‘I’ve got a suspicion that he may have been on our patch towards the end of the war,’ he explained. ‘Can you organize a search to see if a Jaroslav Beran shows up anywhere in the records for that time, especially if there’s any connection with Mickey Doyle?’
His DCI promised to get some men on to it straight away, and with nothing more he could do that day, decided to go for a bracing walk along the promenade in the chill December wind.
After Sian had made up a fresh solution of TTC and Richard had submerged a centimetre-thick slice of the heart in it, the shallow glass dish was placed in the body-heat incubator and left in peace for twenty minutes.
‘Leave it too long and there can be a non-specific deposition of the tetrazolium all over the tissue,’ cautioned Richard.
‘What’s the actual basis of the test?’ asked Angela, curious about something outside her usual expertise.
‘The dehydrogenase enzymes in the muscle convert the colourless TTC to a red dye which precipitates out on to the surface. If there’s no enzyme present — or a marked reduction — then nothing happens in that area and the tissue remains unstained.’
They watched the bench timer, bought in a kitchen sundries shop, and when the time was up, there was a feeling of anticipation, as even Moira, aware of something unusual going on, came to watch. Though earlier she had baulked at the fresh heart lying in the tray, the circle of muscle in its glass dish seemed much less repulsive as Richard laid it on the big table.
‘There’s a pale patch there!’ exclaimed Sian, proud that her efforts in making up the solution had contributed to success.
‘Yep, just where it should be,’ agreed Richard, pointing with forceps at one side of the thick circle of ventricle. ‘Blockage of the descending branch of the left coronary artery would cause an infarct of that part of the heart.’
‘So what’s the significance in this case, Doctor Pryor?’ asked Moira.
‘It takes some time for the death of the muscle to become apparent. How long depends on the way you look at it… just naked eye, with no fancy techniques like this would show nothing for many hours, even a day or two after the blockage. Using ordinary histology would shorten that time, but this is the most sensitive, together with the microscopic techniques that we can’t do here yet.’
‘So you feel that this rules out the possibility that the push on the chest caused the death?’ persisted Moira.
Richard shook his head. ‘I can’t go that far. But it shows that the infarct — the dead tissue — must have been present well before the incident at the side of the road. This was a man with severe coronary disease, who had already suffered an infarct, so that he was in danger of dropping dead at any time.’
Angela joined the discussion. ‘But you can’t rule out the possibility that the squabble pushed him over the edge, so to speak?’
‘No, I can’t. I’m pretty sure that the physical act of pushing him in the chest, which has not left any mark whatsoever, is not relevant. But anyone in a dispute gets an adrenalin release — the old “fight or flight” reaction. Their blood pressure goes up, their heart rate increases and this could well trigger an abnormality of its rhythm, which in a damaged heart, could cause it to stop altogether.’
‘So where does that leave the lorry driver — and the family?’ queried Moira, who was more interested in the legal liability than the pathology.
‘That’s a legal matter, not medical. On past experience, I would think that a criminal prosecution would be unlikely, as if it came to trial, the defence would have a field day with the fact that the deceased had already had a recent, potentially fatal myocardial infarct. Still, you never know, there’s another legal axiom, which is that “you have to take your victims as you find them”.’
Moira’s smooth brow wrinkled in puzzlement at this.
‘I don’t really follow that, doctor.’
Richard did his best to illustrate the point.
‘Look, if someone hits another on the head with a blow that normally would not be expected to kill him, but that person has an abnormally thin skull and dies of a brain haemorrhage, it’s not a valid excuse to claim that the attacker did not know of the thin skull. Actually, in practice, it’s a good point for the defence in mitigation, but the principle is the same as someone with a heart condition.’
Angela, also familiar with many legal dilemmas, pointed out to Moira the difference between criminal and civil actions.
‘The standard of proof in a criminal trial has to be “beyond reasonable doubt”, but in a civil action for damages, it only has to be a “balance of probabilities” which means that it only has to be proved that it was more likely than not that the outcome was due to the alleged cause. So if the police don’t take any action, maybe the family will sue the driver.’
Their secretary was looking bemused by now, but found it all fascinating. ‘I’ll have to go away and think about this,’ she said with a sigh. ‘I wish I knew a lot more about these things.’
As she went back to her typewriter, Richard went off to telephone the Hereford coroner to give him much the same opinion as he had offered to Moira.
NINETEEN
On Thursday morning, Trevor Hartnell was sitting in Meirion Thomas’s room when a phone call came through for him from Birmingham. His DCI, a gaunt Scotsman nearing retirement, had news for him about Jaroslav Beran.
‘We’ve turned up something about him from way back in 1944. He’s never actually been convicted of anything serious up here — just a few drunk and disorderlies and a couple of minor assaults — but he was pulled in a couple of times for questioning on bigger stuff, then released for want of evidence.’
‘What sort of thing was he involved in?’ asked Trevor, giving a thumbs-up sign to the Welsh DI sitting across the desk.
‘He was suspected of being the driver in a smash-and-grab on a jeweller’s in Aston, but the main witness conveniently vanished before trial. Then there was a big black-market meat investigation that he was certainly involved in, but again it all fizzled out for lack of evidence. That one was almost certainly a Mickey Doyle enterprise, as it was known that it was he who had put the frighteners on some of the witnesses. Oddly enough, some of the lamb and mutton involved was known to have been rustled from Wales.’
‘Anything else known about him?’
‘His background was very dodgy. He was virtually kicked out of the Czech Free Forces after deliberately injuring himself, though again they couldn’t prove it. He turned up in Handsworth in forty-three, but after the black-market case, he vanished from the scene altogether.’
Trevor Hartnell shifted the receiver to his other hand, as he made some notes on a pad.
‘Does anybody actually remember him from those days, boss?’
His DCI told him that a couple of older uniformed officers from Handsworth recalled ‘this Czech bastard’, as they called him. ‘A real hard case, they said. Heavy drinker and violent at the drop of a hat, often involved in punch-ups with other toerags. One of them says he used to frequent the Barley Mow pub, which is interesting, as it was one of Doyle’s hang-outs.’
There was nothing more the DCI could pass on, but he promised to keep a couple of men asking around about Jaroslav Beran. When he had rung off, Trevor repeated what he’d heard to Meirion Thomas.