Doctor Death Read Online Free PDF Page A

Abigore’s lifeless body was lying on a pallet in an unheated storeroom between the freight train yard and the railroad station. Rigor mortis had set in while the body was still in the soup-hen crate, and it had not been possible to straighten the priest’s sharply bent limbs without considerable use of force. Consequently, he was lying on his side now, curled up like a fetus in its mother’s womb, with his head pressed down against his chest. There were still flecks of ice in his hair.
    Dawn had arrived, and in spite of the corpse’s position, one could see that the temple, the cheekbone, and the left eye socket had been hammered flat with a violent blow.
    “Suspicious death,” the Commissioner noted. “Presumably murder. What do you think, Doctor?”
    “It is hard to imagine that so considerable a lesion can have been caused by a fall or some other accidental occurrence. He was hit with an object more than twenty-five centimeters wide. My guess would be that he has been felled with a shovel or a spade, not with the edge but with the flat side of the blade—a coal shovel, perhaps? There seems to be some sooty residue in the wound. There was a great deal of power in the blow.”
    “So we can call it homicide?”
    “Everything suggests as much.”
    The Commissioner nodded. “Then I will have to inform the préfecture. The chief constable will not be happy. A murder, and of a priest to boot. Can you give us a time of death? An approximation will do for now, for the purposes of the certificate, but Inspector Marot, or whoever will be in charge of the investigation, will no doubt soon be pressing you for a more precise estimate.”
    The Commissioner had no jurisdiction over the police investigation. His job was merely to determine and attest the cause of death, and his authority went no further than the inquest. But all of Varbourg’s dead were under his jurisdiction. He was Le Commissaire des Morts—the Commissioner of the Dead.
    “Rigor mortis is extensive but not complete. When was he found?” my father asked.
    “A little after six. In a boxcar that was inspected at one ten last night according to the stationmaster’s log book. At that point there were no corpses except those of the slaughtered animals.”
    “Hmmm. Then I would think that he must have died no earlier than eleven thirty last night. It would not have been possible to place him in the box if rigor mortis had already set in. On the certificate, you may write between eleven thirty and two thirty,but in my opinion death must have occurred in the hour after midnight.”
    The Commissioner grunted and made a note in his little black book.
    “Who would smash in the head of a man of the cloth?” he said. “And this one in particular? There are much more disagreeable priests.”
    “He did seem both compassionate and conscientious,” concurred Papa. “And why arrange the body in such a bizarre way?”
    “To hide the crime, presumably. The murderer had good reason to assume that the train would depart for Paris according to plan, that is to say at six fifteen, so that the corpse would not be discovered until much later and in another city. That would have made the investigation considerably more difficult. Merely identifying the good pastor would presumably have taken several days.”
    “But it would have been discovered eventually. There must be more effective ways of disposing of a corpse.”
    The Commissioner nodded. “Normally they just throw them in the river. What do I know? Maybe it was too far to carry the body. Could the killing have occurred in the boxcar?”
    “Perhaps, but unfortunately I do not know a method by which one can determine how much blood came from the animals and how much is poor Abigore’s. I would have expected spatters on the surroundings, not just blood on the floor. In my opinion, the boxcar is not the scene of the murder.”
    The Commissioner growled, a short, unhappy sound. “Well. We will have to leave that to