Now, what on earth was a woman with a Middle Eastern name doing as doctor on a tanker towing an iceberg? Sidetracked by the speculation for an instant, he didn’t notice the sound of the last zippers coming undone. When he glanced up at last, his gaze flicked over the featureless skull-face of the skeletal woman to the profile of the last corpse.
He went cold. His breath departed in a gasp as though he had been hit in the stomach. He gulped in enough air to fuel a word or two.
‘Get out,’ he ordered. ‘Clear the room at once!’
The two medical orderlies looked up at their normally easygoing chief and hesitated. ‘OUT!’ he rasped. ‘Get next door and wait.’
They went and he lingered for a moment himself, looking across the three cold corpses to the one that was obviously not so cold. There was a telephone hanging on the wall behind him. He lifted the handset.
‘Security,’ he requested.
He was through before he had blinked twice, though shock was slowing time around him now as the details of Dundas’s radiation-ravaged countenance were beginning to burn themselves into his stunned mind. He was far away from speculating how and why as yet.
‘Security here.’
‘I need two armed guards over at the medical facility now, please.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And tell them to bring a Geiger counter.’
An infinitesimal pause, then, ‘Yes, sir.’
‘Transfer me back to the operator.’
‘Sir.’ The word was cut short as the order was obeyed, and the operator’s voice returned, echoing the monosyllable.
The doctor hesitated for another instant, his mind racing. But, other than speculation, there was little to think about. The procedures had been laid down in the sixties as to the correct reaction to this sort of thing both in wartime and in peacetime. The standing orders were clear. It might be some kind of exercise, he thought. But even if it was, he still had a clear duty to perform.
‘Get me the Ministry of Defence,’ he ordered.
The man from the MoD arrived twelve hours later. He was a rumpled, dyspeptic little man called Jones, with thin hair and thick glasses. Penmarrick had heard of him; he was a professor of forensic medicine with an international reputation. On the one hand, the captain was confused that the MoD’s reaction had been so slow; on the other, he was impressed by the stature of the man they had sent, if not by his personality. Professor Jones did not drive. He had had to take the intercity express train from London to Exeter. At Exeter he had been forced onto the local service through Teignmouth, Newton Abbot, Totnes, Plymouth, Liskeard, St Austell and Truro. Four dilatory hours, he complained bitterly, on a second-class ticket in old-fashioned, uncomfortable carriages without the luxury of either a refreshment car or a toilet. This bloody corpse had better be worth all the inconvenience and discomfort.
Penmarrick picked him up at Penryn British Rail station, carried his little leather case to the car and drove him down to Culdrose himself. In the interim, the whole naval air station had been put on alert — heavily irradiated corpses were by no means as run-of-the-mill as drowned ones — and Penmarrick was eager to make a detailed report of what he had done in the length of time it had taken for the expert to arrive. He was, perhaps, a little over-anxious, because his reaction to Sergeant Dundas’s body had been exactly by the book — which had not stopped it spoiling the camp commander’s day and putting the doctor’s general popularity seriously at risk.
But the professor wanted no reports or self-justification. He would see what had been done for himself and would make up his own mind as to the procedures they would follow then. He was in any case here to perform an autopsy, not to comment on naval security procedures. The only thing about the navy which did attract his attention, however, was die quality of the camp mess and his chance of a decent dinner after this thing was all over.
Penmarrick had formed no high opinion of his grumbling visitor by the time he pulled up at the security barrier on the main gate. Whether the professor was interested in naval security or not, he was quick enough to produce his security pass and gave the soldier’s crisp salute a curt nod.
He treated the camp commander with a grudging courtesy, but made it plain that he wished to get on with his business rather than exchange social chit-chat. The doctor felt his popularity plunging lower with each rude professorial monosyllable.
Professor Jones’s pale blue eyes were busy about the arrangements which Penmarrick had made inside the medical facility as well, though the beleaguered doctor hardly knew what to make of the raised eyebrow which greeted the sight of armed security guards in white anti-radiation suits. ‘If they need those, then we’ll need them too,’ he prompted, as the two of them stood outside the door. ‘It’ll make things difficult, but we’ll manage. You’ll assist me.’
So, thought Penmarrick, some of the details of his rudely-dismissed report had sunk in after all — the Geiger counter readings, for instance. At least the professor hadn’t actually questioned anything he had done so far.
It took them ten minutes to kit up and for the professor to place a cassette in the little tape recorder he proposed to carry with him, along with the battered leather case. Then they went in. Professor Jones placed his case on the floor and approached each body with the Geiger counter first, tutting to himself as the readings rose. Naturally enough, he spent the longest time checking out Sergeant Dundas. But he kept returning to the nameless, skeletal woman too. The doctor watched him, grudgingly impressed by the transformation which action seemed to bring to the professor. The little man’s movements were suddenly precise and economical. His concentration impressively absolute. To and fro he went between the corpses which lay on the tables like strange aliens half emerged from yellow plastic cocoons. At last he switched the machine off and turned to Penmarrick.
‘You were right,’ he conceded. ‘This is very strange. Your sergeant here is certainly the primary source. The other two men have been irradiated secondarily, and only slightly. There’s something else about the woman, though. Something I don’t understand. Still, time for a closer look…’
He placed his case on a worktop on the far side of the room and stood the tape recorder against it, out of range of interference from the radioactivity being emitted from the corpses, and switched it on. In a loud voice, he intoned the date and time, their names and the names, as far as they knew them, of the people they were examining.
Side by side, they lifted the bodies and pulled the bags out from beneath them. Then, slowly, carefully, working as a team, they pulled off the corpses’ clothes. The outer clothing came quite easily, but they needed to cut the underwear away. Professor Jones opened his case to reveal that he had brought his own equipment with him: enough knives and scissors to dissect a deceased army. He used a pair of scissors with blades like a hummingbird’s beak rendered in steel. It was a filthy, deeply unpleasant job and Penmarrick was grateful for the body suit — though it was designed to protect him against radiation, not liquid putrefaction. The uncut clothes went into one bag. The ruined underclothes into another. The rags from the woman’s skeleton into a third.