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"What have we got?" Halifax asked as he entered the morgue.
Dalliwater, the coroner, looked up from the body, pulled off his gloves, and adjusted his glasses. He had a curious look on his face, almost perplexed.
"I'm not sure," he said, waiting until Halifax stopped beside the trolley on which the body lay. He looked down at him; he was tall, sturdy, with pepper-grey hair, his face curiously scarred. "John Doe. Around forty or fifty. A mother walking her child and dog found the body in Leatherhead this morning. No matches on the fingerprints or dental records. It's almost as if he doesn't exist."
He stopped, and Halifax glanced up at him, his eyebrows quirked in question. "And the cause of death?"
Dalliwater opened his mouth, hesitated for a barely discernible moment. "His bones have shattered, and all his organs have erupted. Blunt force trauma. All the usual signs of falling from a great height."
Halifax flicked through his memory. Leatherhead was a town of about ten thousand, south of Central London. There weren't buildings that tall there. No news about disrupted flights. He considered Dalliwater, keen and expressionless.
"But?"
"It wasn't the blunt force trauma or the fall that killed him," Dalliwater said, sounding discomfited. It was unusual for a man with twenty years of experience.
Halifax flicked his eyes over the body; scars littered his chest as well. "What did then?"
Dalliwater hesitated for another moment and shrugged. "I don't know. It's as if he just - died before he fell off somewhere." He turned around and walked to the table behind him. "That's not all. Have a look at his personal belongings."
Halifax went around the trolley, his eyebrows furrowed slightly. He looked at the items collected in the dish: an oddment of strange copper and silver coins, a prosthetic eye with a piercing blue iris, an astronomical watch, a silver flask and what looked curiously like a wand. He sifted through the items carefully.
"Occult?" he inquired.
Dalliwater shrugged. "Or maybe larping?" he suggested. "Some of them spend a lot of money on authentic costumes and props."
Halifax glanced back at the body on the trolley, still beneath the fluorescent lights.
"A man who doesn't exist," he muttered.
How did someone like that end up dead from an unknown cause in the middle of a quiet town?
And why?