Hole in One by Catherine Aird Page B

from the look of them, all run-of-the-mill clothes.’
    â€˜Mass market name tags, anyway,’ said Crosby. ‘But no shoes.’
    â€˜Pity, that,’ said Sloan. That arch-observer, Lord Baden-Powell, had set out for all time how much you could tell about a man from his shoes. How, though, you could be sure that wearing out soles and heels equally denoted business capacity and honesty he didn’t know. What he did know was that business capacity and honesty didn’t always go together …
    â€˜No distinguishing marks, either,’ contributed the pathologist, ‘unless you count a small strawberry-coloured naevus on
the nape of the neck. It’s very common there.’
    â€˜I’ve got one of those,’ announced Detective Constable Crosby unexpectedly. ‘A stork beak birthmark.’
    â€˜Really?’ said Sloan coolly.
    â€˜Although all the pictures I’ve ever seen,’ said Crosby, ‘have the stork carrying the baby by its nappy. It’s pink,’ he added.
    It wasn’t something that Detective Inspector Sloan needed to know at this moment.
    â€˜And, judging by the marked lack of sunburn on a strip of his left wrist,’ continued Dr Dabbe, ‘the deceased had recently been wearing a watch and been in the open air here or abroad quite a lot.’
    â€˜You can tell quite a bit from a man’s watch,’ mused Sloan.
    â€˜And a woman’s,’ chimed in Crosby.
    â€˜Such as?’ Sloan challenged him.
    â€˜That they should be wearing glasses, sir.’
    â€˜Right,’ said Dr Dabbe, pulling an overhead microphone towards him, ‘let’s get started.’
    Detective Inspector Sloan turned over a new page in his notebook while Detective Constable Crosby drifted away from the body towards the window. He didn’t like postmortems.
    â€˜The subject,’ began the pathologist, ‘is a normally nourished male of approximately twenty years of age. Of quite an athletic build with well-developed muscles.’
    â€˜Not a couch potato, then,’ put in Crosby from the sidelines. When it came to tackling young criminals he much preferred the couch potato to the well-built. They couldn’t run so fast and far.
    Or hit back so hard.
    â€˜Definitely not,’ said Dr Dabbe, continuing with his visual examination. ‘Think athletic.’
    â€˜I have been,’ said Sloan. It was one of the things that being on the golf course did for you. Thinking sunburn was another.

    â€˜And, Sloan,’ the pathologist waved his instrument like a baton in the policeman’s direction, ‘you can note that there are no external distinguishing marks other than a surgical scar in the right iliac fossa , probably an old appendectomy. I’ll confirm that later if the appendix isn’t there.’
    â€˜Yes, we have no bananas,’ sang Crosby, sotto voce .
    â€˜No marks? Not even a tattoo?’ asked Sloan, a little surprised. Tattoos, no longer confined to sailors ashore, were now an important indicator of social significance in the police canon. There was a simple rule of thumb that applied: the more a man had, the lower down the totem pole he was. The same went for studs. Whether the same went for young women he wasn’t prepared to say.
    â€˜None,’ said Dabbe. ‘And no evidence of body piercing of either variety.’
    â€˜I don’t quite …’
    â€˜For drugs or studs,’ said the pathologist, straightening up. ‘No puncture marks from needles and no holes from which gold ornaments might have been suspended.’
    â€˜Ah, yes.’ Sloan scribbled a note. This was something that it was a help to know: defaulting drug takers, too, had lives that were nasty, brutish and short.
    â€˜Just your usual clean-living outdoor boy, then,’ observed Crosby mordantly, ‘except that he got murdered.’
    â€˜Victims come in all shapes and sizes,’ said the