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There is a man on Maria Gorey’s table, and he is telling her a story.
Sir Alfred Harrington, fifty-four years of age, arrived in her office early that same morning, bereft of a coat despite the chill and his silk evening jacket soaked through with mud. He’d been found in some back alley in the East End, miles from his home and his offices in Westminster. A politician, she’s told, but she doesn’t recognize him; he looks like any other man. His face is set with frown lines that rigor mortis pulls into a grimace, and his greying hair falls into his eyes, now bloodshot and glassy with death. He has the hands of a man who has known little hardship, free of calluses despite the dirt, blood and skin beneath his fingernails. There is a hole in his front breast pocket where a bullet has lodged itself in his heart. It has, quite curiously, failed to make him bleed.
She has read the chief inspector’s report, written in an unfamiliar hand. It says: this is a straightforward case, a simple mugging gone wrong. It whispers, in a tone she’s heard before: best not dig too deep.
But the dead speak clearly to those who care to listen, and unlike the living, they do not lie. Maria examines her guest, the burst veins around his eyes and the bruising at his mouth, and sees a different story altogether.
She sends off her own report before lunch, requesting permission for a full autopsy. Cutting noblemen open still isn’t the done thing (although she’s never quite understood why), but perhaps this man could be an exception. Perhaps he’s not important enough for anyone to care, or the case strange enough to allow her this liberty.
An hour later she receives her answer. The signature approving the autopsy is not the one she’d seen on the police report. This time, it is a name she recognizes.
A smile playing on her lips, Maria returns to her guest and prepares to hear all he has to tell. She pulls her gloves on and her mask down, strips him of his clothes and retrieves a clean scalpel. As she does, the tool knocks against one of the many others in the tray beside the operating table; the resulting sound is brief, silver, and just loud enough to ring in her ears. Maria stills, and it is only a moment later that she realises why: even now, she is expecting to hear another set of tools ring out in response, to look up and see Mama working beside her.
Now when she listens, she is met with only silence.
It’s not the quiet that perturbs her. She expects it, invites it— in her line of work there is little need for words passed between the living, and little time for such conversations to occur. But there’d been an ease to working at her mother’s side. Autopsy was a dance they both knew by heart: a pas de deux to the music of metal on metal, of blades against flesh, of bodies opening up before them and singing. Maria dances alone now, and the absence haunts her every step. Her mother lingers in the details— her anatomy books on the shelves, the specimens along the walls labelled in her hand, the colleagues that cannot help but comment on their family resemblance. Maria still holds a scalpel just the way her mother taught her.
Mama’s not dead, not yet. But Maria wonders, when her mother finally hangs, what story her body will tell. She wonders if her own will be any different.
Her thoughts are interrupted by a swift knock at the door and the chorus of muffled voices that follow.
“Come in,” she calls out, and lowers her blade. We’ll talk later, she thinks with no small amount of anticipation.
Maria turns around, and finds the door already ajar. Through it comes marching Detective Constable Gina Lestrade, hands at her hips, casting a glance about the room. When her eyes alight on Harrington’s body, she freezes.
“Oh, blimey,” she swears.
Another figure enters after her, and stumbles into her back.
Kazuma Asougi looks down at the detective with a frown. “Lestrade, what—” the man hisses.
Lestrade elbows him (“ Hey— ”) and with a shrug of her shoulders she clears her throat, straightening the lapels of her jacket. “‘Scuse us, Miz Gorey. This a bad time?”
“No, I’ve not yet begun a full autopsy,” Maria responds, raising the clean scalpel in her hand as evidence. She observes the strange expressions on Asougi and Lestrade’s faces and recalls, suddenly, the voice of her mother, reminding her it was rude to keep her mask on when visitors were present. She pulls the mask up, and feels the cool air against her cheeks. “How can I help the two—”
The door creaks then, and Maria spots a shadow stirring in the doorway. She turns to address her final visitor: “...the three of you?”
Lord Van Zieks glowers into the room. “Doctor Gorey,” he nods in greeting, not moving from his spot. Framed by the light of the hallway, it would be easy to mistake him for a living replica of the portrait Maria had seen on the back wall of his office the few times she’d had cause to visit. It’s not only for the similarity of their features; Van Zieks stands with that same noble bearing, looks down at her with the same sharp gaze. She met Klint van Zieks only once, as a child, but she recognizes the echo of him even still. Perhaps it’s something in the blood. “We were hoping you might have a moment to discuss the Harrington case.”
Maria hums, and tilts her head towards the man in question. “Of course,” she says. “Interesting fellow. I was just about to get to know him better.”
Asougi and Lestrade file into the room, the former peering down at Harrington, his lips pursed. “But you’re already certain it’s not the bullet that killed him?”
“There was a pistol at the scene,” Lestrade pipes up. “Witnesses sayin’ they heard the gunshot. Inspector Forrester thinks it all pretty cut an’ dry.”
Maria vaguely recalls the name, a signature she hadn’t recognized on the police report. He must be new, some former detective sergeant promoted in the wake of Gregson’s death. He has not come to visit with the rest of the investigative team, and Maria is quickly becoming glad of that fact.
