Free Murder on the Home Front by Molly Lefebure

lunch, tucked the body, still wrapped in the dust sheet, under his arm, and requested Ireland and myself to follow him; Ireland with the microscope, myself with typewriter. Away marched our small procession, to the Pathology Block; Keith Simpson, myself, Ireland. We climbed four flights of stairs—owing to air raids the electric lift was out of order, which was hard luck on Ireland, for the microscope was very heavy—and found ourselves in the Department of Clinical Chemistry, through which CKS guided us, to conduct us finally into a very small room leading from the main laboratory. Triumphant and corpse-encumbered, he flourished a welcoming hand. “Miss Lefebure, Ireland, allow me to usher you across the threshold of the Guy’s Hospital Department of Forensic Medicine.”
    We stepped, with respect, into the Department of Forensic Medicine. All three in there together, we could scarcely turn around for want of space. CKS said solemnly, “From small births grow great institutions.”
    “Hear, hear, Dr. Simpson,” said Ireland, putting down the microscope, with relief, on the laboratory bench. I put down the typewriter, CKS put down the queried Mrs. Dobkin, and that was the christening ceremony of the Department of Forensic Medicine, Guy’s Hospital.
    It was, so far as accommodation went, indeed a small birth. Our new “Department” was about ten feet long and five feet wide; a rather brash visitor observed that there literally was no room to swing a cat. He received the frigid reply, “I see no reason why anybody should wish to swing a cat.”
    A long bench ran the length of the room, and there was a very large window over the bench, affording a view of a brick wall, above which was a strip of smoky Southwark sky. The room contained two laboratory stools, Keith Simpson’s microscope, his reference books, a huge blotter, my typewriter, and the scales and weights of Dr. Ryffel, the Home Office analyst, head of the Department of Clinical Chemistry, whose weighing room this really was; he had, as it were, kindly sublet to us.
    In addition, of course, there was the body; that fragmentary body, wrapped in a dust sheet, which might perhaps be Mrs. Harry Dobkin. Might be a “case of a lifetime.”
    The hopes which we pinned upon this body, very tentatively at first, gradually gained strength, for Mr. Keeling was working hard at his end of the case and his discoveries tallied remarkably with those of Dr. Simpson. For example, Mr. Keeling learned that Mrs. Dobkin, missing from home for fifteen months, had been five feet one inch tall, aged forty-seven, with dark brown hair going gray. She had attended the London Hospital for fibroid tumor of the womb, and had refused an operation to remove this tumor.
    All this corresponded exactly with the data CKS had extracted from the remains: woman with fibroid tumor of the uterus, some fifteen months dead, estimated height five feet one inch, aged between forty and fifty, with dark brown hair going gray. Within the privacy of Guy’s we began confidently calling the body “Mrs. Dobkin.” “Miss L., would you take Mrs. Dobkin down to Surgical X-ray, please? I want Miss Newman to take some photographs of her.” So down to Surgical X-ray I would go, with Mrs. Dobkin (in her dust sheet) under my arm—she weighed very little—and for a while I would sit with her perched on my knee before a galaxy of lights while Miss Newman took photographs. (I had better add that I did not appear in the photographs.)
    On the Saturday following the opening of the Department of Forensic Medicine, CKS and I went with Mr. Keeling to the premises in Kennington Lane where the body was found.
    Number 302 Kennington Lane was a disused house partially rented out as a paper store, and it was here that Harry Dobkin had worked as a fire-watcher. Number 304, next door to 302, was a bomb-wrecked Baptist Chapel, and it was in the cellar at the back of this chapel that the body was found.
    It was rather a gruesome