The Silent Sleep of the Dying (Eisenmenger-Flemming Forensic Mysteries) (5 page)

He felt ill, he decided. He stood and went to the mirror above the wash basin by the door. He looked at himself for signs of sickness; perhaps he had the children's bug — certainly there had been ample exposure to potentially infected material during the night. He saw a man who was slightly above average in height, with pale brown hair, blue eyes set in a long face, a nose he considered aquiline (though a departing female acquaintance of long ago had once called him "Beaky") and a mouth which, although not unpleasant, hid teeth which were irregular and ill-met, albeit fairly white. His physique was slightly flabby, but clothing, he thought, hid that quite well; he would worry about the flab when the opportunity arose. Not that it often did, Annette frequently seeming to have some reason for not indulging in marital games.

He did, he thought, look pale. Drawn around the eyes, with largish bags. He felt sick, too; might even vomit now he came to consider …

He sighed. He couldn't afford to be sick, not with Coroner's work to be done and therefore extra cash to be made.

The phone rang too loudly, interrupting his descent from hope into reality.

"Yes?"

"Doctor Hartmann?"

The voice was familiar. He couldn't think who it was but the sound of it raised no pleasure.

"Speaking."

"Frank Cowper here."

Which explained why he could locate no joyful associations. Before he could say anything, Cowper was talking again. "I thought I ought to have a word with you about one of the cases you've got today."

Beware
the
Coroner's
Officer
who
wants
to
talk
to
you
about
an
autopsy
.

He didn't know anything about the cases yet but he wasn't going to let Cowper know that. "Which one?" he asked.

"It's the girl, Millicent Sweet."

"What about her?"

Cowper hesitated. Although the police had not formally demanded a forensic post mortem, if he did not handle this conversation adroitly, he would alarm Hartmann. If Hartmann refused to perform the autopsy and insisted that it was sufficiently odd for it to be performed by a Home Office pathologist, all his good work so far would be for naught.

"She was found alone in her flat. The police have done a thorough inspection and there are no suspicious signs; nothing to suggest anyone else was there … "

Hartmann was not so forlorn that he failed to miss the air of overprotestation that permeated the words.

" … but it appears as though she's been seriously burned."

Fire deaths always caused problems; it was all too convenient to die by a means that destroyed evidence as well. Hartmann was already thinking about not doing the post-mortem even before Cowper had finished.

"Oh."

"The odd thing is, her clothes weren't burned and the flat was entirely okay as well."

"Oh," This time a semitone lower.

Cowper laughed. Then he said, "You see what I mean, don't you? There's no question that there was any foul play, but it's all a bit, well, odd." And he laughed again.

Hartmann immediately did not like the sound of all this. Cowper was a tricksy bastard who would attempt, as he had in the past, to fool him and others into performing autopsies, which ought to have been left to the forensic guys. The most famous example was the man found in a bath with fifty-three stab wounds to his body and two hammer blows to the head; the information from Cowper had, somewhat disingenuously, failed to mention these wounds and had concluded with the statement that there were "no suspicious circumstances."

But there was always another hand.

It was only eighty pounds, but it was eighty pounds that he would quite like to possess. "Was the house secure?"

Cowper assured him that it was.

"Was there a fire in the room?"

This time Cowper had to think hard before answering. "Yes, but she wasn't anywhere near it."

"Was it on?"

"No."

The confidence with which this was pronounced was impressive; Cowper didn't bother trying to remember after the negative had come from his mouth. Hartmann hesitated, but not for long. "I'll tell you what, Frank. I'll have a look at it. If it looks squeaky clean, I'll carry on, but anything funny and I'll come running for the forensic boys."

This was not entirely what Cowper had wanted but he was realistic enough to know that there had been little chance of anything better. "Okay, Doc."

He tried to make this sound cheerful but, strangely, it seemed to Hartmann to be merely resigned.

*

Hartmann took off his coat and tried not only to look not tired, but also happy and ready for work. The skin of his face felt cold and taut and his eyes didn't seem to fit properly in their sockets. Another blossom of nausea rose from his stomach and made him pause with his hand on the door handle of his room. When the discomfort had passed he walked out into the drab corridor.

The department had been built by someone who had clearly possessed no intention of working there; perhaps there really did exist an architect's department in which half the rooms had no natural light, all of the walls were unplastered (possibly the chocolate brown paint on the breeze blocks was an attempt at disguise), and all of the corridors were straight and met at right-angles, but Hartmann had his doubts. Any newcomers or visitors invariably spent considerable, uncountable time wandering aimlessly through Stygian light down corridors which all looked identical. There was an air of the asylum here, an impression not altered by encountering the inhabitants.

To reach the secretaries' sanctum he had to traverse about two hundred metres of corridor enlivened by only the occasional tatty poster and empty notice board. A few scientific presentations on the walls, telling of great research triumphs, indicated when he was passing through the domain of Professor Bowman, head of department and infinitely irritating.

Amy and Cynthia sat in the secretaries' room at their desks, talking across the third desk, the one that was always empty They didn't stop their conversation when Hartmann came in, didn't even lift their eyes to him. Amy was Nigerian, a pleasant but unintelligent woman whose sole existence seemed to revolve around the church; she was, to be fair, the one secretary who could be relied upon to concentrate on her work for longer than ten minutes at a time, although her typing of reports often resembled attempts at Jungian self-expression, so liberally sprinkled were they with words that had been misheard as various parts of male and female pudenda. Cynthia was Australian; an adjective that largely encompassed her entire personality and which rendered any further description both redundant and inadequate. Hartmann had spoken to people who'd seen her working but, as with the Aurora Borealis, he had never experienced the joy personally.

