Authors: Stanislaw Lem
“Are there any possible hiding places in the laboratory?” the Chief Inspector asked. He looked around at the group as if he had suddenly become aware of their presence again.
“Well, that … would be out of the question, Chief Inspector. No one would be able to hide without the janitor’s help. There’s no furniture except for the dissecting tables, no dark corners or alcoves … in fact, nothing at all except a few closets for the students’ coats and equipment, and even a child couldn’t fit into any of them.”
“Do you mean that literally?”
“Sir?”
“That they’re too small for a child,” the Chief Inspector said quietly.
“Well…” The lieutenant wrinkled his brow. “A child might manage to squeeze into one, but at best only a seven- or eight-year-old.”
“Did you measure the closets?”
“Yes.” The answer was uttered without hesitation. “I measured all of them because I thought one might be bigger than the others. They all turned out to be the same size. Aside from the closets, there are some toilets, washrooms, and classrooms; a refrigerator and a storeroom in the basement; the professor’s office and some teachers’ rooms upstairs. Harvey says that the janitor checks each of the rooms every night, sometimes more than once—in my opinion, he tends to overdo it. Anyway, no one could have managed to hide there.”
“What about a child?” the Chief Inspector asked in a quiet voice. He took off his eyeglasses as if to soften the sharpness of his gaze. Gregory shook his head violently.
“No, it would have been impossible. A child couldn’t have opened the windows. They have locks at the top and bottom, released by levers set in the window frames. Just like here.” Gregory pointed to the window, from which a cold draft was entering the room. “The levers are very tight and it’s hard to move them. Even the janitor complained about it. Besides, I tried them myself.”
“Did he call your attention to the fact that the levers are tight?” Sorensen asked, smiling inscrutably in a way that irritated Gregory. He would have preferred to let the question pass without an answer, but the Chief Inspector was looking at him expectantly, so he replied without much enthusiasm.
“The janitor didn’t mention it until he saw me opening and closing them. He’s worse than an old maid. A terrible pain in the neck,” Gregory added emphatically, looking, as if by chance, at Sorensen. “He was very pleased with himself too. Of course that’s natural enough for someone his age,” he added in a conciliatory manner. “He’s about sixty years old, sclero—” Gregory stopped abruptly, embarrassed. The Chief Inspector wasn’t any younger than that. He searched desperately for a way to get around the obvious meaning of his concluding words but couldn’t think of anything. The other men remained absolutely still, their silence arousing Gregory’s resentment. The Chief Inspector put on his glasses.
“Are you finished?”
“Yes sir,” Gregory faltered, “yes. At least as far as these three incidents are concerned. In the last case, though, I looked over the surrounding area very carefully—I was particularly interested in any unusual activity near the lab that night. The constables on duty in the neighborhood hadn’t noticed anything suspicious. Also, when I took over the case I tried to find out as much as I could about the earlier incidents; I talked to Sergeant Peel and I went to all the other places but I didn’t find a thing, not one piece of evidence of any kind. Nothing, absolutely nothing. The woman who died of cancer and the laborer both disappeared in similar circumstances. In the morning, when someone from the family arrived at the mortuary, the coffin was empty.”
“Yes,” said the Chief Inspector. “That will be all for now. Mr. Farquart, will you continue?”
“Of course, sir. Do you want to hear about the more recent cases, sir? Right, whatever you say, sir.”
“He should be in the Navy,” Gregory thought, sighing to himself. “He always acts like he’s at the morning flag raising, and he’ll never change.”
“The next disappearance took place in Lewes seven days later, on February nineteenth. It involved a young stevedore who was run over by a car—ruptured liver with internal bleeding. The operation was a success, as the doctors say, but the patient didn’t survive. Anyway, the body disappeared before dawn. We were able to pinpoint the time because around three o’clock that morning a certain Burton died. His sister—he lived with a sister—was so afraid to stay alone with the deceased in the same apartment that she woke up the local undertaker. The body was delivered to the funeral home at exactly three in the morning. Two employees put it next to the stevedore’s body…”
“You were going to say something?” asked the Chief Inspector.
Farquart bit his mustache.
