It was only after the coroner, Judith Rumberlow, removed her glasses that I realised she was beautiful.
"As far as I'm concerned, it's an open and shut case, Ace - the usual sex on the cross fatality". She slid open the refrigerated cabinet containing the body. He was looking kind of pale, kind of green and kind of like Randolph Tidyman. I nodded a nod of recognition.
Rumberlow pulled out a pen from the top pocket of her lab coat and wrote "Tidyman. R: Confirmation 23/12/95. 2.07 pm" onto the label tied to Randy's big toe. She handed me a clip-board with a form on it. I signed. She slid Randy back into the file labelled "stiff" and escorted me from the premises.
"I never heard of sex on the cross." I said.
She searched the ceiling for a tiny bit of tolerance for a green and cabbage looking private dick: "It's a standard kink. Big with Priests, Bishops, Cardinals, Ulster Unionists, Southern Baptists and lapsed Catholics. What happened with this guy is what usually happens; a person is tied to a cross and pleasured by his or her partner. It's the sense of restriction, of giving yourself over that some people find a turn on. It also has the thrill of transgression about it that the sexually repressed crave". I could see that Rumberlow had attended lots of special counselling courses that helped the loved ones of pervy dead people deal with their loss. She continued as we passed a large photograph of Norman Tebbit opening the morgue in 1983: "I figure Mr Tidyman got a whiff of amyl-nitrate which increased his blood pressure beyond a tolerable level and released a blood clot in his leg - causing a fatal aneurysm." Even I knew that amyl-nitrate would give Sister Wendy Beckett herself a welcome home darling but I was still a few paragraphs behind Rumberlow.