The Surgeon's
Table

Professor Mure was found on his own dissection table, which everyone agreed was either fitting or terrible, depending on their opinion of the man. I was the one who found him, which meant I was the one who had to decide, in the approximately four seconds available before the department began to fill with the morning's first demonstrators, what to do about it.

I closed the door. I stood in the corridor for a moment with my hand on the handle and my back to the wood and considered my position, which was this: I was a woman of twenty-nine working in a department that had admitted me under sufferance, whose chair had opposed my admission formally and on three subsequent informal occasions, and who was now dead in a manner that would require explanation. The explanation, whatever it turned out to be, would be easier to offer from a position of composure than from one of discovered panic. I straightened my coat. I went to find Dr Catto.

Francis Catto was in the preparation room, laying out instruments for the morning's practical with the particular care of a man who performed this task because it needed doing correctly and because doing it himself was the only way to ensure it was. He was thirty-seven, dark, thin in the way of men who forget to eat because eating seems to them a distraction from more important matters. He had worked under Mure for nine years. He had, in that time, published eleven papers, three of which had been credited to Mure in journals where Mure sat on the editorial board.

"Professor Mure," I said, from the doorway, "is dead."

Catto set down the instrument he was holding — a bone saw, which seemed in retrospect a detail worth noting — with a care that suggested the next several seconds were being managed rather than experienced. "Where," he said.

"His dissection theatre. On the table."

He looked at me for a moment with an expression I could not immediately classify and have since spent considerable time considering. It was not surprise. It was not guilt, exactly — though I am aware that is precisely what a guilty person would wish their expression to convey. It was the look of a man receiving information he had in some sense been waiting for and was now rapidly assessing the implications of.

"I'll send for the police," he said. "You'll remain here."

"I'll remain where I choose," I said, pleasantly, which was the only register available to a woman in my position who wished to remain in it.

The police arrived in the form of Detective Sergeant Munro, who was competent and not unkind and immediately inclined to treat the matter as a cardiac event — Mure had been sixty-one and not robust in his habits — until I pointed out, with the professional directness that I had found, over two years in the pathology department, to be more effective than circumlocution, that cardiac events did not typically result in the quantity of bruising present on the Professor's upper arms.

Munro looked at the arms. He looked at me. He wrote something in his notebook. "You've an eye for it," he said, which was the nearest he came to acknowledging that I might be useful.

"I work here," I said.

The bruising indicated restraint — someone had held Mure, or Mure had struggled against being held. The cause of death, which I could estimate but which the official postmortem would confirm, was asphyxiation. The dissection table had a leather strap at the head end, used to secure cadavers during demonstration. The strap had been moved. It had been moved back, but not quite to where it had been, which I knew because I had set it that morning, two hours before anyone else arrived, as was my habit on practical days when the equipment needed to be correct.

I told Munro about the strap. I did not tell him yet what I thought it meant. There is a sequence to offering information, and it is not the same as the sequence in which you acquire it.

There were four people who had keys to Mure's dissection theatre. Mure himself. Catto, as senior demonstrator. Thomas Reekie, the porter, who held a master key for the entire anatomy building as a condition of his position. And me, because Mure had given me a key six months ago and subsequently forgotten he had done so, and I had not reminded him because the key was useful and his memory was the sort that forgot what was inconvenient and retained everything else with surgical precision.

This meant that the field was not wide. What made it complicated was that all four of us had reasons that Munro could theoretically find, and two of us had reasons that Munro did not know to look for yet, and one of us had a reason so well concealed that I had not yet found it myself, which bothered me considerably.

I began with Reekie, because Reekie always knew the things that the department preferred not to be known.

Thomas Reekie was sixty, Aberdeen-born, with twenty years in the anatomy building and the particular quality of institutional knowledge that accumulates in people who stay in the same place long enough to watch everyone else change around them. He was also, which mattered, deeply fond of Miss Holt and the other five women in the faculty, whom he supplied with information, small courtesies, and the occasional protective warning in ways that the senior staff had not noticed because they had not thought to look.

"The Professor had a visitor," Reekie said, in the porter's lodge, without being asked directly, which told me he had decided to tell someone and had been waiting for someone sufficiently attentive to tell. "Last evening. A woman. Not Mrs Mure — I know Mrs Mure. A younger woman. She came in at seven and left at half past. The Professor showed her out himself."

