24 January, 1895 — Morgue, Ministry of Magic

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Content WarningCorpse. Potential for gore/casual body horror depending on how you take it.

Calvin didn't frown when the new body was brought in to the morgue, but he did purse his lips and scrunch his nose briefly. An expression of polite befuddlement. He summoned a clean rolling table with a flick of his wand and then stood back, arms loosely crossed, while the visitor levitated the corpse down to its new resting place. Corpses almost always arrived via levitation spells, he had noticed; no one wanted to touch dead things. This was mostly irrational: it was only very seldom that they had anything contagious about them, at least when they were relatively fresh. This one certainly hadn't died of a mundane magical bug... or if it had, it had been through quite a lot in the meantime. The most obvious affliction was certainly not the catching kind.

He looked at the body for a second after it was set down. "Didn't leave me much to work with," he pointed out. It was perhaps charitable to call it a body; it was half of one at most. He stepped forward and put a hand on the table so that he could lean over the corpse and look more closely, but didn't touch it yet (that hangup people had about not wanting to touch dead things — they usually didn't like to watch him do it, either). "What are you looking for, an identity?" he asked, then dryly joked, "...cause of death?"

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Open to anyone with reason to be bringing him a dead body ;P

  

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Enid was no longer a junior healer, but she had still drawn the short straw, being assigned to bring the body over to the morgue. She didn't understand why the auror couldn't do it, but Auror Sandow had stomped off muttering something about interrogations, so Enid knew she couldn't die on that hill. So she had to — levitate it into the floo and over to the Ministry.

She wasn't sure when she was allowed to flee this errand, either. Maybe they'd have questions for her. She looked at the corpse and tried to imagine herself in the coroner's shoes — Enid didn't shy away from gore, but this corpse, with the jagged edges of skin and bone and flesh around its middle, was enough to make even her feel daunted. Apparently not the coroner, though — he was joking.

Enid met his eyes and gently smiled. "I think they'll want both," she said. With a wave to her own robes, and a slightly sheepish expression, she confided, "Someone put him in our exam room."

  

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set by Bee

"Someone?" Calvin repeated, even more keenly interested now than he had been just based on the state of the body. If she had been talking about a person she didn't know personally but who was known generally she would have said they, probably. Someone implied it had been a complete stranger, come and gone without notice only for the body to be discovered later. It wasn't impossible to sneak around hospitals, he knew that. Once he'd gotten into Sage Whitby's gear locker to see if there was anything interesting in it (there wasn't) and no one had noticed at all. But he knew the hospital layout and was a regular enough face that no one would have questioned his presence there at any hour, and he hadn't been lugging around half a corpse while he did it. The first two points might have been true of the mysterious body-dumper, but certainly not the third. That was bound to attract attention.

"How did someone get into the St. Mungo's exam rooms?" he mused, more to the body than to the healer who had delivered it. He wasn't sure that the body would have the answer, but it might. The people upstairs were often surprised by how much he could find in an autopsy. They were all flashy wandwork and combat training; no faith in medicine. If this could, in fact, be classified under medicine. Turning his attention back to the healer, he continued, "So he was dead before anyone had interacted with him? Any attempts at resuscitation?"

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Enid shrugged. Lots of people walked around the hospital, by her estimation — lots of people had reasons to walk around with a shrouded body, or with a large bag, in the hospital. She bit her lip with unmasked concern. She was immediately thinking about this as if one of her coworkers had killed this person, or otherwise had brought their body to hide it!

She shook her head to refocus herself, and looked back at the coroner. "Not serious ones beyond a rennervate," she said, because why revive half a body? "We think he's been dead for at least a few hours." This was not based on more than a cursory glimpse of the body, though — his skin was discolored on the back, as if the blood had been pooling.

  

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set by Bee

"At least twelve," Calvin agreed. He could tell by the way the body moved — or rather, hadn't — when it had been levitated in. Levitation spells didn't support weight evenly; they buoyed up a central area. Corpses that were very new flopped when they were moved. Corpses that were very old did the same. There was a space in the middle, between an hour and a day, where they went stiff as boards. (People tended to bring him more of the very old corpses than the very new ones — there was always some to-do with getting them out of the place where they'd died and down to the morgue. Most of his very-new-corpse experience had actually come from the hospital, where he had watched people die on occasion. The corpses that had passed into the once-more-flopping area were also usually suffering some degree of decomposition — when they shifted in midair it occasionally made the people bringing them in lose their lunch).

"Probably less than a day, but that's assuming there weren't preservation spells in play," he continued. He knew a handful of them, and there were some worked in to the magic of the morgue tables themselves. Bodies rarely arrived having been already-preserved, but bodies also rarely appeared by themselves in hospital rooms in the state this one was in, so he couldn't rule anything out. He had been looking at the body again, keen to get started on the puzzle it presented, but now he glanced back up at her and seemed to realize for the first time that she wasn't one of the regulars.

"There's paperwork on the desk," he said, with a nod towards a desk on the far side of the room. It was perfunctory; nothing about the tidy rolls of parchment stacked on the edge or the chair positioned perfectly squarely behind it or the clean ink blotter resting next to the stoppered ink suggested it had been used recently. "For you to release the body. You can write unknown for... most of it."

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Preservation spells, Enid had not even thought of that — and many people with access to the hospital would know most of them, too. Ugh! She could not suppress a shudder.

She walked to the desk, which lacked personality. Very few healers at the hospital had the space to express personality, but the morgue had to be mostly Mr. Paxton's space — he didn't want it to be even a little bit welcoming?

Enid didn't really like the phrase release the body, either. She glanced at the paperwork and started filling out her personal details. "How many of these would you say you see in a day?" she asked.

  

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set by Bee

Calvin shrugged at the question. "Oh, it depends on the day. Sometimes none." There weren't really other routine tasks to fill the time when they didn't have bodies coming in, the way there had been at the hospital, but there really wasn't much to be done about it. If people weren't dying, it wasn't as though anyone was going to go out and start making them die faster. And the majority of people who did die did not require an autopsy, either; he only got the ones that were suspicious, or that were involved in a criminal case, or who died without any way to identify them from their belongings.

"We had twelve the day of the sinkhole," he added almost cheerfully, as though this were a fun trivia fact one could pull out at dinner parties. Most of those deaths had ended up being rather mundane — crushed by things, bleeding out, the usual — but they hadn't known that at the time, and with the Padmore Park pit preventing magical methods of healing in its vicinity everyone had been very jumpy about it for the subsequent weeks. Everyone had wanted to know whether there were traces of anything magical — or anti-magical, as the case may be — lingering in the corpses, and when he and the other coroner hadn't found anything the directive had been to check again. The funerals for the affected persons had been delayed for weeks with all the back-and-forth. "I moved here just after the London dragon incident, but I heard that was even worse." That one less because of the potential for mysterious circumstances and more because most of the bodies of dragon victims had been... difficult to identify.

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