The Devil's Grin: Illustrated Edition (An Anna Kronberg Thriller Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page A

the grooves I had made. Great skill and caution were needed to cut only the bones and leave the nerve tissue untarnished.  
    The upper half of the skull came off like the top of a breakfast egg, revealing the brain that at first glance appeared normal. I extracted the right hemisphere and cut it into slices, took the magnifying glass from Mr Holmes’s hand, and bent down over the brain sections. Small, liquid-filled lesions presented themselves.
    ‘Odd!’ I straightened up, tossing my tools aside. His magnifying glass produced a loud clonk on the slab. ‘My apologies,’ I muttered.
    Pressing my palms onto the marble slab, I pushed all thoughts aside and let my gaze fly over the corpse, putting bits of information back into my mind, hoping a picture would form. What had I missed?  
    Impatiently, I yanked my gloves off and pressed my fingers into the bend of the man’s elbow. The punctures felt stiffer than the surrounding tissue. I cut through them and pulled the skin apart. The vein appeared slightly infected.
    ‘It seems as though the man had a needle inserted, which was then left there for some time,’ I said, rather baffled.
    ‘That would make restraints necessary,’ he concluded.
    The man’s stomach lay in a bowl next to me. I opened the organ and another surprise presented itself: half-digested bread and smoked fish, probably eel, swam merrily out of the opening.
    ‘The man had eaten, although he shouldn’t have had an appetite at all during the final stage of cholera. And yet, he ate quite a few bites. I can see no signs of force-feeding in his mouth or oesophagus. Peculiarly, his stomach cramped shut for probably two or three hours before his death. Although half digested, none of the food made it into the small intestines. Why is that?’  
    My hands squeezed the slab hard as though a clue could be forced out that way. ‘Mr Holmes, could it be possible after all that the man had been pushed into the waterworks’ trench?’
    ‘I don’t believe so. One might think a boat could have dropped him off, but the fish wouldn’t have had time to eat all this before the body was discovered,’ he pointed to the corpse’s face. ‘Even if someone went through the troubles of dragging the corpse with a boat for one or two days before dumping him into the trench, we should see very different marks on his body and clothes from ropes or hooks that held him to the vessel.’
    ‘And if that someone had planned to poison half of London with cholera, he would have made sure that the body was fresh,’ I added.
    ‘Precisely,’ said Holmes.
    Then a thought hit me. I almost slapped my forehead with my contaminated hands, quickly washed them, took my mask and apron off and said, ‘Wait here,’ before leaving in a rush.
    Mr Holmes had his eyebrows pulled up as I returned with a box of polished birch wood. I set it on one of the other slabs and extracted a stereo-microscope from it. I wiped its three lenses and both oculars with a silken handkerchief.
    ‘May I introduce the best microscope you will ever set your eyes upon? Or, rather, peer through,’ I said enthusiastically. ‘I found this one in Boston, although it’s a German make. Its secret lies in the stacks of multiple lenses. I never came across a better one. And it cost me an arm and a leg,’ I explained while extracting liquid from the man’s vein.
    I placed a single drop of serum onto a glass slide and tipped a cover slip as thin as paper onto the drop to flatten it to a thin film of liquid. Then I fastened the slide onto the holder just underneath the largest microscope lens and inserted a drop of immersion oil underneath. I aligned the small mirror at the bottom of the microscope towards the sun, peered through the oculars, and focused on the swirling particles.

    Microbes, as seen through Dr. Robert Koch’s Microscope, 1877 (6)

    ‘What resolution does it have?’ asked Mr Holmes, sounding intrigued.
    ‘With an approximately one-thousand-fold