“Identity: sorry, we’re no further forward. Full examination of every item of clothing revealed nothing more than you got from your initial examination in the churchyard. No helpful name tapes, no tattoos, no identity tags. The suit underneath the worn old greatcoat was a good one, but again, the pockets had been cleared out. Nothing useful from the underwear: clean, ordinary Mr. Everyman stuff, the kind you’d buy at Eaden Lilley. No laundry marks, so presumably, these were washed wherever he called home. A tie—striped. You thought you recognised it as a Girton tie, I remember. Again, a tramp can come by these things as part of a charity handout bundle, or even off a washing line. It could be a Cambridge college tie—worn with cheeky sarcasm! Socks heavily darned. Shoes resoled and worn down. They’ve done quite a mileage. Full details noted down for you. And the items themselves bagged up for further inspection.

“General care of person: for a tramp, this is odd. Now, Inspector—you’re going to have to do a bit of rethinking here. We deduced—on account of the invitation card in his pocket—that he was going out for dinner with these loonies who call themselves a dining club, and to that end, he might well have made an effort and had a bath and haircut and all the rest of it and—yes—he was freshly shaven, his hair freshly cut and he still smelled faintly of coal tar soap or the equivalent. His finger- and toenails were clean and trimmed. Now, I can accept that, in deference to the treat to come, he might have taken some trouble with his hygiene, but if this bloke was indeed a tramp, there’d be other clues to his condition. I mean the life of a tramp, with little access to running water and soap, if lived for any length of time, leads to bunions, blisters and callouses and the sort of ingrained dirt that a quick scrub behind the ears before dinner can’t hide. On this chap, there was none of that. This is a gent who’s been bathing regularly for years.

“General musculature: he’s lithe and whippy, naturally a lean type. I wouldn’t say undernourished, but there isn’t an ounce of spare flesh on him. His teeth are in reasonable nick. I’ve done a dental plan of the mouth for you. A few fillings done some years ago, but when he flashed a smile at you, you wouldn’t have looked the other way. In fact, in his prime, he must have been a good-looking fellow.”

“His eyes? I never noted the colour,” Redfyre said.