior area known as the pubis. The lower section of the pubis is wider in the female to facilitate birth. Our subject is definitely male. I won’t prolong this by going into the several other signs of gender.
‘To save time, I measured each of the bones already, starting with the calcaneus at the heel and progressing to the top of the skull. In total he is 1.705 metres, a fraction over five foot seven, but beware. This will not be the height of the living body. A variability factor needs to be added. My calculation is five foot eight at death. Our height diminishes with ageing after reaching a maximum in our late teens or twenties. Let us now deal with what we have in front of us, starting from the top.’
The magnified image of the skull was on the big screen.
Waghorn was using a pointer. ‘In passing, note the prominence of supraorbital ridges characteristic of the male. And now you are — or should be — speculating as to racial identity. Difficult, always difficult, because of the continuum of variation among the races. I would normally look first at teeth, but we have none here. The recessive cheekbones and the narrowness of the palate suggest he was white or Caucasoid in racial type, but this can be deceptive. Of more interest is the tendency of the palate to be triangular rather than the deeper U-shape of the typical African skull. It’s a fine judgement, best left to the expert.’ He bent over the skull as if he hadn’t seen it before, looked up at his audience and said, ‘Caucasoid.’
No question who he meant by the expert.
‘The absence of any hair is to be expected, although we all know of cases of hair surviving thousands of years under favourable conditions. Of more interest in the present subject is the absence of teeth. This may lead us to make an assumption about age, but of course some people lose all their teeth early in life, so I shall look for more reliable indications of age presently when we examine the vertebrae.’
The head bone connected to the neck bone. How laborious was this going to be?
‘Had the teeth been intact they would have yielded more information about age. Can we have the camera on the mandible, please?’
Diamond’s knowledge of anatomy was scant, but he knew the mandible had something to do with the jaw. Still with the head bone, then.
How long was this likely to take, and what would come out of it? Waghorn was hedging on almost every decision. Okay, the skeleton was male and Caucasian and average in height, but little of use to the investigation had emerged.
The process continued in the same formal manner for the next twenty minutes, more of an anatomy lecture than an autopsy. Diamond was peeved by what seemed like a deliberate move to sideline him. The whole performance was designed to stifle comment. In a small group he wouldn’t have hesitated to ask questions. Here any interruption would undermine the teaching. Stuff that. He’d still speak up if there was cause.
‘And so we come to the ribcage.’
The neck bone connected to the chest bone.
‘I would like the camera to display each side in turn, in no particular hurry.’ Waghorn stepped to one side and took a drink of water.
‘Has everybody had a chance to form an opinion? I hope so, because there’s something of note here that I wouldn’t want any of you to overlook, and by the expressions on your faces I can see that most, if not all, of you have missed it. Once more, please,’ he instructed the assistant filming the event, ‘and can we zoom in?’