The Silent Sleep of the Dying (Eisenmenger-Flemming Forensic Mysteries) (12 page)

Over the years Eisenmenger had read a great many such reports, had written perhaps a thousand more, and he had seen almost as many styles. Some reports were prolix to the point of boredom, others were so truncated that they were practically negligent. Those written by forensic pathologists tended to concentrate, almost to the exclusion of all else, on the external examination, paying scant attention to the internal organs. Older pathologists, especially when close to retirement, tended to write the same report for every autopsy, having neither the enthusiasm nor the wit actually to find out the real reason why the death occurred.

His first impression was that this one was unnecessarily long, for it ran to four and a half sides and most autopsies could be summarized in two. His first impression, however, was wrong. It was long because it had to be long; every organ system — cardiovascular, respiratory, gastrointestinal, genito-urinary, lymphoreticular and central nervous — had something wrong with it. In fact, every organ system was involved by malignancy.

And, as he read through it, he found himself becoming submerged by disbelief. He read it again, but still it made no sense.

Looking up he found Helena watching him intently. "What's the verdict?" she asked.

He didn't know what to say at first. He opened his mouth, closed it, shrugged and then returned to the report briefly before commenting, "This is unbelievable."

"In what way?"

"She had cancer everywhere. There wasn't an organ in the body that wasn't affected."

"Isn't that what happens in terminal cancer?"

"Cancer can spread but, if we're to believe this report, she was consumed by it."

"And all in the space of a week and a half," pointed out Helena. Eisenmenger looked at her, feeling slightly chilled by the reminder. She said, "She had non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. What is that?"

"It's the general term for a group of tumours derived from the cells of the lymphoreticular system." When Helena made a face over her glass he explained, "White blood cells."

"Ah."

"At the last count there were something like forty different types, ranging from those that are so indolent the patient usually dies of something else before the lymphoma gets them, to those that grow rapidly enough to require high dose, multi-agent chemotherapy in order to save the patient's life."

"Presumably that's the type that Millicent Sweet had."

He was frowning, back at the report. "Presumably," he said but it was a distant polysyllable. Helena waited. She had seen the look before and knew what it meant. After a few minutes he turned back to the front page of the report. "Hartmann."

"Do you know him?"

He shook his head. "Never even heard of him." But under the heading of those in attendance he spotted a name he knew — Belinda Miller. He went back to the main body of the report. "This isn't right," he decided at last.

She waited and he noticed that her eyes were large. The room was now warm and he could feel his scars, feel that because of them he was no longer entirely normal. He tried to ignore the discomfort as he went on, "Different tumours have different patterns of spread. For instance, some types of lung cancer characteristically metastasize to, amongst other places, the adrenal glands; most cancers arising within the large bowel usually go first to the liver. Lymphomas, especially if they're advanced, involve three sites primarily — the lymph glands, the liver and the spleen. This thing has gone everywhere, including both the small and large bowel, the skin and the brain."

"Can't you get lymphomas that affect those sites?"

"You can, but you shouldn't have a single type of lymphoma doing it. These results argue that it was at least three different types of lymphoma, probably five or six."

"Unlikely, then."

"Unlikely and not squaring with his microscopy report." He turned to the last page. "He sees only one type of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma."

She paused before asking, "So … ?"

He was tired. He became tired very easily these days. "So, why are you showing me this? What do you want me to do or say?"

Leaning forward to put her glass on the table she said gently, "I came to ask your opinion, John. Not just on the report but on the whole situation — the death, the mistake over the cremation, the phonecall. You're good at seeing things, things that other people either don't see or don't want to see."

Flattery and guile. He recalled that she was good at those; certainly better at those than she was at opening up herself. Hesitantly he said, "I think that if I were paranoid, I'd see a conspiracy; a cover-up."

"And if you weren't paranoid?"

He smiled. "I'd still be wondering."

She had her elbows on her knees and her hands clutched. It brought her shoulders together and made her pose one of supplication and perhaps promise. "I need you to help me investigate this, John."

He had known that this would come and, in truth, had been quite looking forward to it, but now that they were there, his fatigue and discomfort felt too strong to be fought.

"Let me think about it, Helena. I'll sleep on it."

*

Annette met with her father after work in a restaurant some hundred metres from Lincoln's Inn Fields, near her chambers. It was a fairly regular arrangement and indicative of the continuing closeness between them. She was an only child and, although she had always got on well with her mother, it was to her father that she had always preferentially turned. As ever he stood when she came in, as if the past fifty years had not happened, or rather as if he was damned if he was going to acknowledge that they had.

Piers Brown-Sequard had pure, grey hair that was swept back over his head to reach almost to his collar, sharply ridged brows that sheltered dark brown eyes, and a face that was shaped by a thin but prominent nose and a long chin. There was a superadded effect of cruelty given by a scar to the left of his mouth — the result of a cycling accident when he was a teenager — which tended to distort his smile; he found the impression it conveyed useful.

They kissed and he waited while she settled herself before sitting.

"How are you, Annette?" he enquired, then at once, "And how are the children? Over that sickness thing, I trust?"

She hastened to reassure him "They're much better. Back to normal."

He nodded. "I wondered if it was the flu."

"Just a tummy bug."

They ordered a bottle of Frascati, neither of them apparently interested in Mark Hartmann's health. The wine arrived and they ordered salads. Small talk fell from them like drops of perspiration from a champion racehorse. Then, midway through their meal, Annette said, "I'm worried about Mark, Dad."

