I had breakfast with them, and said my farewells, before I left for the morgue, to work on the mystery man from Mortonhall. It was a holiday Friday morning and the boys weren’t due back at school for another month at least, but they would be in Gullane by the time I got home again.
Young Sauce Haddock is a keen one; he was waiting for me when I arrived at the horrible brick and grey concrete mortuary on the corner of Cowgate and Infirmary Street. Its appearance is as depressing as its purpose and I never enter it without my spirits being lowered. How bereaved people must feel if they have to go there is beyond my imagination. If I had the power to raze just one building in Edinburgh to the ground and start over again, I would flatten that one.
As Bob had asked, I’d given the victim a quick, preliminary examination the night before. There had been no extra toes, no tattoos, no bar code on his ass, or anywhere else; in fact he didn’t have a single distinguishing mark anywhere on his body. Dental records weren’t going to be any help either; his teeth were perfect, thirty-two of them, all present and correct. In fact, the only part of him that was missing was his foreskin. But there was saliva foam in his mouth, and that interested me.
‘The chief says he wants you to. .’ Haddock began, but I cut him off.
‘I know what he wants,’ I said. ‘He wants me to make his job, and yours, as easy as possible; but that isn’t up to me, that rests with the guy in the next room.’
‘Sorry, ma’am,’ he murmured.
‘Don’t be. If he wants to spell things out, that’s his privilege. I do what I do, regardless. You ready for this?’ I asked him, as Roshan, my postgrad assistant, and I stood with him outside the examination room.
‘You mean will I faint, Doctor,’ he asked, with a Brad Pitt smile, ‘or chuck my breakfast? We won’t know until we get there, but I hope not. Where do I stand?’
‘There’s a viewing panel, with a loudspeaker so you can hear us.’ I looked at him. ‘Or you can come inside, if you want, as long as you suit up like us, and get the hell out at the first sign of queasiness.’
He grinned again. ‘Might as well get it over with. Got a suit?’
We waited until he was sterile, then walked into the room, where our subject was waiting for us. He’d been X-rayed earlier, section by section, as a matter of routine, and an image of the torso was displayed on a light board. My technician, Roddy Frame, was fingerprinting the body as we entered. ‘All the other exposures are unremarkable, but you might want to take a look at that one, Sarah,’ he called across, his voice muffled by his face mask.
‘Why are we wearing masks?’ Haddock asked. The laugh lines round his eyes were creased. ‘Is it in case he catches something off us?’
‘The other way around. You can get some nasty molecules in the air in this room.’
I stepped up to the light board and peered at the image, and saw at once what Roddy had meant. ‘Indeed,’ I murmured. ‘Look, Roshan.’
‘What?’ the DC asked, behind me.
‘He had broken ribs,’ I told him. I pointed at the X-ray, counting the fractures. ‘One, two, three, four.’
‘That’s from the bruising on his chest?’
‘Yes. It must relate.’
‘Is that what killed him?’
‘No. I’d say it was meant to be the opposite. Injuries such as these are common when CPR is applied, that’s. .’
‘Attempted resuscitation?’
‘Exactly.’
‘So he might have had a heart attack?’
‘It’s possible, but I won’t know until I look inside.’ I looked over my shoulder at Roddy. ‘Are you finished?’
‘Yes, Sarah, he’s all yours.’
As I went to work, with Roshan alongside me and Haddock standing stoically a few feet away, but in my eyeline, so that I could spot any signs of weakness, I had a few possibilities in mind. The first was the one that the young cop had raised, the kind of congenital cardiac condition that can strike down the fittest without any prior warning, but when I opened the chest cavity, all the internal organs were in perfect condition. I made a point of checking the lungs and airways for soil or fabric from the sheet in which he’d been wrapped, but they were clear. Given the circumstances, that was important; it meant that he hadn’t been buried alive.
Possibility number two was the jackpot winner. As soon as I opened the skull, I knew. ‘Massive brain trauma,’ I pronounced.
Haddock knew it also, for the blood that had been released made it obvious. He whistled; he was a cool one. ‘I can see that,’ he exclaimed, drawing a chuckle from Roshan. ‘Does that mean he’s been shot?’
‘I doubt it; I looked for an entry wound, but there was no sign.’
‘A blow to the head, then?’
‘No, the skull’s intact; a blow hard enough to do that would have fractured it and caused obvious external damage. I expect to find that this man, whoever he is, suffered a subarachnoid haemorrhage, that’s bleeding between the outer membranes of the brain.’
‘So he was hit?’
‘I doubt that very much; in fact I’m quite certain that he wasn’t. You know the shit that happens to people?’ I asked.
He frowned. ‘I’ve got first-hand knowledge.’
‘Well, this is an example of it. A person, young and fit like this man, could be walking around with a weakness in the wall of a cerebral artery, usually at the base of the brain, knowing nothing about it until the day it gives out. When it does, there’s a fifty per cent chance that it will be fatal, and a good chance that the sufferer won’t even make it to hospital. It’s subject to completion of my examination, but I’d say right now that there was nothing untoward about the circumstances of this man’s death, and that the way in which his body was disposed of played no part in it.’
‘So like the chief said,’ he ventured ‘this might not have been a crime at all?’
I had to laugh at his incredulity. ‘He has been known to be right, Constable.’ When it comes to his work, I added mentally.
‘I’d better report this, Dr Grace,’ Haddock said, full of eagerness.
‘Don’t you want to wait till I’m finished?’
‘Will you be able to tell me any more than you have already?’
I raised my eyebrows. ‘I can’t tell you how the book will end till I’ve read it all.’
His chuckle was muffled by his mask. ‘In that case I suppose I’d better not miss a chapter. It’ll be colourful, if nothing else.’
Aileen de Marco Skinner
I know a few people who claim they went into politics for the excitement of the life. Every one of them is a fool. Today in our nation there are two professions whose members are excoriated by the masses, and held in universal scorn. You know who I mean: bankers and politicians.
I’m one of the latter, and while I am shamed and outraged by those of my colleagues who’ve betrayed the public trust, on balance I’m proud of my job. I’d rather have it than be one of the other lot, and that’s for sure. I don’t say this in the debating chamber or in my constituency newsletters but I sympathise with most bankers. We’ve seen the big headlines, but usually, the bonuses for which they take such stick are contractual, and performance-related. They’re not the fault of the individual, but of a lousy regulatory system set up by my lot, a fact forgotten by too many of us.
The one advantage that bankers have over me and mine is that, with the exception of the few at the top of the tree who are hauled regularly before self-righteous Commons Select Committees with their caps in their hands, they are anonymous. We legislators, on the other hand, are subjected to relentless public scrutiny and criticism. Some of it is justified, I acknowledge, but much of it is simply the reflex antipathy created by our adversarial system, its fires stoked by the media who line up on either side of the ongoing war.
These days there’s no escape in the public domain. Everything we do is scrutinised, and nothing we do is ever one hundred per cent right. We cannot leave our offices without being photographed, often in the least flattering light. This is particularly true for women, fly-away dresses on a windy day being especially popular with the tabloid snappers, and making the wise among us wear trouser suits or tight skirts all the time. The photo libraries have alternative images for us all; the nice ones for a good-news day, the off-guard for the opposite, or all the time, if the newspaper involved is rabidly against the victim’s party.