‘Was your wife careless about her injections?’ the coroner had asked.
‘Sometimes,’ Lomax had replied. ‘She also ate too irregularly for her condition.’
‘What about alcohol, which I understand can contribute to an imbalance?’
‘That had greatly reduced, since our move from America.’
‘You mean she drank immoderately?’
‘Rarely, since our transfer to this country.’
‘But before?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Would you say your wife was careless of her condition?’
‘I would say she had grown too familiar with it.’
‘Familiarity breeding contempt?’ cliched the coroner.
‘That is so.’
‘Was your wife in any way suicidal because of her condition?’
‘Absolutely not! She loved life.’
‘Did your wife take sleeping pills?’
‘No.’
‘You are aware that some were found. And that traces were found in your wife’s body?’
‘I can’t account for that. The pills were mine. An old prescription. They should have been thrown away.’
It was his working practice usually to spend at least three days a week in London. On the day of her death, a Friday, he had arrived home in mid-afternoon. The house had appeared to be empty, which had surprised him because he had telephoned the previous evening to give her his time of arrival. He had assumed Jane was out, shopping or with friends. He’d actually telephoned a particular acquaintance, the wife of an American on an exchange secondment from IBM, to see if she was there. It was not until an hour after his return that he’d gone upstairs to find his wife in bed, in a coma. He called her doctor at the same time as the ambulance and travelled in it to hospital with her. She’d died an hour after admission.
Police Constable Harry Elroyd testified to being automatically called to the mansion by the ambulance alarm. Mrs Lomax had been in bed, still wearing her nightdress: that and the bedding was soiled, where her bladder had apparently collapsed. On a bedside table he found an insulin pack with four ampoules missing. Two, both empty, were on the table. He’d found the other two, also empty, in the bathroom waste bin. In the bathroom cabinet he had found a half-filled bottle of temazepam sleeping tablets. On the bedside table was a syringe, with a needle still attached. Close to it was a goblet still containing sufficient brandy to be identified by its smell. He’d found a two-thirds-filled bottle of brandy on the downstairs kitchen table, together with the uncleared remains of an evening meal, for one person. There was the residue of red wine in a glass and in the kitchen waste bin an empty Margaux bottle. He had located no note to indicate Mrs Lomax had intended to take her own life.
Dr Allan Greenaway said he had been Mrs Lomax’s physician since her arrival in Hampshire. Considering her diabetes she was a woman in reasonably good health, although she had consulted him about stomach pains. He had prescribed mebeverine hydrochloride, for irritable bowel syndrome, but had feared she might be developing stomach ulcers, not uncommon in her condition. For that he issued repeat prescriptions for the insulin he identified from the pack shown to him. Because of her long history of diabetes he had never thought it necessary to warn her against heavy indulgence in alcohol. It was a precaution of which she would have been permanently aware.
Pathologist Michael Bailey described Jane Lomax as a woman in general good health, apart from some pancreatic atrophy consistent with the history from childhood of her diabetes. His autopsy had also disclosed the evidence of impending ulceration suspected by Dr Green-away, which again resulted from her condition. Her blood sugar level was radically out of balance which would have inevitably caused shock, not just to the virtually inoperative pancreas but to the liver and heart. Forensically that imbalance was caused by an excess of insulin, compounded by alcohol and the lactose and sucrose ingredients of the specific meberevine hydrochloride tablets that had been prescribed. It had been impossible for him to calculate with any accuracy the excess of insulin that had proved fatal. He understood her daily dosage to be twenty units, twice a day. The discarded ampoules represented twice that amount and should not, additionally, have been present during what had evidently been a night-time period. He had found substantial traces of temazepam in Mrs Lomax’s body and agreed with the coroner that a dangerous but common side effect of sleeping pills was for someone to awaken, forget they had already taken some and ingest more.
‘In your opinion, could this have happened in this case and further disorientated Mrs Lomax so that she self-administered a totally unnecessary and lethal injection of insulin?’ the coroner had asked.
‘I consider that the most likely explanation for what happened,’ replied the pathologist. His phrase – a fatal cocktail – had provided the headline in two separate newspapers.
It had also been used – and justified the headline – by James Davies in his summing up, although not part of the quote that appeared. There are many facets of this tragedy for which I cannot find a satisfactory explanation – because of which I feel I am prevented from anything other than an open verdict – but all the evidence before me indicates an unfortunately afflicted woman neglecting, through familiarity, the medical condition with which she had been born. Mr Lomax is a new but already respected member of the local community and to him I express my sympathy in his sad loss.
Jeremy Hall was swamped with pointless, unresolvable frustration. At once – objectively, reminding himself of what he was trying to achieve – he suppressed the distraction, as he would have suppressed a flicker of anger in a court. The coroner’s remarks had done more than sum up the inquest: indeed, the concluding words had thrown up in neon-bright clarity the entire formularized direction of the inquest. Sadly bereaved – there were three photographs of a darkly-bespectacled, black-suited, head-bent Lomax hurrying from court – charity supporting pillar of the local community robbed of an adored, medically afflicted wife through a combination of small but fatal misjudgements by a past-his-prime country doctor who himself had died six months later and an occasionally wilfully-challenging woman prone to disregarding her illness. All the statements read and filleted beforehand. A verdict determined (‘Sorry, Gerry: accidental or misadventure just wouldn’t have been right,’) in advance to get the legally required but painful official business over and out of the way in the shortest acceptable time.
In his eagerness he was making the mistake of examining the inquest evidence as he would have done in a far more rigidly structured Court of Law. But the inquest hadn’t done that. Inquests rarely did. Nine times out of ten – maybe slightly less – they were occasions of commiseration. Which is what Jane Lomax’s had been. Her death had been investigated and decided upon in the familiar, non-adversarial surroundings of a village hall, with flower show and horticultural exhibition flyers on a tattered notice board and fold-away chairs stacked at the back amidst smells of paraffin and dust and chalk.
He had to come from the totally opposite direction, the criminally minded, suspicious, believe-nothing direction. The way of John Bentley and Malcolm Rodgers, thinking the worst of everybody and every situation until proven wrong: sometimes not even then.
Jeremy Hall determined upon a middle course, refusing the easy criticism of a country inquest but rejecting, too, a guilty-until-proven innocent approach. As he picked his way with methodical care through the written statements he had consciously to keep that determination in mind, so easy would it have been to veer wildly across both self-imposed guidelines. When he finished he had seven closely handwritten pages of reminders, believed anomalies, seeming contradictions and outright inconsistencies. It had taken most of the day and occupied a further hour separating his own uncertainties into a list of positive requests to Humphrey Perry. They still occupied four pages and after telephoning to ensure the man would be at the receiving end, preventing anyone else identifying the source, Hall faxed them for convenience and to ensure there was no verbal misunderstanding between himself and the solicitor.