Woodward nodded, and looked at me. “Please accept my apologies, sir,” he said. “But I was distraught and did not mind my words as I should have done. But I had received a complaint the previous evening, and misconstrued your meaning.”

“What sort of complaint?”

“Dr. Grove was being considered for a living and was likely to be given the place, but a complaint was lodged only yesterday evening which alleged he was of a lewd way of life, and should not be appointed.”

“This was the Blundy girl, was it not?” Locke asked in a wordly, disinterested fashion.

“How do you know that?”

Locke shrugged. “Common knowledge in the taverns, sir. Not that that fact makes it true, of course. Might I ask where this complaint came from?”

“It came from within the Fellowship,” Woodward said.

“And more particularly?”

“More particularly it is a college matter alone.”

“Did your complainant give any evidence for the accusation?”

“He said that the girl in question was in Dr. Grove’s room yesterday evening, and he had seen her go in. He complained lest others see her and bring its reputation into question.”

“And was that true?”

“I had planned to ask Dr. Grove this morning.”

“So, she was there last night, and Grove was dead this morning,” Locke said. “Well, well…”

“Are you suggesting she extinguished his life?”

“Heavens, no,” Locke replied. “But extreme physical exertion, you know, may in certain circumstances bring on a seizure, as Mr. Cola here so innocently pointed out this morning. That is by far the most likely explanation. If so, then a careful examination will certainly help us. And anything more sinister seems unlikely, as Mr. Lower says the girl seemed genuinely upset when she was informed of Grove’s death.”

The warden grunted. “Thank you for the information. Perhaps we had better proceed? I have had his body placed in the library. Where do you want to examine it?”

“We need a large table,” Lower said gruffly. “The kitchen would be best, if there are no servants around.”

Woodward went off to dismiss the kitchen staff, and we went into the next room to examine the body. When the house was deserted, we carried him across the hallway and into the domestic offices. Fortunately Grove had already been laid out and washed, so we were not delayed by that less than agreeable business.

“I suppose we’d better begin, don’t you think?” Lower asked, clearing the dinner plates off the kitchen table. We took off Grove’s clothes and, in the state in which God had created him, lifted him up. Then Lower got his saws, sharpened his knife and rolled up his sleeves. Woodward decided that he did not want to observe, and so left us to it. “I’ll get my pen if you would be so good as to shave his head,” Lower said.

Which I willingly did, paying a visit to the closet where one of the servants kept his toiletries and fetching a razor.

“A barber as well as a surgeon,” Lower said as he drew the head—for his own interest only, I suspected. Then he put down the paper, stood back and thought for a moment. When fully prepared, he picked up knife, hammer and saw and we all paused a moment in the prayers appropriate for those about to violate and enter God’s finest work.

“Skin isn’t blackened, I note,” Locke said conversationally when the moment of piety was over and Lower began carving his way through the layers of yellow fat to the rib cage. “Are you going to try the heart test?”

Lower nodded. “It will be a useful experiment. I’m not convinced by the argument that the heart of a poisoning victim cannot be consumed by fire, but we should see.” A slight ripping sound as the layers were finally severed. “I do hate cutting up fat people.”

He paused awhile as he opened up the midriff and held open the thick heavy flaps of fat by nailing each corner to the kitchen table.

“The trouble is,” he continued once this was done and he had a clear view inside, “the book I consulted did not specify whether you were meant to dry the heart out first. But you see Locke’s point about the lack of blackening on the skin, do you, Cola? A sign against poisoning. On the other hand, it is livid in patches. You see? On the back and thighs? Maybe that counts. I think we must call it inconclusive. Did he throw up before he died?”

“Very much so. Why?”

“A pity. But I’ll have his stomach, just in case. Pass that bottle, will you?”

And he decanted in a very expert fashion a slimy, bloody, stinking froth from the stomach into a bottle. “Open the window, will you, Cola?” he said. “We don’t want to make the warden’s lodging uninhabitable.”

“People poisoned commonly do vomit,” I said, recalling a case in which my teacher in Padua had been allowed to poison a criminal to see the effect. The poor unfortunate had died rather unhappily; but as he had been due to have his limbs cut off and his entrails burned before him while he was still alive, he remained until the end pathetically grateful to my master for his consideration. “But I believe they rarely manage to expel all of the stomach’s contents.”

Conversation ceased at this point as Lower busied himself transferring stomach, spleen, kidney and liver to his glass bottles, passing comment on all of them as he held each individual organ up for me to see before popping it into its bottle.

“The cawl is yellower than usual,” he said brightly, as the work slowly restored him to good humor. “Stomach and intestines are an odd brownish color on the exterior. The lungs have black spots on them. Liver and spleen much discolored and the liver looks—what would you say?”

I peered inside at the odd-shaped organ. “I don’t know. It rather looks as though it had been boiled to me.”

Lower chuckled. “So it does. So it does. Now, the bile; very fluid. Runs all over the place and a sort of dirty yellow color. Most abnormal. Duodenum inflamed and excoriated but with no traces of natural decay. Same applies to stomach.”

Then I saw him eyeing the corpse reflectively, as he wiped his bloody hands on his apron.

“No more,” I said firmly.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I do not know you well, sir, but already I recognize that look. If you are thinking of opening his skull and removing his brain, then I must beg you to desist. We are, after all, trying to establish the cause of his death; it would be quite illegitimate to go chopping bits off to perform dissections on them.”

“And he will be on public view before the funeral, remember,” Locke added. “It would be hard to disguise the fact that you had cut his skull in two. It will be bad enough making sure no one sees that his head has been shaved.”

Lower clearly considered disputing this, but eventually shrugged. “Keepers of my conscience,” he said. “Very well, although medical knowledge may well suffer for your moral stand.”

“Not permanently, I feel sure. Besides, we should be putting him back together again.”

And so we set to work, stuffing his cavities with strips of linen to present a good appearance, sewing him up, then bandaging the wounds in case any fluids should emerge to stain his funeral garb.

“Never looked better, in my opinion,” Lower said when Grove was finally dressed in his best and placed comfortably on a chair in the corner, with the bottles containing his organs lined up on the floor. Lower, I saw, was determined to have those at least. “Now, the final test.”

He took the man’s heart, put it in a small earthenware dish on top of the stove and poured a quarter pint of brandy over it. Then he took a splinter of wood and lit it at the stove and thrust it into the bowl.

“A bit like plum pudding, really,” he said tastelessly as the brandy exploded into flames. We stood around and watched, as the liquid burned, and then eventually spluttered out, leaving an exceptionally unpleasant odor in the air.

“What do you think?”