‘Both the coroner and the police feel that we should have a Home Office pathologist on this one, doctor,’ he explained. ‘The relatives are screaming blue murder — or at least manslaughter, as the chap collapsed after a scuffle. And the hospital would prefer an outside opinion, as he died on their premises and the wife is hinting at their failure to save him.’
It was common after any death in a hospital where there was even a possibility of an allegation of negligence, for the post-mortem not to be performed by their own pathologist, to avoid any accusation of prejudice.
Richard agreed to come up the next day, after he had dealt with a couple of cases in Monmouth, then went back to the start of the Benny Hill Show.
When he arrived at Hereford next morning, he found the coroner’s officer waiting for him, together with a detective inspector and a police photographer.
They stood in the little office as the DI explained the position.
‘The wife and two sons, one of whom is a solicitor in Worcester, are raising a stink about this, sir. There’s no doubt that Frederick Holmes, the Post Office driver, pushed the deceased, as both the wife and her cousin are solid witnesses and Holmes doesn’t deny it, though he says he was provoked by Jackson throwing his bunch of keys away.’
‘But it was nothing more than a push in the chest, not an actual heavy blow?’ asked Richard.
The inspector shrugged. ‘Well, the wife is making the most of it, quite naturally. But the hospital doctor says there was nothing significant in the way of injuries.’
‘And he died within an hour of this incident?’ persisted the pathologist.
‘Yes, he was alive when the ambulance reached him. It got there about thirty minutes after the incident. A passing AA man on his yellow bike and sidecar had stopped to see what was going on and he drove off to phone from the nearest box.’
‘Do we know if Mr Jackson was conscious after the collapse?’
‘He was according to the wife. Groaning on the ground and complaining of a pain in his chest, but then he slipped into a coma by the time the ambulance arrived.’
The coroner’s officer, a bluff police-officer nearing retirement, added a little more.
‘I spoke to the senior house officer and his registrar, sir. They had told the relatives that they felt that coronary artery disease was the cause of death, but the wife and sons were emphatic that the assault, as they called it, had led to the heart attack.’
Richard trod carefully here, as an incautious word, even to policemen, might come back to haunt him.
‘Well, it’s true that any stress, emotional or physical, can precipitate a sudden cardiac arrest in people with heart diseases, but it certainly can’t cause coronary artery disease. I think we should keep an open mind until the results of the post-mortem. Eventually, it may be a matter for the lawyers, rather than doctors.’
With this hopefully diplomatic remark, he hung up his jacket and went into the post-mortem room next door, to put on his boots and apron. He found Samuel Jackson to be a rather short, plump man of fifty, who looked as if his main form of exercise was going to good restaurants. The coroner’s officer said that he was a successful businessman from Worcester, owning a brewery and a chain of shops.
The only signs of injury were the slight scratches on the back of his neck and between the shoulder blades, consistent with sliding down the front of his Alvis, rather than significant evidence of impact. The reddening of the front of the chest seen by the Casualty Officer was no longer visible to Richard’s eye.
The internal examination revealed no injuries whatsoever and the only positive findings were an over-abundance of fatty tissue and generalized arteriosclerosis. Most significant of all was severe narrowing of all the coronary arteries, with thrombosis of the main branch of the left artery.
‘Could that have occurred in the hour between the incident and the death, doctor?’ asked the detective inspector, with a firm eye upon cause and effect.
‘I doubt it, as this looks firm and well established,’ replied Richard, cautiously. ‘But I’ll need to look at it under the microscope to make sure. That’ll take a few days, but I’ll try to get it done before Christmas.’
Mentally he kept his fingers crossed, as Sian would only have until Saturday to make the sections.
The last thing he did was to cut a number of incisions into the muscle of the heart itself, looking for evidence of infarction, but it looked normal, in spite of the blockage of the supplying artery.
The examination over, he stood at the sink to wash his hands and give a summary to the inspector and the coroner’s officer.
‘There’s no doubt that he had potentially fatal heart disease. This must have been developing for years and could have killed him at any time. But I’m well aware that he died within an hour of a stressful argument and a mild blow on the chest, which caused him to fall backwards.’
‘So did that lead to his death, doctor?’ demanded the CID man, with a terrier-like tenacity.
‘To be frank, I don’t know. I will have to do some tests to try to find out. If he has severe damage to his heart muscle which arose before the incident, then my opinion is that the argument and very slight physical trauma did not significantly contribute to death, which may have been inevitable. But I’m willing to bet that a lawyer might have a different view.’
‘So you don’t feel it’s justifiable to charge the van driver with causing the death?’
‘Let’s wait a few days until I do all that I can to clarify the situation,’ suggested Richard, not wanting to unnecessarily condemn a man to spending Christmas in police custody.
‘He’s presumably not going to flee the country over this, so if we hold our horses until we get all the evidence that’s available, it will be best for everyone concerned.’
As he drove home with his samples, including the complete heart in a large glass jar, he fervently hoped that some articles he had read recently in the specialist medical journals might help him to arrive at the most just solution.
That same Wednesday was proving a busy one for the usually placid Aberystwyth CID. Trevor Hartnell had arrived following a very early start from Birmingham and, after a late breakfast in the canteen, was going off with Meirion Thomas to seek the elusive Jaroslav Beran, now officially known as James Brown.
The local sergeant, Gwyn Parry, was detailed to accompany the pair that had arrived from the forensic laboratory in Cardiff to look at the old van in Comins Coch.
He sat in the front of their Morris Oxford estate, the rear luggage space filled with the paraphernalia needed at a scene of crime. When he piloted them to Ty Canol farm and led them into the weedy wilderness behind the cowsheds, the two men from Cardiff looked with distaste at the rusting van filled with mouldering agricultural devices.
‘What are we supposed to be doing with this?’ asked Larry McCoughlin, the liaison officer. ‘It’s full of junk.’
‘There’s a faint possibility it was used to move a dead body, maybe around ten years ago,’ explained Parry. ‘Can you find bloodstains after all this time?’
‘Depends on where they are,’ replied Philip Rees, the biologist. ‘Not much chance if they were exposed to the weather for all that time, but if some has seeped into protected cracks, we may get lucky.’
He was just going to ask if they were supposed to shift hundredweights of stakes and fencing wire, when the sound of a police Land Rover was heard coming into the yard and two uniformed constables appeared.
‘I thought that might be a problem,’ said the detective sergeant. ‘So I’ve organized some muscle for you.’
The back of the Ford van was soon cleared and the floor became visible, albeit cracked, dirty and covered with an assortment of debris.
‘Made of nine-ply board, that!’ growled Myrddin Evans. The farmer had come to watch the desecration of his vehicle and his scowl deepened as Philip Rees levered up the rotting floor with a case-opener.