“No…” he said after a moment.
The steady drone of airplane engines could be heard outside the building. Overhead, an unseen airplane flew past on its way southward. The windowpanes rattled in quiet unison.
“That is,” Farquart added with an air of decision, “in arranging the newly delivered body, one of the employees moved the stevedore’s body because it was in his way. Well … he claims it wasn’t cold.”
“Hmm,” the Chief Inspector murmured, as if commenting on the most ordinary thing in the world. “It wasn’t cold? And how did he explain it? What were his exact words?”
“He said it wasn’t cold,” Farquart spoke reluctantly, pausing between words. “I know it sounds idiotic … ridiculous, but he insists on it. He claims he mentioned it at the time, but the other employee doesn’t remember a thing. Gregory questioned both of them separately, twice…”
The Chief Inspector, without saying a word, turned to the lieutenant.
“Well … uh … he talks too much. Not reliable at all,” Gregory explained quickly. “At least that’s my impression. He’s one of those clowns who will do anything to get some attention, ready to give you his version of the history of the world at the drop of a hat. He insisted it was a trance or ‘something worse’—those are his words. Frankly, he surprised me. People who work professionally with corpses usually don’t believe in trances—it goes against their experience.”
“What do the doctors say?”
Gregory was silent, yielding the floor to Farquart. Apparently unhappy that such a minor matter was receiving so much attention, Farquart shrugged his shoulders.
“The stevedore died the day before. Signs of rigor mortis were clearly evident… He was as dead as a doornail.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes. Like all the other missing bodies, he was dressed for burial. The only body that wasn’t dressed was Trayle’s—the one that disappeared in Treakhill. The undertaker was supposed to dress him the following day because the family didn’t want to give him any clothing at first. That is, they took the clothing away after the body was brought in. When they came back with different clothing the body wasn’t there anymore…”
“What about the other incidents?”
“The body of the woman with the cancer operation was dressed also.”
“How?”
“Well … in a dress.”
“What about shoes?” the Chief Inspector asked, his voice so soft that Gregory had to lean forward to hear him.
“Yes, shoes also.”
“And the last one?”
“The last one… Well, it wasn’t dressed, but a black cloth disappeared from the mortuary at the same time, or so it seems. The cloth was used to close off a small alcove. It was attached to a curtain rod by some small metal rings. There were still a few shreds of material on the rings.”
“Was it torn?”
“No, the rod is so thin that it would have snapped if anyone had given it a good pull. The shreds—”
“Did you try to break the rod?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know it would have snapped?”
“Well, by sight…”
The Chief Inspector asked these questions quietly, staring at the reflection of the window in the glass door of a cabinet; he acted as if distracted by something else, but he shot out his questions so rapidly that Farquart could hardly keep up with him.
“Good,” the Chief Inspector concluded. “Were the shreds examined?”
“Yes. Dr. Sorensen…”
The medical examiner stopped massaging his pointed chin. “The cloth was torn off the rod. To be exact, it had been frayed to the breaking point but it was definitely not cut. That’s certain. It looked … as if someone had bitten it off. I conducted several tests. Under the microscope it looks the same way.”
In the momentary silence that followed, a distant airplane engine was heard, its sound muffled by the fog.
“Was anything else missing besides the curtain?” the Chief Inspector asked at last.
The doctor glanced at Farquart, who nodded his head.
“Yes, a roll of adhesive tape, a very big roll that had been lying on a table near the door.”
“Adhesive tape?” The Chief Inspector raised an eyebrow.
“They use it to hold up the chins … to keep the mouth from opening,” Sorensen explained. “Postmortem beauty treatment,” he added with a sardonic smile.
“That’s all?”
“Yes.”
“What about the corpse in the dissecting laboratory? Was it dressed?”
“No. But in this case … oh, Gregory’s already told you the whole story, hasn’t he?”
“I forgot to mention it before…” the lieutenant cut in quickly, experiencing an unpleasant sensation because his memory lapse had been discovered. “The body wasn’t dressed, but the janitor claims he was short one doctor’s coat and two pairs of white pants—the kind the students wear in the summertime. A few pairs of disposable slippers may have been missing also, but the janitor says he never manages to keep an accurate count on them—he says the cleaning woman steals a few every once in a while.”