“Well, he was shot, that’s not in question.” Maria gestures to the wound. “But right now I’m nearly certain the injury was sustained post-mortem. You saw the crime scene, didn’t you, detective constable? For a man shot through the heart it seems he hardly bled at all.” She traces a gloved hand over the lividity at his left side, far more blood pooling inside him then there ought to be, the wound itself oddly clean.
There’s a crease in Lestrade’s brow. “Now that ya mention it…”
“I told you something seemed off,” Asougi says with a sharp glance back to his superior.
Van Zieks returns the look. “And as I told you, Mister Asougi, intuition without evidence means nothing in a court of law.”
“But there’s evidence now—”
Maria has little interest in their squabbling, but finds herself watching the pair all the same. It’s fascinating, how despite the tension in their shoulders and the venom on their tongues, their bodies somehow mirror each other, forming twin pictures of annoyance— brows set into the same glare, arms raised in the same defensive posture. A hypothesis forms: that perhaps similarity is not a matter of affinity, just proximity and time.
Lestrade, either ignoring the argument behind her or too accustomed to such occurrences to care, speaks: “How d’ya think ‘e died then?”
“Asphyxiation would be my best guess. Look,” and Maria points to the story laid out across his skin, tracing the tiny starbursts of red along his cheeks. “These pinpoint haemorrhages here indicate a lack of oxygen at the time of death. No ligature marks on the neck, but this bruising around the mouth here— ante- or perimortem I’d say based on the coloration— could indicate smothering. That, along with the blood and other tissue found under his fingernails, leads me to believe he may have struggled with an attacker shortly before death. He was shot afterwards, almost certainly from a distance. See? No gunpowder residue or scorching near the wound, nor on his clothes.”
Maria looks up at her audience. Asougi and Van Zieks have paused their sniping to listen, but as they turn back to each other to confer it’s Lestrade that catches Maria’s eye. It’s a simple movement— Lestrade turning her head, bringing one finger to the brim of her cap in thought— but Maria watches and a memory pulls at her, like a hook under the skin. She’s seen that tilt of the head before, the hand resting on the hip. She recognizes it, like the shape of the wound.
It’s Gregson, almost. She’s seen that gesture a thousand times; she watches Lestrade and at once feels both herself and the girl she once was, stitching stuffed organs in the corner of this very office while Gregson and her mother spoke. Just as Asougi’s face twists with Van Zieks’ ire and Van Zieks stands with his brother’s bearing, just as her mother’s hand still guides Maria’s blade, Lestrade’s body bends into a ghostly facsimile of a dead man’s form.
Something cold curls in Maria’s gut, hypothesis becoming logical conclusion. Perhaps this fate is inescapable, she thinks. Perhaps following in another’s footsteps means you learn to match their gait.
Maria looks at her own hands, and shudders.
“Why shoot the bloke then?” Lestrade asks. “Just to be sure?”
Asougi brings a hand to his chin in thought. “I’d wager that the real culprit is trying to throw us off the scent by framing someone else. And it seems as if the new detective inspector nearly fell for it,” he says with no small amount of disdain.
“Perhaps,” Van Zieks adds, “but I wouldn’t be so hasty as to rule out our main suspect’s involvement. Witnesses did see him holding the weapon—”
“But not shooting it—”
“Either way,” Lestrade interrupts, “we oughta see if our man’s got an alibi for before the so-called shooting, yeah? If that’s when this bloke was actually offed.” There’s something hungry in her eyes as she speaks, defiant.
Her companions nod in agreement, and it is only then that it strikes Maria how strange it is that Lestrade has come here alongside only the prosecutorial team, her superior officer is nowhere in sight. The detective constable may well be running things on the ground, but Inspector Forrestor would have the final say in the direction of the case, and Maria somehow doubts that the man has accepted this case’s complexity so easily.
She considers the scene before her once more: Lestrade with her head held high as she theorises an alternate timeline aloud; Asougi nodding along, laying a case out for the defence; Van Zieks at his shoulder, ready with a counterpoint. Maria thinks of the form on her desk approving the autopsy, Barok van Zieks’ signature at the bottom.
It would be easy, Maria thinks, for them to fall in line— convict the obvious suspect, see another case closed. It would be easy to call it justice, and to believe it. That’s what her mother had done.
But Maria thinks: perhaps she had drawn her conclusions before considering all of the evidence. Their bodies tell one story; their actions, another. The living were strange, that way.
Van Zieks in the doorway dips his head in a bow. “Thank you for your time, Doctor Gorey. Please keep us updated on your findings.”
Maria smiles. “Of course. I’m very curious to see if my hypothesis holds water.”
Van Zieks nods, and the investigators say their goodbyes. Maria watches as they go. Their footsteps echo down the hall, and Maria listens until there is nothing left to hear.
Then she is alone once more, save the man still lying on her table. Maria pulls down her mask and returns to her guest. She looks down at her hands, the scalpel held between her fingers just the way her mother taught her. She thinks: she loves her mother. She thinks: she will not become her.
Maria presses the blade to flesh and begins to work, each incision her own.