But there had been a casualty of the past six years. Toto was still one of the most important women in London’s highest social circles, but Thomas was no longer as brilliant as he had been, in any sense of the word. He no longer performed surgery, and, perhaps more sadly, he no longer possessed the golden shine of a handsome young man with ideas and ambition. He had been through the worst of the drinking, but he still drank far too much to wield a scalpel. There had been so much money after he married Toto that he no longer needed the practice, so it had eventually been sold for a song to a young Phillips cousin. All that work, building the practice up, his own place-that, too, absorbed by his wife’s family.

He now studied all sorts of minor subjects in his spare time, from chemicals to psychology. For a while now marine life had been predominant among these interests-McConnell collected samples of rare cold-weather fish and mammals, the prize of his collection being a perfect Eastern Dolphin. Every few years he took trips, sometimes dangerous ones, off the coasts of Greenland and the fjords. Upon returning he would present his findings to the Royal Academy (he was a member) and contribute his lecture to their journal.

But it wasn’t medical work. The only work he did of that sort was the kind that had brought him face-to-face with the corpse of Prudence Smith. For the pleasure of it, he helped Lenox when he was asked and, though he tried not to betray it, felt an inkling of that old pleasure again, of real work, the excitement of the human mind examining the human body.

He was of middling height and weight, with curly blond hair, a face that was at the moment unshaven, and which told of his drinking. His eyes were lidded but occasionally sharp. He had been putting a golf ball across the cavernous ballroom in his house to a waiting footman when Lenox arrived to pick him up. Now, when Lenox beckoned him toward Prue Smith’s body, he roused himself out of observation and stepped in the room toward the bed.