"Did you see her face?"

"Enough of it." He paused. "She had the look of someone who had come to settle something."

Miss Clara Holt was in the library when I found her, which was where she usually was in the hours that other students spent socialising — not from unsociability but from the calculation, which I recognised from my own experience, that a woman in a faculty that considered her presence provisional needed to be twice as prepared as anyone else in the room. She was twenty-four and had come from Glasgow with a first-class degree from the women's college there and a manner that communicated, clearly and without aggression, that she was aware of precisely how good she was and had no interest in pretending otherwise.

She looked up when I sat across from her. She read my expression in the way that people who have spent time being read by others learn to read in return.

"He's dead," she said. Not a question.

"He was found this morning," I said. "Were you at the university yesterday evening?"

A pause — shorter than Catto's had been, which meant something, though I was not yet certain what. "I was here until eight. In the library."

"Reekie saw a young woman leave the anatomy building at half past seven."

Clara Holt looked at her book. It was Gray's Anatomy, fourth edition, open to the section on the musculature of the upper arm. She looked at it with the attention of someone who is reading something that is not on the page. Then she looked up at me with the expression of someone who has made a decision that has cost them something.

"I went to see him," she said. "About the paper."

The paper. I knew about the paper — everyone in the faculty knew about the paper, in the way that things are known in institutions where the official story and the actual story have diverged sufficiently to become a source of shared, unspoken understanding. Clara Holt had written a paper on nerve regeneration that Mure had reviewed as faculty examiner, praised privately and extensively to Catto, and then published six weeks later in the Edinburgh Medical Journal under his own name with a footnote acknowledging the contribution of Miss C. Holt, student.

"What happened when you saw him?" I said.

"He told me that my interpretation of the data was undergraduate-level and that his version represented a significant intellectual improvement. He said this while I was standing in front of his desk holding the original manuscript with my corrections in the margin." She paused. "I left at half past seven, as Reekie says. The Professor was alive and in excellent health and extremely pleased with himself."

I believed her. This was not a naïve belief — I had spent two years learning to read the space between what people said and what they meant, and Clara Holt's account had the particular texture of a true thing told plainly by someone who was furious and had decided, for reasons of self-preservation, to be precise.

Mrs Jean Mure was at the family's house in Morningside, receiving the colleagues and acquaintances who had come to express condolences with the composed efficiency of a woman who had been managing her husband's professional world from a distance for thirty years and had no intention of being managed by it now that he was no longer in it.

She was fifty-eight, grey-haired, with the kind of stillness that could be mistaken for passivity by people who had not spent enough time in rooms with genuinely dangerous people to understand the difference. I had spent sufficient time. Her stillness was not passive. It was the stillness of a woman who had decided, some time ago, exactly how she felt about her situation and had reached a state of equilibrium that external events were unlikely to disturb.

She received me in the drawing room, away from the other visitors, when I explained that I was from the faculty. She poured tea she did not drink. She looked at me with a directness that suggested she knew why I was there and had decided to be useful.

"You want to know about Alistair's arrangements," she said.

"I want to know about his enemies," I said.

"Those are the same question." She set down the teapot. "Alistair's arrangements — his financial arrangements — were not what a man in his position ought to have had. He borrowed extensively. He borrowed from people who do not use solicitors." A pause. "There was a man. I don't know his name. He came to the house twice in the last year. Each time, Alistair was agitated for several days afterward. The second time, he moved money from our joint account — a significant sum — and told me it was a faculty subscription. There is no faculty subscription of that amount. I have been at faculty dinners for thirty years. I know what things cost."

"When was the second visit?" I said.

"Three weeks ago."

Three weeks. A man to whom Mure owed money, visiting three weeks before his death. A death that had been made to look like a cardiac event — the choice of location, the arrangement of the body, the leather strap returned almost to its original position. Someone who knew the theatre. Someone who knew enough about how bodies were found to understand what a casual observer would conclude.

I thought about Catto's expression when I told him. Not surprise. The look of a man receiving information he had in some sense been waiting for.

I thought about the bone saw, set down with such care.

The answer, when it arrived, arrived quietly and from the direction I had not been watching carefully enough, which is almost always how answers arrive.

