“Oh,” he said and stepped closer. “She doesn’t want you to see her with the mask off …” He waved his hands vaguely in the direction of the house. “She knows if you come inside she’s going to have to take it off and she doesn’t want you to see her. You can understand that, right?”

I nodded.

“She don’t want you to see how bad it is,” he said.

“How bad is it?”

“About as bad as it could be,” said Henry.

“I’m sorry.”

Henry shrugged. “I just wanted you to know that you weren’t being sent away,” he said. “You weren’t being punished or something.”

But I was being sent away, so I said good-bye, climbed back into the Jag and drove back to London.

I’d just managed to find my way back onto the A12 when Dr. Walid called me and said he had a body he wanted me to look at. I put my foot down. It was work and I was grateful to get it.

EVERY HOSPITAL I’ve ever been to has had the same smell, that whiff of disinfectant, vomit, and mortality. The UCH was brand new, less than ten years old, but the smell was already beginning to creep in at the edges except, ironically, downstairs in the basement where they kept the dead people. Down there the paint on the walls was still crisp and the pale blue lino still squeaky underfoot.

The mortuary entrance was halfway down a long corridor hung with framed pictures of the old Middlesex Hospital from back in the days when doctors washing their hands between patients was the cutting edge of medical science. It was guarded by a pair of electronically locked fire doors with a sign saying—NO UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS; STOP; MORTUARY STAFF ONLY. Another sign ordered me to press the buzzer on the entry phone, which I did. The speaker gave a squawk and on the off chance that this was a question I told them that it was Constable Peter Grant to see Dr. Walid. It squawked again, I waited, and Dr. Abdul Haqq Walid, world-renowned gastroenterologist, cryptopathologist, and practicing Scot, opened the door.

“Peter,” he said. “How was Leslie?”

“All right, I suppose,” I said.

Inside the mortuary was much the same as the rest of the hospital only with fewer people complaining about the state of the National Health Service. Dr. Walid walked me past the security at reception and introduced me to today’s dead body.

“Who is he?” I asked.

“Cyrus Wilkinson,” he said. “He collapsed in a pub in Cambridge Circus day before yesterday, was ambulanced to A&E, pronounced dead on arrival, and sent down here for a routine postmortem.”