The Silent Sleep of the Dying (Eisenmenger-Flemming Forensic Mysteries) (14 page)

And now the memory was gone from Turner's gaze, gone from his conscious attitude to the world, yet from its deep, septic locus it coloured every thought, every judgement that he made. It made him a man who saw those around him as competitors to be, as the world a place to be won. Even now he was running from something, and would be forever.

He had never felt the need for drugs, but desperation, Turner was now discovering, was an opiate. Having entered his consciousness, injected by fear, it now seeped into every synapse and there switched the entire focus of his being around so that every other thought, consideration and emotion were lost, reduced, trampled. His world was now discoloured, his vision distorted, his judgement lost because of the progressive horror of his suspicions.

But he had to know more. Specifically he had to know just how Millicent had died. He strongly suspected, but that wasn't enough. He felt weakened by his ignorance and completely paralyzed by his foreboding. This loss of control was novel, and therefore frightening, and therefore exhilarating.

He had spent the rest of the day first establishing from Professor Bowman that it had been Hartmann who had done the post-mortem and then trying to contact him. This proved difficult but eventually his calls were returned.

"Professor Turner? It's Mark Hartmann. I understand you wanted to talk to me."

Turner suddenly felt his heart squeezing itself like a dying man's fist. He heard his breath harsh and unforgiving as if the devil were listening with tasty anticipation.

Steady now. Don't be too eager. "Yes. I hope it's convenient."

Hartmann had been teaching medical students. He hated teaching, hated medical students even more, and now he had too much work left to do; it was work that he hated most of all. "Of course."

"I understand that you performed the post-mortem examination on Millicent Sweet."

And now, ironically, it was Hartmann's turn to feel apprehension. It suddenly seemed to him that it was unfair that he should be rung about Millicent Sweet's autopsy when he was never rung about any other.

"That's right." He tried to make his voice one of insouciance. He almost succeeded, but Turner wasn't listening to shades in Hartmann's voice.

"She was an assistant of mine and … He knew that he ought to have prepared his speech better — had actually tried in a distracted way — but the tension within his intestine had proved too much. "We're obviously very concerned about what happened."

Hartmann heard only a concerned colleague and was deaf to any other possibilities. "Of course, of course." He paused. "It's actually slightly difficult," he admitted, having decided on the cautious, officious approach, "I'm not really allowed to give out any information. It was a Coroner's case, you see. It's really up to him whether or not to release such information."

Turner hadn't expected this. His plan had been predicated on this being an informal chat between two professionals. "But surely … " he began. Then his fears turned his surprise to irritation and the words reflected this as he went on, "For God's sake! It's not a state secret I'm after. I just want to know how she died! Is that too much to ask?"

Actually it was and Hartmann certainly wasn't about to tell him any truth about how Millicent Sweet had ended. He had hoped to say nothing and force this inquisitor to go through the Coroner's Office (who would certainly refuse to give him any information as he wasn't a close relative), but Hartmann now heard professorial anger and the last thing he wanted was a vengeful professor loose in the Medical School. He decided the wisest course was to give Turner the official cause of death and trust that this would satisfy him.

"Well, I suppose it wouldn't hurt … "

Turner hastened to agree. "Of course it wouldn't."

"Actually she died of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma."

Turner had at last had an answer. He had been desperately hopeful that one of the rumours had been true, that she had been murdered, that she had taken her own life, that she had had an undiagnosed congenital heart defect. Now he learned that she had died from cancer and the narcotic within his blood at once transformed into turgid terror.

"Lymphoma? You're sure?"

"Oh, yes. Quite sure. It was a very aggressive lymphoma, quite unusual." Hartmann was completely oblivious of the effect that his prattle was having. Into the silence on the other end of the phone line he said, "It must have grown with astonishing speed … "

It was then that he realized that Turner had just put down the receiver.

Somewhat disconcerted, Hartmann looked down into the mouthpiece for a moment, as if within its depths he might see the Professor's image and thereby ask him why he had rung off. Alas, no such miracle occurred and he too replaced the receiver, a puzzled look turning slowly to concern.

There was something odd about the call and the reaction and he was beginning to wonder if it was connected with Rosenthal.

What the hell was going on?

Not unnaturally he had asked this question of Rosenthal whose reply had been concise and explicit. "If I ever hear you ask that question again," he had said, his smile stubbornly remaining despite the words, "or learn that you've asked it of someone else, I'll slice your dick off, then I'll stuff it down your throat. And then I'll send copies of the tape to everyone who has ever heard of you."

Hartmann hadn't asked the question again.

At least not out loud, but it reverberated inside his head time and time again. Clearly he had wandered into something potentially nasty, smelly and dangerous, for someone had gone to the trouble of setting him up for blackmail and bribery combined. Tens of thousands of pounds had been spent, and that meant whatever it was, it was big. Men like Rosenthal didn't work for the minimum wage either. Rosenthal had the look and sound of a killer and Hartmann believed every one of Rosenthal's quietly spoken threats. The man was outwardly calm and cultured, but beneath that Hartmann had glimpsed madness. What he said, he would do.

But why? What was it about Millicent Sweet's death that had to be covered up? Why should an ostensibly natural, albeit bizarre, death be such a threat to someone? The question was obvious and, when he had first asked it, apparently unanswerable, but Hartmann wasn't stupid. There was now developing a theme.

Cancer.

