Reluctantly, Pye and Wilding opened a door to the left of the window and stepped into the examination room, just as the old man stripped off his surgical gloves and threw them in the general direction of a bin in the corner. They tried not to look at his assistant, who was busy sewing the subject back together.
‘Heart failure,’ Professor Hutchinson declared, looking up almost belligerently at the officers; he stood no more than five feet four and they towered over him.
‘As the doctor on the scene told us,’ said Wilding.
‘Of course she did. In the end the heart always fails. Young Dr Brookmyre can’t be faulted for that. Also, I gather that she was made aware of the subject’s medical history. Is that correct?’
‘Yes,’ Pye confirmed. ‘I wasn’t there, but my colleague told me that Dr Mosley, the Book Festival director, said that he’d had a recent heart attack.’
‘He had, although the indications are that it was fairly minor, as these things go. Even so, that would have led my young colleague to her diagnosis. If only. .’ The tiny pathologist’s eyes twinkled, he paused, and suddenly the detectives were on edge, knowing that their morning was about to change, and guessing that it would not be for the better. ‘If only that young colleague had taken a closer look, then she might not have induced such complacency in you two flatfeet. Mr Glover died of heart failure,’ he went on, ‘but that always has an underlying cause.’
‘And in this case?’ asked Pye.
‘In this case, if she’d bothered to smell his breath, a fairly routine piece of procedure, I have to say, she might have been less presumptuous.’ He pointed to the body. ‘Even now the scent is there. Go on, gentlemen, have a sniff. Go on, I insist.’
Wilding shrugged his shoulders, stepped up to the table and leaned over the body.
‘What do you detect, detective?’ the professor challenged.
‘It’s sort of sweet, isn’t it?’ the DS offered.
‘Fruity, would be my description, but you get the picture. A classic sign.’›
‘Of what?’ asked Pye.
‘Of hyperglycaemia.’
‘Low blood sugar?’
‘No, my son, the opposite. We’ll need some more detailed lab work than I’ve been able to do here, but it’s already clear to me that the man’s glucose levels were fatally high, absolutely off the bloody clock.’
‘But he was seen going off to inject himself with insulin.’
‘Well, he didn’t. I’ve only been able to find minimal levels in his bloodstream. This poor chap developed ketoacidosis. That means he went into a diabetic coma. . and died. When was he last seen alive?’
‘Around about midnight.’
‘And how was he?’
‘Fine. He was lucid, in good form, although he did tell someone that he felt a bit hyper and needed to inject.’
‘Well, he didn’t. I put the time of death at about one thirty, without much room for error. If he appeared normal at midnight and died that quickly, he didn’t dose himself with his insulin. More like he ate three or four giant-sized bars of chocolate. . only there’s none in his stomach, just some white wine and a melange of partly digested canapés. The only conclusion I can come to is that he died as a result of a catastrophic pharmaceutical error or, to use the vernacular, that he chose to top himself, by injecting himself with a massive dose of glucose. Either way, gentlemen, I wish you an enjoyable Sunday.’
Twelve
‘Are you sure you should do this?’ Aileen asked, as Bob slipped his warrant card into the pocket of the light cotton jacket that he had taken from his wardrobe.
‘I’ve just been asked to do it,’ he pointed out. ‘In the last fifteen minutes I’ve had two phone calls from concerned neighbours, people who know me well enough to have our ex-directory number. One of them you know quite well, Colonel Rendell up the road. He’s a crusty old boy, ex-military, and he was quite annoyed when he told me that his wife is afraid to take their dogs for their usual morning walk because of what’s down there. He demanded, point-blank, that I go down there and sort them out. Yes, I could delegate the task; I could pick up that phone and have a van-load down there inside half an hour, doing those vehicle checks I talked about earlier. I could probably have some of their dogs taken away for examination by a vet. . the bastards are noisy enough, that’s for sure. But I don’t feel inclined to. All I’m going to do just now is take the old colonel’s wife’s spaniels for a walk, as a favour to him, and maybe have a chat with our visitors along the way. What’s wrong with that?’
‘For a start,’ she replied, with a smile, ‘you’ll look daft walking two spaniels. You’ll keep your temper, promise me.’
‘Of course I will. I won’t lay a finger on them. I’ll ask them nicely, like I promised you. I might even offer them a police escort to the designated site.’
She frowned, unconvinced. ‘I think I’ll come with you.’
‘No,’ he told her firmly. ‘This is a police matter. I won’t let you get involved.’
‘Think you could stop me if I insisted?’ Her tone was light but the challenge was serious.
‘Don’t let’s go there, please,’ he said, deflecting it. ‘Let me do this, and see what comes of it.’
She yielded to him. ‘If you must. Go on then, but step carefully.’
‘Carefully and light as a feather, babe.’ He turned and headed for the door, but before he had taken his third step, the phone rang. He turned and picked up the receiver from the table on his side of the new king-size bed that he had bought when Aileen had moved in with him. ‘Skinner,’ he said.
He had been expecting another outraged citizen; instead, Detective Superintendent Neil McIlhenney spoke into his ear. ‘Sorry to break into your Sunday again, boss,’ he began.
‘Don’t worry, chum,’ he replied. ‘It’s well broken already. What’s up? Nothing trivial, I take it?’
‘I fear it isn’t. I’ve just had a call from young Sammy Pye; he’s at the mortuary. The sudden death at the Book Festival that you looked in on this morning: just as suddenly, it’s got complicated.’ Skinner frowned, but said nothing. ‘Do I take it you’re not totally surprised?’ McIlhenney asked him.
‘I don’t really know why, but I’m not,’ Skinner admitted. ‘You know how you can walk in on an event and somehow it just doesn’t feel the way it looks?’
‘You mean when everybody else is seeing what they expect to see, a run-of-the-mill event, but you’re looking at a crime scene? That’s happened to me maybe three or four times in my career, that’s all.’
‘But not this morning?’
‘I can’t say it did, but I got there after you’d gone, remember. I didn’t see the same as you, literally.’
‘True. So what’s happened to confirm my special insight?’ He listened as the superintendent passed on Pye’s news. ‘Mmm,’ he murmured, when the story was complete. ‘Have you ever heard of that method of doing yourself in?’
‘No, I haven’t. But if I was diabetic, of a mind to end it all and I was looking for a method that was quick and painless, I can see that might be a reasonable proposition. Instead of balancing your sugar levels, shove them over the top, then slip into a coma, and die quietly and painlessly.’
‘So why would he send Randy Mosley a message asking for help? Are you going to tell me he changed his mind after he’d done it?’
‘I’m not going to tell you anything, gaffer, but that would make sense. Plus it’s much more likely than the old prof’s other explanation, an error by Glover’s pharmacist.’
‘I’ll give you that,’ Skinner conceded, ‘but let’s put an end to the speculation and do what needs to be done.’
‘I’m already doing it. Sammy and Ray Wilding are on their way back to Charlotte Square. By now they’ll have asked Dr Mosley to close off the hospitality centre and the author’s quiet room. . That’s what they call the bit where he died. Appropriate, yes?. . and not to let her cleaners take any of yesterday’s rubbish off the site. Earlier on we had no reason to look for the syringe, or the pen, whatever the guy used. Now we do. More than that, we’ll need to interview everyone Glover was seen with last night, including your old friend Bruce Anderson.’