The Silent Sleep of the Dying (Eisenmenger-Flemming Forensic Mysteries) (17 page)

She had recently been involved in successful litigation in which her client had sued for damages in just such an incident; he had suffered a fractured hip as a woman had backed out of a parking space of a gymnasium. Not unnaturally she feared that here was some form of cosmic vengeance. In fact, the scene that met her somewhat fearful eyes was not as bad as it might have been. The victim was just rising, apparently suffering no permanent injury; he did not even seem particularly put out.

"Are you all right?" she asked anxiously. "I'm terribly sorry … "

She shut up, partly because of the legal training, partly because he was holding up his hand and grinning. "Not at all," he said, "My fault entirely. Should have been paying more attention."

He brushed from his trousers some gravel and dust but then straightened quickly with a sudden intake of breath and a grimace.

"Are you all right?" she asked.

"Just a twinge," he reassured her. He had, she decided, an attractive face. He smiled. "No harm done, I'm sure."

She could — should — have turned away then, except she didn't. It was an important decision, although she didn't yet know it. Instead she said, "Look, how about a drink? It's the least I can do."

He hesitated, then grinned. "Why not?"

*

Eisenmenger was renting a mews house. It was hideously expensive and not much less damp than his previous abode, but it had been all he could find on a short timescale. His savings, although not small, were not large enough to sustain this sort of outlay for long, and soon he would have to ask Helena for an advance on his fee or live on the streets.

God, he was tired.

Marie again. In life she had been clinging, hysterical, vindictive, and death had brought no respite for those she had loved. She came to him in his sleep, continuing the possession of him that had become her obsession wreathed now in flames, silent except for the crackle of fire and the sizzling hiss of burning fat, and he would awake and fight a guilt that he knew should not be his. Eventually he knew that he would have to resort to tablets, but he clung on to normalcy — at least his version of normalcy — as long as he could.

He had returned from the meeting with Raymond Sweet and, bottle of wine on the table before him, he now lay on the sofa, his eyes staring upwards to the over-ornate mouldings on the ceiling. Proteus. He knew it mainly as a bacterium. He also vaguely recollected something about a genetic disorder and something about Greek mythology.

He sat up abruptly, then got to his feet and went to the table by the window, where the sunlight was forming a distorted rectangle, a trapezoid of illumination, crossed by the ugly bars that help both to ensure his protection and to ensure that he felt imprisoned by the nefariousness of others. He put on the table a laptop computer, plugged it in and connected it to the phone socket. When it was powered up his first act was to search an on-line encyclopaedia for references to Proteus.

He found thirty-one.

Proteus
— a gram-negative bacterium, the most important clinical aspect of which was that it could cause septicaemic shock that was frequently fatal.

Proteus
— one of the Two Gentlemen of Verona.

Proteus
— one of the minor moons of Neptune.

Proteus
— the genetic disorder from which John Carey Merrick, the "Elephant Man," suffered.

Proteus
— in Greek mythology, a god who had knowledge of all things, but who was reluctant to divulge what he knew. He could assume any shape and as such was considered to be made of the basic substance of the universe.

Proteus
— a cave-dwelling salamander.

They went on, increasing in obscurity as they decreased in any possible relevance. He looked at the list, saw nothing that gave him stunning enlightenment.

He left the encyclopaedia and went on to the official Pel-Ebstein website. It was superbly done and told him everything they wanted him to know, little that he wanted to find out. His only revelation was in the breadth of their reach. He had assumed that they were merely a large pharmaceutical company, but a name once again proved misleading. They claimed interests in everything from food production to alternative energy research. They even owned a bank.

He then started trawling through all the other references to Pel-Ebstein; there were four hundred and fifty-eight. Some of them were unrelated, but the majority of them were openly hostile, mostly either because of perceived environmental damage or because of possible/probable vivisection. The most interesting was one that accused PEP of involvement in the arms trade.

His last enquiry was using an on-line medical database. Here were listed all the original papers, reviews, medical leading articles and case reports, from everywhere in the world, in every language. It was updated weekly.

He searched for Millicent Sweet, found four papers, one published in quite a prestigious journal; the last of them had been three years ago and related to work she had done for her BSc. Then he searched for Robin Turner. Forty-three papers came up, some of them in the top-rated journals. One of them had been published only four months before.

He looked up from the screen, out to the cobbled mews outside. He could hear the distant sound of the traffic, found that he enjoyed the contrast between that and the quiet around the private lane where he lived. Sweet and Turner were not linked, at least academically. Were they linked by their deaths?

He disconnected from the internet, then found a pad of paper on which he wrote a series of questions.

Was
Millicent
Sweet's
death
natural
?

If
not
was
it
related
to
her
time
at
PEP
?

Is
Turner's
death
a
coincidence
?

What
is
Proteus
?
Just
a
code
-
name
?
Just
the
gibbering
of
a
dying
girl
?
Does
it
have
relevance
?

Lots of questions, no answers. It was early days, but for the first time he began to wonder just what they might be facing.

