Free The Anatomy of Death by Felicity Young

time than force-feeding recalcitrant prisoners, I assure you. But of course you know this. You yourself were incarcerated for throwing rocks at the prime minister’s motorcar.” Florence stiffened in her chair, but said nothing. Dody realised that while Pike might have seen her side of the autopsy argument, he showed no sympathy to the plight of the suffragettes.
    “And you, Dr. McCleland,” Pike went on, fixing his eyes upon Dody. “Did you have an opinion of Lady Catherine?”
    “I did not know her well enough to form an opinion.”
    Dody’s opinion was that Lady Catherine was similar to the Pankhursts: domineering, controlling, and completely inflexible in her views, antagonising militants and nonmilitants alike. But this was hardly something she could say in front of her sister.
    A little while later Dody and Florence stepped from the building into the swirling river mist. To hear Dody and that policeman talk so matter-of-factly about Catherine’s death had been almost unbearable to Florence. The anguish and frustration that had been building up in her since they’d first entered the policeman’s office finally burst its banks.
    “He made it all sound like a childish game!” she sobbed. “I know you never cared much for Catherine and I appreciate that you said nothing negative about her to that unprepossessing little man. But Catherine was one of the best friends I had, devoted to the end. You might not remember this, but she put me up when I ran away from home, never telling Mother and Poppa where I was.”
    At seventeen she had fallen in love with a literary acquaintance of their mother’s, taking it for granted that her liberal parents would agree to the marriage. But when they discovered the liberties the thirty-two-year-old poet had been taking with her, they refused to give their consent and banished him from their house. Florence had run away to London then, expecting her beloved to join her there. He never did. It was discovered later that he had a wife and two children secreted away in Blackpool. She still cringed with shame whenever she thought about it. Bloody men, she thought, shame they werenecessary at all. With the exception of Poppa, the world would be a better place without them.
    “And it was Catherine who convinced me to go back to Mother and Poppa,” she went on, “telling me I needed to focus on other people more and less on myself; basically that I was a spoilt little brat. She encouraged me to help in the soup kitchen and with other charitable works, and it was through her that I joined the WSPU.”
    Dody pulled Florence to a stop under a lamplight, brushed a tear from her cheek, and put her arm around her shoulders. “There, there,” she said.
    Dear Dody. Florence did not know what she would do without her big sister. She kept on talking through her sobs. “But, Dody, how on earth are we to get justice for Catherine when no one on the police force will take us seriously? I had staked my hopes on that man Pike, but now I see he is as sarcastic and corrupt as the rest of them.”
    “I’m not of quite the same opinion, Florence,” Dody said as they made their way arm in arm to their waiting carriage. “I think Pike would have been happy to let me reexamine Catherine if not for Shepherd. I’m thinking he might have doubts about the autopsy himself.”
    “Well, his doubts don’t help us, do they? What are we going to do?”
    Dody gazed around the foggy street as if making sure they were not being observed. “Don’t worry; I have something up my sleeve. Literally.”
    Under the gaslight near their carriage, she revealed a police truncheon within the sleeve of her coat. “It was lying on the sergeant’s desk in the waiting room. I took it when he was helping you on with your cape.”
    Florence felt her face break into a smile, marvelling at her sister’s cleverness. “You’ve stolen it!”
    “Borrowed. You see, Florence, even I will bend the law sometimes, if I think the