"Have you got the Coroner's requests for today's postmortems?" he enquired of both which, of course, meant neither. His interruption of their social discourse earned him cold stares. At last Amy reluctantly mumbled, "I think they're on the desk. I typed them up last night."

She indicated the empty secretarial desk and Hartmann sat down behind it while they took up their conversation across him.

There were two. The first was a road traffic accident, another cyclist who hadn't been observing the speed limit, committing the unpardonable sin of travelling at fifteen miles an hour in a forty-mile-per-hour zone. A lorry driver had sought to go past him but had succeeded only in going over him. The second was Millicent Sweet.

Twenty-three years old. That fact, baldly stated on an official form that told of her death, was the embodiment of sadness; that she should have lived and died alone, in an uncaring and decaying back street of the city, deepened the sadness into despair.

The free text information that Cowper had supplied was, as always, brief and constructed with grammar and syntax that suggested English was his second language, learned from a deranged baboon. It ended with the mantra, "no suspicious circumstances," — a phrase which had the same power and tokenism as "touch wood" — telling him nothing that he did not already know.

"Have the boys in the mortuary picked up the copies?"

The mortuary technicians came in first thing and took copies of the coroner's requests for autopsies; they would have opened the bodies and eviscerated them by the time the pathologist arrived.

Amy nodded slowly and distractedly. Cynthia stopped talking and began to search through her desk drawer for something. It was at this moment that Patricia Bowman came in holding a box of slides.

"Ah, Mark, just the man I want."

The concept of being wanted by Patricia Bowman left him momentarily paralyzed. He generally enjoyed female companionship but in Patricia Bowman he drew a very thick, very prominent line. She might want him, but he could see no circumstances in which he might want her. Despite this he smiled in a superficially friendly way and said, "Hello, Pat."

Professor Patricia Bowman was the head of department but hers was a headship characterized by unconcern. Since she had no interest whatsoever in any form of diagnostic pathology (she appeared to consider it on a par with prostitution, albeit considerably more messy) the budget and management of the department were concentrated in the area that reflected her interests — experimental pathology. On average it was estimated that seven rats per day were escorted into the undiscovered country. The diagnostic service existed therefore on starvation rations. Even though Hartmann and the five other consultant pathologists were independent medical practitioners, because of these considerations she had considerable power over their lives. Hartmann viewed her much as he viewed sexually-transmitted diseases — nasty, irritating and best avoided — but he was sage enough to know that it would not be wise to antagonize her.

"I've just received the next round of breast EQA slides. Would you care to do them first?"

She proffered the box as Hartmann hesitated. In his mind formed the words,
What's
the
point
? EQA — External Quality Assurance — was an exercise designed to test his competence and he knew that he didn't have any. He took them with a brief "Thanks."

She turned to a set of pigeon holes set against the wall and took out a bundle of request cards. When slides were reported the request card was handed to Amy and Cynthia so that the report — either written on the back of the card or dictated — could be typed onto the system. When that was done, it was put into the appropriate pigeonhole so that the reporting pathologist could authorize it via the computer.

"You've got a few in here. Would you like them?"

No
.

"Sure."

She handed them to him and left the room.

*

Hartmann returned to his room, physical sickness now hand in hand with depression. The box-like room was gloomed by the chocolate-brown paint on the bare brick walls and the poor winter light. Because Histopathology was situated on the lower ground floor of a six-storey building and his office looked out onto a square courtyard that was in effect the bottom of a deep well, the light could gain access only at an extreme angle. By the time it reached Hartmann it lost any desire to warm or to exhilarate.

He walked to the window and surveyed the courtyard. In its centre was a monstrosity that the artist had described as a water sculpture. Hartmann had few artistic sensibilities and he considered the thing that lurked some twenty metres from his window was an ugly and shapeless cackpile, but he was never sure whether his opinion was valid or not. Certainly Patricia Bowman, who had commissioned it and pushed for the £10,000 to be found from the departmental budget, appeared to have different views on its qualities.

The rain, which had been more or less constant for two days, splattered gently down on the concrete before the window while Hartmann wondered if things could get any worse.

He had thrown the box of slides that Bowman had given him on to the top of a filing cabinet. The last thing he needed was another EQA test; more pressure, more work, less certainty about life, the universe, anything. Soon he would be spending more time on doing proficiency testing and Continuing his Professional Development than in actually doing anything useful; it seemed to him that perhaps his predicament was a tableau that represented the farce of modern England.

Abruptly he turned away and sat down, feeling almost ready for tears. He knew he couldn't go on the way he was, but he knew also that the road he was travelling had never once had a turning. A recipe for despair, baked to perfection.

*

"Fuh-kin-ell!"

The labiodental fricative, dissected into extended syllables and shouted, bounced around the dissection room's bright, hard walls.

Hartmann smiled weakly at Denny, the origin of this colourful greeting.

"Where the fuck 'ave you been? We thought you'd probably died from overwanking in the bogs. Lenny was all ready to go in there and sacrifice everything to pull your hand out from your trousers."

Hartmann sighed, knowing from several years' experience that there was little point in trying to respond to this onslaught. Lenny and Denny — what passed for mortuary technicians in the strange subterranean world that was the Histopathology Department — had no formal power but an infinite amount of its informal counterpart. He said merely, "I had a few things to do, Denny. Sorry if I held you up."