*

Eisenmenger didn't know Patricia Bowman except by reputation, and that reputation was not of the best. She had long been condemned in the small world of pathology to the grey lands of
mediocrity
, a place far more damning than anywhere that Beelzebub ruled. Neither silence nor gossip was a refuge from this drizzle of mild contempt (
Of
course
,
she's
never
really
published
anything
major
) but presumably the advantages that came with a chair — the title, the headship of the department, the increased salary — were sufficient in her view to outweigh the snide comments and the silences. Perhaps, Eisenmenger mused, she dismissed the lack of respect as driven by envies and jealousies.

"I don't really understand," she said to him as he sat before her impressively professorial desk in the office that was, as it should be, large and cluttered. "You're a pathologist, aren't you?"

But she did understand, her tone suggested; he was in the wrong role. Even if she didn't know who he was (and that, too, carried an implication that he was nothing of much import if she didn't know him) he was at least above being an investigator, a
snoop
.

"That's right."

"Then why are you interested in the Sweet incident?" Her small, greying head with its unattractive face and thin, almost gossamer hair that no amount of hair products would ever assist, bobbed in incredulity. Eisenmenger caught the phrase,
Sweet
incident
, and played with it. One man's tragedy was another professor's incident; it sagged beneath the overtones of irrelevance and unregard.

"Because her father's solicitor is a friend of mine. She asked me to look into it."

Bowman leaned back in her chair. She was just a little too petite to make this an imposing gesture. Behind her a portrait of some famous pathologist or other stared into the room. "It was fully investigated at the time. The funeral directors didn't check the labels. They had somehow become transposed with those of another body; they should have checked but they didn't."

Eisenmenger might once have felt intimidated by the title, the office and the tone, but not now. Now he was too replete with tired melancholy to allow any room for fulmination. "I didn't think that they ever admitted liability," he said. Bowman ducked this with an airy, "Nevertheless, the Medical School and the Coroner are satisfied that that is what happened."

"And how often do labels become transposed like that? One I can understand, but for both the wrist and the ankle labels … "

She leaned abruptly forward as if a spasm in her back had brought her sudden pain. "The mortuary staff were reprimanded."

Eisenmenger felt detached from Bowman's clear determination to put a stop to this nonsense. In the two weeks since Helena's note had arrived he had stopped sleeping and begun waking in dreams. He was tired, both of not sleeping and of pathetic, self-important nonentities like Bowman.

"All the same, if I could see the report of the enquiry," he persisted. "It would be a lot easier than doing it through more … legal channels, and Miss Sweet's father is surely morally entitled to see it … " Bowman breathed in as if going to argue, then seemed to collapse. Bereft of words she waggled her head slightly as if to say, "Well, maybe."

"And then there's the matter of the post-mortem," he pointed out.

Another frown. Frowning, he mused, did her no favours. Her already contracted features became pinched into near nonexistence; goblinesque, he decided. From this mask came the words. "What about it?"

He reflected that it was like taking a poor student through last year's forgotten course work. "Just a few points. For instance, I don't really understand the final diagnosis. According to the report she died of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma; Burkitt's to be precise. Yet even for Burkitt's lymphoma it was rapid and aggressive — don't forget she was apparently fit and well a week before she died. I think it's reasonable for the diagnosis to be reviewed." He paused, smiled and then went on, "And of course there may be genetic implications of this diagnosis which are of grave concern to her family. It may prove necessary for further investigations to be undertaken."

This last argument had impressed the Coroner sufficiently for his permission to be granted to Eisenmenger. Not that there were any known familial factors in Burkitt's lymphoma but Eisenmenger was glad to see that Bowman wasn't entirely sure about this. Certainly she didn't argue the point.

"It's most irregular."

He had no desire, no need and no compunction to reply; the statement might or might not be true but it didn't alter the fact that he was fully entitled to do as he requested. In any case, he had learned over the past few months not to be afraid of silence. It was Bowman who surrendered first; with a sigh she stood up and said, "Very well, then." Her tone was one of irritated acceptance.

She led him out and Eisenmenger had to admit to being impressed that such a small, such an unattractive and unprepossessing figure could radiate such aggravation; it felt like being scolded by a slightly eccentric primary-school teacher. Through the secretary's office and thence into the dingy brown corridor she led him. He looked up and down the subterranean, sublit expanse and reflected that all departments of pathology were like this; most were considerably older but all were soulless, all were uninviting of humanizing influence.

"Where would you like to start? I'll have to get a copy of the enquiry report from the Bursar's Office, but in the meantime perhaps you should meet Dr Hartmann."

He nodded assent. He had a shrewd idea what Hartmann would be like, how he would resent the intrusion and its implied incompetence or perhaps negligence, but Eisenmenger was aware that it had to be done; not to do it would only be another source of ammunition for Bowman. And the same would be true when he came to visit the mortuary. Eisenmenger knew that talking to the mortuary staff was no more than a formality — they would insist that nothing had been done wrong, that they were innocent, no matter what the truth — but he also knew that not to do it would be seen as a dereliction of proper procedure. In a way he was questioning people merely as a cover, for if something untoward had happened by design, then he doubted that his interrogation of any of the participants would expose it. It was the autopsy result that interested him.

"Professor Turner's dead, too, isn't he?"

Perhaps asking her if she had haemorrhoids or did it doggy fashion might have brought her up more quickly but Eisenmenger reckoned it unlikely. "What in heaven has that got to do with anything?"