He itched to get closer to the skeleton but he needed to think and it wouldn't do to go touching it immediately. Bryant's eyes roamed their surroundings, trying to get a feel of what for the moment his mind was dubbing 'the crime scene.' "It's possible this chap -- it is a chap; you can tell by the width of the cranium, just by sight," Bryant added for no good reason whatsoever except this is what he did: look at dead bodies and talk about dead bodies... and touch and work on dead bodies. "It's possible this chap did have a partner, Max," Bryant gave the other man a brief nod, then pointed a ways down the sand to the beached wreck of a boat. He didn't know enough about boats to call it a yacht or say how many it would have held but it didn't look a bit like something one fellow could manage on his own. "I daresay that may belong to this poor devil, or that he belongs to it." Bryant's words came with less hesitation and fractious stuttering when he was in his element.
The yacht, the caves. Perhaps both needed to be searched, though Bryant wasn't the sort of fellow to give orders. He'd let these two do whatever they wished with the scene; the body was a slightly different story. The medical examiner favored Kessie with a brief look. Truth was, Bryant new bugger-all about the emotions or intentions of living people. Yet he'd picked up a sense from the way Max had volunteered to join a crusade that might be unpalatable to a lesser man, from the way Kessie had begged to be included, that perhaps all three of them were hoping to do something constructive with their time here.
Kessie received a small smile, tentative but truthful, and an equally small nod from Bryant. "Yes, I rather think you're correct, Kessie. We must needs, ah, dig the... the homeboy up." With the awkwardness of a man trying on a suit that isn't his, Bryant borrowed Max's terminology. It sounded fine coming from a bartender but sounded just as odd as one would expect from a British doctor. "After the cigarettes, of course," he added as a bit of an afterthought. Then, even more hesitantly: "I'll need one of you to help me... I mean... I'd like to crouch down and get a closer look before any digging happens," The strain in Bryant's voice was only matched by the inherently apologetic tone, "And whilst this prosthetic device is terribly advanced, I don't have a perfect grasp on the way the knee bends. I've gotten good at stairs," he added pointlessly, as Bryant was wont to do, an odd tic in his speech that one got used to. What he was trying to say -- what hopefully came through -- was that he needed someone to lean on. He knew this was a male but Bryant wanted to touch the skull: different races had a different topography, as it were, to their heads and though it wasn't an exact science or even a scrap of forensic anthropology that he dealt with regularly (or at all), Bryant read a lot and applied his reading to his... patients... whenever possible. Sight had him guessing at this being a Caucasian male but he might be wrong. Or he might be able to confirm that by touch. It was amazing how even the tiniest details might differ in different races or geographic areas. A few years ago he'd gotten to map the skull of a Norwegian fellow who'd had his head bashed in with a baseball bat and it had been very different than, say, someone from Africa or Asia.