It was Reekie who brought it. He came to find me at four o'clock, as the light was failing over the Old Town and the gas lamps were being lit along the Cowgate, and he told me, with the economy of a man who had held something for several hours and was relieved to set it down, that Dr Catto had been in the anatomy building at nine o'clock the previous evening. He had seen him arrive. He had not seen him leave, because he had gone for his supper at nine-fifteen and locked the porter's lodge, and when he returned at ten the building was dark and Catto's coat was no longer on the hook in the hall.

"Why did you not say this earlier?" I said.

"Because Dr Catto has been in this department nine years," said Reekie, "and a man can be in a building at nine o'clock for a great number of reasons, most of them ordinary. And because—" he paused, "— because I wanted to be certain before I said it to someone who would do something about it."

He had also, he told me, without being asked, found something in the corridor outside the dissection theatre that morning before the police arrived, which he had kept because he was uncertain what to do with it and which he now produced from his coat pocket: a small glass bottle, empty, with a chemist's label. The label bore a date from the previous week and a name — not Mure's name, and not a name I recognised, but a false name would be chosen to be unrecognisable, and the chemist's mark at the bottom of the label was from a shop on the South Bridge that I knew Catto used, because I had seen him there, and the contents, which had been a sedative compounded in a quantity that a pathologist's assistant could estimate with reasonable precision, had been sufficient to make a sixty-one-year-old man incapable of meaningful resistance before the leather strap was applied.

I took the bottle to Munro. I told him about Catto's arrival at nine. I told him about the debts and the man who had visited the Mure house and the three weeks between the second visit and the death. I told him about the eleven papers and the three that had been credited elsewhere and the nine years of resentment accumulated in a man who was meticulous and patient and had eventually, I believed, calculated that the debt Mure owed him was greater than the debt Mure owed his creditor, and that there was a way to settle both accounts simultaneously — because whoever Mure's creditor was, his death cancelled the obligation, and Mure's death positioned Catto to take the chair that Mure had occupied and the recognition that Mure had withheld.

Munro listened. He wrote in his notebook with the careful pressure of someone who understands that what goes into a notebook determines what becomes possible afterward. When I finished, he looked up.

"You've given me almost enough," he said.

"I know," I said. "The rest is in the department's financial records, which will show that Catto had access to the faculty account that Mure drew from, and in the chemist's records on the South Bridge, and in whatever correspondence exists between Mure and his creditor, which Mrs Mure will cooperate in finding." I paused. "Almost enough becomes enough, in my experience, when the person who filled the gap knows that you know it exists."

Francis Catto was arrested on a Friday — a week to the day after Mure's body was found on his own table. The chair of anatomy passed, in the interim, to a man from Aberdeen who had no history with the department and no debts to anyone in it, which was considered, by most of the faculty, a satisfactory outcome.

Clara Holt's paper on nerve regeneration was published in the January issue of the Edinburgh Medical Journal, under her name, with a note from the editor acknowledging a prior publication in the same journal of a version of the same research, attributed incorrectly. The note was brief and careful and did exactly what it needed to do.

I remained in my position. This had not been guaranteed — I had, in the week following the arrest, been called to a meeting with two senior professors who suggested, with the elaborate indirectness of men uncomfortable with directness, that my involvement in the matter had drawn attention to the department that the department would have preferred to avoid. I listened to this suggestion with the patience of a woman who has spent her career in rooms where the official story and the actual story have diverged, and then I told them, pleasantly and precisely, what I had found and what I had done with it, and why the alternative — a death attributed to cardiac failure, a murderer in the faculty chair, a student's work erased a second time — would have drawn considerably more attention, of a considerably less manageable kind.

There was a silence. Then the senior of the two professors said that I had, of course, acted entirely correctly, and that the department was grateful for my diligence, and that he hoped I found my position here a congenial one.

"I find it useful," I said. Which was true, and which was, I had learned, the only answer that was both honest and safe in a place where being useful was the one quality that could not, in the end, be argued with.

I went back to work. There was a great deal of it, and it did not do itself, and Edinburgh in November was cold and dark and full of people whose official stories and actual stories had not yet diverged far enough for anyone to notice — which was, I had found, the natural condition of most cities, most institutions, and most people, and which was why there would always be more work to do.