24 January, 1895 — Morgue, Ministry of Magic

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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