Sarah’s pulse rate, which had calmed down over the last ten minutes, started sprinting again. There was only one logical explanation. McKirrop’s skull had been pushed back into his brain after the X-ray had been taken! Sarah dropped the probe she’d been holding and it bounced off the hard tiled floor. For a few moments she stood absolutely still, then she started to think about priorities.
She needed proof! She needed solid evidence! The post mortem carried out on this body would simply report that the patient had died from massive brain damage caused by his skull being broken and forced back into his brain by a large blunt object, the base of a wine bottle. Exactly what everyone had suggested. She searched through the pathology cupboards until she found what she was looking for, a Polaroid camera. Another brief search and she came up with film for it. She angled herself behind the trolley to photograph the wound but stopped after taking two photographs. What was this going to show? A photograph of a gaping wound wasn’t going to prove anything at all.
Sarah thought for a moment then came up with an idea. She ran through to the small office next door to the PM room and rummaged through the desk drawer until she found a clear plastic protractor. She hurried back with it and positioned it to one side of the wound. She then inserted a metal probe so that it lay along the angle of the bone. She brought up the protractor close behind it so that it showed the angle of the bone relative to the horizontal. She took four photographs. These photographs when compared to the X-ray of McKirrop’s skull should demonstrate a significant alteration in the angle of the bone.
Eight
Sarah began tidying up. She cleaned the wound site on McKirrop’s head with a swab soaked in surgical spirit and did her best to obscure any signs of interference, not that there were many. The degree of invasion she had used was minimal and there was no reason for the pathologist to be on the lookout for anything out of the ordinary. She cleaned and returned the instruments to their rightful place and disposed of the used swabs and their wrappings in the discard bin for subsequent incineration. Finally, she wound the sheet back round the corpse’s head and wheeled it back to the body vault.
To her frustration, Sarah could not remove the locking pin from the transporter in order to release the body tray. She tried again but it was stuck fast and she broke out into a cold sweat. This was ridiculous: she couldn’t get the body back into the vault! Her heart was thumping with the effort that she was expending, but without success. She cried out in pain as her fingers slipped off the metal and she broke two of her fingernails. Her fingers flew to her mouth, only half stifling the curse that sprang to her lips. Tools! She needed tools!
She hurried back to the Post-Mortem suite and returned with a chisel and mallet. They were really for use on human bone, but two blows with the mallet and the pin eased off. A third and it sprang out to dangle on its chain in a mocking dance. The tray slid smoothly back on to its shelf.
With McKirrop’s body safely back inside, Sarah checked twice that she had left nothing lying around before switching out the lights and listening at the door. She heard nothing, so she inched it open and took a quick look out in both directions before slipping out into the corridor. Locking the door behind her, she ran quickly along to the stairs leading up to the ground floor.
She paused at the head of the stairs to calm herself. It was over; she’d done it; she had found out exactly what she wanted to know. She started out along the main corridor, steeling herself to do so in a confident gait. No one was going to take much notice of her if she seemed purposeful.
Sarah reached the door leading to the outside and to the drive down to the main gate. She paused to consider for a moment. She’d been doing everything in reverse, almost without thinking, but now she fingered the mortuary key in her pocket and looked out through the glass doors into the darkness. Everything had gone well but did she have enough nervous energy left to complete the exercise? Could she go through the business of returning the key? No, she decided after a few moments thought, she couldn’t. She had run out of adrenaline and it would be silly to push her luck any further. She simply couldn’t face the stress involved. The key was about to go missing. No big deal. They could have another one made up. She turned away from the door and continued along the corridor. As she crossed the courtyard to the residency she dropped the key down a grating. The little splash it made marked the end of the operation.
Sarah closed the door of her room and felt weak at the knees. She sank down on to the bed and saw that her hands were shaking. Her mouth was dry and she felt that she might be sick in the not too distant future. Thinking about what she had discovered made matters worse now that she had time to think about it. Fear was taking over from nervous exhaustion. In answering one question, she had opened up a Pandora’s box of others. McKirrop had been murdered; he had been murdered by someone on the staff. It must have been someone on the staff, she reasoned. HTU patients were not allowed unaccompanied visitors, not that anyone had wanted to see McKirrop, anyway.
But who on the staff would want to kill a down-at-heel alcoholic — and why? What threat could he possibly have presented to anyone? Sarah could think of no good reason but she did come up with a bad one. It said that Derek Logan had killed John McKirrop because the results of her tests on the patient were embarrassing and were about to make him look foolish. McKirrop’s death had stopped that happening and had turned the tables on her. Her findings had been discredited and her professional competence brought into question.
But surely not even Logan could do something so awful?
Sarah found that she could not dismiss the idea altogether. She remembered Logan’s distaste for McKirrop. He had regarded him as being a worthless object who was merely taking up space in HTU, his only value being as a potential organ donor. But had McKirrop mattered so very little that his life had been expendable? A pawn to be used in a career game move? Logan was a thoroughly unpleasant individual but was he a murderer? Sarah baulked at believing it, but she was left with a list of questions seeking answers.
Could McKirrop’s death have been some sort of bizarre accident? Perhaps the nursing staff had somehow made McKirrop’s wound worse while they were changing the dressings? Sarah shook her head and admitted that this was a ridiculous idea. Its only merit was that it distracted her momentarily from thinking that someone on the staff of HTU, had deliberately placed a blunt object into John McKirrop’s head wound and pushed his skull back into his brain.
After a restless night filled with bad dreams, Sarah was back on duty in HTU shortly after breakfast. Her first thought was to get her hands on the X-ray that showed the original injury to McKirrop’s skull. This would be vital in proving her case. She went immediately to the X-ray viewing room and flipped through the large manila envelopes in the rack below the wall-mounted light boxes. McKirrop’s films weren’t there! Sarah looked again but there was no mistake. The McKirrop file had gone. Frustration mingled with a hollow feeling in her stomach.
After one more search of the entire room she turned on her heel and went straight to the duty room to find Sister Roche.
“Sister, Mr McKirrop’s X-rays are not in the rack,” she announced.
Roche turned in her swivel chair and looked over her glasses. “No, Doctor,” she said. “Mr McKirrop is dead. His X-rays have been returned to Medical Records along with his case notes. That’s what always happens.”
Sarah felt her cheeks colour. “Of course,” she said. “How stupid of me.”
“Was there something you particularly wanted to see?” asked Roche.