Second Opinion (20 page)

George managed to ignore it all by going down to the mortuary almost as soon as she arrived at the hospital and refusing to emerge for anyone. Even for Professor Hunnisett himself who chose to drop in as ‘he was passing’, an explanation which, as Jerry pointed out, was hardly likely since the lab was tucked in such a distant corner of the hospital that no one ever got to it except by making a distinct effort, a comment which made Sheila smirk, and sent her giggling to the phone to summon George up to see the Professor. But George sent a message back that she had already started on a PM (though she hadn’t) and could Professor Hunnisett not speak to her on the phone? He did and burbled something inconsequential about a lecture series shortly to be on offer at the hospital about which he
wanted to talk to her, before he could bring himself actually to say what it was he’d come over to her unit for.

‘This is a nasty business,’ he said and coughed noisily, so that she had to hold the handset away from her ear. ‘One of our housemen — well, it’s dreadful! Quite, quite dreadful.’

‘Yes,’ George said non-committally and waited.

‘It’s causing some trouble in the neighbourhood, you know.’

‘Really?’ said George and again waited. Professor Hunnisett breathed hard at the other end of the line.

‘Some people seem to have got hold of quite the wrong end of the stick,’ he burst out ‘I mean, dammit all, I’ve got these demonstrations going on outside! I ask you! As though it’s our fault that he got hurt.’

‘He’s more than hurt,’ George said. ‘He’s dead.’

Professor Hunnisett ignored that ‘It’s the most stupid thing I ever saw. Half of them have got banners shrieking about Trusts and safety for patients and a lot of other irrelevant stuff and then there are these others going on about England for the English, though why they should be there, I really can’t —’

George’s patience fragmented. ‘They’re the ones who are glad Harry’s dead,’ she said more loudly than she needed to have done, hoping her voice made him wince as much as his coughing had hurt her ears. ‘The fact that Harry’s the one who’s been killed by their bloody racism doesn’t stop them demonstrating against him. Blaming you for employing him in the first place, I shouldn’t wonder.’

‘Oh, dear,’ said Professor Hunnisett. ‘Really? That does make one wonder whether one should reconsider one’s employment guidelines. Now we’re a Trust and responsible for ourselves more, and having to take local opinion into account…’

‘Oh, my God,’ George said and closed her eyes. ‘If you’ll excuse me, I have a PM to do. Some other time, Professor.’ And she hung up the phone and stood there shaking.
Maybe she’d be out of a job now? Was banging down the phone on the hospital’s Dean and Clinical Director a firing offence? She didn’t know and didn’t, she decided, really care. All that mattered was what had happened to Harry. There was something particularly pitiful about the body now lying waiting for her in her mortuary; lithe, well made, young — he had been, she had discovered from his personal file, just twenty-five, a newly qualified doctor in his first real job — and so vulnerable. He’d needed support and help and no one had given it to him …

She stood and stared at the phone. It’s I who failed him, she thought. He wanted to tell me something — maybe about that baby with AIDS? Who knows? All I do know is that if I hadn’t gone snooping around asking questions maybe he wouldn’t have died.

She shook her head at that and went down the corridor to complete putting on her greens and rubber apron and gloves, ready to start on Harry’s corpse. Make your mind up, she told herself sharply. Either Harry was killed by a racist attack, which is what Gus thinks happened, or — well, or what? The way you’re thinking you seem to be implying that there’s something going on here at Old East that he stumbled on and wanted to tell you about. But why would he want to tell just you? Surely he’d have wanted to tell others, whatever it was. His own boss, perhaps, or at any rate Prudence Jennings? That would be more logical, surely, than choosing me who had nothing to do with his area of work.

Except for that baby, the child who wasn’t called Oberlander. She rubbed her nose with the back of one hand, a childish gesture she reverted to whenever she was puzzled and tried to control her thoughts. All this twisting and turning in her mind would get her nowhere. Better to get on with the PM and see what facts there were. Afterwards, with Gus, there’d be time and opportunity to dig deeper for reasons and blame-apportioning.