At their first meeting, Rosenthal had pointed out that life with thirty thousand pounds and cooperation was far preferable to life without thirty thousand pounds and widespread distribution of the videotaped evidence of his sexual shenanigans. This he had followed with instructions on what Hartmann was to do. He was to rewrite his autopsy report on the death of Millicent Sweet. He was not, Rosenthal was quite explicit, to mention his findings of multiple cancers. Nor was he to suggest in any way that her death had been unnatural (and thereby invoke an inquest). Rosenthal had suggested that she should have died because of a spontaneous subarachnoid haemorrhage and Hartmann was willing to concur with this, until he remembered Belinda.

"I can't put that," he objected, and went on to explain. A brief wash of anger had come over Rosenthal's face, then he had shrugged. "Can't be helped, I suppose," he had murmured and Hartmann had then had the feeling that Rosenthal had momentarily experienced intense, violent anger. Rosenthal had looked up at Hartmann then and asked, "What do you suggest?"

"It has to be cancer of some kind. Belinda saw enough to know that she had massive amounts of cancer."

This had not been received well. Not well at all. Rosenthal had had an aversion to that idea and he showed it. Only after long (and tactful) argument did he accept that lymphoma might be a suitable substitute.

"It's not unreasonable for a young adult to get it, and it can be exceedingly aggressive," Hartmann explained. "Also it should just about keep Belinda happy."

And eventually Rosenthal had agreed. Not happily, but admitting that there was no alternative.

But Hartmann had been struck by Rosenthal's desire to avoid the subject of
cancer
. And now Turner, her boss, had received a dose of the collywobbles when he had heard that Millicent had, officially at least, died of cancer. Hartmann wondered what his reaction would have been if he had known the truth, that she had died from perhaps twenty cancers, all at once, in every tissue of her body.

He looked out of his office window at the monstrous water sculpture, feeling unsafe. His debts were temporarily gone, and he had a newer, even better car but that, now his wishes had come to pass, was scant and hard comfort. The tapes were still there in Rosenthal's possession, and Hartmann could sense greater evils stalking him.

Whatever had led to Millicent Sweet's death was clearly something that somebody wanted kept secret, at any cost, and he, the slightly tubby but — he considered — still loveable Mark Hartmann, was enmeshed in the middle of it all. Firmly clamped in its maw.

*

Turner put the phone down, almost dropping it on the base set. His eyes saw that his hands were trembling, although his mind was beyond caring. Hartmann's words were loud in his head, their conversational tone strangely at odds with their significance.

…
It
was
very
aggressive
…
Unusually
so
…

Turner had known that if she had died from cancer it was going to be aggressive, and not just because she had been perfectly well a week or so before, but to hear his nightmare articulated brought the dread to leaden, crushing life.

He tried to force calm on himself. It wasn't certain that her death was significant, after all lymphomas occurred frequently in young people, so perhaps it was just a coincidence.

But the question suddenly erupted — could it be
Proteus
?

His mind had a kind of spasm. He realized that he had been preventing the word from entering his consciousness and its sudden, unbidden arrival temporarily shocked him. The word was like a daemon; it had too many bad memories attached to allow rational consideration.

…
Unusually
aggressive
.

Perhaps it really was just coincidence.

But then certainty, like a spear, shot through him and he knew.
Perhaps
, be damned. This was nothing other than cause and effect.

He sat back in his chair, staring into space. Then abruptly he leaned forward and picked up from the desk the photographic films that Harriet had brought. The lines across the bottom were still there, of course, and their sight seemed to break him. Suddenly he collapsed, his head on his forearms. He didn't cry but that was only because the overwhelming fear that he now felt was like a paralysis on his emotions.

He knew then that he was going to die. Knew too that it would be in a horrible, horrible way.

But how? How was it possible?

Perhaps in an effort to overcome his terror he forced his mind to think through the events of two years before. They must have fixed the results, but it had been done subtly. Like conjurors they had invited him to inspect their every move and then —
hey
presto
! — they had produced the results that he wanted to see.

Except that they had been falsified.

And he and Millicent and the others had gone on their merry way, believing that all was well, ignorant that they had lives that were disastrously foreshortened.

It must have been assumed that their deaths would be too quick to allow them to make trouble and, in Millicent's case, it had been. But not his.

Suddenly Turner found anger within his fear. He sat up and began to think. He was still well and he had proof that they had lied to him. Even if he couldn't escape his fate, he would make sure that he caused the maximum of grief for them.

Oh, yes. With nothing left to fear now that death was coming, he at once felt emboldened to take on the world. He reached for the phone again. He didn't need to look up the number, for it was one he had once known well.

He was starting to get a headache, but in his desire for revenge he thought he could put up with a minor thing like that.

*

Frank Cowper was worried about the Sweet case. His police instincts had never been particularly good — he had retired as a Chief Inspector after thirty-one years of polishing the brass on his uniform and making sure that whenever faeces and fan collided (as they frequently did when he was involved) he was out of the room, out of the building and preferably tucked away up the Chief Superintendent's rectum — but they hadn't totally atrophied. Nobody avoided trouble as well as he had without being able to smell the sweetness of decay before anyone else.

Hartmann's report for a start. Frank was no doctor but he'd been a Coroner's Officer for over seven years and he'd read a lot of reports, and he'd read this one with some surprise. "Slight redness to the skin," in particular. Who was Hartmann kidding? The girl had looked boiled to Frank's stupefied gaze. And the rest of the report seemed to be downplaying the findings, as if Hartmann didn't want anyone to make too much of a fuss.

Then, of course, she had been accidentally cremated. Just a clerical error, easily done. The letter from the solicitor to the Coroner, expressing concern that the mix-up over labels had occurred whilst the body was legally within his jurisdiction, had been repulsed with a reply that put the responsibility on the Medical School and nowhere else, but it had hinted at deeper things. The letter had gone on to suggest that Mr Sweet had been considering a second autopsy, that perhaps there had been a degree of deliberation in this "error."