The Chief Inspector took a deep breath and tapped on the desk with his eyeglasses.
“Thank you. Doctor Sciss, may I trouble you now?”
Without stirring from his casual position, Sciss muttered incoherently and finished writing something in an open notebook which he was supporting on his sharp, protruding knee.
Then, bending his balding, somewhat birdlike head, Sciss slammed the book closed and slipped it under his chair, pursed his thin lips as if he wanted to whistle, and stood up, rubbing his fingers against his twisted, arthritic joints.
“I consider your invitation to be a useful
novum
,” he said in a high, almost falsetto voice. “It so happens that I generally tend to sound like a lecturer. I hope none of you mind; in any event it’s quite unavoidable. Now then, I have made a thorough study of this series of incidents. As we have seen, the classical methods of investigation—the collection of evidence and the search for motives—have failed completely. Consequently, I have utilized the statistical method of investigation. It offers obvious advantages. We can often define a crime at the scene of its occurrence by the kinds of facts that are connected with it and the kinds that are not. For example, the shape of the bloodstains found near a murdered body may have a connection with the crime, and if so they can say a good deal about the way it was committed. Certain other facts, however—for example, that a cumulus or cirrostratus cloud floated over the scene of the crime on the day of a particular homicide, or that the telephone wires in front of the house where the crime took place are made of aluminum or copper—can be classified as nonessential. As far as our series of incidents is concerned, it is altogether impossible to decide in advance which of the facts accompanying the incidents were connected with the crime and which were not.
“If it were only a matter of one incident,” Sciss continued, “we would be at an impasse. Fortunately, however, there were several incidents. Now it stands to reason that a virtually unlimited number of objects and phenomena could have been found or observed in the vicinity of the incidents during the critical period. Therefore, to prepare a useful statistical series, we must rely only on those facts that are common to all the incidents, or at any rate, to a substantial majority of the incidents. Thus, we proceed by preparing a statistical breakdown of all the phenomena. Until now this method has almost never been used in a criminal investigation, and I am very pleased that I now have an opportunity to introduce it to you gentlemen, together with my preliminary findings…”
Dr. Sciss, who until now had been standing behind his armchair as if it were a lecturn, took a few steps in the direction of the door, turned unexpectedly, inclined his head, and continued, looking into the room at the seated men.
“Now, let us begin. First, you will recall that before any of these phenomena occurred there was a temporary phase which we can label conventionally as the ‘forerunner stage.’ During this stage bodies changed positions. Some turned upside down. Others were found on their sides. Still others were found on the floor next to their coffins.
“Second, with only one exception, each corpse belonged to someone who had died in his prime.
“Third, in each incident, again with one exception, some kind of covering was provided for the body. Twice this was ordinary clothing. Once it was most likely a doctor’s coat and white trousers, and once—a black cloth curtain.
“Fourth, none of the corpses involved had been autopsied; all were undamaged; all were well preserved. Furthermore, every incident took place within thirty hours of the time of death, a fact particularly worthy of your attention,
“Finally, all the incidents, again with one exception, took place in small town mortuaries to which entrance is usually quite easy. The only disappearance that doesn’t fit this pattern is the one at the Medical School.”
Sciss turned to the Chief Inspector.
“I need a powerful spotlight. Can you get something for me?”
The Chief Inspector said a few quiet words into the intercom. During the ensuing silence, Sciss opened his spacious, bellowslike leather briefcase and slowly drew out a sheet of tracing paper, folded several times and covered with colored markings. Gregory looked at it with a mixture of aversion and curiosity. The scientist’s patronizing attitude irritated him. Stubbing out his cigarette, he tried unsuccessfully to guess what was written on the paper rustling in Sciss’s awkward hands.
Meanwhile, tearing one side of the paper slightly as he worked, Sciss unfolded it and spread it out on the desk in front of the Chief Inspector, whom he hardly seemed to notice, then walked over to the window and looked out at the street, holding one wrist with the fingers of the other hand as if checking his own pulse rate.