Danny was ready, looking grim. He too had had his share of people wandering by just ‘dropping in for a natter’ and was as disgusted as she was.

‘Makes yer sick, don’t it?’ he said. ‘Like, they’d never ‘eard of the poor bugger till ‘e gets ‘isself killed and then all of a sudden they’re full of interest. It’s like those ghouls what stand at the side of the road gawpin’ when there’s bin an RTA. Sickenin’, I calls it.’ And he pulled the sheet off Harry’s body and offered George the big tissue knife with a flourish, clearly quite unaware of the ghoulishness of his own approach to his job, which he clearly savoured deeply.

It was an observation which had the absurd effect of cheering George considerably. She was able to get on with the job in hand without too many qualms, and rapidly forgot that this was Harry Rajabani. It became just a body that needed investigating, and one that posed some mysteries; the sort she liked best.

Harold Constant was there as observer as usual, and so was Michael Urquhart, one of the detective constables on Gus’s team, and she nodded at him amiably. She liked Michael, had done ever since the first case they’d worked on together when he’d provided the help that had enabled her to prove to Gus that her ideas were right and that there was a case to be dealt with, and he grinned back. He was inured now to the mortuary and the PM room, no longer blanching as he once had when she set her knife just below a sternum, where the ribs met in the midline, and sent it sweeping down to the pubic bone, opening the abdominal cavity completely. He was just interested.

But the abdominal contents were not all that mattered this morning. It was the surface injuries that told the story of what had happened to Harry most clearly, and she made a careful superficial examination before beginning on the viscera, exploring the skin gingerly and with great delicacy.

‘Gravel burns on all exposed skin areas,’ she dictated. ‘Hands, lower arms, especially on inner aspects and face,
especially right cheek. Petechiae and some larger areas of bruising across the back and shoulders, which make it clear that great pressure was exerted. Some overlapping of the injuries consistent with the body being pressured on three separate passes as would occur if a car passed over three times. Beneath the surface bruising, fractures of the ribs, the pelvis, the spine. Some pulpiness in lung, kidneys query damaged. To check on opening the abdomen. Kidney crushed on right.’

The dictation went on for some time, and then she turned her attention to the head and neck for last checks before setting to work with her knife. There was less to see on the back of the head and neck; the thick sleek hair had clearly protected the skull, and anyway there was no indication that the car had actually touched the skull. There was, though, a small bruise just under the occiput, where the head met the spine, and she stored that in her mind before setting to work to open the skull.

The desultory conversation between Michael and Harold ceased as the burr of the electric saw filled the air, and they waited for George to speak again; but she was absorbed in what she was doing, so much so that a frown was creasing between her brows. She was surprised and she looked it.

‘Something wrong?’ Michael Urquhart was alert; Harold Constant seemed almost asleep and hadn’t noticed her reaction.

‘Well, yes, in a way,’ she said slowly and then shook her head. ‘How does this sound for a scenario? Someone gives him a bit of a wallop on the head — very scientific rather than hard. It knocks him out for a few moments — just a bit of concussion in here — and that is why he’s lying down so neatly ready to be run over by a large car.’

‘If you say so, doctor,’ Michael Urquhart said. ‘What about it?’

‘Well, maybe I’ve got my view of the racist mob psychology hopelessly adrift, but I imagined they actually enjoyed
the beating-up part. I mean, they really hate their victim, don’t they? They aren’t interested in doing something to him that’s hard to spot. They wouldn’t get any kick out of coming on to someone who’s all unaware and hitting on the back of the neck in a way that makes his head jerk back and leads to an immediate concussion and unconsciousness so that he wouldn’t know what hit him. And they wouldn’t get any joy out of running over him with a heavy car to kill him. No real blood to see, no groans of agony, nothing like that.’

Michael was looking at her with his head on one side, like an intelligent and hungry bird. ‘You reckon that’s what happened here?’