The judge looked up at her for a second, then continued to ingest his green stuff. Still interested in the flora on his plate, he asked, "Worried? In what way?"

In truth Annette was uncomfortable with herself. She knew that her father did not much like Mark and she knew also that her father was capable of a considerable degree of callousness — callousness that in the past she had found indistinguishable from viciousness — and she did not want to give him ammunition against Mark. The hesitation produced from her father a reassurance. "Come on, Annette, out with it. I could see that there was something amiss. Perhaps I can help."

He smiled, the distortion induced by the scar, in his daughter's eyes, an integral part of the father she loved. "He's changed," she said at last.

"Changed? How?"

Annette was an advocate and used to language, but this was a situation far removed from the clinical void of her profession and she hesitated before continuing, "Well, he's suddenly got more money for one thing."

Brown-Sequard was well aware of his son-in-law's parlous fiscal state; how could he not be, considering that he had himself engineered it? "Are you sure?"

"He's betting again. That means he must have paid off the bookmakers. Also, he's traded in his car for an Audi roadster."

This information caused Brown-Sequard's silver-grey eyebrows to elevate themselves. Hartmann's previous car had been brand new but a long way from an Audi. "Anything else?"

She considered. "It's his whole attitude. He came back from his meeting in Scotland and for a day or two he was very quiet, very subdued. But now he's changed completely. Half the time he's high, the other half he's really touchy, really nasty."

Her father sighed. He had tried hard to like his daughter's choice of husband, but from their first meeting he had detected something about him that had precluded any warmth between them. He knew that he had always been a strict, almost unreasonable assessor of Annette's suitors, but by any standards Mark Hartmann seemed to him to be a poor choice. His character was weak and he was shallow; also he was prone to panic. Had Brown-Sequard been given the choice, he would not have had him for a son-in-law but no such opportunity had come his way and he had been forced to accept the reality of the situation. Accept it but ensure that it was at least bounded in one or two significant areas by certain contingencies.

Brown-Sequard had no problem with small flaws in a man — he was aware that he had some himself — but those in his son-in-law seemed to be gaping.

Gaping and growing.

He pointed out, "He's hardly likely to take kindly to me butting in."

Annette's face showed alarm. "God, no, Daddy. That's the last thing I want."

He looked at his daughter and remembered that she had once been deeply in love with Mark, but he also wondered if she would now profess to being quite so deeply besotted as once she had been. She continued, "He thinks you hate him. Anything you said would just make matters worse."

He knew that Hartmann had never understood his father-in-law's reserve towards him, seeming to believe that it was a question of social status and breeding, whereas Brown-Sequard saw only the man, saw only that Hartmann had personality flaws aplenty, flaws that signalled danger for his daughter and his grandchildren.

He put down his knife and fork, the salad unfinished. "Then what would you like me to do about it, Annette?"

"I suppose I'd like you to reassure me, tell me that it's all nothing, or something, but I know you won't do that."

"No," he agreed. "I won't."

She sat back in her chair and fingered the stem of the wineglass. It was wet with condensation. "Do you think he's having an affair? Getting money from some woman?"

He slowly reached forward and lightly put his fingers on her hand. It never occurred to him to hide what he thought. "I don't know, but whatever it is, I think that it means trouble."

She nodded, her mouth turned down, her eyes on the abandoned meal. "What should I do, Dad?"

Her father felt a curious mix of outrage, disgust and exhilaration but on his face there was only concern. "We need proof, Annette. Then we can act."

She said nothing, which was itself an admission of consent. He tried reassurance with a smile. "Leave it to me."

*

Turner sat in his office and tried to remain calm. It was three days since he had initiated the tests, three days in which it had gradually borne in upon him just how potentially devastating were the results; now he found himself almost paralyzed with nerves. Certainly work was beyond him, as was politeness. He had not found it within himself to be civil to anyone that day, and that included his wife and his secretary. Only the Dean of the Medical School, telephoning with regard to some matter of overwhelming uninterest to Turner, had been spared outright rudeness, although Turner's clipped, somewhat peremptory and telegraphic replies had left the Dean with the quite accurate impression that Turner wished he would just piss off.

And the closer came the time for the truth, the more certain he became of what he would learn. Without any evidence, only untrustworthy, unscientific intuition, he was convinced that what was coming was a monster, a thing that was going to rip him apart, gouge out his heart, and then eat it.

Suddenly he shivered. Where were those bloody results?

And then there was a knock on the door.

"Yes?" he demanded, aware that his voice was loud and hopeful. The door opened and Harriet, the research assistant he had asked to do the tests, came in while behind her could be glimpsed the disgruntled, tight-lipped face of his secretary. Harriet was holding large photographic transparencies.

"I've just pulled these off the developer. They're the tests you wanted done urgently."

He snatched them from her and turned away to the light. They looked like X-rays but there were no bones to be seen on them, only short, black lines strung out in columns. Harriet was speaking. "Everything seems to be all right, except that there's some sort of artefact. It's really annoying. I can't get rid of it. It's present in all the samples, always down at the bottom at five-point-six megabases … "

But Turner wasn't listening. He wasn't even looking at the sheets any more. His arm had dropped and he was staring out of the window, although his eyes were seeing a million different things. Harriet continued her monologue for some seconds more before she realized that her audience had left the building.

"Professor? Professor? Are you all right?"