Department of Forensic Medicine
Chelsea and Westminster Hospital
London
I, Rosemary Didcott, Bachelor of Medicine, hereby certify on soul and conscience that on the 30th January, two thousand and ten, at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital Mortuary and at the instance of the Coroner, Mr. Paul Lewis-Stevens, I dissected the body of Tess Hemming (21), of 35 Chepstow Road, London, the body being identified to me by Detective Sergeant Finborough of the London Metropolitan Police, and the following is a true report.
This was the body of a white Caucasian female of slim build and measuring five feet seven inches in height. There was evidence of having given birth two days before death occurred.
There were old scars, dating from childhood, on the right knee and right elbow.
On the right wrist and forearm was a recent laceration ten centimeters in length and four centimeters in depth bisecting the interosseus muscle and damaging the radial artery. On the left wrist and forearm there was a smaller laceration of five centimeters in length and two centimeters in depth and a larger laceration of six centimeters in length and four centimeters in depth, which severed the ulnar artery. The wounds are consistent with the five-inch boning knife that was found with the body.
I could find no evidence of any other bruising or scars or marks of any kind.
There was no evidence of recent sexual intercourse.
Samples of blood and body tissues were collected and referred to the public analyst.
I estimate that this young woman died six days before the dissection, on the 23rd of January.
From this dissection I am of the opinion that this young woman died of exsanguination from the lacerations of arteries in her wrists and forearms.
I must have read that document a hundred times, but “boning knife” remains as vicious as it did the first time—no mention of Sabatier to blunt it a little with domesticity.
“Were the results from the public analyst included?” asks Mr. Wright. (These are the results of the blood and tissue tests, which were done after the initial postmortem at a different laboratory.)
“Yes, they were attached at the back and had the previous day’s date on them, so they’d only just come through. But I couldn’t understand them. They were in scientific jargon, not written to be understood by a layperson. Fortunately, I have a friend who’s a doctor.”
“Christina Settle?”
“Yes.”
“I have a witness statement from her.”
I realize there must be scores of people working on your case, taking concurrent statements.
I lost contact with my old friends from school and university when I went to the States. But since your death old friends have been phoning and writing—“rallying round,” as Mum calls it. Among the rallyers was Christina Settle, who’s a doctor now at Charing Cross Hospital. (She’s told me that more than half my biology A-level set are pursuing scientific careers of some sort.) Anyhow, Christina wrote a warm letter of condolence, in exactly the same perfect italic writing that she had at school, ending, as many of the letters did, with “if there’s anything at all I can do to help, please let me know.” I decided to take her up on her offer and phoned her.
Christina listened attentively to my bizarre request. She said she was only a senior house officer and in pediatrics not pathology, so she wasn’t qualified to interpret the test results. I thought she didn’t want to get involved, but at the end of our phone call she asked me to fax her over the report. Two days later she phoned and asked if I’d like to meet her for a drink. She’d got a pathologist friend of a friend to go over the report with her.
When I told Todd I was meeting Christina, he was relieved, thinking I was venturing back into normal life by looking up old friends.
I walked into the bistro Christina had chosen and was punched by the normal world at full volume. I hadn’t been in a public place since you’d died and the loud voices and laughter made me feel vulnerable. Then I saw Christina waving at me and was reassured partly because she looks almost exactly as she did at school—same pretty dark hair, same unflattering thick glasses—and partly because she’d found a booth for us, closeted away from the rest of the bistro. (Christina is still good at bagging things first.) I thought she wouldn’t have remembered you very well—after all, she was in the sixth form with me when you started at boarding school—but she was adamant that she did. “Vividly, actually. Even at eleven she was too cool for school.”
“I’m not sure that ‘cool’ is how I’d—”
“Oh, I didn’t mean it in a bad way, not cold or aloof or anything. That was the extraordinary thing. Why I remember her so well, I think. She smiled all the time—a cool kid who laughed and smiled. I’d never seen that combination in someone before.” She paused, her voice a little hesitant. “She must have been a hard act to compete with…?”
I didn’t know if it was nosiness or concern but decided to get to the purpose of our meeting. “Can you tell me what the report means?”
She got the report and a notebook out of her briefcase. As she did so, I saw a pacifier and a baby’s cloth book. Christina’s glasses and handwriting might not have changed, but her life clearly had. She looked down at her notebook. “James, the friend of a friend I told you about on the phone, is a senior pathologist so he knows his stuff. But he’s anxious about getting involved; pathologists are being sued all the time and minced by the media. He can’t be quoted.”
“Of course.”
“You did English, chemistry and biology didn’t you, Hemms?”
That old nickname, dusty with age; it took a moment to connect it to me. “Yes.”
“Any biochemistry since then?”
“No, I did an English degree, actually.”
“I’ll translate into layman’s terms then. Putting it very simply, Tess had three drugs in her body when she died.”
She didn’t see my reaction, looking down at her notebook. But I was stunned. “What were the drugs?”
“One was Cabergoline, which stops breast milk being produced.”
Simon had told me about that drug and again the fact of it gave me a glimpse into something so painful that I couldn’t look any further; I interrupted my own thoughts: “And the others?”
“One was a sedative. She’d taken a fairly large amount. But because it was a few days before Tess was found and a sample of her blood was taken—” She broke off, upset, and gathered herself before continuing. “What I mean is, because of the time delay it’s hard to be accurate about the actual amount of sedative. James said all he could offer was educated guesswork.”
“And…?”
“She had taken far more than would have been indicated as a normal dose. He thought that it wasn’t high enough to kill her, but it would have made her very sleepy.”
So that was why there had been no sign of a struggle: he’d doped you first. Did you realize it too late? Christina read out more of her perfect italic writing, “The third drug is phenylcyclohexylpiperidine, PCP for short. It’s a powerful hallucinogenic, developed in the fifties as an anesthetic but stopped when patients experienced psychotic reactions.”
I was startled into parrotlike repetition, “Hallucinogenic?”
Christina thought I didn’t understand, her voice patient. “It means the drug causes hallucinations, in lay terms ‘trips.’ It’s like LSD but more dangerous. Again James says it’s hard to be certain how much she’d taken, and how long before she died, because of the delay in finding her. It’s also complicated because the body stores this drug in muscle and fatty tissues at full psychoactive potential, so it can continue to have an effect even after the person has stopped taking it.”