‘I reckon,’ she said. ‘Look. It’s clear, that bruise. And the oedema of the brain. It’s all indicative of pre-death concussion and that means probably loss of consciousness. There are no injuries to the arms, apart from the sort of gravel burns that came from being dragged against the ground. No sign he tried to fight off his attackers. The car passed over him three times, twice going forward — see the line of bruises, heavier at this end? — and once backward. There, you see? And he just
lay
there! He couldn’t have been aware of what was going on. And as I say, that doesn’t sound to me like a racist attack. What say you?’

‘I see what you mean,’ Michael said. ‘Is that all the evidence, then?’

‘Let’s open the belly and see,’ she said, and this time accepted the big tissue knife from Danny. Again silence filled the room until she began to dictate again, her voice clear and crisp.

‘Heart displaced by massive tear to aortic arch and consequent extravasation,’ she said. ‘Lungs compressed, and right lung pierced by fractured fourth rib. Spleen crushed. Liver crushed and capsule severely torn by displaced fracture seventh rib. Kidney? crushed and pierced by spinal fracture …’

Her voice went on, listing the horrific injuries, and they listened and shifted their weight from one foot to the other.

When she’d finished she looked at Michael.

‘I reckon it’s clear, don’t you? This had to be quite a different sort of attack from the one first imagined.’

‘Then say so in your report,’ Michael said quickly. ‘It’s no good me saying anything. It’s got to come from you. I’m supposed to be going straight from here to’ — he reached in his pocket to find his notebook and flicked it open — ‘ninety-nine Laura House on the Lansbury Estate. Flat of a Dave Ritchard. If you could give me the report on this to take with me …’

‘I can do better than that,’ she said. ‘I can bring it with me. Your guv’nor said I could go along on the investigation this morning. Said to phone him when I was ready and he’d get me picked up. So I might as well come with you, right? Gus — the Guv’ll be there, will he?’

‘He said he would.’

‘Fine. Give me a bit longer to finish here. Danny?’ She looked over her shoulder at him. ‘Get Sheila to alert the typists, would you? I want this transcript typed up before I’ve finished my shower. Tell her to get Marie on it. Stop whatever else she’s doing and give it priority. She’s the best one we’ve got.’

She worked swiftly now, finishing her dictation and sending Danny off with the tape hot foot; dealing with the final details of the PM, including the closure, unaided.

She was very angry. The confusion of the earlier part of the morning had given way to an icy determination to track down who ever had done this and to catch him so tightly that there’d be no way he could wriggle out of it. She had never been in favour of capital punishment; it had always seemed to her the most bestial of acts to do to murderers the very thing the murderers had themselves done; it wasn’t justice, but revenge. Yet this time she wished that this killer could hang. Not because Harry had suffered so much more
than others, but because she had seen Harry concerned about sick people, spending all his energy and his working life caring for them. The man had been a doctor, dammit, killed because of some aspect of his medical work, of that she was certain now. And to kill such a one was — and she caught herself as her thoughts went careering away. I sound like policemen do when a fellow copper is killed. Do I, like them, reserve my greatest concern for my own sort? A disagreeable idea, and she took a deep breath to get back some of her emotional control. It was effective. Even before she walked out of the room she felt better. She had, she was sure, identified something very important about this killing, something that would enable Gus to avoid wasting any time and to seek the real killer as fast as possible. There was no need for him to go haring along the racist-attack path. That was definite. He had to come here, to the hospital, because it was here at Old East that the answers were to be found.

15
  
  

In the event she couldn’t go with Michael Urquhart to meet Gus at the Ritchards’ flat; when she got back upstairs, there was a crisis over a set of blood sugars that Jane had done, and Jerry had checked, which the Diabetes consultant, Dr Maurice Carvalho, swore had been done wrongly. He had come over to the department himself to make his complaints and George, hurrying to collect her typed-up notes, walked straight in on the uproar.